In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 7

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

HE child never after that night spoke of what she had seen in the tomb. She shut it in her thoughts with many another thing, and did not share it. But her mind was constantly busy with these dead people, who all slept on their beds of rock and when the air touched them fled. She longed to see them, know of them, go with them.

There was no one to tell her anything. In this ancient land of theirs no one knew of the Etruscans. Strangers came and dug indeed about the Maremma, and rifled the graves that they found, this they knew, but there were no graves known of at Santa Tarsilla, and the subject had no interest for them, and was not even intelligible. In other parts the scattered peasantry here and there made a little money as custodians of the opened tombs, and wondered to see travellers ford bridgeless streams and force a difficult way through the prickles merely to see painted caves with coffins of stone.

But there were none of these near at hand, and Santa Tarsilla knew nothing but of its own fever, its own fishing, and its own smuggling, carried on under the very eyes of the sickly coastguard in a small way, but successfully; Santa Tarsilla within a few miles of Cosa and Vetulonia knew nothing of Etruria.

That Joconda knew anything was because she was a northern woman, and so had keen use of both her eyes and ears, and coming and going to and from Grosseto through fifty long years had gathered many a quaint random scrap of information, and remembered it even when she could make but little of it.

Musa had a strong visionary fancy, though no poet read or history studied had fed it. All she had ever had to nourish it were the songs and improvisations of the foresters and mountaineers, when, with autumn and spring-time, they came into Santa Tarsilla on their way to and from the woods and hills; rough men and wild, but often eloquent, making their lutes sound sweetly by the side of the moonlit sea, or rolling out strophe and antistrophe, unconscious of their harmonies, as the wave broke upon the sand.

Her fancy, untrained but strong, like the wild 'mother of the woods' that brought forth its blossoms unseen over the waste around, made of the dead Etruscans her own nation, and of their subterranean graves her temple.

'You live too much with these dead people, child,' said Joconda to her.

'They do me no harm,' said Musa. 'The living make me angry often, and I strike them sometimes; the dead make me ashamed that I am ever wicked.'

'They were wicked enough themselves, most like,' grumbled Joconda. 'I will be bound men and women have never differed much.'

'They do me good,' said Musa; and she said no more.

They were sacred to her. She could not have put into words what she felt, but it was very strong in her, this sense of tenderness, of kinship, of reverence, with which the lonely tombs moved her.

Musa in her utter ignorance would not for her life have robbed of an ounce of gold or a vase of clay these dead sleepers of a sleep of three thousand years.

She was jealous over them, she worshipped them, they were her idols; let others have their saints as they would, she had never cared for the saints; she cared for these ghostly hosts who filled the under chambers of the earth and waited so calmly, so patiently, with the oak and the thorn and the myrtle growing above their heads.

On all the earth there is in truth nothing so intensely sad, so intensely solemn, as the thought of the buried cities that he with their buried millions under the hurrying feet of living multitudes, or lost in the green silences where orchids bloom, and the thorn of Christ puts forth its golden flowers, and the dragon-flies spread gossamer wings above the fritillaria and fraxinella. As scholars know, she knew nothing of them; but as poets feel for them, she felt.

Whenever Musa had a day of freedom, fascinated by her very fear, she went to the spot on the moor where she had found the sleeping warrior. The place had awe and seduction for her stronger than anything else, even stronger than the sea. She felt that the earth held a mystery, a whole inner world of mute motionless creatures.

Of death she had never thought except on that one day when Joconda had spoken of dying. She had seen the dull black bier go by borne by the beccamorti; she had seen the torches flare as the dead went home, and knew that they were put away underground, and wondered that they were not thrown into the sea. Children, who had been at play on the shore beside her one week, the next were dead of fever, and were buried; that she knew very well, but she had never thought about it. These skeletons on their beds of rock were the first creatures that made her think of the fate that waits for every living thing.

Was he dead indeed, that hero robed in golden beauty, who had passed out under the stars and been seen no more? Then death could not be terrible, she thought; to lie still undisturbed till you went out to the stars and the clouds, that was so sweet and grand, no one need fear it.

She conquered her first terror and went again and again to the tomb. There was the couch of rock, the floor, the walls, the faintly coloured banquet, but the hero returned no more. When the day was bright and noon was high she would go down out of its heat and light into the gloom of that cold chamber and sit upon the bed that the dead had left and watch, always vaguely and wistfully, hoping he would return to tell her all the secrets of the grave, all the glories of the skies.

Beyond this chamber in which the Lucumo and his treasures had lain, an open stone door led to another room of the same dimensions, and from that again, beyond other doors of stone, opened out two cells, divided by a wall of the natural rock. In all these three there were, as she saw, not then but in after days, stone benches and stone chairs, dust-covered. The dust had once been human bones.

Here, too, there were painted jars and bowls, bronze candelabra and utensils of beautiful workmanship and exquisite form, ivory and enamel toys, glass and gold necklaces and clasps and brooches, amber amulets, and jewellery and rings. The walls and the roofs also of these tombs were painted. In one, Mantus and Mania held dread court of judgment; on another the twelve gods sat in council; here the lotus and the bullrush sprang to life, and Etruscan boys danced and leapt and strung the lyre; there Cupa and Horta sported amidst flowers, and Vertumnus was crowned with fruit.

The graves had doubtless all belonged to the same family, that of the great Lucumo, whose skeleton and armour had melted and vanished at the first touch of air. Possibly he had been one of the forgotten kings of the Tyrrhene people; certainly he had been some mighty warrior-prince, since he had had the corona etrusca about his casque, and the eagle with spread wings upon his ivory sceptre.

The shape and sentiment of Greek art were visible on all the ornaments of his burial chamber; the painted vases were all of Greek taste, polychrome and decorated with divine figures or groups of fruits or flowers; such vases as are oftener found in Athens than Etruria. Probably this necropolis had been contemporary with, or somewhat earlier than, Alexander of Macedon.

The tombs had been undiscovered alike by Roman or Gothic greed of gold, and modern science had not dreamed of their existence, even whilst busied in the excavations of Cyclopean Cosa, near at hand, southward, on the same seashore. Doubtless other sepulchres adjoined these, made under the same low swell of friable sandstone cliffs and hillocks, but any others were grown over by brushwood, and engulfed in earth disturbed by volcanic action, no trace of them, or of any opening that might have led to them, was ever found, even though in after days Musa searched diligently and often. They were lost as utterly as the vast labyrinth of Porsenna is lost; only the janitor's room had been left some little connection with the upper earth, and outer soil, by the passage of wild animals, who had found through the ever-open door of the entrance-cell a lair of safety.

Their lonely territory was southward of the great lake that the Romans called Lacus Aprilis, along whose shore the Aurelian Way once was made; it was northward of the weird rocks of Monte Argentaro, and shared in the rich sylva and flora which the central part of the Maremma possesses, in that grander and virginal aspect which the province between the rivers of Ombrone and Fiora owes to the forests of pine, of ilex, of cork, of oak, of manna-ash, and of locust-tree which clothe the slopes beneath the Apennines; to the wilderness of evergreen trees and shrubs that cover in their verdure and dusky gloom the ruins of Roman roads, of Latin castles, of Tyrrhene towns and sepulchres; to the innumerable pools and streams and lakes which are hidden away under impenetrable thickets, and known only to the sultan-hen and the wild duck, the nocturnal plover and the common coot. Away to the southward stretched vast grasslands, peopled solely by the melancholy buffalo, covered in spring with the elysian asphodel; and the dreary, solemn, almost treeless moors, walled in from the east by sombre mountain heights, and covering beneath their soil lost Ansedonia and perished Cosa, and the tombs of the Tarquins, and the moats and ramparts of the once mighty Ardea, and many another perished greatness of which the very name had been forgotten even in Virgil's generation.

Between the moors and the sea stretched all along the coast a yellow sandy beach, or a wide algæ-strewn swamp, or a rocky stony waste bearing the traces still of the ancient Consular way.

From the hills and mounds of sandstone, covered with mountain-box and juniper bushes, that swelled up low and long in a ridge that traversed the part of the moorland which she so especially haunted, the child, looking north and south, could see the whole coast-line from the deep semicircular bay to the eastward, enclosed between Populonia and the Cape of Troja, and facing the peaks of Elba, to the south-westward where Telamone had been a crowded port, and where once the great Argo herself had anchored, yet where now even the little coasters, that drew but two feet of water, often ran aground, and dull Orbetello sheltered a dreary life of sickly soldiers and of sullen coastguards and of listless people picking the salt crystals from the soil.

Over that blue sea, where once the Argonauts sailed, and the Etruscan pirates hunted the Latin galleys, and the merchant vessels went out from the grand and busy ports laden with the Lydian wool, the ironwork that Rome deemed of even more worth than men, the silver and the gold chasings that Greece eagerly bought and could not equal, the yellow grain that made Maremma then, as now, the granary of Italy, over that blue sea there still came stately ships bound for Athens or for Asia, fleets of fishing craft with their lateen sails curved and white in the summer sun, brigs laden to the waterline with cargo and steering straight for Africa. But on the land, the wondrous, mysterious, memory-haunted land, where the lost cities lay under the forests, and the labyrinths of endless cemeteries wound beneath the sand and turf, there scarce any sign of human life was ever to be seen, save when a mounted shepherd on his wild and shaggy horse rode in amongst the herds of buffalo—a true son still of the fierce Etruscan pastori whom even Rome confessed none could war with and none could win without.

True, not very far off there were the ironworkers of Follonica beating the ore of Elba into shape, in the only vigorous work to be found along the coast-line, true sons of the Etruscan Sethlans, who were said to be rough, coarse, ill company enough if met away from their sweltering furnaces. But of the smiths of Follonica she knew no more than she knew of the Etruscan Vulcan.

Another year went by, and the girl grew taller and stronger, and had Santa Tarsilla counted young men amidst its population, they would have looked full well and often at that dark yet luminous face that was by old Joconda's side in the morning mist and the troubled sunlight of the dull church at time of mass. Joconda kept her close, and encouraged her to be silent. Joconda was not loquacious like those chatterers of the seaboard, and she always thought that no harm could come from holding your tongue, though much might come from wagging it.

At fifteen, Musa, as she was now oftenest called, and would be called in Santa Tarsilla if she lived in it a century, was a noble-looking and beautiful creature, with pride in her glance, and more still of shyness, with a bearing royal in its calmness and its freedom, and an untamed and sombre spirit in her blood.

When old Andreino saw her at his tiller or from his boat's side looked down at her as she lifted her bronze-hued, loose-curled head, like a young god's, out of the waters, he would say to himself, 'that suits her better than distaff and missal; there is the courage of sea-lions in her.'

But going to mass by Joconda's side, with her cross on her breast and her palm-branch in her hand, at Easter-time, she looked but a girl, simple, silent, docile, wise in some things beyond her age; yet she seemed out of keeping with the place and with the people; and the old woman would glance at her, and think, 'would not one know there was wild blood there?' and feel her own heart heavy as she looked.

She had been brought up in the best ways Joconda knew; taught cleanliness, truthfulness, and industry, could spin well and be useful in the house, though she hated confinement under a roof, and the moment she was set free rushed to the air like a bird loosed from a cage.

Whether she had affection in her or not, Joconda could not tell; the only creature she ever caressed was the Molossus dog.

As for learning, she had little. She could read slowly, and she could write very badly; this was all that she had been forced to do. But she could, as she said, steer and row like the best of them; she could take the helm of a felucca and bring it safely in over the algæ-heaps and dangerous shallows of the choked harbour; she could fling a net with force and skill, though when it was full of shining, struggling little fish, she often liked to loose it and let them all slide back whence they came; and furthermore she could sing all the rispetti and stornelli of the Maremmano shore to the throbbing strings of an old lute, which Joconda's sons in their short lives had loved to make music with, when they came home from the coral fishing. The chords of that lute and the clear voice from her young throat were the only melody that ever enlivened the damp hot nights, when the scirocco was filling the sorry houses with sand and the haze on the sea hid the green Giglio isle.

Even her singing took its character from the melancholy and abandonment that characterised the land and the water, and it was rarely that she chose other themes than the passionate laments of the provincial canzoni, for those who go far out to sea at risk of life, or for the faithless mountaineer who leaves amara Maremma without a sigh or a backward look, or than, more tragic and more terrible still, that tale of Pia Tolomei, whose despair has echoed through so many centuries, and whose history still often makes the theme of their song to the mariners and the marsh labourers of the Orbetellano, of Massa Marittima, and of the Patrimony of S. Peter, as the lower part of the province is still called.

But when she sang of love and all its sorrows, she knew nothing of the meaning of the words; and she liked better songs of war and death. When she sang

Tortorella c'ha perso la compagna
Di giorno e notte va melanconesca,

she did not understand why any one should grieve to be alone; when she sang

Come volete faccia che non pianga
Sapendo che da voi devo partire?
E tu, bello, in Maremma, ed io'n montagna,
Questa partenza mi farà morire,

it seemed to her but poor and feeble nonsense. And yet her voice gave intensest passion and longing to the words; and when she sang

Andai a bere alla fonte d'Amore,

Joconda shook her head and thought with wistful pain,—

'Ah, you will drink indeed, one day; drink so deep that you will drown!'

Joconda was always anxious and troubled lest anyhow she had missed the way, and done less than she might in the fulfilling of Saturnino's trust. The man was but a galley-slave, a thief, a murderer; but Joconda was faithful to him as though he had been a king.

She was always anxious. The Mastarna, of whom there were none living save this child and the galley-slave, had all died by violent deaths, the deaths of hunters, of smugglers, or of brigands; of Serapia's people she knew nothing, but report had spoken of that dead woman as of a beautiful light voluptuous fool. From both sides there was dangerous heritage—dark precedent. The old woman, with her tender conscience and her upright soul, was always harassed with fear.

Musa had a great skill at rythmical improvisations.

Silent at other times, with a silence that was in strong contrast with the loquacity of those around her, she would at times, when the fit fell on her, recite in the terza rima or the more difficult ottavo, poems of her own on every theme which came before her eye: poems that the next hour she forgot as utterly as the nightingale forgets no doubt the trills that he sets rippling through the night under the myrtle and the bay leaves. It 1s not an uncommon gift; In country places where the dreary levelling parrot-learning of the towns has not touched and destroyed the natural original powers of the people, this trick of musical language, of words that burn, and paint their pictures with fire of passionate and just recital, still refreshes and adorns the life of the labourer of the cornlands and the fishing villages and the old grey farm-houses, set high on a ledge of Carrara or Sabine hills and the fragrant orange thickets, and the sombre calm woods of Sardinia or Apulia. Where the Italian has not been dulled, stiffened, corroded, debased by the levelling and impoverishing influences of modern civilisation, there is he always classic, eloquent, ardent, graceful in body and mind; there is he still half a Greek, and wholly a sylvan creature.

Musa, with her old mandoline with its ivory keys across her knee, and her brown hand every now and then calling the sleeping music from its strings, had moments of inspiration like any pythoness of old, and at such times her eyes flashed, her lips grew eloquent, her colour came and went, her voice rose in cadence that stirred the sluggish sickly souls around her with joy and with terror. All the fire and the force that were in her blood came out of prison in those recitations, and, listening to her, Joconda thought, with a shudder, 'that is Saturnino who speaks so, of love, and hate, and war, and death!'

A thousand memories that were not of her life, yet seemed of her remembrance, thronged on the child at such hours. She seemed to hear the clash of arms, the roll of artillery, the shrieks of slaughtered children, the hiss of the hot blood pouring out as the cold steel plunged in through flesh and sinew; strife, combat, violence, fierce courage, ghastly death, all seemed familiar to her, and she sang of them as Tasso sang of strife before Jerusalem that never his eyes looked on in life. Higher and higher, stronger and stronger, her voice would rise as the rhyme rushed from her lips, and the lute under her fingers would scream and sob like a suffering thing, and a great fear would come over all her listeners; and when, all suddenly, she stopped, pale, breathless, with dilated eyes— the eyes of those who see what is not upon the earth—the neighbours would steal away alarmed and yet entranced, and Joconda would cross herself and think: 'All the dead that her father slew seem to cry out to her.'

It was not very often that she could be induced to take up the mandoline, or show this power to others; but song and narrative flavour the daily bread of all households of the south, like the onion, or the melon; and even in these languid, naked, fever-haunted shores there was always some knot of tired seamen, of weary women, to gather in the shade of a wall, or under the hulk of a stranded boat, and beguile the time with rispetti and recitative.

Such as these would coax her, or bribe her with some carnation flower, or some nautilus shell, to come amongst them, and conjure up, to thrill their sluggish veins, some tragedy of sea or land, some vision of love or death. So she sang of things she knew not, and in the sultry evenings, when the skies were livid and seemed hard as metal, and the sea swayed heavily under the heat like a flood of molten lead, the drought and the drouth and the shivering sickness and the parched poisonous land were all forgotten as they hearkened to that voice of hers which seemed, even as the nightingales' voices do when many of them sing together, to be like the sound of silver cymbals smiting one another.

Joconda discouraged and disliked this power of improvisation, this inborn melody.

'Who knows where it may lead her one day,' she thought; 'and if she became one of those singing-women who give their throats for gold, and show themselves half stripped upon the stage of the world, then had I better have left her to be eaten by the rats under the pine-trees of her father's lair.'

For Joconda was a Puritan at heart, having in her by her mother the Waldensian blood; and she did her best to discourage the gifts of voice in Saturnino's child. But nature is stronger than counsel, and Musa rhymed and sang. Knowing nothing of the metrical laws that govern the sonnet, she yet imitated these so well that she strung many a sonnet like a row of pearls; only never hardly could she keep the text unchanged, her fancy varied, and her spoken poems varied also as the quail's call varies, when he cries across the waving grass to his mate.

'Sing the same as yesterday,' her neighbours sometimes would say to her; and she would answer: 'Can you call yesterday's wind back, or the clouds of last night, can you gather them together this morning? I can only sing what comes to me.'

Under other influences it would have become genius, this facile power of stirring the brains and hearts of others with sound; but here it remained only a gift of verse as many had, though fresher and more eloquent than most. There was no food for if, except a strophe of the 'Gerusalemme Liberata,' a story from the 'Furioso,' or the 'Morgante Maggiore,' passed from mouth to mouth of the people.

Once she found in a drawer a torn and yellow transcript of the sonnets of Petrarca, copied in a crabbed hand by some poor scholar of the past century; it was the dearest treasure that she had; it was her only book. She read with trouble and slowly at the best of times; but by degrees she learned these sonnets all by heart through dint of going over them so often, and the stained rough yellow leaves were sacred to her as the Holy Grail to a knight. She knew nothing as to who Petrarca had been, nothing of Vaucluse, or of the entry into Rome; but she loved those 'liquid numbers' with all her soul, and in her thoughts he was vaguely blended with the dead hero of the tomb.

So she dreamed the hours away, whilst her bodily strength laboured at the crank of the waterwheel, at the mounds of seaweed, at the sickle, with which she cut the wild oats for the mule, at the heavy sails which she dragged over the sands for Joconda to mend. So she never saw the lads who came with the coasters, and who would fain have had play or flattery with her in the evening-time, when the tarred ropes lay idle over the sea-wall, and their tartanas anchored in the weed-choked, sand-filled bay; and they grew angry, and hooted after her, 'Musoncella!' and turned their thoughts to Mariannina, the pilot Giano's daughter, who had yellow hair, and red-brown eyes, and was esteemed a beauty, and kept her pink and white skin safe by going up out of the heat every summer to the house of an aunt who lived high on the Volterrian hills, although Giano's daughter at her best was, beside the lustrous colour of Musa's beauty, as a pale aster in September's sun is beside the glow of the autumnal rose.

But Giano's daughter, Mariannina, smiled and listened and flirted, and had a merry word and a bashful blush for each of them; and in Musa they found a restive, silent, scornful creature; for what do young sailors, or landsmen either, want with a girl who only sees Laura's dead lover, and has no eyes at all for them and their festa bravery?

Throughout Maremma, where love plays fast and loose, and the sower of the corn is seldom the reaper of it, and the hunter of one autumn is rarely the same as another—in Maremma, where the passions are lava and the faith is thistle-down,—the boldest and the lightest would never have dared an amorous word to the Musoncella.

There was a straight, far-away look in her great blue-black eyes, and a curve on her red lips that would have scared them, even had any of those passers-by had time to tarry and see what a rare and strange flower was growing up in the stony, reedy sands of the dreary world-forgotten place. And_ besides, there was Joconda, who always banged the door with scant ceremony, or grumbled a morose good-morrow, if she saw any human being looking twice at the child whom she had called after Mary the Penitent Joconda was always afraid for the future.

There was the galley-slave on Gorgona, and there was the wild blood in the stormbird. The only good, she thought, she could wish for the daughter of Saturnino was to live without sin in this desolate spot, unseen, unknown, with little more soul in her than there was in the stout shore thistle, that neither sands nor sea could swamp.

'So, the saints will pluck her to themselves at last,' thought Joconda; and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems only stagnation, inanition, death.

The exhausted swimmer, reaching the land, falls prone on it, and blesses it; but the out-going swimmer, full of strength, spurns the land, and only loves the high-crested wave, the abyss of the deep sea.

There were seventy-one years between the souls of Joconda and the child who slept in her bed, sat at her board, and knelt before her cross. They were too many for sympathy to bridge them, and though she loved the child, behind the love was always fear: the human fear of the tiger's cub.

Meanwhile Andreino, who was a shrewd and sagacious person, had other schemes for her future; he liked the child, and he liked still better the thought of the good store of gold and silver pieces that rumour assigned to the woman of Savoy. He had a ricketty, ague-shaking little great-grandson of eighteen, with a pretty, sickly face, who lived with his father at a wineshop in a little seatown in Apulia. ' Why not get the girl for the lad,' he thought.

'And they could live with me,' mused this disinterested old man; 'and she is stronger than many a boy, and loves steering and rowing, and would go out to the night-fishing like any man among them. It would be but kind to speak of it to Joconda.'

So he went and spoke of it with his pipe in his mouth one day that Joconda was sitting in the shade of her house wall mending a sail, for she was never idle. Joconda gave him few words in answer.

'One does not mate a trailing weed with a young oak,' she said with calm contempt, having well in her mind's eye Andreino's sickly and shaking descendant; and though he talked his best for the chief part of two hours, he did not come any nearer towards changing her convictions.

'She is a crafty, crabbed soul,' thought her neighbour. 'Maybe she has some one in Savoy———'

At that moment Musa came in sight.

'We were talking of marriage for you,' said Andreino with a grim smile, as she drew near them.

Musa looked at him a little perplexedly under her straight brows, then her grave face laughed.

'Marriage! I know what that is: it is for the woman to stay at home and spin while the man is at sea, and to go out and rake wood and salt while he is drinking at the wine shop. That 1s what it 1s; it is not for me.'

The old fisherman laughed.

'It is not only that. 'There are———'

'Hold your tongue, Andreino,' said Joconda. 'It is oftenest only that or worse. The child need not think cf it for many a day.'

'Men will think of it,' said the old sailor, 'and you have a pretty penny, and it would be well to find a decent lad.'

'When I show the penny the lads will come like flies to wine, never fear,' said Joconda grimly. 'The child has no such thoughts. Let her be.'

Andreino went away grumbling. He hiked to act the part of the padrone d' amore, though the sickly and scant population of the coast gave him little scope for the taste, and he had thought to taunt and tease the woman of Savoy into proving to him how many of those pretty amorini, good solid coins, were in the pitcher under the hearth, or the bucket sunk at the bottom of the well, or the hole in the brick behind the mule's manger, or wherever it might be that the savings of her long life were kept.

Joconda, left alone with the girl, looked at her a little wistfully.

'Child, you are handsome,' she said at last. 'That old cracked chatterer said true. Some one may want to marry you.'

'Yes,' said Musa, indifferently.

'Though there is not a soul here, still sometimes they come—Lucchese, Pistoiese, what not—they come as they go; they are a faithless lot; they love all winter, and while the corn is in the ear it goes well, but after harvest—phew!—they put their gains in their pockets and they are off and away back to their mountains. There are broken hearts in Maremma when the threshing is done.'

'Yes,' said Musa again.

It was nothing to her, and she heeded but little.

'Yes, because men speak too lightly and women hearken too quickly; that is how the mischief is born. With the autumn the mountaineers come. They are strong and bold; they are ruddy and brown; they work all day, but in the long nights they dance and they sing; then the girl listens. She thinks it is all true, though it has all been said before in his own hills to other ears. The winter nights are long, and the devil is always near; when the corn goes down and the heat is come there is another sad soul the more, another burden to carry, and he—he goes back to the mountains. What does he care? Only when he comes down into the plains again he goes to another place to work, because men do not love women's tears. That is how it goes in Maremma.'

'Yes,' said Musa for a third time.

'Child, do not let a man touch you till you have had the blessing of Church upon you. Remember that. Whilst I am here, if a man come, it will be the worse for him if he come not honestly. I am tough still. But when I am gone there will be no one, for Andreino is but a gawky gossip full of tales. Promise me that; let no man touch you till the Church has blessed you. Promise that.'

Musa at last was astonished and startled. A warmth of blood came over the delicate brown of her face and throat.

'I promise,' she said quickly. 'But I do not see any men; I do not want them.'

'Some one will come,' muttered Joconda. 'Some one always comes. Swear me that by the image you wear.'

The child kissed the gold Madonnina that hung about her throat, and said, 'I swear it—but a promise is the same.'

'With you I think it is,' said Joconda. 'But, Lord, what are you yet? A bird not out of nest—a bud all folded up. You do not know what you will be in a year or two. And now that you have sworn you will remember.'

'I will remember,' said Musa.

Joconda was silent, recollecting, as she twirled her flax, on what the Maremma had always said of Saturnino—that he was true to a plighted word through good and ill, and when he swore on his Madonnina abode by his oath, whether it were for blood-guiltiness or for the sparing of blood.

'She is Saturnino's own child,' thought Joconda. She was his child. To the mind of Joconda that one fact made this calm young life seem like a fair garden outspread on a volcano's side. There were the budding lilies indeed, and the half-shut roses, but there was the lava stream beneath them that any day might rise in fire.

'If only I could be always here,' she thought, poor soul, fancying that she would find some force to stay the lava with the uplifted crucifix. But she knew she could not be always here; she was eighty-six years old this brilliant day of San Zenone, when the light and the fragrance of spring were beautiful, even in cursed Maremma.

When Musa was asleep that night and all the little place was still, Joconda, behind her barred shutters and bolted doors, by the light of her lantern looked at her little hoard, which was kept under a stone in the paved floor of her kitchen.

She counted it. It was but little, though the fancy of Santa Tarsilla made it much. Fortunes are not made by weaving hemp and mending sails.

There were some score of gold Grand Ducal coins, and some handfuls of Papal silver ones; that was all. Before the child had come to her she had thought the money would do to bury her, and buy some masses for her soul. Now the child was there she said to herself, 'my soul can do well enough without masses; she must have it all;' and caused to be scrawled in Grosseto, by a friend, on a scrap of stamped paper to make it good, these words of formal bequest:—

'All this is for the child Maria Penitente, whom they call Musa or the Musoncella, and the parish may bury my body, and my soul will be with God, who will do what He likes with it. Deus exaudit nos.'

This, which had been written at her own dictation, she wrapped carefully round the money, and with a sigh replaced it in the hole, and set the stone down over it. It was but little to be the only plank between a girl, and hunger, and thirst, and homelessness, and shame.

Yet over the face of Joconda a grim smile fluttered as she put out her lantern. 'Andreino thinks I have a pretty penny,' she thought; 'and he would like to sell me his ricketty great-grandson that shakes with ague like a jelly-fish in a lobster-pot!'

The smile faded as she laid herself down to sleep; she knew all the niggardly self-seeking ways of the people, and had diverted herself with them through all the silent years of her life on these shores; but they were sorry neighbours to whom to leave a solitary child for care and for mercy.

'Well, the good God will be with her,' sighed Joconda in the formula of her faith. But she was a woman whom a formula could but half console.

Deity at his best was very far away, and always silent.

She would gladly have had those pieces under the pavement more by a hundredfold.

She glanced wistfully at the figure of the girl ere she put out her light, as Musa lay on the rough bed scarcely covered, with her slender straight round limbs glistening like some golden-hued marble, and her head hung downward in deep rest, as a flower hangs when full of dew.

She thought once of her own people, but she knew nothing about them. More than sixty years had gone by since she had come down the mountain paths out of the mist, and sad farewell to the great snow-peaks, the forests of pine, the green glacier waters tumbling through the ravine. She had never seen them since, nor any of her kindred. Letters had come once, now and then, in two or three years' time, but that was long ago, long ago; she had had but two brothers, and they had forgotten her, when once she was married, and far away over the southern sea.

It was of no use to think of them.

'Never hearken to the voice of a man that bears you away,' she would say to the unconscious child, as her memories drifted to that time, so long ago, when she had left her Alps for her lover's shores. He had been a true lover, indeed, that dark-eyed Maremmano, but he had perished before her eyes, and his boat had come in on the surf keel upward, and all the widow's jointure he had left her had been sorrow and disease and barren years, dry from grief as the shores were dry with the sand-bearing scirocco. If she had never known him, she would no doubt have lived and died amidst the peace and plenty of those A]pine farms.

'Love is a cruel thing,' she thought; and the next day she brought out their few scant letters, of which the latest was thirty years old, and bade Musa read them aloud to her.

The child read them with some difficulty; they were short and grave, such letters as busy farmers would write on a winter's night when the chalet was blocked in snow, and their mountain side seemed severed by a wall of ice from all the world. Joconda listened, and said never a word. Her heart was full. Herself, she could not read, but she looked at the signatures, Anton Sanctis, Joachim Sanctis; and it seemed once more as though she were fifteen years old, and her brothers were breasting the face of the rocks and calling to her where she stood above, with the red and white cow Dorothea. She had never spoken of her youth to the child before. She spoke now, in few words, but tenderly.

Musa, with the old faded yellow ill-writ letters lying on her knee, sat in the sultry pestilential mists of a summer day in Maremma, and heard of that land of coolness, of rest, of forest stillness, of glacier solitude. It seemed strange to her, and very wonderful.

'Are they all dead, do you think?' she said, sharing Joconda's vague anxiety.

'Ay, for sure, they are all dead,' said Joconda, with a smothered sigh; and in the dust, in the glare, in the furnace-blast of the scirocco that is like a curse from the mouth of a fever-stricken man, she told her beads and muttered to herself:

'Dear heaven! for the feel of the snow in the air, for the smell of the great pine woods in the wind—what I would give, what I would give! But I have nothing to give; I am old and a fool; and they are dead, my brothers.'

To be sure they were dead; dead many a year, no doubt, with the cross set at their headstones, about the little chapel under the crest of the mountain; the little chapel that she remembered so well, lying so high that the clouds bathed it, and the snow scarce melted till June. And she would herself lie here in the sand and the sun.

During this hot summer season the thought of them, her two only brothers, grew stronger and stronger upon her; and as she drove one day into Grosseto, the remembrance grew so vivid that she went to a scrivener and said to him—

'Write me a long letter and a good one, and word for word as I tell it you; and write it so that it can go over the sea and the hills without harm; and when it is written address it clearly and in a bold hand to Anton and Joachim Sanctis, above the Val de Cogne, in the kingdom of Savoy.'

As she dictated so the scrivener wrote, and with her own hand Joconda dropped the letter into the bag of the post, as it went out of Grosseto that evening time at sunset.

Anton and Joachim, if alive, would be very old men, for they had been older than she by some years, but that scarcely occurred to her. She always saw them as she had seen them last, bold mountaineers and farmers, stalwart and handsome, angry at her wedding with the Italian from over the seas, and bidding her and him a reluctant and sullen God-speed as the mules jolted down the steep ways into the valley, and the glaciers of Grandcou and Monei and the peak of the beautiful Grivola were lost for ever to her sight.

'Ay, I had better have stayed there,' she thought, with a wistful sigh, as she dropped her letter in the post and made her way through the pale dusty haze of a summer twilight in sickly Grosseto.

The memories of the mountain winds, the deep still woods, the crystal clearness of the cold bright air, the forest silence on those heights where the sole visitants were the eagle and the vulture, came back upon her mind amidst the heat, the dust, the heaviness, the nauseousness of the atmosphere of the seashore in Maremma.

'Surely I am near my end,' she thought, knowing that when the thoughts of youth return fresh as the scent of new-gathered blossoms to the tired old age which has so long forgot them, the coming of Death is seldom very distant; and she jolted home behind the mule, falling asleep at intervals while the beast took his homeward course unerringly, and when she awoke with a start and saw the level and mournful plains around her, she did not for the moment understand, and began to call Rosa, and Nix, and Dorothea, the cows that she had had at pasture on the Alps when she had been some fifteen summers old!

'Lord, their bones lie bleaching fifty years!' she said to herself, knowing her own folly; yet she could see them all; the dun, the black, the pretty red and white, thrusting their noses through the lush Alpine grass, and lowing their welcome to her through the Alpine mists of morning. 'When one leaves one's cradle-land one does ill,' she thought wearily, as the sea gleamed in her sight, pale, smooth, ghastly, in the light of the moon; the bottomless grave that held her dead.

Each day after that she began wistfully to hope that she might hear something from Savoy. The postman came over the plains and along the shores very irregularly to Santa Tarsilla. If it were not the soldiers or the priest who had a letter, no one else ever saw such a thing save once, when Andreino had been known to have one announcing the death of a son of his, who kept a wine-shop far up the Riviera, where the orange, and the lemon, and the fragrant olive grow together by the edge of the sea. Joconda began to look wistfully for the dusty jaded figure of the tired postino coming across the sand, but she looked in vain.

The weeks came and went; the drought became greater; the plain grew yellower and the sky greyer; the air was like a furnace, and over the water there hung always a livid fog of heat. But she got no answer.

'No doubt they are dead,' she thought, and felt the sadder and the lonelier for the thought.

 

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