第73章
We landed in a familiar part of the country.Dominic took one of the boat's oars with him.I suppose he was thinking of the stream we would have presently to cross, on which there was a miserable specimen of a punt, often robbed of its pole.But first of all we had to ascend the ridge of land at the back of the Cape.He helped me up.I was dizzy.My head felt very large and heavy.At the top of the ascent I clung to him, and we stopped to rest.
To the right, below us, the wide, smoky bay was empty.Dominic had kept his word.There was not a chip to be seen around the black rock from which the Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed at one blow, had slipped off into deep water to her eternal rest.The vastness of the open sea was smothered in driving mists, and in the centre of the thinning squall, phantom-like, under a frightful press of canvas, the unconscious guardacosta dashed on, still chasing to the northward.Our men were already descending the reverse slope to look for that punt which we knew from experience was not always to be found easily.I looked after them with dazed, misty eyes.One, two, three, four.
"Dominic, where's Cesar?" I cried.
As if repulsing the very sound of the name, the Padrone made that ample, sweeping, knocking-down gesture.I stepped back a pace and stared at him fearfully.His open shirt uncovered his muscular neck and the thick hair on his chest.He planted the oar upright in the soft soil, and rolling up slowly his right sleeve, extended the bare arm before my face.
"This," he began, with an extreme deliberation, whose superhuman restraint vibrated with the suppressed violence of his feelings, "is the arm which delivered the blow.I am afraid it is your own gold that did the rest.I forgot all about your money." He clasped his hands together in sudden distress."I forgot, Iforgot," he repeated disconsolately.
"Cesar stole the belt?" I stammered out, bewildered.
"And who else? CANALLIA! He must have been spying on you for days.And he did the whole thing.Absent all day in Barcelona.
TRADITORE! Sold his jacket - to hire a horse.Ha! ha! A good affair! I tell you it was he who set him at us...."Dominic pointed at the sea, where the guardacosta was a mere dark speck.His chin dropped on his breast.
"...On information," he murmured, in a gloomy voice."ACervoni! Oh! my poor brother!..."
"And you drowned him," I said feebly.
"I struck once, and the wretch went down like a stone - with the gold.Yes.But he had time to read in my eyes that nothing could save him while I was alive.And had I not the right - I, Dominic Cervoni, Padrone, who brought him aboard your fellucca - my nephew, a traitor?"He pulled the oar out of the ground and helped me carefully down the slope.All the time he never once looked me in the face.He punted us over, then shouldered the oar again and waited till our men were at some distance before he offered me his arm.After we had gone a little way, the fishing hamlet we were making for came into view.Dominic stopped.
"Do you think you can make your way as far as the houses by yourself?" he asked me quietly.
"Yes, I think so.But why? Where are you going, Dominic?""Anywhere.What a question! Signorino, you are but little more than a boy to ask such a question of a man having this tale in his family.AH! TRADITORE! What made me ever own that spawn of a hungry devil for our own blood! Thief, cheat, coward, liar - other men can deal with that.But I was his uncle, and so...I wish he had poisoned me - CHAROGNE! But this: that I, a confidential man and a Corsican, should have to ask your pardon for bringing on board your vessel, of which I was Padrone, a Cervoni, who has betrayed you - a traitor! - that is too much.It is too much.
Well, I beg your pardon; and you may spit in Dominic's face because a traitor of our blood taints us all.A theft may be made good between men, a lie may be set right, a death avenged, but what can one do to atone for a treachery like this?...Nothing."He turned and walked away from me along the bank of the stream, flourishing a vengeful arm and repeating to himself slowly, with savage emphasis: "AH! CANAILLE! CANAILLE! CANAILLE!..." He left me there trembling with weakness and mute with awe.Unable to make a sound, I gazed after the strangely desolate figure of that seaman carrying an oar on his shoulder up a barren, rock-strewn ravine under the dreary leaden sky of Tremolino's last day.Thus, walking deliberately, with his back to the sea, Dominic vanished from my sight.
With the quality of our desires, thoughts, and wonder proportioned to our infinite littleness, we measure even time itself by our own stature.Imprisoned in the house of personal illusions, thirty centuries in mankind's history seem less to look back upon than thirty years of our own life.And Dominic Cervoni takes his place in my memory by the side of the legendary wanderer on the sea of marvels and terrors, by the side of the fatal and impious adventurer, to whom the evoked shade of the soothsayer predicted a journey inland with an oar on his shoulder, till he met men who had never set eyes on ships and oars.It seems to me I can see them side by side in the twilight of an arid land, the unfortunate possessors of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the emblem of their hard calling on their shoulders, surrounded by silent and curious men: even as I, too, having turned my back upon the sea, am bearing those few pages in the twilight, with the hope of finding in an inland valley the silent welcome of some patient listener.