by Howard Pyle
She stood away from him, drooping, downcast eyes averted, and she made an odd little despairing gesture — as it were of defeat. Arbe went from her hands in that gesture. Triumph was renounced that her lover’s honor might rest unstained.
“Yes,” she said— “yes, you must go, lord. I will not dishonor you. But oh, if there is a God who hears lovers’ prayers, I pray that he will not let you come to harm. If you are killed this day I shall not live.”
The ships were drawing nearer, down the coast of the island.
“I shall be,” said the woman of abomination, “in the city, lord, when you take it.” She smiled again her wry smile, as if something grimly amused her.
“No!” said he. “Wait here or in the wood north of the Land Gate. I will come for you. You must not put yourself in danger.”
“I shall be in the city, lord,” she said again, “but not in danger. Oh, I pray God to keep you safe!”
“I must go,” said he, looking over his shoulder at the three high galleys. “I must go, but oh, my dear, never doubt me! I shall come to you if I have to crawl on hands and knees!” He took her into his arms and kissed her mouth. It was the first time. Then he caught up his mantle and stood, sharply outlined on the brink of the cliff, waving it about his head, until through the still morning air he heard cries from the men of the nearest ship and saw that he had attracted their attention.
Near where he stood a fissure rent the wall of rock — a watercourse half filled with earth and shale and grown up with low shrubs. Down this he made his way, plunging recklessly among bowlders, and so reached the tiny strip of beach at the cliff’s foot. The first galley was already hove to, and from it a skiff put out to take him aboard. In ten minutes more the three ships bore away again southward, and Zuan Gradenigo was in command.
And, after all, they had very little fighting for their pains — too little to please them. For it seems that an hour before the three ships came into sight of the city the Venetians and Arbesani of the garrison, too carelessly guarded by their barbarian captors, rose, in street and market-place and improvised prison — rose at a preconcerted signal — and fell upon the Huns tooth and nail. Some of them had weapons, some sticks or stones, one — an Arbesan called Spalatini, and his name deserves to go down in history along with Messer Samson’s — the thigh-bone of an ox which the Huns had killed and roasted whole in the Via Venezia.
When, therefore, the three galleys under Zuan Gradenigo drew into the harbor and hurriedly made fast to the landing-place, a running hand-to-hand fight was in progress from one end of the city to the other. It was not a battle, for it had no organization whatever. It was a disgraceful mêlée. Naturally enough the Venetian reinforcements incontinently decided the day. Something over three hundred of the ban’s barbarians — Huns, Slavs, and Croats — gave themselves up. Nearly two hundred killed themselves by leaping over the high westward sea-wall, and a hundred more were killed in fight or escaped by water. It was an inglorious ending to a matter which had promised so fine a struggle.
An hour after the landing, as soon as ever his duties gave him a moment’s breathing space, young Zuan made up the Via Venezia — that single long street which runs north and south through the city — to the castle which sits at the street’s northern end, and under which is the Land Gate, the only means of entering the town except by sea.
In the loggia of the castle he came upon the count — Jacopo Corner — a round old man with a red face, gouty, so that he went upon crutches. At this moment he was surrounded by a group of gentlemen — Arbesani for the most part, heads of the city’s great families — De Dominis, Galzigna, Nemira, Zudeneghi, and such; but he turned from them to greet young Gradenigo.
“Ah, Zuan, my lad!” he cried out, “you come in the nick of time — you and your archers! You’ve saved the day, for those dogs were just getting the better of us. Another hour and — St. Mark! — our heads would have been on pike-staves!”
Young Zuan struggled to preserve a face of civil sympathy, but his eyes were upon the open doors beyond. Old Jacopo seemed to read his thought.
“Ay, we have the queen bee in there! She’s in my private audience-chamber, bound to a chair. Queen bee, say I? Hussy! Strumpet! Daughter of abomination! Mother of sins!” He shook a crutch at the bronze doors. “Ay, she’s there!” he said. “But the wench has cheated us, for all that. She has robbed me of the pleasure of tearing her evil bones apart — alive, that is.”
Gradenigo, one hand on the door, turned slowly backward a masklike face. He felt that he was shaking and swaying like a drunken man.
“What do you — mean?” he said, in a flat voice.
Old Jacopo hobbled nearer and touched the younger man’s arm. “Eh, lad!” he croaked. “Come! come! You’re not yourself. The sun has got to you. You’ve a bound-up head, I see. Better have a rest!”
“What was it you said?” asked young Gradenigo, looking down at the ground, which swung slowly back and forth under him.
“Yaga?” said old Jacopo. “Oh, she’s dead. The wanton’s dead. She got a serving-maid to stab her while she sat bound in her—”
“Out of my way!” said young Zuan, in a great voice of agony, and he dashed the old man aside and sprang through the half-open doors of the castle.
He knew where the private audience-room was, and ran there at speed. No soldier stood on guard at the door — all had been engaged in that hand-to-hand street-fight through the city. He tore the door open and reeled into the room, then closed it behind him and stood with his back against it.
The room was oddly like that room in the doge’s palace where he had sat with his uncle two days since in Venice. The same great, carved table stood near the centre. The same high-set windows let in bars of colored light, which slanted down through the dimness and lay across floor and furniture in billets and lozenges of gules and vert and azure.
A single red beam rested upon the bared shoulder of the woman who hung drooping from her bonds, in the count’s great chair of state; but lower, from between the woman’s breasts, a darker red had coursed a downward trickling stream, and, still lower, made a red pool in the woman’s lap. Her head, bent, with chin on breast, was in shadow, but out of the shadow two eyes, still half-open, gleamed with the shallow, dull opacity of death.
SHE HUNG DROOPING IN THE GREAT CHAIR OF STATE
Young Zuan, shaking against his closed door, gave a dry sob.
“Child! Child!” he mourned, bitterly. Then, all at once, his eyes narrowed in an alert frown. There was something strange here.
He crossed the room with swift steps and dropped upon one knee before the chair of state, staring close through the half-darkness.
This was a woman, beautiful indubitably, but no longer young. Her bared shoulders were thick and mature, the breast under them mature, too. On her bent face lust and hatred and cupidity and all evil passions had graven marks that not even death could erase.
Ay! something strange here. Young Zuan’s foot struck against a yielding body which lay under the heavy shadow of the table. It was another woman, and dead also, lying upon her face. Gradenigo turned the body over with panic in his heart. A squat, broad-jowled, peasant face — the serving-maid, it would seem, who had done her mistress that last service and straightway followed to serve elsewhere.
Zuan rose to his feet frowning. The matter was quite beyond him. Then one stirred in the shadows at the far end of the room, and very slowly his princess came to him through those bars of colored light.
“Child! Child!” he cried again, and tears rolled down over his cheeks. He put out shaking arms to her, but she held him away with one hand, saying only:
“Wait, lord!”
Young Zuan swung about towards the dead woman who drooped so heavily in her bonds.
“Who is — that who sits there dead?” he asked. “Corner told me it was the Princess Yaga. Some one has lied to him. Who is it?”
She gave a quick sob.
“Lord, it is the Princess Yaga,�
�� she said.
“But,” said he, dropping his voice to a whisper — he did not know why— “but you — you?”
“Natalia Volutich, lord!” she said, whispering, too.
Young Zuan put up a hand to his bandaged head, and he drew the hand across his eyes. His eyes were bewildered, hurt — like a child’s eyes before some great mystery.
“I do not understand,” he said, just as a child would say it.
“Lord,” cried the maid, with little sobs between her words, “I — did it first — I pretended to be Yaga first, for — duty’s sake — the duty I owed to her. She had been good to me, lord, kind and loving. When your lieutenant thought I was Yaga and begged you to set sail with me, leaving Arbe, I saw that it would give her time — time to strengthen the — defences. So I lied. I did not — care what became of me if only she was — safe. Then — then you were in — danger and — oh, lord, I had looked into your eyes! I had — There was never man like you. I — loved you from the first moment — the very first moment. I could not bear that you should die. So I — saved you. Lord, do you not understand? What I did I did for love’s sake. This morning when I found who you were I tried to tell you the truth. I tried, lord, did I not? Did I not? Oh!” she cried, turning from him with wringing hands, “I have done everything ill and you will never forgive me; and yet, lord, I did it all for love’s sake!”
She looked towards Zuan Gradenigo, but he stood silent and helpless in his place, his eyes staring, his lips apart. The thing had been too swift and too amazing for him. His mind, unused to indirections, labored blindly at sea. And so, after a moment, she turned away again and crossed the room to where the dead woman hung, lax and heavy, in the carven chair. Sobbing, she dropped upon her knees before the chair and laid her forehead against the dead woman’s arm, into whose soft flesh the leathern thongs had cut so cruelly.
“And I was away when they bound you!” she wept. “I was not with you when you died!”
Zuan Gradenigo awoke from his daze.
“Child!” he cried. “Child! Come away from that vile body. It pollutes you!”
But the maid turned fiercely upon him.
“She loved me!” cried the maid. “She was kind to me, gentle and pitiful — and I let her die alone! Whatever she may have been to others, to me, lord, she was like the mother who died when I was a little babe. She loved me, and I let her die miserably, alone here! Oh, lord, have you nothing but curses for a woman who is dead and cannot answer you?”
Zuan bent his head. “Child,” said he, gravely, “I ask your forgiveness, and hers, and God’s. She was kind to you, wherefore I shall never speak ill of her again. But oh, my dear, come to me! She is dead and you cannot comfort her now. Come to me, child, who am alive and cannot live without you.”
“Oh, lord,” said she, “I would not have you try!”
THE END
Dulcibel (1907) by Henry Peterson
A TALE OF OLD SALEM
Illustrated by Howard Pyle
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
The original frontispiece: ‘She stood up serene but heroic’
CHAPTER I.
Dulcibel Burton.
IN THE AFTERNOON of a sunny Autumn day, nearly two hundred years ago, a young man was walking along one of the newly opened roads which led into Salem village, or what is now called Danvers Centre, in the then Province of Massachusetts Bay.
The town of Salem, that which is now the widely known city of that name, lay between four and five miles to the southeast, on a tongue of land formed by two inlets of the sea, called now as then North and South Rivers. Next to Plymouth it is the oldest town in New England, having been first settled in 1626. Not till three years after were Boston and Charlestown commenced by the arrival of eleven ships from England. It is a significant fact, as showing the hardships to which the early settlers were exposed, that of the fifteen hundred persons composing this Boston expedition, two hundred died during the first winter. Salem has also the honor of establishing the first New England church organization, in 1629, with the Reverend Francis Higginson as its pastor.
Salem village was an adjunct of Salem, the town taking in the adjacent lands for the purpose of tillage to a distance of six miles from the meeting-house. But in the progress of settlement, Salem village also became entitled to a church of its own; and it had one regularly established at the date of our story, with the Reverend Samuel Parris as presiding elder or minister.
There had been many bickerings and disputes before a minister could be found acceptable to all in Salem village. And the present minister was by no means a universal favorite. The principal point of contention on his part was the parsonage and its adjacent two acres of ground. Master Parris claimed that the church had voted him a free gift of these; while his opponents not only denied that it had been done, but that it lawfully could be done. This latter view was undoubtedly correct; for the parsonage land was a gift to the church, for the perpetual use of its pastor, whosoever he might be. But Master Parris would not listen to reason on this subject, and was not inclined to look kindly upon the men who steadfastly opposed him.
The inhabitants of Salem village were a goodly as well as godly people, but owing to these church differences about their ministers, as well as other disputes and lawsuits relative to the bounds of their respective properties, there was no little amount of ill feeling among them. Small causes in a village are just as effective as larger ones in a nation, in producing discord and strife; and the Puritans as a people were distinguished by all that determination to insist upon their rights, and that scorn of compromising difficulties, which men of earnest and honest but narrow natures have manifested in all ages of the world. Selfishness and uncharitableness are never so dangerous as when they assume the character of a conscientious devotion to the just and the true.
But all this time the young man has been walking almost due north from the meeting house in Salem village.
The road was not what would be called a good one in these days, for it was not much more than a bridle-path; the riding being generally at that time on horseback. But it was not the rather broken and uneven condition of the path which caused the frown on the young pedestrian’s face, or the irritability shown by the sharp slashes of the maple switch in his hand upon the aspiring weeds along the roadside.
“If ever mortal man was so bothered,” he muttered at last, coming to a stop. “Of course she is the best match, the other is
below me, and has a spice of Satan in her; but then she makes the blood stir in a man. Ha!”
This exclamation came as he lifted his eyes from the ground, and gazed up the road before him. There, about half a mile distant, was a young woman riding toward him. Then she stopped her horse under a tree, and evidently was trying to break off a switch, while her horse pranced around in a most excited fashion. The horse at last starts in a rapid gallop. The young man sees that in trying to get the switch, she has allowed the bridle to get loose and over the horse’s head, and can no longer control the fiery animal. Down the road towards him she comes in a sharp gallop, striving to stop the animal with her voice, evidently not the least frightened, but holding on to the pommel of the saddle with one hand while she makes desperate grasps at the hanging rein with the other.
The young Puritan smiled, he took in the situation with a glance, and felt no fear for her but rather amusement. He was on the top of a steep hill, and he knew he could easily stop the horse as it came up; even if she did not succeed in regaining her bridle, owing to the better chances the hill gave her.
“She is plucky, anyhow, if she is rather a tame wench,” said he, as the girl grasped the bridle rein at last, when about half way up the hill, and became again mistress of the blooded creature beneath her.
“Is that the way you generally ride, Dulcibel?” asked the young man smiling.
“It all comes from starting without my riding whip,” replied the girl. “Oh, do stop!” she continued to the horse who now on the level again, began sidling and curveting.
“Give me that switch of yours, Jethro. Now, you shall see a miracle.”
No sooner was the switch in her hand, than the aspect and behavior of the animal changed as if by magic. You might have thought the little mare had been raised in the enclosure of a Quaker meeting-house, so sober and docile did she seem.