In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
.jpg)
HILST in the midnight hours the carabineers had searched Santa Tarsilla, and the people had spoken of Saturnino and recalled the old days of his prowess and fame, this long, toil-worn, rough, enduring life had come to an end; decently, silently, without complaint and without companionship, as 1t had been spent.
When the neighbours, apathetic but not brutal, though, being a foreign woman, they had let her live alone, came running in at the sound of that terrible and desolate cry, they found Musa lying senseless by the white dog, and the blanched blest palm hanging above a body already cold in the stiffness of death.
Joconda must have died somewhere about midnight, so the apothecary told them when he came. He said that death had come from sheer old age; the life had ceased, that was all, as an old tree falls, as an old clock refuses to move and grows dumb. There was nothing strange in it. She had been eighty-five years old if one. No one had noticed her house being closed all day, because it was so often shut up in that way when she was absent.
When Musa regained consciousness she saw the brown, withered, labour-bent body lying still upon the mattress, as an old broken bough will lie on the cold ground.
'I robbed her last night!' she said suddenly, with a piteous self-reproach. Her great eyes had a grievous despair and shame in them.
Happily for her, in the clamour of tongues around her no one heard or heeded. No one thought of her, or troubled about her. Joconda must be buried before another day broke, that was what they thought of, and talked of who would have the little she had saved, and the mule. It was a strong beast and useful, although old; they began to ask each other what they would give for it, and to wonder who had the right to see to the burial and pay for the mass. She was known to have had a little money hidden somewhere, but perhaps she had people that belonged to her over the mountains in far Savoy.
None of them thought of Musa, who, after that first bitter cry of self-reproach had burst from her, had sat mute and still beside the dead, with the white dog between her knees.
When they fetched the priest from vespers, and he spoke to her, she stared; his words went by her without awaking in her any sense of them; she was dumb as the dog was; her sorrow had neither tears nor speech, yet it was very great.
Between Joconda and herself there had been seldom tenderness, but there had been always love. An immense void had suddenly yawned in her path; an immense loss, that she could ill measure, had fallen on her. She had not been very happy, for life at Santa Tarsilla does not contain many of the elements of happiness; she had always vaguely suffered from the narrowness and stupor of it, from the languor and disease that were around her, and her whole nature and intelligence had always needed a richer soil, a finer air. But Joconda had been good to her always. She had been all that the girl had known of motherlike care and watchfulness; she had been always just, and, in her own rough way, indulgent. What she knew of the wild, fierce strain that was in Musa's veins had made her very patient of her wanderings on sea and land, and of her sudden passions. Joconda had always said to herself, 'it is the blood of the Mastarna,' and so had made excuse.
It had been a part of her life to see Joconda always near her; she had never had to take thought for herself; the bread and the broth were always on the board; her linen in summer, her lamb's-wool clothes in winter, were always ready; as she had dropped asleep she had always heard the voice of Joconda muttering her aves in that faith in some answer coming sometime, from somewhere, which had never left her; though an answer she never had got, unless this death which had come to her all unawares in the stillness of the night could be called one.