In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 49
CHAPTER XLIX.
FTER awhile, when some calm had in a measure succeeded to that intoxication of wonder and of thanksgiving, he went within and called to her.
Her voice answered him from the innermost chamber, where was the coffin of Joconda.
'I am tired, she said gently; 'let me rest.'
'But tell me, tell me once more,' he urged with nervous eagerness; 'this is true? Beyond doubt? What is it you have seen?'
'What I said. It is printed on the walls. Take the boat and go. You will see and hear what I have said.'
'You are sure it is no snare?'
'I am quite sure. Let me rest a little.'
Her voice was weak and broken.
He had no ear to notice that.
He thought only that she was sure—sure—sure. Then it was no dream. He was indeed free.
She was then standing within a foot of him in the grey gloom of the tomb that had been his home so long; but she was no more living for him. What were alive were the throngs of men in the cities, were the laughter of women and their dances, were the ways of the world and its gladness, and its dreams, and its passions, and its strife: all that he had been a stranger to so long; all that the youth in him sighed for, imprisoned here in the night of the grave.
He was not more ungrateful than the storm bird had been; only in him, as in that, there moved the irresistible instincts of movement, the longing to spread wings to the air and go. And in that tumult of emotion and aspiration, and remembrance and desire, she who gave him his liberty was forgotten, as she had been forgotten by the bird. It was natural, and she understood it. She had not looked for any other thing. Only she said once more, 'I am tired.'
She was tired, no doubt, going all those roads over the hot earth beside the mule to get him bread; but he did not think of it. The whole world had changed for him; life smiled at him once more.
Oh the joy, only to sit unmolested in the public square, and see the careless crowd go by, and feel the sun and wind upon his cheek!
That she was tired he had no leisure to remember. All the memories of his past were thronging about him like brothers and sisters giving welcome from long absence.
His heart was in that silent town amongst the shadowy waters, where he had drifted on his oars under the swell of the deep brazen bells of Ave Maria, and where he had seen the glisten of the lilies in the moonbeams when Death had slept with his mistress.
She was tired, no doubt; but all at once she fell back to nothing in his life; she vanished from it as a pluckt rose that drops to pieces goes silently away out of a careless hand.
'My dear! come forth and speak to me,' he said, with a sound of joy in his voice such as she had never heard in it even when he had first said 'you love me!'
'Wait a little,' she answered him; and in a few moments she came out to him, thankful that the light of the tombs was so feeble.
He caught her hands.
'Oh tell me, tell me again, it is true indeed? Tell me all they say.'
She answered him in a strange measured voice, as though she recited a lesson.
'They offer five thousand lire to whosoever can tell where you are. Perhaps your people put it there. It 'said that the old man has confessed himself guilty of his wife's murder, and that the State pardons you because you are innocent; that I do not understand———'
'It is the common formula when the law has been at fault and condemned the wrong person, he said quickly, a joyous agitation still trembling in him.: 'Yes, yes, no doubt my poor mother offers the reward. What she has suffered! You are sure you read it all?'
'Quite sure.'
He did not observe her, or he would have seen that the calm she had by such effort attained was strained almost to bursting.
She stood a little away from him; her head was bent, her hands were clasped one in another.
Once, she thought, perhaps now that he was free to go where he listed he would remember the promise she had given Joconda, the promise she had broken for him, and would say—'shall we go up to the house of God together?'
A vague expectancy, too faint and too unformed to be a hope, came to her for a moment. But the great humility and resignation of her love for him made her doubt whether he would even remember her, once having back his liberty and the world, and not one syllable escaped her lips to recall either his duty or his debt to him.
'I think I am mad,' he said, with a gay, unsteady laugh. 'I feel as if I had drunk new wine; the place goes round with me! Ah, to be free, to be free———'
'She will not rise again to welcome you, she said in a low and bitter voice.
For the first time she felt a throb of pity for the woman whose memory she had abhorred; they were alike forgotten.
'Hush! you are cruel,' he said angrily. 'Do you think I did not remember? I would give my liberty up now—now—to make her living once more!'
There was the vibration of true passion in the words: the woman dead in Mantua was dearer to him still than she who had given him a love surpassing human love in its sacrifice and its effort.
She was silent.
He stood silent also; unconscious that he was cruel, as men mostly are.
They rarely wound because they wish to wound, but because they do not remember, do not understand, do not measure the pain with which women love them.
'Might I go and read that, think you?' he said suddenly. 'It may be best to lose no moment of time in showing them I live—some impostor may cozen them—if you will not feel me unkind. Oh, heavens! if you knew—if you only knew—how I long to walk out amongst men in the bright broad day once more!'
'Go; go at once,' she said to him, still with that strange faintness and constraint in her voice, which he did not notice. 'The boat is there; you can find the shore without me; I—am—tired.'
'I will go, then, and I will return by nightfall, by midnight at the latest. Ah, dear, forgive me if I speak like a drunken man—I feel drunk—drunk with joy! Sweet one, kiss me and farewell; farewell for a few hours! Dear, you have been to me what no living man could merit in any living woman! Often have I felt ashamed———'
'Hush!' said Musa, and she strove to smile. It might be that never more would she behold him; she would not let him hear one accent of reproach as her farewell.
He took her tenderly in his arms and kissed her tenderly; feeling indeed that all the life he had to live on earth could never be long enough to repay her all that she had given to him, all that she had done for him here in these twilit chambers of the Etruscan dead. He kissed her again and yet again; then went.
He ascended again into the light and air, and walked a few steps across the ground.
It was so strange, so beautiful, so delicious, this mere sense of utter liberty: to stand and move erect in the sunshine of the declining day without danger, without terror, without being forced to scan the furthest distance lest any living soul should be in sight. Almost insensibly he moved onward and onward, and it seemed to him as if the dry turf were velvet and the hot air a caress from heaven.
Across the moor he saw the azure glisten of the sea; the boat was there.
Insensibly he walked onwards, his feet elastic as the deer's that goes to drink at the forest spring at daybreak.
The sun was now near its setting.
Maremma saw that western pomp and splendour in its uttermost perfection, its low shores shelving to the sea that rolls away to Spain and Africa. All colours of all jewels known to men glowed there, where the great beams shot upward, like archangels' spears. A storm afar off, beyond the headlands of Sardinia, gave majesty and magnificence to the hour. Low down, southward, dark purples and crimsons strove together, and a beam of lightning ever and again flashed zig-zag athwart them. But these were distant, and did not disturb the golden serenity, the rose-like radiance, of the immediate west, where the sun hung still high above the waters, one white sail and one brown crossing each other full in the effulgence of its rays.
He had not beheld the sun since, tortured with heat and thirst, he had drifted face upwards, hopeless, and seeing no escape from the galleys save in such death as he would find sinking to those depths below him, where the shark and the octopus waited for drowned men. It allured him with sweet unconquerable attraction. He went softly, almost insensibly, on and on, over the sand and the grass; his head held high, his eyes happy, his breath coming quickly and gladly, like the sighs of love that is content.
The sea was there; the world was beyond; men would welcome him back in their midst.
A vague sense of shame, of duty, of ingratitude, drew him backward like an unwelcome hand; but it had not strength to detain him.
'I will come to her; I will send for her,' he said to himself; and he continued to walk on and on, through the luminous warm air, towards the shining of the blue waters through the red-brown stems of the pines.
He was so happy; he could not stay to look behind. He longed for the voices of the world, for the hum and the laughter of the streets, for the sound and the sense of living, for the dark old houses leaning above the silvery shallows of Mantuan waters, while the lute throbbed below and the human heart beat above!
Away there, north and south, and east and west, the earth was alive with the mirth and the music and the triumphs and the passions of men.
He forgot that there were pain and privation and struggle and sorrow there also; he only remembered the world as an orchard of fruit and of flowers, fair to behold and to taste, full of sunshine eternal, and musical with tireless song. That Winter came there, and sickness, and grief, and death, he had forgotten.
The boat was on the edge of the sea, tied by a rope to a pine-tree, and with the oars of it lying on the beach.
'I will come back to her,' he thought, and he pushed the little skiff through the loose yellow sand to the surf.
For a moment it ploughed the soil, sullenly grating on the pebbles as it went; in another moment it floated buoyant and borne up by the water.
He sprang over its side, and plunged the blades of the oars in the sea.
The breeze that comes a thousand miles in a breath blew a scent of orange-flowers from the woods high above in the north.
His nostrils drew in with delight the sweet familiar scent; his lips laughed; his heart rose; he set the head of his boat northward, and rowed straight for where the orange-trees grew, and ran down to the sea and kissed it.
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