In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 46

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XLVI.

 

HE summer passed on and entered the sign of the lion once again, and more than a year had gone since that night when she had come down the steps of the tombs and found a nameless fugitive seated by her hearth. All the summer, since he had forbade her going into the towns to sell her work, they had had but little food. It was the season of the year when the woods yielded the least, when it was hardest without going far afield to get enough to make even a slender meal. The wild oats indeed she had cut and threshed and kept; but such grain is unpalatable, and yields but little nutrition, and ill sustains the strength of a man.

Her old carking care came back on her; she saw that he grew paler again and thinner, and a terror seized her lest again the miasma of the land should take hold of him in his weakness. So strong was this fear, so vivid were her memories of that awful fever fiend with which he had wrestled, half-dead, so long, that she passionately besought him to grant her leave to go and sell her store of work and bring him back food and wine.

He himself began to see that they could not long continue to live thus, and let an unwilling assent be wrung from him. After all, too, he cared less. She had a lovely face, but he had looked on it so long that he knew its every line by heart, and thought he could have moulded it in clay with his eyes shut.

She was always there; that was her only fault to him. Perhaps it was the most fatal fault of all.

Therefore he let her go on this errand without objection, and bade her take with her a few of the trifles he had modelled: he fancied they might bring in a few pence.

She could not bear to leave him for a day, but she knew not what else to do. There was no one she could seek aid from within reach, nor could she have trusted any living creature with his secret.

She could not see him waste away for the bare need of food, and she was well aware how the poison mists that rose at sunset from every morass and every stream seized on empty viscera and impoverished blood.

She clung about his throat, and kissed him with tender passion; then she went.

She had lost her buoyant vigour of movement; she had felt unwell the last few weeks and did not know what ailed her; but she summoned her courage and her strength, walked to the coast, and there set sail in her little boat, that had the pine-bough at its prow. The morning was fine and calm; the sea was blue and so were the skies; there was no chance of foul weather. It would have been nearer to have crossed the country on foot to Telamone; but she did not feel as strong as usual, and the linen she had spun and the matting she had made were heavy to carry.

The sea was quiet; there was wind enough to fill her little sail, and what there was favoured her. Under the easy motion of the boat, with the play of air and light around, she recovered her natural spirit; she sat and steered and now and then thrust an oar in the water, that was all. She wanted to make all the haste she could; she longed to be at home again, carrying home good food and the red wine that is man's strength.

She sailed in over the seaweed and the sand of the choked-up bay of Telamone under the shadow of its castle on the rock. She moored her boat hastily and went into the sorry place to try her fortune. The townspeople, such a few as they were, would buy nothing; but there chanced to be there a pedlar who had known her as a child in the house of Joconda. He was one of those who bring goods and news together from the outer world into Maremma, and round whose packs the housewives and the gossips gather eagerly.

He was jovial, and not more unjust than trade makes all traders, great and small. He bought all she had of spun linen at a fair price, and being a man who knew the bigger towns and their tastes, and went about with his merry eyes open, he discerned at a glance the talent and grace of the clay images, and bought them also and shut them in his wooden brass-bound box. Then he persuaded a huckster of the coast to take her matting too, and altogether made her passing rich.

'Nay, I knew Joconda forty years,' he said, 'and a good soul she was, though silent as a clapperless bell, but good and sturdy and honest, and hospitable always if she had but a crust.'

Then, being a chattering man, a bell with more clapper to it than was needful, he would ask her many questions, all of which embarrassed her to answer. She replied at random, vaguely, longing to get away, and buy what she had come for, and set sail again. But the pedlar was not easily denied, and chattered on; and then out of a dirty lane came Andreino, who had pulled himself over in his old punt from Santa Tarsilla to speak sub rosâ of some tobacco he had received contraband from fishers of the French coast, and which he was willing to sell, as he usually sold such good consignments, to the parish priest of Telamone.

Andreino would be chatted with as well, and listened to, and was curious, and hard to pacify, as he hobbled by her side to the edge of the shallow anchorage.

Had she come by the sea? Was she living as far off as the foundries, then? No? Under the mountains? Then why come by sea? She looked grand and proud; a little pale, but quite a woman now. Had she no wooers? Was she still the Musoncella? Well, time would cure her of that. And then the sly old man looked at her sideways, and said with a low chuckle:

'And the youth that was sick, my dear? Do you make the muso to him too? Eh—eh? I fancy not! Well, pluck your cherries while they are ripe; the cherry-time soon passes.'

The only answer she gave him was the hot blush that came over all her face, and he chuckled the more.

Then all at once he said to her:

'There is a fine piece of news put up all down the coast. But no doubt, my dear, you have seen it; though in that cherry-time I talked of most of you are blind. But if you do know that stray dog, you may as well get the reward for him.'

'A stray dog?' she repeated. She was ready to help any dog, for sake of dead Leone.

'A dog that will pay well,' said the old man with a grin. 'You can read; I have only heard tell of it; look, it is up on the tower there.'

The south wall of the old martello tower in which the coastguard had of yore been located had a large white placard on it, covered with printed letters that were only confused lines and dots of black from where Andreino was sitting. It was but a step to the wall, and she went up to the proclamation.

What she read, printed there, was the declaration of the pardon of the State to an innocent man, in the common formula of the law.

The published words stated that one, Count Luitbrand d'Este, had been cleared of the imputed crime of blood-guiltiness by the confession, made in Mantua, of Ser Piero di Albano, who had acknowledged himself to have been the assassin of his wife, Donna Aloysia Gorgias; and who had further declared that he had planned and carried out the assassination in such wise that the accusation of it should fall upon his wife's lover, and be his vengeance of their adultery.

It proceeded to declare that whereas, by due surrender before the courts of law, Piero di Albano had declared himself the assassin of his wife, therefore he who had been accused of and punished for the crime of Donna Aloysia's murder was now declared innocent and free of law; and whosoever might have seen him living, or heard of him dead, was bidden under penalty to report their knowledge to the State.

The print said, further, that a large reward would be paid to whosoever should either give information of the whereabouts of the Count d'Este, escaped from the Isle of Gorgona two years before, or proof of his death, if it had been known to take place.

She read this, standing in the sunshine, with the wall before her, and about her the buzz of the people's voices.

She stood gazing stupidly at the white sheet fastened up there upon the old, red, peeling, heat-cracked bricks.

Then the sea and the earth seemed to heave and rise up before her, as they do in an earthquake, and a great darkness came down, as from heaven, over her eyes.

The world was gained for him; but he was lost for her.

He would go away!

That was the one thought standing out from the blackness which seemed to have fallen over her like a veil flung by some unseen hand.

Then, quick as a snake darts out of its hole in the ground, another thought crossed and supplanted that one. She remembered that unless she told him he would never know.

Not a soul but herself and Maurice Sanctis knew that he lived. Not a tongue save theirs could tell of his hiding-place. Not a living creature would he ever dare to accost; no human eyes would ever behold him.

With the instinctive concealment of her race, which is in the Latin temper side by side with so much fire and fury, she turned from the wall with no evidence of any emotion on her face or in her voice.

'The law makes blunders, and people suffer them,' she said simply to Andreino, who shrugged his shoulders despairingly.

'They say the law is never wrong,' he answered, 'but were I that young man, I would have some one's blood for being shut up and chained, and all for nought. If he be living anywhere, methinks he will find out his unjust judge and kill him.'

'Perhaps,' said Musa; but she did not hear his words; they were like the burr of the water running underneath the old stone piers, where some fisher folk were busy setting their lobster-pots in the shallows.

Her head was throbbing quickly; all before her eyes seemed blood-red; at her ear there was a sound like some one whispering, 'why should he know? why should he know?'

When he knew, he would go away.

With the profound humility which is the characteristic of all great love, she knew at once that he would go; she never doubted for a moment that she would have no power to hold him.

She did not reason on it, or frame it in any conscious formula, but her reason told her that he would go, once learning he was free.

Yet she bade Andreino a good-day in a steady voice, threw her packages into the boat, and set sail homeward.

The old man looked after the little vessel as it went over the waves, dipping and righting itself with pretty ease.

'Her lover cannot be that missing youth of Mantua,' he thought, 'or never would she have taken it so quietly. A great reward, and a damo with a title to his name! Nay, nay, such good luck would have turned her head. She used to be in heaven when one but gave her a silly flower or a shell.'

The boat went over the sea homeward.

It was now high noon.

The sea sparkled, blue as woodland pimpernels, and ran merrily from under her bows.

She was hardly conscious of anything she did: she steered straight by sheer force of habit, not seeing either the sky or the water, either the pale white coast or the dusky belt of the pines that divided the beach from the hills.

When the boat was beneath the Sasso Scritto, she ran it ashore, left it lying on the sand, with the wine and the flour in it forgotten, and took her course over the familiar moor and marsh and pasture lying steaming in the sun.

Grey and opal hues were cast over the land by passing clouds; where some herds were crossing it, a cloud of dust rose, dusky and curled like smoke.

She traversed the well-known ways. The sky and the earth seemed whirling round her. Her feet moved without her knowing it. Her body seemed one great pulse, beating, beating, beating.

She never thought of his innocence being made known; had she not always known it? What she thought of only was this: as soon as he was told, he would go.

Need he ever be told?

She held him as one holds a bird in the hollow of the hand.

If she never unclosed her hand, he would never go.

No, he need never be told: she said so to herself as she walked: never, never.

If her mouth were shut, no other could speak. He was hers, as the dead are the earth's.

She could keep him close here, hers only, hers absolutely. Was he not hers, purchased by all that she could give, won from the very edge of death, wrestled for long with sickness and pain, and possessed and adored?

But for her he had been ere now a lifeless creature, fallen under some tangle of mastic, some bush of marucca, eaten by the hogs of the brake and the marsh, picked bare to the bone by the birds of Maremma; no more than any rotting lizard or carcase of a buffalo dead of drought.

She was but a wild creature of the moors herself, with something noble in her instincts born there as in a dog's, and with something of strength and faithfulness taught her by Joconda.

Her first impulses were of passion and of possession.

He was hers, here, in the shadowy caverns of the earth. Why should she lose him to the world of light, that unknown world where she had neither place nor part?

His water-city that he loved; the women leaning from their lattices, with the pearls braided in their hair; the hum of strange towns, the stir and strife of streets, the laughter and the music, the learning and the love, the jocund comedy and bitter tragedy that jostle each other on the stage of life—why should these become her rivals? She could not contend with them; they were to her known only through his words; they were mere phrases to her, but she feared them.

She vaguely pictured, beyond the opaline horizon of her plains, brilliant and shadowy hosts, dream-cities, golden gates of ivory palaces, faces of women lovely as the opening blossoms of the lily and the rose. Why should she yield him up to these?

She walked across the width of white sunshine shining on the dust, and said in her heart: 'I will never tell; I will never tell.'

She was not conscious of any treachery in her resolve; she had only the barbarian's instinct to hold and keep.

They were so happy; so it seemed to her. She would have wanted nothing more all her life long than to live on in that solitude, and spin, and weave, and hunt, and fish, and bake bread, all for him, enough repaid by a caress, a murmur, even a mere glance.

She walked with dull step and heavily-throbbing heart over the sunburnt earth. The many miles seemed like a rood, yet they cost treble the time to traverse than ever they had cost her before.

The old joy with which she had always seen the brown swell of the uplands, the blasted stem of the big cork tree, was all gone. She was afraid to see them now, the burden of this knowledge being shut up in her breast.

It seemed to her as if iron were bound about her ankles; the placid, drowsy amber light seemed like a wall of steel between herself and him. Without knowing what she feared, she was afraid to look upon his face with this secret withheld.

They had always met each other as simply, as naturally, as two blossoms that blow together in the summer breeze, as two children that run to meet and play. But already the shadow of the thing she knew, and would not reveal, went before her, and would stand like a ghost from the grave between his life and her own.

The heat was very great; it was a heat as if the fires, burning in the woods and on the mountains, had coursed down in streams of flame and licked up all the beauty of the earth as prairie-fires do.

It was only the scorch from the blaze of the sun at his zenith, but it was terrible. The very toads were panting, sunk downward in the lowest deeps of the pools. The buffaloes and the boars buried themselves low in beds of canes and cotton-grass; the birds were all still; only the tree-frog shouted in the shrubs, and the snake lay basking and happy on the sand; the wild mares and their foals could scarce drag one hoof after another; but she was insensible to the sun-rays, that darted at her like arrows red-hot, and lapped her with tongues of flame, and lay on all the land around her like a plague.

She thought only of this secret she carried in her brain. Would he whom she loved not read it in her eyes?

She would never tell him.

That fierce tenacity which was in her blood, as it had been in Saturnino's, fastened on to the one resolve and clung to it.

For the time all that was passionate, violent, fierce, selfish, held their sway, and all she thought of was to hold and keep him, as the child in the cruelty of his possession holds the poor bird it loves until it dies strangled in his embrace.

For the time she did not even realise that what she would do was base. She only remembered that he was hers, that if the world took him he would be hers no more.

Yet, though she was not fully conscious of the treachery she meditated, all the speed and gladness with which hitherto she had always flown homeward to him had gone from her heart and from her feet.

She went on more slowly than her wont across the grass; unwillingness to look upon his face had taken the fleetness from her steps. Without her consciousness of it, this secret which she would keep, this wrong that she meant to do, was already a barrier between herself and him.

When she had drawn quite near the myrtle-brake above the place of the tomb, she stopped, and for the first time in all her life she trembled. If he should read what she had seen upon her face!

With a desperate hand she pushed away the brambles and went down into their place of refuge.

Even here in the heart of the soil the heat had penetrated. The air even underground was heavy and warm, and with little power in it to refresh the panting lungs of man or beast.

In the outer chamber, where the most air came, Este was lying asleep.

He was cast down for coolness on the stone bier where once she had seen the king lie in his armour of gold. He looked like a dead man. He was very pale, his chest scarcely heaved as he breathed, his lips were close shut, his long lashes rested on his wasted cheeks.

The loose shirt he wore fell off his breast and showed the emaciated bones, and the feeble yet feverish beating of his heart. In his noonday sleep he looked exhausted, hopeless, heart-broken.

Suddenly, as if it were written in letters of fire above his head, she saw the truth: that what was her home was but his prison, that what was her heaven was but at best a living death to him.

Without awaking him she went away and climbed again into the upper air; and there, where the marucca and myrtle made a shadow above the place of the tombs, she sat down on a block of palombino, stunned and dumb.

At sight of him she had known the baseness of the thing that she would do.

She saw herself as guilty, as cruel, as vile as he who betrayed with a kiss, whose memory has come down through all the ages as the traitor of all traitors.

 

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