University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.
VALENTINE THE SOLDIER:

The pass to which Berthold, well-acquainted
with all the hill region, now directed his course,
was the same which we have noticed as being so
suddenly filled with a French force detached in
an early stage of the neighboring conflict, to
gain by a circuitous route a position favorable
for co-operation in the main assault upon Dego.
Through this path the vine-dresser knew that a
secure detour might be made, conducting them
away from the Bormida and its dangerous vicinity,
toward the great highway to Milan, where,
once arrived, the marquis, he was aware, could
safely defy the humble friends of the abducted
Bianca.

Nevertheless a new enemy was before them,
advancing like themselves toward the path that
promised them so easy a method of avoiding interference.
Hardly had the encumbered riders
turned to leave the causeway, when close beneath
they saw a battalion of culrassiers, followed
immediately by a scattered body of tiralleurs;
sweep upward toward the heights. Berthold at
once drew bridle to avoid the fierce celerity
with which the soldiers pressed upward over the
uneven ground; but ere he could effect his purpose
the adjacent hillocks and the causeway itself
were covered by the French, whose onward
ranks wound between the two riders enveloping
them in a cloud of dust. Francesca at this crisis,
threw out her arms, and gave utterance to
another shriek for succor.

But the dense battalion, regardless of aught
but the imperious force of military discipline
that urged it forward, had no ear for a feeble
woman's cry. Almost sudden as its approach
was its sweeping disappearance up the rough
ascent—so sudden indeed that the Marquis Roberto
clasping his muffled prize with one arm;
whilst with the other he strove to guide his steed
which had been carried onward in the whirl of
the troops, found himself now in peril of being
crushed in the press or entangled in the advance
of the French. It was impossible at the moment
to rejoin his companion, for the tiralleurs
drawing closer together, now filled the causeway
between them, and the noble, rather than
attempt to force his way through these, chose
rather to urge his horse directly away from the
securer pass toward a narrow ridge that shelved
steeply downward to the hillocks whence the
scattered tiralleurs were now converging. There
he hoped to maintain at least a foothold till the
soldiers should debouch by the pass above.

But the shriek uttered by Francesca, though
it failed to arrest the iron-clad curassiers, had
not been raised in vain. The echo of its
despair had hardly ceased to vibrate, when a
soldier, blackened with dust and powder, sprang

from the rearmost rank of the tiralleurs, and
darted toward the Marquis Roberto, whose attempt
to back his steed had withdrawn his attention
for an instant from the burden which he
held. During that instant, the mantle which
had closely concealed Bianca, became detached
from her shoulders, and fell trailing from the
saddle-bow, and the marble-white countenance
of the swooning girl were revealed distinctly in
the sunlight—the features beautiful, though so
death-like, turned upward from the breast on
which the head was leaning.

Lord Roberto had no need for further care of
his horse, for a strong man's hand clutched the
bridle, and threw the animal upon its haunches.
Then, as the insecure ground crumbled beneath
its iron hoofs, the steed reared affrightedly, and
rolled over the sloping ridge, whilst the marquis,
reeling in the saddle, fell backward heavily
upon the rough stones; but ere horse or rider
struck the earth, Bianca, still unconscious, was
caught in the outstretched arms of the soldier
Valentine.

Little space had the comrades of the daring
tiralleur to marvel at, if they indeed noticed, his
sudden action—for closing their ranks as they
neared the upper pass, the long line dashed amid
the hills and disappeared from the dusty causeway,
leaving the hunter-soldier sustaining on his
bosom the drooping form of a woman, whilst
the man whom he had hurled from the saddle,
lay motionless and inseasible upon the stony
ridge.

Berthold, meantime, separated by the rushing
battalions from his employer, and forced to control
at once the motion of his mule and the
strength of the struggling Francesca, who he
had believed would speedily become reconciled
to her captor, but whose resistance was redoubled
at every attempt which he made to soothe her,
had not as yet become aware of Roberto's rencontre;
nevertheless, perceiving as he paused
amid the cloud of dust raised by the rushing
military, that the marquis lingered behind, the
vine-dresser turned his mule, and beheld his
companion's situation, though without recognizing
the strange soldier who had overthrown him.
Not so, however, Valentine, who supporting
Bianca in his arms, fixed his astonished gaze
upon the female whom his brother held upon the
mule, while he exclaimed:

“Berthold! is it thee? What means all
this?”

Berthold, though he had failed to discern in
the blackened figure before him the man who of
all others he least desired to encounter, could
not but be assured by that voice that Valentine
was actually there; and no sooner did he become
aware of this than the ruffian feelings
which had been gaining strength with each new
struggle of Francesca for release, burst forth into
desperation. Springing from the mule, and
recklessly dashing his burthen to the ground, he
leaped towards Valentine, and aimed a blow at
his heart with the weapon already twice stained
with human blood that day. It was a murderous
stroke, and the young soldier, sustaining
with one arm the still fainting Bianca, had
doubtless sunk beneath it, had not an unlooked-for
hand restrained the vine-dresser's motives,
interposing suddenly between him and his brother.
It was Monna Barbara!

Wierd-like and unearthly seemed the crone,
thus gliding suddenly into the sunlight from behind
the rocky wall which on one side here terminated
in the open plateau. She threw her
thin form before the furious Berthold, her bright
eyes shining with more than mortal lustre, as
she fixed them upon the distorted visage of her
eldest born. The vine-dresser's uplifted arm
trembled, even while it threatened his brother's
breast; but it was only for a moment that his
purpose faltered.

“The dog shall die!” he muttered, savagely.
“Stand aside, woman, if you value your own
life!”

“I value it not, ungrateful!—but thou shalt
not take it!” replied Monna Barbara, still pressing
before her desperate son.

But at this moment a shout that startled a
thousand echoes, rang through the neighboring
defiles; and breaking like wild deer from above,
a score of hunters leaped suddenly from the
rocks upon the causeway; and between the foremost
two, their arms upholding his sinking
frame, appeared the old Tomaso.

Francesca, who had meanwhile risen from the
ground to which her felon lover had flung her
in his rage, rushed in an instant to her father's
side; while Berthold, recognizing the men of
Val d'Orazio, felt that his doom was sealed
should he fall into their hands; but his habitual
craft failed him not at this crisis, for seizing the
moment of confusion to spring upon the mule,
he spurred the animal with furious speed toward
the pass he had previously sought to enter. The
hunters saw his movement and attempted to intercept
him, but he had already gained a hundred

yards advance, desperately urging his flight
toward the hills.

“Let not the villain escape! Follow me!”
cried the first hunter, dashing forward in pursuit.

His companions delayed not an instant, but
dispersing simultaneously to various accessible
parts of the rocks, prepared to cut off the retreat
of the fugitive.

Monna Barbara, whilst this rapid transition
of circumstances was taking place, stood in the
attitude which she had assumed in attempting to
stay the vine-dresser's violence, with her witch-like
head thrown back, and her arms extended
rigidly before her; but a strange alteration was
apparent in her countenance; the eyes no longer
sparkled brightly, but, fixed and staring, seemed
clouded by a deadly film; her features, alike
immobile, seemed palsied, as did her whole
frame, by some fearful memory just awakening
in her brain. They were turned toward the
girl Francesca and the wounded Tomaso, whom
the former sustained upon her breast, whilst she
supported the brigand's drooping head with her
encircling arm.

That strange, out-wandering expression which
Monna Barbara's face had once worn when, in
her gloomy hut, she had discovered the small
cross of jet, gleaming like a star through the
darkness, now again marked her withered lineaments,
succeeded as before by a singular softening
of the rigid muscles and a moistening of the
hard eyes. Thus the crone remained for a few
moments, taking no apparent heed of Valentine
who stood beside her, nor of the sudden flight
of Berthold, pursued by his vengeful enemies.
Then slowly, as if fearful to distract her own
tensity of vision, she crept, rather than walked,
towards the old Tomaso.

The wounded brigand raised his swimming
eyes as the woman approached, and for another
brief space the two gazed at each other, an expression
of wild recognition overspreading Tomaso's
countenance, which seemed to re-illume
as it were with a flash of many memories. His
lips opened as if to speak, but only a feeble murmur
broke from them. He clasped his hands
together, and outstretched them toward Monna
Barbara.

“Berthold!” shrieked the crone, staggering
nearer to the brigand, and sinking prostrate
upon the ground at his feet.

Tomaso raised himself with a violent effort
from his daughter's bosom. His breast heaved,
his uplifted hands shook for an instant as with an
ague fit, then fell heavily downward, clasping
the shrivelled neck of Monna Barbara.

“Barbara! Barbara!” he cried, in a half stifled
tone; “My wife—my Barbara!”

Valentine and Francesca—for the hunters had
all departed in pursuit of the vine dresser—alone
witnessed this strange scene, and the former, absorbed
in his efforts to restore the fainting Bianca
to consciousness, gave little heed to aught
else that might occur. The horse which his
strong hand had backed till the rider was unseated,
now careered wildly over the plain, while
the master, Lord Roberto, lay stretched over a
rough ledge, stunned by a violent blow which he
had received in falling. Francesca still knelt
beside her sire, watching his strange agitation,
and startled with the words that, breaking so
suddenly from his lips, revealed the existence of
a parent whom the maiden believed to have
died while she herself was yet a child. It was
with trembling anxiety that she awaited further
revelation of the mystery that enveloped her.

And this was not long delayed; for as the
clasped arms of Tomaso embraced his long lost
wife, the vine-dresser's mother raised herself
slowly to her knees, and placing her withered
hands upon the brigand's cheeks, pressed back
his head, and gazed long and tenderly upon the
manly, and it might be still handsome features.

“It is he!” she murmured, the tears gushing
from her eyes. “It is, indeed, my Berthold—
the husband of my happy youth!”

Then flashed over Monna Barbara's memory
a portion of the vision which had softened her
heart in the lonely hovel of Val d'Orazio.
Again recalling the dim past, she knelt beside
her brigand husband in the cavern of a Swiss
mountain, illumined by the glow of sunset, bathing
his wounded side, while their children sported
on the rocks without; again she beheld that
husband dragged from her embrace by the fierce
soldiers who had tracked him to his hiding-place;
again—

But as the painful vision rushed athwart the
woman's recollection, her eyes encountered those
of Francesca, fixed with earnest but wondering
expression upon her face. The sight recalled
her to the present. She glanced inquiringly
at Tomaso, and at once, by the light that
broke from the old man's features, divined what
she would have asked.

“My daughter!” murmured the crone, and
tottered feebly toward Francesca.

“And—my son—our—Berthold!” cried the
brigand, with a look full of anxious meaning.

The words seemed to pierce Monna Barbara's
heart like a dagger. She forgot her weakness,
her memories, her joy—she thought only of that
wretched one who even now was fleeing for his
life before a score of angry foes.

“There!—there!” she shrieked, pointing her
withered hand upward to the Alpine range.

The sun, long since ascended to its zenith,
now sloped its rays over the western side of the
mountains. The smoke of battle, hanging low
upon the plain and river, rendered the surrounding
atmosphere dense and murky; but on the
elevated region to which Monna Barbara's gaze
was now directed, all was clear, and every outline
distinctly visible in the beams of day. The
mule and its fugitive rider were no longer with
in sight; but the hunters of Val d'Orazlo could
still be discerned, occupying various points of
the upland, but though seemingly dispersed,
were evidently shaping their paths towards a
high hill, or rather rocky shaft, which cut the
central background of the landscape, towering
over the encircling hills and ridges. These
mountaineers appeared to be pursuing the race
with the same vigor that had marked their first
appearance, and so lofty a track had they already
gained, that only faint echoes of their encouraging
shouts came back to the causeway. Still
seeming to abate no portion of their determination,
the vengeful comrades of Pietro toiled in
their ascent toward the base of the white-walled
rock that lifted its narrow summit like a vast
altar prepared for some fearful rite of sacrifice.