Frances smiled with a wan gratitude.
“Nothing. I should call on you without hesitation if there were. You were a friend of—” but she couldn’t speak the name. “I am going to-morrow,” and in a sudden outburst, “I never wish to see this town again as long as I live.”
Mr. Elliot bent over her hand. He was himself deeply moved. That dreadful little package on the stretcher between the shrouded servants of the Misericordia — Julian Linchcombe — old Admiral Timbertoes stumping in the Italian garden amongst his children. He murmured a broken word or two of farewell. As he stood erect again, the doctor and the tutor entered the room together.
“I asked for you, gentlemen,” said Henry, “to announce that we shall leave at seven in the morning. So if you have farewells to make, they should be made this afternoon. I shall ask you to be precise to the minute.”
There was a noticeable new stateliness in Henry’s address which took Mr. Elliot by surprise. The tutor, whose eyes were swollen and red behind his hornrimmed spectacles, could only sniff and nod his head. The physician was calm as became his profession and his experience.
“You can count upon our punctuality, my Lord,” he said, and with a cry Henry covered his face with his hands.
“Oh, no! Please!”
Then he lifted a face twisted with pain.
“Not yet! Let us go back as we came!”
The physician bowed with discreet and silent sympathy. Mr. Elliot was almost startled out of his skin. “My Lord” — Henry Scoble! He had not given a thought to this change in Henry’s fortunes. Henry Scoble, the son of Philip’s younger brother, a mere tutor at an Oxford College with a cottage in the Park was now Henry Scoble, Earl of Linchcombe, Viscount Terceira, Baron Hardley, the owner of Grest and all its wide acres, its appurtenances, its pocket-boroughs, its power.
He had disclaimed the title almost with horror, certainly with distress. That was much in his favour — yes — he earned the best marks for his revulsion from the title. Yet — yet — was there more than an unusually dramatic “nolo episcopari” in his outcry? There had been undoubtedly a new stateliness and authority in his injunctions to the two doctors... Mr. Elliot wondered. Henry was dressing himself in the robes, whilst rejecting, or at all events deferring, the style.
VIII. A SONG IS SUNG TOO WELL
JULIAN WAKED FOR a few moments. He was conscious of an unendurable agony in his head where a hammer was pounding with the regularity of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece in front of the bird-mirror in the great drawing-room of Grest; and of a throat like nothing at Grest — parched and black and leathery — like something — like a black octopus on a beach in the sun. Then in a whirl of pain he fell down through darkness into oblivion. When he waked again, the hammer was lighter in its strokes. It had not the sharp clang of iron. They had muffled it. It fell with a thud — almost endurably, if it hadn’t been for the great log which crackled and threw out sparks. For each crackle was the thrust of a pen-knife into his head, and each spark passed through his eyes, searing the brain behind them. A cry, weak as a little child’s, struggled from his throat, and a woman rose. She lifted his shoulders and he moaned. She held a cup of goat’s milk to his mouth and turned it up until he had swallowed the last drop. Then she laid him down again and fastened a damp cloth about his forehead. His body beneath its rough covering relaxed and now he slept. The woman squatted at his side until his eyelids closed and his breathing grew regular. Then she moved away and said in a low voice:
“Guappo il ragazzo.”
A grunt answered her. Julian waked the next day and though he neither looked nor felt festive, as she described him, he was able to notice that he lay upon an old pallet in a hovel full of smoke. A man bent over him — Julian knew his face again — a man of middle age in the clothes of a peasant — and drew the mattress out into the open air and left it under the shadow of the eaves. A young woman brought out to him some spaghetti and a glass of a rough red wine which set his throat tingling. She was not ill-looking, with a broad, dark face and a wide mouth, and her voice was kindly.
“Lie still,” she said. “No one will hurt you.”
Julian looked at her with big, solemn eyes and said nothing. The woman went back into the hut. Julian heard her say:
“That boy frightens me,” and an older woman — or so it seemed to the boy — cackled suddenly.
“That atom of white flesh?”
Julian lay back; a rough sack supported his head, a goatskin covered his body; he was lying high up on a slope of the hills. Bells, little pleasant musical bells were rattling and stopping and rattling again. He saw a herd of goats against a sky line and to the sound of those bells he slept. As the sun sank behind the hills, he was taken again into the hut. In the morning they told him to get up and dress. He was given a shirt of flax, a rough jerkin and breeches and a pair of sandals for his bare feet. He went out into the sunlight. A youth — Julian had seen him before, too — drove a herd of goats out from a pen. He grinned at Julian.
“Good fishing in the bay!” he said and laughed as though he had uttered the finest witticism. The man came out of the hut with the mother and the girl; and the three of them looked Julian over.
“He’s fine,” said the man.
“He’s ready,” said the woman. She was probably of no greater age than the man, but she was wizened and wrinkled like an old apple.
“To-morrow then,” said the man.
But the girl stuck her hands upon her hips and objected.
“No! It is too soon, Father. He must get stronger. In a day or two perhaps.”
Julian drew back until his shoulders rested against the wall of the hut. The three of them were watching him brightly, curiously. He shivered suddenly and sheer terror stared out of his eyes. To the girl they seemed to grow enormous and with their beauty obscure all the beauty of his face.
“Poor child!” she murmured with a helpless little movement of her hands. Then her face lightened.
“You are hungry?”
Julian was in terror and doubt of many things, but of one he was sure.
“Yes,” he said eagerly.
“Wait,” said she, and she ran back into the hovel. The man turned away with a grunt and a shrug of the shoulders. The older woman turned back into the hovel. In a little while the girl brought out to him a steaming bowl of zuppa di vongole — frutta di mare the dish was elegantly named, but it was nothing but limpets stewed to a broth. Julian, however, was not in a critical mood. There was nothing left in the bowl when he had done, even the wooden spoon was licked clean. And to round off the meal she brought him a platter of dried apricots. The boy’s face lit up with pleasure when he saw them.
“Eat your fill, child! They are good.”
Julian was too busy to spare words. He grunted, only with more good-will than the man had put into his grunts. He sat back at last and wiped his hands upon the turf at his side.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Costanza.”
He repeated it gently.
“You are kind.”
“Boys need kind people.”
He moved a little nearer to her and caught her arm. The terror was back in his eyes now. He dropped his voice to a whisper.
“What were they going to do to me to-morrow?”
For a little while Costanza was silent. Once or twice she looked at him and looked away again. Then she said:
“Sing to me!”
Julian frowned. He could not follow her thought. It was no answer to his question.
“Sing to me,” she repeated with a touch of impatience in her voice which still more frightened the boy. Sing! He was never less inclined to sing in his life, but he could not afford to lose the friendliness of the only person in this family who had a care for him.
“I’ll sing.”
He thought for a minute or two, searching for some air which might please her. He must choose one which would show off his voice at its freshest and sweetest, one which made a demand or two u
pon his management of his throat and was difficult to sing without even a “serpent” to lend him any support. For her friendship’s sake and the promise of help which he read into her gentleness, he gathered his strength about him to give her such pleasure as he had never given, to sing as he had never sung. And it was his fatality that he succeeded.
One song, partly for its own loveliness and still more because of its supreme associations, stood quite by itself in Julian’s memories. On that most memorable day when Handel had come to Grest, he had given the boy in the morning the score of a song from his opera Poro, with the words by the Italian poet Metastasio; and after dinner he had seated himself at the harpsichord in the great drawing-room and, setting Julian beside him, had made him sing the aria to his accompaniment. “Se possono tanto,” it began, a song for a soprano which fitted Julian’s treble very well, and for a few moments after he had finished, Handel had continued to play, running his fingers over the keys and striking a chord or two very gently. Julian had stood by the great musician’s side, feeling that he had fallen below expectations, but suddenly Handel had looked up. There were tears in his eyes and he laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said: “I thank you for discovering for me what I made.”
Julian had practised that song again and again with his master after Handel had gone. It burst from him now in a torrent of sweet melody made passionate by a sudden longing for Grest and all the grace of its life. It soared up above those upland pastures and — lost him Grest for ever.
For as he sang, bewilderment showed itself in Costanza’s face.
“Gesu Cristo!” she murmured.
The bewilderment changed to admiration and that again into delight. There was a movement inside the hovel and the older woman shuffled to the door and stood listening. Julian was away by then on his own wings and they had carried him back to the great drawing-room and Handel at the harpsichord. He did not notice the look of greed which began to fight with the delight in Costanza’s face and, in the end, conquered it all. She looked at her mother, nodding significantly and smiling, but with as mean a smile as ever disfigured a comely face. She could hardly wait for Julian to finish his song. She sprang up and drew her mother into the hut. She left him sitting with his back against the wall, without a word.
“Marvellous,” she said in an eager, excited voice. “They said it was nothing. A voice which would do very well for a choir-boy in an unimportant church and come down in a year or two to a guitar twanging in a back street for enough farthings to buy a plate of beans. What nonsense! It’s not to be understood” — and indeed it was not to be understood for years, and then not by Costanza. “It’s a voice in thousands. One of the great ones!”
And she had been thinking of helping him to escape! — yes, actually, in the kindness of her foolish heart it had crossed her mind to open the door when all were asleep, whisper to him the path to take and give him food to carry him down to the sea. Luckily she had asked him to sing. Music was good, but music which meant money was ever so much better. There was money paid already which soon they would begin to spend. But with this voice, there would be more, wouldn’t there? Lots and lots more. Bargains would be made — surely. Costanza plunged her hands into imaginary bags of money and dripped gold between her fingers.
“But you mustn’t catch cold, child,” she cried, coming quickly to the boy and trying to repeat the compassion of half an hour ago. “Come in! The evening air is dangerous. Come in!”
Julian rose at her bidding. He no longer made any appeal to her. Once he had made it, and then something had happened, and he had lost somehow the charity of the one compassionate being he had found amongst his rough captors. It was not within his nature, even at his age, to plead twice. As he sat, whilst the two women planned his future within the hovel, he began to collect in a sequence for the first time all that he knew of what had happened to him, in the hope that he would find in it some outlet by which his small body might escape.
On the morning of the festival of San Januarius, he had gone sailing. His uncle Henry had arranged the expedition for him with Bortolo Scalfi, the fisherman. Domenico the courier, Dr. Lanford and himself made the water-party, and Scalfi was to bring his two sons to help with the big, heavy lateen sail. But Scalfi had not brought his two sons. He had brought one and besides the one, the youth who drove the goats up the hill in the morning, Tonio — yes Tonio Traetta.
For a time, under the guidance of Bortolo, he had steered the boat. But the boat was heavy, and though he adored steering it, he had grown tired and wanted a rest.
“I gave up the tiller and crawled forward under the big sail and lay on some fishing nets in the bows, with my head over the rim of the boat, watching the water divide, and seeing little fish darting about deep down. It was adorable. Then Tonio began to talk to me.”
Yes, Tonio had crept forward too under the big sail and he talked about sailing and what fun was to be got at night when in the darkness you suddenly flashed a bright light close down over the water and the fish rushed into it, so that you could net them by the hundred. To the boy the scene which he imagined, rather than Tonio described, seemed pure magic. He looked with a sharp envy on the youth who spent his life doing such lovely things. The stars, the cool night, the boat swishing through the water, the bright lamp hung over the bows and then the fish streaming like flecks of fire towards it!
“Oh, if I could only come!” he had cried; and in front of the big sail, what with the breeze and the rush of water, he must have made a louder outcry for a word of it to have been heard in the stern.
“Why shouldn’t you?”
Julian shook his head wistfully.
“I am only a boy. I have lessons to do. I have a doctor besides,” and he grinned with amusement at this absurd appendage of the Linchcombe retinue.
Tonio wrinkled up his face in contempt of such maidenly doings.
“It is a pity. There will be no moon until ten. We shall go out early as soon as it is dark for an hour.”
Julian sat up on the nets, all the imp in him lighting up his face.
“For an hour?”
“Yes.”
“As soon as it’s dark?”
“Yes.”
“You and your father?”
Tonio nodded vigorously and laughed — laughed mirthfully, but with something secret in his mirth. Julian, up on the hillside, remembered that for a few seconds he had been puzzled and uneasy.
“We should have this boat?”
“This or another like it,” said Tonio with a shrug of the shoulders. Tonio was cunning. His fish was already on the hook. Why pull at it and see it break away? He turned on his back and drew a battered broad-brimmed hat over., his face.
Julian in a little while laughed and glanced guiltily back under the sail. His old tutor was fast asleep with his mouth open in the shadow of the sail, dreaming no doubt of Æneas and post-pluperfects.
“I am to see the miracle of San Januarius in the Duomo square,” he resumed. “It takes place in the evening when it’s getting dark. The square will be crowded. I could slip away.”
But from the Duomo to Santa Lucia where the fishermen lived was too far. He could never wriggle through the crowds in time. It was disappointing and no doubt his face grew cloudy.
“It’s no good, Tonio,” he said, and the name startled his companion. He sat up and asked fiercely: “How do you know my name?”
“I heard your father call you by it.”
“My father’s an old yellow-faced fool,” Tonio grumbled and he leaned towards Julian. “No, it can’t be managed. You see, we shan’t start from Santa Lucia. We shall get better fishing on the other side of the Bay.”
They would push off from the beach below the Largo del Mercato.
“Is that far from the Duomo?” Julian asked. Tonio shrugged his shoulders.
“Five, ten minutes.”
Julian grew excited.
“And you come back — where?”
“To Santa Lucia, of co
urse.”
“When?”
“Eight, half past eight.”
“Oh!”
At once this expedition became possible. He could slip away from the room hired by Sir Edward Place — that would be easy — and pass through the crowd. What did the miracle matter compared with this wonderful sail? Perhaps he would be allowed to hold the tiller whilst the others were forward hauling in the net! He alone at the stern, steering the boat in the darkness over the Bay of Naples — something to remember all his life! And he would be back at the Inn before anyone could wonder.
“I’ll speak to Domenico. If he will come too, it will be splendid.”
The boy could not believe that Domenico or anyone in full possession of his wits would not grasp at such a glorious excursion. Tonio was indifferent.
“It is as you wish. We shall not wait.”
Then he appeared to think for a moment.
“You know the Head of Naples?”
“No,” answered Julian.
“It is the great head by the Church of St. Eligio, close to the Mercato — in any case Domenico knows it. I’ll be there, under the head, at half past six. If you and Domenico meet me, well, we’ll go.” Julian called Domenico forward into the bows. Would he come? Oh surely! It would be a night of nights. And only for an hour. No one need know. Domenico would not hear of this truancy. Domenico relented. Before the boat reached Santa Lucia and Dr. Lanford waked up and readjusted his spectacles, Domenico had agreed.
Julian passed an afternoon which was almost unendurable in its delicious anticipation. But everything happened as it had been planned. Domenico and Julian escaped from the Duomo square whilst the Archbishop was still making his supplications to the Saint. They went as swiftly as they could through a maze of intricate narrow streets and met Tonio under the great Head by the Church of St. Eligio. Together the three went down to the dark and deserted beach.
It was at this point that Julian, sitting with his back against the hovel, found that his memory was playing him false. He remembered a strange man — not Bortolo Scalfi, but one whom he now knew to be the older Traetta — who had risen up from the stern of the boat. Had he been struck down by a blow on the head? He could not remember. He had recovered his wits to find himself lying at the bottom of the boat unable to move, with his mouth gagged. He remembered the sail like a black wing of death swinging across above his head as the boat went about, and then he lost consciousness again. He waked once more in dreadful pain, shut up in some stifling sack and jostled and flung and bumped on the back of a mule. Then he had gradually struggled back to life and perception and pain in this hovel in a cup of the hills. Where he was he did not know. No one had come to rescue him and take him home. And there was something this family meant to do to him — something which would need his strength — something horrible then. The boy shivered again in a panic. He must escape before they did it. He must!
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 733