In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 30
CHAPTER XXX.
LL that day they spoke little to each other. At daybreak she rose to keep her tryst by the Sasso Scritto. When she crossed the entrance-place Este stood before the stairs.
'You go to meet that northern stranger?' he asked.
She looked him straight in the eyes. 'Yes; if I do not go, he will come here.'
'Let him come. You shall not stir from here.'
For a moment her eyes flashed fire. 'You could not prevent me if I put out my strength,' she said quietly. 'I promised to see him there to prevent him from coming here. If I do not go, I tell you he will come; he will feel that I have not kept faith with him.'
'I wish that he should feel that. If you do so, I will go over to Orbetello and give myself up to the law.'
'That is madness.'
'I swear that I will surrender myself if you meet this man,'
He spoke now with both a petulance and a passion that carried truth with them. For the moment he meant what he said; for the moment nothing on earth seemed of any import to him except to keep her there.
She grew pale, and her dauntless temper did not rise in revolt.
'You will make me break my word!' she said, with a wistfulness of appeal in her voice.
'Yes; I will make you break it, or I will keep mine and give myself to the galleys.'
'I will not go,' she said with a humility of obedience utterly alien to her nature. 'I will not go. But it is folly; and I am afraid that harm will come of it.'
'Let come what will,' said Este, with a glow of triumph on the pale olive of his cheeks.
He said no more to her, nor she to him.
She occupied herself in the common cares of that cleanliness and order which Joconda had taught her, and with which she kept her strange dwelling-place as heedfully as though it were a palace. She made her bread; she drew fresh water; she prepared a meal of mushrooms and herb broth; then she took her spinning-wheel and sat at it without lifting her eyes from the distaff.
Without, the rain was still falling heavily; the wind was high. There was no sound on the moors except the rushing of swollen rivulets and the sough of the bay and the arbutus boughs blowing and rustling together; the woodland animals were in their forms, their lairs, their earths; the birds were all tucked away under the leafless willows or the thick ilex-oak foliage. The only creatures that rejoiced were the marsh frogs and the mallards.
The rain fell all the day.
She spun on and on; he wove the osiers, as he had learned to do to wile away the tedium of the long uncounted hours. Ever and again he watched her with eyes that saw her as though they rested on her for the first time.
It seemed to him that he had been blind. He saw her now as Sanctis saw her;—a creature half divine from strength and innocence united, and with all the fragrance of the woods and all the freshness of the dawn and of the dew about her, and with the mystery of the forest night and the silence of sleeping nature part of her as they were of the nymphs, on whom no mortal looked without madness befalling him, or death.
Disease and weakness and the carking pain of continual apprehension had kept him dull, sightless, half dead; now he was roused and saw, and his dead love drifted away from him and went to join the many ghosts that walk at midnight down the dim ways of Mantua, once the Glorious.
Yet still he knew that he had loved his lady there, as he would not have strength or faith in him ever to love again.