In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 9

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

E followed her mutely, and asked her nothing. He did not doubt her. He did not question her. The sound of the horses' hoofs in pursuit had gone from off the stillness of the night. His quick and apprehensive glance told him of the excellence against discovery of the tangled scrub and thorny brake through which she led him. When they descended into the tomb he asked nothing still; to others it might be a tomb—to him it was only a hollow in the ground as is his earth to the fox.

'It is good,' he said, as he looked around him in the chamber of stone.

She drew the lamp forth and lighted it. His glance glistened; he saw gold.

'What place is this?' he muttered, the sight of the gold stinging his senses to life.

'It is a grave,' said Musa, in a hushed and tender voice. 'And these are sacred things. Sacred to the dead, and to the gods.'

He laughed; his laugh was hard and low, and hurt her.

'The place is good,' he said once more. 'Is there food in it?'

'There is no food. But I will bring you some at morning; some bread at least.'

'And a knife. Bring me a knife.'

She hesitated.

'I will bring you bread and wine.'

'Bring me a knife.'

'But you will kill some one?'

'What of that? I will not kill you if you keep faith.'

'I did not mean that. I am not afraid.'

'Bring me a knife, if you are not afraid.'

'I am not.'

'Who knows of this place?'

'Not any one; only I know, and a little goatherd.'

'That is well. Go get me the bread; I am sick with hunger.'

'I cannot; it is miles off that I live, but at daybreak I will be here.'

A gleam of sullen, suspicious wonder flared like a dull flame in his eyes.

'Why should you do this? You cannot care.'

'You are hunted,' she answered simply.

That was the truth; he was hunted, and so she aided him.

'You can sleep there,' she said to him, and pointed to the couch of stone on which the golden warrior had rested. 'I am sorry that I have no food. I will try and be quick. But I am tired, and it is far.'

His eyes gazed at her sullenly, wonderingly, yet with a gleam of gratitude, like the gleam in the eyes of a fierce dog which, after being lashed and chained through years, is loosened by a tender hand, and wonders, distrusts, and yet is thankful.

'If you do come back you will be brave as men are rarely,' he said, with a gloom deep as night upon his darkening face.

'I will come,' she said simply; then she looked up once in his face, put the lamp down on the stone, and went.

'Perhaps I should have killed her,' thought Saturnino. 'It would have been safer, and it would have been easy—that small throat.'

His fingers closed instinctively as though they were closing upon the slender neck.

But Musa was away, running fleet through the pallid moonlight.

When she reached the edge of the sea there was no sound; her boat was rocking on the surf; the moon had climbed into the zenith; far away upon the white expanse of the sands she saw four dark specks no bigger than four stalks of grass; they were the carabineers riding on southward towards Santa Tarsilla.

'They are fools!' said the child with scorn. Had she been in pursuit of any creature, she would have noticed the signs on the sands disturbed where she had dragged the swimmer ashore; she would not have ridden by unheeding as they did, and passed on, as they were doing, to Santa Tarsilla unsuspecting.

'They are fools!' she said to herself with that pleasure in the defeat of authority and that contempt for its narrow means and narrow sight which had been born in her with her blood. Then she loosened her boat and rowed backward to the little town.

The carabineers were always in sight— little dark specks in the white space of the sandy shore.

She was very tired. Strong and young though she was, she was exhausted by the efforts she had made and by the long hours in which all her muscles had been strained to unusual effort. The heat was still intense, for 12 midsummer in this country the heat in darkness is often more oppressive than in the hours when the sun is shining. At midnight and for a little after midnight, it will at times be chill, but before midnight it is sultry still. The heat, the sullen, heavy air, the singular drowsiness which comes with the moon's rays after these burning days, united with the fatigue that she had borne, made her eyes grow weary and slumber steal upon her ere she was aware. The oars lay motionless in the rowlocks, her head dropped, her arms relaxed their tension, and she fell asleep.

The sea was calm as glass; her boat floated on it with hardly any movement; the great white flood of moonlight fell upon it and her; together they made but a small, dark, motionless thing in the midst of that silvery field of light. How long she slept she never knew; when she awoke with a start the cool of the midnight had come that comes with the descent of the dews.

Used to the look of the sky, she knew that it was midnight by the stars. She awoke refreshed, but conscience-stricken. Every moment she delayed was a pang of hunger and of fear more to the hunted man. She owed him no service, but she pitied him; she had promised him; these were bonds that knit her to him strongly, and that it never occurred to her to break.

But how to get him food and wine and the weapon that he had prayed for?—the weapon that she could understand would be sweeter to him than any drink to his thirst, any bread to his famine? She did not know how to find them. The houses of Santa Tarsilla would be all shut and the people all slumbering by the time she reached there, and money she had none, even had there been any place upon the coast nearer than the fishing-town that was her home. There was nothing for it but to ask Joconda.

She bent her back to the oars once more and rowed on steadily; the carabineers had passed out of sight long before: whilst she had been asleep they had ridden down into Santa Tarsilla and had revived long dormant memories with the old forgotten cry of Saturnino.

She rowed on, and in somewhat less than two hours she saw the low, grey line of the stone piers of the little harbour, and the masts of the few old useless boats that were left at home, and the round white towers of the soldiery and coastguard. All was quite quiet.

She steered herself carefully within the shallow water, and fastened the boat to the ring. Where the moonlight is so brilliant the shadows are proportionately black. She could keep out of sight in these shadows, and did so, for she heard voices and a sort of stir in the narrow lanes that parted the houses one from another. Some people were awake loitering languidly on the stones, or hanging from the open windows. The passage of the mounted carabineers through the town had roused them, but only roused them slightly. To men and women shaking with ague, feeble with fever, ill always through brain and bone with the deadly air, it mattered very little whether the law had its nights or not.

For the most part they would have hindered the law rather than have helped it, but even to hinder it they would have had but scant energy.

She went by under the shade cast by the projecting roofs unseen by any of them. She gathered from their talk that the carabineers had searched through the place, then ridden on; men were saying to one another that they remembered Saturnino Mastarna, remembered the day the guards had brought him down from the hills with his feet tied under his horse's belly for the market crowd to gaze at in dull Grosseto.

'He was a brave man,' they said with a reverence in their voices that they never gave to the guardians of the law.

'He was brave, thought Musa as she heard. 'Then it must be right to save him.'

She went to her own home.

All was locked and barred; but she pushed herself through the stable windows by withdrawing the wooden shutter on the outside.

Leone did not give tongue; he came to her in silence, only moving his tail with welcome. Joconda lay in a sound slumber, so sound that she might have been murdered in her sleep without awaking. A gleam from the moon came in and fell on her hard, toilworn, withered face, and her knotted hands and her rough white hair, and the sheaf of bleached palm blessed at Easter that hung above her bed to keep away evil spirits and to please the saints.

Musa looked at her with a great tenderness gleaming in her own eyes.

'I am going to rob her', she thought wistfully. 'But I will tell her in the morning, and if she be angry then I will sell my gold Madonnina and pay her. That will be just.'

Without arousing the sleeper she took a brown loaf, a flask of wine, and a knife.

Then she soothed Leone with a caress, and went as she had come, softly and unseen, drawing the stable shutter behind her carefully when she had gone forth again into the air. She was now very tired. But her spirit was strong and her will resolute. She never thought of not returning to the tomb. Not to keep faith with that friendless creature would have seemed to her most vile. She could not have told why, but when he had every man's hand against him it would have seemed to her vile and mean to desert him or betray him. 'To spare herself did not occur to her. She would go on, she said to herself; go on till she dropped down, perhaps, as the women did sometimes from sunstroke when they were raking in the salt.

It was now day dawn; the pale gleam of morning was beginning to show over the dusk of the marshes and mountains far away inland. Another long, dreary, scorching, cloudless day was about to be born on Maremma.

She stepped once more into the boat, and once more retraced her path across the waters.

The gossipers had all gone within to sleep a little; a few early-risen toilers, too aged or ill to be away with the coral fleet, were getting out tackle and nets to go and try for fish close in to shore, or going with their sickles to cut the maritime rush that grew in long lines here and there between the beach and marsh.

No one noticed her, because they were so used to see her out at daybreak by, or on, the sea.

She got away safely, and rowed on along the coast. She was so fatigued that she could barely grasp the oars and move them, and she made slow headway against the inert water. There were fish rising all around her; before going deep down in the heat of the noon they passed the early morning on the surface, catching insects and infusoria. The sun was not yet up, and it was cool; yet all the landscape was pale, grey, and weary-looking as if the night had brought little repose and little freshness.

It was a toilsome journey; it seemed to her to be endless. Midway in it the sun rose, and the touch of its rays on her bare arms felt like fire. In the great heats even sunrise loses its charm, and seems but a trouble the more to the tired eyes that wake from startled sleep and wasting sweats.

With pain and effort she dragged herself ashore at last, three hours after she had left the pier of Santa Tarsilla, and began her toilsome walk through the close-growing timber and thorny thickets up to the tomb. Her head swam, her sight began to fail, her limbs felt heavy as lead; but the thought of the faith that she kept, of the succour she went to give, sustained her.

'He will not doubt now,' she thought. 'He will be glad.'

She had brought away with her, as well as the knife, three silver coins that had been given her once by a traveller whom she had guided across the marshes; they were all she had; she meant to give them to Saturnino.

She pushed her way through the cistus, and bearberry, and rosemary; now and then a partridge flew up before her feet, but there were no birds singing; the season of song was passed. There were hundreds of lizards rushing to and fro, and the big wood rat, the fox, and the snipe, and the plover, were still astir, going home after their night's foray; that was all.

She pushed the bushes aside and ran down the steps, and entered the cave without fear, thinking only of the help that she brought. 'The tomb was empty.

In answer to her shouts there was only a dull echo thrown back from the roof of sandstone.

Suspicion and distrust, the seeds sown by captivity, and sure to bring forth fruit in sullen sins of hatred and of fear, had been too strong for the nature of the galley-slave to resist their influence and their instinct. How could he tell that she would not sell her secret for a price, and only return to bring his capturers with her? How could he tell?

Alone there in the bowels of the earth, cowardice and mistrust had mastered him. He had left his shelter and fled.

Looking round, she saw that the golden lamp, and the golden diadem, and all the toys of gold, were gone.

Saturnino, so long the robber of the living, had now robbed the dead.

 

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