In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 39

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXIX.

 

HE day following she said to him:

'There is no more flour and there is no more wine; I must go to Telamone. I have a roll of cloth that I have spun to sell. Shall I go today?'

He looked at her in doubt.

'Do you go to meet the Sicilian sailor?' he said bitterly, and was ashamed of himself as he did so.

'It is not fair to say so to me,' she answered him patiently. 'Though I did meet him, what would it matter? I have no eyes that see him. Wherever I go it is you who go with me. You know that.'

'I know I am not worthy of your answer!' he said with instant repentance.

'It is but the truth, she said simply. 'As for the sailor, I think he is far away, by this time. Shall I go to Telamone today?'

'Do as you wish; you are wiser than I.'

'I must take the boat if I go; I cannot carry the cloth all the way by land. Pray, pray be prudent. Do not burn a fire by day, the smoke might be seen; it passes upward through that hole in the rock; I saw it myself yesterday. If a shepherd saw, he might come.'

'Put the fire out, if it trouble you.'

'Without it you are cold, I know; down here it is cold, though above the sun is so hot. Ah, that you could but see the light.'

'I see it through your eyes as blind men do by eyes they love.'

She was silent; she busied herself in getting ready the strong linen cloth she had spun in the winter, and in getting ready also the simple meal that he would require in her absence. For herself a crust of bread taken with her was enough.

'The first nightingales sang last night,' she said. 'Did you hear them?'

'No; do you know what I hear when I sleep or lie awake at night? I hear your voice always, saying cruel things.'

She coloured and did not answer him.

Was she cruel?—and to him?

It was early day, the sun had but just come over the mountains; there was a loud piping and trilling of birds above ground amongst the myrtle and olive.

She was ready to go; she had the cloth rolled in a bale, which she would carry on her shoulder. She looked at him wistfully; a great longing came over her to drop down at his feet and bury her face upon his knees and cry out to him—'I am thy servant, thy dog, thy love!'

But she was haunted by the memory of the dead Mantuan woman, and by the remembered words of Joconda; she restrained the passion of tenderness that welled up in her as the moment of her own departure drew nigh. She placed before him all that he might need during the day, and without meeting his eyes said to him: 'Farewell for a little while. Be careful, oh I pray you! Be careful.'

'Why should I take any care?' he said bitterly. 'If we are for ever to live thus, Gorgona will be less pain to me than where you are.'

She gave a quick sigh, and without answer took up the bale of homespun cloth and mounted the steps of the entrance.

When she parted the boughs and emerged into the open air the glory of a dazzling morning was sparkling all around her on the brimming waters and the dewy earth.

A hare was peacefully nibbling at the grass; a jay was swaying on a bough and meditating his own homeward flight; further away in the distance, against the light, there was a pretty group of a mare and two foals; down in the dark green rosemary bushes at her feet a pair of green grossbeaks, hardly to be told from the shrub, were pecking in play at one another.

'If only he could come into the air!' she thought with passionate pain.

What use are the most loving eyes of others to the blind shut in the impenetrable darkness of their own calamity?

She could do for him what the sister, or wife, or daughter does for the blind man; she could watch for peril for him, bring him food, labour that he should live; but she could not lead him from the gloom up into the light, she could not make him rejoice in the green world that was renewing its youth.

An impulse of longing to look on him once more made her retrace her steps, and made her kneel, leaning down to look through that cleft in the rock roof of the tomb which she had made in the earliest days of her occupation of the tombs, that by its orifice the smoke of her wood fire might escape.

Through the fissure she saw straight down into the chamber where she had first found the golden warrior on his bier. She saw Este as he sat in the stone chair once sculptured there for visitants to the dead. His body was bent, his arms lay outstretched on the table of nenfro that held his modelling tools, his head was bowed down on them; his whole attitude expressed the unnerved, weary, hopeless dejection of a man to whom life was valueless.

The sight of him thus smote her as if with a blow. He called her cruel: was she in truth cruel? Was she cruel as one who denies water to a chained dog, air to a caged eagle? Did she indeed give him a stone when he craved bread?

A vague, heavy sense of wrong done by her to him went with her over the broad moors and meadows, and along the shining sands of the shores.

She got her boat out and pushed it into the water and loosened her little sail.

The wind was favourable to her, and the boat danced buoyantly on its southward way. But her heart was heavy as lead.

When the swell of the Sasso Scritto rose up between her and her moors, she felt as if she had bade him farewell for ever.

For once she had no eyes for the gannets gathering above the sea for their northward flight, for the rock-martins flying along the face of the cliff, for the sandpipers tripping amongst the samphire of the shore, for the curlews screaming above the estuary.

She had told him the truth.

She only saw him wherever she went.

No one would buy her cloth at any reasonable price at Telamone; she knew what she ought to get for it, and was unwilling to sell it for too little. Most of the people there were poor, and the few who were not so were mean. She saw nothing to do but to try at Orbetello. The wind was all in her favour, and the sea, though boisterous, was no stormier than pleased her, sea-gull as she had been called so long.

The boat beneath her, as it rose and sank and leaped the crests of this wave and of that, was to her as the horse is to the fearless rider. The sea was so familiar to her; she was at home upon it as any one of the storm swallows after which they had named her in her babyhood.

The red and green of the tufa land, the deep shadows of the pine-woods, the pale aloe-dotted shores, the distant mountains amethyst and purple as the mists cleared from them, flew by her rapidly; a belt of seething, wind-blown, sunny water flashing and heaving between herself and them.

At Orbetello she could sell her linen, not over well but at a fairly decent price.

She rested a little, ate her bread, and bought for a small bronze coin a plateful of cooked rice; then she purchased the wine and the flour she needed at home, and put the rest of the money she had earned safely away in the breast of her tunic.

There did not remain much, for wine was dear in vineless Maremma. She paid a visit of gratitude to the old chemist, and took him a basket of rare mushrooms, and told him that when the time came to gather herbs she would not forget her promise.

'You have a face that remembers,' said the old man, pleased.

'How can anyone forget?' said Musa. It was that which seemed to her strange. Neither benefit nor wrong would have been ever written in sand with her. Though he had been dying before her, never would she have forgiven Zirlo.

'Did the sick man recover?' the old chemist asked.

'Yes; it was your cordials that saved him. That is why I came now to thank you.'

'And does he marry you, this springtime?' said the old man, with good-humoured pleasantry.

'Ah, no!' cried Musa quickly, with a colour deep as the dark winter rose on her face.

She went out of his pharmacy without bidding him good-day. The thoughtless question had gone like a knife into her heart.

That was what Joconda had meant when she had made her swear on her Maddonnina.

Laden with the flasks of wine and oil and the little sack of flour, she took her way to the quay; and as she went almost ran against an old lean man with a pipe in his mouth.

'Eh, la Velia!' stammered Andreino in sad fright.

'Is it you?' said Musa with contempt in her voice. 'Did they not tear you to pieces amongst them, squabbling for the money in the pitcher?'

'Aye, aye, almost they did, the greedy souls,' said Andreio quaking. 'And where have you been all this while? You know I always loved you. I did hear that you were in service somewhere upon the mountains; but I said to them, so handsome a wench, and so handy with a boat, have the coaster lads no eyes———'

'I have found a home and work yonder,' said Musa, cutting short his compliments, with a sign of her head as she spoke towards the westward. 'As for you, I do not forget that you used to lend me your boat when I was a child. But you were weak and miserable when those women raged———'

'Oh, my dear, my wife was amongst them; if you had come quietly to us instead of dashing that pitcher down and wasting all that fair money———'

'Oh, you would have loved me as long as the money had lasted,' said Musa with a curt sarcasm. 'So would any one of them; you are not alone there.'

'But you have got money now?' he said with an envious glance at the flasks she carried.

'These are not for myself,' she answered. 'And how goes on the smuggling? Has the coastguard never yet found out that closet of yours behind the olive-wood Pietà?'

'Oh now, my sweet child, be quiet!' began the old man trembling. 'There are guards and soldiers all about, and never did I do you any harm, but lent you my boat and gave you pretty shells, and would have welcomed you always.'

'You are safe with me, Andreino, and your secrets too,' she said with a little laugh as she bade him good-morrow and went down towards the quay. He would let her alone, she thought, now that he knew she could bite.

The old man hobbled after her and touched her on the arm.

'You were always running about over all the wild places,' he said timidly. 'Did ever you see that young man the law is looking for always? The placards have been down a long time, the rains worked havoc with them, but no doubt you will have read them, and there is a pretty penny to be made that way, and if you should have ever seen him———'

'There is a pretty penny to be made, too, by telling how tobacco is run in at Santa Tarsilla,' she answered him calmly. 'I am no informer, you know that; do not you begin to be one in your old age. If the young man escaped the fever of the marshes, surely men may let him live in peace where-ever he be; such peace as he can have with a price upon his head.'

'Who is your lover that has been ill?' murmured Andreino in wheedling, insinuating tones as though he were caressing her. It was the merest guess with him, made in shrewd cunning.

His eyes, keen still to mark such things though he was nigh ninety years old, saw the blood go away from the peach-like cheek that the sun and the air had kissed all her years through. Her very heart seemed to stand still in her terror. But she had courage and presence of mind; she looked the old rogue full in the eyes.

'If a lover I have, what is that to you? We do not ask you for bit or sup, Andreino. You used to know me well. Remember how I bit the hand of the man that struck my dog. My dog is dead, but my blood is alive.'

She looked at him all the while full and sternly in the face, and the old man was frightened.

'I meant but a jest,' he mumbled. 'For sure you are the same as you were, with your terrible eyes and your terrible tongue; but your friend you know I always was, and always will be, my dear.'

'That is well,' said Musa carelessly, hiding the apprehension that sickened her as she thought of the hand of the law held out with the blood-money, and the greedy hand of this old man stretched out to take it. If Andreino ever knew, the law would know also before the day was an hour older.

She left him and gained her boat and put her purchases in it, and let fly the little sail. Andreino stood watching by the sea-wall. To give him a false scent she steered south-westward for a mile or two, with the black peaks of the Argentaro between her and home. Then, when she was distant enough for none to be able to tell hers from the many other similar boats that were out on the sea that day, she tacked and put her little vessel about, and repassed the rocks of Orbetello standing herself well out to windward, so that from the mole of the town her sail looked no bigger than a white speck against heavy leaden-coloured clouds that were drifting up slowly under the pressure of a strong cold wind.

But to put about thus, and place that square mile and more of heaving water between Orbetello and herself, had taken several hours; the day was advancing, and the sun was low, as she came once more on the northerly tack and began to steer to the north-east. She was too good a sailor not to guess the meaning in the whistle of the wind and the steely hue of the great banks of clouds that rose higher and higher over the face of the sky. Far away, where the Atlantic races through the Straits of Gibraltar and the waves of Biscay lash the Spanish coast, a sea-storm was raging already, and coursing like a greyhound to reach and overtake the blue Ligurian waters,

Even if she had not known what soon would come by the look of the sky and the feel of the waves, she would have known it by the way in which the big ships in the offing spread every stitch of canvas in the effort to make a port before the tempest should be upon them, and the way in which the little lateen craft came running in from every point of the compass, fishermen knowing that 'the devil would take the hindmost.'

Her own boat flew like a curlew, for the change in the wind favoured her, but though it sprang from wave to wave and was as buoyant as any cork Musa knew her own danger very well. Her boat was but as a nautilus-shell that would soon be tossed and whirled in a typhoon. To reach her own shore would be hard; to land might prove impossible. She reproached herself bitterly that she had not read more wisely the look of the skies at daybreak; but even wary and weatherwise fishermen make such mistakes at times, and have the blackness of the tempest and the howling hurricane down on them, and their vessel keel upward in the boiling surf, ere they can cry out one single prayer to the Mother of mariners.

Sometimes, she knew, out of a score of feluccas that went out at sunrise blithe and busy as a swarm of swallows, five or six only would come home to the mole next morning. The hungry libeccio would have swallowed up the rest.

The storm was not yet down, but made itself felt in the chill of the air, in the force of the gusts, which fell like blows, in the swirl and surge of the waves, in sunshine so blue, now yellowish-white and leaden-grey. The little boat still flew, elastic and easy, before the wind, rocking and reeling often, but always righting herself, even though drenched again and again with water. Musa was wet through; the shrill wind whistled amongst her curls and blew them upright; it was all she could do to keep her place, and cling to the tiller to keep the boat's head due north.

The hours she had lost, going about to hide her destination from Andreino, had brought her into the very press and peril of the wild weather that had come upon sea and land. But for that she would have been home by now. She could scarcely keep in a bitter cry, all useless as was such lament, thinking of him at home watching for her, wondering, doubting perhaps, alone with the bitterness of his own heart all through the weary day.

The sun had long been covered by the dense western clouds and she could not well guess the hour, but it began to grow very dark, and big raindrops began to fall. She could hardly tell her course; all before, behind, on every side, was fog and spray and gloom.

She thought with a continual agony, 'what will he do if I should drown?'

She knew it was very likely that she would drown, alone, out at sea on such an evening in a little open boat. She had seen the cruelties of the sea in all their shapes from her babyhood. She had seen many a drowned man washed up on the sand, swollen, eyeless, half-eaten by the sharks. She knew the great fish that waited down there underneath the waves, to give an added horror to death. She knew all the ghastliness of death in the deep sea. But it was not of herself she thought, but of him. He had no one in all the world but herself; what would become of him if the sea killed her?

All the while as this one thought kept place in her mind, to the exclusion of all others, she did all that it was possible to do to save the boat and herself. Once she was washed fairly out of the boat, but she clung to it with both hands, and climbed over its wet side, and went on again in the trough of the trembling waves. The flasks of wine and oil and the sack of flour had been washed over also, and were lost. Even in that moment of mortal jeopardy she felt a pang the more to think he would not have those things he so sorely needed.

What headway she was making, whether she was close inshore or out at sea, she could not tell; all was black as night around her. Now and then the lightning flashed, now and then she could see the whiteness of the hissing water; now and then the wind lulled, and she could hear the minute-guns of some ship in distress firing far away behind her. There is many a coral reef and many a sunken rock along the sea-shore of Maremma.

'Are the angels all dead that tend the stars?' she thought, in the vague fancy that the songs of the 'angiolin' had imbued her with; and then she set her teeth and clung on for dear life again. No one in heaven cared. It was with her as when the moor-hen was shot on the waters, as when the woodlark was trapped in the net. No one cared. There was no 'angiolin' beside the stars!

She was now almost numb with cold. The water drenched her, rain and salt water both poured over her, and the night had grown bitterly cold. She supposed it was night, she could not tell. She put off her heavy shoes, and made her clothes as light as she could, knowing that at any moment she might have to float and swim for her life. She kept her hold as well as she could on the tiller, and kept the boat as far as she could guess due north.

The sea seemed like some great cauldron that boiled and seethed. The roar and the shriek of the winds were incessant. The rain seemed to strike like whips. The little craft was well-built and seaworthy, and kept afloat where a heavier vessel would at once have filled and sunk. But she knew very well that every moment might be her last, and a great cold had crept into her very blood. She began to grow giddy and to feel deaf, the noise of the winds was so loud, the swirl of the water was so riotous. She began to be bewildered and dull; and she kept saying, ever and ever and ever aloud, 'what will he do if I drown? what will he do?'

That was her only distinct thought. All the rest, without and within, was darkness, utter darkness, in which she was thrown hither and thither and buffeted by the winds and the waves. At last one great wave took her and cast her over the boat's side. She flung up her hands in vain, the boat was no more there; the weight of the leaping billow dashed her on her back, and the salt foam poured between her lips.

'What will he do?' she thought. 'What will he do?'

That was her last conscious moment.

The sea closed over her and she knew no more.

 

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