In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 15

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

IN MAREMMA.

 

CHAPTER XV.

 

URING this second summer that she passed upon the moors, early in a May morning, when she was out on the waters, there was a vessel standing off the shore; a rare sìght there, for, though many sailing ships and steamers passed in the offing, no one of them ever came close in, unless it were a tartana coasting, much less did any cast anchor anywhere nearer than Civita Vecchia one way, or Livorno the other.

This vessel, however, a comely barque of Sicilian rig, a brig of some 100 tons, had paused in her course for her crew to fish, as in the clear water a shoal of tunny had been seen, and the nets had been thrown in amidst it. The men hailed her in her boat, and asked her some questions as to the soundings and the coast; for there was a fog on the horizon, a white fog like a silver veil, and they thought it meant wind and water both, and they were strangers.

She answered them willingly, for she thought well of all sailors; and their skipper, a young fellow and handsome, whose first voyage it was on these seas, as he was of Palermo and had always traded eastward, pulled himself out to her in his long-boat, and threw into her little skiff some oranges and other fruit. As they were from a sailor she took them, and let him see her white shell-like teeth in a smile like sunshine in a storm. When she pulled her boat to shore, he pulled his too inland; and when she stepped through the shallow water and the sands, he stepped beside her.

He was very handsome, with a glowing, sun-warmed beauty, like one of his own Sicilian fruits. He was but twenty-three years of age; his heart was warm, and his head was hot. He said to her:

'Maiden, where I come from the land is beautiful as the sea is; the shores laugh; the hills are rich as a mother's breasts for her first-born; men and women live on fruit and wine, and song and love; yet not in my own Sicilia did ever I see so handsome a maiden as art thou!'

And this he said in his own soft amatory Sicilian tongue, which is like the flow of honey from the lip of a ewer of gold.

She looked straight at him and frowned a little.

'I took your fruit, friend, because you gave me it with good friendliness; if you clog it with lies, I will fling it in the waves.'

The Sicilian stared at her hard with his brown starry eyes; then he laughed all over his face.

'Lies? I said never a truer word. But if it displease you, so much the wiser are you. Tell me, who are you? Nay, do tell me, I pray of you.'

'I am no one,' said Musa, curtly. 'They call me the Musoncella and the Velia. Go you back to your ship, and leave me to go home.'

'Where is your home?

'On the moors; miles inland.'

'May I visit you there?'

'No.'

He was silent a moment. Then he spoke again with fire and force:

'I am a stranger, and you answer me rightly. But listen to me one little minute. Nay, I am an honest man. I am Daniello the son of Febo, of the house of Villamagna. I have been a seaman all my days, and now I command the brig yonder, and own part of her too, my fair Ausiliatrice; as good a brig as there sails on the high seas, trading with fruit as far as the misty cold northern coasts. That is all. But it is enough. I would not change with princes. I am my own master; and yonder, in my island, I have withal to keep a wife in comfort. Now, look you, if you will be that wife I will be a happy man. What say you?'

He was only the rough skipper of a coaster that made the chief profits of her voyages for her merchant owners, not for him. But he was a Sicilian; he had fire in his veins, fancy in his brain, passions in his heart; he had been born under the flame and snow of the mighty Etna, and he had been lulled to his sleep from infancy with the sound of the waters that wash the Golden Shell.

He was a sailor; a son of rude Sicilian mariners; but love had stricken him through the eyes, even as it struck great Dante, gallant Ariosto, and grave Petrarca.

For in this land this sudden birth of love is still a truth; a fact, like the gold in the lily's heart or the red in the pomegranate's flower.

She stared at him, half enraged, half amazed. Then she shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of scorn and scepticism.

'Go back and say that to your Sicilian maidens. You remind me well that I have spoken too long to a stranger.'

Then she shook his fruits down on to the sands, and turned her back on him, and began to walk homeward with the dog, who had been in her boat beside her. The sailor was stung and wounded, yet he approved her. He stepped quickly on too, and kept pace with her a moment.

'As Gesu lives I speak in seriousness, and swear you honest love. One flash of your eyes to mine was enough; that is how we love in Sicilia. My eyes to your heart say nothing, alas! alas! But this I swear to you, oh cruel one and unjust! I pass by here in four months' time with my cargo from the Scotch shores. Here I will land, and, if you will meet me, I will say the same again, and you shall go back with me to my isle, and we will build you a nest in the fig-tree and the cactus-hedge of my own shore. There is my hand on it, as I am Daniello, son of Febo, of the house of Villamagna.'

He stood before her on the lonely beach, and held out his hand; he looked eager and passionate, and youthful and handsome as a young sea-god.

But he failed to touch her.

Her eyes laughed with incredulous scorn.

'In four months—we will see,' she said, with the same incredulity in her accent as in her glance.

'In four months you shall see,' said the sailor, with suppressed fury and pain. 'Oh, maiden, with whom have you dwelt that you have a heart like a stone to a man?'

'What matters it?' she said, with a shrug of her shoulders once more.

Her soul was dumb and blind as yet; she could not understand; she thought him mad, or in joke.

'It will matter to you also, some day,' said the Sicilian skipper.

'Will you promise to be here on the beach this day four months?' he pursued. 'Come what winds and tides there may, here will I be.'

'Not I,' she answered him; 'if you want to see me, then you may find me. But you will not.'

'I will find you,' he said passionately; 'you have said they call you a sea-bird and the Musoncella.'

But ere he spoke she had taken to flight; going over the moist, red, moss-eaten earth as the wary lapwing skims it when the nets are spread in his sight. He could have followed her, for he was young and fleet, but a sense of awe and of timidity withheld him. He looked after her a little while, then he went back to his good brig.

It made no impression on Musa; her senses were unawakened, like the sting of the bee that lies undeveloped in the alveole; and her emotions were more quickly moved to anger than to pity. She ran on like a young ostrich who hears the negroes after it, and felt no safety till she had plunged once more into the friendly twilight of her home.

No thought of the future troubled her.

If the charcoal-burners never drove her out, or the shepherds never found her refuge and maltreated her, she feared nothing. It seemed to her that she would live on for hundreds of years, so, in that calm unending solitude, in that dreamful quiet place.

 

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