Half Brothers

by Hesba Stretton

The few watchdogs knew him too well to be disturbed by his soundless footsteps as he passed among the silent huts as if he had been a ghost. The foundations of the walls alone remained of Chiara's hovel, and there was still some warmth where the roof had been left smoldering on the ground. Martino squatted down in the midst of the ruins. It had been nothing but a squalid and dreary home to him, but it was the only one he had ever known. This was the one spot on earth that had been his dwelling-place, and his enemies had destroyed it with an utter destruction. There was no roof now to shelter him, no door he could shut in the face of his foes. He felt it with a vague bitterness, as some beast might feel the destruction of its hole, and tears filled his eyes, and rolled slowly down his rough and furrowed face.

He roused himself after a while, for he knew the nights were short; and, being fleet of foot, he ran down the steepest paths to Cortina, to pick up any food he could find for the coming day. There were roots growing in the fields there on which life could be sustained for some time, and his dull brain was untroubled by forebodings of the distant future. He prowled round the hotel, where Sidney was sleeping a troubled sleep, and picked up some fragments of food, which the wasteful servants had thrown through the window as the easiest way of getting rid of them. The dogs would have eaten them in the morning, but they were a Godsend to Martino, who carried them away in his ragged clothes. When he reached his cave at dawn, and the rising sun shot its earliest beams into it, they fell upon as poor a wretch as the sunlight would find out during the livelong day.

Once more he slumbered all day, hearing at intervals the attempts made to reach him in his fastness, and the voices calling to him repeatedly, all with one accord saying that his father was come and was searching for him. He laughed to scorn their attempts. Not a man among them would dare to scale the precipice; and he did not believe that there was anyone on earth who would claim him as a kinsman. His father! He had heard too often of his mother and her accursed fate, but no one had ever spoken of his father. His mother's grave he knew; and once, when there was in his heart a strange, confused springing up of tenderness—it was when he felt a sort of love for the girl who scorned and repulsed him so indignantly—he had reared a rude cross at the head of it and collected white pebbles from the river to mark its outline. But his father!

At night he stole down to Cortina again, and picked up any fragments thrown outside the doors for the scavenger dogs. But he did not go to the desolate ruins, which were no longer a shelter for him. And so two or three days and nights passed by, Martino living as wild a life as any wild and noxious beast, while Sidney used every means that could be thought of to capture him. Not Sidney alone. All the population of the Ampezzo Valley knew something of the errand that had brought the rich English signore to Cortina, and every man was eager to gain the reward he offered, but no one knew a safe approach to the cave, and, if Martino was on the watch, it seemed certain death to make any further attempt to seize him.

At last Sidney himself ascended as far as any man could climb on the almost sheer face of the peak, and drew as near to his son as was possible, calling to him in his pleasant and persuasive, but unfamiliar, voice, so different from the voices he was used to hear that there was some chance of his paying heed to it. But Martino was sleeping soundly at the time, and did not hear his father's voice; and, possibly, if he had heard it he would have thought it a fresh snare. Sidney retraced the perilous path, disheartened.

"He will die of famine," said the guide who was with him. "Perhaps he is dying now, and cannot move himself to answer."

It was a terrible thought to Sidney; yet it seemed only too likely. Sophy's son was perishing like a wounded creature that creeps for shelter into its den and dies a lingering death of famine.

"We must save him," he cried. "I will give anything you ask if you will save him."

"If we knew for certain he was dying," said the guide, scanning the rock carefully, "I would do it; but if Martino is not dying he is as strong as an ox. It would be death to any man who climbed up to his cave. We will get him when he is dead," he added cheerfully.

Sidney went down into the valley hopeless and heavy-hearted. Yet underneath the heaviness of his heart lay a vague and wordless impression that after all it would, perhaps, be best for Martin to die. For, if he lived, would it be possible ever to civilize this wild peasant, and bring him in any degree into harmony with the life of civilization and luxury to which he by birth belonged? The position and career for which Philip had been educated with so much care must be filled by this incapable, untrained, utterly ignorant savage. It would be impossible to fit him, at his age, for the position of an English farmer; he was below the level of the lowest English laborer. The sin of his father had been so visited upon him that nothing could atone to him for it in this life. Sidney acknowledged that it was his sin which fell so heavily on his son; he repented of it in bitter contrition of heart. But would it not be best for all if Martin was dead?