In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 45

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XLV.

 

N the grey river-clay that she brought for Este with arduous toil from the bed of the Ombrone river, he had made in the twilight of his sombre and solitary workroom a full-sized statue of her. He had a facile talent, and here, where it was his only solace, his sole pursuit, he had achieved a certain greatness of conception; and freedom and grace were both in the work of his hand.

When she came in that day, he stopped her with a gesture.

'Ah, how like you are to my image of you,' he said, with an artist's pleasure in his own creation.

In his statue he had made her with nude feet and arms, fresh come from the sea, with the bronze aryballos poised upon her head, as he had seen her stand a hundred times before him. On the rough clay of the base he had scratched Glauca as her name. His work was both graceful and noble; it had truth to nature and a beautiful youthfulness in it. He who had only idled now and then with clay in the Lombard studios of friendly students was both amazed and proud that he could now call so much life out of the grey earth that the Ombrone washed daily towards the sea.

'Is it like me, indeed?' she said for the twentieth time as she looked timidly at it. 'I see my bare feet, and the ribbon-weed in the sand, and the bronze jar; but all the rest—can it be like me?'

And he told her for the twentieth time—

'It is like you if grey clay can be like a living flower.'

She looked at it doubtingly, unable to believe in any flattery so sweet as this. Then she said to him:

'You will be glad to know that Saturnino Mastarna has got safe away from Orbetello; he has crossed over to Sardinia; it is an island, you know, a big one; we can see it very far away, like a cloud, and the flamingoes come from there, they say.'

'Who told you?'

'A man upon the shore.'

A certain sensitiveness—rather for him than for the lover she had rejected—made her shrink from saying that a man who was free to woo her had spoken to her of love that day. She was afraid to rouse his jealousy.

Este ceased to look at the statue; his face grew overcast, he sighed with impatience.

'He can go, and the flamingoes, and the swallows, and the falcons,' he said bitterly; 'only I must stay! How did he get away?'

'The boat of a friend took him; he sprang from the sea-wall in the dark, as the gang left off their night-work.'

'I should have been better there than here; then I too might have taken that leap.'

'And I?' said the eyes of Musa; but her voice said nothing.

Was it of this he was always thinking? To escape, to get away, to go elsewhere? Was this home, that was as dear to her as its hole in the rock to the cliff-pigeon, only to him but a prison the more?

'That brute, cursed with a thousand crimes, can get free!' he muttered. And I shall rot away my whole life in a hole in the rocks, and hear the feet of men go by above in the grass! And there is no blood on my hands!'

She looked at him in awe and pain.

'I thought you would be glad, for his sake,' she said wistfully, and then added, with a quiver of exceeding tenderness in her voice: 'For me, I wish all his crimes forgiven him; he sent you here.'

That exquisite softness of meaning and of accent passed by him; he was envying the freed man his flight across the sea to that mysterious isle, where, safe in the darkness of immemorial forests, the wild beasts still live in peace.

'If you had never seen me, it would have been well for you,' he said, with a sudden sense of self-reproach.

'When you are content, it is well with me; so well!' she said softly.

The very tenderness of the answer galled him; he passed it over.

'Saturnino did not mean you well,' he said bitterly. 'He said to me—"a fawn's throat is soon slit."'

'That was only because he has been a bad man, and cruel all his years, and his knife always ready. He knew well that you would not hurt me.'

'Have I not hurt you? Heaven pardon me!' he murmured, and he kissed her.

Sometimes he seemed in his own sight what men would have called him—a base coward.

'You hurt me when I think you wish yourself away,' she said timidly under her breath; and he said to her in answer:

'Nay, not away from you, but free to go out into the light, free to feel the wind on my face, and hear the stir of the world once more. Ah, dear! if they had opened his cage door for that vulture that I told you of, I think he would have found strength, even in his paralysed wings, to rise and go.'

'Perhaps,' she said simply, and said no more.

But that night, in her sleep, she sobbed bitterly, and she dreamed that she watched a flock of flamingoes, as she had watched one many a time, going westward, rose-red against the blue sky, and she thought that their wings were so ruddy of hue because they had been dipped in her own heart's blood, and she grew fainter and fainter the further they flew, and when they were lost to sight in the gold haze of the sun, then her life went from her and she sank down and died.

In Mantua that night, an old man sat writing in an ancient house looking on the Lago di Mezzo, and having its foundations sunk deep down amongst the reeds and osiers and the shifting sands. There was no sound but such as came from the hoarse chorus of the frogs that thronged the lake, and now and then a bittern's call or an owl's hoot. In the city, now dark with the gloom of a moonless midnight, the white marble of a mausoleum, with a lamp burning ever before it, was shut away behind the stately doors of the noble church of S. Andrea; and that tomb, with its guardian angels, was raised to the memory of his wife, who had died young whilst he was old. What he wrote now at the leather-covered table, by the light of oil wicks burning feebly, was his own confession that he had killed her with a dagger which her lover had left in her chamber in carnival time.

A pale-faced foreigner had haunted his steps for weeks and months, had traced all his past years almost hour by hour, had pieced together a million fragments of infinitesimal evidence, fine as dust, that thus assembled made a tale written on granite; had found out old servants, and made them speak in secrecy under their oath; and when the proof was so complete and overwhelming that no denial of or escape from it was possible, had come straight to the worthy judge of the civil court whom Mantua reverenced, and had said to him four words, only:

'You were the murderer.'

With the eye of a trained man of the law, the masked assassin knew at a glance that there was no loophole of escape for him; that this pale stranger, come he knew not whence, and working to what end he could not tell, had pulled down all his careful fabric of fraud and falsehood, and hemmed him in between two stone walls of evidence.

He confessed: seeing in that act some paltry chance of life and public pity, and wrote out his confession and signed it.

When on the morrow he was in the hands of justice, and conveyed to the prisons of the city, the task of Maurice Sanctis was over, the gift that he would give to Este was complete. Greater gift than this of freedom can no man give to another.

'I myself will tell him,' he thought, on the eve of that memorable day when the people of Mantua gathered about the marble tomb of Donna Aloysia, and talked in the narrow contrade of the city of this strange tragedy which had come in fresh guise to their mouths to help them pass the long, hot, empty hours.

But that night Mantua, as though jealous that a stranger from beyond the snowy mountains on the Lombard frontier should have come there to seize its secrets from out of its dark old palaces, that have seen so many crimes and kept so many mysteries untold, Mantua, as though angered against him, poured into his throat the poison of her subtle vapours, of her fever mists, that lurk for ever amidst her long fields of reeds and her pale-gleaming water-meadows.

That night he fell ill.

With morning he had almost lost consciousness. The people where he lodged, being frightened, called in Italian leeches, who, true to their school, drew blood from the body that needed all its strength, and then did little else. Without them his constitution might have done battle with the disease and conquered it, but, bled to utter weakness, he had no force left in him to resist the destroying power of that fatal and insidious venom.

By the part he had taken in the detection and accusation of Donna Aloysia's husband, the city had learned his name and his place in art and fame; but wiser science was too late summoned: he died on the fifth night, before even his own people could come to him from over the mountains.

His window was open to the wide waters, to the bulrush-thickets, to the slow-gliding Mincio that had given him his death: at this last hour, some sense returned to him, and he strove in agony to speak, gasping for breath the while.

But the utter blank of death soon came upon him, and he perished miserably, with only hirelings and strangers about him, as the midnight hours were tolled from the belfries, and the moon-rays slanting across the water fell through the casement of what had once been Donna Aloysia's chamber, and gleamed on the old gold of the baldacchino above the empty bed.

 

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