In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 60

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER LX.

 

S he passed away over the moss-grown earth, and she sat there in the shadow of the Lucumo's chamber, some sudden perception of his words, some sudden sense of the menace which had been in them, came to her, breaking through her absorbed mind as the glare of a torch burns through a dull grey fog.

Whilst he was with her the full purport of what he had said had not dawned on her; she had dully wondered why this man, a stranger, an outlaw, should think of her in any way; but now, in his absence, certain of his muttered disconnected words came back on her recollection. A great dread suddenly seized her; surely danger menaced Este. Perhaps, she thought, this man was mad, perhaps his long accumulated crimes, and his many years of captivity, had made him lose his reason; but, mad or sane, remembering how he had looked, how he had spoken, she began to doubt, she began bitterly to lament that she had blessed him and wished his sins forgiven him. Assassination had been no more to him than the slitting of the kid's throat is to the butcher; human life had never been of more account to him than the grass of the field as it drops is to the mower; he, like Etruscan Tarquin, had held men of no greater sanctity than the poppies growing with the corn.

There had been cruel hate in him when he had spoken of Este; why had she not seen that before, why had she let him go away? An agony of fear came on her; the worst of all fear to bear because it was so vague.

Instinct rather than any reasoning made her feel that the return of Saturnino meant some peril, if not the greatest, to her lost lover.

Would aught save crime have had the power to lure him from the secrecy of the Sardinian forests?

She thought not.

She remembered the gleam in his great black eyes when he had spoken Este's name, the steel-like gleam of an unquenchable hatred.

Some sinister motive must have brought the outlaw from those dark glades where he was safe from arrest unless the State sent soldiery swarming through the forests and over the mountains in greater numbers than it would ever spare for the mere sake of capturing a galley-slave; and her instinct told her that no motive would be ever so grave, no magnet ever so powerful, to the brigand of Santa Fiora as vengeance: such vengeance as can only quench its thirst in blood, such vengeance as on the soil of the Italiote has ever been held as justice and as holiness.

She could not tell what root his desire of vengeance sprang from; whether it were some fancied wrong long brooded over, some smouldering fire of antagonism, which had burst into flame in envy at Este's liberty; or whether it were some fantastic sense of amends owing from him to her, because, through him Este had first come to the shelter of the tombs; she had heard in days of her childhood the stories that were told in Maremma of the impulses of capricious honour, of uncertain generosity, which had at times broken through the ferocity and selfishness of his natural temper. Which of these might be the motive that ruled him she could not tell; but such instinct as makes the dog scent danger for his master, whilst yet nothing is seen or heard, made her tremble for the one whom she loved, whom she had so long sheltered and defended that to save him from his enemies was still second nature to her.

In an instant the thought that Este still might need her poured new life into her limbs, awakened the old bold spirit in her that had sunk into the apathy of sorrow, and revived in her alike the courage and the subtlety which had so often served him when he had been a hunted criminal with a price set on his head. She knew at once what she would do, what she must do.

In open dispute she could never hope to vanquish or disarm Saturnino Mastarna; by betrayal of him she could never stoop to arrest his steps, she would sooner have killed him; she knew that what she had to do was to watch him, and if he let Este alone, then would she in turn leave him alone. She knew that she might suspect him falsely, but that if his soul were bent on guilt no words of hers would turn him from it; whilst on the other hand, if he had no such thought, to gall him by suggestion and accusation of it might sting into crime a temper which had always found in crime the fiercest joy and most lasting desire of life.

She wasted not one moment, but took her course with that swift decision which had often served her in good stead. In Este's service she recovered the elasticity, the force, the energy, the physical animation, which since he had left her had gone out of her as utterly as its colour and palm-like grace go out of a dianthus that has been plucked from its place in the rocks beneath the sea and cast down to perish on the sand.

She took some bread, some maize, and a gourd of water, took that three-edged poignard of Florence which Este had found in the brigand's lair by Santa Fiora, and had left behind him here, took one little silver piece that had remained in the old coffer with the corn, and, closing the stone doors of the tombs behind her, went out on the track of Saturnino.

To her skilled eye, used to trace such slender signs, the marks of his footsteps were visible on the wet mossy ground he had traversed. She followed them; they went always southward, straight ahead to that golden horizon where Rome lay, sixty miles or more beyond the moors, out of sight, sunk down in the sunlit ocean of the air.

Her heart stood still as that southward direction of his steps brought confirmation of that sudden fear which had dawned on her as though its light were shed from heaven. But it was not for the first time that terror gave her fresh courage, as the spur wrenches fresh effort from the sinking horse. To baffle and disarm this man would need all her prudence and all her boldness, that she knew; and almost her terror was effaced by the sense of returning happiness which came to her with the thought of once more shielding Este from any danger.

She walked on and on, cautiously though quickly; stooping every now and then to verify the traces of Saturnino's passage through the woodland. There was but one path practicable southward; and she knew that he would not dare to show himself on the main road, the once Consular and Imperial Highway that ran far nearer the moor than did this mule track over the moors and meadows, which was only in use by the charcoal-burners, the herdsmen, the foresters, and the hunters, and which now mounted over tufa or sandstone rocks, now delved down into wooded hollows, and now was interrupted by brawling streams descending from the hills.

She had walked perhaps three miles from her own abode, when a rise in the ground let her look far ahead, and in the bright light, dark against the sunny sky, still holding on straight towards the south, she saw the tall gaunt figure she pursued. He was moving quickly, still clad in the goatskin clothes which shepherds wear, and still carrying the crozier-shaped crook and the wallet on his back.

She had him in sight; she breathed more freely; now there was nothing to do but to keep upon his track and go wherever he went, unseen by him. It would be difficult and it would be dangerous; but her spirit was not lightly daunted, once aroused.

She felt for the dagger in her girdle as he had felt for his; it was the only sure friend that either of them trusted. She drew the breezy autumn air more deeply into her lungs, that she might get strength from it as men do from draughts of wine. She walked on, keeping in his path as surely as his shadow did, watching with untiring eyes every movement that he made; now losing him perforce from sight as the ground he traversed sank beneath the bushes, regaining sight of him as he emerged from the scrub of myrtle, of oak, or of olive, and climbed some rugged steep over which the bridle-path ran.

She marvelled that he dared be out thus in open daylight; but he trusted to his disguise in part, and in part to the fact that the State believed him in Sardinia, and hunted him no more, letting sleeping dogs lie as the proverb bade them do. In truth they were not unwilling that he should thus escape; his name had once been like a trumpet-call to all Maremma, and they were content that he should get away and trouble the law no more. He had suffered sixteen years of the galleys; to all the populace this seemed punishment enough, too much in truth, for a bold, open-handed son of the soil who had taken to the hills as other men took to the ploughshare or the forge. He knew that the popular sympathy would everywhere be with him, timid, yet strong enough to make the law sometimes willingly blind. Relying on it, and on the solitariness of the Maremma wilds, he walked boldly on towards his goal, and she, unseen by him, followed step for step.

Happily for her he only moved by day, and this by reason that the nights were moonless, and the half-covered mule tracks which he alone durst follow could not be found, even by his knowledge of the country, after dark. So at night sleep did refresh her, even though it were fitful, startled, and roofless. The owls flew by her and the pole-cat glided past, and the bats and the rodents stirred the air and the grass, and the wild ducks rushed by on the chill northern winds. But these were all old friends and comrades; she was afraid of no creatures of the earth and sky. She slept on a pile of fallen leaves, in the hollow of a tree, on the leeward side of a rock, anywhere that gave her momentary rest, and let her see from some safe shelter Saturnino arise and go forth as the dawn came.

For three days she kept him in sight often enough to be able to follow in his track. For three nights, when he crept within some hut that he had made for as a shelter, she wrapped herself in her woollen mantle, and rested amongst the leaves hard by, and slept fitfully the deep dreamless sleep of great bodily fatigue.

It was late in autumn; it was not certain death to pass the night abroad as it was in summer seasons. Cool winds from the north had swept away the noxious gases of the canicular heats; there were damp and cold to dread, but the malaria had in a great measure gone with the past summer. Moreover, her nerves were at that tension, her mind was in that overwrought anxiety, in which women, through all ages of the world, have performed miracles and passed through physical dangers of all kinds without physical harm.

There was always with her the dread lest at any moment he should see her and take her for a spy upon him, and slit her throat with his knife as he had once bade Este do. There was the dread, also, lest at any moment, from the inequalities of the ground and the impossibility of drawing near to him, he should escape her sight and go whither she could not follow him. When sleep conquered her despite herself, and pressed her heavy eyelids downwards, she awoke with the apprehension of his having gone away from his resting-place during the night whilst she slept. If she once fairly lost him from view, she might, she knew, never come on his track again; and now that she had left the territory that was familiar to her, and crossed the Fiora water, and come upon lands that were utterly strange to her, she might, if she lost sight of him, lose her own way hopelessly, and perish of hunger on the waste.

He, she saw, turned aside at times into the huts of shepherds or of the ploughmen come to till the corn-lands, and there no doubt ate, and paid for what he ate with Sardinian pence, and no doubt told them he was a shepherd, too, going towards the Campagna to rejoin his flocks. But she had only the loaf of bread and the handful of maize she had brought with her; they would last her, eaten sparingly, four or five days, but after that she would have nothing except the one little silver piece, and she began to be afraid lest her strength should fail her ere she knew whither he went.

Between sunrise and sunset he covered from fifteen to twenty miles, and she did the same. Two years before such walking as this would have been mere sport to her; but now she was no longer as strong as she had been, her splendid vitality bad been rudely shaken, and her limbs began to tremble as she moved, and she began at times to stumble and recover herself with effort. Still she kept onwards, and was scarcely sensible of anything she felt from the passion of anxiety that possessed her. She could not but believe some wicked purpose sent this murderer on this strange pilgrimage on foot to Rome.

Of the land he knew every rood. In all the province there was not a mule-track he had not followed, not a cluster of hovels he had not visited in those many years of vigil and of violence, when his lair had been made by the snows of Monte Labbro, and his gallant person had been pointed out with pride at the feasts of the mountain villages, and even in the market-places of Grosseto, of Massa, and of Volterra. He was at home here in these woodlands on these moorlands, as any dog-fox that had burrowed there from the time it had been a cub. The map of all this wild country was clear in his brain, and all that the prisons had done to him had not made one memory fainter of all that labyrinth of foliage, all that desert of green pasture, all those untrodden hillsides, all those barren moors silent as Sahara.

As a child he had run through them barefoot, light-hearted as the scampering goats; as a man he had ridden over them, trodden through them, hidden there, fought there, there loved and hated, and there called with one shrill whistle a score of his men from bush and briar. Until the iron heel of that great gaoler Death should stamp his brain out into nothingness, he would remember every wind of the dizzy path up the face of the rocks, every spring that coursed through the moss and the ling, every hole to hide in where the wild olive grew with the holy-thorn above the ruddy travertine or the yellow sandstone.

So he dreamt not of descending to the sea-shore, but held on his way inland; whilst the Apennines that had given him shelter so long behind their ramparts of stone cast their wide purple shadows over the plain.

And behind him, unseen, followed the tall, slender figure of Musa, with the sun shining on her pale stern face, and in her luminous eyes; as if the God he had outraged so long had bidden a young angel, an angiolin, come down from its watch amidst the moving worlds of heaven to follow in the footsteps of this one bloodstained, brutal, human creature.

He, knowing nothing, pursued his way, whilst the noonday light and the afternoon shades in turn came across his path. Rome was still fifty miles away, if one.

Her greatest fear was lest he should descend to the sea, and take the sea way south; if he did that it would be impossible to follow him or to know whither he went; even if her boat had not been lost, she could not have gone back for it in time to overtake any craft in which he might sail.

But he did not go down towards the shore. He was indeed afraid of the coast, where at every hamlet there was some rural guard, some watchman, or some soldier quartered at one of those Martello towers which dot the shore at intervals.

Every rood of the soil that she trod was full of Etruscan memories, but that she knew not.

Here had been Vulci and Toseania; here had been Tarquinii and its vast necropolis; here had been Cære and the Centum Cellæ; the melancholy Marta flowing through immense and silent meadows to the sea, the low sombre hills that rose and fell in monotonous sequence, and now revealed the belfries of Corneto, and now the blue waters by what had once been Graviscæ, whilst on the eastward they rose higher and higher, and met the dark grey wall of the mighty Ciminian, half hidden in stormy clouds—all, all, had been Etruria Maritima, and beneath the mastic and the locust-tree, beneath the matgrass of the moors and the salt-rush of the marsh, there were cities, and palaces, and ramparts, and labyrinths, and necropoles, with their buried treasures that never more would see the light of day.

But she knew nothing of this.

She only saw a sad wild country that was unknown to her, vegetation that grew scantier and sicklier at each step, green swamps that had a familiar look, and moorlands that looked endless, and had no living creature anywhere upon them save the meek and melancholy buffalo, and the wild mares and colts that here and there swept like a hurrying wind over the brown grasslands.

Rome, too, said nothing to her.

The name that alike the poet and the scholar, the devotee and the agnostic, can never hear without emotion, to her had no meaning save as a place where her lover dwelt. In her childhood she had heard speak of Rome as of the city of the Holy Father, and had had vague fancies of it as of a great white throne set upon the everlasting hills, with walls of ivory and gates of gold, and all the angels as its ministers, and on it for ever a light like that of sunrise.

That had been her vision of it as a child.

Now she knew it was what men called a city: a place terrible to her as of meeting roofs and brawling crowds; a place where he lived, and living, forgot Maremma.

'Is it far, so very far, to Rome?' she wondered, with a sinking heart and tired feet.

Saturnino had still chosen the inland instead of the seaward way; he still feared those watch-towers of the coast, the soldiery who were perpetually on vigil to seize the smugglers from the isles.

In lieu of descending to follow the Via Aurelia where it wound down a few miles off the coast, by Santa Marinella and Santa Severa and mediæval Palo, and the volcanic soil and the steep ravines by Cervetri, where the long avenues of cliff sepulchres are all that remain to show the site of Cere, and gaining so the mouth of Tiber to ascend the stream in any boat that he might find by Fiumicino, he still struck across the country by cattle-tracks known alone to himself and wild men like him, and chose to leave the Maccarese morasses untrodden in his rear, and followed the course of the Arrone river as far as the high cliffs up by forsaken Galera.

At this deserted rock-village he slept that night, the fifth night of his pilgrimage, and she, still unseen by him, climbed also in the twilight of the early autumn night, and there rested also as a hill-hare worn out with travel might have done.

He, all unconscious that she was near, slept soundly with rude stones for his bed.

In his days of pride his range had sometimes swept as fer as those wood-clothed cliffs that rise about the lake of Bracciano, the Lacus Sabatinus of the Romans. In that time he had been well known in all this country side, and the wayside winehouse further away on the stream of the Due Fossi had once been proud to entertain the lordly brigand from the Apennine hills when it had seemed good to him to sweep down on travellers too curious and too incautious, riding or driving out by the Via Flaminia to see Veii or Scrofano or the classic baths of Apollo's Vicarello.

Ere the light of daybreak had come over the green mountain of Rocca Romana in the east, he rose this night from his rough couch of stones, and broke his fast on dried goat's-flesh and a draught from his flask of wine, and then began to descend the hills, using greater prudence and more wariness now that he neared Rome.

Musa, who had been yet earlier awake, had bathed her face and feet in the Arrone, and was watching to see him stir, herself screened amidst the brushwood.

It was a fair morning, golden and light.

Over the Campagna away southward there were white mists that hovered longest where the Tiber rolled, but eastward on these rocks the woods were all alight with sunbeams, and the glancing streams ran sparkling through grasses, starred with dragonflower and cyclamen, and shaded with heavy boughs of beech and chestnut.

Even in the strained, vague terror which filled her mind to the exclusion of any other emotion, a sense of the beauty of this morning smote her, and her eyes involuntarily dwelt upon the scene around her.

Before her, some sixteen miles away, there was a dome that lifted itself from the circling mists and the green shadows of a great plain; a dome that looked blue as a hyacinth, ethereal as a shadow itself, against the clearness of the morning skies. The plain was the Roman Campagna, and the dome was the dome of San Pietro.

She did not know it, but dimly she divined it. Something of that ineffable thrill which comes to all who thus behold it moved her even in her ignorance.

'Yonder must be Rome,' she thought, and knelt a moment on the grass, forgetting Saturnino.

The moment passed, she sprang to her feet again, remembering her errand; alert, lithe, agile, wary even in her fatigue as any forest animal that watches for the hunters to spring away at the first sound it hears.

Saturnino went down the cliffs, and passed the Arrone by a ford, and, giving La Storta a wide berth to his right, kept clear of the post road and passed by a path across the downs to Isola Farnese. He walked slowly now, being himself fatigued; she followed over the turf, a grey gliding figure, little noticeable, for the hood of her woollen mantle was drawn over her head. On these open fields she feared that he might turn his head and at a glance recognise her.

He did not ascend the cliff to Isola, but passed on beneath it, still keeping clear of the highway.

The 'Troy of Italy' lay behind them on its bare ground; but of this she knew nothing. Beyond that were the dark heights where the waters of Tivoli fall, and the snow-line of the Sabine range; in front stretched the Campagna, broken here into narrow ravines, and with scattered groves of trees, whose golden leafage caught the sunshine of the early day as the morning broadened behind the frozen summit of the Leonessa, and over the once sacred oaks of Eleusinian Musino.

To her they were but such long heaving mountain-lines, such hills, with barren sides and wooded summits, such downs and moors, with the yellow dragon's-mouth, the amethyst-hued cyclamen, in their grass, as she had had always about her in autumn in Maremma. Even the tumuli and the tombs that often marked the way were familiar features in her home landscape. But that blue dome in the blue air afar off, that bell-flower which seemed to hang downwards from the floating clouds, that was new, strange, marvellous; that seemed to call her forward towards it, that seemed to say to her, 'hasten, hasten, here is the city of God.'

Only before her, between her and it, went the form of Saturnino like the shadow of Death.

When they left the glens and broken ground, and came out on the level turf of the Campagna nearer Rome, she was afraid that he would turn and see her. But he did not. He was walking a little lamely now, but with a dogged persistence, as if the thoughts with which he was accompanied would not let him delay or rest.

He knew very well that now he was going with open eyes straight into the jaws of danger, and his dread of capture was much greater than his dread of death. He knew that at any moment a question put to him, a suspicion caused to any guard or soldier, might fling him back into the hands of the State. Away in the wild country he had been comparatively secure; but here, where perforce he must mingle with other men, and perforce pass the city barriers, he knew that at any moment the law might fall on him, and claim him. But he went on all the same, feeling every now and then for his dagger, which was hidden beneath his goatskin breeches.

A body of mounted carabineers chanced to ride past, their horses' hoofs cutting deep into the wet Campagna turf; he turned quickly aside and hid himself behind a mound of tufa.

Turning, he saw her, but he saw in her only a peasant girl coming with her head hooded against the keen winds that were blowing up from the mouth of Tiber away in the west.

When the mounted patrol had trotted by and were lost to sight beyond a fringe of alders on the Valca's curve, he did not even think to look for her; a mere woman of the Campagna, as he thought, coming to the city as so many come.

He was absorbed in one terrible purpose, in one mission which was the only shape of duty that had ever guided his steps; its preoccupation obscured in him his usual wariness of eye and brain.

By this time it was afternoon, for he was footsore and walked slowly, and the ground was for the most part rough and heavy, and often encumbered with thorns and brambles and stones half sunken in the turf.

They met few living things; now and then an ox-cart came along the deep ruts in the turf; a birdcatcher spread his nets to snare the greenfinch and the goldfinch in the berried briony; a mountain lad went by playing on his pipes a melancholy hymn; a shepherd lay asleep amidst his nibbling flock, whilst his dog watched.

That was all.

They were now treading on what was once the Via Cassia, and they pursued it some little way; but in lieu of going on by it to the Ponte Molle, Saturnino crossed the green turf by paths he knew, and at length entered on a broad crowded public road, which once had been the great Flaminian Way. He deemed it less perilous to pass through the gates with other men than to endeavour to enter the city secretly by any suspected means.

Her heart tightened as she saw him take the road.

It would be far more difficult to follow him in any highway or any street than it had been upon the downs and moors, where the clear air showed every figure on them as far as the human eye could reach in vision. Once in a street, a momentarily-gathering crowd, the passage of a waggon, the twist of any unknown passage, the barrier of a group of people, any unforeseen trifle, might take him from her sight, never, perhaps, to be found again in this great city which appalled her as she drew nigh it with its over-spreading walls and roofs, and palaces and cupolas and towers, and dusky piles of red-brown travertine, and gigantic churches that seemed to surge, colossal, from a petrified sea of stone.

Fear took the place of that exaltation which had sustained her sinking limbs so far: the nameless fear which comes on all free forest things when they are driven to approach a city.

She, like them, was bold so long as the width of the green grasslands, of the heath-grown moors, was around her; as long as she possessed the lovely light of the unobscured skies, the wholesome wine of the strong wind, the fresh fragrance of the dewy soil.

But as she drew nigh this wilderness of stone, of brick, of marble, of iron, she saw no more the purple flower of the great dome: she only saw a labyrinth of men's making in which she would wander miserably; finding not her lover, and losing her hold upon his assassin.

A greater terror than that which she had felt in the prisons and judgment-chamber of Orbetello fell upon her. If she could not find Este, if she lost sight of this man bent on his destruction, what could she do? How could she warn him whom she would have given every drop of her life-blood to save?

The autumn day was drawing to a close; the splendour of sunset in November was beginning to lend its deeper gold, its darker blue, to the western heavens; the bells of Rome were rocking and beating on the air.

With that frost of fear on her heart, she followed Saturnino as he passed through the wine-carts, the hay-waggons, the horses, the mules, the brawling men, the shouting children, about the gates of the Porta del Popolo. He had thrown his wallet aside when he had left Galera; he had nothing on him that the customs-guards could ask to examine. He passed them unnoticed; a tall, sinewy, black-browed, brown-cheeked shepherd, like so many that came down from the mountains, with their goats and asses, to go the round of the streets at daybreak.

She passed also; a slender, youthful figure, clad in homely homespun clothes,

She was in Rome.

She had walked sixty miles in five days.

She looked neither to right nor left.

She only watched the figure of Saturnino, towering a full head above the throngs through which his long stride passed.

Once only he paused; it was to go into a wineshop, and, under cover of drinking, ask the way to the palace that Este had inherited; the palace once of a Pope's mistress; a grand and gorgeous place, standing with its sculptured walls on a small piazza, dark and old, across the water on Trastevere. It had a wooded garden sloping to the Tiber, as the Farnesina had. So they told him in the wine-shop, making clear to him the way that he should take.

His back was to the entrancee-door as he drank, and paid, and spoke. She leaned against the lintel and listened, and heard.

She had believed all along that he came thither to kill Este; she heard without surprise the question that gave her confirmation of all she feared. What reason moved him, she wondered dully, while the pulse of her life beat in her as if every vein would burst.

She shrank back into the shadow of the wall as he came out. His face was dark with drink and passion; his lips were set. His eyes had a red fury in them, as an angered mastiff's have when he is about to spring.

Almost she was tempted to leap on him, and drive her dagger through him.

To save or serve Este any crime would have seemed to her holiness.

But she knew that beside him she was as a reed beside an oak; that if her first blow failed to strike home, he would turn in his rage, and stab or strangle her; then who would warn Este if she died?

She dared not touch him lest she should fail, and no living thing be left betwixt her lover and him.

She continued to follow him, going through the strange ways of the wondrous place with no more sight of them than if she had been blind.

The noise of the streets, the confusion and babble, and sounds of moving horses, of soldiers' trumpets, of shouting charlatans, of rapidly-revolving wheels, all went by her unheard.

Her fear of the city was lost in a yet intenser fear. Had its streets been a furnace, she would have plunged into its flames.

Saturnino left the noisier and gayer streets to pass into the dark steep lanes that encompass the Pantheon and lead the way to Tiber. It seemed to her as if these miry, crooked, gloomy ways would never end; their rough uneven pavements, their battered darkling house-walls, their stench, and the cries that filled them from the brazen lungs of the populace thronging through them, made them seem to her like the passage-ways of hell. Yet she scarcely felt the flints under her feet, the foul smell in the air, the uproar on her ear; she was almost as sightless, almost as deaf, as a hunted dog that runs straight on, hearing and seeing nought, made mad with terror.

Only mad she was not; the great love in her burned too clearly like a strong light in a lamp of alabaster, and her courage made her calm.

Saturnino passed through the ancient ways that dive down through the heart of the city to the riverside. He crossed the Tiber by the bridge of S. Angelo. The sun had now set; a crimson hue was upon all the scene; the river rippled in lines of gold, the pine-trees were black against the glow, the angel on Hadrian's tomb lifted a flashing sword into the light.

Even in that moment the beauty of the evening upon Tiber forced some perception of itself upon her; he never paused nor saw. He entered Trastevere.

Its streets and lanes were dark. Lamps were burning, and the glisten of fountains showed white through the gloom.

The great bells were tolling, for on the morrow it was the feast of S. Elizabeth. The air seemed to palpitate visibly with their rocking sounds. There were many monks and priests in the streets, their white or their black robes flitting by beneath the shadow of high walls over-topped with orange-trees and cypress and here and there a palm. The people came out of their dim arched doorways, from under their iron lamps, with mass-books in their hands or long rosaries of olive-beads. From some church or monastery whose portals stood open there came a low subdued chorus of Gregorian chaunts swelling softly out over the evening air.

Saturnino neither noted nor paused for any of these things. He, a man of religion always, had for once no heed to the call of vespers, no salutation for the lighted altars. He pressed through the priesthood and the populace alike in haste and with feverish steps.

He still walked lamely, but he went fast, stopping in his course only to ask once or twice his way to the palace of the Count d'Este.

Once a brown-eyed Trasteverina with red laughing mouth heard him ask that, and smiled.

'A handsome youth and open-handed,' she said; 'he lives yonder where you see the statues on the roof; he led a mirthful life last winter, but he did not forget the poor. He was away all summer at some pleasure, I suppose; now he is back again; yes, he is there; he is not alone, he is never alone; he is a gay gentleman, and handsome as a camellia-tree in carnival.'

Saturnino said nothing; he slid his hand within his clothes to feel his dagger-hilt.

Musa was not near enough to hear the woman's words. She saw him change the direction of his steps, and she saw a dark grand pile, with a vast doorway and Gothic statues of saints along its roof, that stood at the further end of a narrow piazza, great trees of the gardens behind it making a black cloud against the evening sky. Then for a moment her eyes grew dim, her brain grew dizzy; she felt that she was near Este.

And if she could not save him! if she had chosen a foolish, useless way! if she had erred when she had been afraid to strike her knife into his enemy's breast lest the blow should fail from any feebleness of her hand!

This was all she thought of; that her lover had forgotten her she never remembered; a great love is an unchanging pardon. Strained to the uttermost it will not fail or faint; it will endure all things.

She quickened her steps, and, trusting to the deep shadows that fell from the house walls of the piazza, crept close upward to him, so close that stretching out her hand she could have touched him.

He, knowing nothing still, went on across the pavement of the narrow square. No one noticed him; shepherds came in oftentimes from the Campagna on the vigil of holy feasts, and he, they saw, was from the downs and moors, with his rude goatskin clothes, his wild dark hair, his pastoral staff, his leather-girt strong loins.

The oaken iron-studded doors of the palace stood wide open; there was a keeper of them, clad in red and gold, like all such servitors of Roman princes, but he had crossed the piazza for a moment, and was quenching his thirst at a canteen, where some of the Swiss guard of the adjacent Vatican were lolling and drinking in his company, their yellow and red uniforms and the steel glitter of their halberds making a glow of colour under an old bronze swinging lamp.

She gave the men-at-arms a swift glance, and felt glad that they were so near: if she failed they would be there to hear.

She crept up closely towards Saturnino, so closely that she walked in his very shadow. Her footfall was noiseless. He did not know that he was followed; that he had thus been followed all across the wastes of the Maremma.

He passed without a moment's pause through the doorway; whenever he had struck a deathblow, he had always struck quickly as the eagle does.

Within there was a vast and lofty hall, austere with sculpture, its floor mosaic, its ceiling frescoed; a staircase of immense width, made of marble, stretched upward between walls of marble; silver lamps swung from above and lighted it dully. It was deserted and silent; all the footmen dozed in Roman fashion, in the antechambers before the great apartments up above where the first flight of the great stairs ended, and where, in a great arch within the wall, a statue of S. Michael stood, colossal, with white wings outspread and spear uplifted.

Saturnino crossed the hall and mounted one by one the steps of marble.

Once he looked back to be sure that no one saw him there. She shrank against the pillars of the balustrade, and her grey clothes were so like the shadows on her that she escaped his sight.

All around the landing-place there were large doors, black doors touched with faded gilding; there were oil lamps burning, their pale light fell on the marble of S. Michael, with the fiend conquered at his feet.

By hazard Saturnino flung open the nearest door to him, and thrust back the curtain of gilded leather that hung behind it. The chamber within was an antechamber, spacious, but well warmed by a bronze brazier in its centre; here several lacqueys in liveries of purple and white were lounging at their ease in idleness.

Some stared, some started up at sight of the strange figure of this Campagna shepherd, as he looked to them, standing on the threshold, with one hand putting back the gilded Cordovan leather of the curtain.

He called to them in a loud voice: 'Go, tell your master I am here; I, Saturnino Mastarna. Say that I bid him for old friendships sake come out for a word with me.'

There was something in his tone, something in his look, which awed into silence the arrogant and impudent words with which they were always ready to greet and turn away one of the populace; to them, all Roman youngsters as they were, the name that was still a sacred name to the Maremma, said nothing, but they were impressed and cowed by the rude majesty, the lordly, haughty command, of this strange man, who spoke to them as though he were an emperor.

They whispered amongst each other in hesitation and vague alarm. He stood on the threshold waiting and impatient, his great dark eyes glowing with flame beneath his bent and stormy brows.

'Go,' he said again to them, 'Go; your master and I kept company for two long years until we sawed each other's chains asunder. Go; I am Saturnino Mastarna.'

Two of them slunk away upon his errand, the others waited about alarmed.'

Behind the leathern curtain Musa stood, within a hand's-breadth of her father. Her heart beat so loudly against her breast that she thought he must hear it, and would turn and see her there. Her whole being was strung to tension, all the blood had gone out of her face, tongues of flame seemed to dart through her eyes, her lips grew dry and parched. In the agony of her watching fear she almost forgot that her sight would soon see Este. If she failed to save him!—this was her one consuming thought.

It seemed to her hours that she stood there, on the threshold of the vestibule, waiting, whilst the idle lacqueys loitered within, looking at this strange unbidden guest with stupid curiosity and amaze. She heard a clock striking the seventh hour of the night; she saw the hand of Saturnino steal within his belt of leather, and knew that he was fingering the dagger hidden there.

The doors at the upper end of the long frescoed chamber unclosed; Este came through them, the light from the swinging lamps fell on his classic face. He looked surprised, disturbed; he came across the floor with a rapid step, and motioned back his eager lacqueys.

'Are you prudent?' he said in a low tone. 'I have not forgotten, I will befriend you, but what brings you here?'

Saturnino cut his words asunder.

'This!' he said; and swift as the lightning flash above his mountain lair his dagger flashed in the air.

Ere it could strike she had thrown herself on him, and with the strength of a young lioness had torn the steel out of his grip, and forced him, staggering like a drunken man, against the marble columns of the doorway. 'You too!' cried Este; and all his debt, and all his sins of oblivion and ingratitude, came back upon him like a rain of curses, and held him dumb and paralysed.

'I would not have come,' she murmured, careless that the blood was streaming from the hand with which she had seized the dagger, and still clenched it close; 'I would not have come—oh never, never—but he meant to kill you, and I have followed him all the way, all the way.'

Then she dropped senseless on the marble floor at his feet.

Saturnino stood silent, leaning against the columns of the door.

The veins of his throat and his forehead were black and swollen, his dark face was crimson, the blood was surging in his temples and in his brain; he only saw a crimson reeling mist that circled round and round him; the servants seized him and he felt them not; he saw nothing, he knew nothing; only one memory remained with him.

'She was the child of Serapia,' he muttered, 'and you—you—you—you will escape me!'

He strove to wrench himself free from the grasp of the men who held him; he strove blindly, madly, to get away and throw himself on Este; but he could see nothing, he could hear nothing, for the rush of blood in his brain; the darkness over him grew denser and blacker, the sense of suffocation grew worse, he thought the hands of a hundred men were at his throat; then, like the carcase of a slaughtered bull, his body slipped from those who had seized him, and he fell face forward on the floor.

He breathed a few times with labour, but his brain was already dead; soon the trunk and the limbs were dead also. The silver image that Joconda had given to him still hung about his throat.

So he perished, unpitied, unassoilised, and they let him lie like carrion, and to be like carrion carted to the streets.

 

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