In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 22

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXII.

 

HE was up whilst the sun was still unseen, and only a geranium colour, lovely and wondrous as that of the flamingo's wings, was spreading over the darkness of the Maremma. She looked into his chamber; the lamp was spent, but he was sleeping. She could see the outline of his head and shoulders resting on the homely linen she had spread above the leaves.

She went softly back again; went out, and plunged into the tarn and bathed; then clothed herself and set about the preparation of such humble meal as she could make with water and with bread and with the sweet herbs of the moors. It had always done very well for her, but she doubted whether it would suffice for him. She looked for some eggs from her fowls, and she was pleased that she could find three.

Then she took up the silver-framed mirror of burnished steel that had been buried there with some regal or noble woman, and that now served her to give her back a dim reflection of her own face, and she combed and brushed her short rich hair till it shone like dusky gold that the fires have burnished and reddened. For the first time in her life she looked at the great eyes that surveyed her from the mirror, and said to herself, 'Is it true that I am good to look at? Joconda said so once or twice, but then she loved me.'

She had never heard of Boccaccio, but a drop of the old potent Florentine philtres that Boccaccio used had touched her lips.

She was leaning on the sward outside her home, and gazing into the steel mirror which was lying upon the grass.

For the first time she looked with interest on the face that the Etruscan mirror reflected, and wondered if indeed it were handsome.

She did not know that her head was like that of Carlo's angel, and her body like one of the beautiful, lissom, strong, and harmonious figures that are still left to us in Greek marble.

As she looked down on the reflection, where she lay, with her chin resting on her hands and her elbows leaning in the thick wild thyme, a scorpion, black and hideous, ran out of the herbs and passed across the steel face of the mirror which was engraven with the figures of the Tyndarids, dear to Etruria as to Rome.

She started as the ugly dangerous insect passed over her own image.

She rose to her feet and left the steel flatterer lying amongst the dews on the ground. The scorpion remained upon its silver framework.

'Do you come to tell me that to think of my face is a sin?' she said to the beast; 'a sin as ugly and as poisonous as you?'

Joconda had always told her so; but the soul of her vigorous and brilliant youth insensibly rebelled against these austere negations of the flesh. Nature told her to rejoice in herself as the Hellenic anthologists told the beautiful boy and the virgin who stripped for the race.

The soul of the Greek lives oftentimes in the Italian, though it lives benighted and struggling in bonds and unconscious of itself.

She left the mirror still lying on the grass and went within. She took some food in one of the earthen jars and went towards his chamber.

'Are you arisen?' she called softly.

He answered her feebly:

'I cannot rise; my limbs seem made of stone. I fear the chills have got into my very bones; I am in great pain———'

She went forward to his side.

'Our marshes will do that sometimes,' she said, with a soft pity in her eyes, like that which came there when she saw a hunted bird or beast and could not save it. 'I have seen that malady; it is as though your whole body were frozen; but if you have not much fever it may pass. I have brought some good food—eat it.'

She held the earthen holkion, and a wooden spoon, towards him, and he took a little of her broth and said that it was good, and then took more.

With the momentarily revived forces that came to him after the food, he drew a quick breath from aching lungs, and with many a pause from weakness, and many an involuntary shudder from cruel memories, he told her how he had first come thither from Gorgona.

'Saturnino and I escaped together, and one other man, who, poor wretch, was shot as he leapt from the wall. We had planned it long before we could find the occasion to take that mad plunge into the sea. We swam and swam, and at last fortune favoured us in a wondrous way, we came on a drifting boat, the boat, I suppose, of some wrecked tartana, she was Mediterranean build. In that we rowed; and sculled ourselves warily all night long, and gained the coast, and hid all day long under the rocks off Romito. There is a wild thicket of rosemary there; it served to hide us. At nightfall we took to the sea again. The idea of Saturnino was to get ashore somewhere near either the Albegna's or the Fiora's mouth, and so in time creep home to his old lair by Monte Labbro. We pulled all day long; we were half dead of hunger and thirst; we had drunk at a spring near Romito, and for food we had a bit of black Gorgona bread, but we had finished that at dawn. We rowed on, keeping some way off the shore, hoping against hope that if the coastguard or the carabineers saw us they would see in us two fishermen and nothing more. The heat was frightful; the sea looked still enough, and glassy and oily, but there was a heavy swell underneath that made the pulling hard. I know not how many miles we rowed that day, but they must have been many. We rowed on all that day and caught some fish and ate it raw, and chewed the seaweed, and were nearly mad. At night we stole on land; thirst drove us; it was a wild place, and we found fresh water and some wild fruit. At daybreak, after sleeping like drunkards, we went to sea again and pulled along the coast; we saw the mounted soldiers riding along the Tombola, by the bay of Populonia. They were looking for us, that is certain. At three o'clock, or thereabouts as nearly as we could tell by the sun, an awful storm burst over us. It was quite sudden, or seemed so; it was rainless and horrible. The waves rose like walls; the wind drove us like a whip in some giant's hand; great clouds of foam on the sea, and of dust on the land, obscured the shore and the horizon. We were thrown to and fro like a cockleshell; the noise of the wind all the while like rushing cataracts. The sky was livid with lightning, the thunder pealed like the cannon of vast armies. Our little skif overturned; we could not right her, we were thrown headlong into the hissing water. She was flung about 'for a few moments, and then dashed like a plaything far out of our reach. We were in the deep sea, faint for want of food and almost weary to insensibility. How I gained the shore I cannot tell. But I did. Saturnino I never saw. Later I heard that———'

'I saved him!' said Musa; who had held her breath and listened with parted lips.

'Yes, I know!———'

'Yes,' she proceeded unheeding, 'I plucked him out of the sea, and I hid him here, and he paid me by stealing the gold of the tombs.'

'He told me that. We met up in the mountains, up under the Labbro; he had made me acquainted with all the haunts and hiding-places of the hills. We had endured unutterable misery, both of us. To me women had been kind—they are always so to a man in misfortune' [in his thought he said, rather, to one who is young and well-looking]. 'We were but a few days together; he told me of the gold out of the tomb, and I blamed him hotly, and we came to fierce words; he went down to the Orbetellano to sell that gold, though I told him to attempt it would be his own undoing; and I went up to his old favourite lair on the Rocca del Giulio, where it is cold as winter even in the canicular heats. You will understand, of course, that all this time we moved with the greatest caution, and only at night, like the bats and the owls. Well, in the Orbetellano he was taken as I heard, but I heard it long afterwards, and I remained awaiting him up at the Giulio. There were some stone cabins there, very wretched ones, where his band had dwelt, and there were still remnants of their booty and of the things they used. There was even a child's toy in ivory of Indian workmanship; taken, I suppose, when they plundered a train or stopped a travelling-carriage. It seemed strange to see it, that frail toy, in such a solitude! Well, there I passed the autumn and the winter; I lived miserably, that is of course. I picked up the pine cones and cut the brushwood; and there were old friends of Mastarna's down at a hovel that is called a hostelry in the hamlet of Saturnia, and for his sake and for love of outwitting the law, for they were all smugglers, if not worse, they sent me up coarse food once in eight days and took down the fuel. So I lived. It was hardly better than Gorgona, except that there was the sense of a relative freedom, and the sight of the clouds that lay beneath one of a morning, and, when they cleared at noon, showed so glorious an expanse of wood, and moor, and cliff, and sea, far down, so far down!—One saw as the eagle sees. But I was for ever on the watch, and scarce dare, even in the bitter days and nights of winter on the mountains, light a fire, though timber was so plentiful and near, lest any glow of flame or any curl of smoke should tell my hunters I was hiding there. Then I heard from the men of Saturnia that Saturnino had been captured afresh and been for months in the prisons of Orbetello. That hurt me greatly, for though I knew he was but a brute and stained with many crimes of blood-guiltiness, yet there were a force and a rough generosity in him which allured one.'

'It was generous to steal the gold!'

'No, it was mean; but what would you? He had been a robber all his life, and he was at that moment most desperate, starving, homeless; besides, it was only roba delle tombe to him.'

'That is what is so vile! The dead could not defend it, or strike him down.'

'I know, I know! But, my dear, wild and lawless men who go to the galleys come out of them devils. I myself, who had long habits of education and social observance behind me, I was little better than any, for when I had been for six months in that accursed place, when hunger and thirst tortured me, I could have killed or robbed like Saturnino. What we call our soul is only in safety so long as our body feeds! He took your gold, and that was bad, and to wrong your trust was worse; but he has paid for both sins heavily. He will not get away again from his torture. Well, when I heard he had been shot down, but taken alive, I lost heart and hope; he had seemed my only friend. The time went by most miserably, until, one daybreak, I saw down amidst the cork woods the glitter of the musketry of soldiers. Whether one of the men at Saturnia had betrayed me or not I cannot tell, but it was certain the soldiery were out after me. In the stillness of dawn I could hear their heavy tread, and their weapons breaking the branches as they passed. They were hundreds of feet down below me. I packed a little bread up, and took a dagger I had found in those huts—the dagger you see, a three-edged old dagger of Florence—and then I fled for my life again, and hid in the holes of the rocks with the other hunted beasts of the hills. That was in April last; I knew the month because the ashes were in blossom, and made the woods below look as if a snow-storm had fallen on them. It is of no use going over all I suffered—suffering of starvation, of exhaustion, of cold, of heat, of rheumatism, of cramp, of wet, of darkness, of perpetual terror. Ah! do not think me a coward! I have been palsied with fear—I am still!'

He gazed at her with dilated eyes, with straining ears, with panting breath, with shivering flesh; his danger was ever present. Even now the muskets of the soldiers might be glancing in the moonlight amongst the Christ's thorn above the sepulchres.

Musa was alarmed at his look.

'You are unwell,' she said gently. 'Do not talk any more, and be not afraid. Here no one will come—you are safe!'

'Safe!' he echoed, with so poignant a despair that it struck her heart with cold as if his three-edged dagger of Florence had pierced it. 'No; I can never more be safe on earth, though I wander as long as Ahasuerus. There is nothing more to tell; you can guess what my life has been—hiding and creeping away through all this green land, for ever afraid of every sound, of every breeze, of every leaf! I came down here without knowing I was near you, and then by certain landmarks that I saw I recognised the place of the tombs that Mastarna had described to me, and I resolved to throw myself upon your mercy, and in your absence I crept down the steps. I was very faint; I have eaten nothing but berries several days, and I have an open wound on my shoulder. A month or more ago the soldiers were near enough to me to fire at me, and they hit me; though it is but a flesh wound it does not close, and it is painful. I have lain out many nights on your moors, and men used to say that it was death to do that. I have doubled like the fox; the soldiers believe me gone to the hills again; but any hour they may find out and come.'

He shuddered; his eyes closed, his head fell back upon his rude pillow of dried grasses. So much speech had exhausted his enfeebled spirit and frame.

'I shall be very ill,' he said wearily. 'You had better turn me out whilst I can crawl away from you.'

'I will care for you till the illness passes,' she answered.

'It were better to call the carabineers,' he said bitterly. 'A sick man and a felon—what can you do with me?'

'I will tend you till you are well,' she said simply again. 'You are quite safe here. No one, except a little goat-boy and two strangers who are far away, even knows of these tombs. It is true there is little food for you, but there will be enough to keep you from hunger.'

'But why should you do all this for me?'

'Because you have no one else to help you.'

'That is very noble of you!'

'Why that? I have no one either. Leone whom I loved is dead.'

'Leone? What was he?'

'He was a dog.'

'Is that all you have had to love?'

'I had a woman; she was very old. She died in the summer of last year.'

'You loved her very much, I think, by the sound of your voice; there are tears in it.'

'She was very good.'

'Tell me what is your name?'

'I am called Musa. And yours?'

'I am Luitbrand d'Este.'

'That is a very long, fine name. It is not of Maremma—at least I think not.'

'No, it is not; it is of the north, of the Lombard plains, where the snow lies long in winter-time, and the rivers rage and outspread themselves till the land is drowned, and men and their cattle and their cities are drowned too.'

'You should not speak any more. You are weak. I will go and get a brazier and light you a fire, and I will make you some herb-tea that will be good for your pain. Lie and sleep if you can. It is such a fair day without. It is a pity you cannot see it.'

'I should not dare to look out into the light if I could rise. You forget that I am a hunted beast.'

'That is why I trouble myself for you,' she answered. 'I would always save the boars if could. They kill nothing; they only eat roots and berries, and men hunt them wickedly. Of course they fight when they are pressed; so did you. Now lie still and sleep, and I will light a fire.'

She had burned some fallen wood in the summer into charcoal, and made of that the brace, which was the only form of fire known in Santa Tarsilla. She filled a big vessel with this; a metal lebes that had served in Etruscan times to hold the wines of a funeral feast. Once lighted, the slow warmth of the smouldering embers soon spread itself through the place, though it had no power to cure the chills and shivering of the sick man.

She did for him what she had seen Joconda do for those thus afflicted; and the grand sunshine and storm of the late summer days passed over the moors and mountains, and the libeccio blew the sea into a field of foam, a steam of mist, and for the first time she kept no count of the change on the face of nature, but in the twilight of the Etruscan tombs watched the waning of strength, the flickering of breath, the half-unconscious torture of a human frame.

For days together she never left the sepulchre.

She waited on his lassitude, his heats, his chills, his shuddering pains, all the long hours through, doing what she could do to alleviate his ills; and at night, when she lit the little bronze lamp with oil, she was alone with a man delirious, and who seemed to her on the point of death.

She never felt that temptation, which a coward would have felt, to leave him to his fate and rush away from this misery and danger into safety where the dwelling of men and the meeting of roofs would give it. She prayed passionately for him. That was all she did. She never had heard of physicians; there was not one at Santa Tarsilla. If such a person were needed he had to be sought from Orbetello, and no one dreamt of doing that once in ten years, though the surgeon of the Orbetellano was considered the parish doctor of the whole district. There was hardly any one in the villages in summer, and the few that were there, in winter, cured themselves with nostrums or with simples, and, if they could not cure, lay down meekly like suffering animals, called the priest, and died. Therefore of medical help or service she had no idea; and if she had known of it, could not have left the sick man to seek it. And Zirlo had been a traitor; she could no more call to him across the moorlands and see his little brown face peer through the brushwoods in answer.

She was utterly alone with this hunted creature who seemed at once frozen and on fire, and of whom she knew nothing. It never occurred to her to be afraid or to summon other help. Distrust of others was an instinct in the child of Saturnino, and the loneliness of her life with Joconda had made independence of human sympathy and aid her second nature.

If she had wished it, moreover, she knew that she would have called for help in vain. Of the sickly timid souls of Santa Tarsilla, not one would have ventured here, and of the rude, scattered herdsmen and husbandmen native to Maremma she knew nothing, and they had their toil, which was their all, to fill their time.

So she remained alone beside the nearly dying man.

But as fear paralyses the feeble, so it nerves the courageous; she was brave, and she did not let her fear conquer her compassion. And she was afraid of the strangers coming as Sanctis had come, afraid of the greed of the labourers on the moors and the hills if it were known that there was something here strange and worth seeing; and if such as these came, then after them would come the guards. These thoughts kept her anxious and awake all through that long night; she sat by the sick man's bed on the stone chair sculptured there for the dead Etrurians to occupy, and listened to his disjointed, wandering speech, and watched the oil flame flicker in the lamp that had been fashioned by hands lifeless three thousand years before.

She knew his malady to be that deadly scourge of the soil, called the perniciosa; that terrible fever which seems to have joined hands with frost and fire. Twice the fatal fit came on him; the ceaseless shivering and trembling, the blue pinched cold, the bloodless icy collapse of the whole tortured body. The third seizure would mean death, she knew. Raging heat, as though his flesh were melting in a furnace, followed, and held him in its power for many days, but the cold fit returned not, and she began to hope that life would be stronger than the marsh-poison.

What the fugitive said in his stupor told her nothing of him.

When he was sensible, he complained of thirst and racking pain; when he was delirious, he thought that the carabineers were on him, and he struggled with them and shouted aloud. Sometimes he murmured passionate love words and called with yearning endearment on the name of Aloysia.

'How could they think he killed her, since he loves her so?' thought Musa as she heard.

For fifteen months he had been wandering, pursued, hidden amidst hill-forests or by the sea in caves, holding his life in his hand, more wretched than a hunted stag or fox, waking from every hour of jaded sleep with the memory that his foes were seeking him and might be behind each rock, each tree, each tuft of marucca. Now that he had dropped thus in exhaustion, his harassed brain could not escape the horrid terrors of his haunted past.

Once she had seen a trapped flamingo struggle in the gin, writhing its flower-like body and its flame-like throat, and beating its crimson wings in madness and terror, till it died; he made her think of the Egyptian bird.

It was a fear so natural which pursued him even into the stupor of insensibility that it seemed, not craven, but merely human, as is the fear of men in shipwreck.

She soothed him as well as she knew how, with wet moss upon his head, and water ever to his reach. 'To her, used as she was to the open air and the open sea, there could have been no greater deprivation than to remain cooped up under the vault of stone all through the brilliant days of the late summer. Yet she stayed down in the tombs for this stranger's sake, only going out for such time as it was absolutely necessary to take for the finding of simples and of food, and the cutting of wood for fuel. She missed the help of Zefferino sorely; and without him the little gains she had made were lost to her, at least were lost until she could be free to carry what she sold herself to the hill-villages, and this she would then be afraid to do lest it should lead to discovery not of her refuge alone, but of the fugitive she harboured there.

She wanted many things for this terrible sickness with which she alone fought; but she could get none of them. She could not bring herself to leave him in his great peril for so long a time as it would take to go to Santa Tarsilla or Telamone; and, even if she had left him, her appearance in those places to which she had been so long lost would have provoked comment, wonder, and possibly pursuit, and, with pursuit, the sight of one for whom to be seen by human eyes would mean a lifetime spent at the galleys. So she had to do as she could with the narrow means within her reach; and whilst the fever lasted the demands of the sick man on her were not great. The water from the nearest spring, a drink she made from the bilberries on the moor, a little broth of herbs thickened with beaten egg, such as she had seen Joconda make for sick people—these were all he wanted, and often more than she could force through his scorched lips, drawn back from his teeth in the convulsions of alternate heat and cold. The terrible nausea of his disease made even the spring water taste bad and bitter to him, though in his devouring thirst he drank of it almost unceasingly, as if he had been shipwrecked on some bare rock without a drop to cool his mouth save such as rained from the clouds upon him.

But, if he should recover, when lie should recover, she said always to herself, she knew very well that his hunger in convalescence would equal his long fasting now; that he would want meat, wine, many things that she would never be able to procure; and the thought of this kept her harassed and anxious, and blinded her eyes to the autumnal colours on the moors and woods, and made her heedless of the departure of her songsters from the myrtle coverts and the jungle of cistus and bay.

When the call of the striginæ echoed over the marshes, or the night heron's croak thrilled hoarsely through the dark, they startled her now. She took them for the shout of soldiery or the boom of powder.

As she watched his fever, -and scanned the moors for him, so, as a child, she had watched the fluctuations of life in a storm-swallow with a broken wing that she had taken off the waves after a boatman had shot it. Often the bird had seemed lifeless, with blind eyes and dulled plumage, and she had been sure that it was dead. Then she had warmed it in her bosom, and it had recovered. She had kept it all winter, and then the wing had grown whole once more. On Easter-day it had flown off her shoulder over the sea, a speck of silver and bronze in the sunshine, which she had watched with big tears in eyes that had never been so dimmed before.

As she had watched the bird then, so she watched now the struggle between life and death in the body of this doomed and hunted man.

When he was restless and could not sleep at all through the nights that seemed long as centuries, she took her mandoline and sang to soothe him such sonnets as she had sung to the shore people at Santa Tarsilla. The mellow, tender thrilling of the old chitarra chimed in softly with her voice, which in its youth and its clearness was as melodious as the spring and autumn song of the woodlark, which chaunts ever, as the old French quatrain has it, 'Adieu, dieu, adieu!'

Once above ground a shepherd went by over the turf, not witting of all that lay below; and he heard that sweet lullaby beneath his feet thrilling through the earth, and was so terrified that he ran headlong, his flock behind him, and told for many a day in his own Pistoiese mountain home on winter nights that in Maremma the dead people sang below the soil, in the very heart and core of the round globe.

So, slowly, by one care and another of hers, her sick man rallied, and cast off little by little the weight of disease, and stretched out his thin transparent hands for more food than she found it easy to supply to him.

Slowly, as the September days grew shorter and the winter solstice came nearer, his resurrection began in the shadow of the Etruscan grave.

Towards daybreak at the close of the fifth week of his sojourn there, his fever grew lower; a quieter sleep came on his heavy eyelids, his limbs shivered less; he got some rest. She left him to let the fowls out into the air. The sun was once more coming up behind the dark edge of the moors. She scanned them with beating heart lest she should see any new-comer on them. Dread woke up with every dawn for her now; her old simple peace was gone for ever; the peace that she had shared with the kid that cropped the pasture, with the arum that was curled within its green spathe.

She was thankful beyond words because at last some hope had come for him. Yet a deep sorrow took possession of her soul as she realised the burden bound upon her; tears rose in her eyes and veiled the carnation of the morning skies. She did not reason on it, but she felt that vast irreparable loss which no treasures of the world, or passions, or joys can adequately pay—the loss of youth's unconsciousness.

Never again could she go light-hearted to the shore to wade amidst the sea things, glad as they; never again would she come back over the brown moor in the hush of evening, content because a meal of chestnuts or a few wild figs had been her day's sufficient gleaning.

The unconscious life—the life that is content with itself from sunrise until sunset from the mere sense of living, from the sheer sweet strength and health of the body that is fleet as the roe and tireless as the swallow—was gone for ever; and in its stead were the unrest, the bitterness, the pangs, the ecstasies of human affections.

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