Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (44 page)

“Not so swift, Sir Knight.” And now the voice of Stentor was but a serpentine whisper in the leaves. “I know it is your will that I should die, and I guess that in your sleep your hands twitch on the coverlet in a mime of strangling, but your commission forbids, on pain of your disgrace and mayhap worse, the overt or even covert doing of the deed. But you have softer and slower and more insidious means of encompassing my dispatch than the knife in the dark or the poison in the cup. There is, for one ensample, the device of starvation.”

“You do not,” returned the good knight with a restored humor in his countenance, “seem to me to be dying of that malady. Your bones are as well hid under your flesh as the stumps of felled oaks under January snows.”

“Aye, you say so? Well, and if I say that what your mean benison permits myself and my entourage is of a gross insufficiency and that I am forced, this very day, to send ancestral gold and silver to be sold in the markets of the island’s capital—What say you then, O Knight of the Doubtful Countenance?”

“I say that it is but an act of gratuitous malice, to bring myself low in the world’s eyes. You have no need to sell plate that you may eat, and well you know it.” Sir Hud’s eyes, which Lion of the Valley closely observed, betrayed unease and resentment of an injustice he could not scotch, since the members of his prisoner’s household were not themselves prisoners and hence could not be barred from free access to the marts of the town. There would be talk and there would be calumny, and the malice, transformed to a mendacious image of his tyranny, would fly with the trade winds to the known corners of the earth. “This is,” he said, “a traitorous and unworthy act.”

“It is,” rejoined the other, now disporting his small but ample body in the postures of a known triumph, “a fair return for your own cruelty, aye, unworthy and unknightly cruelty. For in confining me as you do to the wretched periphery of this estate, you deprive me of all exercise. Was I not at one time free to ride a-horseback over the island ridge? And now I, whose life was lived in the field, must nurse a liver swollen and a belly over-rounded with the neglect of bodily action. Is not this cruelty, is not this a manner of slow and contrived murder?”

“Ride the ridge and you will ride to the shore. I cannot allow of such dangerous liberty and well you know it.” But the eyes of Sir Hud had still to recover the calm and light of one content in his judgment. Of the cunning of his adversary he had long known; he had not however conceived that such cunning might contrive a manner of victory through self-elected martyrdom.

“Oh aye,” jeered his prisoner, “and your soldiers will shoot me if I ride too far afield. Or perchance they may not. In spite of the hatred of myself that the governors of your realm hug to their bosoms, it may well be that the governed are of a different heart. May it not then be,” and his voice was low and musical, “that you nurse some inner fear of my cause being not yet lost, of your own men responding to my trumpet, of mutiny in the name of liberty, the jack hauled down and the tricolor raised? Is it not so, O Knight in whose knightly countenance glooms a whole night of doubt?”

“This alone is so,” responded Sir Hud, and his look and his voice alike had recovered authority, “that your confinement to the boundaries of this estate of Longwood shall be reinforced with the greatest rigor, and that orders will be given in my name and thereby in the name of His Majesty of England that, should you essay trespass beyond them, then you will be shot at sight.”

“Ah,” returned Lion of the Valley all smiling and in a voice of honey, “this likes me well. Your enmity is declared and, believe me, Sir Knight, Knight of Blackness, it shall be chronicled forever in the annals of infamy. For when I am dead, and this cannot in the nature of things be long delayed, it will be known to all the world who was my murderer. I foresee a time,” said he, and the light of the visionary shone in his countenance, “when the agonies of the Emperor shall be enacted upon the common stage, and the pusillanimity and rancor of his jailor, the unchivalric chevalier, shall call forth cries of outrage from them that see the foulness of it all, and, yea, the very comedians who enact your part shall fear for their lives. Was it such fame as this that your parents foresaw for their offspring in the unlucky hour of your begetting?”

Sir Hud now trembled with emotions he could not, in the moment of their arousal, well define. “This is unjust,” said he in a choked voice, stressing the word with a trembling fist, “and before the Supreme Judge of all of us you know it. I do no more than my duty, and my duty is to oversee the security of your confinement, as is delegated to me by my masters. If you consider that you and your household are in want of the necessities of sheer life, that what is allowed for your and their provisioning is inadequate, then I will, as is my duty, convey your complaint to them best able to judge of whether it be well-founded. For the rest, I must set severe limits on the bounds of your freedom of movement, and before God I see not how I can do otherwise.”

“And so,” said Lion of the Valley, and he purred in rather a tigrine than a leonine manner, “I am to have armed men still patrolling about my walls and peering in at my casements. Well, this I promise, as the Almighty is my witness, that should any come too close I shall conceive of it as unlawful trespass and act accordingly. Aye, Sir Knight, I will fire a ball into the breast of the intruder.”

“This is contrary to all the laws that govern the covenant,” began the knight, still trembling, but the other at once struck in with:

“Covenant, say you? There is no covenant between enemies. You and I, Sir Lowe, are at war.”

“This is the very cream of madness,” said the knight, with a partial recovery of his equanimity. “By rights you should be unarmed.”

“And if I were to say aye to that,” responded Lion of the Valley, “there would still be the matter of my royal entourage, which is a body of free men bearing all the privileges of free men, though they have of their grace and loyalty joined me in my incarcerated state. And to be armed is their right, and it would be their bounden duty to use arms in the defense of their prince. So I say again: beware. And if you yourself, Sir Knight, seek entrance here as out of what you conceive to be your gubernatorial privilege, then you too will receive, before you thrust foot beyond the threshold, a ball in your breast. Are my words clear? Do you apprehend them?”

“I must seek instruction from my masters,” said Sir Hud. “For the moment I will say that my men will, and this I grant of my grace, keep discreet distance, neither peering in nor unlawfully entering. Their limits shall be the borders of your gardens.”

“Ah, you say so?” responded his prisoner in glee. “I have won so much. And is there some law that forbids my tending and working in my gardens?”

“There is no such law,” said the knight, though unhappily, “and it may be regarded as the healthful exercise you seek, but I know well what you have in mind.”

“Aye, you will have read of me. Aye, you will have been apprised of the time of my cadetship. For a garden is what a man must win from the wilderness, it is the order he seeks, with nature’s own compliance, to impose upon the aimless growth of nature’s germinating forces. And my gardens shall spread, sir, and my trees and bushes push back the bounds of your watchfulness. Once I sought to turn all Europe into a garden, nor, despite all, will the wilderness altogether reclaim it. And so it must suffice now, that in a smaller or microcosmic figure, I must resume the labors to which God called me. I will construct, while you will but constrict. Is that not the truest and briefest summation of our respective aims?” The knight said nothing, having nothing further to say. “So now,” spoke the Emperor of Longwood as to an underling, “you may leave my presence and plan new stratagems. But I shall win, make no mistake of that.”

The day was hot beneath that southern sun,

The time conspired to rest, though Nature’s self,

Knowing no rest, was busily at work,

The bees about their task, the butterflies

Gilding the blue they sailed and skimmed along,

And all the hidden forces underground,

Inaudible to most but to the ear

Attuned to Nature’s music live and loud.

Thus as I strolled, wiping with movement slow

The copious dew the sun called forth to film

My heated brow with the coarse handkerchief,

A sister’s gift, that I had hither brought

Out of my gentler dales, I chanced upon

A sweating gardener, singing at his task,

Digging and hoeing, and with cheerful tones

Bidding his helpers, men less apt than he

And with no cheerful song upon their lips,

To work apace for soon the westering sun

Would sink apace, the southern stars rush out,

And in one stride the mantling dark descend.

His language was not mine, but I had once,

In those good days when Freedom was the cry,

And France was teaching Brotherhood, been fired

To speak it much and dwell some little time

Where it was spoke, and so I used it now

In cheerful greeting. “Good it is to see,”

Said I, “such happy industry, my friend,

And such fair promise of a myriad blooms

And saplings that, when you and I are dust,

Our souls recalled to Nature’s bosom, may

Yield grateful shade which sunburned travelers,

Such as myself, will bless, as also bless

The good man who once placed them in the earth.”

He smiled at me; he was of middle years

And corpulent, and something in his mien

Shone that was hardly of the common sort

As though, but reason thrust the fancy back,

He had been ruler of some little world,

A squire, or officer of revenues.

Smiling he said: “I do, sir, what I may

To enlarge my little kingdom, as of yore

I made a greater kingdom greater still.”

And, saying thus, he plied his clodded spade,

Calling out “Spadé, spadé,” in a jest

I could not comprehend, as though he thought

Our English “spade” was an Italian word.

This, and his earlier words, made dawn in me

A sense that he was what a happy trope

Terms one of Nature’s naturals. So with a smile

But neither look nor word of unbelief,

I let him speak on gaily as he worked.

“Aye, sir,” said he, “for all that wilderness

Which men call Europe, wherein noisome weeds

Did choke the flowers, and greedy hornets bred,

And fruit did rot upon the vine, I took

Once as my garden-plot, and with the help

Of Nature and my fortitude inborn

And the long gift of patience did I make

The greatest garden man has ever known,

With tended plots and avenues built fair,

And cool gazebos, glassed herbaria

And everything to glad the heart of men.

Now, as you see, I work a humbler plot,

But still my kingdom.” Then his manner changed.

It seemed he had but now discerned the tones

Wherein I spoke his language, for he said:

“Are you of Albion’s shore? Are you sent here

To spy and probe? Whether so sent or no,

You trespass on my kingdom—get you gone.”

And then he offered with his spade to strike:

“I have no
spada
but by heaven this spade

Shall serve me,” and I understood the word.

And so I got me gone, though smiling still,

For Nature is as various in the men

She breeds as in her fruits and flowers, I mused.

And to this day, when idle hours invite

The drawing from my memory’s varied store

Of images extravagant, extreme,

Or pale and simple as the woodland blooms

Wherein I lie at summer ease, I see

That man again, of swollen dropsied frame,

Of swollen fancy too, and hear his voice

Speak of his garden-kingdom, and I smile,

But deg the smile withal with generous tears.

S
ergeant Trouncer, of His Britannic Majesty’s infantry, and as good and faithful a servant of His Britannic Majesty as His Britannic Majesty could hope to find, if His Britannic Majesty were disposed to look, lay at his ease, or at such ease as the broiling heat would permit, on the plain pallet of the guardroom, and removed his boots. Each fell to the stone floor in its turn with as much noise, within the limits of its booty capacity, as it could muster, as though aware of a kind of military responsibility to be noisy, and, for good measure, the hobnails of the soles flashed sparks against the stone, as though concerned to impress the crawling foreign blackbeetles with a sort of British firework display. Sergeant Trouncer observed his junior colleague, Private Slodge, admire the steam that arose from within the discarded leather, as though each boot were a fairy Vesuvius, or rather, since he was a young man of no large imagination, the boots were twin bakeries released from their task of roasting Sergeant Trouncer’s feet for some supper of delicate-stomached cannibals who must arrive soon if they were not to eat their pedal victuals lukewarm.

“I see you looking at them boots, young un,” Sergeant Trouncer pronounced. His upper lip was adorned with an ample mustache whose looser fronds blew about when he spoke. If his statement were to be construed as being of the present tense, then it must be deemed inaccurate, since it was at the lively filaments of the aforesaid labial adornment that Private Slodge was now gazing. “Them boots,” Sergeant Trouncer weightily repeated, making the very words sound like a soldier’s feet coming to smart attention. “Them boots,” he said, “has marched.” He paused and looked fiercely at Private Slodge, as if the latter might be inclined to table a denial of that affirmation. “Yes, young un, them boots has marched from the Anterlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and all the way back again. Not that it’s any more Red than what I am,” he added somewhat inaccurately, for he had been baked as lobster-hued as his tunic by the tropic suns of service in the name of His Britannic Majesty, not that His Britannic Majesty was aware of this or, if aware, greatly concerned one way or the other. “It’s just what they calls it—Red.” He paused with the same ferocity as before, as though now ready for a new denial, this time in the realm of geographical nomenclature.