In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 8

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER VIII.

 

EANWHILE, for sympathy Musa went elsewhere. She turned to those who had been dead three thousand years if one.

She had never spoken of her discovery; the secret was sacred to her and sweet; she loved the moors and the city of the dead that was beneath them. All the leisure that she had she spent there. With the help of Andreino she had made, at last, for herself a rough little boat out of drift-timbers lying about, and she rowed herself hither and thither in it: it was not very seaworthy, but that had no terrors for her; she could swim like a fish. She visited her Etruscan burial-place with each fast-day that came round, when the crisp snow of December made the marsh ice and the world white, as when the suns of August sucked up the venom from the emerald soaking swamp.

She found the other spacious chambers connected with the first grave; tombs with stone biers around the walls, and the same strange fantastic paintings on the wall, and many earthenware cups and trays, and some lamps and goblets of gold. These last had not been oxydised as the first that she had seen, and therefore did not vanish at her touch; no doubt because, though she could see no ray of light into these inner chambers, some air had always come, for the dead were not there, not even their bones and ashes; these had long ago gone forth on the breath of the wind, as her warrior king had done.

To any scholar, or even to a traveller unscholarly, these tombs would have seemed capable enough of simple explanation; but to her they were as an enchanted city, as a world apart, as a thing given to herself from some unseen power that set the planets rolling, and made the storm arise and sweep bare the sea.

When the bare cold rocks blocked her passage, she felt very sure that beyond it, though she might not behold further, were all the other kingdoms of the dead, all the hosts over whom the king, who had vanished in the light of the stars, once had reigned.

The upper world, that bore the oaks and the grain, the honeysuckle and the holythorn, became almost nothing to her; it was but as a mere crust above the true world, the world where the dead in their millions slept and awaited—what?———she did not know, but she felt she would wish to wait with them for ever, rather than be one in that sordid, sickly, little living world she knew, with its greed over a haul of fish, its savage quarrels over a copper-piece, its worry, its weariness, its wailing, its beds of sickness, and its hearts of stone.

To whosoever dwells in an ideal world the world of men and women seems but a poor thing; and Musa began to dwell in one—she, whose father had seen no beauty save in a scarlet lip, a narrow poignard, a sack of gold, a pool of blood.

The little that Joconda had said of the nation of dead, instead of allaying the fever of her fancy, inflamed it.

'Do they tell of these dead people in books?' she asked Joconda once, who answered:

'Aye; all lies come out of books, I believe, and some truth too, they say. For my part, a book was always a thing I thought best put in the priest's hands, and left there.'

Musa grew diligent in her endeavours to read well and rapidly. But nothing did she find of the dead people. All that she had to read in were stories of the saints, and the proclamations about taxes and other annoyances that were posted up on the piers of Santa Tarsilla.

'Who has got books?' she wondered.

No one at all in her world.

She went back to the world of the dead, and imagined all that she would have liked to find in the books. Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

There was that in the silence, the solitude, and the sense of ownership which made the subterranean sepulchres beautiful and beloved to the child; if any other had broken in on them, their spell would have been weakened; she grew familiar with the strange dancers on the walls, the strange creatures, and flowers, and symbols; she found ornaments on the floors and on the stone biers, but she only looked at them reverently; everything was only waiting: the dead people would come back.

The grey shadows of these chambers grew dearer to her than the light of spring or summer in the thickets or on the sea. Their intense stillness seemed sweeter than even the sound of the waves she had so well loved. She returned to her home with sorrow; there were the jar of shrill voices, the hissing of oil in frying-pans, the cry of hurt animals, the rattle of copper vessels, the babble of sickly women.

An Italian village is never lovely.

There is always so much dust, so much dirt; there is so much stink of oil and sickly smell of silkworms; the dogs and cats and the fowls and mules look hungry and scared. The children play in mud or sand with some live thing they torture; even amidst the hills or beside the pastures they are always marring the beauty of the country thus. By the palsied shores of the Maremma this squalor, this cruelty, this unloveliness, were a thousandfold more painful.

When she went back to them from the silence and solemnity of the Etruscan moorlands they hurt her with a sudden sense of their unfitness and their hatefulness.

'It is better with the dead,' she thought, when she went reluctantly home to the low-lying shore when the flat roofs of Santa Tarsilla were white and black under the moon.

When a certain Etruscan tomb was broken open in Italy, and one of those necklaces of fine gold that no known work can surpass for skill was found in the grave, a duchess, still living, put the dead woman's ornament on her own throat, and danced in it on that night.

Musa never so offended the dust. She would as soon have rifled the Madonna's altar as have touched their jewels.

She let all the gold and the earthenware lie or stand where she had found it, where the mourners had placed it when the bones had been laid there; and although in one of the empty biers there were golden chains and golden grasshoppers, and a girdle of gold such as might well tempt a girl to put them above her linen boddice and about her woollen kirtle, she let them lie—she whose father had snatched gold wherever he saw it.

She spent many an hour in loneliness, sitting in the twilight of the tombs, studying the figures on the walls till they seemed alive to her, and thinking, not clearly, but dreamily; as the ox thinks in the meadow-heats of noon, as the deer thinks, and the dog, and the great eagle, when he sways on an oak-bough, and looks down through ten fathom deep of azure air and mist of sunbeam in the gorge below.

The summer was very hot and full of mist and of disease as summer on those shores is always; the moorland grew full of dangerous gases, the broad oak foliage sicklied and looked parched; the sea was grey and hazy with the horrible haze of heat; pestilential vapours rose in steam from the marshes; clouds hung on the windless air that were clouds, not of rain, but of mosquitoes; all animal life grew feeble, languid and inert; the time was come for the curse of Maremma, the midsummer that elsewhere is the year's crown of rejoicing.

In this oppressive weather, when the heavens looked a vault of copper, and the sea a breathless noxious oily plain, and all the marshes and the moors were as though a destroying wind of fire had passed over and scorched them brown, Musa, all by herself, still sought the shadow and the shelter of that tomb whose secret was only known to her.

She was never afraid; she was always watching, watching for the dead to arise or to return. The intense silence did not appal her; the intense solitude there, underneath the soil, all alone in that vault of sandstone, with the bones strewn on the beds of rock, had no terrors for her. These dead were like her people.

She was afraid lest any one should come to share their secret with her.

The moor was very lonely; far off, now and then, the figure of a shepherd, satyr-like and clad in goatskin, would loom black against the orange of the sunset sky; and she would watch him angrily and suspiciously lest he should bring his flocks to crop too near the mouth of the tombs, and learn their existence and rob her of their solitude. But no one disturbed her. The herds of buffaloes tramped by, snorting and bellowing as the gnats stung them, and the flies fastened in their flesh; the wild boars would come too, seeking roots in the cracked dry ground, and thrusting their snouts amidst the sawgrass,

These were the only visitants that she had, except the frogs that croaked on the stagnant mud of the steaming pools, and all the feathered tribe of summer singers, that were mute under the burden of the windless weather, and sat dull and gasping in the caroba boughs.

One day at early morning, going there, she saw for the first time a human being amidst the maidenhair and the vetches about the orifice of the warrior's tomb. She saw him with displeasure and fear. Yet he was only a young goatherd about ten years of age, whose goats were all about him, cropping the herbage; grey, and black, and white, wise-looking, bright-eyed, creatures, half beast, half fawn, as all goats are, always looking as though they had strayed from Hymettus or from Tempe.

He was a pretty brown boy, a mountain and moorland boy, half-naked, and playing with his reed pipe, like a true son of Pan.

'Who are you?' she said angrily; for she felt that the moor was her own.

He laughed.

'I am Zefferino; they call me Zirlo. I know you. You are the girl they call Musoncella and the Velia down in Santa Tarsilla.'

'What if they do? Either is as good a name as Zirlo. Why do they call you Zirlo?'

'Because I sing!'^[1]

'Who does not sing? That is nothing. Why do you bring your goats here?'

'Why not here? The moor and the marsh are free. It is hot, but there was no grass on the mountain so I came; I live in a hut on this moor in winter. I have not been down here since Pasquà.'

Musa was silent. She knew that it was true; the land was free.

'Do you live far off?' she asked.

'Up there,' he said; and pointed vaguely across the plain.

'What do they call it, where you live?'

'San Lionardo. It is over there.'

He pointed again across to where the red sullen haze of the heat overhung the inland moors, where they swelled upward and met the first spurs of the mountains.

Musa stood and looked; he was close by the aperture of the tombs, which she had carefully covered with stones and dead branches; he was lying on his back, with his reed-pipe in his half-open hand; he had a lovely, dusky, innocent face.

'Why do you mind my being here?' he said, good-humouredly. 'It is all so dry; my poor goats have had scarcely a mouthful all the week; just here it is a little better, because there is so much water. Why do you mind?'

'I like to be alone.'

'Ah, yes, you are the Musoncella. But it is not good to be alone. I never am, because I have the goats. I have heard say you are wicked. Are you wicked?'

'I do not know.'

'They say you strike people?'

'Sometimes.'

Zirlo raised himself, a little in apprehension.

'Why do you strike them?'

'Only if they make me angry.'

'You are angry now. I will take the goats away.'

Musa's eyes shone; then she relented. He was afraid of her, so he disarmed her.

'I do not want to hurt you. Let the goats feed,' she said. She said it as a princess might have done, giving them leave to crop the roses of a palace garden.

Though she was like a young dryad, and he like a little faun, they were but children after all. The childhood in them had its affinity and its attraction.

It was early in the day; a burning day in the most cruel month of the southern year, when even the red of the rosebud seems pale with heat, and even the gold of the sunflower wanes and rusts; when the birds are silent everywhere, and the grass looks like the sand of a desert, and even the deep still hours of midnight are stifling and without air, and the cloudless heavens are as a furnace of brass.

There was a broad ilex-oak here, and the boy was in the shelter of its shade, and the goats too. Musa sat down beside them. She had some black bread and a flask of water; he had the same. They ate and drank as two children might have done on the slopes of the Sicilian hills when Theocritus was shepherd there.

The boy was timid and yet attracted; she was displeased, and yet did not wish to be unkind. The great heat was around them and above them, like a sea of hot vapour; there seemed no hues anywhere that were not either grey or yellow; it looked as though dull sinking fires were burning on the horizon all around in a ring of flame; it was always so every morning and every evening while the sun was passing through the sign of Leo.

Musa sat and thought, How could she descend to her refuge without this lad learning the secret of it? As for him, he had taken his pipe, and was playing on it those melodious, carolling, tender little lays which had earned him his name from the people of the little mountain hamlet where he lived.

Musa, while she pondered, on her own thoughts intent, lifted her voice and sang; Zirlo sang too. The clear voices burst over the silence of the songless moor, and floated away over the silence of the buried tombs. Pan might have listened with joy had not Christ killed him.

When their voices were tired of leaping and falling, and piercing with sweet sound the drowsy heaviness of the atmosphere, they drank the water of their flasks and ate of their black crusts; the ilex leaves, black and grey against the yellow sunshine, drooping above their heads, unstirred by any breeze.

Suddenly the grazing goats stopped browsing and began to bleat uneasily, standing with their heads seawards.

'There will be a storm,' said Zefferino. 'We cannot see it coming, but they can.'

'If I were out at sea, I should know,' said Musa. She was not so familiar with the portents of the land.

In less than ten minutes the storm broke, sudden, violent, terrible as only a rainless storm can be. The sky was a sheet of lightning; the wind rose in fury; the thunder pealed as if heaven and earth were meeting; clouds of dust were driven before the wind over the moor; and herds of buffaloes with their horns sloped downward, rushed, like a whirlwind themselves, over the ground towards the shelter of the thickets.

The goats massed together, with stern outward, resisted the force of the hurricane as best they could, trembling and staggering as the wind struck them like a scourge. Musa, who stood erect, though she was shaken like a young tree, seized the boy, who had fallen prone upon his face.

'Get up; bring the beasts into shelter or they will perish!' she cried to him as she grasped him by his shirt of goatskin and plucked him from the ground.

'Shelter! There is no shelter for leagues round!' he screamed, and strove to cast himself again upon his face.

She dragged him up by sheer superior strength.

'There is shelter,' she said. 'Follow me, and make the flock follow you.'

Deafened and blinded by the hurricane and the dust-storm, she managed to keep her feet, and reach the aperture that she had covered; she tore away the brambles and boughs till the stone steps were laid bare; then by force of will and force of limb together dragged the little shepherd down with her whilst she called his beasts. More sagacious than he, with a headlong rush the goats descended into the refuge, while the storm which for one instant had lulled broke out afresh with increased violence.

Musa, with the goats around her, stood in the warrior's tomb. Zefferino was trembling and white with terror; he had fallen on his knees.

'Oh, you coward!' she cried, with boundless scorn; she, the daughter of Saturnino, had no fear in her.

Zirlo did not hear; he was so aghast at his own plight that he was scarcely sensible. Above head the tempest was pealing with awful fury; the echoes of the thunder pealed through the hollowed rocks; but the tomb was a safe shelter, the goats gathered themselves together against the bed of the vanished king, and were no more afraid: they bleated gently, that was all.

'They say their prayers,' said Musa. 'Say yours if you are so timid.'

Zivlo began to murmur words that he had been taught to say at mass.

Musa stood and looked at him in the semi-darkness, with pity and contempt.

'What would you do on the sea,' she said, 'when there is a storm? There are fifty every summer.'

'I was not frightened when I was on my face,' whispered Zefferino trembling. 'But this place, this dark cold place—where am I? And your eyes blaze so; you frighten me more.'

'Do my eyes blaze?' said Musa, who was pleased to hear it. 'If they do, it is because you are such a coward. Zirlo do they call you? A thrush would have more sense. This is mine, mine, do you hear, this place, and you must never speak of it.'

Zirlo stared at her in the twilight.

'Yours?' he said, wonderingly.

'Mine, because I found it,' said Musa, and, added under her breath, 'Of course, it is theirs.'

'It is a cave,' said Zirlo, as his eyes wandered over the vault and the walls.

'It is a tomb,' said Musa.

The boy shuddered.

'You say that to frighten me. There is never a tomb made like this. A little hole in the earth, and a wooden box pushed in—that is what they call a tomb. I know, for they buried my mother last year.'

'You have no mother?'

'No.'

'I too have none.'

The common misfortune drew them together a little nearer; Zirlo's eyes filled with tears; Musa stood grave and absorbed; he knew all he lost; she could only imagine it. The storm still beat above ground; they could hear the breaking of boughs, the rushing of winds, the scampering hoofs of terrified animals running hither and thither.

'If it would only rain, said the boy listening.

'It will not rain,' said Musa. 'It will not rain for a month, perhaps not then; the fishermen said so this morning.'

There is something awful and weird in a rainless storm, that seems unnatural, and is more deadly far to vegetation than the storms that drench and flood the land. When they are passed they leave a benison behind them, at least to all the sylva and the flora, in the freshened soil, the deepened streams, the brimming rivers. But a rainless storm is like a loveless life; it brings and gains no blessing.

The children in the hollowed rock stood and listened to the sounds in the earth above. If it would only have rained, how welcome it would have been to hear the sweet cool fall of the big rain drops! But it seldom rains in August even in moist Maremma, and besides 'there is a red moon,' said Zirlo, in the common superstition of all husbandry.

To the red moon the vine-dresser and the tiller of the fields ascribe one-half their ills. When the red pestilent dew is over leaf and soil no peasant will ever believe that it is not the moon that causes it.

It grew darker and darker, the roll of the thunder was continuous, the blaze of the lightning lit up now and again all the shadows of the Etruscan sepulchres.

'I am afraid!' cried Zirlo, and hid his face, as the electric glare shone on the banquet painted on the walls.

'There is nothing that will hurt you,' said Musa more gently, remembering the great awe that had fallen even upon her in this place.

'But who are those?' said Zirlo, trembling, pointing to the figures of the frescoes.

'They are pictures of the dead; the dead of long ago,' said Musa with a wistful sadness and reverence in her voice. 'They used to reign here—here—and they must have been happy, I think; and they had flowers; see, there are the water-lilies like our lilies now, and the dog like my own white dog, and the pipe like that pipe you have cut from a reed. And yet it is all long, long ago, Joconda says; so long that the earth has had time to pile rocks and grow trees above their graves, and men have quite forgotten who they were.'

Zirlo was silent; this was a thing he could in no way grasp, and of time he had no notion. If he had been asked how long he had lived, he would have said that he could not remember; he had been always on the moor, always with the goats; he knew what to do for them, and that was all he did know. His fathers before him had been shepherds, and he had been born in a hut made of reeds and bramble amidst the goats, and he had sucked them as the kids did, and grown up from a baby to a child amidst them, and then had had a goatskin garment girded about his loins, and a staff put in his small hand, and had been told to take the kids to pasture. That was all so long, long ago to him; he did not think these dead people that she spoke of could be so far away as that.

Nothing is so impossible for the uneducated mind to grasp as the idea of time. Musa only understood it with her imagination; her fancy enabled her to conjecture what her knowledge left a blank. But Zirlo had not this fatal gift; his mind had never got beyond the marsh and moor, the flock and fold. The bare bold scarp that was called San Lionardo was the outmost boundary of his world. As he thought that the ivy and the honeysuckle only grew for his goats, so he thought that the sun and the rain were only made for them.

It is this narrowness of the peasant mind which philosophers never fairly understand, and demagogues understand but too well, and warp to their own selfish purpose and profits.

When the hurricane had lulled and they could leave their refuge, Musa bade him good day, and took her own way to the Sasso Scritto, three miles off; the storm had quite passed, but it had only left the earth more arid and more desolate. Broken branches strewed the ground, and the earth had yawned open in many places as if by an earthquake; the lizards swarmed, making the dry grass crack and rustle as they kissed or fought; here and there out of a hole a snake thrust his black or leaden-coloured head. The intense heat lay like a fog on all the country; a heat breathless, scorching, cruel, in which all hues were blanched and all animal movement seemed suspended.

It was near the close of day; the sun almost touched the horizon; it was dully red, and rayless.

When she reachied the edge of the waves the red globe seemed to rest upon the water; a cone of luminous white light replaced it in the heavens; and on each side of it there glowed another crimson sun.

It was but the optical effect well known to astronomers, due to the refraction and reflection of light. But it terrified philosophers and astrologists and conquerors in days of old, and startled her now.

The long curved shores, the sea still as 'a painted ocean,' the grey skies with their pallid mists, the black heaps of putrefying weed upon the beach, the fierce sickly heat that had a pressure on the brain like the heavy hand of an invisible god—these were all too familiar to her to seem strange, but the white iridescent intense light of this atmospheric phænomenon she had never seen, for in these latitudes it is rare.

She stood still and looked at it as Antoninus, and Pliny, and Constantine had looked before her in the same wonder; herself, black as a figure on a camera against the yellow haze of sea and sky.

As she gazed in some vague awe, beholding the sun thus multiplied, she saw the head of a man in the sea. He seemed not to swim, but to be at the pleasure of the water swell which floated him where it would. He never moved, or struggled, or seemed to exert himself at all. Musa looking intensely, used to all the ways of the water and those who trusted themselves to it, saw that the swimmer could not make any way, that he was cramped and paralysed. A mere blacklooking log, he lay on the glassy surface with the vertical transparent gleam of the luminous column behind him. Then, as she looked, slowly, quite slowly, he sank.

He was drowning, peacefully, unresistingly, as the sun seemed itself to sink into the sea, tranquilly and of its own will.

Musa wasted not one moment, nor thought again of the apparition on the heavens, but waded in, and struck out towards him.

The water was still warm from the heat of the day; it felt oily and unwholesome; the storm had left a heavy turbulent movement in it that was like a tide and was hard to breast. But she had lived in the sea for hours most days of her life, and was a strong swimmer, capable of long exertion. The body rose up, and once again sank, as she neared it; she knew it would rise yet again; if only she could be certain where it would rise it would be possible she thought to herself to save him yet. She made her way steadily and swiftly, cleaving the Mediterranean with her brown supple arms and keeping her head and throat well above water. It would have been better if she had had the boat, she knew; but it was ten yards off her, moored under the Sasso Scritto, and it would have wasted many minutes to unloose and launch it.

She rested on the waves a moment and watched for the man, who might be drowned and dead by now, to appear again; it was very dark upon the sea; the brief light of the parhelion had faded; the sun and its phantoms had alike gone from sight; there was only a dull red spent colour far away in the west, and the moon had not yet risen.

At last something came in sight; it would have been hard to tell what it might be in the dusk, and with the sea churned to white foam from the storm as it was.

But she swam to and seized it; she felt the round shape of a human head in her hand, and, being close to it, she saw the dusky bulk of a human body. The skull was close shaven, and there was nothing on the body to hold by except a trouser-belt about the loins, which she could dimly see as the foam broke over it and the motion of the water rocked it. She grasped the belt with one hand, and, swimming with the other, turned now flat upon her breast instead of on her back, she towed the body behind her towards the land, as she might have towed a piece of driftwood.

She thought he was dead, but having thus reached him she could not abandon him; and there might be breath in him still. She had seen drowned men restored to life.

Happily for her and him, she was but a little way from shore, or she could not have continued to push and drag the inert mass that lay so heavily upon the water. The sea upon that portion of the beach was shallow; she soon stood upon her feet and waded up to her middle, always dragging the senseless swimmer with her till she gained the pebbles and the sand, and let him drop on them.

It was now very dark.

She bent over him and breathed into his nostrils, and tried to make him vomit the water from his lungs, and did what she had seen the fishermen of Santa Tarsilla do for any one of their number overcome with such exhaustion. The fishermen's were rude ways, not founded on any scientific reasons, but often tried in actual experience; they sometimes succeeded and they succeeded now; the heart of the man began to beat feebly, the sea water poured from his mouth, a shiver ran through all his frame; he awoke to life. He was a large, sinewy, supple-limbed man; he wore canvas drawers and a belt of leather; he was burnt almost black by the sun from the forehead to the waist. He was about fifty years old, or more. He raised himself into a sitting posture on the sands, and stared into the dusk with wild, fierce, suspicious eyes, not knowing where he was, not seeing the girl in the deep shadows, not understanding what had come to him.

'Do not give me up,' he muttered; and his hands felt at his ankles and his wrists, as if seeking something familiar that was not there. He lifted his head and glared around, trying to pierce the gloom. He was confused and stupefied, but his eyes had ferocity and fear like those of a captured wild beast.

'If I had only a knife!' he muttered. 'If I had only a knife!

Musa listened and was sorry for him. He was afraid, this strong, rough, savage creature; afraid of something—perhaps of capture. She did not think that he might be dangerous to her. She touched him on the shoulder.

'Why do you want a knife? And what is it you dread?"

He looked at her and realised in a dim way that it was only a girl, a child, whose figure loomed dark between him and the grey sea sand.

'How came I here?' he asked her, confused still. There was scarce any light; but the little there was, reflected from the skies, showed her a face so sullen in its despair, so brutal in its ferocity that, bold child though she was, she trembled as she saw.

'You were drowning, she said simply. 'I saved you. That was all.'

'You saved me!'

He looked at her and laughed with a hard, grinding, joyless laugh that grated on her ears.

'You?' he echoed, 'you are a baby. It is a lie. There are men hidden———

'There is no one. I am strong. I swam and saved you. I was foolish to do it.'

He was still sitting on the sand, his soaked canvas clinging to him, his breast and back bare and looking like the torso of a bronze Hercules; his head was shaved close, his shoulder had a brand.

Musa felt the bright brave blood in her veins run cold. She had heard of galleyslaves; she knew now that she was facing one, alone on the lonely shore.

'I understand,' she said very low. ' You have escaped———?'

He moved his head in assent.

'You will not betray me?' he said quickly. 'If you do, though I have no knife, I will kill you. You are young. One could crush you to death.'

'You could,' said the child, and stood looking down on him, wondering why she had seen him this hot, silent night—why she had saved him.

Another of her age would have fled in terror; Musa did not leave him. His very ferocity and wretchedness rooted her there and kept her wondering, and forgetful, or indifferent, of personal pity.

'How did you escape? By swimming?' she asked breathlessly; the longing for the bold, strange tale that he must have to tell overcame every other feeling in her.

'Are you alone?' he said, disregarding. 'If you lie I will tear you with my teeth, and kill you, so.'

'Why should I lie?'

'To hunt me down.'

'I would not help them to hunt you; not more than I would to hunt the boar.'

He stared at her with brooding, bloodshot eyes that glowed in the gloom like a jackal's.

'Was I drowning, do you say?'

'Yes, you were drowning: who are you?'

He ground his teeth that flashed white like an angry dog's.

'Who? Who? I am nothing. I have no name; I am numbered like a beast of burden. I am dead and buried. But if I had a knife!—if I had a knife!———'

'What would you do?'

'I should be a man once more. To have a knife and a gun, that is to be a man.'

His head sank on his chest; he was stupid, and his mind began to wander a little; he had been in the water for hours; he was numb and felt strange. He stared at her with reddened eyes that were black and sombre save for the flame that could light up in them.

'You are a strange wench. Perhaps you mean well. If you did save me———'

'I did save you.'

'You are strong and bold then. Yes, I swam. I have lain hid on the rocks at night and crept along the coast by day; we had sighted a boat; we sculled along in her, but in the storm just now she heeled over; we swam for our lives; he who was with me is drowned I think. Just now I grew blind and numb, and I could not make way any more. I suppose it was being so long in the sea. I am thirsty. Give me to drink.'

She had had the half emptied gourd slung at her side, and had set it down on the beach when she plunged into the water. She held it to him, and he drank it dry.

'Were it but wine!' he said, with an oath. 'Give me a knife now.'

'I have no knife.'

'You can get one.'

'Not here. This is all wild coast.'

He sat up and stared still sullenly into the gloom; he was bewildered, but he remained suspicious and ferocious like the tiger chased by night and dazzled by torches and fire.

'I was Saturnino,' he said, low in his teeth.

She understood. She had heard of Saturnino.

'If I had only a knife!' he repeated; 'only a knife or a gun!'———

His bronze-like shoulders glistened with the salt of the sea; he sat erect on the beach regaining strength and consciousness with each breath; the heat of the night was around them like steam: it seemed to her startled fancy as if his eyes and his mouth gave out fire. She was rooted to the ground as by some spell; a fascination that she was powerless to resist held her there, by this man, though she knew he could turn and rend her as the wild boar tore the young dogs.

'Tell me how you got away,' she said very low at last, spurred on to rashness by an unquenchable longing to hear and know. 'Tell me, tell me; I will tell no one else; never, never, will I tell.'

The hunted creature that had once been the superb chieftain of the hills did not heed. He was looking northward down the long, low, level shore that shone ashen and white in the strong moonlight.

'Is there no place to hide in?' he muttered; 'is there not a rock, not a stone? Is it all bare—bare and accursed. They will come hunting at daybreak.'

'Do they know you are away?'

'Know? Every day I baulk them and beat them. I lie hid, and I hear their feet on the stones above me. I see the shine of their steel through the gaps. Where can I hide? You are of the coast?'

'Yes.'

'Where can I hide? Hide me. If you betray me I will kill you—somehow.'

Musa did not answer. She was thinking.

'I know of one place,' she said slowly.

'On the shore?'

'No. Inland; a little way.'

He rose with difficulty; a tall, gaunt, terrible form, black and weird against the shining sea and the starry skies.

'Lead me there. Remember, I need no knife to kill you. You are young, and to me are little.'

'I am not afraid that you should kill me.'

She spoke the truth; she was not afraid. An immense pity, and what was that stronger sister of pity—sympathy—was in her for the hunted, houseless man, and the strength of that emotion absorbed into itself all weaker, slighter feelings, and made selfish dread impossible.

She was awed, but she was not afraid. She wished to help him as she had wished to help the driven boar at bay.

Her lustrous, unfathomable, star-like eyes looked up into his wild and sombre ones; they did not know one another, but each trusted the other after that one long look.

'Come,' she said simply, and struck inland.

The light was clear almost as the day; the pale, sad shores looked wan; the brown and shadowy moors had a mysterious, unearthly calm; the heat brooded on sea and earth like a cloud of pestilence slowly gathering its forces to destroy. From far off down the shore in the intense stillness there came a sound. It was the sound of the horses' feet of the carabineers: they were seeking the galley-slave.

He listened with pricked ears, and crouched, like the hunted fox; then he followed the child, their two shadows falling one on another in sable blackness on the pallor of the sand. Musa led him to the tomb of the Lucumo.

1. Zirlo means the whistling of the thrush.

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