In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 32

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXII.

 

LITTLE later, as darkness closed in without, she and Este sat in the larger chamber of the Lucumo's bier.

It was now on the turn of the new year, and the earth was green as an emerald, though it was midwinter, with the forests of holm-oak and pine, and the dense growth of olive, of box, of bear-berry, of alaternus, of pyracantha.

The fire burned; the lamp was lighted; she sat once again at her spinning, whilst he was modelling clay that she had brought for him from the bed of the Ombrone.

He had that facile skill in the arts which is the gift, and often, also, the curse, of his countrymen, since it is too readily skilled at imitation to be often capable of original creation. It passed the weary hours for him to mould the clay with his hands and such rude instruments as he had been able to fashion out of the bronze Etruscan spillæ and knives found in the tombs. He thought, too, that the time might come when she would be able to sell them for a trifle in some town; and he would thus be able to bring his quota to their maintenance.

He had modelled, in the grey river earth, flowers and fruits and oak-leaves, all forest things she brought him; the Typhon, too, and the Chimæra, and the lotus-lilies of the walls around him; but, oftenest of all, the head of Musa. Sometimes he made her with the lotus on her brow, like that Braschi Antinous she resembled; sometimes he set the sacred hawk of Egypt upon her head, as it had been set upon Cleopatra's; sometimes he took her in her own simplicity, with no wreath but her own curls, and her woollen gown, still cut like the tunics of Della Robbia's choristers, drawn close up around her slender, rounded throat; and often, as he did so, the features and the eyes of the woman murdered in Mantua would come before him, and sometimes the bust changed despite his own will, and had a likeness in it to his dead love that he would fain have blurred out and could not; and then again, also, when the face in the clay was Musa's and hers alone, there would be, do what he could, a reproach in the eyes and a sternness in the mouth which so annoyed him that he would dash the earth out of all shape, and leave it in a heap upon the stone floor of the tomb.

To her, all these things that he did seemed marvellous and exquisite. To be able to take a lump of mud from the stream, and make it fair, in the likeness of flower or bird or human face, seemed to her a power and possession as wonderful as his knowledge of the past of perished nations. It was the first time she had been ever touched by the sorcery of the arts: the true magicians.

She would look at the likeness of herself with a grave smile; she was proud to be like that. Then she would turn her eyes away.

'Joconda always bade me think nothing of how I was made,' she said once.

Este always heard her speak of Joconda with impatience.

'I told you the first day I saw you,' he said to her, 'that one could say of you what the angel Gabriel, in Boceaccio's story, says to Madonna Lisa.'

'I do remember,' said Musa, with a sudden flush upon her face. 'But that very day, when I looked in the steel mirror because you had said so, a scorpion ran across the mirror; and I believe that Joconda sent it—to remind me.'

'You keep her memory about you like a knotted cord of penitence!'

'No, no,' said Musa, softly; 'like a bit of sweet basil, that keeps away the evil eye.'

Este heard with no sympathy,

Without distinctly knowing it himself, it was just that 'bit of sweet basil' which he desired to pluck out of her hold; which held him aloof from her, and surrounded her with an invisible defence.

It was that sweet basil set against her breast which made her so unlike his dead love in Mantua; whose beauty had dropped to his wooing as the ripe nectarine drops at a touch off the sunny south wall.

It was but five or six o'clock; accurate time they could only keep by listening for the Ave Maria bells, morning and evening, from the monasteries on the mountain side and the village churches down the distant shore. The stone doors of the Lucumo's chamber were shut close, but there was no lock or bar, from their inability to make either, and in the stead of those defences they relied on their quick ears and their unceasing apprehension of approach.

But in this early evening hour, as the freshly-lighted heather and pine cones crackled and blazed, and the coldness and the gloom of the wintry night closed in upon the country above them, suddenly she lifted her head and met his eyes fixed on her in angry and suspicious contemplation. She conquered her habit of silence, so long fostered by Joconda, and spoke to him.

'Perhaps it is better you should know;—he who comes from Paris, and who wished me to meet him that other day, is a son of Joconda's nephew, Anton Sanctis. They were poor, but he is rich.'

Then she went on to tell him in her terse and simple diction of the coming of Maurice Sanctis, through the letter of Joconda's dictation written by the public scrivener in Grosseto.

Este heard without response, his hands all the while shaping the clay; the lids drooped over his pensive eyes.

A confusion of anger, dismay, and jealous apprehension made him hear with disordered mind; he kept thinking only: 'She will go; sooner or later, she will go.'

He had heard enough of Paris to know that it is to all women who have the chance of it an irresistible paradise and perdition; a phosphorescent whirlpool in which all their barques swim giddily and go down, one in a thousand escaping.

For a moment he saw her in his fancy taken there, as a wild forest animal is taken to the light and noise and glitter of the circus. What would not an artist make of that beauty that was at once Greek and Lydian, at once classic and oriental, at once so vivid and so serene? What would she be like, with jewels on her smooth transparent skin where the blood mounted so readily beneath the golden brown, with her great eyes wide opened, astonished at the world? Would he set pearls about her throat, and take her there where all the multitudes of rich and idle life could see her, in some great circle of some dazzling amphitheatre?

All in a moment he saw her as she would look—Penthesilea in chains of gold; the nymphæa alba of the forest waters in a hot-house; the pilgrim falcon hooded and jessed with silk for sport.

'If he be rich, why should you not go where he asks?' he said, without raising his eyes from their work.

The question hurt her, though in her own simplicity and integrity of purpose she saw no insult in it.

'I would never leave Maremma,' she said, as she had said to Sanctis.

'Never is a word; you are a woman. Your "never" will be as long as a summer day—no longer. Maremma is accurst, your home is but a tomb; you will go.'

'I shall not go,' she answered, while melancholy and impatience came upon her face. Did he understand her so little? Did he so little believe?

She clung to her own old land as the fire-fly clings to its field of corn, knowing of, and wishing for, no other share of earth.

'Is he rich—rich indeed?' he asked again.

'What is it to me?' she answered. 'He says so. He must be, no doubt, for he does no work—only makes pictures, such as they put over the altars in Santa Tarsilla and Telamone. Let us say no more of him. I only told you because I thought it best that you should know.'

'You will think more of him,' said Este, with sullen insistence. 'He will tell you of Paris till you will want to go; you will learn to forget Maremma, and to forget me.'

'You speak foolishly. Even the birds do not forget; year after year they build in the same place. Am I less worthy than they?'

'He will talk to you till he makes you go,' persisted Este; 'and why should you not? You are not made to stay by me in the twilight, here, for ever. I am but a felon, and this is but a grave. Elsewhere there are worlds full of light, of sound, of stir, of colour; you will go to them and look at them with your mysterious eyes that have all the night in them—the night that means silence, and dreams, and love—and they will not understand you because you come from the depths of the forest and are not as they are; but they will adore you, they will crown you, they will flatter you, till you will no more remember Maremma than you think now of the sand that clung to your feet yesterday as you came from the sea———'

'I shall never go; therefore shall I never forget,' she said simply, unmoved by the visions that were framed in his words.

She was sorry he understood so little; he seemed to her to speak foolishly and thanklessly.

'Have I once failed him?' she thought. 'Have I once tired, that he thinks me so poor a thing?'

'Why should you not go?' he said obstinately. 'Why should you stay?'

'Why does the snipe stay in her reeds, and the mountain-dove cling to her rock?'

He was silent awhile. Then he rose and pushed the clay aside, and came nearer to her.

'The snipe has her mate and the rock-dove too,' he said with a soft murmur of his voice. 'But you—you do not love me, though you befriend me so.'

A troubled look came into her eyes, and she left off her spinning.

'You love the woman in Mantua,' she said, almost sternly; this Mantuan memory hurt her although love was in no way distinct to her, and although when she used its name she still understood little of its passion.

'Yes,' said Este, with a quick sigh and shudder. 'But that past is past. She cost me dear. Her memory is only terrible———'

'Is that love?' said Musa, with a scornful smile upon her mouth. It seemed to her very poor.

'It was ours,' he answered. 'We had a summer night; then tempest. The storm wrecked us. Oh, I loved her—yes. For months I never looked at you; do you not remember? Now that I look, now that I see, you bid me be blind.'

'I do not understand,' she said, troubled and confused. 'If you loved her, that was for ever. Just because she is dead, is that a reason to change? Why should you look at me? I serve you. I do what I can; you are safe with me; that is all you want, since liberty you cannot have.'

'No; liberty and I have said farewell. My life must pass in a prison, here or elsewhere. But you may make the prison so fair that I shall deem it one no longer. You serve me, yes; but do more—love me. In a way you do, I know; but it is not that way which will content me. You are not a dog, nor a servant, like those two whose ashes lie in the entrance there. You must give me more than dogs and slaves can give, faithful and tender though they be. Oh, my dear! love is given us to make a sunshine in this gloomy place. The mountain-doves you talk of do not dwell apart!'

He glided to her feet and sat there, and drew the distaff away from her, and gazed at her with caressing eyes that subdued her to his will and poured trouble into her heart.

'We are happy as we are,' she murmured. 'Do not look so! No; you are not happy; I forgot. But I thought it was always for Donna Aloysia you sorrowed———'

'Let the dead be. We live!' said Este with sudden passion, as his arms enclosed her and his face drooped towards her breast.

But she, with a sudden movement of alarm and anger that were rather at herself than him, thrust him away and rose with abrupt rapidity.

'You hurt me,' she said feverishly, and with the first personal fear that she had ever known. 'Oh! I have been so happy!———'

The tears rushed into her eyes. She did not know what ailed her. Some great impending loss seemed to hang over her.

'Dear, there is more happiness than that,' he murmured. 'You have known but the daybreak; I will lead you to the noon. Are you afraid?'

His hand stole towards her, his eyes magnetised her, his lips approached her.

For the first time she shrank from him: 'Let me go; let me think,' she said faintly.

Neither of them heard a step come over the moist ground above and descend the steps, and pass the entrance chamber. Before either had been warned by the slightest sound, one of the rock-doors was thrust open, and through its aperture there came Maurice Sanctis.

They sprang to their feet, and the hand of each went quick as thought to the haft of a knife; but before they could move or even think, he cried quickly:

'Wait! I come in warning. Men from the hills, from San Lionardo, mean to visit you to-night. They have a fancy that gold is hidden in the tomb. I overheard them; so I came.'

He was out of breath from the haste he had made; the night dews clung about him. His eyes, even as he spoke, were staring in blank amaze upon Este. Este himself stood erect, white to the lips with overpowering fear: but as he met the gaze of another man, the old chivalric blood that ran in his veins compelled him to conquer fear, and with dignity, even amidst his terror of discovery, and with a patrician's grace, he put Musa aside as she sprang towards the stranger, and himself advanced a step.

'I am Count Luitbrand d'Este,' he said simply. 'If you be my enemy, you can give me up; I am a runaway felon.'

There was silence between them for a moment; the grasp of his hand on her wrist held Musa motionless, and her hatred and her anguish alone spoke to the other through her eyes.

'Count Luitbrand d'Este,' said Maurice Sanctis at length, with a voice that he had hard pains to control, for his heart was beating in tumult against his ribs, 'I know nothing of you; I am not a hunter of men. I heard what I said awhile ago on the hills; the men will come here after Ave Maria———'

'Go out,' said Musa to Este. 'Hide under the shrubs till I call you; I will wait and give them welcome.'

She did not even look at Sanctis; she heard the words of warning, thinking of Este, taking their sense by instinct, but without attention to their speaker.

'I will not leave you. Can you think me so poor a creature?' he answered; the presence of another man stung the dulled spirit in him into life.

'What of me!' she cried, with agony of entreaty. 'I will show them that there is no gold; then they will go. But if they see you———'

'Go, both of you,' said Sanctis, sternly. 'Since you dwell here together, go together; I will stay and receive these men. When I have dismissed them, you can return; I too shall be gone.'

'Why should you do this? Why should you think of us?' said Este.

'I do not think of you. I do not know you. I came to warn her, to save her from insult and violence, for when the men find there is no gold they will be brutal; she will have told you of me; I am the grandson of the brother of Joconda———'

'You are generous,' said Este.

There was a tone in the words that drew fire from the calm eyes of Sanctis as steel does from the flint-stone.

'It does not matter what I am,' he said, with effort keeping his patience. 'What matters now is the loss of a moment. These hill-men come on a devil's errand in hope to get man's godhead. Let them find me here alone. They will find with me dogs that bite.'

He showed the steel of his pistols that he wore in a belt about his waist.

She broke from Este and came up to him and gazed at him with passionate, imploring, searching eyes that tried to read his inmost soul.

'You will not betray him?' she said under her breath. 'Now you know why I said that I must kill you if you told———'

Sanctis drew away from her.

'I am not a spy of the police,' he said coldly. 'You may be satisfied of that.'

She looked at him in silence.

She did not doubt him, yet she was afraid.

A secret once disclosed is like a bird once loosed: who can say where it may go?

'Go, and take him with you,' added Sanctis, with a certain harshness in his tone, 'I shall not betray him, but these men, once they see him, will.'

'We had better stay,' urged Este. 'We have both daggers; we can do something———'

'There must be nothing of that sort,' said Sanctis, with cold indifference. 'If blood were shed, the hue and cry would be out over the country and the guards here. The men will go when I speak to them.'

'It is the father of Zirlo!' said Musa between her teeth. 'I will wait—but go, go, go;—if the men of San Lionardo see you, the carabineers of Telamone will be here to-night.'

Sanctis laid a hand on her shoulder with an imperious gesture.

'Go out into the dark and hide—you and your friend—you have "the wisdom of the woods" you say; use it. When I sound this whistle three times it will be safe for you to return. Go; or you will have the men down on you—and him.'

A quick shudder of cold, like an ague, passed over her as he spoke of Este's danger. She dropped her head on her breast and drew Este towards the inner chambers with both hands.

'He is right,' she said. 'Come, oh my love! Come!'

Even in that moment of supreme peril and fear, the eyes of Este shone with a great triumph.

He glanced at Sanctis; then went.

Sanctis, left alone in the chamber of the Lucumo, heard the sound of their retreating steps as they passed across the other cells and began to ascend the rocks without.

Then he sat down on the stone bier where the Etruscan prince had lain in his golden armour, and placed his pistols beside him. He had received so great a shock that it seemed to him as if the very pulse of his life had stopped; but he was quite calm, and he listened for the sounds without with the fine ear that was his mountaineer's heritage,

As he had walked down through the woods that afternoon from Præstanella, he had overheard a scheme discussed between the father of Zefferino and two charcoal-burners of the oak forests below San Lionardo. Their plan was to come some dozen in force and plunder the tombs, and treat the dweller there better or worse, according as she yielded to them or resisted.

'She will resist,' Zefferino's father had said with a laugh, 'and then—well, there are dead there already; and who will know?'

Then the minds of the men had inflamed themselves with mad hopes of uncountable treasure and unearthly beauty.

'They do say she is the daughter of Lucifero,' they had muttered one to another.

So much he had heard; passing by unseen in his grey clothes amongst the grey tangle of leafless branches and tall-growing rosemary.

He now moved into one of the inner cells all the traces of her residence there, the lute, the candelabra, the handsome bronze vessels, the look of which might tempt the San Lionardo men to plunder; then, with the lamp burning but the fire extinguished, he sat down and waited for them, and rested his eyes whilst he did so on the clay busts that wore the likeness of Musa.

'He has been here long,' he thought.

With his eye trained to perceive beauty in the lowliest flower, the most fleeting phase of nature, he had rendered instant justice to the personal beauty of Este, to his supple panther-like grace, to his patrician's air, to his face that was such as Lionardo might have seen in a vision of Adonis.

He understood everything now.

He needed to ask no question.

He had seen the printed notice all along the coast, offering the Government reward for the apprehension of Luitbrand d'Este. One glance at Este's face and hers had told him all he had to know.

He guessed the whole story, and he understood why she had guarded her secret so fiercely and had threatened his own life under her terror of the law.

He smiled once, bitterly.

'Poor Joconda!' he thought, 'of what use was it to stretch a dead hand from the grave?'

Then he remembered that Joconda's body was lying there, within a few feet of him.

The remembrance subdued the sardonic bitterness which was coupled with his pain. He sat still there, and time went on, and the evening deepened into night.

He remembered two years before, when he had passed through Italy on his way eastward, pausing in Ferrara, and Brescia, and Mantua, and staying longer in the latter city on account of a trial then in course of hearing in the court of justice, which had interested him by its passionate and romantic history; it had been the trial of the young Count d'Este, accused of the assassination of his mistress. Sanctis had gone with the rest of the town to the hearing of the long and tedious examination of witnesses and of accused. It had been a warm day in early autumn, three months after the night of the murder; Mantua had looked beautiful in her golden mantle of sunshine and silver veil of mist; there was a white, light fog on the water meadows and the lakes, and under it the willows waved and the tall reeds rustled; whilst the dark towers, the forked battlements, the vast Lombard walls, seemed to float on it like sombre vessels on a foamy sea.

He remembered the country people flocking in over the bridge, the bells ringing, the red sails drifting by, the townsfolk gathering together in the covered arcades and talking with angry rancour against the dead woman's lord. He remembered sitting in the hush and gloom of the judgment hall and furtively sketching the head of the prisoner because of its extreme and typical beauty. He remembered how at the time he had thought this accused lover guiltless, and wondered that the tribunal did not sooner suspect the miserly, malicious, and subtle meaning of the husband's face. He remembered listening to the tragic tale that seemed so well to suit those sombre, feudal streets, those melancholy waters, seeing the three-edged dagger passed from hand to hand, hearing how the woman had been found dead in her beauty on her old golden and crimson bed with the lilies on her breast, and looking at the attitude of the prisoner—in which the judges saw remorse and guilt, and he could only see the unutterable horror of a bereaved lover to whom the world was stripped and naked.

He had stayed but two days in Mantua, but those two days had left an impression on him like that left by the reading at the fall of night of some ghastly poem of the middle ages. He had thought that they had condemned an innocent man, as the judge gave his sentence of the galleys for life; and the scene had often come back to his thoughts.

The vaulted audience chamber; the strong light pouring in through high grated windows; the pillars of many-coloured marbles, the frescoed roof; the country people massed together in the public place, with faces that were like paintings of Mantegna or Masaccio; the slender supple form of the accused drooping like a bruised lily between the upright figures of two carabineers; the judge leaning down over his high desk in black robes and black square cap, like some Venetian lawgiver of Veronese or of Titian; and beyond, through an open casement, the silvery, watery, sun swept landscape that was still the same as when Romeo came, banished, to Mantua. All these had remained impressed upon his mind by the tragedy which there came to its close as a lover, passionate as Romeo and yet more unfortunate, was condemned to the galleys for his life. 'They have ill judged a guiltless man,' he had said to himself as he had left the court with a sense of pain before injustice done, and went with heart saddened by a stranger's fate into the misty air, along the shining water where the Mills of the Twelve Apostles were churning the great dam into froth, as they had done through seven centuries, since first, with reverent care, the builder had set the sacred statues there that they might bless the grinding of the corn.

Sitting now in the silence of the tomb, Sanctis recalled that day, when, towards the setting of the sun, he had strolled there by the water-wheels of the twelve disciples, and allowed the fate of an unknown man, declared a criminal by impartial judges, to cloud over for him the radiance of evening on the willowy Serraglio and chase away his peaceful thoughts of Virgil. He remembered how the country people had come out by the bridge and glided away in their boats, and talked of the murder of Donna Aloysia and the sentence of Luitbrand d'Este; and how they had, one and all of them, said, going back over the lake water or along the reed-fringed roads, to their farmhouses, that there could be no manner of doubt about it—the lover had been moonstruck and mad with jealousy, and his dagger had found its way to her breast. They had not blamed him much; but they had never doubted his guilt; and the foreigner alone, standing by the mill gateway, and seeing the golden sun go down beyond the furthermost fields of reeds that grew blood-red as the waters grew, had thought to himself and said half aloud:

'Poor Romeo! he is guiltless, even though the dagger were his———'

And a prior, black-robed, with broad looped-up black hat, who was also watching the sunset, breviary in hand, had smiled and said, 'Nay, Romeo, banished to us, had no blood on his hand; but this Romeo, native of our city, has. Mantua will be not ill rid of Luitbrand d'Este.'

Then he again, in obstinacy and against all the priest's better knowledge as a Mantuan, had insisted and said, 'the man is innocent.'

And the sun had gone down as he had spoken, and the priest had smiled—a smile cold as a dagger's blade—perhaps recalling sins confessed to him of love that had changed to hate, of fierce delight ending in as fierce a death-blow. Mantua in her day has seen so much alike of love and hate.

'The man is innocent,' he had said insisting, whilst the carmine light had glowed on the lagoons and bridges, and on the Lombard walls, and Gothic gables, and high bell-towers, and ducal palaces, and feudal fortresses of the city in whose street Crichton fell to the hired steel of bravoes.

'The man is innocent,' he had said that night in Mantua; and now once more he had looked upon him, and his innocence seemed no longer to him clear as then.

The priest, no doubt, he mused now, knew better than he, a prior of Mantua as he was, and able to judge aright the lover of Donna Aloysia.

To live here, sheltering himself by ruin to the one who aided him; to live here, defended by a girl's love, maintained by a girl's labours;—was this not as guilty a thing as to have struck the dagger through the lilies at that Mantuan woman's breast? And baser, perhaps, because less bold than that. To Sanctis it seemed so, at the least, in this first hour of overwhelming surprise, of extreme bitterness, of intense disappointment and chagrin. To him the savage purity of her life had been sacred; he had believed in it undoubtingly. To him she had been a vestal, a dryad, Penthesilea, Maia, Britomart, everything strong, pure, heroic, virginal, steeped in innocence as the flowers were steeped in the penetrating force of the sunlight, clothed in the impenetrable armour of an absolute ignorance of evil. He had called her Una in his own thoughts as he had gone away from her through the aisles of the evergreen-oaks.

And now———

It hurt him like a personal shame, it wounded him as if in his own honour, to find her here in the heart of the earth, side by side with the lover of that murdered Mantuan woman whom angrily to himself he called the hero of a tawdry tragedy.

He remembered that in Mantua that day he had thought the accused prisoner innocent, but now it seemed to him that he must have been in error and the judge and the priest been right. He was a man of noble temper and usually just judgment; but, unconsciously, the finding of Este there had made the Mantuan tale stand out before him in new colour, in strange guiltiness, blood-red as the sunset he had watched over the westward lake.

Nevertheless, guilty or guiltless, he had promised to save him. He had to do so, even whilst at that very hour, no doubt, this other Lombard Romeo was hiding with her hand in his, her breath upon his cheek, in the darkness of the wooded glades and the hushed mystery of the moorland night.

By his watch two hours went by; then, listening intently, he heard a sound of several feet moving amidst the grass above him.

They were near. He sat in the same position, but he took a revolver in each hand, ready cocked, and fixed his eyes on the stone doorway.

The steps came, heavy and trampling, down the few steps into the entrance-place.

There were some dozen men in all, black-browed fierce-eyed charcoal-burners of the mountains; the father of Zefferino was in the rear; he carried the only lantern amidst them; they were all armed with daggers or knives, two or three had axes also and pickaxes.

They expected in the buche delle fate to find more gold than all the Emperors of Rome had owned.

Sanctis watched them, without moving; they did not see him as they hustled and trampled through the entrance, already jealous of each other, hot with greed, burning with wicked passions, yelling aloud for the girl and the gold.

When they stumbled, like fierce, stupid cattle, into the chamber of the Lucumo, Sanctis rose, and levelled his aim at them.

'Halt there,' he said to them. 'The first that advances is a dead man.'

They hung together in a throng; they did not approach. They stared in bewildered awe at the steel tubes of the pistols and at the calm, stern eyes of this unknown man.

'What do you want?' he asked them.

They for a moment did not speak; then the father of Zefferino, who was the ringleader and promoter of their foray, cursed heaven and earth, and cried aloud:

'We want the gold; there is gold here; it belongs to us of right; we are the men of the soil. She is a witch, a devil and the child of devils; she struck my own boy till almost he died under her hand. We want the gold she has found; we will let her go if she give us the gold———'

Sanctis kept his eyes fastened on them, and he saw the whole dusky, restless mass of them writhe and cringe under his gaze and the death-dealing tubes of his weapons.

'You are wicked men,' he said sternly; 'and you may thank God and me that you are spared to-night adding the blackest crimes of earth to your souls. I know all you came to do. I know the names of you all. There is no gold here; there is nothing of any value here whatever. There are dead men's skulls, if you be bold enough to look on them. Constantino, father of Zefferino, you lie; and you have brought your friends on a fool's errand. Go back as you came; and swear by the Madonna and the Holy Spirit never to return.'

His calm voice, which had so much menace in it, awed them not less than the slim steel of his arms, beside which their knives seemed weapons so poor and slow. They were astounded and affrighted. They began to mutter against Constantino who had brought them thither, and to turn on him with gnashing teeth.

'If you do not take the oath, it will be worse for you,' pursued Sanctis, as he saw the impression he had made. 'I have bought all the lands above San Lionardo; you are all men of my ground and my forest. If I say how you have come hither to-night, the law will lay hold of you and not let you go lightly. Gold there is none here. Had any found it, would they be such fools as not to bear it away? Learned men care for these tombs, but there is nothing in them for those who are ignorant. I treat you more peaceably than you merit. Come, take the oath I bid you while my patience lasts.'

'It was Constantino!' they muttered with one voice; and they cursed him.

'If there is no gold, there is the girl,' he shrieked in self-defence. 'Where is she?'

'She is not here,' said Sanctis. 'And if she were she should be sacred to you as your cross, or I would kill every one of you like flies. She has those who can defend her from afar, and whom you had better fear in the future. Come, I have seen enough of you; take the oath that. I tell you, or I may lose my patience. I have your lives in my hand.'

They were men, ferocious enough if crossed, with all an animal's instincts without an animal's innocence; they were brutal in their lonely lives, where it was so hard for the law to reach them. They had come primed for any and every crime that the hidden sepulchres would cover, and they had mad dreams of riches that should make them free from need to labour all their years to come. But they were so amazed, so discomfited, so cowed by the stern serenity of this northern stranger and the cruel gleam of his merciless weapons that they hustled one another uneasily to and fro, and gnashed their teeth against their misleader and deceiver; and unwillingly, yet with one voice, they swore never again to molest the tomb.

Their hungry eyes, roving over the chamber, saw its nakedness, its emptiness. The half-worked clay told no tale to them.

They felt a mortal terror of this fair-faced, cold-eyed man risen up there against them in the midst of this place of the dead. The father of little Zirlo muttered that he had meant nothing; only to share the gold honestly.

‘Go, all of you,’ said Sanctis, surprised at his own facile victory. ‘Since you repent, I too will forget. But if you transgress again, then you will find my memory is long and my bullets reach far.’

‘We will go,’ muttered the charcoal-burners, feeling still a shivering cold, as of those steel barrels pressed against their brows; and they began to trample backwards, hustling against each other in their mortification and confusion, and looking with strained, dazzled eyes for ever at the levelled pistols.

He heard them make their slow way out, and heard them when they reached the air fall into furious recrimination, and loud inquiries, one of each other, while the voice of Zefferino's father rose shrieking in their midst.

He went up the stone stair himself, and sent a shot up into the starry heavens.

'Be off in silence,' he called to them, 'or you will have more of these messages.'

In the fitful shadows of the night, lit only by the stars, he saw the whole troop of them seem to melt away and be swallowed up in the great void of the darkness.

The night once more was peaceable, with no other sound in it than the wings of the water-hen splashing in the pools, and the feet of the rodents scurrying through the brushwood.

He laid his ear to the ground to hearken to the retreating tread of his discomfited antagonists; but he heard nothing save the rustle and the murmur of insects and cheiroptera. There was no fear of the return of the San Lionardo men, for their souls were white-livered though their appetites were fierce, and they had been scared and palsied with awe of this man who had known their secret thoughts, and waited for them in the place of the dead.

He listened for half an hour or more for any echo of their returning steps, but there was nothing near save the bats wheeling through the gloom and the wood-rats running fast and noiseless through the grass.

Then he descended into the tomb; laid his pistols down upon the Lucumo's bier, and blew a dog-whistle three times. It pierced the stillness of the night air with a shrill blast.

 

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