Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (79 page)

At last she began to be aware of a wonderful revolution, compared to which the fire of Mittwalden Palace was but the crack and flash of a percussion-cap.  The countenance with which the pines regarded her began insensibly to change; the grass too, short as it was, and the whole winding staircase of the brook’s course, began to wear a solemn freshness of appearance.  And this slow transfiguration reached her heart, and played upon it, and transpierced it with a serious thrill.  She looked all about; the whole face of nature looked back, brimful of meaning, finger on lip, leaking its glad secret.  She looked up.  Heaven was almost emptied of stars.  Such as still lingered shone with a changed and waning brightness, and began to faint in their stations.  And the colour of the sky itself was the most wonderful; for the rich blue of the night had now melted and softened and brightened; and there had succeeded in its place a hue that has no name, and that is never seen but as the herald of morning.  ‘O!’ she cried, joy catching at her voice, ‘O! it is the dawn!’

In a breath she passed over the brook, and looped up her skirts and fairly ran in the dim alleys.  As she ran, her ears were aware of many pipings, more beautiful than music; in the small dish-shaped houses in the fork of giant arms, where they had lain all night, lover by lover, warmly pressed, the bright-eyed, big-hearted singers began to awaken for the day.  Her heart melted and flowed forth to them in kindness.  And they, from their small and high perches in the clerestories of the wood cathedral, peered down sidelong at the ragged Princess as she flitted below them on the carpet of the moss and tassel.

Soon she had struggled to a certain hill-top, and saw far before her the silent inflooding of the day.  Out of the East it welled and whitened; the darkness trembled into light; and the stars were extinguished like the street-lamps of a human city.  The whiteness brightened into silver, the silver warmed into gold, the gold kindled into pure and living fire; and the face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet.  The day drew its first long breath, steady and chill; and for leagues around the woods sighed and shivered.  And then, at one bound, the sun had floated up; and her startled eyes received day’s first arrow, and quailed under the buffet.  On every side, the shadows leaped from their ambush and fell prone.  The day was come, plain and garish; and up the steep and solitary eastern heaven, the sun, victorious over his competitors, continued slowly and royally to mount.

Seraphina drooped for a little, leaning on a pine, the shrill joy of the woodlands mocking her.  The shelter of the night, the thrilling and joyous changes of the dawn, were over; and now, in the hot eye of the day, she turned uneasily and looked sighingly about her.  Some way off among the lower woods, a pillar of smoke was mounting and melting in the gold and blue.  There, surely enough, were human folk, the hearth-surrounders.  Man’s fingers had laid the twigs; it was man’s breath that had quickened and encouraged the baby flames; and now, as the fire caught, it would be playing ruddily on the face of its creator.  At the thought, she felt a-cold and little and lost in that great out-of-doors.  The electric shock of the young sun-beams and the unhuman beauty of the woods began to irk and daunt her.  The covert of the house, the decent privacy of rooms, the swept and regulated fire, all that denotes or beautifies the home life of man, began to draw her as with cords.  The pillar of smoke was now risen into some stream of moving air; it began to lean out sideways in a pennon; and thereupon, as though the change had been a summons, Seraphina plunged once more into the labyrinth of the wood.

She left day upon the high ground.  In the lower groves there still lingered the blue early twilight and the seizing freshness of the dew.  But here and there, above this field of shadow, the head of a great outspread pine was already glorious with day; and here and there, through the breaches of the hills, the sun-beams made a great and luminous entry.  Here Seraphina hastened along forest paths.  She had lost sight of the pilot smoke, which blew another way, and conducted herself in that great wilderness by the direction of the sun.  But presently fresh signs bespoke the neighbourhood of man; felled trunks, white slivers from the axe, bundles of green boughs, and stacks of firewood.  These guided her forward; until she came forth at last upon the clearing whence the smoke arose.  A hut stood in the clear shadow, hard by a brook which made a series of inconsiderable falls; and on the threshold the Princess saw a sun-burnt and hard-featured woodman, standing with his hands behind his back and gazing skyward.

She went to him directly: a beautiful, bright-eyed, and haggard vision; splendidly arrayed and pitifully tattered; the diamond ear-drops still glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces.  At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin.

‘I am cold,’ she said, ‘and weary.  Let me rest beside your fire.’

The woodman was visibly commoved, but answered nothing.

‘I will pay,’ she said, and then repented of the words, catching perhaps a spark of terror from his frightened eyes.  But, as usual, her courage rekindled brighter for the check.  She put him from the door and entered; and he followed her in superstitious wonder.

Within, the hut was rough and dark; but on the stone that served as hearth, twigs and a few dry branches burned with the brisk sounds and all the variable beauty of fire.  The very sight of it composed her; she crouched hard by on the earth floor and shivered in the glow, and looked upon the eating blaze with admiration.  The woodman was still staring at his guest: at the wreck of the rich dress, the bare arms, the bedraggled laces and the gems.  He found no word to utter.

‘Give me food,’ said she, — ’here, by the fire.’

He set down a pitcher of coarse wine, bread, a piece of cheese, and a handful of raw onions.  The bread was hard and sour, the cheese like leather; even the onion, which ranks with the truffle and the nectarine in the chief place of honour of earth’s fruits, is not perhaps a dish for princesses when raw.  But she ate, if not with appetite, with courage; and when she had eaten, did not disdain the pitcher.  In all her life before, she had not tasted of gross food nor drunk after another; but a brave woman far more readily accepts a change of circumstances than the bravest man.  All that while, the woodman continued to observe her furtively, many low thoughts of fear and greed contending in his eyes.  She read them clearly, and she knew she must begone.

Presently she arose and offered him a florin.

‘Will that repay you?’ she asked.

But here the man found his tongue.  ‘I must have more than that,’ said he.

‘It is all I have to give you,’ she returned, and passed him by serenely.

Yet her heart trembled, for she saw his hand stretched forth as if to arrest her, and his unsteady eyes wandering to his axe.  A beaten path led westward from the clearing, and she swiftly followed it.  She did not glance behind her.  But as soon as the least turning of the path had concealed her from the woodman’s eyes, she slipped among the trees and ran till she deemed herself in safety.

By this time the strong sunshine pierced in a thousand places the pine-thatch of the forest, fired the red boles, irradiated the cool aisles of shadow, and burned in jewels on the grass.  The gum of these trees was dearer to the senses than the gums of Araby; each pine, in the lusty morning sunlight, burned its own wood-incense; and now and then a breeze would rise and toss these rooted censers, and send shade and sun-gem flitting, swift as swallows, thick as bees; and wake a brushing bustle of sounds that murmured and went by.

On she passed, and up and down, in sun and shadow; now aloft on the bare ridge among the rocks and birches, with the lizards and the snakes; and anon in the deep grove among sunless pillars.  Now she followed wandering wood-paths, in the maze of valleys; and again, from a hill-top, beheld the distant mountains and the great birds circling under the sky.  She would see afar off a nestling hamlet, and go round to avoid it.  Below, she traced the course of the foam of mountain torrents.  Nearer hand, she saw where the tender springs welled up in silence, or oozed in green moss; or in the more favoured hollows a whole family of infant rivers would combine, and tinkle in the stones, and lie in pools to be a bathing-place for sparrows, or fall from the sheer rock in rods of crystal.  Upon all these things, as she still sped along in the bright air, she looked with a rapture of surprise and a joyful fainting of the heart; they seemed so novel, they touched so strangely home, they were so hued and scented, they were so beset and canopied by the dome of the blue air of heaven.

At length, when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow pool.  Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast; the floor was paved with the pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images.  She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe.  The breeze now shook her image; now it would be marred with flies; and at that she smiled; and from the fading circles, her counterpart smiled back to her and looked kind.  She sat long in the warm sun, and pitied her bare arms that were all bruised and marred with falling, and marvelled to see that she was dirty, and could not grow to believe that she had gone so long in such a strange disorder.

Then, with a sigh, she addressed herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it round her face, and the pool repeated her thus veiled.  Her hair had smelt like violets, she remembered Otto saying; and so now she tried to smell it, and then shook her head, and laughed a little, sadly, to herself.

The laugh was returned upon her in a childish echo.

She looked up; and lo! two children looking on, — a small girl and a yet smaller boy, standing, like playthings, by the pool, below a spreading pine.  Seraphina was not fond of children, and now she was startled to the heart.

‘Who are you?’ she cried hoarsely.

The mites huddled together and drew back; and Seraphina’s heart reproached her that she should have frightened things so quaint and little, and yet alive with senses.  She thought upon the birds and looked again at her two visitors; so little larger and so far more innocent.  On their clear faces, as in a pool, she saw the reflection of their fears.  With gracious purpose she arose.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘do not be afraid of me,’ and took a step towards them.

But alas! at the first moment, the two poor babes in the wood turned and ran helter-skelter from the Princess.

The most desolate pang was struck into the girl’s heart.  Here she was, twenty-two — soon twenty-three — and not a creature loved her; none but Otto; and would even he forgive?  If she began weeping in these woods alone, it would mean death or madness.  Hastily she trod the thoughts out like a burning paper; hastily rolled up her locks, and with terror dogging her, and her whole bosom sick with grief, resumed her journey.

Past ten in the forenoon, she struck a high-road, marching in that place uphill between two stately groves, a river of sunlight; and here, dead weary, careless of consequences, and taking some courage from the human and civilised neighbourhood of the road, she stretched herself on the green margin in the shadow of a tree.  Sleep closed on her, at first with a horror of fainting, but when she ceased to struggle, kindly embracing her.  So she was taken home for a little, from all her toils and sorrows, to her Father’s arms.  And there in the meanwhile her body lay exposed by the highwayside, in tattered finery; and on either hand from the woods the birds came flying by and calling upon others, and debated in their own tongue this strange appearance.

The sun pursued his journey; the shadow flitted from her feet, shrank higher and higher, and was upon the point of leaving her altogether, when the rumble of a coach was signalled to and fro by the birds.  The road in that part was very steep; the rumble drew near with great deliberation; and ten minutes passed before a gentleman appeared, walking with a sober elderly gait upon the grassy margin of the highway, and looking pleasantly around him as he walked.  From time to time he paused, took out his note-book and made an entry with a pencil; and any spy who had been near enough would have heard him mumbling words as though he were a poet testing verses.  The voice of the wheels was still faint, and it was plain the traveller had far outstripped his carriage.

He had drawn very near to where the Princess lay asleep, before his eye alighted on her; but when it did he started, pocketed his note-book, and approached.  There was a milestone close to where she lay; and he sat down on that and coolly studied her.  She lay upon one side, all curled and sunken, her brow on one bare arm, the other stretched out, limp and dimpled.  Her young body, like a thing thrown down, had scarce a mark of life.  Her breathing stirred her not.  The deadliest fatigue was thus confessed in every language of the sleeping flesh.  The traveller smiled grimly.  As though he had looked upon a statue, he made a grudging inventory of her charms: the figure in that touching freedom of forgetfulness surprised him; the flush of slumber became her like a flower.

‘Upon my word,’ he thought, ‘I did not think the girl could be so pretty.  And to think,’ he added, ‘that I am under obligation not to use one word of this!’  He put forth his stick and touched her; and at that she awoke, sat up with a cry, and looked upon him wildly.

‘I trust your Highness has slept well,’ he said, nodding.

But she only uttered sounds.

‘Compose yourself,’ said he, giving her certainly a brave example in his own demeanour.  ‘My chaise is close at hand; and I shall have, I trust, the singular entertainment of abducting a sovereign Princess.’