In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 57

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER LVII.

 

HEN a little while later the formalities were fulfilled, and she was allowed to leave her prison, homeless, friendless, penniless, but free, she understood why Este had gone: why love had become nothing to him beside that ecstasy of liberty.

The hot light whirled round her in giddy circles, her limbs were weakened by long and harsh captivity, she was feeble and faint, but she was almost once more happy. 'The earth was her own once more, and somewhere on the earth was her lover.

'If only they had left me that little grave,' she thought.

On the threshold of the prison there met her an old shrivelled man; the steward, her accuser.

He muttered quickly, in some shame:

'My dear—I am sorry—I had too much zeal—go back to the sepulchres if you will; go back; and the little child is buried in God's ground, buried beside Joconda, do not be afraid.'

Then he hurried away, being in great fear of her.

For Daniello Villamagna had said to him, 'If you will not disturb her in those tombs she loves I will rent them of you at a hundred scudi by the year, and your lord need never know.'

They had brought her out by the white salt-covered shore; and she stood still a moment, drinking in the autumnal air: all her soul, and mind, and body absorbed in one unspoken prayer, praising heaven that she was free.

She had not a friend in the world, nor any roof to cover her, nor even a coin to buy bread.

But she was not troubled by this; she was absorbed in thinking, 'How can I get back?' They might tell her, how they would, not to go there; this was her one thought. How would he find her elsewhere? And was not his memory there with every remembered hour of joy? The temptation came to her to go and seek him, but she thrust it away. She said to herself: 'I must not remind him of his debt.'

Nay, though she died of longing to look upon his face she would never do that.

It was afternoon. Though close on autumn the sultriness of summer had not abated there. The air was still thick with mosquitoes. The sails of the boats out at sea hung like painted sails of wood. Some men were killing a half-dead shark; his eyes rolled in horrible futile agony; they were cutting the live flesh off his spine.

Pale shores stretched on either side, pale mountains slid away into heat mists in the distance. Everything was still feverish, pallid, weary with that ghastly weariness of great heat which makes the ice-floe and the north wind seem in desire as paradise; the heat which blanches and enfeebles and fevers and wastes all in one; the heat in which flowers and birds wither and pant, and children droop as the tall stems of the sunflowers do; the heat in which all the beauty goes out of the land, and the trees grow grey, and the skies are ash colour.

In all that pallor and whiteness of the sickly town and the low-lying shore and the feeble people, the figure of Musa stood out with the grace and the rich colour of some crown imperial lily growing out of sand, straight as a young palm, luminous, golden, distinct.

She knew the danger of the marshes. She did not wish to die: who does that loves? Whilst the earth feels the steps of the feet we adore, to live is beautiful; whilst the eyes that we love unclose to the day, the sunrise that wakens them still smiles at us.

She shrank from any thought of death, since death would be eternal silence, endless separation; and she knew that to sleep on the swamps was death as sure as to drown in the deep sea. Yet the swamps stretched between her and the moorland tombs.

A hag came up and hissed in her ear that with such a face and such a form as hers money was to be had thick as the salt upon the sands, and Musa turned on her her great troubled eyes, half in wonder, half in scorn, and the woman shrank away.

She stood irresolute upon the shining shore; the old hag looked longingly at her, but dared not speak again. Something in the grand innocence of those troubled eyes awed and frightened her.

'Will you not even take my boat?' said the voice of Daniello near her, as he came from under the shadow of the sea-wall, and stood in her path, submissive, timid, with bared head as before an empress.

'You are all alone,' he added, feebly and stupidly, not knowing well what he did say.

'Have I so many friends?' she said curtly. 'Nay, do not think I want any. Now they have set me free I need nothing.'

'But you will not go on foot all that long way to your own moors?'

'Will I not! It is so long since I have felt the ground under my feet, I could walk on, and on, and on, I think, all day, all night———'

'You fancy so, because it is beautiful to you to be free. That I understand. But you are not as strong as you were a year ago. You are weaker than you know. You may faint by the way, and if you sleep out, you know that sleep after sunset means death where you go. Will you not let me take you in my boat? Or, if you choose the inland road, may I not find a mule-cart for you, an ox-waggon? There are plenty in the Orbetellano.'

'You mean kindly,' she said, with her mind made up, and beyond any pressure or inclination from without. 'But I need nothing but the freedom of my feet. It is months since I saw a tuft of grass! That is pleasure enough!'

'Where are you going?'

'I am going home.'

'To those tombs?'

'Where else?'

He was silent. He dared not say to her, 'there is a home in Sicily.'

He dared not. He would almost as soon have dared to strike her a blow.

'The old man said just now he would not drive me out again,' she added; 'I think he was sorry that he had been cruel.'

'I hope he was,' said Villamagna simply. 'But oh, my dear, that is no place for you; a hole fit only for the fox, and the bat, and the owl. Will you not think a little before you return to it?'

A smile flitted over her face—pale as a moonbeam, but of ineffable tenderness.

'It is dearer to me than if it were a palace. I would never live elsewhere. You have been good to me, that I see; but let me go now, and do not follow me.'

He looked at her with infinite longing; but he drew out of her path and left her to go onward unmolested and unquestioned. In the amorous impetuosity of his nature, a finer and a rarer feeling had come since her misfortunes had made her sacred to him. He had done her some service, so his lips were sealed, as were hers to Este. He could not say to her, 'this you owe to me,' without becoming a base hound in his own sight.

'After all I have done so little,' he thought. 'But more she would not take.'

She would never know that he had done anything; in all likelihood she would never have enough sympathy for, or remembrance of, him to guess the share that he had had in her release. But he thought it was best so. If she had known she might have been humbled, angered, troubled. She might have even been afraid to go back to that solitude which was all she knew of safety, all she cared for as home.

And other thoughts thronged on him. He had been born amidst the forests that deck the seaward side of Etna, and the fires of the mountain were in his blood and in his soul. He had been always taught from childhood that a just vengeance was a holy thing;—that women might sit down and weep, but that men should scorch their tears up with a dagger's flash and the smoke of blood justly shed.

All these days he had been saying always to himself, 'Who is the coward that has left her alone? Who is the beast that has forsaken her?' and thinking and thinking, thus perpetually, of one thing he had come slowly to put together this and that, and to divine that her lover had been the companion of Saturnino, the man of late set free by the same law which had condemned him.

But he was not sure.

No tortures would have forced the lips of Musa to speak Este's name.

They might have done with her what they would. She had the temper of Greek Læna in her. She would never have spoken.

He let her go away from him along the sad sea-shore with the strewn weeds steaming in the torrid sun; then with a few long steps he overtook her and spoke in her ear.

'It was the Mantuan noble that you loved?'

She turned her head with a quick, frightened anger, but in the warmth that mounted over the pallor of her face, in the look of her dilating eyes, he knew the truth.

She could not lie, she would not speak; with that one swift glance over her shoulder, she shook him off, and hastened on. He had been answered.

He let her go once more onward and northward towards the moors, alone.

She had escaped the horror of years of an imprisoned life only through him; but that she did not know, and he would not have her told of it.

'She would be angry with me,' he thought in his humility; the humility which is the sign of all great love. He knew besides how intolerable it would be to her to learn that he had spent money in her defence which she could never hope to be able to repay to him.

He stood motionless, looking after her as long as she was in sight.

When a curve in the land took her from his eyes, he gave a deep short sigh, he muttered a deadly oath; then he retraced his steps and went back to the harbour where, in the shallow salt water, the lateen craft in which he had come hither was lying moored, the sun on its one white sail. In another moment he had leaped into the boat and cast her loose.

There was wind blowing, a hot wind straight from the east, and full of sand.

He set the boat's head towards far Sardinia, lying hidden in the pallid clouds of heat.

A little way out of the town, as she reached the shade of the pine-woods that lined the shore, the woman Pomfilia overtook her.

'Let me go with you,' she cried. 'You are not well enough to go alone; let me go with you. My husband and the sheep are on the moors; I could go by the boats, but I would rather walk with you.'

'You are kind to think of it,' said Musa; 'but I would sooner be alone.'

'Ah, you have had a rude time,' sighed the shepherd's wife, 'and never might I have heard of it but for that good Sicilian skipper who came up upon my hills at home and hunted me out and brought me here in time.'

'Did he do that?'

She coloured with pain and vexation; she could not bear to think she owed so much to him.

'Ay, that did he,' said the woman of the Apennines. 'To my thinking, but for him those brutes would have caged you for half your life and more. It would be well if you could care for him; he has a good heart and loves the ground you tread on. I know not what the other one is, nor where; but for sure he left you alone in your trouble and your adversity, and merits nothing.'

She paused, frightened at the look of the eyes which silenced her without any need of speech.

'Go you by the boats,' Musa said curtly. 'For me be not afraid; I know my way home. I thank you for all you have done, and when you want shelter or food come to me. But, if ever you dare speak to me of the Sicilian again, I will not see you ever any more.'

The shepherd's wife shrank away humbly, and went back to the sea-wall, where boats were always coming and going.

Musa passed on under the pines.

She could not have borne the fret and jar of the woman's well-meant condolence and sympathy. She could not have borne the sound of any human voice—save one.

All she could bear to hear was the breathing of the wind amongst the trees, the lap of the sea water on the beach. All human words only lacerated and hurt her, be they gentle as they might.

She had been sorely wounded. The insult of her captivity was bitter to a nature which had inherited all her father's pride, and something of her father's arrogance, with a sensitive reserve that her lonely life had fostered till she shrank like the mimosa from any human touch.

She needed to be alone; alone with the shadows and the leaves, and the wide waters, and the green wet plain, and all the things that told her she was free.

She found her way back as the hunted hare escaping travels footsore to its form amongst the saintfoin and the spurge.

She was very tired. She was often faint; she had not a coin upon her; she slept the night out under a little hut of brake and ling made for a goatherd, and deserted by him when the heats had come.

She was feeble now; her glorious perfection of health and strength had gone from her, and the symmetrical limbs that had never known ache or pain were now languid, and felt broken as she dragged them over the great silent moorlands.

But the hope of her return sustained her as it sustains the beaten panting fox, or the stockdove with shot in its little aching body that yet flies on to die, if it can, in its own familiar place.

Her one thought, her one terror, was, if he should have been there, if he should have found her absent, would he think her so soon faithless and tired? Would he have gone away in anger and doubt?

That thought of him, and the longing in her to be at home once more, to be by her own hearth and within the walls that held her memories of him, kept up her fainting spirit, kept erect her trembling limbs.

With unutterable joy she at last entered on the wild woodlands, where a rising of the soil let her look away eastward over the sea of foliage, and search with yearning eyes for the landmarks by which she would know from afar the place of the graves of the Lucumo.

When she saw them at last, and the great suber-oak rose up above its fellows to her sight, then indeed she knew that she was home once more.

She dropped on her knees and praised God.

 

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