In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 12

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XII.

 

HEY buried her at midnight with the horrible, selfish haste of the country's habits and laws in death.

The day before she had been alive; a woman, shrewd, brave, wise, and faithful in her own rude way, boiling the soup in her pot, cutting the canes for her mule, looking at the sea and the sun, giving good-day to her neighbours from her house-door; and now she was thrown into a hole of the earth, and the earth was cast in upon her, and she was nothing—nothing;—less than the fish that died in the nets on the shore, for they could be sold, and so were of value.

To the living, human beings are cruel very often; but to the dead they are always brutal, be the dead, pauper or king.

Only one torch burned for her; old Andreino, the fisherman, bore it. It burnt steadily in the hot, heavy night. Musa and the white dog stood by the grave. She moved as if she were walking in her sleep, and never a sound came from her lips; the dog hung his head, but was quiet, pressing close to her side. Once he threw his muzzle in the air and howled. It was when the first shovelful of sand and clay fell on the dead body.

The priest spoke some commonplace words of consolation and of hope; he was a simple, honest man, the son of seafaring people, and born fifty years earlier in Santa Tarsilla. Musa did not hear what he spoke.

She went home in unbroken silence; the night was oppressive, the sea was still, the heavens were covered with mist. There was one more grave on the low sandy shore; that was all.

She went home to the house, and barred herself in, and threw herself on the bed where Joconda had died. No one had the heart to disturb her that night.

'Let her sleep if she can,' said the priest and old Andreino. But for them the women would have dragged her out, and made her understand that she was homeless.

All the day following she kept her door, and her shutters, barred, and would see no living creature. Towards evening the priest of the parish came; a little bibulous and garrulous, not clever nor wise, but simple of spirit, and honest and cheerful.

She would not open to him until he said that he brought her a message from the dead. Then she let him enter, shutting the door again on the peering faces of Andreino and some women gathered out there in the hot air.

The priest spoke kindly to her, a little frightened at her looks; she was quite silent, and her eyes were dry though their lids were swollen and very weary.

He told her that the dead woman had left with him the knowledge of the precise spot where her little treasure was hidden, and he counted the stones of the paved floor from right to left, and found the one beneath which was the pitcher containing the coins, and he raised it up, and took the pitcher out, and read to her the words of bequest leaving to her the money, the furniture, the hardware, the mule, all in a word that Joconda had possessed, written by the scribe of Grosseto on the bit of yellow paper folded across the jug.

Musa listened and saw; she said nothing; she did not even notice that on that paper she had herself no name save the baptismal one from the Egyptian saint. She only thought all the while:

'She was all I had on earth and she is gone.'

The priest tried to speak a few phrases in season of counsel, to hazard a few questions, but he made no way. Musa was still and mute; she seemed to him like a statue; she said only as she looked at the pitcher—

'This is mine?'

'Surely, said the priest. 'At least there are none that I know of nearer of kin to dispute, and even if there were, the bequest, I think, would hold good. I am not sure, but so I believe.'

Musa lifted the pavement and replaced the pitcher with its coins in its hole. Then, with a sound that was half sob, half sigh, she sat down on the edge of the low bed and said to the good man:

'Father, will you go? I am best alone.'

'But you cannot remain alone—you, a girl so young———'

She did not answer. There was something in her look and in her attitude that awed him: he was used to the vehement outbursts and the evanescent passions of a passionate but quickly consoled people; he did not understand her; he thought hastily that in the morning he must take counsel with the sisters up at the convent, and muttered his blessing feebly and went away. She barred the door behind him.

The good man went home and ate his little supper of small fish and oil, and drank a sweet pale wine, and gossiped with his capellano, telling him that the woman of Savoy had after all died worth a pretty penny; a whole jug full of gold pieces under the stones and left to the girl. Who was the girl? What would she do?

The capellano in turn went out and gossiped with the few dwellers in Santa Tarsilla, all loitering or lying about by the edge of the sea this hot night, gasping for a breath of air, and, in default of the air, grateful to hear some news.

They grumbled much one to another; for they were dissatisfied, and their curiosity had no food for its appetites.

'One would have thought to know who that wench is now,' they grumbled to one another, and some of the women said:

'She has got no name. That is odd. Do you mind of the time when Saturnino was taken up in the hills yonder? Some did think then the girl was Saturnino's daughter. But Joconda was always so close.'

Musa herself did not notice that she had no name in that little wrinkled bit of paper which gave her the money and the mule.

Alone she passed the long oppressive sultry hours.

She heard the voices of the people outside as the sun dropped and the night came; but she would not open, even to old Andreino, who rapped at the door with a stick and called to her more than once. She lay awake all the night long; towards dawn she fell into what was rather stupor than sleep. In her sleep she was always trying to loosen the weight of the sand and the earth that lay on the body of her lost friend, and to lift up Joconda from that close and cruel prison. She thought she could have better borne her loss if the dead body had been laid gently down upon those rocky biers in the Etruscan tomb, there to wait till the moonlight should touch her and take her to itself, as it had touched and taken the Etruscan king. But how could she ever rise from that narrow bed, from that stifling sand, from that ghastly crowded place where the dead lay like mounds of putrid fish, thrown down and forsaken?

It was late in the day when the child awoke from this heavy troubled sleep, which left her dazed and fatigued, as she had been at night; awoke with the burning sun on her aching eyes, to hear impatient hands knocking at the shutters and the house door:

'Art thou dead, too?' the shrill voices of women were calling.

Musa shuddered, and in the scorching heat of the morning felt cold.

Was Joconda in truth lost for ever? Had this death which had been so long in the mist of a vague dread and foreboding become a fact? Would she never come back?

The neighbours knocked louder and louder. She rose, clothed herself and opened to them.

'What do you want?' she asked of them.

They burst into the room; the five or six women who were all that Santa Tarsilla held in summer-time, a little sickly child or two between them; old Andreino was a little way behind.

'My dear one,' he said, with a hand to his eyes, 'if any love can be of use to you, I and my Serafina too———'

'You can have nothing ready in the house. Come and break your fast with us, Musa mine,' said the foremost woman, ruthlessly drowning the rest of his phrases with her own shrill tones, to be in turn swamped in a neighbour's fuller voice that cried:

'Not a wink of sleep have I had this night, thinking of the good soul gone to her rest; neither have you closed your eyes, my dear; that one sees without asking. I have brought a fresh egg———'

'Addle your eggs!' cried a third, elbowing her away with scorn; though, indeed, eggs were rare as roses on the sad seashore. 'Let the girl come and take bit and sup with one who can be as a mother to her. How should she dwell alone and fare and cook for herself? My man has just brought in some fine fresh crayfish———'

'Get out,' said old Andreino fiercely; 'who should she come to if not to her oldest friends? My Serafina is in bed with the ague, or she would have been here all night. My house is Musa's, and that I promised long ago to the good dead soul sitting out by the threshold there. I said to Joconda—I said———'

He continued to talk for ten full minutes, but no one heard a syllable more that he said, by reason of the superior strength of screaming that the women's lungs possessed.

Amidst the hubbub and outcries she stood quite still; she scarcely seemed even to see that the people were there.

When they found her silence continue so long, and that neither by look nor word was she moved to respond to their hospitable and fond entreaties, they began to grow angry; and one of them said tartly and hotly:

'We come in charity and good will, but we may go in wrath. Musa, there is money here, and there are debts that should be paid with it.'

'Debts!'

It was the first word she spoke. She had heard of debt; she knew that it was a great calamity. Joconda had always spoken of it as a great shame; she had seen the man of the law going into the wretched cabins of the neighbours more than once, and seizing and selling the very chattels of the cupboard, the very mattress of the bed; and at such a time Joconda had always said—'they have burned their candle at both ends; they have eaten their Paschal lamb at Ognissanti; poor fools, poor knaves!'

She knew that debt had no more clung about Joconda's honest name than ill-got gold had clung about her honest fingers.

'You have got all the money she left,' said one. 'You are a brave and honest girl, Maria Penitente; you will pay me that quintale of hay for the mule———

'And my little bill for the coffee and the beans and the cheese,' said another, who kept the small pizzicheria shop by the church. 'It has run and run, goodness can tell how long, but I was never one to press; and we all knew that the old soul was safe and warm though she was niggard.'

'And there are three pairs of boots owing to my husband,' said the cobbler's wife, who had come on his errand, because he was such a poor weak white-livered thing himself; 'Joconda wore out a many boots; tramp, tramp, trot, trot, for ever as she did; and too proud-stomached ever to go a scalza———'

'There is a trifle of oil, a quarter-barrel; I let her have it last Night of the Kings as I had fetched it in from the country, thinking it only neighbourliness,' said a fourth, who had a year-old baby at her breast.

'And there were little sums I lent, on and off, not much; she put her cross for them; she was a lone creature; one could not be hard. I have got them all fair writ out, and her cross is at home in the book,' said the woman who lived next door, whose husband owned three of the fishing-smacks, and was a strozzino in a little hungry way, i. e. a usurer, who lent out small sums at large interest, and kept his gains in a deep well in the court of his old house, and could never sleep at night for thinking of them, and so was in a fair way to grace a madhouse before long: a man whom Santa Tarsilla cursed as it never had cursed Saturnino.

Musa was still and mute; she heard them; she stood erect in the centre of the floor where the sunlight made a golden glory all about her.

Old Andreino sidled through the vociferating knot of women, and came close to her and put his mouth to her ear.

'Never listen to them; her debts were her own if she had any; let them take their scores to her grave. Come home with me, my dear, and bring the pitcher with you and we will count it all out fair and straight, and think what best to do with it; you might put it in my son's wine shop, and he would give you good profit out of it, and so———'

Musa shook him off; she stood like one slowly awaking out of a hideous dream; she looked from his face to the faces of the women, and a darkness of scorn and of rage gathered over her own.

'You all lie! You all lie!' she said, sternly. 'She never owed man or woman a handful of leaves, or a hank of wool, or a copper coin in all the days of her life. Never, never! She robbed herself to give to me. She robbed no other. Oh tongues false and accursed! have you no fear when you lie of the dead?'

For a moment they were silenced before the intensity of scorn, the solemnity of rebuke. For a moment their falsehood and their greed shrivelled up as dry leaves shrivel before a flame. But only for a moment, for they had so lied one to another that their lie almost seemed a truth to them; almost they had persuaded even themselves that they had a right to the gold of the woman of Savoy.

'Would we come with false claims?' they shrieked aloud in a chorus of wounded honour, and cried one against another, 'This is what comes of too great goodness! We trusted a foreign woman, and we left her alone because she was old, and then, when her end comes, we are despoiled! This is our reward! This is the justice we get from aliens!———'

'Be quiet! be quiet! my dear friends—my good sweet neighbours!' murmured the old man, running from one to another, and thinking to himself, 'Whether she owed them or not, not a stiver of that good money shall go in the maw of these pigs. No, no; my grandson and I will do justice by her; and if she love not the wineshop we might buy a share in a boat, or in the salt-working, or purchase a pineto and clear it———'

For as yet he did not know how much was in the pitcher or not; but he was quite sure the amount must be large.

The women began to shriek more and more loudly; they screamed one against the other. Conscious that proofs were wanting they made up for lack of evidence with storm of noise; they howled aloud that they were honest as the day, and were robbed, they reviled the dead in her grave.

'Proof! She wants proof!' they yelled. 'If we have no proof, or but little, it is because we were too good. We trusted an old lone creature. We let her take our substance and never asked her a quittance. We were too good, too simple, too long-suffering; and now we are cheated at last.'

Musa stood and looked at them; her face was pale and cold as marble, only in her eyes a passion of hatred and of scorn shone as the lightnings would shine at night in the purple skies of the summer.

She bore in silence for a while that hissing steam of angry breath, that harsh shrill uproar of abusive voices, their menacing hands that dashed about her in the air, their glittering eyes, that seemed to dart at her like snakes' tongues in the sunrays. Then, all of a sudden, she stooped, lifted the loosened stone, and took up the pitcher from the hole. She raised it above her head one instant, high above her head and their reach, as she had held a pitcher of water a thousand times if one.

'You are false and accursed,' she said to them, and her voice was deep and clear, and smote them as if it were a sword. 'You are false and accursed; and she owed no man or woman a thread in her garments, a crust in her mouth. She was honest and faithful and true, and cheated not a dog nor a mule of his rights. But all she has left—take! Take and scramble for it like the thieves you are; and may the bread and the wine that you buy with it blister your mouths and consume your bodies.'

Then with a single gesture of magnificent rage she dashed the pitcher down through the sunlight on to the floor amidst them; it fell shattered in a score of pieces on the stones, and the coins rolled hither and thither, and their metal gleamed in the sunlight. The women threw themselves on them. The old man screamed.

Musa called Leone to her side, took the linen, and the summer and winter clothing that belonged to her, took the lute and the distaff, and the trifles that were her own, passed into the adjacent chamber where the mule was stabled, bridled him and led him out into the open air, first having bound upon his back her own mattress, with its hempen sheeting and its coarse but warm blankets.

The women were yelling and quarrelling over the scattered coin; the old man was trying to snatch his share, and was buffeted and beaten between them. In their haste and their greed and their struggle they did not notice or know what she did.

Without looking back once she passed out of the old home of her childhood, and went out between the blocks of stone and the stunted aloes, leading the mule and followed by the dog.

She went straight across the tufa mounds, and the narrow paths crossing the reedy, moist soil, the rank grass lands, and the wild undergrowth that stretched around Santa Tarsilla, and walked slowly on and on, on and on, for eight miles, plunging into the deep woodland and entering the vast virgin meadows, until she came within sight of those cliffs of sandstone, where the tombs of the Tyrrhenes were hidden away behind the fence of thorny ruscus and the dense walls of bay. 'They will not be angered against me, nor will they speak ill of her,' she thought; and led the mule straight onward to the place she loved, where the tall leafy cork-trees rose up from the thickets, and the white-flowered cistus-bushes, and the hawthorns and the myrtles, and the yellow-blossoming Christ's-thorn covered the burial-place of the Etruscan dead.

Intense heat still brooded over all the land, but she was used to it; it did not harm her.

For miles around there was nothing visible; not a sail in the distant sea, not a bird in the air, not a boar in the brakes, not a snake in the sand.

She led the old mule, and paced beside him; her heart was like a stone, her feet felt like lead; all at once she realised all that the faithful, kindly, fostering love of Joconda had been to her, and knew that it was gone from her for ever.

She went on with the animal through the hot white light, their shadows lying black behind them on the scorched grass and the grey sand. An immense sorrow had entered into her, and an immense regret. She thought—'I was never thankful!'

She had not been thankful because she had not understood. As the child does not comprehend his cost to the mother who bore the burden of him, so she had never understood what she owed to the woman who had sheltered her nameless life.

She had taken all that was about her, as children do, unthinkingly; they do not ask why the sun shines, why the bread is there, why the roof is between their heads and the winter storm; these things are so; they accept them and do not question nor wonder. She had not been thankless; she had only been a child. Now she was a child no more. She had looked on death, and it had left her desolate.

She had made her mind up to go and dwell with those whom she had called her own people, in the twilight of the earth, underneath the grass and canes. She was sure that they would not repulse her.

She preferred their mute mercy to the clamouring greed of the living. What appalled her was, not that she was penniless, but that she was alone.

She went across the moor in the strong unchanging sunlight that, as the day grew apace, ceased to have even the relief of any shade from leaf or blade of reed. She met no living thing. She uncovered the entrance of the tomb and descended the steps into it; and the mule, used to the stone stairs that led to his own stable, was with little trouble induced to follow. She unloaded the things off his back and laid them down; she took her sickle and went up into the air and cut thistles and dry grass for him, and filled a stoup of water at the half-dried pool, and stabled him there in as much comfort as she could. Then she gathered sticks together, and lit a fire on the stones of the entranceplace, and set a little soup-pot on to boil with some herbs and beans and fish in it that she had brought, with some rough bread, to make her midday meal.

The food seemed to choke her, but she ate, being young and in health, so that hunger came to her despite her sorrow.

When she had eaten she laid her bedclothes on the stone couch that had served for the last sleep of the Etruscan Lucumo, and sat down in the soft grey gloom of the twilit place, sheltered from the glare and scorch of day, and said to herself, 'my home is here.'

Santa Tarsilla was no more her home. It was full of liars and of thieves. She abhorred it. Though its sands were to become full of silver ore, as the soil of Populonia once had been, she said to herself that never again should her feet tread them.

Let them keep the money and kill each other fighting over it!

She almost smiled as she sat there in the gloom and thought of old Andreimo beaten to and fro by the struggling women, and clutching at the coins and shrieking in his feeble treble.

'One would think that gold were God!' she thought; remembering how but three days before the galley-slave had robbed her: robbed the tomb that was sacred, the dead that were defenceless.

The terror of her own lonely and hapless fate looked at her from the awful eyes of the sculptured Chimera and the frowning brows of the painted Typhon; yet so consoled was she to be in this silent sanctuary that she began to think of her future maintenance and her future liberty here with a sense of deliverance rather than of danger. There would indeed, she knew, be no means of gaining any livelihood here. She could spin well, but so could every one else in the province, and she could make nets with skill, but so could every fisherman on the seaboard: and there was nothing beyond these to do.

Work is the political economist's one advice and panacea; but there are many places in the world where it is not possible to work, and the Maremma in summer-time is one of them. There is nothing to labour at; all has been already done by the army of labourers that stream down from the mountains. The few that are left lie in the sun and think themselves blessed if they do not sicken or starve; many do both.

But of sickness she had no fear, and she was not even afraid of famine.

She thought if she could manage to make her bread from the saggina, or wild oats, that grew all around she could live here well enough. She scarcely, indeed, took more thought of what might be her bodily privation than the nightingales coming back, whilst the days are still short and the woodlands still brown with their first budding, take heed of the wild weather that may come to still their song and stay their courting.

She had never known any kind of indulgence or fastidious appetite. She had always eaten sparingly of the simplest food; the idea that she might have only a bit of oaten bread for weeks together did not frighten her. She was very well aware that she would have to depend on what her own hands could gather.

The old mule was lying down on the litter of dry grasses; the dog was asleep, for he was old too and soon drowsy; the twilight of the tomb was like the soft shadows that herald the dawn; the painted shapes upon the walls played on their pipes, and wreathed their garlands, and danced in the border of lotus flower; outside, the burning day was fierce and white, the animal life of the moors was all hidden and still, there was only the rustle of the snake through the tall stalks of the distaff-canes, the hoot of the cicala swinging high on the caroba^[1] boughs: the sound of the insects' odd singing came faintly into the stillness of the tombs.

'If only she were here!' thought Musa.

Who had been those vanished people who had known so well how to cherish their dead and put them gently away in their painted chambers with the toys of their infancy, or the weapons of their manhood, or the jewels of their virginal or matronly pride, tenderly placed beside them? Who had they been, those forgotten peoples, who robbed death of half its terrors, and laid the dog beside his master, the toy beside the child, in cool, fresh, sacred chambers where the dead seemed not dead but waiting?

Ah! why was she not here!—she, who was thrust into that hole in the sand, in that box of pitch-pine, thrust out of life with unseemly haste, with a brutal eagerness to be rid of her and forget that ever she had been.

Musa could not have reasoned out the thing she felt; but the ghastly rites, the hideous selfishness, the vulgar hurrying cruelty, that mark out the Christian treatment of the dead weighed on her with their harshness and their horror as she sat in these graves of the Etruscans—made ere men had heard of Christ.

Then for the first time a few great tears rushed into her eyes and she wept bitterly, and, thus weeping, fell at the last asleep, in a merciful sleep that lasted through several hours, while the hot day throbbed itself away without, and the rays of the sun beat in vain upon her resting-place and could not enter.

When she awoke it was dark; night-herons, early come from the north on their voyage to Egypt, flying over the marshes sent forth their loud harsh croak. She mounted the stairs and looked upward, and guessed the hour by the place of the evening star, and the look of the heavens. She went down again and ate a little and drank some water, fed the dog and the mule, shut them both in the chamber, and went out into the open air.

She had an errand to do, with which, undone, it seemed to her she could not sleep. A strange fancy had come to her, and the fancy assumed the shape of duty to her; of a duty of gratitude so imperative that it would have been a guilt in her sight to evade its execution.

The uneducated are perhaps unjustly judged sometimes. To the ignorant both right and wrong are only instincts; when one remembers their piteous and innocent confusion of ideas, the twilight of dim comprehension in which they dwell, one feels that oftentimes the laws of cultured men are too hard on them, and that, in a better sense than that of injustice and reproach, there ought indeed to be two laws for rich and poor.

Musa walked through the still sultry night.

There was a haze of heat over the heavens that obscured the stars, and there was no moon. When she reached the entrance of Santa Tarsilla it was midnight and quite dark. There were no lights in any of the houses; far down the coast there was the gleam of the pharos of Orbetello: all else on sea and earth was in impenetrable gloom.

She, who had known the ways of the place from infancy, made no error in her going. She took her path straight to that field of death where they had laid Joconda.

The walls of the cemetery were low and white; one of them was washed by the sea. Her eyes, grown accustomed to the blackness of the moonless air, discerned the outline of the walls, and over the inland one, nearest to her, she leaped with the agility of her strong youth, and slowly took her road over the rough clods and the rough grass of the enclosure.

Then she lit a lantern she had brought with her, and by its light found her way to the freshest grave that was there, hard by the sea wall.

The earth lay all broken up into hard clods and heavy lumps as the earth, when sun-baked by a scorching midsummer, always lies, beat it as spade and hoe may. She stood by it, looking down on it timidly and tenderly with yearning eyes awhile; then she lifted her lantern and went to the little white-washed shed which served as a funeral chapel.

There was a toolhouse close by it, the door of which was never shut; she went in and got a pickaxe and other tools and returned with them to the grave of Joconda.

She began to loosen the earth; that brutal earth which lay so heavily on the breast of her best friend.

Southward on the sea there was now a crowd of lights burning yellow against the deep blue of the summer night; the men of the Orbetellano were spearing the fish frightened and blinded by the blaze of lanterns. But there was no sound in all the place except the ripple of the water against the low mortared wall. Once a dog, far away in the fields, barked.

She laboured on undisturbed.

The earth loosened when so dry does not readily adhere together again, and the clods were all easy to remove. In an hour's time she had uncovered the rough deal box that they had called Joconda's coffin.

She took breath and leaned against the wall and gazed down into the chasm. Before womanhood had fully opened for her she knew the doom that comes with age. She lived with the lost dead instead of with the living.

A deep-toned clock in the house nearest struck faintly the seventh hour; the old way of counting time still prevails in Maremma. It was, as we say, one hour after midnight. The fear of interruption gave her fresh strength and energy. She knew that to raise the coffin would be more difficult than to uncover it; but she descended into the pit, tied cords about it, and, after another hour's hard and patient toil, raised it up on to the ground above.

Then she trembled; the great dews rolled off her forehead; in the hot night she grew cold.

The only human soul that had ever loved her was there at her feet, helpless and senseless as the clods of clay—no more a human creature, but a thing thrust out of sight and forgotten of all.

She shivered as she looked on it; then she took up her spade and shovelled in the earth; dry as it had been, and loose, she knew that in the morning it would bear no sign of disturbance to careless eyes, and that most likely there would not be even a careless glance cast on that waste corner by the old sea wall.

When it was all filled in, the earth was lower than it had been, but this would seem no more than the natural in-sinking of the soil. She rested once again, a moment, from her labour, and drew breath again for her heaviest trial of strength, the lifting of the coffin over the wall and into the boat beneath. She had great strength in her symmetrical limbs; she was shaped as nobly as a Greek statue, and in her beautiful arms, her straight limbs, her superb hips, there was no less force than grace. From her childhood upward the sea had bathed, the wind had fed, the sweetness of sound sleep and the tonic of athletic exercise had nourished her. Beside the sun-starved, room-cooped prisoners of the factory and of the schoolroom she would have been as Atalanta beside the dried and shrivelled atomy of a specimen-jar. With all her strength now she raised the coffin by the cords she had knotted about it, dragged it up on to the wall beside her, which was of breadth enough to afford safe footing, and thence by degrees lowered it into the old wooden craft, half boat, half tub, belonging to Andreino in which she had spent her happiest hours.

She descended into the punt, laid the coffin reverently at her feet, loosened the chain from the staple, and, taking up her oars, bent over them and began to row back to the place on the sea-shore where she had rescued the galley-slave Mastarna.

She was drenched with the sweat of exertion, she was cold with a nameless terror, she was aching in every muscle with the strain of her over-wrought labour. But she was content. She had done her duty as she saw it. When her eyes rested on the deal surface of the oblong thing at her feet, she thought tenderly,

'Surely she knows; surely she is glad I take her to them?"

It had seemed to her so brutal, so vile, so thankless to thrust the dead, only because it was dead, into the earth, in a waste hole of ground, and leave it alone to the growth of the rank grass and the thistle, to the companionship of the newt and the worm.

The sea was perfectly placid; the air was still without wind; the moon had now risen, and seemed like a friend in the sky. In Santa Tarsilla no one had awakened; all was still. She was safe, and her errand was done.

When at length the boat reached the place on the sands where the low myrtles and rosemary grew well-nigh to the edge of the sea—the place where Saturnino had sat on the sand and cursed mankind and his own soul—the lovely vermilion hue of early daybreak in the Maremma was slowly spreading over the heavens.

She sprang into the water, and with infinite tenderness and solemn care drew the boat with its freight upon the shore, amidst the sea-stocks and the samphire.

Then she dragged her weary feet over the three miles of heath that lay between her and the Etruscan tomb. She went down into the grave, stirred the old mule from his slumber, and placed his pack-saddle on his back; followed by Leone, she led him by the bridle to the shore. She was now so fatigued that her limbs shook under her, and her head swam. But she pursued her way.

Reaching the edge of the waves, she drew out the coffin from its shelter beneath the shrubs, raised it with great difficulty on to the pack-saddle and fastened it there; then once more, with her hand on the mule's bridle, and with the dog beside her silent and subdued, she went back, now not alone, to the grave of the kings.

As she went—the mule patiently bearing the burden of the dead mistress who had fed and tended him for twenty years, rendering his owner this last service ere he, too, should fall away into the uselessness of age, into the darkness of death—Musa looked back once at the open sea.

The rose of dawn was all above her head, the waters lay wide and peaceful in the sweet mysterious light.

Her heart was full.

'Surely she must be glad,' she thought; 'she will be with us, and she will know that I did not forget.'

 

1. Ceratonia siliqua.

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