In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 37

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXVII.

 

HE winter heliotrope blossomed in the grass and the black hellebore bore its flowers as the year was born; the nights had frost that melted with the sunrise, and were splendid with the winter-lustre of the constellations; out of sight on all the great ploughed plains the corn was again as high as a man's hand; on the hills at dark the fires of the charcoal-burners flamed with every fall of eve. It was the time she always feared; the time when the sound of a foot on the grass made her hide, when all Maremma was given up to the northern labourers, when the animals panted and trembled with terror, and the wild birds flew in panic from the waters. She had always hated and dreaded the winter that brought aliens to the land and death to the forest creatures.

Now she feared it with unceasing alarm. Any day the father of Zirlo might speak to a man from the mountains, or a shepherd with his travel-worn Lucchese sheep might pull the briony from the entrance-stairs, and oust her, and find the hunted fugitive, and claim the gold at Orbetello. Any day, any hour, she knew very well that this might betide them; and often all the night through she listened outside the tombs, her heart standing still with fear as the wild ducks flew by screaming hoarsely, or the greater owls beat the air with their broad wings, or the fox crept homeward through the rustling of the withered brake, a moorhen or a coot in his mouth.

The Church feasts of winter followed on one another.

Through the frosty air of the nights the bells of many a distant hamlet came sonorous though faint to her ears, ringing in the first masses of the morn. On such feasts she had been used to go up to the old dark church with Joconda and ask a blessing on the year; but it seemed to her now that she asked such blessing better, kneeling down where the walls of the thick-growing bay enclosed her, and the turtle-dove, and the partridge and the friendly blackbird flitted by her as she prayed to heaven in her vague trustfulness which was rather hope than faith.

'Keep him safely!' was the perpetual burden of her prayer.

'Yet what is the use?' she would think wistfully as she rose from her knees and heard some distant report of a gun breaking the frosted stillness of the early morning. 'God cannot care; He lets the birds be netted and the little gentle hare be torn with shot. They are His creatures as much as we, and He gives them over to make the wicked sport of men.'

No one cared; the terrible, barren, acrid truth, that science trumpets abroad as though it were some new-found joy, touched her ignorance with its desolating despair. No one cared. Life was only sustained by death. The harmless and lovely children of the air and of the moor were given over, year after year, century after century, to the bestial play and the ferocious appetites of men. The wondrous beauty of the earth renewed itself only to be the scene of endless suffering, of interminable torture. The human tyrant, without pity, greedy as a child, more brutal than the tiger in his cruelty, had all his way upon the innocent races to which he begrudged a tuft of reeds, a palm's breadth of moss or sand. The slaughter, the misery, the imjustice, renewed themselves as the greenness of the world did. Noone cared. There was no voice upon the blood-stained waters. 'There was no rebuke from the offended heavens. To all prayer or pain there was eternal silence as the sole reply.

 

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