In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 62
CHAPTER LXII.
_-_Capital_O.png)
N the sixth day from that she reached her home. She knew not how she reached it: knew no more than does the hunted beast, that runs panting, sinking, almost dying at each step, and yet runs on to die at home. She had no consciousness of what she did; her hand bled, her brain turned, her feet stumbled, yet she kept on, with only that one instinct of the stricken doe left in her, to reach her home and die there.
She lost all beauty, all youth, all likeness of herself. She crept on with the torpid movement of old age; in her heart she carried its despair.
Everywhere around her, in the buoyant clouds, in the mountain snows, in the greenness of the land, in the light and lustre of the sunbeams, she saw only one thing, the face of the woman who had robbed her; of the woman who was by his side, with the noiseless laugh on her mouth and the glisten of the old gems at her throat.
That was all she saw.
The few men who met her in the fields and on the moors were frightened at her look, and thought her mad, and hurried from her path.
For six days and nights she wandered, now running, now creeping, now dropping and lying like a stone, now gathering herself up and going onward as a deer does that carries a mortal wound with him through the brake and the stream, over the hill and the heath.
Sometimes she slept.
Sometimes all night she lay with eyes wide open to the stars, staring, wondering where God was.
On the seventh morning she came home.
There were redbreasts singing amidst the myrtle. She went down into the tombs. They were very cold; the ashes of the spent fire were on the stones.
In the ivory skyphos he had always used there was water; she drank it thirstily. She kissed the rim his lips had used to touch. She kneeled down and said a Latin prayer. 'If God care,' she thought—and wondered dully.
The little timid song of the mountain birds came into the stillness of the tombs.
She did not hear it; she only heard Este's voice.
She took from her girdle the three-edged dagger that he had once worn near his heart night and day; she set it upright in the spot where the little child had lain upon its bed of rosemary, forcing the hilt down into a crevice in the rock floor of the chamber of the Lucumo.
Then she threw herself forward on the upright blade, which sank straight through breast and bone.
When the messengers of her lover came thither a day later, having sought her in the city and on the downs and hills in vain, she lay as though asleep, face downward, her head upon her arm.
He made her grave there, and buried with her half his life.
But men forget—and he forgot.
In time the wild olive, and the myrtle, and the evergreen alaternus grew closer and closer around the entrance of the Etruscan grave, and at last wove so impenetrable a veil between it and the light that even the wild birds and the hunted hare seeking a refuge could not enter there.
It defended her in death as it had sheltered her in life; and the woodlark sang above amidst the woodspurge, and the balm and the spikenard and the wild rose grew over the place of the tomb.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET