In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 47

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XLVII.

 

HE sat in the hot air and felt neither heat nor fatigue, though she had walked nigh twenty miles since daybreak. An adder crawled by her under the dry grass, and she saw it not. She was struggling with herself, with all her ignorance, her strong instincts, her absorbing passions, her unutterable love for this the only living thing she cared for out of all the universe.

Had he been left to her, all the nations of the earth might have perished in droves like oxen that die of pest and drought, and she would have looked on indifferent.

She sat here, in the silence and the sultriness of the day, like a statue of bronze set upon the dry and cracking ground.

She was quite motionless; the folded linen on her head kept off her face the vertical rays of the sun, but they fell unfelt on all her crouched form, on her closed hands that were resting on her drawn-up knees, and on her tired feet, past which the adder slid unseen.

She had no knowledge, no experience, but she had imagination.

Imagination showed her the world that waited for him outside that girdle of the moors that held her fast. The vision was in no way like the real world, but it was lovelier, richer, fuller; such a world as haunts poets in the dreams of a summer's night, crowded with shapes divine and clothed in light.

Here he was hers, but there———

She had no hope, no illusions.

She never thought once that he would say to her, 'come also;' she never doubted that he would take his freedom as the storm-swallow had done, spreading its wings without once looking back.

Whether she stayed there moments or hours she knew not; the great heat falling upon her seemed to numb her as if it were a rain of ice. Her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, her veins swelled and grew dark, her mouth was parched as with great thirst. Still she never moved, she was unconscious of physical suffering, she was saying always to herself—'He will go! he will go!'

The most terrible, the most cruel temptation that any human soul could ever know assailed her.

Almost she felt as if the priestly fables were true; as if the Power of Evil in bodily shape stood over her in the burning heat, with vast black wings outstretched above her head.

'Oh, dear God, help me!' she cried aloud in utter agony.

All that was violent, imperious, and sinful in her sided with the mighty passion she bore her lover, and urged her to bury for ever this secret, which would put an end to all her joy, and give him to the world. All that was noble, tender, and full of the impulse of self-sacrifice in her heart told her that to be false to him, to deceive him, to destroy his life that it might slowly consume itself away within her arms, would be as base as though she killed him sleeping.

The darkness and the light strove for the mastery over her.

She was like one torn in pieces by ravenous beasts that rent her asunder.

The sun was going towards the west, but was still high in the heavens, whose cloudless space looked grey beside the deep and sparkling azure of the sea, when to her ear there came a low faint sound; it was the voice that she loved calling to her, timidly and with caution, from below the nightshade and the acanthus foliage.

He wondered, and was afraid, at her long absence.

The sound pierced her apathy, and roused her, as a child's cry does its mother after birth.

She rose to her feet.

Her bright clear skin was pallid and dull; her throat was dry; her brain was hot, and beating in her skull.

She looked once over the yellowed moors and up to the cloudless skies, as a beast that is hunted to the death will do, seeking for pity, finding none.

She drew her belt close about her loins, as though she went to combat, then plunged without pause into the twilight of the tombs.

Ere he could speak, she cried to him, hoarsely, with her parching tongue, out of her swollen throat:

'They have set you free! Go yonder, read it.'

He looked at her, and trembled violently.

He stood just within the entrance of the sepulchre; and as she spoke, such a change came over all his face as comes to a dead man galvanised into sudden life. His lips, his eyes, his whole frame seemed suddenly to grow instinct with life and light and wonder, and rapture and radiance. He caught hold of her with both hands.

'What? what?' he said, with tremulous force. 'What do you say to me? Tell me again—quick, quick!'

It seemed to her as if all his life would go out of him in that passion of hope; as if he would dissolve into the air and vanish, as the Etruscan king had done.

He vibrated from head to foot with passionate desire.

She could not bear to look at him or feel his hand upon her.

'It is true,' she muttered hoarsely, as she shook herself loose. 'Go and see it for yourself. The old man has confessed. They look for you; you are free.'

Then she glided out of his hold entirely and went away into the darkness of inner chambers.

 

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