In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 21

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXI.

 

EANWHILE, in Maremma, as the August heats lay heavy on the land, fate was at work for Musa; the fate which comes to all, and sometimes, like the prophet of old, blesses and curses in the same breath.

One day she went out on the sea; the sea was as hot as the land was, but still she was glad to bathe in it, to swim against it, to pull her boat through it, to watch its lovely colours, here the line of a pigeon's breast, there deeply, darkly blue as the indigo-berries of the laurestinus when they purpled the moors in autumn. There was a slight southerly wind, and it filled the little lateen sail that she had contrived, by much hard work with axe and mallet, to fix up in her treasure-trove of a boat. She had made the mast from a young pine, and had woven and stitched the canvas herself. In the pleasure of her sail, she went far and stayed late; it was evening when she went down the steps of the tombs.

As she descended, she saw in the twilight of her home a lonely figure sitting crouched before the embers of the fire. Her heart beat wildly, not with fear but rage. Who had dared to violate her sanctuary? And with her wrath there mingled apprehension; if shepherd or forester found out this safe shelter, would they ever leave to her sole ownership of it?

She looked through the boughs down into the gloom. She could not see the face of the stranger; his head was bowed on his hands and his whole frame crouched up like that of a stray and shivering dog.

She took the long knife she always wore in her girdle and went down the steps; at the slight sound she made the intruder looked up as she had seen startled animals look, sprang to his feet, and, before she could stop him, had prostrated himself at hers.

'I claim your shelter,' he said, and he kissed her rough woollen skirts. 'I am an innocent man, hunted and miserable. Save me!'

Musa stood over him with her grave luminous face full of sudden compassion. Her hand still held the long knife, but she showed neither doubt nor fear of him.

'Who are you?' she said simply.

'I was a prisoner on Gorgona; I escaped with Saturnino; we parted company in the storm that overtook us. I saw him again when he was hiding a few days later; he had doubled like a fox. He described this place to me and bade me make for it. I am wounded—and tired—and—forgive me.'

A great faintness came over him as he spoke; his lips turned blue, his heart seemed to cease to beat, and he sank downwards on the earthen floor. A wound in his shoulder had burst out bleeding afresh.

Musa threw her knife on the ground; she busied herself with such restoratives as she knew, and with a firm hand bound up the gunshot wound while he still lay insensible. Then she forced a little wine that Joconda had kept as a cordial between his lips, and bathed his head and face with cold water.

After a little he regained consciousness, but only languidly, and he did not fully awake to the remembrance of what had passed.

'You are good; you are good; that cools me,' he murmured as the water fell on him.

He was in a feverish sort of trance, his skin was burning, and his breath was short and quick.

She was absorbed in her efforts to help him; she did not notice that he was a man young, and wonderfully handsome, with the beauty of the Greek ideal; beauty which not exposure, or imprisonment, or shame, or terror, or privation, or the ghastly horrors of the galleys had had any power to destroy, though they had wasted, darkened, and dimmed it, as dust and ill-usage obscure the soilless glory and fine lines of the marble god. Of all this she saw nothing, thought nothing; it was enough for her that he was hunted and in fear, like the beasts and the birds of the Maremma.

She tended him as she would have taken care of a stricken deer or a maimed hawk. Saturnino's name said nothing to her. She thought of him only as a thief who had robbed the dead; but even as she had aided and pitied him, so she did this man. There was in her blood a fierce hatred of law and oppression; a keen sympathy with all that was driven and persecuted.

After awhile the stranger became more awake to where he was, and recovered, as the wine flowed down into his chilled, bruised, weary body, sight and speech and sense. She had piled dead wood on' the hearth, and he was still stretched where he had first dropped before it. The night was cold, though the days were scorching, and the heat of the fire was welcome to his limbs, numbed with long fatigue and exposure in woods and marshes where he had disputed acorns with the boars and the rats,

'You will not give me up?' he said, with timid appeal in his great dark eyes,

Musa standing above him, in her strength and her health, smiled with a little scorn. 'Why do you come to me if you think so?'

'Saturnino said you had been good to him, and that the place was a sure refuge.'

He did not say that Saturnino had also said to him:

'If the maiden be squeamish, or be like to be treacherous, you can easily rid yourself of her—a fawn's neck is soon slit.'

'He was vile himself,' she said hastily, with sternness in her eyes. 'What think you he did? He stole the gold cups and platters—theirs. I was glad when I learned he was taken.'

'Can you be so cruel?' said the refugee with a little look of wonder and fear.

'I do not see that I am cruel; he was a traitor and a thief. If I let you stay, will the place be sacred to you?'

'You and it, that I swear.'

'Stay then,' said Musa, with calm unconcern.

It did not occur to her that he was a man, and young; her innocence was too grand a thing for that.

'You did not do the crime they took you for?' she asked him with a long, grave look into his face.

'No; that also I swear. I was guiltless as you.'

She felt that his answer was the truth.

'What was the crime?'

'I was accused of the murder of my mistress.'

'Ah!'—she drew a deep breath; it did not seem to her anything very strange; the knife was a common cure of faithlessness in Maremma.

'She was false?' she added.

'Not false to me. Nor slain by me. God in heaven hears me! Never.'

'Very well. I believe,' she said simply. 'You can tell me more when you will. Now you are unwell—tired and feverish. I will make you a bed of leaves—there is nothing else—in the further chamber, and you had best go to it.'

'Can you sleep amongst these tombs?' he cried, and glanced around the sepulchres with awe.

'The dead do not hurt us,' said Musa, with a grave tenderness. 'They have but gone before where soon we go.'

The young man shuddered a little. Life had been glorious to him, and was still sweet and precious.

It needs a pure soul to love the dead.

She left him, and made a bed of moss and leaves in the innermost chamber of the tombs; she filled one of the black vases with the thin wine of Joconda's store, and put it with some bread beside the bed; she lit a little wick in a little oil in one of the Etruscan lamps, and set it in the place; she went to the spring that welled through the passage beyond, and filled a big copper vessel with it for a bath.

'That is all I can do,' she thought, intent on her preparations as Nausicaa for her hero from the sea.

It was a pleasure to have some one to serve and to defend.

'Can you walk to the spot?' she said to him. 'If not, lean on me; I am strong.'

'I think I can walk,' he said, embarrassed somewhat because she was not so; and he rose and dragged himself feebly into the third chamber.

'I am so tired,' he muttered. 'I think I should let the carabineers take me now as easily as a stunned hare.'

'The carabineers will not come here,' said Musa. 'Do not think of them. Sleep, and if you want any aid give a shout, and I shall hear.'

'You are good to me,' murmured the stranger with a little confusion, looking at her as she stood with the light of her own lamp shed on her dark level brows, her lustrous eyes, her up-thrown masses of bronze-hued hair, and the form that was clad in the white lambs'-wool as the fauns and nymphs of old may have been clad in Tempe and Arcadia when through the gladness of the woods the winds of winter rustled.

'I will say of you as the angel Gabriel said of Madonna Lisa,' he said with a little smile, 'that you are the fairest thing that ever was seen in Mondo or Maremma.'

'Oh, not I, said Musa, with a little displeasure. 'When the rose and crimson flamingoes come like a cloud red with the sun's setting, they are much more beautiful than I. Do the angels ever remember Maremma? I think not. Who could tell you they did? Good-night to you; good repose.'

Then she went across the other chambers, crossing herself as she passed the coffin of Joconda, and in time laid herself down on her own bed as calmly as though no human intruder had disturbed her solitude.

Only, every now and then she kept awaking with a start, and, sitting up on her rough couch, listened with ears as eager and sure as the deer's to hear whether any sound on the night's silence was like the tramp of the soldiers of the State. She was afraid for him; she was not afraid of him.

True, once before she had sheltered a galley-slave, and he had robbed her; but she felt no distrust now. When this man had said, 'I am innocent,' there had been truth in his voice; and she had sympathy with him as she had with the large-eyed deer, with the rose-red phenicopteræ, with the timid hare and the brave boar, and all the man-hunted things of the marsh and the moor.

The blood of an outlaw was in her.

 

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