In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 55

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER LV.

 

HE old man, not to be diverted from his vengeance and his purpose, rested with her that night at his own farmhouse on the edge of the great corn lands, and in the morning began his journey afresh with other oxen, and took her to the sad sea town of Orbetello, where the people die of the heat like flies of poisoned meat, and the salt crystals on the shore are all its wealth.

The seizure of her was not legal, and he had no legal power to make it; but such trifles as legality could easily be ignored by the steward of a grand prince who was absent, and had half the Orbetellano in his keeping. When he left the inland tracks and entered on the long line of darksome pine-wood that by land connects Telamone and Orbetello, he for form's sake made the matter known to a brigadier of carabineers who was his friend, and, to have all matters right in form, his friend sent two mounted guards, with their carbines slung beside them and their cutlasses at their side, to go beside the ox-cart into the town, and give the captive up to the prison authorities.

Thence they went on again under the pines by the side of the blue glancing sea, and she lay, almost senseless, on the straw at the bottom of the waggon.

They met old Andreino on the coast. He held up his hands and cried aloud:

'Dear Lord! Did I not always know that she would meet her end like that! The saints be praised she did not get my sweet Nandino!'

At Orbetello they threw her into prison after hearing how she had hidden a dead body in the closed Etruscan tomb.

She did not understand of what they accused her. She thought vaguely that they missed the gold things stolen by Saturnino, and that they attributed the theft to her. But it was not clear to her; neither could she comprehend why they should blame her for having buried her little child and brought the body of Joconda there. She had done no harm; she could not see why they should seek to punish her. But the spirit with which a few months earlier she would have laughed them to scorn and cut her way free of them, if needs be with her knife, was gone out of her. Her lover was lost to her, and her child was dead: little else mattered.

She was kept in that prison a month, awaiting such time as they should see fit to remove and to try her for this crime. The air grew very hot; the town was like a sick ward in a hospital, the miasma crept up at sunset every night from the swamps around, and found out the people sitting on the sea-walls, or in the streets at dominoes, or lying panting and naked on their beds.

She was shut in her little cell; she who had all the day long roamed moor and shore, and plunged in the waves, and led the life of a woodland beast or of a silver-plumaged guillemot.

The cell had a square window, with four transverse iron bars; it was very narrow, but through it she could see the sea, the only familiar friend she had. She thought in after days that it was this sight of the sea which alone kept her alive in those terrible weeks. She could see a hand's-breadth of its blue jewel-like surface leaping, and seeming to laugh, and every now and then a felucca sail would sweep across the narrow field of her vision, or the wing of a gull would flit by, and these familiar things kept sense in her, and saved her from insanity.

Presently they put with her a prostitute; a woman abandoned and loathsome, who was there on a charge of having murdered a youth in a brawl. She was a creature of foul and filthy tongue, and she tried her uttermost to hurt what she saw was a pure soul; but Musa shut her ears and her lips, and looked at the sea; and the obscenity passed by her without harming her. She was beyond that woman's reach.

This great love which absorbed her was like an ivory wall built up between the world and her.

All the while, day and might, she was thinking—if he should go back? if he should go back and find the tomb empty, and her place vacant? Would he think her faithless? would he think she had tired so soon?

This doubt was such agony to her that at times it conquered her reason, and she would shake the bars that divided her from sea and sky, and cry aloud to the gulls and ships to take her message to him, to tell him where she was mewed up against her will, torn away from her moors and her beach, and her innocent liberties of wind and sunshine.

The next day but one they led her out to be examined. She regained her self-control, and was quite calm, though very pale.

'I have done nothing wrong,' she said to her guards; 'wherefore should I be afraid?'

They set her before her judge, the Pretore of the court there, a lawyer in black gown and cap. He was startled by her look, by her solemn luminous eyes, the repose of her attitude, the contempt upon her beautiful mouth.

'She is no criminal,' he thought, and called for the deposition of the testimony against her

Then the steward, who gave his name and that of his lord, gave his declaration of all that he had seen and done; of the dead bodies he had found there, and of the uses to which she had put the Etruscan tomb. He could not accuse her of theft as well, but he said that a shepherd boy, whom he could produce, had known her and seen gold there in an earlier time, whereas he had only found a gold fibula and a gold grasshopper or two.

When he had sworn all that, his men were called, and described on oath their entrance and examination of the tombs, and their discovery of the body of the little child and of the woman's coffin. The steward then added his own witness that the body of the woman was beyond doubt that of one Joconda Romanelli, who had been a tenant of his master's at Santa Tarsilla, and had died three years before.

This was the case against her. The young judge, who had felt prepossessed in her favour, looked grave and stern: on the use of the tomb as a dwelling-place he would have been inclined to look leniently; but for the concealment of the dead bodies he could see no plea: nothing could extenuate such an act, so hostile to every prejudice of a Christian land, even if no darker bloodguiltiness were involved in it.

The accusation ended, he addressed her, and asked her for her own explanation of her acts.

It was at all times difficult to her to find many words to explain her thoughts, and in this strange place, before these cruel unfamiliar faces, without a friend beside her, her heart was sick, her brain was dizzy, her eyes swam. Nevertheless she strove to be calm and to answer them. She could not bear that the listening crowd should think her afraid or guilty.

'I buried my little child with me,' she said simply, while the hot tears swelled up in her eyes and throat, 'because I wished to have him near me always. How can you think I hurt him? I would have given my life for his, of course. As for Joconda, they thrust her away in a hole in the sand, and I went for her because it seemed thankless to leave her all alone in the rain and the wind; she had been most good to me, and I loved her. I did not think I did any harm; I do not think that I did do any. I have nothing else to say. I found the tombs; I did not know I might not use them; I have maintained myself honestly in them, I owe no one anything.'

Then she ceased to speak, and stood without indifference, but without anxiety, with a tranquil and haughty simplicity and repose.

The judge was perplexed.

'How long did the child live?' he asked.

'Only seven days.'

'Of what did he die?'

'I cannot tell; he faded as the flowers do when the sun is too hot.'

'Why did you not give him Christian burial?'

Her old scorn flashed in fire from her eyes.

'Christian burial?—to pay a stranger to dig a hole, and mumble something, and then to go away and forget?'

'It is the law of the land.'

'The law is cruel, and foolish, and blind,' she said coldly, thinking of how in Mantua the law had condemned an innocent man, and honoured and praised the murderer.

'The law is sacred and omnipotent, as you will find,' said the judge in rising anger. 'Who was your lover?'

Over the pallor of her face the colour mounted fast, then faded.

'That I will never tell you.'

'The law shall compel you to speak.'

'That the law cannot do,' she said with a calm disdain. Had not Lena bitten through her tongue rather than speak of him she loved? So also could she. Este had told her the old Greek story.

The judge was angered, irritated, and bewildered. He knew not what to do. He could not think her guilty, yet he could not, in face of the offended majesty of the law he represented, declare her guiltless, and refuse the steward of Prince Altamonte his right to demand a trial.

He closed the examination hurriedly, and remanded her to prison, there to await her fate. There was no one to tell her that perhaps she might successfully ask to be left free until the time of trial, and, indeed, such a request would probably have been refused in view of the guilt of which she was accused.

But that night the judge said to his sub-pretore, 'Never did I see innocence if I do not see it thither; and she would go to the scaffold, if we sent her there, mute.'

In the populace, on the contrary, there was furious wrath against her, and readiness to condemn her to the worst chastisement had they had her fate in their hands. She was only the Musoncella, and she had offended all their dearest superstitions. What was she to deride the consecrated ditch in which they all hoped to lie, when it came to their turn, made snug till the Day of Doom, and made safe for that by their priests' mumbled rites?

They said amongst themselves that they would warrant she had the mal'occhio, and that this lover whom she would not name had been the foul fiend himself. Had they had their way they would have given her short shrive.

Meanwhile the guards took her back to her prison-cell.

Then she understood what Este had felt; why she had been powerless to console or to content him so long as the sense of captivity was upon him, so long as he could no more go whither he listed.

Now it was at this time the end of midsummer, and the law courts throughout Maremma would be closed until autumn by reason of the unhealthiness of the hot season, so that there she would remain until they opened again, and might die of the malaria of the town for aught that any one knew or cared. An accused is always two-thirds of a criminal in the eyes of the law, which always looks through magnifying glasses.

The steward went his way, the judge and the lawyers went theirs. No one cared whether she lived or died, and the hot winds came and blew the stagno into pestilential vapours, and the white piles of the salt glared in the sun, and the heavy livid heat settled down on all the shore, and disease walked abroad with every fall of evening dew.

They shut her in her cell, and the sole solace she had was that she was left alone in it. But it went hard with her to keep her reason; not to let go her hold on life and sense. She to whom it had been torture only to see the birds imprisoned in the nets, to whom the open air had been as breath from the very lips of a merciful God, to whom the lowliest weed had had beauty and the lowliest beast been a comrade, who had never missed the setting of the sun and the rising of it, who had watched the passage of the round moon through the illumined clouds with the deep delight that poets know, to whom the forest or the moorland day had been one hymn of praise to nature, and who, amidst her deepest sorrow, had found that consolation in the solitudes of the wolds which nature keeps for those who love it perfectly, to her, a prison cell was every hour such misery as those know who, buried in haste, awake from their swoon to find the oak of the coffin, the stone of the vault, for ever between them and the living world.

The only thing that saved her from madness was that small square space in the wall through whose bars she could see a hand's breadth of the sky and water, and smell the salt glad scent of the sea.

The only thing that made her cling stubbornly to life was the faint hope, shut in silence in her own breast, that Este might hear, and come.

 

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