In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 17

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XVII.

 

N the following morning she was sitting outside the tombs, plaiting the biodo,^[1] with her mind still darkened and her spirits still troubled by the treachery of Zefferino. Her rage had been like a styptic, and in a measure had cauterised the pain she felt, but it was sorrow as much as wrath that filled her heart this morning; she had been fond of the child and had trusted him, and he had sold for silver her secret, her peace, her safety; since all security for her depended, as she knew well, on no one being aware of the existence of the sepulchres.

It was, therefore, with heavy and anxious thoughts that she plaited on at her rushes in the early day, whilst the bees buzzed about the yellow-flowered coronilla, and the jewel-like snakes crept harmlessly under the emerald leaves of the wake-robin.

Her worst fears took definite shape as, between her and the glory of the morning rays, pouring down over the mountains behind her, there came a human figure.

His back was to the sun and she could not discern his features, but there was that about him which made her sure it was one of those to whom Zirlo had sold her—the one who had spoken most to her.

Her first instinct was of flight, as it is that of all other moorland creatures at sight of an invader of their solitudes. Her next was a bolder one; she rose, thrust her plaiting down on the ground, and went forward to meet him. Her eyes blazed as they had done the night before; her teeth were set.

'How dare you to come hither again?' she shouted across the heather and the holythorn, the coronilla and broom, that parted him from her. 'How dare you? I forbade you. This land belongs to me. Get you gone, or I will force you to repent of it.'

The stranger paused humbly and looked at her over the golden flowers of the coronilla and the broom.

'May I speak one word to you?' he said gently.

The man who drew near her was about thirty years old; he was tall and strongly made; his face was delicate and full of thought; it had not much beauty, except that which was due to the luminance of expression, and the colour and largeness, of his clear blue eyes. It was a physiognomy strange to her, for it was entirely northern.

He came on as quickly as the prickly shrubs, and the creepers that laced them together, would allow him to do. He was looking at her with an expression of keen interest, and she stood awaiting him with knitted brows and dark suspicious glances, ankle-deep in cinquefoil and saintfoin.

'Are you not she whom the shore people call the Velia and the Musoncella?'

'Yes,' she answered angrily; 'what is that to you?'

'It is much, he said gently, being as fearful of her taking flight ere she could hear him as the bird-catcher is of alarming the lapwing when it is turning its crested head in innocent curiosity to the nets he spreads. 'It is much. I will tell you who I am—I am the grandson of Joachim Sanctis.'

All the rage and the imperious scorn went out of her face; she was amazed and awed.

'You are of her people!' she said under her breath; then, with the lapwing's caution, she drew back her momentarily awakened sympathies.

'Maybe you only lie,' she said with impatience. 'Any one on the shore knows that I lived with Joconda. It is very easy to say this; and you crept into my house yesterday while I was away as a fox creeps into the moorhen's nest when she is absent.'

'I am no fox, indeed,' he said with a faint smile, 'and I mean you nothing but friendliness. Here is Joconda's letter, written to Joachim, who has been dead five and thirty years and more, when I was not born myself.'

Across the morning light and the amber blossoms she glanced at the letter which the public letter-writer had penned in ceremonious and very flowery language; but she did not take it.

'I knew nothing about the letter,' she said suspiciously. 'And how did you come to have it. It was not written to you.'

'No; it was written to my grandfather and his brother. Both are dead. All are dead of her generation. There is a bailiff in the farmhouse she knew. The letter went to the priest down at Cogne, and he sent it on to me. But I was in Asia, and never received it till this spring, when I returned from the East; and when, as I landed at Naples, I got it, I resolved to come and see you and Joconda. At Santa Tarsilla I heard of her death, and of you no one could tell me anything. I have roamed about your Maremma to look for you. Yesterday, a friend who travelled with me wanted to find out these tombs; and when I saw you I felt sure that you were the "Musa" of Joconda's letter, only I would not speak before the other man. I slept up at a wretched place, San Lionardo, and at sunrise came to see you. That is all. I do not know why you should doubt me.'

She was silent, unconvinced, yet a little touched by his words and troubled at the thought that one of her dead friend's blood should be living and standing before her.

'Why did you look for me?' she said curtly.

'The letter asked Joachim to befriend you if she died; I thought I ought to do what he would have done.'

'That was kind.'

'If it were I have more than my reward."

The flattery passed by her unseen, making no more imprint than the dew as it rolls off a cabbage-leaf.

'I do not see why you should care,' she said at length; meaning what she said.

'But I did care,' he said with some anger. He did not add, 'because Joconda said that you were beautiful, and alone, and I love all beautiful things, and I pity all lonely ones.'

She stood silent, looking at him, musing.

'Come to her,' she said abruptly and yet with a great tenderness in her voice; and she motioned him to follow her into the chamber where the coffin of poplar-wood lay in the twilight of mother earth.

She knelt down by it and kissed the rough wood.

'Dear and good friend,' she murmured, 'canst thou not hear? Thy people forgot thee so long, but at last they have repented and remembered.'

Then, kneeling still, she prayed in Latin, as she had been taught, to the God who was to her a vast, unknown, incomprehensible Spirit brooding on the face of the waters and smiling with the sunbeams of the morning.

Maurice Sanctis felt his eyes grow moist, and he bent his knee beside her; though for prayer and paternoster he had the easy scorn of a modern student, yet for the old faith that moved the simple hearts of the women of his family he kept a reverent indulgence.

When Musa rose her face had grown tender, and had lost the suspicion and the impatience with which she had received him. He seized that moment of softer feeling to draw from her some account of how she lived there, and why, and of how her early years had passed in Joconda's house.

She told him, simply and frankly, having nothing to conceal; and unconscious of how her narrative made her short history stand before his mind's eye in as bold and pure and heroic lines as those of a Parthenaic frieze. What added to his interest was his own knowledge of the blood of Saturnino that ran in her veins, her parentage having been written by Joconda's scribe on a separate page that he had not offered to her. From the dragon had come forth, not indeed a dove, but a white-winged curlew, strong alike on sea and moor.

'But how is her coffin here?' he asked with surprise, after long silence.

She told him how she had brought it there.

He listened with emotion.

'You are as faithful as a dog,' he said; 'it is not southern, such constancy.'

She did not understand; she knew nothing of any divisions and races of men.

'Do you not think she would have wished to be with me?' she said, anxiously.

'I am sure that she would. Who of us all cares to lie alone in the black earth with the worms? You loved her much, it seems?'

'She was good, and I was too thankless. I know it now; now it is of no use.'

'My poor child! We all feel that when we have lost what served us. When my father lay dead before me I seemed to myself to have been a very brute, living all for my own aims and pleasures in Paris, not giving a thought to the old man by the lake, who would fain have had me live all my life where I could look upon Mont Blanc; and very likely I shall go and live there ere I die. When you are mountain-born you use cities, you do not love them.'

'Is Paris a city?' she asked.

'The city of cities.'

'Where is it? Is it far from here?'

'Will you come with me and see it?'

He spoke half in jest, half in earnest. She took the question literally, without its seeming strange to her.

'I would never go where roofs lie close together,' she said; 'how can the people bear it? always breathing others breath instead of the honey-smell of the flowers.'

'It is a false taste; like choosing wine rather than water. So you are wedded to your Maremmano moors?'

'I love Maremma,' she answered him, slowly; for she had never been called on to analyse and express what she felt. Then she added:

'Where is that other gone who was with you?'

'He is gone back to Genoa, to go to Vienna, where he lives. Did he please you, that you ask?'

'Please me! I am only afraid that he may come back, or tell others of these tombs. I wish that you did not know of them.'

'Why?'

'Because it is the solitude that I care for, and if people know of them, travellers will come and look; they do wherever there are buche delle fate; and if the shepherds find it out they will drive me away and stable themselves in my stead; it would be much better for a shepherd than his hut, because in storms and very cold nights he could drive his flock in with him.'

Sanctis gazed at her in amazement.

'But—but you do not mean that you think in all seriousness of staying here all your life long?'

'That is what I hope to do.'

'Good God! Have you no other dream for your future?'

Musa knitted her brows angrily.

'What better can there be? I have all I want. I can maintain myself very well. I am in the midst of the birds, and of the beasts. There is the air in my mouth, the wind on my face, whenever I choose. I am content. In summer time it is too hot perhaps, and they say the steam of the marshes is bad to breathe, though never has it hurt me; but to live here is good, so good! I do not know what cities may be like, but I know that I will never go to one. Men and women make me angry, cruel, wicked; I never am with them that they do not; they are so mean, they are so cowardly, they are so greedy. But here I am content, and I think, wherever she is, she is content with me.'

Maurice Sanctis was silent; he was moved by that intense and reverent remembrance of the dead woman; he was bewildered at this creature's absolute ignorance of her own physical charm, and of the passions and the hopes that agitate humanity, and illuminate for youth its visions of love. He was loth to disturb her repose. Besides, he saw that he would speak to her in an unknown tongue; he saw that she was a child entirely in thought and feeling.

The early hours of the morning grew warmer, and the noon chimes swung drowsily in many a belfry in little villages upon the shore and on the plains; Sanctis remained there in the shadow of the burial place, breaking his fast with her oaten bread, and drinking the spring water from the ivory-handled rhyton that had served the funeral feasts of the dead Lucumo.

Musa had resumed her plaiting of the biodo, and was all the while longing for him to be gone. He was sacred to her, but he was not welcome; and all the while, also, the treachery of the little curly cherub-faced Zirlo was heavy at her heart.

He had sold her for a silver piece!

As she plaited she had a rebellious and unwilling look, as if this stranger held her captive instead of being but a visitor there; a guest, sharing her bread. She was vaguely distrustful of him; his hands were so white, his linen so fine.

'Joconda was poor,' she said, abruptly; 'you are not a poor man.'

'No, I am not. Anton, the son of Joachim—named after his brother Anton—went to live in Geneva, and owned small craft upon the lake. He throve, and earned bigger boats, and built them for himself, and at last became owner of lake-steamers, and made much money. He was a simple hard-living man to the last, and saved all the money he made. I am his only son; I inherited all he had, years since. I myself am a painter of pictures, and live in Paris. Men call me famous, but I do not think I am worth as much as were Anton and Joachim. Now,' he continued, almost solemnly, 'will you not come with me? My dear, do not be afraid; you will be sacred to me beyond everything. I will take you to sisters of mine, who live upon our lake in such a green wooded place; in spring it is a bower of apple and pear blossom, and rosy chestnut flowers. I swear by that good dead woman, whom her kin forsook and you have cherished, that we will be tenderness itself to you, and make your life a fairy story. Now, answer me, you will come? I do not ask you to come to a city; you will come to mountains grander than yours, and to wider waters and healthier winds.'

'All these words are very well,' said Musa, with scorn; 'but why did you all let her live and die alone?'

'It was wrong,' said Sanctis; 'but mine was not the blame, nor was it my father's. Joachim and Anton had hated and opposed her marriage, and in later times resented her silence. For want of a word lives often drift apart.'

'Was not a Maremmano mariner as good as a cowkeeper in Savoy?' said Musa, with continuous contempt.

'It was the antagonism of races; our people came from Glarus, and were of a Teuton stock,' said Sanctis; and then remembered that he was talking in an unknown tongue to his companion. He added quickly, 'I am very sorry that we let her live so. But to me she was only a vague name, she belonged to such a distant time; even my grandfather Joachim I never saw.'

She was mute. She was angered with his intrusion on her solitude, and she was resentful of that long neglect under which Joconda had lived through so hard a life to pass away in so lonely a death.

If he had been a shepherd, or a herdsman, or a rude sailor, he might have awakened her sympathies; but there was about him the atmosphere, as it were, of another world than hers: a sort of look of ease, of culture, of success, of all things which were beyond her comprehension, yet which alienated her.

He could not prevail on her to listen, nor on himself to give up so easily what the dead woman's letter had entreated her brethren to do. He stayed a few days at Telamone, at the wretched little wine-house which was all the accommodation it could afford, and hired a little felucca and sailed along the coast to the Sasso Scritto, and thence, most days, walked inland to the tombs. This displeased her, and she made him feel it, though she checked many a harsh word unuttered because he was of Joconda's kindred.

He meekly asked her permission to finish his sketches of the sepulchres, and she gave it reluctantly, suspicious of a stranger's entrance in those solitudes.

Often when he arrived there to go on with his careful drawings of the walls, he found the place silent and empty; she was away, gone over the moors which she knew so well, and in whose mazes of vegetation it was hopeless for him to follow her. She avoided him; he was alien to her, he was outside the pale of her sympathies; she had more friendship for a sheldrake plunging and splashing amongst the pond-lilies, for a porcupine or a hedgehog creeping on its careful excursions under the giant fennel. She vaguely felt, as the gipsy feels it in the stranger who accosts him, that he desired to take her away from all this freedom. She did not know the world he came from, but she hated it without knowing it; a world where the roofs were close together, and the birds were in cages, and the free air of heaven was feared; that was what she thought it, and she was afraid lest he should in any way compel her to go to it. She did not think he would betray her, because he had Joconda's clear blue eyes; but she did not breathe freely where he was; it seemed to her that he wanted to take her as the bird-snarers took the poor stream-swallows, to carry them into cities and sell them, to have a thread tied about their foot for house-diversion.

 

1. Scirpus paludosus.

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