In Maremma/Volume 3/Chapter 36

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XXXVI.

 

HEN she brought to Este the written lines, he read them in silence. They said:

'I will give up my life to the endeavour to prove your innocence, in which, at your trial at Mantua, I, almost alone, believed. If I be successful, I will only ask one thing of you: when you are free, do not forget your debt to her, and justify her in the eyes of all men.' The paper was signed in full: 'Maurice Anton Sanctis.'

Este read it twice; then burnt it.

'Does it anger you?' she asked.

'No. I do not understand———'

It embarrassed him; he could not comprehend. Why should this man, who loved her, seek to do him service? The greater nature, with its finer impulses, escaped him; he felt baffled and humiliated; he groped in the dark of dim conjecture after possible motives which he conjured up one moment to reject the next. Thinking long, again and again, over the words written to him, he ended in disbelieving them. Vague suspicion was easier and more natural than belief in instincts entirely unselfish and pure of origin.

'Is he truly gone?' he said, looking at her with eyes that doubted her.

'Gone? I do not know. He said that he was going. It does not matter; he will not come to us.'

'You know that he loves you?'

'No; that is not love; he does not speak as the Sicilian did———'

Jealousy darted from the dreamful gaze of Este; it is a hooded snake that always lies beneath the amorous smile of all Italian eyes.

'There is another?' he said with a quick breath of rage and of suspicion.

She was vexed with herself that she had spoken without thought.

'It was only a sailor who wished me to go with him and live on an island that he calls Sicily,' she said, with a troubled confusion in her thoughts. 'I told him I would never go; that it was folly. He will not come back again.'

'And I thought no eyes ever beheld you!' he cried, with amazed anger. 'I thought you hid unseen in the reeds and the woods like the moor-hen. Are there hunters for you as for her? Is the Maremma one great net? You should not listen. Why do you listen? If you loved me, you would be blind and deaf. That is love; that only. In all the sounds of the earth only to hear one voice———'

She looked at him. She did not speak, but in her humid sombre eyes there was such infinite love, passing all power of words, that he in turn was dumb.

His jealous petulance sank to silence, abashed before that mute eloquence of a single glance. The momentary fever of his roused senses was stilled and chilled by the immensity of sacrifice and heroism which that one look recalled to him.

'Ah, forgive me!' he murmured with instant contrition; and emotion which for the time was true and profound brought quick tears into his eyes as he stooped towards her and leaned his lips upon her shining curls.

She drew herself from him with the same fear which at his touch, before, had stirred and trembled in her dauntless nature; a fear, vague, unintelligible to her, oppressive, cruel.

'Why are you so afraid?' he murmured. 'Since we love each other———'

She put him away almost angrily. Her eyes had perplexity and terror in them.

'I do not know why we should talk of it. I have loved you—always, I suppose. I have only thought of you, only of you, since that first night I found you in the tombs. But you—you have loved her. That cannot change. If you were dead I should but love you more.'

He shuddered as she spoke; the ghost of that woman slain in Mantua seemed to him to glide in between this living thing and him.

'I think you would but love me better,' he murmured, with some sense in himself of shallowness, of littleness, of guilt. 'But I am not like you; I am not great or strong in any way, and she—well, she is dead, and she has brought on me a living death, and in my misery you alone can give me any joy. Dear, men are not faithful so; why will you speak of her? The grave has her; her lord has heaped up marble over her; she is nothing, nothing, as the fruit 1s that rots and drops away. Why will you put her ever between yourself and me? We live, you and I; we are all alone, and the earth is above us, and we have nothing to do with it; we are alone, and we love one another———'

His eyes poured their beseeching passion into hers, his hands held her, his lips approached her; but once more she put him away from her with a look upon her face that he had never seen there.

'Ah, yes, I love you,' she said very low, and her voice seemed to him to have the very melody of the nightingales in it, so infinite a caress did it give with these three words. 'But we were happy—why did you speak?—it was better as we were. Do not touch me; it is ungenerous; let me alone, let us live as we have done. Never will I forsake you; but never must you make me ashamed.'

Then she withdrew herself quickly from him, and went to the place where Joconda's coffin lay, even as she had done the night before. She shut to the stone doors and threw herself upon her knees, and prayed passionately.

He dared not follow her.

He remained in the gloom of the Lucumo's chamber, alone with his thoughts.

Before his vision stretched the pale, cold body of his murdered mistress, with the moonbeams finding out the death-wound in her breast. Her voice that was for ever silent seemed to rise and cry at his ear:

'Our hours of joy cost me my life; and already hast thou forgotten?'

Already he had forgotten; rather had done worse than forget; had upbraided and cursed her memory because of the fate that through her had befallen him; had done his very uttermost to thrust away from him remembrance of one in whom for three long years he had seen his heaven, his arbiter, his treasure, his supreme destiny.

A vague sense of shame stole on him.

Did he love this other now, he who in the moonlit luminous Mantuan nights had sworn his love eternal as the stars?

Was this new-born passion love indeed? Or was it not the mere pulsation of reviving senses, the mere covetousness of a thing born only of the knowledge that others coveted it?

For months she had been beside him, and been no more to him than a generous boy who should have so defended and laboured for him would have been. For months he had seen her and heard her, and let her go and come, with no perception of her sex or of her youth, because his eyes were tired and his heart was sick.

But all at once he saw, and his dulled desires leaped from their ashes into fire, because other men also saw, other men also desired. But for them he would still have let her go by him, the unnoticed Nausicaa of his bitter Odyssey.

 

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