CHAPTER XI
MANSLAUGHTER
The Spera in Dio having reached Gravosa, it discharged the timber it had taken for Ragusa, and loaded a valuable cargo of tobacco from Trebigne in its stead. The ship was now lying at anchor, ready to set sail with the fresh morning breeze.
It was in the evening. The captain was in hopes to start on the morrow; for at night it is a difficult task to steer a ship through that maze of sunken rocks and jagged reefs met with all along the entrance of the Val d'Ombla.
The pobratim had been talking together for some time. Uros had tried to persuade his friend to go and marry Ivanka before the mistake under which her father was labouring had been cleared up; but the more the plan was discussed, the less was Milenko convinced of its feasibility.
Uros at last, feeling rather sleepy, threw himself into his hammock, and soon afterwards closed his eyes. Milenko, instead, stood for some time with his arms resting on the main-yard, smoking and thinking, his eyes fixed on the moon, in its wane, now rising beyond the rocky coast, from which the cypresses uplifted their dark spires, and the flowering aloes reared their huge stalks.
The warm breeze blew towards him a smell of orange blossoms from the delightful Val d'Ombla, and the fragrancy of the Agnus castus, the Cretan sage, and other balmy herbs and shrubs from that little Garden of Eden—the Island of La Croma. Feeling that he could not go to sleep, even if he tried, and finding the earth so fair, bathed as it was now by the silvery light of the moon, he made up his mind to go on shore and have a stroll along the strand.
What made him leave the ship at that late hour, and go to roam on the deserted shore? Surely one of those secret impulses of fate, of which we are not masters.
He had walked listlessly for some time on the road leading to Ragusa, when he heard the loud, discordant sounds of two men, apparently drunk, wrangling with each other. The men went on, then stopped again, then once more resumed their walk; but, at every step they made, their voices grew louder, their tones angrier. Both spoke Slav; but, evidently, one of the two must have been a foreigner. Milenko followed them, simply for the sake of doing something. When he got nearer, he understood that the cause of the quarrel was not a woman, as he had believed at first, but a sum of money which the Slav had lent to the foreigner.
As they kept repeating the selfsame things over and over, Milenko got tired of their discussion and was about to turn back. Just then, however, the two men stopped again. The Slav called the stranger a thief, who in return apostrophised him as a dog of a Turk. From words they now proceeded to blows; but, drunk as they apparently were, they did not seem to hurt each other very much. Milenko hastened on to see the struggle, for there is a latent instinct, even in the most peaceable man's nature, that makes him enjoy seeing a fight.