In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 53

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER LIII.

 

HE shepherd's wife went back to the mountains with her flock as the days of the spring lengthened into midsummer, and the warm winds came from the south and blew amongst the ruddy wheat and the browned hay-grasses.

Musa was once again utterly alone; alone with a grave the more; a little grave, small almost as if a bird were buried there, that she had made herself with laborious effort in the rocky floor and lined with rosemary as the sedge-thrush lines its nest.

This was all that was left to her of her love.

But her lover lived still, though her eyes could not behold him and his heart called no more to hers; he lived in that great unknown world which had stolen and absorbed him; and therefore the courage of her life came back to her after a time.

Some day he might remember.

Some day he might have need of her.

So she lived on, and the warmth of the year grew into full summer, and the field flowers perished, as her little child had done, under the unbearable light of the sun.

A strange silence seemed to her to have fallen on all the world, although around her in truth the solitary moors were still musical with many a nightingale, and many a cushat cried its happy call from pine to pine, and across the far edge of the great plains there went many a band of reapers, come down from the mountains to lay the tall wheat low, many of them going by singing, with lutes strumming in front of them, and dogs about their feet, and wild magnolia flowers from old forsaken gardens slung with the wine gourds and swinging at their waists.

But they were too far off to be more than distant dark lines against the sky, and could their songs have reached her she would have been deaf to them, as she was to the nightingales thrilling through the night in those last melodies that would cease as the fire-flies would die with the fall of the wheat.

Yet in this intense stillness and desolation in which she dwelt it never came into her thoughts to seek out Este, never at any time. She could not go to him, without seeming to say, 'Have you forgotten—you my debtor in so much?'

She could not go to him without bringing both a rebuke and a reproach before her. If he forgot—he must forget. All she could do was to live on and wait; some time he might remember.

This seemed to her neither heroism nor sacrifice, but simple necessity.

If he had passed by her in a crowd she would have kissed the stones his steps had touched, but she would not have spoken, since to speak would have been to say to him, 'You are thankless.'

Her love was her religion.

Fools may say what they will; there is none holier.

She lived on without joy, but not wholly without hope. The long, slow-footed days seemed very long; the cloudy heat, the rainless wind, seemed wearisome and sad. She laboured enough, just enough, to meet her barest wants; no more.

She no more watched the stars, the plants, the birds, the streams and shallows with the blue butterflies at play upon their surface.

Her youth seemed to have died in her with the little child, her eyes seemed for ever to be darkened with tears that never fell.

As each hour went by she thought, 'Where is he? who beholds him? who watches for his step?'

When night fell, she prayed that in his dreams he might once dream of her, and so remember once.

Did he fear her reproaches that he did not come? Ah! how little he knew!———

 

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