Christine of the hills

by Max Pemberton

“‘Little Christine,’ said I, ‘you shall be lonely no more. To-morrow we will find a new home and new friends. God be praised that I have found you again.’

“The burst of weeping comforted her. She began, after a while, to laugh through her tears; and remembering that I had come far, and had eaten nothing since midday, she put bread and fruit upon her table, and a bottle of the wine of Mostar. And at this she fell to telling me how she lived by her needle, doing work that Ugo brought her from the city, and existing on the pence which would have been starvation to a beggar. She pointed also to the little fishing-boat anchored in the creek, letting me know that it had come to her from her brother together with the furniture of the cabin and the old violin she played so sweetly.

“‘Pietro taught me,’ said she, as she busied herself to serve me, ‘Pietro, who comes to sing the Mass on Sundays. He promised me that I should play in Vienna some day—but look you, Andrea, he is like the rest now.’

“‘Child,’ asked I, ‘how came it that they speak so of you in the village?’

“‘It was the word of Nicolò, my brother. He whined to the priest, and would have sent me as a servant to the Sisters at Zara. But I ran from him and hid myself in the woods. Oh, it is good to be free, good to lie in the shade of the trees and to look over the sea and dream of the city and the people beyond. I have read of it in books, and I think sometimes that I shall wake from my sleep to see the things I read of. Can you not understand, Andrea?’

“I told her that I could; yet, God knows, I understood Christine but ill. She was not a peasant, excellency, for her father had been a man of some little learning, and her mother was a musician of rare gifts. Had I thought upon it, this remembrance would have led me to discern the double nature which was then my stumbling-block. For here was one reared as a savage, yet controlled at every turn by the birthright of natural culture; a vagrant in name, yet a little queen in gesture and in speech. The visions which deluded her were the visions of a past growing up and magnifying with the years; carrying one whose world was a few acres of thicket and of sand out to the life across the sea. Isolated as she was, friendless, homeless, never once did she cease to dream of a greater world, where triumph and love and that pride of self which is victory awaited her. The same spirit, I doubt not, held her back from the embraces of the peasant who worshipped her. She was grateful to the man in that he was a friend to her. But at his touch she trembled; his kisses were like coals of fire upon her lips.

“Something of these thoughts, signor, passed through my mind as the child waited upon me so prettily in her cottage. I knew that her beauty would be riches to her wherever she might carry it; I could feel instinctively that conscious superiority which birth may give and circumstance cannot check. And this was odd to recognise in one whose legs were bare and whose hands and arms were burnt almost black with her labour in the sun. Yet she had but to speak and her rags were forgotten; but to take her crazy violin in her hand to awaken the mind to passionate dreams or to all the sweets of languorous rest. Long I listened to her that night, as the dark came down upon the Adriatic, and the sea moaned upon the beach before her door. It was as though she had put some spell upon me with her wild, untrained music; had carried me back to remember forgotten days of my own childhood; had peopled the island with unnumbered men and women, or had set before my eyes visions of the greater cities themselves, with all their world of sound and light and struggle and death. The whole of her soul was in the music, excellency; it awakened her to laughter, to tears, to joy. Her face was the face of one transformed while she played; yet she had but to set down her violin, and indifference, silence, nay, almost the shadow of hate, were to be read in her eyes.

“I speak of these things, excellency, that you, when you come to hear of the whole life of the woman you have seen to-day living in luxury and in the light of gratified desire, may know of the impulses which led her to the path she followed, and of that surpassingly curious childhood which fate decreed should be her portion. When I left her that night in her cottage, to lie myself at the house of the priest, my chief thought was of her future, and of the man to whom it would be given to hold her in his arms.

“‘For,’ said I, ‘that man will either pluck a thorn for his pillow or take treasure to his house—yet which of these he is to do the God above us alone can tell.’

“Next day I rose at an early hour from my bed, and, having heard Mass in the little church, set out upon my journey to the eastern shore. There were many of the islanders now ready to help me, for the news that I had money in my pocket was quick to be noised abroad, and one old woman tottered far upon her stick that she might look at a piece of gold again. But I listened to none of them—neither to their tales of the love they had treasured secretly for the child nor to their offers of service.