In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 43

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XLIII.

 

HE fair commencement of the spring spread into fuller glory; the air grew full of the scent of narcissus and woodruff; the gladwyn and the iris, purple and azure, blossomed beside every pool and runlet of water; in the woods the flowering ashes were white as new-fallen snow, the sombre ilex glades grew light with their young leafage, the bird-cherry and the fragrant cherry were in bloom, and the goats cropped once more the tender leaves of cistus and of myrtle.

In the great unmeasured meadows the grass grew already breast-high; the buffaloes and the roebucks wandered through seas of flower-foam; the honeysuckle garlanded the straight pine-stems, and the cerulean clusters of the mouse-ear and the deep green fans of the nymphæa began to spread themselves between the sky and the little merry fish and the ever-chaunting frogs that filled with noise the silence of the pools and streams. All the earth was running over with foliage and blossoms and young new-born things, as the week-old fawns slept beneath the acanthus shade, and the colts gambolled on the velvet softness of the mossy glades, and the pretty little foxes ran out of their earths in the moss-covered sandstone, and the yet prettier leverets stole in their mother's wake across a bed of hyacinths blue as the sky.

The cuckoo called from the leafy heights of the esculus-oaks, and all night long the nightingale told the rosemary that she had seen nothing sweeter than itself in Egypt or in Palestine; for it is the rosemary rather than the rose that Philomel loves best.

Sometimes, when Musa came up from the shadow of the tombs into all that abounding light, that universal fragrance, that immense sense of life and loveliness, in which she could almost hear the green earth growing, she would stretch out her arms in love of it all and gratitude, and cry out aloud to the sunlit solitude:

'I, too, am happy! I, too, live!'

Every pulse of life in her rejoiced with rejoicing nature. She envied no more the water birds sailing all day beside their nests; she no more wondered why the woodlark sang praise, praise, praise, and nothing but praise, to the Creator of all.

The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.

He loved her; at least he loved her enough to have that power over her which steals all the strength away from the woman it rules, and closes her eyes in a trance.

He loved her; and when she went out away from him into the golden air, all her life seemed to sing its joy within her; she could have laughed aloud and have danced with the fawns in the pastures.

Even he was startled at the change and radiance that came upon her beauty; her eyes seemed to have imprisoned the sunbeams in their depths; her lips seemed to have ever on them that sigh cf love which is happier than ail smiles; when he embraced her it seemed to him that he touched an Immortal.

'You are glorious as a young goddess, he had murmured to her once; 'and I—I am but a hunted felon, afraid to meet the light.'

Then she had laid her arms upon his shoulders, and raised her beautiful mouth to his.

'You are my love! my love!' she had answered him; and in the brief whisper there had been such eloquence of passion as he thought no poet's words or musician's melody had ever yet been able to give to sound.

When she took the flowers of the woods and put them before Joconda's coffin, as she never forgot to do, she said always, as she kneeled a moment there:

'Dear friend, where you are you understand; he loves me, and we are happy, and you, you will forgive?'

It seemed to her that the dead must see as God saw, with whom they were.

Her daily life was the same as it had been before. There could be but little remission cf her labours, since nothing but her strength and her effort stood between them both and death by hunger. She passed many hours of the day in her usual work; the boat had been flung up on the shore by the Sasso Scritto not injured too much for her to repair it. She continued to fish, to spin, to hew and carry wood, to plait the biodo, and to cut the heath; only he would never have her go more into the towns and villages, and so they lived as best they could on the wild oats of the last year, on the roots of the earth, and the eggs of the plover and water-hens, and when she took those she was always heedful to leave one or two In each nest.

'I could make nothing unhappy now,' she said to herself; and only for his sake, never for her own, would she ever have robbed the birds even thus far.

Her daily labours remained the same, but it seemed to her as if she had the strength of those Immortals he told her she resembled. She felt as though she trod on air, as though she drank the sunbeams and they gave her force like wine; she had no sense of fatigue; she might have had wings at her ankles and nectar in her veins. She was so happy, with that perfect happiness which only comes where the world cannot enter, and the free nature has lifted itself to the light, knowing nothing of and caring nothing for the bonds of custom and of prejudice with which men have paralysed and cramped themselves, calling the lower the higher law.

She was as innocent as the doe was in the brakes, knowing no will but its forest lord's. Her pride had melted into willing submission as the night's frost of the Maremma dissolved before the kiss of the sun-rays at morning.

'It is not as though he were free as other men are,' she said in her communion with the memory of Joconda. 'I am all he has. Even you would never have bid me leave him.'

She longed to have delicate apparel that she might seem the fairer before him; she was tempted to set the golden grasshopper upon her bosom that she might look the lovelier to him; she would put flowers at her throat; she would take the sweet smell of the broken bay leaves on her hands; she would say to the sunbeams that could not enter the tomb, 'O come in with me that my hair may have your light!' and she would cry to the birds amongst the blossoming trees, 'O tell me your secrets that I may sing to him a song that will never tire him.'

For her songs tired him; that she saw. He was always tired, he who could not see the face of the sun, who dared not walk across a rood of turf, who had no range but these narrow stone chambers that he paced with restless feet, as the caged lions pace their den.

He was the world to her; if she had been in the crowds of a city she would have seen but his face amidst the multitudes. In the twilight of the tombs his smile made for her a light more lovely than the morning glory of the skies; she could have lived so through years, through centuries, content.

But he—his caprice crowned, his victory assured—he began once more to weary of the long and empty days, to sigh for the ways of the world and the voices of men, to fret his soul in that dull dejection which had been roused and dissipated for a little time under the eagerness of jealousy, the excitation of failure.

'It is no fault of yours, dear,' he said once wearily, 'you do all you can. But I am a prisoner here. Though you console, you cannot change, my fate. I have read of a bird, a great vulture, who lived in his cage, but his wings grew paralysed and hung helpless. I am like the bird. I am half paralysed. I am scarce a living man.'

Then, when he saw the great tears start into her eyes and her face grow pale, he repented and kissed her, and drew the close-curling bronze of her hair to his breast.

'Nay, I do live, through you. I am an ingrate to lament. Forgive me and forget it!'

But his lament echoed in her heart, and remained in his. It was the one shadow across the sunlit path of perfect joy down which her feet were going, careless of their goal. He was not free; and without freedom the sweetest fruit has a bitter taste, the clearest water has an acrid flavour.

He was not free; and she who had had power for awhile to make him oblivious of bis doom soon lost that power, through no fault of her own, but merely through the seldom-varying laws of reaction that govern the man in his passion as the child with his toy.

For a short space, for a few weeks, a few months, the physical beauty of her and her absolute devotion moved Este to some emotion that was nearly love, and so in its momentary empire possessed him and consoled him. But it took no real hold upon him, had no real power to absorb him and reconcile him to his fate; nay, his very infidelity to his dead mistress made him remember her with renewed tenderness. With his heart beating against Musa's he would think bitterly: 'Why cannot I love as I once loved? Why does all her beauty leave me cold? Why cannot I know again that old sweet madness? Alas! alas! with her—my dead queen—should I have cared whether a prison or a palace held her, should I have known where we were, so long as we were left together?'

That was all dead in him.

He knew it. Vainly he strove to call alight the fire that had died down in him; vainly he sought to persuade himself that sensual covetousness was the same thing as passion, and chill desire sweet as adoration.

Like those kings of the East, who slay living slaves to warm their own frozen veins, he had thought by sacrifice of her to make himself drunk once more with that intoxication of the soul and senses in which the despair of his hopeless fate could be forgotten. But his heart beat but dully; he could give but a poor, short-lived, languid gratitude to this hard-won love which merited such endless recompense. Sometimes, when he bowed his head down on Musa's breast, the bitter tears would rise under his closed eyelids, as he would think: 'If only she lived again! if only once more my lips could touch her!' And he knew that she was a dead thing there in Mantua, a thing rotted out of all likeness of itself, in her grave under the marble pile in S. Andrea!

 

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