In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 34

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXIV.

 

WO days later in the year Sanctis stood alone in the great central hall of the old fortress of which he had become lord.

The shadows of the early winter morning were grey and sombre; a pale sunshine coming through them faintly touched a gigantic caryatide in Carrara marble at his side. In that splendid age when the prince and the noble, sheathing their swords in moments of repose, turned to the arts alike for pleasure and for glory, the lords of Massa had summoned painters of Florence to decorate and ennoble this place that was now forgotten and going to decay on the solitary mountain side, as so many other palaces and castles fade and fall, all over Italy, burying their stories with them.

The colours were dim on the vast vault of the ceiling; the gilding of the friezes was covered with webs of dust; the marbles of the columns and the statues were stained and broken; but there was a grandeur in the place that gained rather than lost from that invasion of time, that dimness of age.

He had purchased, but he was about to leave it, and he knew that most likely he would never return. His heart was sick within him. He had been beaten and baffled. It seemed to him that the good and evil genius in which the Etruscan, like the Asiatic, had believed, had striven together for the soul of her, and the holier spirit had lost.

He could do nothing more. She had chosen this man, and must abide with him since that was her choice. Now more than ever it was impossible to invoke the aid of the law, since to let in one ray of light upon that myrtle-hidden necropolis would be to deliver her companion to his gaolers. There she must stay, and drift to whatever misery she might; the burden she had bound upon her shoulders none could lift off from them against her will.

He stood in the hall of this ancient place of Præstanella, which he had bought with a faint but happy hope which he had never cared wholly to analyse; and his heart was heavy as he said to himself that there was no more for him to do than to turn his face for ever from this 'sun-bright waste,' which would haunt him, he thought, through all the remaining years of his life.

His eyes rested, without his knowing well what they saw, on the wide landscape beyond the columns of the loggia; on the slope of the olive-covered mountain bathed in morning vapour that drifted down and spread like a lake over all the wooded valleys and level pastures far away below. As he looked he saw a figure coming up the hillside, with the white mists all along it: a figure which always looked to him like the very divinity of the woods, which always seemed to him to have a forest fragrance and a wild doe's grace.

She came steadily upward, clothed in her garment of lamb's-wool, with a white cloth folded on her head as a ciociara wears it on the mountain ways that lie about Soracte and the Leonessa.

He saw her for awhile, mounting slowly but surely under the olive boughs; then he lost her from sight for a time where the rough road wound away under the outer bastions of the old fortress; then in a little while, which seemed very long to him standing wondering and expectant there, she came unannounced through the farthest circle of the long open arcade that opened from the loggia.

She came towards him in silence, without embarrassment, without hesitation.

Himself, he neither moved nor spoke.

A great anger and a great yearning wrestled together in his heart, and held him silent.

'I wished to thank you,' she said simply, as she came and stood before him.

He was mute.

'I thought I ought to thank you for all you did,' she said again. 'I heard that you were here, so I came.'

'It is a long way to come for so little,' he said, his strong emotion seeking a refuge in a commonplace truism.

'That is nothing to me,' she said. 'I wished to thank you. You were brave and kind; you were very generous; I had been rude and thankless.'

'Do not talk of that; I did nothing.'

'You did much. And you left your pistols.'

'They may be of use.'

'It was good of you; and I am grateful.'

He had not looked at her since she had first entered; he did not look at her now; many words sprang to his lips, but he did not wish to utter them.

'You know I am not ungrateful,' she said wistfully. 'That is all I came to say. You were bold and generous, and we seemed cravens. It was hard, but you understood;—it was not for myself I would have hidden.'

'I know,' said Sanctis quickly. 'I have never undervalued your courage.'

'That is all I came to say. You will go away now, will you not?'

'Yes; I go away—at once.'

'And this place?'

'This place will not be more forsaken than it has been. It is mine, but most likely I shall never look on it again. Child, why could you not trust me? Could you think I should have betrayed your friend?'

'How could I tell? And his secret was not mine to give away.'

Sanctis was silent; he had not yet looked at her face; her presence hurt him. He wronged her; he thought her bold and without the natural shame of her womanhood.

She had no shame because she was as yet as innocent as a forest-doe.

'Do you want anything of me?' he said abruptly.

She looked at him in some surprise.

'No; I only wanted to say that. I could not bear to seem thankless and a coward. I am sorry, too, that I was harsh and rude, since you have been so brave and have saved him.'

The face of Sanctis darkened.

'I should not have lifted my hand to save him; I did what I did for you. How can you harbour him? how can you care for him? He is a felon.'

'He is innocent. He never killed her.'

He did not reply. The scene in the judgment-hall of Mantua rose up before his eyes.

Watching him she grew angry at his looks and at his silence.

'You believe he is innocent? You must; you shall. He loved her; he would not have hurt a hair of her head.'

'I was present at his trial,' said Sanctis coldly. 'Mantua believed him guilty.'

'Mantua might; you could not? You are a painter of men's faces-look in his.'

He was silent a moment. Then the justice of his nature conquered him; he remembered that when the man was nothing to him he had believed firmly in the innocence of this most unhappy lover. Had he not said to the priest on the bridge of the Argine, 'Poor Romeo! he is guiltless.' Should he say less to her? Should he affect to see the stain of blood because the accused was hateful to him?

'I did believe him innocent,' he said at length, with effort. 'Few others did; but I believed so, though the dagger was his own with which the woman was murdered. He has told you that?'

'Yes; it was one he had left in her chamber after a masked spectacle. He is innocent.'

Sanctis said nothing.

'I will go now,' said Musa. 'I came to thank you. I do thank you from my heart; I never will forget. We shall not meet any more. Farewell.'

He turned suddenly, and for the first time looked full at her; his eyes were dim, and his face was pale and very troubled.

'Oh, child, what can I say to you?' he murmured. 'If you would only have listened in the summer; now it is too late. Have you thought what it is that you do?'

'Do not speak of me. It is of no use.'

'I fear it is of no use; yet-even now-dear, I would always befriend you; I would serve you in any way. You cared for Joconda; think of her a little. If you would still put your trust in me, you might still be saved for a better life than this one-hiding in the heart of the earth with a condemned felon as your companion. Nay,-we will say he is condemned unjustly. His city does not think so. Once discovered he must suffer his sentence; and you, as the one who has hidden him and braved the law for him, will be condemned as well.'

'Oh, I know,' she answered quietly; 'they will punish me with him-now.'

Her words were quiet, but in her eyes there shone gladness and exultation.

A revulsion of feeling came over him as he heard. He thought her devotion hardihood; he thought her loyalty audacity.

'They would punish you, no doubt,' he answered, more coldly than he had spoken before. 'And sooner or later they will find you; the moors and the woodlands are wide and lonely, but some time the eye of the law will find him out in your cave. The peril of last night will renew itself when I am not there. He may kill you and himself, perhaps, but there will be no other way of escape.'

'That will be as it must be; men have hidden all their life, I think, in Maremma. There are many stories———'

'I do not wish to say what hurts you; we will not speak of him; but listen—for yourself, This man is dear to you—dear, no doubt, through his beauty and his misfortunes—but what future will he give you, with what misery does he not dower you? Leave him to me, I will busy myself with his safety; I will share his risk, I will be to him as a brother—if you will leave him and go where women can care for you, where your youth may blossom unblighted, where you may be safe and happy without any sort of fear. For me, if you will, I will swear never to see you if only you will let me place you out of the reach of harm. What can your life be as the mate of a felon hidden in a hole in the earth? You do not seem to understand what you have become; but think once of all I say for sake of the dead woman who loved you.'

The words were wrung out of him almost despite himself. All the night long he had told himself that it was too late; that she chose her own fate and by it must abide. All the night long he had argued with himself that there was no other course for him than to set his face northward and banish her from his thoughts for ever. She was no longer lovely to him in body or mind; she seemed to him to have the gloom and taint of that Mantuan murder on her, and of the sin and shame of Saturnino. She was to him a Britomart, stripped and bound; a Penthesilea who was but her lover's slave, and did not blush to be that humbled thing.

All his fancy and his faith which had grown about and rooted themselves in her had withered when she had put her hand in Este's and led him out into the night of the moorland. He could not tell that Este's lips had never touched her own; he could not tell that the 'bit of sweet basil' of a dead woman's prayers had been as a magic girdle of defence about her. He could not tell. They dwelt there together, and he had heard her say, 'Come; oh my love,come!'

He had meant never to look upon her face again; he had thought of her as of a creature quite as lost and dead as the Mantuan woman was, in her grave beside the reedy waters. Yet an irresistible longing to snatch her away, to send her out into light, peace, safety, to save her from the touch of the hands that had the fetters of the galleys on them, rose up in him stronger than himself, and made him speak words which he knew were as vain as ever had been the call of Este on his murdered love.

She heard him without any movement, and she answered him without emotion. She did not understand that in his sight she had lost all her Una's innocence, all her holiness and purity of power.

'I will never be angered against you,' she said simply, 'because you saved us, and were good. But to speak to me so is foolish. It is of no use. I would not leave a fox that needed me as he needs me, and you could never be his friend; there is no love between you. The hole in the earth is all the home I want; we are happy in it. If the soldiers come to take us, then we can die. That is not so terrible.'

Thereon she turned, with a long look at him, a look of reproach, and began to walk down the arched corridor, open to the air, which led out to the woods.

Sanctis put his hand up a moment to his throat as if he were choked.

A certain emotion of disgust at what seemed to him her lack of natural shame mingled in him with veneration for her fidelity, with passionate pain at her rejection.

'Wait one moment,' he said in broken tones. 'Will you say one thing to him? Say it from me. I am a rich man, as I have told you, and gold can do most things. Go, and say to him from me that I will compass his escape in some way; I will hire a vessel and a crew, and carry him in safety away in the darkness of the night (it will be possible on these lonely shores) if he will trust himself to me. Are you loyal enough to serve him so? to tell him this? It will be your own separation from him; it is only fair to warn you of that. Are you generous enough to take my message?'

She grew very pale.

She covered her eyes a moment, and was mute.

'I do it for you, not for him,' continued Sanctis. 'I should care nothing if he died to-morrow; but I will do my best to aid him to escape if he will trust himself to me—that I swear to you. Will you go and tell him so?'

She was still silent; so was he.

'It will be possible if money enough be spent on it; and I will grudge nothing,' he added, after a long pause. 'If he attribute to me base motives, he must do so. I do not care for his judgment. If he will come, I will aid him in every way that he may wish.'

'You would take him to your own land?'

'Yes,'

She said nothing more for awhile; she rested against the marble column with her hand before her eyes still. Then suddenly she looked up; she was as pale as the white marble by which she leaned.

'I will go and tell him,' she said simply. 'It is for him to choose.'

Without more words she turned and began to traverse the loggia. At some little distance she looked back and spoke:

'The way is long; I cannot be here till to-morrow,' she said, as she paused.

'Will you not have a mule, a horse? Will you not rest and eat?'

'No; I will be here to-morrow.'

Then she went.

 

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

 

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