In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 6

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

HEN she regained her consciousness, a slender thread of light was shining on the rocky floor. It was a ray of the risen moon. Day was quite gone, and night had come to bear death company. She raised herself slowly upon her feet, and though her heart beat with the force of hammers, and every limb quivered with a ghostly fear, the courage inborn in her roused itself, and moved her to struggle for life and liberty. The grey dust lay behind her, the dust which was the only thing left of a human corpse and a golden treasure. But the dust to her was neither warrior nor gold; to her the dead man had arisen at the touch of the sunbeams, and had gone out away into the light, and had left her alone in his place.

The great fear was still upon her like frost upon a flower.

She could not understand what she had seen. She could not comprehend what place this was in which she stood. But the instinct of reviving life made her long to rise and flee; it put strength into her limbs and courage into her veins; she dragged herself towards the entrance, thrust herself through the narrow aperture, and forced herself once more up into the air, under the open sky.

When she saw the bushes around her and the stars above, she gave a cry of joy; they were familiar, they were friends.

She breathed again.

She felt no fear of the fresh night, of the lonely moors, of the silence and the solitude of these marshes that stretched around. She knew them all. When the bats flew by her, and the owls, she stretched out her hand to them and laughed aloud.

After that awful silence, that intense cold, that terrible nameless burial-place, the moles burrowing in the black earth, the water-beetle blundering through the shadows, the stealthy polecat hunting rats through the prickly pungente,^[1] the common snipe foraging for slugs and snails amongst the sharp spines of the water-soldier, the woodcock winging his way against the wind as he likes best to do, the great plover trotting to the marsh to drink, these were all dear companions, welcome as the air.

She made her way quickly over the solitary moor down to the beach. Some far-off bell from a church far inland on the waste was tolling for vespers; the night was clear and cold. She found her boat safe, and unmoored it and rowed backward. There was no wind, and the way seemed very long. For the first time in her life she felt terrified and feeble. The sea looked so wide and the heavens so vast.

The moon was full and of a deep gold colour; she wondered was it the dead man's golden shield that lay in the tomb all day and at night was held up there by unseen hands? A golden shooting-star flashed down the west; she thought it was the dead man's vanished spear.

The dead had risen and fled.

Was he there in the lustre of the sky?

The great fear went with her like a pursuing shadow, yet an immense longing, an intense eagerness, were with her toa; if only she could go where he was gone, if only she could know that mystery!

But she could only bend over her oars and send her boat through the phosphorescent calm of tranquil water. Neither sea nor sky answered her.

When she reached Santa Tarsilla, the village was all dark. It was midnight. The fishing smacks were still out, far away by many a mile, and the men with them. The women and children slept. She fastened the boat to its iron ring in the stone landing, and went slowly ashore.

On the edge of the little water-worn low pier an old woman stood and a white dog; the dog rushed to her, the woman cried angrily, 'Why give us this fright? I bid you always be in at moonrise. I have been here for hours, looking, looking, looking, while Leone howled———'

'It was not my fault,' said the child in a low tone. 'I have seen strange things.'

'Pray God you have not seen your father,' thought Joconda, as she said aloud, 'Come to the house; you must be hungry.'

'No,' said Musa; but she went with Joconda homeward, and when she got there drank thirstily; she could not eat. Joconda waited for her to speak in vain.

'What have you seen?' she asked at last.

'I have seen Death, and it is beautiful,' the child answered wearily.

'Beautiful?' said Joconda. 'Child, you have not yet seen what you love die! Do not speak in riddles. What have you seen?'

Musa told her what she had seen; speaking in a hushed strange voice, and with pain.

'Is that all?' said Joconda, when she had ended. 'That is nothing. You stumbled on a grave. I know those people. They are underneath the soil everywhere hereabouts. We call them buche delle fate. They were great people once, I have heard tell, who had cities and palaces and the like, and all is covered with thistles and thorns now; they buried their gold with them, but it did them no good. There are plenty of their graves all over the country, and treasure is dug out of them. But it is not well to rob the dead. For me I would not do so. You took nothing?'

'I? It all went away with him; went away into the air.'

'That is folly,' said Joconda, 'and if you talk of it so, none will believe you; they will say you have robbed the tomb, and there will be bad work, and I am not sure to whom that waste land belongs. Say nothing. That will be best. You have seen something, surely, for you look scared, but to say the gold and the dead went into the air is folly.'

'I say the truth,' said the child.

'You slept and dreamed, and I am tired. Get you to bed. It 1s midnight.'

'But who were those dead people?'

'That I do not know, and what does it matter? Poor souls—their day is done.'

'But the earth—is it all a grave?'

'Ay; and we shall be in it; no fear of our not having our turn; I almost wish you had brought a bit of the gold if you really did see it, not that it would have been right.'

'Did God make men and women?' she asked, meeting the eyes of Joconda, who answered testily—

'For sure, and He might have made them better when He was after it.'

'He must have been more glad when He made the coral in the deep sea, and set the lilies in the pools,' said the child wearily.

Joconda sighed and stared.

'Aye, there is nothing to make Him glad in any of us. The wicked never cease from troubling, and the whitest souls are but greyish and spotted, like a fungus in a wood. Sometimes I have thought myself He must repent. But I talk wickedly. Have you lain in moonlight, child, that you say such odd things?'

Musa was silent.

'I think those people are my kindred,' she said under her breath to Joconda, who replied:

'Well, they may be; no one knows whence you come;' and said to herself, to excuse the lie to her conscience, 'and no one does, for I never heard tell who Serapia's people were; some said one thing and some another.'

'But how did I come to you?' said Musa, with that direct question which Joconda had always dreaded.

'I picked you up on the hills in chestnut-time,' said Joconda; and said to herself, 'and that certainly is true.'

Musa asked no more. Her thoughts were with all those dead people under the ground, whose gold outlived them.

Her great eyes looked up through the unglazed window to red Arcturus shining in the constellation of Boötes.

'Do the dead sleep all day in the dark in the earth and at night shine in there?' she asked, gazing at silvery Spica hanging above the sea.

Joconda pushed her to her bed.

'Leave the dead alone. You have just begun to live. Get you to bed, for it is late and oil is dear. If you had brought a little bit of the gold now—God forbid I should tell you to steal, but the dead are dead and it could not have harmed them.'

The child lay down and turned her face to the wall: her cheeks were wet with tears.

 

1. Scarpiurus muricata.

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