The Prince of the Captivity: The Epilogue to a Romance

by Sydney C. Grier

It was no use to struggle, and she could not cry out. She was held down firmly, and the cloak, or whatever the covering might be, was pressed tightly over her face. She had almost lost consciousness when the pressure was relaxed, and she lay helpless and motionless until she felt some one shaking her by the shoulder, and heard a voice speaking in an unknown tongue. She looked up into the sunken eyes of an old woman, who was holding in one hand the rough woollen cloak which had served as a gag. The stranger was blaming her for venturing into such a place, Helene gathered, and warning her that if she had been discovered, her life would have been the forfeit. Realising the old woman’s meaning, she remembered suddenly all that had passed, and springing up, she peered through the bushes again. The carriage and its attendants were gone, and the crushed weeds in the drive showed where it had passed. She turned to run after it, but the old woman caught her by the arm, and intimated by signs that it was travelling so fast she would never catch it. Resorting to signs in her turn, Helene did her best to inquire whether the old woman could take her by a short cut through the forest to the road, that she might see what direction the carriage was taking, but the old woman expressed the most lively fear at the prospect, moderating her gestures, however, when she saw Helene put her hand into her pocket. It was not often that the girl carried a purse, for there was nothing to buy at Drinitza, and she rather liked making Usk pay everything for her when they went into Novigrad, but it was well to have a little loose change at hand ready for going into the village, on account of the beggars. If the beggars were not duly noticed and relieved, they were apt to curse the passer-by, and Helene had a nervous dislike of being cursed. Her purse happened fortunately to be in the pocket of the pink gown, and she emptied the store of small coins it contained into the old woman’s hand, with the result that the owner grinned widely, and made signs indicative of her willingness to start at once.

They crept down the drive again, and once outside the gate, plunged into the forest to the right, avoiding the lane, and very soon found themselves mounting a steep slope. This part of the woods Helene had not explored with Usk, and she was therefore obliged to rely entirely on the old woman, who hobbled along, helping herself up the steepest places by clutching at the bushes, with wonderful agility. On they went, now up and now down, through such mazes of forest that Helene decided she must come back by the road, or she would never be able to find her way home by herself. Moreover, as the first excitement of the chase died down, she became conscious that she had gone through a good deal since first starting out that morning, and that her limbs, shaking with fatigue and agitation, would scarcely carry her. But she struggled on bravely, and at last the old woman stopped on the very brink of what seemed to be a wooded cliff, and pointing straight downwards, said something which Helene took to mean that the road was there.

The declivity was not quite so steep as it looked, but Helene soon found that it was impossible to walk down it. The only plan was to run whenever a clear space appeared, bringing up against a friendly tree when she was out of breath, and then picking her way slowly from one trunk to another. It was natural that she should run faster than the old woman, and therefore it did not surprise her to find herself in front; but when she reached the foot of the cliff, and discovered that her companion had not followed her, and she was all alone, it struck her that she had been rather shabbily treated. She sat down, thankfully enough, upon a fallen tree, keeping in the shade so that her light dress might not attract attention, and with her eyes fixed upon the stretch of road to the left, waited patiently. This was a part of the road that she and Usk had never reached, even in their drives, and she felt sure that she must be a good deal in advance of the carriage, which had to follow the many windings necessary for the maintenance of a comparatively slight gradient. For a time she was so glad to rest that she thought of nothing but the relief to her tired feet, but after a while it occurred to her that the afternoon was wearing away, and that she had a very long distance to walk home. Moreover, the road was lonely. Not a creature had passed while she sat on the log, and there was no sign of a human habitation anywhere. The best plan would certainly be to walk back towards Drinitza, and so meet the mysterious carriage. On that quiet road she would hear it coming a long way off, and be able to hide in the wood until it had passed. Or perhaps it might not pass at all—which was a contingency that had not occurred to her before—but in that case she would know that it had taken the only other direction possible, the road leading to Klotsch, so that her walk would not have been in vain.

Rising from the log, she turned to the left, in the direction, as she had never doubted, of Drinitza, and set out boldly along the road. Before she had gone far, however, it struck her that the sun, now approaching its setting, should have been behind her, instead of which it was in front.

“How stupid I am!” she said wearily, beginning to retrace her steps. “My head is so confused that I was actually going the wrong way. And yet I don’t see how—but it’s no good trying to work it out now. I must simply go on.”

On and on she went, still without recognising any familiar landmark, until she was too tired to look at anything but the long white ribbon of road which seemed to unfold itself endlessly before her. At last the growing dusk made her lift her eyes to the sky again, and there was the sun, now sinking behind the hills, in front of her once more! The truth flashed upon her. The unfamiliar scenery was accounted for. She had been right at first, but at that point the road doubled back upon itself, in order to skirt the base of the cliff she had descended, so that for a little while its direction was actually west instead of east. But at the end of the turn she would have found herself looking eastwards again, whereas now she had been walking away from home with every step she took.

For the moment Helene was overwhelmed. She could never walk back to Drinitza now, she knew, and she was utterly alone, in a district which did not seem to possess a single inhabitant. Tired and cold, and faint with hunger, she sat down by the roadside and cried weakly. Unless another miracle occurred to help her, she must spend the night where she was, and even in the morning Usk would have no means of knowing where to look for her. But again she saw a miracle in what followed close upon the despairing little prayer she sent up. From the forest behind her came the lively sound of ungreased waggon-wheels, faint at first in the distance, but gradually increasing in nearness and excruciating distinctness. A vehicle of some kind was jolting over a rough forest-track, and presently she could hear the ejaculations addressed by the driver to his oxen. So comforting was the knowledge that a fellow-creature was at hand, that she ran forward impulsively as the heads of the oxen appeared, but the driver was far too busy to notice her until he had safely manœuvred his team and the long rough waggon, laden with wood, from the side-track into the main road. Then he seemed suddenly to become aware that he had heard a human voice, and he looked down from his stately height—he was a huge Dardanian—to see a little pale girl, in dusty and draggled European dress, weeping bitterly, and sobbing forth entreaties in two or three languages. It was well for Helene that her giant was better-tempered than giants are generally supposed to be, and kind-hearted as well, for although he could not understand either French, German, or English, and shook his head vigorously when she tried to explain that she wanted to get back to Drinitza, he offered her a seat on the wood in his waggon, and actually lifted her up there when she hesitated. She made no further opposition after that. Where he might be taking her, she had no idea, but presumably it was to his home, and possibly to some place where she might find the means of communicating with Usk.

The oxen tramped on patiently, and the waggon began to jolt again as the road became worse, but Helene dozed spasmodically on her rough couch. It was not until the waggon came to a standstill that she really awoke, to find herself in the one street of a little Dardanian frontier village, the white walls and dark roofs of which were glorious in the after-glow of sunset, and made a kind of theatrical background for the gigantic men and strapping women in red and blue and gold-embroidered white garments who were crowding round to hear of the strange adventure which had happened to Petros. Before Helene was fairly awake, the smallest man in the crowd asked her in broken German for her papers, and it was evident that a bad impression was produced by her confession that she had none. The small man had something to do with the customs, apparently, for she gathered from the cross-examination which followed that he suspected her of smuggling, though it was not clear what she had to smuggle, with the exception of her worn and weary self. Moreover, he fastened upon her statement that her husband was English as his own excuse for not understanding her German, and they argued at cross-purposes for some time, while the listening villagers made remarks that were evidently uncomplimentary in their nature. To Helene’s horror, he succeeded at last in making it plain that she would be detained for the night as a suspicious character in the hut in which the customs business was carried on; and already she saw herself led to prison before the eyes of the crowd of curious villagers, and locked up hungry and tired, and, above all, alone. In despair, she turned to the tallest man in the crowd, who also seemed to hold some position of authority, and fortunately remembering the word used by the Dardanians to designate their ruler, did her best to explain that the Prince was her cousin, and would hold the villagers responsible for their treatment of her. She could not be sure that she was really understood, but the people seemed to be impressed, and the tall man and the small man consulted together. Presently she distinguished a sound sufficiently like the Illyrian word for “telegraph” to assure her that they were talking of telegraphing somewhere for directions, and she seized upon the proposal with almost hysterical joy.

“Oh, let me telegraph to my husband!” she cried to the little man, “and just let me rest somewhere till he comes, and he will pay anything you like.”

Whether the mention of payment stimulated the official wits, or whether the man was afraid of getting into trouble through over-zeal, he appeared to understand and approve of the suggestion. The big man lifted Helene down from the waggon as if she had been a baby, and after she had thanked the driver for his kindness, the scene changed to the post-office, of which the big man was in charge. Here a fresh difficulty occurred, for Helene had no money, and the simplicity of modern dress precluded her from resorting to the time-honoured expedient of offering jewellery in pledge. She had not even a watch with her, and the postmaster became stern and implacable once more. The little man came to the rescue by pointing out that she had a gold ring on her finger, but she pleaded so piteously that she could not give up her wedding-ring, that matters were at a deadlock again. Then the postmaster, apparently prompted by his handsome, slipshod wife, proposed a compromise. He would send the telegram, and wait for the payment until the morning; but Helene and the ring must remain in pawn, so to speak, since she would not be separated from it. She should spend the night in the post-office, which was a lean-to attached to his own house, and could only be entered through the room in which he and his family slept; and if there was no answer to the telegram in the morning, the ring must be given up. There were few things to which Helene would not have agreed at that moment, and she wrote out the telegram, surrounded by the eager and curious circle of villagers, all bristling with weapons. She wrote it in German, as the customs-officer’s help would enable the postmaster to make it less unintelligible in that language than in French or English; and when the whole assembly had looked at it wisely, heard it translated and explained, and discussed the meaning, it was allowed to be sent. When, after a good deal of squabbling between the postmaster and the customs-officer over the spelling of the words, the message had at last been despatched, Helene, who had been upheld by her anxiety so far, staggered forward, and clutching feebly at the office-desk, slipped to the floor. Instantly the postmaster’s wife, who seemed to have been severely repressed hitherto by her husband, took possession of her, and ordered the other villagers out of the room. It was clear she was saying that whoever the girl might be, she was faint and exhausted, and should not be tormented any more by stupid unsympathetic men. Even this good Samaritan could not provide a softer couch than the bench which ran along one end of the room, but she brought a sheepskin as a coverlid and a rolled-up apron for a pillow, and a frugal meal of black bread and milkless tea. She was so obviously sympathetic and compassionate that Helene kissed her impulsively as she covered her up, and the Dardanian woman smiled broadly as she kissed her in return, and patted her shoulder with a friendly hand as she bade her sleep well and not be frightened.