In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 16

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XVI.

 

EANWHILE that morning, Zirlo, lying on the wild thyme and grass, was accosted by two strangers who were wandering over the moors on a vain quest for an Etruscan city, which was marked on old maps as lying to the south of San Lionardo.

These persons looked down on to the little faun-like figure of the shaggy child and his upraised pretty face, and said to him: 'My little man, can you tell us of any buried tombs, or any great old walls, known hereabouts?'

Zirlo rose up on his rosy feet and put his hand up against his eyes as if he were dazzled by the sun, and he answered at once and sturdily: 'No; I never heard of any such thing.'

'Try and think again. Look at this. It strengthens memory marvellously. If you can lead us to any such old places under the ground, this shall be yours.'

This was a broad silver coin—a whole scudo in solid silver!

Zirlo felt as if he were giddy.

'There is no such place,' he stammered; but his accent was unsteady and his eyes fastened on the silver bit glancing in the sun-rays.

'There is such,' said the stranger with insistence, 'and I think you know it very well, and if you will bring us to it this scudo shall be yours. Come, my little lad, you will earn it cheaply.'

Zirlo grew red, grew pale, shuffled his feet on the turf, trembled, longed, feared, denied; then longed again.

'You will not hurt her if I show you?' he said wistfully.

The strangers laughed.

'What should we hurt? We are only travellers, artists, archæologists. We will do no harm, little man; we will only give you that money and as much again if you lead us aright.'

Zirlo was silent in an agony of hesitation.

'It is a cave you want?' he stammered, 'with coffins, and painted walls, and pipkins strewn about?'

'Yes, yes,' they said eagerly; 'you know where to lead us. Come, go on, and we will follow you. Your goats can come to no danger here in this solitude. Why are you doubting about such a simple thing?'

Zefferino grew very white, his hands clenched nervously together, his teeth chattered as with cold; he was afraid of his own perfidy and of her vengeance. But the silver scudo!—it tempted him as the 'Dio del Oro' tempts alike in desolate country places as in crowded cities. What would it not buy! The boy, whose stomach was never full, and whose appetite was always keen, shook with the intensity of his longing.

'And the place is as much mine as it is hers;' he thought, with a sophism that came to him by nature.

Yet she had trusted him, and she had threatened him. Between his desire and his dread the little fellow was like one torn in twain by wild horses.

'I dare not!' he said at last, with a piteous sobbing and shivering.

'You are afraid of the place?' said his tempters, who were all the more eager to see it. 'Well, money can buy courage as well as it can buy bread, or a pretence of it at any rate. Come, little man, and if you show us a true Etruscan tomb you shall have two scudi. There!'

Zirlo's hands fell to his side.

He gave a little gasp, as though yielding up in sheer desperation his soul to the evil spirit.

'I will take you,' he muttered between his little pearly teeth, and then he grew very cold, as cold as though it were midwinter; and he looked scared over his shoulder, fearful of seeing the friend he was about to betray.

'That is well,' said his unconscious corrupters, and they sent the little figure on before them across the brown solitudes of the autumnal moor.

Zefferino walked as if he were dizzy and faint, and for a moment the blue belt of the sky spun round him in circles.

He heard the strangers talking one to another in a strange tongue, and he heard all those words as though they were spoken in a dream, and his heart kept beating against his sides, and he kept saying to himself, 'If she should have come back?'

Still he walked on steadily for a space of two miles and more, always across the great green and purple moorland, and skirting the flowering marshes where the waters ran, and so coming out on to that wild growth of marucca and arbutus and myrtle scrub which hid from the light of the sun the graves of the Etruscans, and of old Joconda.

There he stopped and cleared away the branches and grasses which she was so careful to pull together over the entrance, and he laid bare to the view of the two strangers the first steps of the stone staircase.

'It is down there. Now give me!' he said, stretching out his little feverish hand, which had all its fingers clutching and moving greedily like a miserly old man's.

The stranger who had always addressed him put two scudi in his palm with a sense of astonishment and distaste.

'Who would think that the money-lust lived even here in a baby goatherd!' he said, as Zirlo took to his heels and, with his little fist closed on the silver, tore headlong backward through the bryonies to the place where his flock were grazing.

'The dead whom we seek had that passion, and it is the only human passion that is immortal,' said his companion. 'You were too quick to pay the greedy little imp; who knows whether he has cheated us or not? This may be but a fox's earth.'

'Foxes have no stairs, and we can soon see for ourselves,' said the other, and he descended into the aperture and felt his way down the steps, and at the foot of them stood still in surprise at the tomb that was Musa's home.

It was a grand tomb, he saw, Etruscan beyond doubt, and more perfect than most of these graves are when once the light of day and the eyes of curious mortality have fallen on them and found them out beneath their veil of myrtle and of bay leaves.

The stone biers, the stone chairs, the black pottery, the niche for the dog, the various paintings, all were Etruscan beyond question; but on the earthen floor there were the sticks and ashes of a spent fire; in the platter and one of the cups there were milk and bread and wild fruits, in a corner were a spinning wheel and a mandoline.

'Some one must live here,' they said one to another, and understood why the child had been so afraid to bring them to it.

'This is a coffin of to-day!' cried one of them, who had penetrated into the third chamber, where old Joconda lay.

'Some one lives here, sleeps and eats here, and here buries his dead,' said his companion. 'A woman it must be, for here are female clothes and the distaff.'

'It is strange,' replied the other. 'But it is a grand tomb, and finely preserved. Let us make sketches while we can.'

And they sat down and spread out the colours they carried with them, for they were both artists, and one was a scholar. The latter sketched the proportions of the chambers of death, and copied the strange figures of the dancing women, of the winged boys, of the lotus flowers. The other made a drawing of the spinning wheel and the mandoline and the blackberry boughs that were thrown, full of berries, across an Etruscan dish, while a bronze lamp stood on the floor beside a bowl full of yellow marsh lilies.

The one would serve for some grand cartoon of an Etruscan marriage feast or burial banquet. The other would serve for some minute genre picture.

When Musa returned from her headlong flight across the country, she saw at the first glance that her careful screen of brushwood had been disturbed. Supposing that Zirlo had so stirred it by his usual boisterous entrance, she descended the steps, thinking there to find her playmate. But Leone growled and looked at her for some word of command, and she saw instead of the child the two strangers, who were intent on examining the paintings of the walls. She had no conception of what the men were like; it was enough for her that they were human creatures, violators of her sanctuary and of the dead.

She advanced to them with all her face dark as the summer skies in tempest, and her eyes flashing like lightning.

'How dare you. How dare you,' she cried with intense passion. 'All this is mine and theirs. You-profane it, you blaspheme. Out of it! Out of it; or I will send the dog upon you!'

The two men stared at her, confused, and dimly almost doubting whether she were mortal, so sudden was her descent into the twilight of the cave, so burning and furious were her eyes and words.

'Pardon us,' said one, with hesitation. 'Is this Etruscan tomb your care in any way? We did not know. We sought for a sepulchre that is marked on ancient maps. A little boy, a little goatherd, brought us here. If we offend———'

She turned very pale.

'A goatherd! Zirlo?'

'How should I know his name?' said the stranger. 'A little long-haired, barelegged fellow. I am grieved if you are distressed, but how were we to know?'

'Zirlo! Zirlo!' she said again, with a bitter wondering sadness in the words that touched her listeners, though they could not understand its cause, and thought she was but jealous of the custody of the tombs and of the silver scudi.

'If,' began one of them, holding out a French gold piece; but his very breath was caught and stopped by the girl's imperious gesture.

'Get you gone or I shall hurt you!' she said, as she motioned to the stairs. 'This is my house, my home, my temple, my grave, my all! The boy betrayed me. He is vile. Get you gone!'

'She is mad,' they murmured one to another, awed by her anger, which they could not comprehend, and dazzled by her beauty.

'Get you gone, or the dog shall tear you!' she said, with a passion that was the more intense because restrained. 'The place is mine. I am here with my dead. Get you gone!'

'Let us go,' said the men to each other, and they did go, slowly, and looking back at her, and doubting still whether she were mortal, and, if mortal, mad.

'Mad, surely!' they said one to the other, and one of them added:

'It is best to humour her. But we will go back again. She is beautiful. It must be she who owns the spinning wheel and the guitar.'

Left to herself she sat quite still, and hot tears gushed into her eyes.

'Zirlo, Zirlo!' she repeated. 'And I loved him!'

There is no knife that cuts so sharply, and with such poisoned blade, as treachery.

Time went over her head uncounted. She sat there, lost in the intense pain that consumed her at this her first taste of the bitter-sweet apple of human confidence and friendship.

She had trusted him and he had betrayed her.

It seemed to her that fire ought to descend from the skies and smite him, and burn up his little, weak, false, worthless life. She did not know that if this vengeance overtook human falsehood the skies would be for ever as a scroll in flames.

She sat there a long time motionless. Then she was seized with a deadly fear. Had they come for Joconda's body?

She went into the third chamber, and there she found the wooden coffin untouched, the flowers she had laid there undisturbed, and the lamp burning steadily.

She left it, and ascended the stairs, and looked over the moors.

The day was dying down, and the grand red glory of the west blinded her for a moment as she looked on it from the gloom of the tombs. There are no sunsets more gorgeous than those on the sea of the Maremma, and their pomp of gold and purple is a mockery of kings.

This day the gold was burning behind a transparent cloud of dusky blue, and the scarlet, soft, yet intense as the colour of pomegranate flowers, glowed above it, and melted into the azure of the still shining skies. The moorlands were dark and hushed; the sea was the hue of the zenith.

She looked, and her eyes filled.

Then, far off, very far off, she saw a little dark figure, black against the ruby and the gold. All her rage sprang back into her heart, and she ground her teeth like a wolf. She wound her short and narrow skirt about her limbs, and with bare feet and bare shoulders leaped across the grass and ran like a greyhound.

He was half a mile off. In his babyish cunning he thought that if he were near at hand with his goats, she would think him innocent. Seeing her, across the moorland, coming towards him, swift and silent as the wind, his cunning deserted him, and his fear alone mastered him. He fled.

She gained on him nearer and nearer. No fawn of those wild meadows was swifter on her feet than she; she ran as the Greek girls ran of old in the arena, in the springtime of their lives and of the year.

The dark elastic turf, the lightsome woodmoss, rebounded from her touch; she sprang through the sunset glow of the air as the doe springs.

The boy, leaden-footed with terror, and not fully braced as she was to the movement of his limbs, tumbled forward rather than ran, and in his blind and palsied terror gained no ground, but stumbled round and round in a circle.

With every moment she drew nearer to him. He thought he felt her hands amidst his hair, her breath against his cheek, her steel upon his throat. He put the silver coins that were the price of his treachery between his teeth, and his teeth chattered so that he scarce could keep their hold upon the treasure for which he had lost his own soul and her trust and love. He ran on and on, falling forward in his terror, and plunging into watery grasses, slimy, and sinking under him. The glow faded, the sun had sunk to light the nether world. It was night; still he ran on and on, and she ran in his wake. At last, as the moon rose above the distant hills, she reached him, and he fell prone under her grasp.

She stood over him, and to his terrified eyes she seemed to grow in stature and dilate until she touched the stars.

'You betrayed my shelter!' she said again, and her hands fell on his shoulders and she swayed him to and fro till the glittering vault of the night seemed to rock about him.

'Oh, miserable!' she cried to him; and the deep intense scorn of her voice seemed to roll like the notes of an organ over the solitary land. 'You betrayed me for silver pieces as Judas betrayed his Lord! Do you know that I could kill you, you mean and wretched thing; you so small and so light, and I as strong as the buffalo? Do you know that I can dash out your brains on these stones, and hurl you dead into the sea, and wherefore should I not, you vile and faithless worm, viler than the adder and the newt?'

As she spoke she swung him backwards and forwards, and he was dumb and blind with horror; his eyes gazed up into the sky, but saw nothing.

He believed she would take his life.

'I trusted you, I trusted you!' she said to him; and it seemed to him as if her grasp were closing at his throat, and pressing the breath and the air and the life out of it.

An unutterable terror kept him mute and motionless; the whiteness of the moonlight shone on his ghastly little face, and its abject fear stung her to disgust, that made her rage seem too high an honour to so cowardly a thing.

She threw him off her some distance, so that he fell heavily on the turf.

'You are a traitor!' she said; and her voice rang loud through the night. 'I will not hurt you. You are too vile. But come never in my sight. Breathe never the air I breathe. If you were dying, never would I lift a finger of mine to save you. I trusted you, you base, false, foolish, trembling thing, and you lost my trust for a silver coin! Oh you fool, oh you fool!'

Then little Zirlo, lying where she had flung him, saw her for a moment, seeming to him to touch the stars, and gather all their brilliancy about her hair and shoulders and luminous fire-flashing eyes, and the night appeared to snatch her up into itself, and a great darkness fell between them, and he was all alone.

Musa, convulsed with passion that was still but half spent, went slowly away from the spot through the luminous air, and retraced her steps until once more she sat in the shadow of those solemn chambers which now were hers no more, but opened to the world of men.

A shudder of rage shook her from head to foot; then she bowed her head down upon her knees, and wept bitterly.

She had been betrayed.

Kinder than treachery is the knife that severs the cord of life.

It was her home, this temple of the dead, this sanctuary of the lonely moors that sheltered her and Joconda.

It was her home, and stood in the stead to her of all those ties and defences which surround the lives of other female creatures. Here she had been safe; her only visitants the timid hare, the friendly goat, the winter-burrowing lizard, and the night-birds that love gloom and silence.

Now all that sweet calm sense of security was gone for ever. Strangers any day might come and disturb her and the dead in their tacit amity, and drive her, as they would drive the scops from his hole in a tree, or a fox from the refuge of the tombs. She knew nowhere else to go in all the world; she had no other home, no other friends.

The child knew that, and yet he had sold her for silver!

As she sat in the darkness of these chambers, where the moon-rays could not come, she wondered that she had not killed him.

What had held her hand?

Not fear, of a surety, nor pity; some awful sense of unutterable strength and scorn, set high above herself and him as the stars were, which had come upon her as she had gazed up into the brilliancy of the shining summer heavens.

 

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