In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 1

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

IN MAREMMA.

 

CHAPTER I.

 

HERE was a very busy crowd gathered in the cathedral square of garden-girdled Grosseto.

It was the end of October, and the town and all the country round it were awakening from the summer desolation and sickness that reign throughout Maremma from springtime till autumn, whilst all the land is sunburnt and storm-harassed and fever-stricken, and no human beings are left in it, save the tired sentinels at their posts along the shore, and a few villagers too poor to get away, sickening amidst the salt and the seaweed.

With late October the forests begin to glow with a golden tinge or a scarlet flush, the fever abates and slackens its hold, the ague-trembling limbs grow stronger, the north winds come, and the swamps are healthy with the smell of the sea or the scent of the woods; the land that has been baked and cracked till it looks like dried lava, or has been soaked by torrential rains till it is one vast smoking morass, becomes ready for cultivation.

Then the real life of Maremma begins; down from the mountains of the Lucchese and Pistoiese districts labourers troop by the thousand; shepherds come from the hills with long lines of flocks; herds of horses and cattle go daily by the roads; hunters chase the boar and buck, and charcoal burners and ploughmen pour themselves in busy legions over the plains and the woods.

The country is then full of the men come from the hills, from far and near, 'il montanino con scarpe grosse e cervello fine,' whom the Maremmano employs, envies, and detests; brown, erect, healthy, smiling, stalwart; looking, beside the pale, swollen, ague-shaken creatures, who live here all the year through, like life beside death. They are all mountain-born, and chiefly from the chestnut-woods of the northern spurs of the Apennines, where the snow has fallen already; here, down in the green Maremma, they will, year after year, arrive all their lives through, to plough, and harrow, and sow, to hew, and saw, and burn wood for timber and charcoal, all the winter long; and then, after waiting perhaps for the first hay stacking or wheat harvest, will go back with the money in their pockets to reap and plough, and gather the nuts, and prune the olive on their own hills; a half nomadic, half home life that is rough and healthy, changeful and pleasant, and makes them half vagrant and half husbandman; bitter foes and hot lovers; faithless ones, too; for when the Maremma girl sings of her lover, he is always some Pistoiese or Lucchese damo from the Apennines, and the burden of her song is always one of absence, of doubt, and of inconstancy.

When he goes away with the rich loads of summer-grass or grain, he goes to his own hamlet up high in the chestnut forests of a healthier land, and it is seldom indeed that he will cast any backward look of regret to misty Maremma steaming beneath its torrid suns. And when he comes back another year there,—then he finds some one else.

This day in Grosseto there were many hundreds of these come here for the hiring by owners and stewards of this perilous yet fruitful Maremmano soil; the same men came for the most part year after year, and were well known; the market day was the day to find masters and make terms for their winter labours; and from here they would all scatter themselves far and wide, north and south, east and west, on their several roads; some to the swamps and the thickets; some to the pine and oak woods; some to the sea-shore towns for the industries of the coast; some to the vast wheat and oat fields that stretch level and dreary as moorland, and bring forth the finest grain in all Italy.

There were gathered together hundreds and even thousands of them; but this morning they had other thoughts besides those of their hire and wages; they were standing under the broad, blue autumnal sky, patient, and yet eager to see a great sight: no less a sight than the passing through Grosseto of the brigand-chief of Santa-Fiora—Saturnino Mastarna.

The news of his capture had startled the town at midnight when the carabiniers had ridden in, thirty strong, with a man bound hard and fast in the midst of them; and the Grosseto citizens, for the most part in their beds, had lit their lanterns hurriedly, and thrown open their casements as the tramp of the horses and the clatter of the weapons had awakened them from sleep.

'They have captured some poor soul!' the good folks had said with a sigh of sympathy and regret, and had murmured to each other mournfully, 'è il nostro Saturnino!'

As the troop of guards had passed under the walls of their dull little city, a torch here and there flickering on their naked sabres and the barrels of their short carbines, and a moonbeam here and there glistening on the whiteness of their cross-belts and the foam on the manes of their horses, there had been few in Grosseto who did not pity the captive in their midst, with his arms tied tightly by cords behind his back: few who did not for his sake wish the troopers a sudden death and a bad one.

When the trot of the chargers and the clash of the steel had passed into silence, and the town had lapsed into its wonted quietude, the burghers of Grosseto putting out their lanterns had sighed: 'Quel povero Saturnino, Aïe! Che peccato!' For Maremma had always adored her Saturnino, and it regretted his capture very greatly; he had never done any harm, he had only robbed the rich, and killed a foreigner now and then; he had been a holy man, and the priests had always been the better for anything he had done; and he had been so precious as a theme for talk in the long dreary winter nights, in the still longer, still drearier, summer days.

Without Saturnino Mastarna, the Maremma would be more than ever desolate.

The province had always been full of sympathy with its great robber, whose popular boast it was that he never had wronged any poor man. All the creatures of the law, soldiers, guards, coastguards, and carabiniers, were hated and shunned throughout the province; got help from none, and were, again and again, baffled and laughed at by the shrewd finesse of the people in the woods, and on the shores. To cheat a sbirro was a loyal task that brought praise and honour to whosoever had accomplished it.

Therefore for years the seizing of Saturnino had been impossible, and scarcely even desired by the authorities, so great an unpopularity was his capture certain to produce.

But at the last the brigand had grown too audacious: he had seized foreigners of note, and foreign governments had bestirred themselves, and it had been thought needful to show some vigour and vigilance against a mocker of the law who would stride about in the towns of the Maremma in festal bravery, secure of immunity, and boasting that no ruler of them all would dare to touch him. Troops had been put in motion; municipalities arraigned by ministers, and at last it was felt that the great days of Saturnino Mastarna must be numbered.

The Government had been told by foreign nations that it behoved its own honour not to leave him at large any longer. So strenuous efforts had been made all summer through, and the hill sides had swarmed with scouts and sharpshooters, and at last on one misty October night, the State had been one too many for its wary and ferocious son, and Saturnino, asleep and heavy with wine, had been surprised, and after bitter and murderous resistance been vanquished, and dragged from where he dwelt amongst the clouds of the mountain's top, where Monte Labbro reared its silver summit to the whiteness of the moon.

All men of the Maremma had been proud that their province boasted so dread a name as Saturnino's: a name sweeping clear, like a scythe, all the countryside of travellers, and resounding even down to the very walls of Rome.

That terrible shape and rumour up there in the mountain-labyrinths above the stormy Fiora water had lent mystery and majesty to the land; had hung a dread tale to every wayside bush along the lone sea-roads and haunted every thicket of mastic and laurel that grew above the old ways of Porsenna's kingdoms. They had been proud of Saturnino, the great Saturnino, at the lifting of whose voice all the wet grass upon a summer's night would grow suddenly alive with gleaming eyes, and flashing firelocks, as though he called men up from the very stones to do his bidding.

All men in Grosseto this autumn day were talking of that one theme: Saturnino of Santa Fiora—il gran' Saturnino!

So they murmured with one accord, leaving business, and bargains, to crowd together and tell the tale over a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, and agree amongst each other, cordially and with many an oath, that to have captured Saturnino and slung him across a horse's back, with heels tied together like any sheep's, was a sin and shame in the executive.

For Saturnino had been their hero, looming as large as gods loom in the mist of myths. 'He was a man!' they muttered one to another: and then the natives of the little city seized the strangers who came down for the first time from the Lucchese hills, and told them wondrous tales in passionate high-vibrating voices, and cried a hundred times:

'Do your mountains breed the like? Nay, not they. There is but one Saturnino. Never would he hurt the poor. Nay, not a poor soul in the land but had him for a friend. And a dutiful man too has he always been. When he came down into the towns, straightway would he go to the church and be shriven, and to the Madonna he would send always half the jewels that he might light upon: a good man and a great! And now, see you, oh the pity of it! They have trapped him and taken him, like any greenfinch in a net. Well, he will not be forgotten. We will tell our children's children.'

Then, as talk is always thirsty work, they would go in and drink a good rough red wine, with the Lucchese and Pistoiese strangers, wherever some green bough hung out over a doorway, and over the wine tell how a waggon full of barrels of Neapolitan Lacrima had been stopped but last week by Saturnino on the Orbetello road, and the waggoner, because a crusty and unpersuadable obstinate, had been left in the dust with his feet cut off, Saturnino being intolerant of obstinacy.

Meanwhile the yellow autumnal sun shone on the grey stones of Grosseto, and bells clanged, mules brayed, horses champed, swords clattered, and towards the doors of the prison a fresh squadron of carabiniers, come to replace the jaded escort of Saturnino, rode slowly across the square amidst the muttering of the hostile people. What mattered the wine-carrier? He had been only a Romagnolo.

Besides, all Maremma knew that it was not for the wine-carrier at all that their demi-god had been hunted down, but for a straniero, that no one cared about except the Government; a traveller that Saturnino had shot in a paroxysm of jealous rage, and who had been a person of distinction enough for the nation to which he belonged to demand that justice should be done on his assassin. The stranger had been waiting for a ransom to be sent, and had looked at the beautiful Serapia who dwelt with Saturnino too long or too boldly, and Saturnino without waste of words had blown his brains out; a rash act of violence which had become his own undoing.

And now he had been taken; taken just like any common thief who robbed an old dame of a copper coin; taken by those general foes, the soldiery, and brought down into the lower lands with his feet tied under a horse's belly, as helpless as though he were a kid in a butcher's hands. They were restless, curious, passionately eager to see and hear; but there was only one emotion amongst them—regret. A regret which was full of resentment, and sympathy, and indignation, and which would have burned fiercer and higher, and become revolt and rescue had not the military force been strong, and the mounted guards many.

All the multitude was awed and chilled. A heavy sense of the power of the law, of a law which they had no sympathy for, and which they feared with the angry fear of impatient resentment, was weighty upon them, like a sheet of lead.

Many of them were sensible of more or less close abetting of the hill thieves, more or less passive or active interest in the lawless acts of the band of Santa Fiora. Many a tradesman there had never sought too curiously to know how the black-browed seller of rich brocades or costly jewellery had come by them, or how foreign gold had found its way to sunburnt, powder-blackened hands.

Even those to whom the great Saturnino was but a name, the youngsters come down for work from the high villages of the Carrarese and Lucchese ranges, were dumbfounded and regretful. Saturnino had always been the friend of the forester and the ploughman and the shepherd; the lads felt that when no more tales could be told of the king of Maremma, savour would be gone out of the goatsflesh roasted in the charcoal in the woods, and the wineflask passed round when the last of the long furrows had been turned across the plains.

In a gloomy silence, broken only by gloomier mutterings of the crowd, the carabiniers drew rein before the prison.

The closely-packed, loudly chattering groups of men, few women amongst them but many in the doorways of houses and churches, stood gathered together to see him brought out and taken on his next stage to the tribunal of Massa, where his trial was to take place. They were all sorrowful. None blamed him. None thought him a criminal.

Poveretto! he had lived a bold, vigorous, manful life up yonder on the snow-capped hills above the foaming Fiora and down in the deep, dark ravines where the Fiora water rolls, and in the rich vale of the Albegna, and on the treeless lands that stretch away to Ostia far down in the south.

He had been a fierce fellow, indeed, and a terror to all travellers, and many a tale of his ferocity to captives was told from mouth to mouth along the marshy shores of the Maremma, and in the huts of the shepherds on its moors; but the travellers were all strangers, and the captives all rich men, for from the poor he had never been known to levy a crust or a coin, and the sympathy of the crowds was wholly with him as they hung about the cathedral walls and outside the winehouse doors, waiting until the prisoner should come out with the strong guard that was to march him to his trial at Massa; which would, they knew, certainly end in his condemnation to the mines of the south or the prisons on the little island that was then glancing to amethyst and gold in the glory of the sunset light, away there to the west on the seas they could not see.

They had not to wait very long. As the time grew near, the people became very quiet in the hush of expectation.

For many and many a year to come, the imagination of the Italian people will be always captivated and blinded by the bastard heroism of the brigand; he is born of the soil and fast rooted in it; he has the hearts of the populace with him; and his most precious stronghold is in their sympathy, from which no laws and no logic of their rulers can dislodge him yet.

Saturnino Mastarna was to all the Maremma shore a hero still.

A few quiet citizens of Grosseto apart, the people looking on were all for him, and muttered menaces of the guards. The mountaineers and woodcutters, and rough labourers of all kinds that had come down into the town, were most of them men to whom 'to take to the hills' seemed a bold and right thing to do; most of them would have been not unwilling to try it themselves; many of them had been often in secret league and complicity with the terrorism which was no terror to them, because it only struck the rich and never harmed the poor. They would have all been willing to rescue the doomed man, but they paused doubtfully: no one taking the lead.

'Poveretto! Poveretto!' they all muttered in regret for him; and had there been an adventurous spirit amidst them to advise his rescue, those gathered labourers of the forests and the plains might have been formidable in their resistance to the law.

But the Italian loves to talk; he loves not equally to act. And so they stood there, sullen, sympathetic, but inert, as the prison gates opened, and the carabiniers rode out with Saturnino in their midst.

The autumnal floods had for the time rendered the railway that runs through Grosseto, from north to south, impassable, and the carabiniers had had their orders to ride with him through the twenty odd miles that were under water. It was thought well that the folk of Grosseto, whose traders were suspected of collusion with the brigand, by the purchase of many of his stolen treasures, should see the famous marauder in this sorry plight in their streets. Further south, such a spectacle would have provoked a rescue, or at least a riot; but, in Grosseto, blood ran more quietly and more soberly, and the multitude waiting there only muttered a curse or two as the little troop of horsemen passed out of the court of the prison and came in sight.

With his legs tied beneath his horse, Grosseto saw its fallen hero.

He was in his own mountaineer's dress, a sheepskin jacket, breeches of untanned leather, a sash of brilliant crimson, weather stained, a broad-leafed hat with golden tassels, and in its band a little gold image of Our Lady. At his throat, too, was a Madonnina. His pistols, his knife, his earrings, they had taken away from him; but these little images his captors had left him, from a charitable feeling that it was as well to leave the man, in such a strait as this, all such aid as he could have from heaven.

His great black eyes were sombre and terrible; his dark locks hung to his throat, slightly curling, for he had been vain of his good looks; his lips were rich and red; his features straight and handsome; his brow was low, his chest and his limbs were massive. He was the true robber-chief of romance.

Who could say what blood ran in his veins? His name was the old Etruscan name that had once been that of Servius Tullius; he had been the son of wild mountain hunters; who could say what blood of omnipotent Lucumo, of aruspex weighted with the secrets of the stars, of languid and luxurious Lydian, of lustful lord of Sardis, might not be in him, hot and cruel and lascivious? The Etruscan name had been his forefathers' for hundreds of years counted on the hills.

'Is that truly Saturnino who is taken?' asked an old woman on the edge of the piazza, a tall gaunt woman with blue eyes and snow-white hair, who had a different accent and look to those of the crowd.

'Aye, mother, that it is,' the man nearest to her answered sorrowfully.

Grosseto knew him well. He had loved to ruffle it, in all his finery, on feast days, in its wineshops and on its public ways, in open bravado and scorn of the power of the law to touch him.

'Dear God!' she muttered, 'how are the mighty fallen! Only the other day and his name was a terror that made the very dead quake in their graves.'

And she pushed a little nearer to see better.

'It is verily he!' said the crowds now wistfully gazing up at this fallen majesty, bound there on his horse's saddle, with the muzzle of a trooper's carbine resting on either side of him, as the little band halted for a moment in the midst of the cathedral square while the captain bade farewell to the syndic of the town. 'It is verily he!' they sighed, and were full of regret. What would Maremma be without its Saturnino?

'Ay, it is he!' said the old woman, bending her piercing eyes upon the face of Mastarna. She was a plain-featured, clear-skinned woman, much beaten about by sea-winds and scorched by poisonous suns; but she had a frank, straight, and even noble regard. She dwelt on the low shores of Maremma, but in her youth she had comfrom the Alpine ranges of Savoy.

She looked at Saturnino as she stood on the edge of the crowd, and said, 'Ay, ay, it is he!'

'You have seen him before, mother?' said an eager youth, who had come from the Apennines to go and make charcoal in the Ciminian woods away yonder to the south-east.

'Ay, ay, she said briefly, and said no more, being a woman of few words, who, though she had dwelt here fifty years, was always called the woman of Savoy, and deemed an alien and a stranger.

She was standing near the troop of horsemen, clad in a russet gown, with a yellow handkerchief tied about her white hair. The brigand was sitting in his saddle, sullen, sombre, ashamed: ashamed to be brought thus amidst the people, like a netted calf, like a yoked bull.

The old woman with the keen blue eyes, and the face that had once been fair, looked with the rest, and though she was an honest woman, law-abiding, God-fearing, her heart also was heavy for this hawk of the hills that for ever was caged.

She had been a woman of many sorrows, to whom death had been unkind, and a little son of her dead daughter's had been all that had been left to her of the children of her blood. And one day the little lad had been lost, going with his goats on the high passes above the Albegna valley, and there had been found by the dread Saturnino, asleep, and frozen, where the snows were deep, and Saturnino, who never hurt the poor, had taken him up in his arms and carried him to his own lair miles away, and there fed and tended him, and next day sent him down by one of his own men into his native village safe and sound, and with twenty broad gold pieces in his little woollen breeches.

She, being a brave woman and a holy one, no sooner found her one lost lamb thus than she took the most precious thing she had, an image of Our Lady, that had been blessed by God's Vicegerent, and slipped that and the gold coins in her pouch, and said to the mountaineer who had brought her boy, 'Lead me to your chief that I may thank him.'

The man demurred and was afraid, but finally she prevailed, and he took her back with him, a long and toilsome tramp up into the hills, staying one night at a cabin on the way, and when they started on the morrow blindfolding her eyes that she should not see whither she went.

When the handkerchief was lifted she was in the presence of Saturnino, whose eyes, according to the people's tales, could send out flame and burn up those on whom his rage lighted.

But she was not afraid. She took out of her pouch the holy image and the gold pieces, and she held them both out to him.

'Saturnino,' she said to him, 'I have come up hither to bless you with my own voice, for you have restored to me the only little living thing I have to love, and night and day I will pray to the saints to have you in their holy keeping. And I have brought you the only bit of value that I own—a Madonna that our Holy Father blessed—and do you put it by a string about your throat, and it will keep the thoughts and hopes of heaven with you. But this gold that you gave to my boy I bring you back, because I know too well, alas! alas! how all your gold is gained.'

The men standing around thought that he would cut her down with a stroke of his sword straight through skull and throat. But he did not harm her. He took the image meekly like a chidden child, and the gold pieces he dashed in the snow.

'A brave soul!' he said of her, and she blessed him once more, and kissed his hand that had sent many a one to an untimely death, and took her homeward way again, praying silently that the holy hosts of heaven might be about his steps and win him from his sin.

Since that time, when she had gone up into his very lair, she had not seen Saturnino. Twenty years had gone by. The little boy that he had saved had died of fever—the ghastly fever that walks these shores all summer through like the ghost of dead Etruria.

Twenty years had gone by, and Saturnino, from a young and generous man who, although fierce and terrible, could be merciful and just, had grown year by year a deeper terror, a dreader name; not to Maremma still, for still he spared the poor, but to the law and state. More murders lay upon his soul than he had time to count; his will, which was unchecked by those around, and unbridled by any fear of consequence or qualm of conscience, had grown overbearing, intolerant, exacting, and capricious almost to madness.

Amongst his many loves he had conceived a violent passion for the woman whom he had carried off and kept up in his mountain lair by force: that most beautiful Serapia, of whom the stranger waiting for his ransom had been too amorous. Serapia had died, and after her loss all that there had been of any softness in the nature of the man had been burnt out under the fires of his hatred of fate and rebellion against his misery; he had become a monster of cruelty, having in him the same temper as of old made the tyrants of Padova and Verona and Brescia the scourges of their generation. Even his men had begun to grow disloyal under the iron heel of his unendurable despotism, and the treachery of one of these had delivered him over into the chains of the State at which he had laughed in secure defiance for so long.

Yet the hearts of the folk in Grosseto were sad for his fate, and the old woman with the northern eyes said to her neighbours: 'Nay, I am sorry he has been taken. You remember how he saved my Carlino. Always I have hoped that with time and my prayers Saturnino would some day turn to an honest life.'

'Nay, mother,' said a Pistoiese, 'of a fox never can you make a house-dog. The pity is that such a man had not luck to the end to die of a shot or a sword-thrust out on his own hills.'

The people murmured assent; that would have been fitting enough certainly. But the galleys! For Saturnino to be chained and numbered, set to work with an axe or a spade in dockyard or on highway, cowed with the whip of the overseer, and pointed out like a wild beast to strangers, that seemed hard.

The thought of it made the blood curdle and grow cold in their veins with the fear of that law which could work this miracle.

'If one may not kill the man who covets our ganza, what use are powder and shot?' said the men of Grosseto.

Suddenly the old woman of the north put her hand into her pocket, drew out a piece of money, pushed her way to a wine-shop a few yards behind her, bought a stoup of the best wine, and came out with it. She went straight up to the carabiniers, and said to them:

'Yon man did me a good turn once. Will you let me give him this to wet his lips? A good man he is not; but he was good once.'

The guards hesitated. They were not churlish; they had a lingering sympathy themselves for their prisoner, who had been taken in a snare at the last, after having been the hero of all Maremma twenty-five years and more, since he had been a mere lad when he had first captured a great English milord, and had let him go with only the loss of one ear cut off, in consideration of a ransom of thirty thousand scudi.

Saturnino, sitting with his head erect, and his great black eyes blazing in a scorn he strove to assume, that he might hide the bitter shame at his heart, heard the voice of the woman, and glanced at her.

The carabinier on his right side, relenting, held the wine towards his mouth. The brigand's hands were tied behind his back, or he would have dashed the pewter cup down. As it was, he would not drink; but his sombre eyes dwelt on the woman.

'Let her speak to me,' he said.

The carabiniers were ill-disposed to obey, but they saw that the crowd was eager and full of pity for Saturnino. They were afraid to irritate, since they had not gagged, him; and, after all, a woman could do no harm.

One of them moved, so as to let her in between his horse and that of the captive. He kept the muzzle of the cocked carbine pointed against her; but she was a brave woman; she did not heed that.

'Drink my wine, Mastarna,' she said to him, and lifted the cup herself.

'Is it you, Joconda?' he said.

But he did not drink.

'It is Joconda,' she said curtly, 'How came you in this plight?'

'I was betrayed,' said the brigand, while his great despairing eyes flashed as a knife that is raised to kill flashes in the light, and he said it more truthfully than many greater conquered conquerors who excuse their own feebleness and lack of forecast by the plea of treachery. He had been betrayed, and seized as he had sat drinking at sunset at the door of his hut in the hills.

'Joconda, I saved your lamb,' he said, after a pause.

'You did. You are a butcher; but you saved my lamb. That is why I am sorry to-day.'

'Save my lamb, then.'

'Have you one?'

'I have one that I love. She is Serapia's child. I loved her mother, and her mother is dead. Go and save her!'

'Where is she?'

'Up yonder,' he answered, with a backward gesture of his head to where, in the haze of the far distance, the snowy hills of his own lair lay. 'Any one will tell you on the hills. Ask for the Rocca del Giulio. They seized me; my men fought, but they killed them. She was with women; but they may have fled. Will you find her, and bring her up in your house?'

The face of the old woman grew weary and perplexed.

'It will be a burden, Mastarna.'

'Ay, it will. Do as you choose. But she is little and alone.'

The woman paused and mused.

'I will take her if I can find her,' she said at length.

Across the bold, sombre, fierce face of the fettered man a strong emotion swept.

'Lift your wine to my mouth,' he said. 'I will drink it now.'

And he drank.

'Loosen the image from my hat. She has the same about her throat; her mother hung them both. I have your Madonnina still at mine,' he muttered, when he had drained the cup.

She put one foot on the stirrup, for she was strong and active, though old; loosened the golden image, and detached it from its place. At that moment the officer in charge of the escort, arriving in haste, reproved his men in fury, and the horses started so suddenly that she could scarcely save herself from falling between their legs and being trampled to pieces on the stones.

By good fortune she escaped injury, and only fell on her knees, and rose again unhurt. The troop of carabiniers were trotting out of the square, their carbines pointed at the head of Saturnino.

They soon vanished in the golden haze of the rising sun.

A hundred hands were stretched to touch her; a hundred questions rained on her ear.

'What did Saturnino tell you, mother?' cried the Grosseto folk jealously, for they had been so kept at musket's length by the guards that no one had heard a syllable of what had been said.

'I knew him years agone,' she answered, 'and he bade me hang this image in some chapel, that Our Lady may have grace to him. Nay, hands off; it shall go where he told me. And he whom you call your Saturnino needs heaven's mercy sorely; for he was a murderer many times—many times.'

For these were her foolish notions, she being a woman from the north.

More they could not get out of her. She carried the empty wine-cup back to the wine-shop, and then made her way quietly out of the square by a narrow lane.

The people stood about in a silent, sad, sullen mob; discomfited and dissatisfied with themselves that they had not struck a blow for their hero.

Saturnino Mastarna had been a robber; and, as she had justly said, a murderer many times. He had swooped down on the lonely mountain paths above the mountain-born Fiora, and along the once consular and imperial highway that runs through Orbetello and Civita Vecchia to Rome, even as the pseudœtus eagle of these hills swoops down from his cliff-nest, made of oak leaves and olive boughs, on to the water-fowls of the pools, until the daring and the frequency of his captures had made his name a household word that had rung far and wide beyond the confines of Maremma.

Therefore Maremma had been proud of him; proud in a fierce, defiant way that had given him many a nameless ally amidst the scattered gentry of all that wild and lonesome country, and even here in old grave Grosseto, a score of miles away from the foaming waters of the Fiora, people had felt the same pride in him, and now, as the trot of the horses and the clangour of weapons died away into silence, there were regret and a smothered rage in the populace to think that their hero should have been brought through their streets with his feet tied under the belly of his horse, to go to the galleys of Gorgona or the salt mines of Sardinia, and be no more seen of men, although for years and years to come the story of his exploits would be told from mouth to mouth wherever a group of woodmen sat about the forest fires at night, or a couple of fishermen wiled the becalmed day away with talk, or in the winter evenings in farmhouses far away on the Lucchese hills men and maidens munched the chestnuts with white teeth.

A great stillness and gloom fell on the populace, and the tongues of the people for once ceased to buzz and scream, and were only heard in a few rebellious mutterings against the State, which took a frank freebooter like a rat in a trap and dealt with him as it dealt with any paltry thief of the cities. Saturnino was gone: a dead man, or worse than a dead man, and never more would his native Maremma thrill with the Homeric tales of his acts; never more would this town of Grosseto see him stride through their public places with his pistols and knife in his broad red sash, and his bold black eyes full of challenge and scorn.

It was all over, like wine spilt on the ground; henceforth the Maremma would speak of him only with bated breath, and memories half glorious, half sad, like the memories of dead heroes. Saturnino Mastarna was gone; seized by the impalpable, far-reaching, spectral arm of the law, which to a rustic and simple people is so vaguely terrible, so unjust, so incomprehensible, coming out, as it seems to them to do, from the infinite and the unknown to seize them for their secret sins.

He was gone, and there was little mirth in Grosseto that day, though usually the October weeks are full of merriment and business, of song and dance, of bargains made, and of wine drunk, and of gladness at the coming winter, and of sportive love offered and returned. But this day the crowds were dull and vexed, and looking in each other's faces read one unspoken thought there, common to all:—

'We should have rescued him!'

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