In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 24

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXIV.

 

NE day a thought struck her that if she could sell her collection of herbs she could get money, and so get food for him. Joconda never would sell herbs; she gave all away. She had said that God's afflicted were not there for her to make pence out of, and thus to Musa it had always seemed impossible to turn her simples into coin, But now she thought it would be honest dealing; no shame in it, and no robbery. She was glad she had gathered and dried so many plants in the hot autumn weather. She had a large stock of herbs of all kinds, sweet and bitter; some medicinal, some for kitchen uses. Joconda had taught her all their various properties, and in the autumn of the previous year she had gathered a great store, and dried them and kept them carefully. They were the only things she had to sell; they, and some score of baskets and mats that she had not given to Zefferino.

It was a grand day outside; such days as, here, deck October and November with a glory of colour and of luminance that make all other months of the year seem pale. It was such weather as made her always seck the open air from dawn to dark, beside the sea, or in the brakes and thickets where the wild boar hid.

She determined that she would go to Telamone and try and sell all she had, and bring him back some wine and _ better food. She was alarmed to see that he remained so weak. It seemed to her so unnatural that a man should lie all the day long listless and dumb with despair, and no more able to move than the pine-tree that the foresters slashed down with their hatchets.

She was alarmed, too, because food there was none, save a little of the oaten bread which she could eat but he could not. Unless she could buy flour she could get nothing better. Of fish he was weary, and to go out and fish took her as long as it would take to go to the little sea-town.

She went, and told him for whom she slaved that she must be absent some hours. She was going to Telamone.

He was lying on one of the stone couches, in that prostration and silence which had been habitual with him since he had crept off his bed of fever.

He lifted his languid lids, and looked at her with suspicion.

'Why should you go?' he said angrily.

'There is nothing to eat in the place,' she answered him gently. 'You want food and you want wine, and I am going to get them both. I will be quick.'

'How long will you be?'

'I must be several hours. We are on the moors here; the nearest place is far.'

'They may take me while you are gone.'

'There is no fear of that. I will cover the entrance so that a polecat would not find its way down.'

'That may not prevent———How do you go?'

'I will walk over to Telamone. It will be nearer so. I had thought of the boat, but it will be nearer across the land,'

He looked at her and let her go in silence.

He was ashamed and afraid to tell her that he doubted her. Even his dazed mind could see that there was no treachery in those clear fearless eyes. Yet all the time she was absent he would doubt her; strain his ear at every sound, and whet his dagger, the only weapon he had.

She put her herbs in a great frail basket, took the few articles she had made with the reeds and the canes, swung them across her back, and stepped out for the shore.

It was a grand autumnal morning, steeped in the colour and the moisture of late autumn.

The grass was embrowned with the red-brown feathers of the graceful sanquinella^[1] and the fairy-like sprays of the tremolino,^[2] and every moss-grown nook was painted delicately with the exquisite colour of the tender cyclamen-flowers hanging over the moist autumnal earth, leafless, and looking like rose-tinted shells. The golden stars of the dandelions were gleaming everywhere, and above the blossoms of the ivy swarms of wild bees were humming in ecstasy; but in the water-places the reeds and canes were growing ragged and broken, the nuphar and the nymphæa leaves were getting yellow and torn, and here and there a leaf fluttered from the silver poplar-trees.

To walk against the wind, to feel the wet grass under her feet, to smell the fresh scent of the sods as a troop of young horses galloped past her, scattering the earth with their unshod hoofs in merry scampers, unconscious of the cruel fate—of the whip, and the curb, and the shafts, and the brutal mastery—that waited for them in the future; all these sights and sounds of nature were such delights that the pressure of anxiety which weighed upon her for the sake of the man she protected was lifted off her as she went; and her young body, and the heart that beat in it, both felt light as thistledown.

She saluted all her friends and familiars. She saw the first flight of herons of the year sailing towards the Ciminian range; she saw a goose alight, jaded after long journeying, and settle, as if with a sigh of content, in a fringe of the red reeds; she espied some grasshopper warblers in the sedges, and she saw a water-rail, arrived before his female, look around him, calling, and wearing his little mind out with seeking her high and low upon the waters of his favoured pool, she all the while most likely flying steadily and faithfully towards him, but afar off where he could not see her, and where, perhaps, a shot would lay her low and widow his tender constancy.

All these, and many another welcome and well-known comrade, she saw as she struck across the moors and thickets, and the black heads of the buffaloes pushed themselves up above the red-berried briony, and the wild swine began to sniff for the first acorns of the scarlet-oak, and the beautiful buck fled across the sunlight, made timid in his innocence because man has so much of the devil and spares nothing.

She was so glad to see them all again.

It seemed to her ages since she had been free to run and loiter at choice amidst these green solitudes. But she could only give them a glance and a smile; she was bound, or she thought so, to be no longer away from the tombs than she could help. Her voluntary loyalty to the man she sheltered was like a chain upon her foot that was fleet as the roebuck's and had been as free.

She walked on rapidly, and sorely tempted to turn aside into many a leafy defile she knew of, where the hill-hare made its form, to pause beside many a sedge-rimmed shallow where the sultan-hen was splashing. But she resisted the longing to revisit all those beloved haunts that she shared with the winged and the four-footed peoples. She held on straight across the narrow dangerous paths that intersected the marshes, and the cattle-tracks that led through the mazes of underwood, and after some hours of incessant motion she saw the castle on its headland that marked Telamone. Another hour brought her to its desolate beach, where the ruins of many a Roman villa divide the sand with the stunted aloes and the glazier's weed.

It is a dreary, dirty, miserable place, though in other ages it was decked with the snowy marbles of patrician palaces, and bore, on its then deep waters, the gilded pleasure-galleys of the great Romans.

Here she tried in vain to sell what she had brought; the few people were too poor to be willing to spend a bronze coin even, on field medicines which they knew were good. They recognised her and asked her where she had been all this while. She pointed vaguely eastward and told them she had found work to do over yonder, and she only now wished to sell her herbs because she wanted a little money to spend at the autumnal fairs.

This they thought so natural that the Telamone women were willing to help her. They told her of a pharmacy in Orbetello where her simples would be willingly bought, and one of the old men, called Febo, who had his felucca lying off the dirty, shallow port, where once Marius landed with his thousand men, said to her:

'You used to be a good one on a deck; I want to go to the Orbetellano; if you take the tiller, I will carry you there.'

'That is kind of you,' she said gratefully.

'Nay, nay, you will give me something when you have sold your stuff,' said he. 'The wind will serve us; we shall fly. You know the water hereabouts; you will not run us aground?'

'Not I,' she answered as she sprang on deck.

The little felucca did fly; these butterfly-like boats are the lightest and the swiftest in the world. A strong wind was blowing from the north-east and made the little sail swell out as if it were a soap-bubble being blown by the children of Glaucus in play.

'I shall be so late home!' she thought with a pang as the blue water raced past the sides of the boat, and the sandy shore, and the red tufa hills, and the white vapours rising from the morass, and the stately line of the receding mountains all drifted by her as they went. Her eyes filled as she saw the old stone house where she had dwelt with Joconda standing against the crumbling quay of Santa Tarsilla, whose stones were fewer every year as the rains soaked them, and the weeds dragged them down, and the stormy water sapped their base.

'Andrea is always alive?' she asked of the old man with her.

He chuckled, 'Ay, ay, always. We old blasted sea-pines are hard to kill; all the sap has been run out of us, but we hold fast on the sand. I am eighty years old, and Andreino he must be going on for a hundred, but we are alive, we can suck our pipe-stems still; and there were two youngsters from the Lucchese just come down here who died last week like flies, just of our air and our smoking soil. You die early, or never, here.'

She did not answer him. The words sent a chill through her blood; she thought of the man at home. He was young and of the blood of the north; the fever had eaten all the life out of him, and it was still very possible that he never would rally entirely, but would sink away out of apathy into death, as slowly and as surely as the sea was sinking away from the shore and leaving disease and desolation, where once the coral had grown and the dianthus spread his pale pink plumes.

The old sailor mumbled and chattered on of the seaboard as he had remembered it, and the time when he had known the great works begun in 1829 for the drying up of the Castiglione lagoon (once so fair and harmless a lake that we know from Cicero rich men coveted an island on it), and chuckled to himself over his prediction that the bonificamento that was still going on would be only so much squandering of money and labour, and that the salt and fresh water would always manage to meet, all engineers notwithstanding, and that they would repent ever having meddled with the ways of God and the course of the Ombrone, and that he for his part should be glad to see the houses of the Pescaja sink down into the swamp, for he liked not such meddling with the shape of the earth and the run of the rivers; and he expected heaven's vengeance yet.

Musa listened inattentively, though his views were her own, for she too hated 'the meddling' with the streams and the waves, the dykes and the locks that shut out the sea, the drainage that killed the little fish and the reeds and the brilliant marsh flora, and the men who would fain make a dry place, and build a factory, or a foundry, where the bulrushes now nodded to their own reflection in the water and the birds from the north found food and shelter.

Almost as quickly as a storm-gull could have flown there, the felucca sailed over the ten odd miles that part Telamone from Monte Argentaro, and, drawing so little water, ran easily in over the sandy bottom and through the submerged fields of algæ into the stagno, and lay to underneath the huge block of the Pelasgic sea-wall.

Then ruin seemed to menace her, for she was stopped on landing by the customs-takers, and toll and fee were imperiously demanded for her bundles of herbs and her frail baskets, and she had not a single coin upon her! She had not one in the world, indeed, for Zefferino had always paid her by barter for whatever he sold for her, and had brought her food or oil or flax or wool, and never any money.

As a great favour and goodness, the guards at last, after debating and scolding half an hour, agreed to take two of her baskets in lieu of the number of centimes that she ought to have paid to the State.

'Eh, Musoncella,' said old Febo, tugging her sleeve as they landed, and pointing to a proclamation pasted on the water-walls, 'can you read that? I cannot. They say there is money to be made. You who are always roaming, you may come across that man they want.'

She looked where he pointed; and went up to the big printed letters and spelled them out slowly, not being skilful in reading.

Her heart beat fast; her eyes seemed to grow for the moment blind.

The State offered a large reward in money to any one who should aid in the discovery and apprehension of the Count Luitbrand d'Este, escaped from the prisons of Gorgona fifteen months before.

The proclamation had been pasted up, and torn down, or defaced, and put up again, some hundred times since the summer night when the galley-slaves had dropped off the rocks into the deep water and swum for their lives, with the musket-balls raining around them and hissing in the sea.

The people of the Orbetellano had more sympathy with the fugitives than with the authorities, and thought that the young man was hardly dealt with: 'Poor lad! It was only a love murder,' they said pityingly. 'After all, if you are jealous and stab your dama, you do what is but natural. Does not the stork kill the faithless mate? So they say."

She read it; but she had self-control enough to let no emotion betray her; side by side with strong passions in her went strong self-command and power of silence.

'I should think,' she said indifferently, turning to Febo, 'that they might be pretty sure that the marshes have killed this poor youth. What will you do, Febo, if they should take to offering rewards for whoever will tell of contraband goods run ashore to Maremma?'

She smiled slowly as she said it, and the old man winced.

'Hold your tongue,' he said angrily, 'and with these doganieri—burn them!—so near; are you mad? Come, let us go and find your pharmacy.'

She was free to go into the town, which to her seemed a large bewildering place, enclosed as it was between its stone fortifications and its sea-walls. She had never been there before, and she had the true mountain and moorland instincts of distrust and hatred for all places where men dwelt in numbers, cooped up in stone or brick compartments, and shut out by tiles and timber from the sight of the sky.

The men began to stare at her and make admiring jests; she pulled further over her head the woollen hood which Joconda had always enjoined on her to cover herself with if she went amidst a crowd; and laden with her goods she set to work to find out the pharmacy, and did find it in time, though with trouble.

It was a little dark vaulted place, made out of no one knew what old ruin of Roman work.

She knocked and went in boldly, and found an old chemist, who was the leech of half the Orbetellano, and far more trusted by the people than the youth with many greater accredited qualifications who was set by the municipal rule to cure their ills as parish doctor and surgeon.

The chemist was a wise and kindly person, curing chiefly by those herbs which modern medicine neglects, to ransack nature for minerals and poisons. He was liberal and could afford to be so, for he had a large following in the maritime population, and when the haul was large after the night's fishing those men were open-handed. He was pleased to see so rare and large a store of the most useful plants, and said so honestly, and questioned her where she found them, and asked her how much she wanted for them.

'I want quinine, not money,' she answered him, 'but if you can give me money too, I shall be glad; I have none, and I want to get wine as well.'

'You have some one sick? A father? A brother?'

'I have some one who has been sick, she answered curtly. 'But he is only weak now. But it is such weakness!—it is like death.'

'He has had the fever?'

'Yes. Quinine is what he should have, is it not? You would know,'

'Quinine and pure wine. I will give you both for your herbs; and as for those baskets, I dare say my wife will take them.'

He called his wife, and she haggled more than he liked over the baskets, but at last consented to buy the lot. Frail baskets are much in favour here, and are used by women marketing, by masons and carpenters for their tools, by anybody who has to carry anything and can carry it with most ease thus.

The wife gave her a handful of bronze pence for the lot, and knew she could sell them again for as many silver ones. The chemist put up quinine in two large phials, and three flasks of pure Campagna wine.

'That is strong and good red Lacrima,' he said to her. 'That will pour life into your sick man as the sunbeams pour colour into the green fruit. As for the quinine—you can read?—then give it him as I have written on the phials, and if that do not cure him, nothing will, but our Maremma will take him to herself as she takes so many. Can you carry those flasks? See, sling them together so; and when you have other simples to sell, bring them to me. They are God's own medicines.'

She thanked him and went out; at the door he slipped a little money in her hand.

'You were not paid enough for your baskets, my dear; and get your sick man some meat with that.'

'T will bring you the rarest plants in all Maremma,' she said, with a tremor in her voice, 'and you shall pay me nothing at all for them. You are good.'

Ashamed of her emotion, she ran away up the little dark twisting street.

At the end of it, the old owner of the felucca was waiting.

'You will give me something now,' he said; 'you have done well.'

'I will pay you when we are back at Telamone,' she said, knowing her people.

'Oh, no, indeed,' said the old fellow angrily; 'that will not do at all. In the first place, I am not going back. My son lives here and we go harpooning to-night. You must pay me now.'

'I have no right to pay you. You were coming, and you said I might steer. And how shall I get back without the felucca? You will let me have the felucca at least? I can manage her all alone quite well.'

'Eh, eh, Musoncella!' grinned the old man, 'you will not pay for the voyage here, and you think I shall trust you with my boat? I go out in her to-night myself; that is why I came. Pay me now, or I will make it worse for you; and if I call a guard, then I shall know where you really live, for it is my belief———'

'What will content you?' she said in desperation, feeling her cheeks grow cold with fear.

'Pay him nothing,' said a voice behind her, and turning she saw the face of Daniello Villamagna, the Sicilian skipper. 'Pay him nothing, and let him stay here with his cockle-shell. The "Ausiliatrice" will land you where you will.'

'Oh, I was only joking,' said the old sailor, for he knew the skipper of the 'Ausiliatrice,' and knew his tongue was hot and his knife not very slow to back up what his tongue spoke, and he had no wish to come in collision with this son of the lava of Ætna.

Musa looked from one to the other doubtfully. She was sorry to see Daniello Villamagna there.

'You will let me have your boat,' she said, in a low tone imploringly to the man of Telamone. 'Pray let me have it. It will be quite safe with me, and I will give you silver for its use.'

'Oh no; that I cannot anyhow,' said the man; 'I go out to-night—I have promised my son.'

'My brig is off the stagno; she cannot come in, there is no draught for her. But if you will come out to her she shall land you where you choose,' said the Sicilian.

'I can hire a boat on the stagno,' said Musa, and she turned away from them both and began to make her way back to the port, pausing at a butcher's stall to buy some sound fresh meat, as the chemist had bade her do.

The Sicilian sailor followed her; he looked amidst the yellow faces and the yellow sands of Orbetello like a native of some other planet; his warm brown cheeks, his brilliant eyes, his elasticity of step, his rapid movements, were all the signs of a perfect health anda dauntless manhood; a scarlet cap, upon his black curls, and a scarlet kerchict at his shapely throat, caught the sunshine as he went. His glance was full of triumph and gladness.

'Eh, Musoncella!' he murmured. 'You see I kept my word. I am back in four months. I was coming to you.'

She felt the great dread tighten at her heart.

'How should you come to me?' she said, with assumed indifference. 'You cannot tell where to find me.'

'I should soon find you; there are not two like you on these shores. Have you ever thought of what I said to you?'

'No. Why should I think of it?'

'I have thought of nothing else night and day. I love you!———'

'That is nonsense. I can be nothing to you. Why will you walk through the streets with me? I dislike it.'

'You never remembered me, never once?'

'Why should I?'

'Ah, Musoncella! The old man called you aright.'

She smiled superbly.

'They have always called me that.'

'But if you would listen,' he pursued, the passionate blood flushing his clear brown skin, 'I am no poor, sickly, dawdling Maremmano, and my brig—she is as good a barque as the high seas hold. And Sicily is beautiful, and at home we laugh and sing and dance all day; and my people are merry and good, and we are well enough off to deny ourselves nothing in reason. And in Sicily the men are strong, and the maidens gay. You would be happy there. I love you! I have seen nothing but your face; it was always between me and the great tumbling Biscay breakers, and the thick white fogs of that Scottish coast, where once nearly we foundered, and went to pieces, for the fog there is like a wall, and the very lightship is hidden in it———ah, you do not listen; you do not care. Yet heaven is my witness; if you will, I will prove my love in every honest way before men and the saints, and I will take you back with me to the island and be more proud than if my hold were filled with gold and silver. And if you doubt what I say and what I am, you can ask the syndic of this very town, for he has known me and my people many years, since my father traded here———'

Musa only tried to move faster before him.

'You are mad, I think,' she said angrily, She thought he was. A man to talk thus who had only seen her once before for five minutes, on a summer morning, upon the sands!

In vain he urged, in vain he pleaded; he could make no impression upon her as he walked beside her, pouring out his full heart in words as the nightingale pours his in song. He was vehemently in earnest; he cared nothing for who she might be, nor whence she came: he wanted her, this strong and fearless and beautiful creature! What a mother she would be for sea-born children cradled by the winds and waves!

He might as well have spoken to a figure of bronze for aught that she was moved by it.

She scarcely heard him; she was thinking every moment of the fugitive hidden in the tombs of the rocks: was he safe? did he want for anything in her absence? might faintness overcome him and, without succour, pass into the endless swoon of death? if he were well, was he wondering why she was so long, was he doubting her? would the old man of Telamone talk of her and cause her refuge to be found?

All these anxieties were torturing her; what cared she for a foolish, fire-tongued Sicilian who doubtless said all those fine phrases to somebody in every port at which the 'Ausiliatrice' touched?

Soon they had threaded the dirty streets and come out upon the harbour. It was a busy day; fishermen by the hundred sat on the sea walls, or swarmed on the narrow tongues of land that join Argentaro with the mainland; the harpooning of the night was to be on a large scale, shoals of fish had been seen, and, less welcome. several large sharks. The men were telling long and grim shark stories one to another; the fishing fleet was all ready and anchored, but the fishing had to wait for the dark of the moonless night.

One part of the sea-wall had been recently washed down during a tempest; those huge blocks of Pelasgic or Tyrrhene architecture have seen the storms of centuries when Alexander was yet unborn and Christ and Cæsar names unknown. Three thousand years and more the sea has raged at them in its furies of autumn and of winter, but it has only been able to displace, never been able to destroy them.

At these vast blocks, which tax the strength of yoked oxen, a gang of galley-slaves was working; the overseer was near them with his whip, as though they were wild beasts of an arena and he their tamer.

One of them, a Hercules in build, and burnt black with the sun on all his naked limbs and throat, looked up and saw her and knew her.

It was Saturnino. He had not yet been moved from Orbetello since his capture there.

She looked at the great black figure of the man with a pity that quenched the scorn she had always felt for the baseness of his theft. She knew his story: the great Saturnino as the country side still called him! And he was working there as elephants do in timber-gangs, old before his time, calcined with sun and powder, bent but massive still, with angry, sullen, bloodshot eyes gleaming like a lion's out from his black bent brows.

$he pitied him, and that pity came back like dew on her own heart. Almost she loved this cruel, savage, brute-like creature, stained with so much blood, burdened with so many crimes. Had he not sent her Este!

That memory made her eyes soft as they dwelt on him; he saw their softness, and deep down in his fierce, ravenous, sullen heart he was glad.

'Does she know I robbed her tomb?' he thought—galley-slaves hear nothing.

On an instinct of pity she paused beside him a moment.

He had taken the gold of the tomb, and he was for that accursed, and he had betrayed and wronged her shelter of him, and when she had heard of his capture she had been ferocious in her triumph. Yet now that she saw him she was sorry; sorry as she felt for the great boar when she saw him plunge through the rushes bleeding and torn, with the hounds at his flanks and the steam of his panting lungs coming like smoke from his red tongue.

She longed to say a syllable to tell him that his companion in flight was safe with her, but she dared not lest others should overhear. She nevertheless paused by him one moment and slipped one of the silver coins the chemist had given her into his hand.

'Yes; I know,' she murmured, answering the guilty interrogation of his eyes. 'You robbed the dead. That was worse than robbing me. But I think they would forgive—now.'

Something in the tone of her voice brought to him the echo of a voice that he had loved; the voice of Serapia.

He put her coin between his teeth in silence. Then, as he looked up and saw her standing in the full daylight, with bare head and throat, something in her aspect and her features stirred memory in his brain.

He seemed to see his own face in the innocence of its adolescence as it had looked back at him mirrored in some hillside pool in that season of his boyhood when no blood was on his hands, no price was on his head.

A thrill of remembrance, a throb of wonder, stirred the sluggish apathy into which his ferocious passions had sunk under the drugs of monotony, inactivity, and despair.

He had become half madman, half brute, the dullest, most savage, most hopeless unit of all that hopeless world to which he now belonged. But for that one moment humanity stirred in him—he was a man once more.

He remembered the little child that he had left under the stone-pines on the crags above the Fiora torrents.

He sprang forward, he cried out, the whip of the overseer lashed him back into the ranks, the guards hustled him with oaths into silence.

Musa passed on, going she knew not where.

Daniello Villamagna looked hard at her.

'You did not turn your face from that hound,' he said jealously.

'He is a hound chained, and so to be pitied,' she answered him.

'He was the robber of Santa Fiora.'

'I know,'

Her face was sad and anxious; she was thinking of him who had been sent to her by Saturnino.

Out in the deeper water beyond the Argentaro rocks the Sicilian brig was at anchor; a trim vessel still, though she had been buffeted about in the mists and storms off the Scottish shores.

Daniello pointed to her where she lay rocking gently on the wondrous blue of the Archipelago.

'If you will come out to her,' he said softly, and more timidly than he had spoken before, 'I swear on the good faith of a sailor to put you ashore where you will, and to speak no word whilst you are on my deck of what you do not choose to hear.'

'I can hire a boat,' said Musa, and she turned and tried to bargain with a ragged lad who had an old punt there beneath the wall. But the youth would not be hired or bribed; there was the night-spearing to be seen and shared; no man or boy would leave Orbetello with that prospect of delight in store for the evening as soon as the slender crescent of the young moon should have vanished.

'You will get no boat here,' said Daniello. 'Not one of them will stir this afternoon. Since you are distrustful of the "Ausiliatrice" hear this: yonder is my own boat, with which I pulled from the ship here; there are some of my crew about; you could not row that boat yourself, but I will send the best man I have with you wherever you want to go.'

She was silent.

'I will not come with you myself,' he added, 'since you flout and hate me so. But remember what I have said, and I shall see you and say it again.'

She was still silent; she could not bear to owe him a service, but there was something in this generosity of his action which touched her as all his amatory eloquence had had no power to do. She could not endure to use his boat, yet unless she did so she could never reach home that night, and what would Este think of her? What might not happen to him, alone, and feeble, and without food?

As she hesitated, the Sicilian shouted to a sailor on the little isthmus of sand; his own boatswain, a man of years and one to be trusted. The boatswain ran to his call, and Daniello whispered to him. A long slim boat was soon aground against the sand.

'That will take you where you wish to go,' he said, and his large black eyes gazed on her with a reproach that dimmed their fire and light.

She looked at him a certain shame.

'I am thankful to you,' she said simply. 'But give me your word first that when I land your sailor shall not follow me.'

'Sailors are not spies,' said the Silician with a haughty anger. 'No; I take no unfair means. But we shall meet again. It is written.'

'Farewell,' she said to him, and she sprang into the boat, and took the tiller-cords.

For herself she would not have done it. For herself she would rather have run all the certain dangers of night upon the moors than have incurred this debt to the man whose frank fair passion seemed to her an intolerable offence. But, left to herself, she knew she could never reach Telamone, much less the sepulchres, that night; already the sun was slanting towards the sea, already the glowing amber of his afternoon beams was falling like molten gold upon the many-coloured sails of the numerous fishing craft that lay close in to shore upon the salt-water lagoon, and further out under the shadow of the twin-peaked rocks.

The boatswain pulled with long and steady stroke against the nor'-wester that was blowing still. It was Ave Maria when she reached Telamone. The mariner carried out his orders strictly, and when he ran her into the harbour never asked her a word, but turned his boat's head with a cheery 'goodnight,' and sculled himself back again towards the south.

It was vesper-time and in another moment would be night. She got through the little town as quickly as she could, holding the precious medicine closer in her bosom, for quinine was coveted there like the very elixir of life. She had eight or nine miles of moor and hill and woodland and marsh before her still; but she was not afraid, once in her own country as she called it. Of the less known lands around Telamone she was less confident.

She had her knife slipped, safe and secret, in her garter and a bold heart in her breast; she walked on without pausing, through the damp warm night, full of vapour, only just rustled by the wind from the north, which, though it was strong and high upon the sea, had little power over the low and close-woven foliage. She met nothing worse, however, than a mounted buffalo-driver, who swore at her because the lantern she had lit to save herself from straying into the swamps had frightened the horse he rode; and all her furred and feathered friends of the season who liked to hunt and travel by night; the grand-dukes and the smaller owls, were out, of course, and all the various races of the snipe tribe were busy after molluscs or mice, larvæ, or frogs, according to their size and prowess; the moor fox was stealing through the osiers to where the moorhen slept, and the first wild ducks of the year flew by against the slender horns of a new moon. Once a great dark bird sailed over her head so near that she could almost have touched him; it was a belated booted-eagle going from his summer haunts on Monte Amiato to his Asian or African eyrie on Himalaya or on Atlas.

Save these she met nothing.

Men do not care to be out on the Maremma lowlands after sunset; every pretty brown tarn reflecting clouds and stars may be a poison-bowl of noxious gases; every will-o'-the-wisp that dances over the hairy sundew and the vernal sandwort may be a torch that leads on to the grave.

She met no creature to do her harm, and knew her country so well that she did not lose her way or miss the unsteady bridge that oftentimes the rough tussocks of grass alone offered as passage across some marsh that was like a soaking sponge. It was midnight, she thought by the skies, when she reached the tombs and knocked aloud at the stone doors, and called with a tired but happy voice, 'Open! it is I!'

 

1. Panicum ciliare.
2. Briza maxima.

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