In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 48
CHAPTER XLVIII.
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E stood mute and motionless awhile. Then, as the truth was borne in on him, tears gushed from his eyes like rain, and he laughed long and laughed loud, as madmen do.
He never doubted her.
He sprang up the stone steps, and leapt into the open air: into that light of day which he had been forbidden to see so long.
To stand erect there, to look over the plains, to breathe, and move, and gaze, and stretch his arms out to the infinite spaces of the sea and sky—this alone was so intense a joy that he felt mad with it.
Never again to hide with the snake and the fox; never again to tremble as his shadow went beside him on the sand; never to waste the sunlit hours hidden in the bowels of the earth: never to be afraid of every leaf that stirred, of every bird that flew, of every moonbeam that fell across his path!—he laughed and sobbed with the ecstasy of his release.
'O God, Thou hast not forgotten!' he cried in that rapture of freedom.
All the old childish faiths that had been taught to him by dim old altars in stately Mantuan churches came back to his memory and heart.
On the barren rock of Gorgona he had cursed and blasphemed the Creator and creation of a world that was hell; he had been without hope; he had derided all the faiths of his youth as illusions woven by devils to make the disappointment of man the more bitter.
But now, in the sweetness of his liberty, all the old happy beliefs rushed back to him; he saw deity in the smile of the seas, in the light upon the plains.
He was free!
He laughed again, as children do in utter gladness, the great tears coursing down his cheeks.
Man had remembered him, and God released him!
He was so happy.
Only through his heart one sharp pang shot, as though a dagger pierced it.
They could give him back his freedom and his youth, but never more could life return to that dead woman slain, in the season of her youth, by the waters of Mantua.
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