In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 31

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXI.

 

N the shore, in the wild, wet morning, Maurice Sanctis waited for her in vain.

He was too hardy a mountaineer by birth to heed rainy weather; he sat or stood beside her boat in the cleft in the rocks, and patiently counted the hours as they went by. There was nothing to be seen on sea or land; the one was all mist and wind, the other was obscured by the driving sheets of rain. When noon had gone, he gave up all hope of seeing her that day; he knew she did not fear bad weather, yet he thought it was possible the ink-black skies might have deterred her from coming so far as the Sasso Seritto. 'She will be here to-morrow,' he said to himself, and went back to the wretchedness of Telamone.

'I am a fool,' he said to himself, but the folly grew with him. He had set his heart on saving her from this wild and solitary life, which was endurable only as long as youth and health should last, but even then was hourly filled with a thousand sources of peril and possible evil.

He grew uneasy. It was unlike her nature to fail in what she had promised; she was too grave to be capricious, too tenacious to be deterred by any obstacle or accident from doing what she had said she would do. He saw she had not come there in his absence, for she had not used the little boat, which remained always high and dry upon the shelf of rock, the oars and the fishing-gear lying inside it. For her to be so many days away from the sea, he felt that something unforeseen and serious must have occurred.

Any day, a wild boar might turn on her; a false step take her from the narrow path of safety into the slimy slow death of the black bog; the fever that she never feared might yet overtake her, or the lawless fierce men from the mountains find out her dwelling-place under the marucca and myrtle. The soil of Maremma was treacherous as Iago, and, though she made no count of it, her days were full of danger as the timid snipe's for whom the fox waits in the brushwood, and the muzzle of the gun slips through the reeds, and the hawk watches above in the air, and the dog steals through the fennel and brankursine. She in her courage and ignorance hardly ever thought of these perils, and trusted to the earth and to the water as a child to its progenitors. But Sanctis, who had thought of them almost unceasingly ever since he had first seen her face, was tormented now by his own imagination.

The people of the coast wondered to see him there, but they supposed he was one of those foreigners who to them seemed half-witted, who endured privations, and penetrated trackless swamps, and asked innumerable questions, in the effort to find buried stones and marbles under the vegetation of Maremma.

He spent money willingly and gave no trouble, and understood their boating and their fishing; he had not been unwelcome to them in the summer-time, and he paid largely for the little vessel that he hired and sailed himself.

He went to the Sasso Scritto on three fine mornings when the weather had cleared into the buoyant and transparent brilliancy usual in winter; but Musa did not come.

He thought of going on to Orbetello and there obtaining permission of the authorities to see the man who had once been the terror of all travellers and the idol of all Maremma.

He was curious to know and study something of that wild nature whose love of liberty and impatience of control and custom were inherited by her. He took blame to himself that he had not done so in the summer, that he had allowed her intolerance towards him to drive him so soon away from her shores.

He promised himself that with the morrow he would repair his fault. But when that day he reached Telamone, the people of the little town were talking of an event that had happened that night in Orbetello.

Listening to their chatter on the beach, where the aloes pricked through the sand, he heard that Saturnino of Santa Fiora, as the people still called him, had escaped a second time. As they had worked at night on the sea-wall, he had leaped at one bound into the waves, as he had done off the island of Gorgona. The night had been dark from heavy clouds; in the fitful light from the lamps and lanterns he had been lost to sight; though bullets had ploughed the waters and boats been sent out in all directions he had never been seen again. Sharks were about, and it was guessed that he had met his fate in their jaws.

It was said that one of the gaolers, who was a native of the Monte Labbro country, had favoured the prisoner by intentional lack of vigilance; but no one suspected of any complicity with him the skipper of the Sicilian brig that had been beating about up and down the coast for some weeks, waiting for a south-easterly wind to bear her back merrily to Messina—a wind which rose that night.

The few folks of Telamone, loitering out there amongst the aloes and the sand and the loose stones, once more recalled the long-passed time when Saturnino Mastarna had been the hero of every tale that was told on tartana-decks in a calm, or on land in the hot windless weather.

Sanctis listened to their rambling disjointed talk, and gathered the facts out of the loose, redundant words, and a light of comprehension broke in upon him; Saturnino was at large once more, he felt sure that it was in the tombs that he was sheltered. He did not for a moment believe that either the sharks or the sea had killed him; he made no doubt for an instant that her father's presence was her secret, and his danger her anxiety. He grew angry against himself for ever having suspected otherwise; for ever having attributed to that fearless life of hers the passions and the weakness of an amorous secrecy. His heart grew lighter; and he felt that he could not leave her land.

He waited patiently a whole week, willing to have her come of her own accord, if it were possible, rather than rouse her susceptible apprehensions of him as of one who haunted her.

With all the pleasures and successes of the cultured world ready to his hand, he, whose every hour could be rich in creation and ambition, stayed on by choice in the squalor and poverty of a sickly fishing village: his days empty, his mind barren, his art neglected, and the world forgotten.

He spent all his time under the great wall of the Sasso Scritto, while the surf leaped up amongst the rosemary and the waves ran in between the now leafless rock-rose bushes.

Great ships passed in the offing, their canvas swelling in the wind; yawls and brigs and the tartane of the coast went to and fro in the fresh weather, dipping and showing their copper under the rolling of the seas; now and then a little felucca with her single sail stood off the shore while her men were fishing, or out from the bay of Follonica a whole lateen fleet came crowding when the news was told of a shoal of ragni or rombi seen at sunrise. He waited patiently, with the sea and its vessels before his eyes, and the big white clouds floating above the head of the bluff.

But not a soul came there.

Even his patience, which was long, began to give way under the stress of time.

He might wait for ever on this shore. He began to think that he was under the sway of Circe, and that these fables after all were not so far from truth.

Then his fears took a more prosaic path, and he began to be alarmed lest any accident of asp-bite, or marsh-miasma, or too rash trust to the chill waters of the pools and streams should have befallen this child of Glaucus that she came not to the sea, to which he knew her face turned ever so faithfully, as the face of the sunflower to the west at evening.

At last, on the morning of the eighth day, he climbed the cliffs and began to walk across the evergreen water-threaded land above, where the little slender pipes of the robins were sounding under the berry-laden boughs of the bay.

Wild as the country was, and dangerous with bog that moss and couch grass hid from sight, he remembered by certain landmarks of tree and tufa-mound and the look of the distant mountains how to find his way back to the tomb of the Lucumo.

'She cannot blame me if I go there now,' he thought; 'she has failed me.'

His heart burned within him with as much anger and alarm as ever she had felt at his presence. His natural calmness forsook him. He had come in good faith for good offices and he had been met with indignity.

There was not a disloyal thought in him, and she dealt with him as if he were the hunter and snarer she had called him.

'She shall do me justice ere I go, if I must leave her to her fate,' he thought as he walked on over the soaked turf and cut his way through the pungente and the prickly pettygree.

His step flushed woodcocks, the partridge flew before him up from her tuft of rosemary, the coots fluttered and splashed as he passed their pools, a pilgrim falcon sailed by holding a rat in its talons. He was a mountaineer, a hunter on his own alps, but he never noticed these creatures now. Even, artist though he was, the beauty of the scarlet balls hanging amongst the glossy leaves of the arbutus, of the red earth glowing under the morning sun, of the brimming streamlets coursing through the grass, of the flocks of white northern divers settled on the estuaries, of the azure and emerald wings of the kingfisher and the porphyrion flashing amidst the grey network of leafless willows, even these, and all the untellable wonder of colour woven there in the shadow and the sunshine as on a web of green and gold, of scarlet and purple, escaped his sight that day.

All he saw were sombre eyes, the colour of summer skies at midnight, looking at him with mistrust and disdain; was a mouth, red as the red arbutus-fruit, saying to him: 'though you ask me for ever, never will I come.'

The way seemed long to him, and his progress slow. Though Musa ran from there to the shore almost as quickly as the fox could do, it was because she knew her way at its shortest, and sprang over the bogs by a leap from tussock to tussock, and over the streams by shallow places that she and the fox alone had found. To him the path was tedious and entangled, and it was past noonday when he at last saw the blasted suber-oak which marked the place of the tombs.

Whilst it was still some distance from him he saw Musa herself coming across the moor. She had been gathering mushrooms and collecting wood; she had a bundle of dry boughs poised on her head. She walked easily and erect under the burden of it; some amber leaves which were still on the branches hung down and touched her shoulder.

There was nothing in her of the toil that is sorrow and poverty; of toil as Millet has painted it and modern eyes seen it. Hers was the old, glad, rural, health-giving, open-air labour of the Italiote pastorella, of the Greek girl treading, with feet winged by youth, the honey-scented herbs and the wild ivy of Mount Ida.

The world has lost the secret of making labour a joy; but Nature has given it to a few. Where the maidens dance the saltarello under the deep Sardinian forests, and the honey and the grapes are gathered beneath the snowy sides of Etna, and the oxen walk up to their loins in flowing grass where the long aisles of pines grow down the Adrian shore, this wood-magic is known still of the old, sweet, simple charm of the pastoral life.

Some wistful thought of the sort crossed the mind of Sanctis as he saw her approach. After all, what was it he wanted to force on her? Constraint for freedom, formality for fawn-like ease, the breath of crowds for the flower-fragrance of the fields, the midnight oil of anxious study or of feverish pleasure for the gracious night of a slumbering earth fresh with dews, unvexed with noise, stirred only at dawn by whisperings of birds.

For a moment all he had to offer looked poor and trivial. She had found the charm that escaped the hands of men when they slew Pan, and drowned his cries in whirr of wheels and scream of steam.

The courage of Maurice Sanctis went out of him as she drew nigh, the golden leaves touching her lightly-breathing breast. Plato's self could have found no plea to urge the hamadryad to leave her groves, the naiad to forsake her fountain.

At first she had not seen him, for there was a screen of carob boughs and withered bracken between himself and her. When she did perceive that he was there, a great and, it appeared to him, utterly inconsistent and disproportionate trouble and anger came together into her speaking eyes.

She stopped short; she did not speak.

He approached her, and said, with his usual gentleness:

'I was afraid some ill had happened to you. It was not like you to break your word.'

'I could not come,' she said, with some hesitation. 'I thought you would understand when you did not see me, and that you would go away.'

'I asked you to hear me once, for Joconda's sake,'

'I could not come,' she repeated, impatiently; 'and I do not want to hear. I told you so.'

'I know you do not,' he said, with regret; 'and I can fancy that you are reluctant to leave your woodland life. It is free and has a beauty of its own; but it needs perpetual youth and a certainty of health that are not given to our poor humanity.'

'I shall be young a long time,' said Musa, with her grave smile; and she drew a deep breath with the conscious strength of perfect powers of life rejoicing in themselves.

'Yes; no doubt to you it seems that you have a kingdom there that you can never lose. But it will go away from you as it goes from all; and water and wind and weather bring its loss early. Do you never think of a future?'

'No,' she answered curtly. A shudder went over her for a moment. What might the future bring? Could Este always be saved from his pursuers? Would the time come when all her care and thought and vigilance and sacrifice would be unavailing to shelter him?

'But Joconda would have bade you think,' he urged to her. 'She herself thought for you or she would not have written to us. I know that the life you have made for yourself, all alone as you have been, is full of courage and strength, and has much nobility of purpose and of independence in it; and I can understand that it seems more delightful to you than any other, because of your wise love of the open air and the beasts and the birds. But, dear, it is winter even here; and if sickness should overtake you your solitude would become very terrible. I want you to think a little of that. You have no friends, you have no home, you have no one to look to in any need; and there are many dangers for a creature that is as beautiful as you are when she is so near womanhood.'

He paused, not knowing well how to put his meaning into words that her pride would hear patiently or her innocence understand.

'I have no one who has a right to say a word to me,' said Musa, angrily. 'If that is what you mean, you say truly; and you should know by that to hold your peace and not to importune me.'

'I do not wish to importune you,' said Sanctis in his turn, a little moved from his long patience; 'but the wishes of the dead are sacred—to me at the least. A woman, now dead, wrote to her brothers on your behalf, and I am their representative. As I have their name and their fortune, so I have their duties. I should be unworthy of them if I refused to accept the last as well as the first. You are too young to know what perils you run, what a frightful future you prepare for yourself. If you will not hear me willingly, I must try what aid the law will give me. Before the law you are an outcast, and it would deprive you of independence, it would regard your dwelling-place as nothing better than the owl's hole or the fox's earth; it would certainly compel you to accept some other asylum. If I go to the authorities of Orbetello———'

He paused in words which he was using as his last resource without fully knowing what they meant, or how far they would lead him; for Musa, as she stood before him, suddenly changed from a listening, angry child into a pythoness, a lioness, a very incarnation of every shape of rage that the earth has ever seen upon it. She snatched from her girdle her long two-edged knife; she cast down her brambles and branches from her head; she leaped to within an inch of him and flashed the steel before his eyes. All the savage blood of the Mastarna of Saturnia leaped up in her, like a naphtha flame from the soil.

'Unless you swear to me that you will never breathe a word of my name or of my dwelling, I will kill you where you stand,' she said, as her eyes flashed their sombre fires into his; and her voice was not loud, but low and deep, like the lioness's voice of menace. Her whole frame seemed alive with rage, as a tree, lightning-struck, is alive with the electric fluid; but it was a rage that would strike as it threatened, not a rage that would die of its own violence.

So intense a surprise seized him that he for the moment could say nothing, and did not move. They gazed into each other's faces.

'Will you swear it?' she said, her voice still low, but as fierce as a snake's hissing, 'If you will not, you shall not leave this place alive. You are a man and strong; but you are unarmed, and I can kill you.'

She kept her eyes fixed on him, and her hand clenched on the stiletto. She had no fear, nor any sense of sin; all conscience and all judgment was drowned in the flood of one passionate instinct—to save Este.

For herself she would not have so spoken. But for him she was ready to do the thing she threatened. Why would this meddler come unasked and undesired, and thrust himself before her in these green glades that were all her own? She turned on him as the boar turns on his pursuers.

He did not move. For a moment he thought of wresting the knife from her; then he knew her strength and her tenacity; the manhood in him recoiled from a struggle with a woman who was scarce more than a child.

'I think you would kill me if you wished to do it,' he said gently, and with the sadness that he felt. 'I am stronger than you, but you are like the lightning of the skies; you would find your way to cut the cord of my life somehow. But I am not an utter coward, my dear; and I cannot promise or swear you anything under a threat. Put the point of your knife against my heart if you like, but listen to me for a moment.'

Musa gripped her stiletto the tighter, but she did not move it nearer to him.

She understood what he meant, that he could not say what she wished under a menace. All courageous instincts found their echo in her.

'You must say that you will speak of me to no living soul,' she said slowly, 'or I cannot let you go alive out of these woods. It is not that I want to hurt you, but that if you will not be silent any other way I must silence you so; that is all.'

'And you would do it,' he said, for he did not for a moment underrate the unblenching determination that was in her, nor the ferocity of the wild blood in her when once aroused. 'But hearken one moment.'

'I will not. You wish to betray me. I will have no more words.'

'Betray is a bitter thing to say. I am no traitor. I meant only that since you throw yourself away, and all your future, in a barren and a dangerous life, I should do no more than my duty if I sought the aid of the law, which would protect you in your own despite, and to which you would in time grow grateful.'

'That is betrayal. I have told you that rather than you should live to do it———'

Her eyes were full of fire; her breath came and went through her clenched teeth; an agony of fear made her ferocious; her hand, as it closed on the handle of the stiletto, trembled with passion; all the mercilessness of Saturnino was up and alive in her.

She longed to strike down this man who menaced her secret and her treasure.

Had he not been kindred to Joconda she would have struck, without giving him a choice.

'Do not make me kill you!' she muttered behind her shut teeth.

He disregarded her words. He said abruptly—

'Tell me one thing; you are not alone now?'

She was silent.

'Is that why you menace me?'

'What is that to you?'

'You say always, What is it to me! Well, it is much; more than you know, or would understand if you did know. I think you are the loveliest creature upon earth, and your ferocity does not disgust me. It becomes you; and it is natural, being what you are. I want to take you out of all your ignorance, your peril, your barbaric liberties, and make of you the noble woman that you might become. I have no other motive. I would neither wrong you nor the dead; and you are so young; but if you be not alone, if there be another'———

'It is nothing to you,' said Musa, with passion and with desperation. 'It is nothing to you what I am or what I have.'

'You are not alone any longer,' he said, with his gaze trying to penetrate hers.

'Why should you say so?'

'Because you care too little for yourself, and are too generous to wish to kill me if it were only yourself who was disturbed by my interference.'

He kept his eyes fixed on her as he spoke; what he thought was that she sheltered Saturnino. She did not change colour or give any sign of the intense agitation that was in her.

'Very well, then; think so,' she said between her shut teeth. 'Think anything you please; but leave me to myself.'

'I cannot promise that. I should feel a coward if I did. I cannot leave you to yourself, for you are your own worst enemy.'

She was silent; she was thinking sternly and unflinchingly, as her father had often thought of his foes, how she was to be rid of this man who would be Este's ruin. All life had been sacred to her in the birds and the beasts around her; but now it seemed to her that she would have no choice but to take his since he would persist and rush upon his doom. She had been frank with him and rude; she had warned him, she had refused him, she had done all she could to turn him aside from what appeared to her his persecution of her, and he would not be persuaded. There seemed no choice for her but to turn on him as the boar was forced to turn on those who drove him from the shelter of his bed of bracken and his screen of oaks.

He had menaced her with the law, and what would the law on herself mean but the discovery, the seizure, the eternal misery of the one for whom she was giving all her own life without counting it as sacrifice?

'Will you let me come with you to the tombs?' said Sanctis, with entreaty in his voice. 'Beside Joconda's coffin I do not think you would be at war with me like this. I could make you understand———'

'I understand well enough. You want to give me up to the law, though I have done no ill. And I have said that you shall never do it.'

'Will you let me go home with you one moment?'

'No. I will never take you there again.'

'Because you are no longer alone?'

'You have threatened to betray me. That is reason enough.'

Her eyes never ceased to keep their lioness-like watch on him; her hand never relaxed its hold upon the stiletto. He was of Joconda's kindred, that was the only thought that made her pause, and give him one more chance.

'You must promise me, swear to me,' she said passionately, 'or you will make me kill you. I cannot let you go to bring the law you boast of as your helper. If first of all Zirlo had not betrayed me to you, you would never have had the power to betray me again yourself, I am not unjust to you; if you are a traitor you deserve a traitor's death, and I would give it to you—yes—though I tracked you for twenty years over one-half the earth.'

He looked at her with perplexity and admiration. He had lived all his years in the midst of cultured and controlled communities where the passions were tamed and the inborn ferocity of the human animal was scarcely visible; he had been reared amongst pious and reserved people, and his manhood had been spent amidst men whose minds were steeped in light and art, and who had little of the natural brute left in them. This intensity of purpose, this readiness for fierce action if by no other means its ends could be attained, this constancy in vengeance which would wait through half a lifetime rather than forego punishment, these the qualities of an earlier time, of a simpler and freer world than his, fascinated him by their force and their absolute unlikeness to anything in his own life. The sense of impotence that she had felt before his northern calmness and tenacity now fell on him before her more spontaneous and more violent nature; he felt that he might as well have tried to change the course of volcanic lava as endeavour to sway or alter her, or ever make her regard him as a friend.

He looked at her, and through his mind passed many images and memories to which she had so much likeness. She belonged to the soil; she was one with it; she had its fierce suns and its fierce storms in her nature. Here on this coast, where the Dea Syria had been worshipped with madness and mutilation, where Cybele had been adored with flame and sacrifice, where earlier yet Mantus and Orcus had been propitiated with the palpitating hearts of scarce dead victims, and the tempest and the hurricane had been charged with the dread messages of the gods, here she alone seemed to live, the last echo and shadow of those vanished years, of those forgotten religions, of those changed or perished races.

To him she seemed less a living soul of his own time than some young priestess of Isis, some vision in which Lydia and Latium both lived, eternally young, preserved in the secrecy of these forests, without change, whilst all the rest of earth grew old.

What could he say to her?

How could he hope to alter her?

Who could ever have wooed Pan from his thymy nest, and Glaucus from his cool sea depths? and who should win her from their woods and waters that she alone enjoyed now that Glaucus and Pan were dead?

He felt himself powerless and humbled, as the artificial world is always before the strength and the simplicity of the sylvan life that has none of its necessities.

A sigh escaped him. She was dearer to him than he knew, and he felt that he could no more hold her than he could have held the fires of Vesuvius in his hand. He knew that he could no more bind and influence her than the shepherds and the mariners of old could capture Pan and Glaucus.

'Well,' he said slowly at the last, 'I will not seek to force your secrets, and I will even dare to seem a coward to you. It may be the truer courage, and perhaps one day it is as such that you will see it. I promise you that I will not seek alien aid or bring the law you abhor to my assistance. So much I will promise you, though I do not see why you should trust my word since you mistrust myself.'

'I thought no one ever broke their promise,' said Musa: in such good faith the woman of Savoy had reared her.

'Well; think so. I do not; and you may trust me. I will speak to no one of you, or of the sepulchres that shelter you. But at the same time I do not promise you to renounce all effort to change you by my own persuasion if we meet in the neutral solitudes of these moors or on the shore. I do not promise yet to go away.'

'I cannot send you away,' she said, with the dusky fire of her eyes still luminous. 'But you will not come to me?'

'No; since I am unwelcome.'

She slipped her stiletto back into its hiding-place, and stooped and replaced the boughs and brambles on her head.

'That is enough,' she said. 'But it will be better that you should go—me you will never see.'

'You cannot prevent my seeing you abroad?'

She smiled a little at his stupidity.

'You will no more see me than you can see the dwarf-heron when he makes himself into the likeness of a dead stump and sits, all grey and brown, amongst the sedges. You do not know the wisdom of the woods.' Before the last word had reached his ear she was away and was soon lost to sight beyond a dense wall of arbutus and mastic.

She knew the wisdom of the woods herself as well as the bittern or the great plover knows it.

Sanctis retraced his steps with a heavy heart, seeing nothing in the blue pale light of the wintry day but her face as it had been raised to his while her hand had played with the steel. He was discouraged and discomfited, and a sense of painful defeat and mortification was upon him; she had threatened his life, and he had yielded to her. He was a man of courage enough to bear to look a coward if it were needful to do so, yet it hurt him as he went away to think that no doubt, as she was going through the leafless woodlands and the green bay thicket, she was thinking of him with contempt, perhaps with laughter.

But his nature was calm and very patient. He knew that he had been unwise to use the menace of the law to her, and that her menace of the knife had been but her natural reply. He promised himself to do better, to speak more tranquilly when next he sued her; for her threat that he should never see her had passed by his ear unheeded.

That she was not alone he believed, yet since he had heard of the second escape of Saturnino Mastarna he had felt little doubt but that her father had sought her out in the tombs and claimed her shelter by making himself known to her. He did not think her savage pride and her stern self-dependence were compatible with any other secret.

She, who to Este was gentle and soft as the cushat to her mate, by him had been always seen untamable, and shy, and fierce as any one of the dwarf-herons that she defied him to discover by the pools.

On the mountain side above San Lionardo, set well above the miasma and rain mists of the marshes, there was an old castellated place called Præstanella, half villa and half fortress, which from the ninth to the thirteenth century had been a mighty strong-hold, changing hands often in the internecine wars that ravaged the Massa Maritima. Later on it had been less of a fortress, and had taken some of the characteristics of a mountain villa, having terraced gardens made before its machicolated walls and hundreds of acres of wood behind and around it. It now belonged to a noble family who had many such places. It was neglected and half dismantled. No one cared to come to it; stewards ate in its tapestried halls and peasants made pigsties of its long vaulted corridors.

Maurice Sanctis had wandered over it in the first days that he had stayed in Maremma; the glory of its views, the intensity of its loneliness, and its war-scarred towers and weed-grown terraces pleased him. Money was nothing to him; his father Anton had left him great riches, and he had simple tastes that cost him little. He thought to himself now that he would buy this place; the price was a mere trifle, hardly more than the value of the pine-woods about its bastions. It was melancholy and had been stripped of many of its carvings, marbles, and tapestries long before, but the magnificence of its landscape and the solidity of its walls nothing but an earthquake could destroy.

That night he went to Grosseto and there saw the notary who had been charged with its sale for twenty years and more. To the rich an easy path is soon made. He was promised that in a week or two at the uttermost the old palace in the Apennines should be made over to him with all formality and security; a true eagle's nest set up on high, and from its heights commanding all the deep green vales and the asphodel meadows and the reedy marshes where of old Etrurian and Italiote, Roman and Goth, mercenary of Bourbon and soldier of Borgia, free lance of Florence and horseman of Massa, had turn by turn made the earth a field of death.

 

Layout 2