In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 20

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XX.

 

HE summer passed on. Sanctis did not return, and she gave him no thought. The wild flowers ceased to bloom; the torrid heats descended on the earth; under the passing rain storms the hot soil seethed and smoked; the Serpent-bearer gleamed nightly in the southeast, and from Perseus shooting-stars fell across the heavens.

The height of summer here is the weird, the oppressive, the ghastly season of the year; rarely even has the sunset beauty, the red rayless ball too often lends but a red, dull hectic to the sun and sky. The chanting tree-frogs are happy, and all the snakes and the heat-loving lizards; nothing else is.

The panting fox hangs his tongue out even as he lies in his cool damp earth; the porcupine sleeps supine; the birds doze, songless; the hare is hot even in her leafy form lined with the milkwort; there is not a breath even amongst the sedges, that rustle so readily at the least air; the very water is sickly and lukewarm, even under the moon, when the snipes are bathing and questing.

When the rains come, as they do often here, they scarcely bring any coolness; they only serve to distil the dangerous miasma from the ground.

For the first time in her life the season affected Musa; she was not ill in any way, but she felt tired and oppressed. Treachery is like the fever of these lands; its injury may be shaken off and its poison defied, yet where it has once entered no life is ever quite the same again. Zirlo was only a little, selfish, cunning, merciless child; but he had stabbed her to the quick.

Never once did she regret her refusal to Maurice Sanctis. He had been so unlike all she had ever known; what he offered was so unintelligible to her. His relationship to Joconda seemed to her so like a fable, so unreal, so intangible, that he had left no impress on her mind.

When she thought of him at all, it was with a contemptuous impatience and wonder, such as she had felt at Daniello Villamagna.

But the sailor was nearer to her, more comprehensible; she would have liked to own the good brig if she could have done so without his owning her.

The Sicilian she laughed at, but in a measure understood; Maurice Sanctis she understood not at all.

Meantime, in a great château of the western provinces, Sanctis himself pursued his work on vast blank wall spaces, which he had promised to make bloom as the rose, with frescoes of the old sweet story of Eros and Psyche.

To every true artist there is no such true delight as fresco; no method which gives so entirely the sense of the power of instantaneous creation. Surely, also, art has never been so great since the panel and the canvas supplanted the wide wall-surface, so eloquent in its barrenness to those who can see with the eye of the mind, as Raffaelle saw when he went through the Stanze that he was called to decorate, dreaming of the School of Athens.

Sanctis would not have been unworthy to unloose the sandals of the Angel of Urbino.

He worshipped Art and followed it with humble and perfect reverence.

If there were too great an austerity, too chill a calm, in his creations, as in Flandrin's, and Laurens', and Overbeck's, they were absolutely pure, entirely noble.

Under his touch now his Eros became too entirely the incarnation of spiritual love, his Psyche too entirely the embodiment of the soul; but the myth lost none of its grace and gained a holiness not its own under his treatment.

But, for the first time, his heart was not in the work of his hand. He had not his usual interest in his creations. He had his usual fine thought, delicate touch, subtle meaning in what grew beneath the sweep of his brush, but for ever between him and the fresco came the remembrance of the Musoncella and of Maremma.

As he drew the gold curls and fair face of his Psyche, he saw always the dark and brilliant face of that daughter of the Etruscan Mastarna. As he painted the Greek portico, the cool atrium, the dark green of orange and myrtle touching white marble, he only saw the veil plea of the tufa soil, the amethyst and sapphire of the mountains, the dusk of the silent tombs, the lustre of the eyes of the offspring of Saturnino.

He knew her origin; his knowledge let him trace the possible current of oriental blood that had most likely been unmingled with any foreign stream in all the generations who had borne the name of Mastarna and dwelt upon the site of the ancient Saturnia. Her passionate instinct of attachment to the Tyrrhene nation might come from transmitted influences that for three thousand years and more, under the shadow of the Apennines, had been strong in a race that had changed neither its dwelling-place nor its instincts.

It was a fantastic idea, but it took hold of the mind of the artist, which was more dreamy and enthusiastic than he knew. He fancied that he saw the voluptuous Lydian of the days of Asian supremacy look from under those level brows and full eyelids of Saturnino Mastarna's child.

The memory of her pursued him and unnerved him; he was angered against her. His reason told him that it was best for his peace to see no more of a life which, brought into his own, in any way, would be as the wind and the lightning flash of the tempest are in serene pale April skies; yet, think as he would, he could not shake off a sense of cowardice and wrong-doing in leaving undone the task that Joconda had asked her brothers to do. He could not, whether in the historic silence of the old Armorican castle, or in the mirthful and crowded streets of Paris, forget for any length of time that solitary figure as he saw it stand amidst the amber of the coronilla and the broom.

She was so strong, so fearless, so fierce, so lonely, dwelling there amidst the graves of her perished nation; she was beautiful as a hawk is, poised on a bough of oak and looking with bold and brilliant eye down the shaft of the golden sunbeam. She had that grace, that strength, that untamed dignity and daring, which the free things of forest and crag alone possess. The memory of her haunted Sanctis, whose life, all artist though he was, had been chill, orderly, calm, cultured, with little passion in it, and on it the yoke of an early training whose precision could never be wholly abandoned, for strong are the bonds of birth and habit.

He was a man of genius, and by custom a Parisian; but there was much in him of the calm and simple mountaineer, of the patient and prudent alpine peasant. His work, his mind, his modes of life, were those of a famous painter who was also a rich man, and could build for himself a house that was a temple of art; but his nature remained that which had been Anton's and Joachim's before him. He loved order, method, cleanliness in morals, serenity in the manner of his days; his paintings erred in almost too great an abundance of limpidity, of mathematical exactitude, of faultless perspective; they were so perfect that they seemed a reproach to a hurrying and careless world that loves brio and celerity. Never in all his life had a thought that was unwelcome and poisonous been harboured by him for more than a moment; his clear and calm mind had been always able to repel it. But the desire to return to that strange, unhealthy, luxuriant, mournful land where Musa dwelt grew upon him, and although he resisted he could not banish it. And he smarted with a sense of cowardice, remembering that he had allowed her to drive him from it.

'Doubtless the Sicilian lover is with her,' he said again and again to himself as he worked on at the great frescoes.

And yet he could not fancy her with any lover; he could not think of those superb lips as tremulous with any tenderness or warmed with any kiss. It seemed to him that she could never live in any other way than so, alone with her Etruscan dead.

To living humanity she was the Musoncella.

He worked at the frescoes summer and autumn, and was never content with them; and went back to Paris, where his house was the envy of his fellows. There he shut himself in during those chilly autumn days when the leaves were flying in scarlet squadrons down the asphalte without, and he painted that which haunted him.

He portrayed her just as he had seen her in the hot transparent morning, with the gold of the coronilla and the broom behind her, and the turquoise blue of the sky beyond. He gave the picture that strength, that liberty, that untamable spirit, that freshness of open-air life, and that repose of solitude which were in her. His friends came and saw it in progress and called it Maia, Erinna, Heliodora, and many another classic name; and said that it would be the grandest and most luminous thing that he had ever created. But one day he was struck with a sudden unreasoning sense of utter hatred to it; he drew a great brushfull of bistre over the damask rose of the mouth, the oriental sombreness and mystery of the eyes, and set it with its face to the grey wall, and locked his studio and went away.

 

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