The story of the sack of a castle was of a kind to have wide circulation; at the same time this one was recent enough to be still in the memory of persons living. Finding the place of its occurrence was the difficulty.
If in the vicinity of Brindisi--well, he would go and ask. The yearning spoken of did not come alone; it had for companion, Conscience, as yet in the background.
There were vessels bound for Venice. One was taking in water, after which it would sail for Otranto. It seemed a fleet craft, with a fair crew, and a complement of stout rowers. Otranto was south of Brindisi a little way, and the castle he wanted to hear of might have been situated between those cities. Who could tell? Besides, as an Italian n.o.bleman, to answer inquiry in Constantinople, he would have to locate himself somewhere, and possibly the coast in question might accommodate him with both a location and a t.i.tle. The result was he took pa.s.sage to Otranto.
While there he kept his role of traveller, but was studious, and picked up a great fund of information bearing upon the part awaiting him. He lived and dressed well, and affected religious circles. It was the day when Italy was given over to the n.o.bles--the day of robbers, fighting, intrigues and usurpations--of free lances and bold banditti--of government by the strong hand, of right determinable by might, of ensanguined Guelphs and Ghibellines. Of these the Emir kept clear.
By chance he fell in with an old man of secondary rank in the city much given to learning, an habitue of a library belonging to one of the monasteries. It came out ere long that the venerable person was familiar with the coast from Otranto to Brindisi, and beyond far as Polignano.
"It was in my st.u.r.dier days," the veteran said, with a dismal glance at his shrunken hands. "The people along the sh.o.r.e were much harried by Moslem pirates. Landing from their galleys, the depredators burned habitations, slew the men, and carried off such women as they thought would fetch a price. They even a.s.saulted castles. At last we were driven to the employment of a defensive guard cooperative on land and water. I was a captain. Our fights with the rovers were frequent and fierce.
Neither side showed quarter."
The reminiscence stimulated Mirza to inquiry. He asked the old man if he could mention a castle thus attacked.
"Yes, there was one belonging to Count Corti, a few leagues beyond Brindisi. The Count defended himself, but was slain."
"Had he a family?"
"A wife and a boy child."
"What became of them?"
"By good chance the Countess was in Brindisi attending a fete; she escaped, of course. The boy, two or three years of age, was made prisoner, and never heard of afterwards."
A premonition seized Mirza.
"Is the Countess living?"
"Yes. She never entirely recovered from the shock, but built a house near the site of the castle, and clearing a room in the ruins, turned it into a chapel. Every morning and evening she goes there, and prays for the soul of her husband, and the return of her lost boy."
"How long is it since the poor lady was so bereft?"
The narrator reflected, and replied: "Twenty-two or three years."
"May the castle be found?"
"Yes."
"Have you been to it?"
"Many times."
"How was it named?"
"After the Count--_Il Castillo di Corti_."
"Tell me something of its site."
"It is down close by the sea. A stone wall separates its front enclosure from the beach. Sometimes the foam of the waves is dashed upon the wall.
Through a covered gate one looks out, and all is water. Standing on the tower, all landward is orchard and orchard--olive and almond trees intermixed. A great estate it was and is. The Countess, it is understood, has a will executed; if the boy does not return before her death, the Church is to be her legatee."
There was more of the conversation, covering a history of the Corti family, honorable as it was old--the men famous warriors, the women famous beauties.
Mirza dreamed through the night of the Countess, and awoke with a vague consciousness that the wife of the Pacha, the grace of whose care had been about him in childhood--a good woman, gentle and tender--was after all but a representative of the mother who had given him birth, just as on her part every mother is mercifully representative of G.o.d. Under strong feeling he took boat for Brindisi.
There he had no trouble in confirming the statements of his Otranto acquaintance. The Countess was still living, and the coast road northwardly would bring him to the ruins of her castle. The journey did not exceed five leagues.
What he might find at the castle, how long he would stay, what do, were so uncertain--indeed everything in the connection was so dependent upon conditions impossible of foresight, that he resolved to set out on foot.
To this course he was the more inclined by the mildness of the weather, and the reputation of the region for freshness and beauty.
About noon he was fairly on the road. Persons whom he met--and they were not all of the peasant cla.s.s--seeing a traveller jaunty in plumed cap, light blue camail, pointed buskins, and close-fitting hose the color of the camail, sword at his side, and javelin in hand, stayed to observe him long as he was in sight, never dreaming they were permitted to behold a favorite of one of the b.l.o.o.d.y Mahounds of the East.
Over hill and down shallow vales: through stone-fenced lanes; now in the shade of old trees; now along a seash.o.r.e partially overflowed by languid waves, he went, lighter in step than heart, for he was in the mood by no means uncommon, when the spirit is prophesying evil unto itself. He was sensible of the feeling, and for shame would catch the javelin in the middle and whirl it about him defensively until it sung like a spinning-wheel; at times he stopped and, with his fingers in his mouth, whistled to a small bird as if it were a hunting hawk high in air.
Once, seeing a herd of goats around a house thatched and half-hidden in vines, he asked for milk. A woman brought it to him, with a slice of brown bread; and while he ate and drank, she stared at him in respectful admiration; and when he paid her in gold, she said, courtesying low: "A glad life to my Lord! I will pray the Madonna to make the wish good."
Poor creature! She had no idea she was blessing one in whose faith the Prophet was nearer G.o.d than G.o.d"s own Son.
At length the road made an abrupt turn to the right, bringing him to a long stretch of sandy beach. Nearly as he could judge, it was time for the castle to appear, and he was anxious to make it before sundown. Yet in the angle of the wood he saw a wayside box of stone sheltering an image of the Virgin, with the Holy Child in its arms. Besides being sculptured better than usual, the figures were covered with flowers in wreath and bouquet. A dressed slab in front of the structure, evidently for the accommodation of worshippers, invited him to rest, and he took the seat, and looking up at the mother, she appeared to be looking at him. He continued his gaze, and presently the face lost its stony appearance--stranger still, it smiled. It was illusion, of course, but he arose startled, and moved on with quickened step. The impression went with him. Why the smile? He did not believe in images: much less did he believe in the Virgin, except as she was the subject of a goodly story.
And absorbed in the thought, he plodded on, leaving the sun to go down unnoticed.
Thereupon the shadows thickened in the woods at his left hand, while the sound of the incoming waves at his right increased as silence laid its velvet finger with a stronger compress on all other pulsations. Here and there a star peeped timidly through the purpling sky--now it was dusk--a little later, it would be night--and yet no castle!
He pushed on more vigorously; not that he was afraid--fear and the falcon of Mahommed had never made acquaintance--but he began to think of a bed in the woods, and worse yet, he wanted the fast-going daylight to help him decide if the castle when he came to it were indeed the castle of his fathers. He had believed all along, if he could see the pile once, his memory would revive and help him to recognition.
At last night fell, and there was darkness trebled on the land, and on the sea darkness, except where ghostly lines of light stretched themselves along the restless water. Should he go on?...
Then he heard a bell--one soft tone near by and silvery clear. He halted. Was it of the earth? A hush deeper of the sound--and he was wondering if another illusion were not upon him, when again the bell!
"Oh!" he muttered, "a trick of the monks in Otranto! Some soul is pa.s.sing."
He pressed forward, guided by the tolling. Suddenly the trees fell away, and the road brought him to a stone wall heavily coped. On further, a blackened ma.s.s arose in dim relief against the sky, with heavy merlons on its top.
"It is the embattled gate!" he exclaimed, to himself--"the embattled gate!--and here the beach!--and, O Allah! the waves there are making the reports they used to!"
The bell now tolled with awful distinctness, filling him with unwonted chills--tolled, as if to discourage his memory in its struggle to lift itself out of a lapse apparently intended to be final as the grave-- tolled solemnly, as if his were the soul being rung into the next life. A rush of forebodings threatened him with paralysis of will, and it was only by a strong exertion he overcame it, and brought himself back to the situation, and the question, What next?
Now Mirza was not a man to forego a purpose lightly. Emotional, but not superst.i.tious, he tried the sword, if it were loose in the scabbard, and then, advancing the point of his javelin, entered the darkened gallery of the gate. Just as he emerged from it on the inner side, the bell tolled.
"A Moslem doth not well," he thought, silently repeating a saying of the _jadis_, "to accept a Christian call to prayer; but," he answered in self-excuse, "I am not going to prayer--I am seeking"--he stopped, for very oddly, the face of the Virgin in the stone box back in the angle of the road presented itself to him, and still more oddly, he felt firmer of purpose seeing again the smile on the face. Then he finished the sentence aloud--"my mother _who is a Christian._"
There was a jar in the conclusion, and he went back to find it, and having found it, he was surprised. Up to that moment, he had not thought of his mother a Christian. How came the words in his mouth now? Who prompted them? And while he was hastily pondering the effect upon her of the discovery that he himself was an Islamite, the image in the box reoccurred to him, this time with the child in its arms; and thereupon the mystery seemed to clear itself at once. "Mother and mother!" he said. "What if my coming were the answer of one of them to the other"s prayer?"
The idea affected him; his spirit softened; the heat of tears sprang to his eyelids; and the effort he made to rise above the unmanliness engaged him so he failed to see the other severer and more lasting struggle inevitable if the Countess were indeed the being to whom he owed the highest earthly obligations--the struggle between natural affection and honor, as the latter lay coiled up in the ties binding him to Mahommed.
The condition, be it remarked, is ours; for from that last appearance of the image by the wayside--from that instant, marking a new era in his life--often as the night and its incidents recurred to him, he had never a doubt of his relationship to the Countess. Indeed, not only was she thenceforward his mother, but all the ground within the gate was his by natal right, and the castle was the very castle from which he had been carried away, over the body of his heroic father--_he was the Count Corti_!
These observations will bring the reader to see more distinctly the Emir"s state after pa.s.sing the gate. Of the surroundings, he beheld nothing but shadows more or less dense and voluminous; the mournful murmuring of the wind told him they belonged to trees and shrubbery in clumps. The road he was on, although blurred, was serviceable as a guide, and he pursued it until brought to a building so masked by night the details were invisible. Following its upper line, relieved against the gray sky, he made out a broken front and one tower ma.s.sively battlemented. A pavement split the road in two; crossing it, he came to an opening, choked with timbers and bars of iron; surmisably the front portal at present in disuse. He needed no explanation of its condition.
Fire and battle were familiars of his.