And I? I drew the upland air into my lungs, and the scent of the recovered macchia through my nostrils, and inhaled it as a man inhales tobacco-smoke, and could have whooped for joy. Not by one-fifth was the scent so intense as I have since smelt it in spring, when all Corsica breaks into flower; yet intense enough and exhilarating after the dank odours of the valley. But the colours! On a sudden the macchia had burst into fruit—carmine berries of the sarsaparilla, upon which a few late flowerets yet drooped, duller berries of the lentisk, olive-like berries of the phillyria, velvet purple berries of the myrtle, and (putting all to shade) yellow and scarlet fruit of the arbutus, clustering like fairy oranges, here and there so thickly that the whole thicket was afire and aflame, enough to have deceived Moses! God, how good to see it and be alive!
Marc'antonio bore me up through the swimming air and laid me in the shadow of the cave—her cave. It was empty as she had left it, and my back pressed the very bed of fern on which she had lain. The fern was dry now, after long winnowing by the wind that found its way into every crevice of this mountain summit.
How could I choose but think of her? Thinking of her, how could I choose but weary myself in vain speculation, by a hundred guesses attempting to force my way past the edge of the mystery, the sinister shadow which wrapped her round, and penetrate to the heart of it? I recalled her beauty, childlike yet sullen; her eyes, so forthright at times and transparently innocent, yet at times so swiftly clouded with suspicion, not merely shy, but shy with terror, like the eyes of a wild creature entrapped; her bearing, by turns disdainful and defiant with a guarded shame. This turf, these boulders, had made her bower, these matted creepers her curtain. Here she had lived secure among savage men, each one of them ready to die—so Marc'antonio assured me, and all that I had seen confirmed it—rather than injure a hair of her head or suffer it to be injured. She was a king's daughter. Yet this lad of the Rocca Serras, noble, of the best blood of the island, had turned his own gun upon himself rather than wed with her.
I thought much upon this lad Rocca Serra. Why had he died? Was it for loathing her? But men do not easily loathe such beauty. Was it for love of her? But men do not slay themselves for fortunate love. Had her loathing been in some way the secret of his despair? I recalled my words to her, and how she had answered them, turning in the steep track among the pines "I am your hostage. Do with me as you will." "If I could! Ah, if I could!" I liked to think that the lad had loved her and been disdained; yet I pitied him for being disdained, and half hated him for having dared to love her. Yes, for certain he had loved her. But, if so, her secret had need be as strange almost as that of Sara, the daughter of Raguel, whom seven husbands married, to perish on the marriage eve—"for a wicked spirit loveth her, which hurteth nobody but those which come unto her."
In dreams I found myself travelling beyond the grave in search of this dead lad, to question him; and not seldom would awake with these lines running in my head, remembered as old perplexing favourites with my father, though God knows how I took a fancy that they held the clue—
"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who dy'd before the God of Love was born.
I cannot think that he, who then loved most,
Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn.
But since this god produc'd a Destiny,
And that Vice-Nature Custom lets it be,
I must love her that loves not me.
"O, were we waken'd by this tyranny
T'ungod this child again, it could not be
I should love her who loves not me.
"Rebel and Atheist too, why murmur I
As though I felt the worst that love could do?
Love may make me leave loving, or might try
A deeper plague—to make her love me too;
Which, since she loves before, I'm loth to see:
Falsehood is worse than hate: and that must be
If she whom I love should love me."
Many wild conjectures I made and patiently built upon, which, if I were to write them down here, would merely bemuse the reader or drive him to think me crazy. There on my enchanted mountain summit, ringed about day after day by the silent land, removed from all human company but Marc'antonio's, with no clock but the sun and no calendar but the creeping change of the season upon the macchia, what wonder if I forgot human probabilities at times in piecing and unpiecing solutions of a riddle which itself cried out against nature?
Marc'antonio was all the while as matter-of-fact as a good nurse ought to be. He had fashioned me a capital pair of crutches out of boxwood, and no sooner could I creep about on them than he began to discourse, over the camp-fire, on the hunting excursions we were soon to make together.