In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 51

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER LI.

 

N the seventh morning there came across the moors the shadows of a man and of a mule. Standing, looking with tearless, aching eyes along those sunburnt levels over which he had gone, her heart gave a leap of rapture and her face grew warm with blood as she saw a human figure through the haze of heat. He had come back!

Soon that joy, too exquisite to live longer than a breath, was broken roughly. It was a stranger who stood beside the laden mule, his face and figure were unknown to her. She dropped back into her attitude of crouching hopeless apathy. What was any pedlar or other traveller across the plains to her?

The mule came on and was led beside the trunk of the cork tree, and the man who led it called aloud to her, 'Is it you who live beneath the ground here? If it be you indeed, I have a letter———'

At that word she leapt to her feet, changed in an instant, as the dry wood is changed when the rosy flame catches it.

'Is he well?' she cried. 'The letter! the letter! Give me, quick.'

'The Count d'Este, my master, is well and in Mantua,' the man answered. 'He sent me here with these; he bade me get a mule at a town on the shore; he bade me see you myself and take him all tidings———'

'The letter! the letter!' she cried, with her hands outstretched.

He gave it to her.

'Oh, dear God! what a blessed thing it is that I can read!' she thought as she seized it; herself transformed, her cheeks the colour of the wild rose that was burning on a hundred hills and vales, all her whole face instinct with life and rapture and gratitude and wonder; wonder that he had remembered, he who never in any moment of her life was absent from her memory.

'Wait without,' she said to him, and hurried down the stone steps of the tombs.

She could not bear that a stranger's eyes should see her happiness.

It was hard for her to read written words, she had seen so few.

But love aided her; she read it trembling in every limb.

It was not long.

It gave her tender names and words; it begged forgiveness that he had been unable to return; he had been compelled to leave at once for Mantua; there he had learned that no good thing comes alone, that not only had the law freed him, but that he had inherited the vast property and the palace in Rome of a distant relative on his mother's side from whom he had never expected aught. This heritage took him to Rome at once, where henceforth he would spend much time; soon he would come to her or send for her.

'What can I say to you? I owe you so great a debt; it weighs me down,' he wrote in conclusion. 'Think me not heartless that I fled. Nay, dear, it is only that liberty is so rapturous a joy, it makes one mad, when for so long one has been thirsty for it. I send you a few things that women care for; mere nothings, indeed, but they will remind you of me. Soon I will come to you or send for you. I took your boat with me and lost it, but you will need it no more, for you must leave that wretched life you lead at once. Go where you will and tell my messenger where I shall find you. Love me always.'

And as he had written those words he had thought:

'Will she be for ever on my life? I owe her so much, but—but—what shall I do with her in the world? She is but a beautiful barbarian, and she will never understand, and she will be for ever like a chain about my feet. And all I want is to forget—to forget!'

She read the letter once—twice—thrice. Inside it was a roll of bank-notes bearing the cipher of a large sum.

If he had killed her she would have kissed his hand as it took her life; and it would have hurt her less.

There was on the slab of nenfro near her paper and a pencil which she had bought for him long before that he might make drawings for the clay he moulded.

She could write very ill, in the large, straggling, ill-shaped letters which were all she had been taught.

She wrote thus, with much labour, on a sheet of the paper,—'I am well. I want nothing. I am yours always; there is no need to say it. I send you back all the things you send because I wish not for gifts and have no need of money. I shall be always here. Think not of me save when you desire.'

Then she signed it tua eterna devota, and put it up in a packet with the bank-notes. His letter she thrust into her bosom.

She went up into the light; the messenger, who was an old servant of the house in Mantua, thought, as he saw the change in her face, 'Was the letter cruel? why did he not come himself?'

He had undone his burden, which was one of the great Italian nuptial caskets, velvet-studded and metal-bound. He had spread out upon the grass some of its contents. They were things of great delicacy and value; strings of pearls, fine raiment, eastern stuffs, jewels. At them she scarcely glanced.

'Put them all up,' she said to the messenger, 'and take them back to him and give him this letter. I do not want anything; if he ask you, say I am quite well.'

The servant went back faithfully to Mantua, and faithfully delivered the great casket, and the poor, ill-written, humble, yet proud words.

Este was deeply angered.

The words failed to touch his heart because they stung his conscience.

'Will she ask all my life?' he thought.

But she asked nothing. And the heroism of her silence, as of her sacrifice, awed him, oppressed him, humiliated him.

 

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