Nicanor - Teller of Tales Part 17

Nicanor's grim lips relaxed to a half smile.

"I will do it, then, since Hito craves it," he said, and went his way across the court. Hito shook his heavy jowls in rage.

"Dog!" he muttered. "'Hito craves' forsooth! I'll have that up against you, mighty lordling, one of these fine days! In the name of the G.o.ds, what is one to do with a fellow who cares not the snap of his finger for any punishment I can devise?"

Nicanor went along the covered gallery leading from the slaves' quarters to the mansion. At intervals he s.h.i.+fted the heavy brazier from hand to hand. The heat of the smouldering charcoal in it rose to his face, gratefully warm. When he reached the anteroom of Lady Varia's apartments, going by the rear pa.s.sages, he found no one. The room, warmed to Summer heat, and filled with flowers, was empty. Perfumed lamps burned low, swinging from their bronze and silver standards; in a curtained recess in the wall a marble Minerva gleamed shadowed white, half concealed by curtains of dusky red. A silver jar of incense, burning before the shrine, tinged the air with faint fragrance. All was quiet and peaceful, a safe and sheltered nest. From the other inner rooms he could hear voices; a girl's voice steadily intoning sonorous blank verse; at intervals another voice, interrupting, slow and languid, that set his heart beating hard and his face flus.h.i.+ng. He picked up a bell from the stand near the entrance and rang it.

The recitative stopped; there was a murmur of mingled voices, and footsteps. A girl parted the curtains which hung between the rooms and came toward him. Her hair was black, fastened by long pins of bone; her face white and resentful; her brows were straight and dark, and the eyes beneath were shadowy. She was slim and moved swiftly, and her skin was white as milk. This, then, was the girl upon whom Hito had cast his evil glance. Nicanor kept his eyes on her as she came, and wondered if she was newly bought, that he had not seen her during the months he had been at the villa.

"I bring the brazier Nerissa commanded," said Nicanor, and she nodded.

"Nerissa is busy with our lady. I will take it in."

"She is not ill?" he asked anxiously.

"Nay, not ill," the girl answered. "It is but that she feels the cold. I will take the brazier." She looked at him with some surprise that he did not give it up.

"It is heavy," he warned her. "Stay one moment, I pray you. Will you not tell me your name? I have been in this house these many months, and never before have I seen you."

"I am called Eldris," she answered. "And I have been here also, but--it is true you have not seen me, although at times I have seen you. I have been seen by none save--"

"Save one, perhaps," said Nicanor, and looked into her eyes. "I bring you word from Hito--if you are she he told me to seek out. He saith that he, Hito, is willing to see you to-night; that he expects you, and that you will understand. He saith that he awaits you--you will know where; and if you do not come, he will find out why. Also--"

He stopped on the word. The girl had gone gray; and into her eyes there leaped a look of helpless terror, of dumb anguish and nameless fear. And at once, with the look, she became elusively familiar. A memory, half lost, beckoned to him, of a white and tortured face, of eyes which held the terror of a wounded animal at bay, of a long red welt across brown shoulders. His glance went to the girl's shoulders, white as milk, half hidden under her coa.r.s.e white tunic.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'You sent for me, Lady Varia?'"]

"Hito!" the girl exclaimed below her breath; and again--"Hito!" She flung out her hands with a movement of bitter despair and hid her face in them. "What can I do? Where can I go?" she cried hopelessly. "Since the first day he saw me this hath hung over me--and what can I do? O my G.o.d! what can I do against him?"

"You do not go willingly?" Nicanor questioned, and took note of the exclamation she had used.

"You will not force me to him!" she gasped in terror, misunderstanding, and shrank from him.

"Not I! I am no man's procurer!" Nicanor said curtly. "I give his message; the rest lieth with you and him."

"Never with me!" the girl exclaimed. She broke into hard dry sobs that racked her. Nicanor watched, quite at a loss what to say or do.

"He hath--he hath threatened force and the rack if I refuse," she sobbed.

"The rack is a bad thing to know!" said Nicanor, thinking of what he had seen in the room at the end of the pa.s.sage. He spoke with all sincerity, being no better than his time.

"Ay, but there is something worse!" Eldris flashed back. "I would rather face my lord in the torture-chamber; I would rather be broken on the wheel and die the death--" She shuddered, and again hid her face. "And there is no way out of it but death. What can I do, a slave?"

The old bitter cry, wrung from the lips of many that the word of the Nations' Law might be fulfilled--wrung from the lips of Nicanor himself.

He knew the full measure of its bitterness, and somewhere in him an answering chord stirred and woke to life. He put his hand on her shoulder.

"See then, if that be thy feeling,--though them knowest not the rack!--I too am a slave, but it may be that I can help thee." The girl stilled her sobs to listen. "Hito is a fat swine. It would give me great joy to foil him."

"I have tried to move him," she said, with a weary hopelessness more suggestive than many words. "It is because I struggle--" She stopped, biting her lips, her eyes dark with misery. "It is not me he would have now, but his way," she said forlornly.

"For me to take thy refusal would do no good," said Nicanor, his voice reflective. "Tell thy lady; surely she will give thee protection."

"Often I have tried to do that," Eldris answered. "Always Nerissa or other women are there to know what I would have with her; and always they say it is not for me to talk with her unless she gives command--that I am to tell them and they will carry the word to her. And when I tell,--" she faltered, with drooping head,--"they laugh, and call me fool, and ask why I should hold myself too good to do as others have done, and say our lady is not to be troubled with a thing such as this.

That is what they say, and they are worse than he. And I fear him! Oh, I fear him!" She clenched her hands tightly across her breast and s.h.i.+vered with closed eyes. "By day I go in dread lest he give command to seize me; by night I start awake lest I see his face grinning in the dark, even though for weeks at a time he will give me peace and make no sign.

When my service is done, I hide like a rat in its hole, wis.h.i.+ng to be seen by none. But he never forgets, and he never forgives, and I have scorned him. Oh, I would to G.o.d that I were dead!"

"Art thou Christian?" Nicanor asked curiously.

"Ay," she answered, without spirit.

"Once I was at a Christian church," said Nicanor.

"Art thou of the faith?" she asked, quickly and eagerly.

"Not I," said Nicanor. "What good may it do a man? And if it doeth no good, any faith will do to swear by. It hath not done thee much good, this faith of thine, since it leaves thee in this pa.s.s."

"I trust it," she said quietly.

"Nay," said Nicanor, in all seriousness. "It is I whom thou must trust.

It is not thy faith will help thee here, but I, and the wit I have and the strength I have, because I am the only one near thee. How then, if it be I, can it be thy faith?"

"I trust it," she repeated vaguely, as though she did not quite understand his meaning. He laughed shortly.

"I had rather trust myself. See now, if the door were opened, couldst thou escape from here?"

"I have no money--nowhere to go," she answered.

Nicanor shook his head.

"Money I have not, but I could see that friends received thee."

She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture half resignation, half despair.

And with the movement, the elusive familiarity returned; the flickering memory leaped to life. Black straight hair, framing a gray face and burning eyes; a girl, a lean wisp of a thing, with chained wrists and a ragged frock which only half concealed a long red welt on a brown shoulder--he had seen them all before. The memory grew and would not be denied; suddenly forced itself into words.

"Art thou she who was bought at Thorney of a slave-driver by one Valerius, and claimed sanctuary of a Christian cross by the church of Saint Peter?"

Her glance at him was startled.

"Yea; but how dost thou know of it?" she asked in turn.

"I saw thee sold," said Nicanor, and looked at her with new eyes. "When Valerius pursued thee to the foot of the cross, I ran also. It was I who went for the priest, and came back and found no one. Often since, I have wondered what became of thee and the folk who had gathered." He laughed.

"But it made a good tale. More than once I have used it, and fitted to it endings of mine own."

"While I lay grasping the cross, a man in the crowd cried out: 'Girl, the priest cometh! Run thou quickly to him!' And I, being well-nigh dazed with fear, had no better sense than to spring up, crying, 'Where?'

And no priest was there at all; but the instant my hands were off the cross that man seized me and ran, and all the crowd ran after to see what might happen next, some saying it was not just, and others finding it rare good sport. At the river he thrust me into a boat and gave the man money to row quickly; and since their sport was over, the people went away. It did not take long." She looked at him with quickened interest, and in her face also there was new thought.

"So--art thou, then, that teller of tales, whom men call Nicanor of the silver tongue?"

Nicanor laughed again, but softly, all the hardness gone from his grim face, his eyes s.h.i.+ning oddly. Did they indeed call him that?