In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 28

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXVIII.

 

AUSICAA, in the safe shelter of her father's halls, had never tended Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino tended his fellow-slave.

The sanctity of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither profanity or passion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was a grand and noble thing, like any one of the large white lilies that rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes: a cup of ivory wet with the dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the languor of sickness and of despair borrowed unconsciously for awhile the liveries of chastity; and he spoke no word, he made no gesture, that would have scared from its virginal calm the soul of this lonely creature, who succoured him with so much courage and so much compassion that they awed him with the sense of an eternal, infinite, and overwhelming obligation.

It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.

To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower nature feels it always as a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long as force compels.

Which nature was Este's he would not have known himself.

At times, indeed, the weight of his debt to the fellow-creature who had sheltered him came upon him with a shock, and startled him at its vastness. But commonly he thought no more of it than the cuckoo thinks of debt to the tree-sparrow in whose nest he lies so safely whilst April storms shake off the April blossoms.

All she did for him was done so simply, so wholly as a matter of course, that no mute claim on her part, even of look or gesture, ever recalled to him that she owed him no more duty than she owed to any hill-fox or wounded scops who should have hidden itself in her retreat.

Sometimes he liked to talk to her; it took him in a measure out of himself to tell her those facts or traditions of science or history which to her seemed like tales of magic. Sometimes he liked to hear her sing the mournful sea-songs of the people, though oftener the sound of the mandoline hurt him with an intolerable pain, recalling to him the moonlit nights in Mantua, when his lyric underneath her walls had told his love that his boat was there, casting its shadow on the reedy waters, white with the shining of the moonbeams.

But always she was no more to him than the slave had been to the Lucumo. Her strength, her courage, her directness of speech, her power of exertion, all made her seem to him rather a youth than a girl. He had loved a woman with soft, idle hands, and languid, inert limbs, no more capable of facing the hurricane or steering through the winter waves than a peacock in his pomp of purple is capable of breasting the breeze, or cleaving the breakers, with the gyps-vulture or the storm-swallow.

He had loved one who was as useless as the painted butterfly, as lovely and as idle as the lotus floating on its broad green leaves, rocked on the rippling water.

This creature, all strength, and daring, and continual effort, had for the moment, at least, no woman's charm for him as he saw her come home from her day's hard labour, bearing on her shoulders the faggot of sticks, or the sheave of bracken, and in her hand the fishing-nets, and the sickle or the hatchet. So might have looked any maiden of Tempe or of Calydon; so might have looked Theocritus' love when the Sicilian vales were lilac with the meadow mint, and rent by autumn gales.

As these she had looked to Maurice Sanctis. But Este, though he knew the pastoral poets by heart, did not see her with those eyes. For him her humble daily cares of him obscured her beauty, as in days of old it obscured for mortals the divinity of those gods who came amidst them, and drove their ploughshares and sat beside their hearths.

If he had known of Daniello Villamagna, with his face like a Veronese portrait, and his sinewy elastic frame, and stately yet supple movements, some pulse of anger might have quickened in him, and with it some smart of sudden appreciation.

But she never spoke of the Sicilian sailor; some vague instinct locked her lips about him, though a little while before she had opened them so carelessly to Maurice Sanctis. So to Este she remained nothing more than a dryad of the lonely woods, who scarcely touched him with any sense of the sea in her; a genius alba who ministered to his dire need and saved him from his hunters, but who came and went without receiving one impulse in him to keep her hand in his, and say to her, 'I am beggared of love: make me once more rich.' So nothing troubled the perilous peace in which she dwelt; and the autumn deepened into winter, and the rainstorms deluged the earth above, and she was still innocent as Nansicaa, he was still sacred to her as Odysseus.

She did not know her own heart.

She did not know why all the ardour of the Sicilian left her hard and scornful; why all the gentleness of Sanctis had left her cold and thankless; and why one languid smile from Este's eyes, one listless word from his mouth, made her grateful and full of joy.

She was drinking at that fatal fountain which Joconda once had feared that she would drink so deeply from that she would drown. But its waters were clear and harmless at her lips as yet; she could not tell that there was poison in them and bitter after-taste.

She did not even know the name of this fount at which all pilgrims of earth drink soon or late. She tended him as she had tended the wounded dotterel from the Polar seas. She loved him as she had loved that; but passion was still dumb and slumbering in her. Often in youth it lies and dreams like Endymion, and would never wake but for the kiss that startles sleep, and changes the dream into desire.

Once awakened, that peaceful rest, careless on the crushed cowslips, can come back no more.

So the months went on, and the days renewed themselves, each like the other; filled to her with bodily exertion that had become delightful because no longer for her own sake alone, and to him with the dull, heavy, stupid pain that men of cultured mind feel when they are barred out from the world of other men and from the face of nature.

He told her all he knew of the Etruscan nation; all (that all so little) which Pliny and Dionysius and Silius Italicus have told; all the old tales that the Etruscans cherished, and he himself had read in dreamy boyish days of drowsy Mantuan summers—the old, old tales of Ulysses and his son; of the Dioscuri, whose images were engraved on the mirror she used; of Diomedes, snatched to the gods upon the Adrian isle, and his companions changed to birds.

He pictured to her the grand and puissant lucumonies that have perished so utterly off the face of the earth that even their records have perished; he pictured to her the people driving their cattle and carrying their corn to the forests dedicated to Feronia, to exchange them with the Umbrians, the Latins, and the Sabines; the white sacred cattle drawing the brazen ploughshare through the moist green soil, to trace the walls of cities to be; the long, prosperous, ease-loving and luxurious life that was led through so many centuries within those cities' walls when raised, doomed to succumb and change and die out, little by little, when the tramp and the clang of the Legions came over the mountains, and the greed of consul and of emperor robbed the land of her marbles of Luini, of her temple-columns, of her bronze and her gold work, of her delicate potteries, of her colossal statues.

The brother of Fabius Maximus, with his slave, disguised as shepherds of Gaul, with javelins and sickles, wending their perilous way through the darkness of the dreaded Ciminian woods, and descending to the rich plains and the stately cities to propose the admittance of that mission from Rome which was ultimately to be the curse of Etruria; the augurs tracing with their wand the lines of separation on the heavens, watching the flight of herons, of storks, of crows, to gather the secrets of the future, taking warning or counsel from the play of lightning on the heads of the spears, worshipping with blood-sacrifice Jupiter Elicius amidst the thunders of the storm; the fifty-oared armed galleys going out from the sunny crowded ports, some up the tawny Tiber, some away to Spina for the tin and amber come overland from the far Scandinavian waters, some by the Ægean coasts to the gorgeous and languid lands of the East, where the Tyrrhene mariners were welcomed as brethren and sons; the sunlit towns now level with the dust, then strong with colossal bastions and ramparts, graceful with temples and with statues, stately with religious feasts and princely banquets; the son of Atys setting sail with his famished Lydians from Smyrna; the Tyrrhene pirates capturing Dionysos, and changed for their sin into water-spouting dolphins; the Persian faith brought with the Persian eagles to the Italiote soil; the great Etruscan confederations gathering in harmony at the temple of Voltumna; the oxen drawing the fair Carrara marbles into the port of Luna, to make the altars of the beloved orchard-god, or the likeness of the divine Cytharœdus—all these things he set before her in vivid language, and as she followed his words she saw all that they portrayed; she heard the brazen bray of the Lydian trumpets, she saw the purple glow of the Lydian robes; when she went down to the edge of the sea, she thought of the Navigium of Isis, as the people had gathered for it on those very shores with their torches flaming against the daffodil light of a March morning; when she collected the broken boughs of the seapines for fuel, she thought of the tree laid low in symbol of lost Attis, and borne garlanded with flowers to the shrine of the Mighty Mother.

And when he told her that all this Etruscan and Latin life had been lived long ere the Galilean gathered his disciples from the fishers of the lake side; and that before this yet again, in long ages ere the Italiote or the Tyrrhene had turned a sod of the soil of Maremma, all these green, wet, shining woodlands and red blossoming grasslands had been the haunt of the meridional elephant, of the armoured rhinoceros, of the terrible machairodus, of the huge hippopotamus, and, later than that, of the mammoth and the lion and the bear coming down over the Alps as the Goths did after them—then her eager imagination, starved so long, fed itself on all these wonders with entranced delight, and he who told her of them seemed to her a magician as marvellous in power as the Etruscan aruspice had seemed to the Etruscan slave.

Of all the tales what fascinated her the most were those of that prehistoric time when all the Tuscan valleys and plains had been forest and marsh, and grass and water, and the vast quadrupeds had moved with massive measure through the woods that no axe touched, in the twilight that no hearth fires lit, in the green virgin wastes that had no sound but the tread of their mighty feet, the trumpet of their solemn voices; and man, when he did at length come amidst them, had been a small, and timid, and puny creature, glad to profit by the branches the elephants broke down, grateful to follow the course of the hippopotamus along the shores of the brimming rivers, meekly and humbly culling the fruits the great lords of the soil did not need. She wished that she had lived then to have been friends with the huge leaf-eating beasts. She sorrowed for them, driven away little by little off the soil they reigned over as man multiplied and climate changed, until at the last they perished utterly, as ages after them the Etruscan people did in turn.

He told her all these stories, that are written in fragments in ivory letters on the heart of the earth, when he was in the mood to speak in the long evenings that now approached as the winds drove the last leaves from the maple and ash, and the dyer-oaks and the downy-oaks grew yellow.

His shallow studies were enough to seem to her ignorance a very ocean of knowledge, in whose depths were wondrous pearls.

When he spoke to her of all these unknown things, her mind, by nature eager, poetic, and aspiring, followed his with breathless attention and delight.

As she watched her round loaves bake in the warm embers, she hearkened to these stories of lands and peoples that she had never heard of; Herodotus and Pliny yielded what to her were tales of absolute truth, and her grave and brooding fancy, starved so long, spread with rapture over these new fields of thought, glad as any bird loosed from a narrow cage. They were all as real and beautiful to her as they were to the Etruscan sacrificing to his garden god in the red and gold of his autumn orchards, or to the Latin beseeching the smile of the goddess of the myrtle bough alike upon his vineyards and upon his nuptial joys.

They sat together in the chamber of the Lucumo, the oil burning in the bronze lamps, the wood fire upon the stones, while she wove the basket osiers or spun the hemp; and it beguiled the time to him to recall the narratives that he had read in his college books, and after college in other books that his ecclesiastical masters called heretical and damnable, since they treated of geology and science.

Time was long and dull; he could hardly keep so much count of it as the Etruscans had kept of the years that they marked by nails in their temples.

The hours were all so precisely similar, so uneventful; so like was the night to the day, here, where he never saw the sun itself, but only some stray thread of it which came down through the briony and bindweed, some faint reflection of it which shone through the open doorway of the entrance-cell, that all the weeks became confused in his mind into one blurred, grey, colourless mass of time that might have been a century, so long it seemed. He used to think that he would remain here till he became like Carolus Magnus in the depths of the Unterberg, with grey beard grown downward to the stones, and the ages rolling on without awaking him.

His life seemed to him broken in his hands; like a plume of golden-rod or red amaranth snapped off in its full flower and left to wither. To venture forth into the light and air was almost certainly to return to the galleys; to stay on here, though life itself was kept up in him, was to die in all save the actual rotting of the body.

Musa to him was only like a brave boy who had rescued him; he did not feel to her more than the Lucumo (once prince here) might have felt to the faithful slave whose ashes he had placed between his own bones and his dog's. She was perforce out all the day, getting him such food as she could, or such work as she could glean from the moors; cutting the distaff canes to make them into bundles, seeking for edible roots, bringing in wood blown down in the autumn winds, or the dry brake to make a couch for herself, netting or spearing fish for his evening meal, searching for and gathering those medicinal herbs which she relied on as the chief means of making money enough to buy quinine and wine. Unless she went out he must starve, and so perforce she left him in these dark and stormy autumn days alone with his passionate regrets, his almost sullen despair.

If he could but have gone with her and laboured beside her, he would have regained strength and tone.

The cumulus clouds hurrying in vast masses before the west wind; the often angry sea lashed by the north blasts into a smoking field of foam and mist in which the barques were lost as caravans of the desert are lost in the simoom; the beauty of the green, wet, shining earth, with pool and estuary brimming from the copious rains, and thronged with the flocks of arctic birds; the glory of shadow and colour, and sunbeams glowing through the steam of rain, and dark hillsides swept by the mists and echoing back the thunder,—all these, which to her were so beautiful, might have taken some hold also upon his mind and freed him from the brooding dread and desire which consumed him like a disease of vital parts.

But the outer air could never touch him save at rare short times when, fearfully, he stole to the entrance and looked up at the brambles and branches crossing one another, and envied the brown wings of the pilgrim-falcon wheeling against the wind, the silver-grey triangle of the storks travelling across the sky.

Air is the king of physicians; he who stands often with nothing between him and the open heavens will gain from them health both moral and physical. But he could not do this, and there was nothing to arouse him from the morbid dejection into which he fell with scarce an effort. The struggle had been too long for him, and these tombs at their best were but a naked prison.

Walls hung with storied tapestries, couches rich with old embroideries, a woman's ringed hand amongst his curls, a mellow warmth scented with the orange-flower and the carnation blooming in gardens green and old, love murmurs, low laughter, pensive fancies, 'sad only for wantonness,'—these were what suited him, as they suit the soft Italian night.

She was, meanwhile, still always troubled more or less by what is called a vulgar care; she found it difficult to get such food as this man, still weak and weary, could be induced to eat. The bread she made from her summer-garnered store of wild oats was hard and indifferent; there was no longer Zefferino to bring any change of diet in ewes' milk or maize flour for polenta; the crust with spring water and wild berries, which had been enough for her strong health and unpampered appetite, were nothing to tempt the nausea and the languor of a still feeble convalescent. She knew how to do what Joconda had done. If she had had them, she could have prepared the goat's ham, the curd cheese, the broth with wine in it of savoury herbs, but except the herbs she had none of the materials needful for these things; and even for sake of Este she could not bring herself to snare the birds, her dear friends, her cherished playmates, beloved by her before she had seen his face.

This life of the wild moorlands and woodlands had been all-sufficient for her in her simple needs, but the more complicated wants of a man once used to gentle life, and now worn with long languor and weakness, found it utterly barren and empty.

It was a blessing to her that it was autumn, that many a rough fruit and edible fungus could be gathered off the moors, and that the teeming sea was still so near that she could draw from it fish succulent and various. Still, food was hard to obtain, and obtained hardly by the sheer strength of her arm and sureness of her eye; and when afar off on the sky-line she saw the great corn-wains passing black against the sun, laden with the wheat that in all time has made Maremma the granary of Rome, she looked at them with longing hungry eyes, as her father had looked from his lair upon the rich men traversing the vale below.

True, she did not know that there were such things as riches anywhere; the life of wealth, of luxury, was invisible to her; every one around her lived on roughly-made polenta, a sea or a fresh-water fish, a mussel, or an onion. This was all they tasted for relish or for rarity. All the opulence and ease of the world were hidden from her by the stretching sea, the solitude of the moors, the noxious and uninhabitable marsh. But she knew that there was a region where all the grain went, all the cut grass, the burned wood, the felled pines; a fairer, happier region, which rejoiced in all that left Maremma poor, and where sickness was not in the soil, nor fever always in the sunbeams.

Those immense plains which the men from the mountains ploughed and sowed in autumn, in summer were golden oceans of grain, reaped ere midsummer was passed. And not a bearded head of it all could she have! The rebellion that had been the passion of her father's life rose up in her—the unreasoning rebellion of those who only know that they have nothing.

Had not her honesty been natural to her as her courage, and braced by the Piedmontese woman's stern repeated lessons, it would have broken down now under her longing to serve this man, and her wondering rage at the inequalities of fate.

'These might fetch money,' Este said once to her, taking up a fibula of gold and a necklace of amber which had escaped the ravenous greed of Saturnino.

'They are theirs,' she said quickly and sternly, and took them out of his hand and laid them down reverently.

He smiled faintly.

'Oh, do not think I would rob you like Saturnino. But these things belong to you by right of discovery, and they are no good to the dead.'

She shook her head.

'That may be. But I would sooner seize some one by the throat and rifle his pockets than I would rob those who sleep and are silent.'

'I cannot quarrel with you for that,' said Este. 'Theodoric was less scrupulous than you. He ordered the plunder of the graves, and the moderns followed him.'

'Who was Theodoric?'

'Never mind; I like your instinct better than his greed. It is a right one. They give to the galleys a poor wretch who opens a tomb made yesterday to seek for treasure; and the nobles and the students who plunder the Etruscans and carry their toys of death off into cabinets and glass cases are applauded. Life is very unjust; most crimes are sanctioned in some form or another when they take grand names.'

'I could not steal from them, even for you,' she answered him, without noticing his subtler argument.

Even for him she would not have touched those golden fibulæ, those golden grasshoppers, that the dead had carried with them to the earth and trusted to it as the wild partridge trusts her nest.

Even when she used the vessels of bronze and pottery, and looked at her own face in the steel mirror of the Tyndarids, she was afraid she did an irreligious thing, an ungenerous thing, since the dead could not avenge an insult. Though these tombs had been heaped with gold, the child of Saturnino would have touched none of it.

Having nothing else of her own, she gave Este the uttermost of her strength and patience; she laboured late and early, she hunted for edible fungi, she netted fish—a cruelty she loathed—she worked hard at the rush-plaiting and the spinning to have something to take in to Telamone or Orbetello with which to purchase the wine he needed. She raked up the pine-cones, she cut the ling and broom; she carried in the dry wood she collected from under the trees; she kept the sepulchres as clean and sweet as any sea-shell with the cleanly ways that Joconda had made a second nature to her in her childhood. She worked arduously and willingly in all ways, and this very devotion to him obscured her beauty to him; sometimes he was ingrate enough to murmur angrily because she left him so much alone.

She was only his servant to him; he did not see his ministering angel in her. He did not see that glory as of a young goddess which was about her buoyant feet and her close-curled head for the eyes of Maurice Sanctis and of the Sicilian mariner,

To them she was so proud; to him she was so humble.

When he threw her a soft word or two of thanks, she was repaid a thousandfold; when at nightfall she sat at her spinning, and he told her old-world stories of all that Maremma has seen since the mammoth pulled down the foliage of its esculus-oaks, she was so happy that her thoughts never travelled past that glad immediate hour.

She knew nothing of her own danger.

The only fear that ever quickened her pulse was when in the hush of night she heard the call of the bittern booming over the marshes, or the loud rush of the wild duck's wings through the air, and trembled lest the sound should be the coming of armed men to break into her sanctuary.

Now and then a quiver of sharper alarm ran through them both, when she saw any figure of shepherd or hunter on the horizon, when the mounted buttero crashed through the thickets chasing a brood-mare or a bull-buffalo, when the shots sounded from the marshes or the estuaries, or the boar with the hounds on his flanks burst through the evergreen brakes.

But these alarms were few and far between. Maremma is wide, and the tombs of the Lucumo were fenced about with many prickly outworks of all the ruscus tribe, and the holy-thorn, and the box-holly, which horses could not face and that hunters had to hack with their knives. Usually the days were perfectly still, with no sound in them save such as the birds made, or the foals as they whinnied and capered, or the wild hogs as they grunted for joy over a new fall of acorns.

She saw moreover, at last, the colour of health returning to Este's face, and strength to his listless limbs; the potent medicine of the Orbetellano leech began to restore the tone and the nerve to a constitution naturally good, though never vigorous. His physical beauty grew with each week that his lost health and force came in some degree back to him. His eyes ceased to have beneath them the dark sunken circles of weakness and pain; his skin had the delicate brown of his youth in lieu of the pallor that had been like the hue of worn ivory; his limbs lost their emaciation, and regained their symmetry of proportion and ease of movement. When he stood at nightfall for a few wary moments at the entrance of the tombs, to draw a few timid breaths of air, and the white light of the moon fell full upon his upraised face, it was beautiful as the Vatican Hermes' is, as some human faces are here still in this land of the Apollo and the Antinous.

They were both in their youth; they had each that physical beauty which is still, despite all the efforts of the soul and mind, the one sure sorcery that earth still knows. They were together in the solitudes of the marshes and forests, in the gloom under the myrtle and the heath; but they had never as yet touched each other's lips, or found their solace on each other's breast.

Of love she knew nothing, even while she loved unconsciously; and he, for awhile, still only saw the dead face of his mistress lying in the pale lamp-light under the great golden canopy of the Gonzaga's bed.

While it is winter the porphyrion sails down the willowy streams beside the sultan-hen that is to be his love, and sees her not, and stays not her passage upon the water or through the air; she does not live as yet to him. But when the breath of the spring brings the catkins from the willows, and the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he awakes and beholds her; and then the stream reflects but her shape for him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was still winter with Este—a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of his adversity.

To break the frozen flood that imprisoned him was his only thought.

Had he been asked he would have answered that his heart was dead, like last year's violets, and his passions with it.

'If only you could come out with me!' she said often with a sigh to him, since to her greatest and most cruel of all losses was it to be debarred the feel of the wind as it blew, the sight of the cloud-shadows as they sailed over the moors and meadows.

'Never more shall I see the sun and smell the heather, he said wearily. 'It is hardly worth while to live on—thus.'

Yet it was not the heather and the sun that he missed the most, or would the first have sought. His heaven had not lain, like hers, in the sense of the broad sky, in the feel of the elastic grass, in the simple joys of motion and vision and the gladness of bright weather. What he longed for were amorous secrecy, forbidden delights, the silent ways of an old city that he knew, the warm loveliness of a woman who had leaned from her casement to draw him the sooner upward to her arms.

Nature was nothing to him—to him said nothing. What he longed for with intolerable weariness was once more himself to live. At his age men cling to life tenaciously, and death appals at all ages the Latin temperament. Yet even he at times felt tempted to make an end of this dull, torpid, aimless existence, maintained at such difficulty and in such hardship: the life of a hawk, half-starved, in an iron cage. Often when she was away he looked at the keen-edged dagger, or thought of the deep pools of this wilderness, where none but the moorhens and mallards would see a human life come to its last rest amidst the reeds.

But he was young, and so against all reason hope remained with him, and made endurance possible.

It was November weather; brilliant and luminous, with noons warm as summer, and gorgeous sunsets, and cold misty dawns that heralded bright days.

The woods were in all their pomp; the poplars yellow as guinea-gold; the ashes, in their wondrous mingling of fawn-colour and purple and brown and crimson, the most glorious of all autumn foliage; the oaks resisted change sternly for awhile, and then transformed themselves suddenly into masses of amber and of bronze; the bays were black with fruit; the pines knobbed with ripe cones; the maple was a glow of scarlet; the osmunda and the hart's-tongue were like great flames of fire, on the ground.

The huge white clouds that wise men call cirri-cumuli swept grandly over the blue sky, and gathered in masses westward as the sun went down. The air was strong and full of exhilaration; the pungent odours of the wood-smoke rolled down the mountain sides. Last of all the flowers, the pretty canary-coloured dragon's-mouth was in blossom in all green places. It was a season in which, despite the added perils that came with it, only to breathe and move seemed joy enough to Musa; the earth and air around her were so gorgeous, so clear, so radiant, so healthful.

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