CHAPTER XIV.
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O the days passed by and the weeks and the months, and the life was always the same there.
The death of Joconda had left an awful blank of silence and loneliness around her. In its desolation she realised all that the dead woman had been to, and had done for, her, and a great remorse entered into her. She had been too thankless, she had been indifferent, unthinking, hard of heart, so she thought; and she would have given her life to have those brown, wrinkled, rough hands in hers for one hour.
Apart from this great sorrow she was happy in her wild, lonely life on the moor. She had no one to say her yea or nay. She was as free as the wild boar himself; and the wholesome winds of the west blew against her face, and nigh at hand was the green autumn of Maremma.
So she took up her domicile in earnest there, and ceased to feel desolate.
The jewellery was all that Saturnino had robbed from the tombs, and the utensils of bronze and of pottery served all her daily needs. Untroubled by any knowledge of their history and antiquity, yet vaguely moved to reverent use of them because they belonged to these dead owners of the place, whom she revered, she took the bronze oinochoë with her to the water spring, she set her herb-soup on the embers in the bronze situla, she made her oaten bread in the embossed phiale, she drank the broth out of the painted depas, shaped like that cup of the sun in which the Python Slayer once passed across the sea. She used all these things reverently, washed them with careful hands, and never thought they were dishonoured thus.
The Typhon frowned at her from the ceiling of the tomb, and the Dii Involuti turned their impassive faces on her every time she passed out of the stone doors or climbed the steep stair passage to the open air; but she knew nothing of their dread attributes, and though they awed her they did not fill her with any painful fear. She did not understand them; there was no one to explain to her the meanings of the paintings, and carvings, and the letters on the walls; but she grew into a great and tender sympathy with them which was in itself a sort of comprehension.
Even of the terrible shapes she had no fear; the dread winged boy with hoary locks of age, that the Etruscans feared as higher than the gods, had no terror in his frown for her; and the veiled divinities who sat beside the inner door of the warrior's tomb, who for the dead had been tyrants of fate, mystic, inscrutable, omnipotent, grew to be to her as playmates and as friends. The very twilight and hush and solemn sadness of this place were but so much added sweetness to her. And in her there seemed to have been always that melancholy, and that obedience to destiny, which were the characteristics of the Etruscan religion, even when most they loved the lyre and the lotus garland and the brimming rhyton.
Here was her refuge, her palace, her place of sanctity and dreams; here the native unconscious poetry and passion in her found a likeness to themselves, a consolation for the unlovely life that seemed to pollute the sea and shore in the only group of human habitations that she knew, and which hurt her without her ever tracing the why or wherefore.
She managed to live very well; her wants were few, and the moors supplied all save one or two of her needs, such as oil to burn, and flax to spin, and hens to keep for eggs, and these Zefferino brought to her, being paid for them with scrupulous punctuality out of the two silver pieces that she possessed.
She found she could cut the wild oats in plenty for the old mule, which was all she needed herself, since she could live on the bread she so made, and she could make enough any day in the year for herself and the dog.
It is wonderful how few are the actual wants of a human life that is far away from all artificial stimulus and necessities.
She was up as soon as the white gleam of dawn showed above the barren mountains of the eastern sky-line, and, long before the heavens there grew warm with that sunrise flush which is as bright and deep a rose as any oleander-flower, she said her Latin prayer at daybreak beside the coffin of Joconda, as she had been used to do by her side, tended the mule and the dog, baked her rude loaves, and swept over and burnished her stone chambers and her bronze utensils with those northern habits of cleanliness and order in which the woman of Savoy had reared her.
Then she was free to roam all the day long, and go out upon the sea as she might choose; every day she dipped and dived and swam like any gannet. She bathed twice daily, either in fresh water or salt water, with as much zest as her winged comrades; and she kept her thick hair, that clustered like the bronze curls of a Greek bust, and all her simple apparel clean and in order, obeying all that dead Joconda had enjoined on her as her daily habits, with as implicit an obedience as ever on that soil the Etruscans had shown to the commands of Tages.
That was her fashion of repentance for many a moment of petulance, and many an hour of wilful indifference, which were to her memory as the sting of the spine of the yucca is to the flesh.
Now and then, faintly from a distance, the bells of some hamlet or of some monastery would ring over the plains, and be wafted by the wind to her ear; now and then some shot would sound from some little lagoon, or some thicket of box elder, and wild olive, where the strangers were slaying the natives of the marsh and the moor; this was all she heard of the living world, and she desired to learn no more. She lived with the dead; and something of their cold repose, their ineffable indifference, their passionless defiance of mankind, had come upon her and entered her soul.
She had quite forgotten she was young. She had never known that she was beautiful.
She was not afraid of anything; she had the courage of Saturnino in her blood, and with it the superb innocence of a child's soul that has never been dimmed by the breath of folly.
Whilst it was summer weather even shepherds and herdsmen were never seen; the flocks were on the mountain, the harvests had been reaped at midsummer, the chase was forbidden by the law; all Maremma was as silent as the heart of the Sahara. Sometimes, against the law, which is utterly defied in this respect all over the country, men would come over the scorching moor at eventide to set their fell net, the square paratoio with its fettered call-bird, and would watch all night at peril of their lives from the swamp-gases, and at daybreak would carry away their poor fluttering struggling prey. But even these were few and far between, because the fever and ague of the marshes had terrors enough to daunt and conquer greed.
In summer she and Zefferino had these moors to themselves, and even Zefferino had been more alarmed at the heat and the fever than she, and stayed for days together upon the wooded spur of his native mountain, where the miasma seldom reached.
So the long days went by, one by one, and were not long to her; and at noontide she slept soundly and dreamlessly within the cool solitude of the tombs, safe as a mole in his castle, refreshed as a coot on the breast of the pool. In the short nights, above all when they were moonlit, she did not care to sleep; she sat at the entrance of the graves with the white dog like a carved marble thing at her feet, and watched the sylvan life that stirs at dark flit over the face of the sky or the shadows of the earth. She could not see the sea, the growth of the low woodland was too thick, but she could hear the surf breaking on the shore, and often when a steamer was passing, or a brig coasting, or a fishing barque standing in under the wind, she could hear the beat of paddles or the rattling of halyards or the voices of fishermen calling to each other.
The sea was near enough to give the sweet sense of its strong companionship, and if she climbed the sandstone only a little way and overlooked the darksome stretch of myrtle and oak scrub, she could, at any moonlit hour, see it sparkling underneath the stars, flowing away into the infinite space of the clouds and the night, phosphorescent, radiant, hushed—the black fantastic crags of Elba borne upon its waters like a barque.
So the end of the summer passed with her untroubled except by that sense of ingratitude towards her lost friend which lay like a stone on her heart. Whenever she knelt by the coffin she said at the close of her prayers always: 'Dear and good one, forgive me. I was blind!'
The need of companionship never weighed on her. She was unconsciously happy in the air, in the liberty, in the delightful sense of healthful and untrammelled life.
Her mind busied itself with its own vague imaginations, and her mode of life was filled with that sombre mystery which she loved as the Etruscan race had loved it. If she had been shut in the garret or the factory-room of a city, this temper would have become morbid and dangerous in her; but, braced by the daily physical labours of her life, and by the abundant and vigorous exercise of all her bodily powers, it only served to give a solace, and a sort of sublimity, to a fate which would have seemed to many hard and friendless. The moorlands and the moorland sepulchres were made for her and she for them.
The visits of little Zefferino kept her from that absolute solitude which in time hurts the mind and distorts it. He was a very human little thing; greedy, playful, timid, kindly when it cost him nothing, most kindly when he gained most by it; a complete little epitome of humanity clothed in shaggy goat's hair.
She grew fond of the child, and was indulgent to him with that indulgence of the strong to the weak which is often misunderstood, abused, and preyed upon by the feeble. She knew that he told lies by the hundred, and pilfered when he could, and had no more real heart in him than the red and white pumpkin that keeps the beauty of its quaint shell whilst the summer sun has sucked up all its pulp inside it. Yet he was loving and lovable in his own way, and Musa, who thought he loved her, was glad to see him always as she was glad to see the birds and flowers.
They were more truly her companions, however, than he. She was always in the air, except when the sudden and frequent storms of the Maremma drove her perforce into the shelter of the sepulchre, although the 'bolt-hurling gods' of the tempests had no terror for her as they had had for the Tyrrhenian multitude who had seen divine wrath in every electric flash, and heard imprecation and prophecy in every roll of thunder that echoed from the Apennine to the Ciminian hills.
The white straight rain, the slanting wind-blown showers, the blackness of hurrying storm-charged cloud, the strange yellow light that made the leaves look like foliage cast in copper and the skies like a vault of brass, the ominous hiss and shriek of the wind that made the slow buffaloes gallop fast with fear, and filled the air with the hurrying wings of frightened birds, all these were to her only as the sound of trumpet and the smell of powder to the war-horse. The storms were fierce and swift, and rent like a veil the drowsy languor and heat of the usual atmosphere. She would see them coming over the sea from the west at sunset, or gathering above the southern horizon, where the Roman Campagna and the Pontine marshes were steaming with vapour.
When the autumn arrived, she was undismayed by the prospect of winter there, although she felt afraid that it would be more difficult to keep out of sight of men in the season when the waterfowl and the roebuck and the boar were hunted from dawn to twilight in their native haunts.
At this time of the year, too, the flocks came down from the mountains, footsore, travel-tired, with the shepherd and his woman and children behind them footsore also, and the white dogs that were kin to Leone running among the bleating sheep. She saw these travelling tribes more than once; dusty jaded crowds moving slowly over the marsh and moor. The shepherds are solitary and sullen people for the most part, and instead of a crook they often have a carbine. She avoided them and let them pass on southward to the rich low pastures, afraid that if they knew of her retreat they might rob her of it. As little did she like the hunters who harried the boar in his brake and shot the wildfowl in the marshes. What harm did those wild boars do, living on the roots of the earth and the acorns, or the lovely green-throated drake of the swamp floating his little day away amongst the weeds and lilies?
Except these, there were not many newcomers to fear, her own immediate portion in the Etruscan kingdom was so overgrown with thickets and low timber and matted parasites that walking was almost impracticable, and a bill-hook was needed at almost every step, and the quagmires and swamps that separated it from the vast grain fields to the north deterred all save the boldest and the hardiest from adventuring there.
It never occurred to her that her life would alter. Of love she knew nothing, and marriage, when she thought about it, seemed to her, as she had said to Andreino, an unequal and unjust division of toil.
Her only fear of men was lest, if they knew of her beloved tombs, they might drive her out and rifle them of the bronze and the pottery as the galley-slave had done of the gold. It was for that reason alone that she scanned the horizon with the keenness of the roebuck, and fled at any sound of steps into the shelter of the thorny coverts with the self-preserving instinct of the mountain hare.
The chill season was at hand, but she was not much in awe of it; she was only afraid lest those sportsmen whose guns echoed over the lonely wastes, or the labourers from the north who passed by on their way to level some remnant of sacred wood or of historic forest, should see her and wonder and talk.
She grew learned in all the ways of nature, and, could she have told or written all she saw, would have lent much to the world's knowledge of fauna and of flora. In proportion as she fled from man so she grew familiar with and endeared to the beasts and birds that filled the moorland with innocent life, and with as deep an interest as ever the Etruscan priests had watched them, to forecast from them augury of the future, did she watch in awe and ecstasy that miracle—perhaps of all the greatest miracle—of nature, the migration of the winged nations of the air.
She did not know what these flights meant, but she observed and pondered on them with intense curiosity and interest as the winged tribes changed their feeding grounds, and came, and went; the northern birds arriving as the songsters of the south fled.
A triangle of silvery grey would float slowly down the yellow light of closing day; it was the phalanx of the storks passing over the country without resting there; wisely distrusting the land beyond all others fatal to all birds. Less wise, though usually so cautious in his ways, there flew here in large bands the bright and gracious lapwing from the frozen canals of the Low Countries and the German forests covered deep in snow.
In a waving line, graceful against the sky as the sway of a reed against the water, a band of the glossy ibis would go by on their aërial voyage to Egypt or to India. The crows sailed over her head from Switzerland or Sweden, not pausing, or, if pausing at all, dropping on the moor for a few days of rest only, and going straight towards the Soudan or the Blue Nile. The ever-wandering quails fell, in autumn as in spring, panting and exhausted in millions on the beach and turf, so strangely ill-fitted by nature for the long, almost perpetual, flight that nature impelled them to undertake.
There would break upon the silence of the moors at night a sound as of flames crackling and hissing over dry turf and through dry wood; and it was but the noise of a mile-long troop of wild ducks coming from the Polar seas to the Tuscan lagoons.
The kittiwake and the tarn and the storm swallow forsook their Finnish fjords and Greenland rocks to come and fish in the blue Ligurian waves. The graceful and vivacious actodroma, and the trustful sanderling, alighted here in simple good faith to escape the death grip of the Arctic ice. The cheery godwits settled upon sea or sand, and looked like clouds of silvery smoke touched by red rays of flame. The shore was peopled with the feathered exiles of the north, whilst, inland, the common buzzards arrived with the first gold of autumn to wage war on rats and snakes in honest open combat; the superb merganser spread his bright plumage to the sun and surf of this unfamiliar shore; and the sea-mew less confidently trusted himself to the south-west sands, where the aloe, and the hesperis, and many an unknown thing growing there, startled him as he made for the inland pools and streams. The laughing-mew and the stream-swallow sought the shelter of the rushes and the reeds, and most of the family of the gulls were to be seen upon the wing above the shallows where sea and river blended. More rarely, and alone, might perchance be seen the northern oyster-catcher (misnamed) hunting his worms and tiny fish in the shallows of the shore, meeting perchance the merry turnstone bent on the same quest, but never wetting his slender feet more than by contact with wet pebbles he was compelled to do. Whilst, by the side of the polar piscatricides, with their plumage of snow-white or grey, there were along the line of the breaking waves, and oftener beside the shallows of the swamps, slender and lofty shapes of radiant rose colour, bending their slim long necks, lithe as wands of willow, or standing motionless and dreaming in the wintry sunshine on the sands; they were the flamingoes.
some of them live all the year round here, as in Sicily or Sardinia, but these are not numerous; in large numbers they only arrive in the cold weather, to depart on the wings of the first March wind.
Though they are so shy of human eyes, she had seen them ever since she had been old. enough to come here, and she had always fancied that they were half flower half bird; no heart of a June rose or cluster of rose-laurel blossoms has ever more lovely crimsons, more delicate flush of colour, than the phœnicopterus roseus of Egypt and of Asia. Flying, the flamingoes are like a sunset cloud; walking, they are like slender spirals of flame traversing the curling foam. When one looks on them across black lines of storm-blown reeds on a November morning in the marshes, as their long throats twist in the air with the flexile motion of the snake, the grace of a lily blown by wind, one thinks of Thebes, of Babylon, of the gorgeous Persia of Xerxes, of the lascivious Egypt of the Ptolemies.
The world has grown grey and joyless in the twilight of age and fatigue, but these birds keep the colour of its morning. Eos has kissed them.
Farther inland yet, the jays came, saddened and stupid as all these little travellers are when they first arrive in a strange country, missing their dark pine forests of Scandinavia, of Lithuania, of Thuringia. With them there came the redwings, the redstarts, the redbreasts from the mountains, and from further afield, the English and French robin, dearest, cheeriest, brightest, kindest of little birds, and even the robin was sorrowful and timid at the first, though, soon plucking up his gallant little spirit, he sang upon a myrtle spray as gaily as on his native hawthorn branch or apple bough in Westmoreland or Calvados.
All these and many more she watched as they came, singly, or in bands, according to their habits, upon the chilly wind that blew from their native north countries.
In the moorland ponds and the marsh rivulets there were the persecuted coots with her all the year round, the water-hens, too, in their demure garb of olive-brown and grey, and their brilliant relative the beautiful porphyrion, showing the sapphires and the rubies of his feathers in all seasons, amidst the white vapours of a wintry dawn as amidst the gold of the pond-marigolds in midsummer; and over all the land, all seasons through, the red-legged partridges ran under the cistus and rosemary they best Jove, and the cushats, though their voices were mute, stayed at home and braved the autumn rains and winter sea-fogs that stretched to the mountain's foot.
All these innocent and most lovely creatures had cruel foes; cruellest foe of all the pitiless snarer or sportsman who had no better aim in his own miserable life than to slaughter these lives that were so much lovelier than his own.
But the moors are vast, and vast the meadows virgin of the scythe, and vast the labyrinths of forests and of undergrowth stretching at the mountain's foot. There was many a lagoon, where never other voices than the birds' were heard; there was many a league of woodland, where the thorns of the firebush and the sloe and the tangle of matted vegetation made impenetrable barriers to the greed of trappers.
When the boats came at night with the lanterns to daze and bewilder the roosting wild ducks, and the cowardly showers of shot fell like hail on the unresisting myriads, Musa could do nothing; she could only listen with throbbing heart and clenching hands, and laugh aloud in derision to think that men called the hill-fox a robber and the falcon bird of prey. But when she found the nets stretched across the pools, and the paratoio set on the turf, and the setters of these had gone away for the night, fearing the deadly vapours of the soil, then she, seeing these fell things at twilight, and not being afraid, would wait and go without sleep, and when the night was fully down, and the invaders of the birds' kingdom had gone to some distant knot of houses on the hillside or the shore, or to some shepherd's hut, she would work her hardest at the snares, pulling up the stakes from the ground, dragging the huge nets out of the water, hacking down with her hatchet the poles, and destroying all she could destroy of those treacherous engines.
If the men had ever suspected her, if they had ever returned before dawn and come upon her at her work of demolition, they would have shot her in all probability, as they would have shot the poor birds, and with no more scruple or remorse after it. She knew that very well; but her love of the soft wild things of lagoon and woodland was stronger than self-love, and the bold blood that filled her veins was warm' with pleasure as she strained at the wood or the cordage of the great traps closing in the mouths of streams, or drawn round the sleeping places of the unconscious palmipedes.
It was not often that she had the chance of saving her feathered friends, for not very often did the snarers leave their prey, but whenever the power came in her way she made use of it, and whenever she saw ill-looking fellows, strangers or natives, coming in upon the territory which she regarded as the birds' and beasts' and hers alone, she followed them unseen, creeping under the heather of the uplands, and the cane-brakes of the swamps, to watch their choice of place, and foil their efforts if she could.
To a snarer of birds she would have had no more mercy than he would have had to her, if he had known what she was about; and she had almost as much scorn for the so-called sportsmen, hiding amongst the reeds to take the bright porphyrion unawares, or steering their boat through water strewn with a thousand dead and dying coots.
Her watching of the sea and land birds, and her care over them, made the absorbing interest of her lonely life. Her wants were so few that they were soon provided for, and almost all the day long she could pass in the open air; like Borrow, she did not fear 'nature's clean bath, the kindly rain.' When she went home dripping with water, she changed her clothes, lighted a wood fire, and was none the worse. Leone shook himself,' and slept after the rain, and so did she.
In that free life she grew still taller and still stronger, slender and supple, and fit model for a young Artemis, had any sculptor been there to copy the fine and graceful lines of her limbs in the modelling clay that comes from Tiber.
She, like the flittermouse, passed the winter there as tranquil as though beside Joconda's hearth; nay, more tranquil, for in her old home the constraint of severe habits, the enforced household labours, and the squalor and the sickness of the people round had been irksome and painful to her. Here she was sole possessor of her painted chambers, and without had the wide moors and the blue sea to roam over as she would.
Even the sea was kind to her; for one night, when there was a great storm and she sat beside her fire in the warrior's sepulchre, Leone howling by the kennel tomb where the Etruscan dog's ashes lay, there was a barque wrecked a mile or so down the coast; and when the weather cleared on the third day—for the white squalls of violent wind and rain upon these waters usually last three days—she went down to the beach to see the sea, that was sobbing still like a child after vain passion, and, washed up upon the driftwood and the glass-wrack of the rocks, she found a little boat bruised, but still serviceable; doubtless belonging to the lost brig that had foundered with all hands off the dark grim peaks of Monte Argentaro.
It was flotsam and jetsam, and she took it as a sea-gift.
It was light and shapely, and its two oars were in it. She dumbly thanked God for it; having a real boat, for what she had made for herself was but an awkward and unseaworthy tub, she felt as though wings had grown upon her shoulders. The sea seemed to be all her own, as it had seemed to the Tyrrhene pirates three thousand years before to be theirs and none others.
She was as thankful as a dog; she dragged her treasure up over the rocks out of the wet sand in which it was bedded bows downward, and hid it in a little aperture she knew of in the cliffs within a few yards of the water.
With this boat for her use when she would, she felt strong and free as any osprey. It was another means of livelihood also; she could make a net, and catch a fish, as well as any man of the sea hamlets; in the hill-villages they never tasted fish, their few folk were too far off and too lazy by far to drag their limbs a dozen miles down to the beach at any time, and the shore folk were too indolent and too feeble to go to them. But she, who was neither idle nor weak, determined to carry fish to the hovels of the plains and hills if she were ever pressed for hunger, and get their bread and dead goat's flesh in return. So she said to herself as she hauled up the boat over the stones, though she would never take the lives even of the fish if she could help it. And she felt satisfied, having her future thus provided for; it seemed to her as if she could live thus so easily all her days.
With the winter, she clothed herself in the warm, thick, woollen clothes made of lamb's wool that Joconda had woven for her; and at night, when rain, like the rain of the tropics, poured on the sandstone rock that made her roof, and was sweeping in sheets of water over Maremma from mountain to sea, she span at her wheel, as Tanaquil had done before her, by the low light of one oil wick burning in the lofty candelabra whose like had charmed the delicate and lofty taste of Sappho's Hellas.
Sometimes a snow-storm would sweep over the moors and the sea; sometimes the broad lagoon, formed where the marsh waters joined the salt pools in the sand, was one mass of boiling, wind-lashed, turgid, yellow froth; sometimes thunder rolled and blue lightning flamed above the bare peaks and crags of the easterly mountains, and a darkness that could be felt descended at noontide on Maremma as on the land of the plagues; sometimes, rarest of all, there was the film of frost on all the moors, and the terns and smews had to tap with their bills at a sheet of ice on their tarns and streams, and fancied themselves back in their own Greenland or Siberia.
But rough weather, and wet weather, were the portion rather of autumn than of winter, and for the most part the sun shone above the Arctic birds that had come southward for shelter, and upon the child of Saturnino gathering the fallen wood off the moor, or driving her little boat through surf and spray. The winter-time was short—shorter than counted by the solstice—for by the turn of the new year the corn was springing and covering, like a thin green cloud, all the vast plains to the north; and on the yet vaster grass lands, where no foot of a ploughman or hand of a mower was ever known, under the gauze veil of the rime frost, the bulbs of the wild crocus and the wild narcissus began to feel their trustful way upward through the earth like little children timid in the dark, yet confident because they think that God is near.
Then, in those still, starlit nights, cleared by the magic wand of the frost till all the lustrous sky seemed alive with throbbing light, Musa would leave her hearth and lamp and go up into the air, and stand and look at the silent procession of those distant worlds of which none had ever told her anything.
She had no conception what they were. She knew that fishermen and mariners steered by them all night long, and that was all she knew.
The gorgeous constellation of Perseus hung above the sea, and over the weird peaks of Elba the great star Aldebaran burned; the Golden Plough was driven on its fiery way down the north-eastern heavens; above the great south moors, far down in the purple night, where Rome was, there flamed Orion, and straight above her head, in the zenith, Auriga shone, holding in his hand Zeta and Eta, the dreaded storm-bringers of the Greeks. To her they had neither name nor message, yet she would stand and gaze at them for hours. Surely they could not burn there only that ships might steer?
Her only idea of them was inspired by the songs of the Maremmano people, which call on Hespera to help their loves as on a living spirit, and hymn the star that has an angel by its side, a young angel—'un' angiolin'—attending it always on its path through the shining heavens; a graceful fancy, which took root as a fact in her belief, so that she would gravely gaze upward for hours, trying to see the winged servitors of the constellations; and sometimes she grew angry with them, thinking, 'are there so many angels, cannot they warn the tartane off the shoals? cannot they stoop and let a light shine on the sea when their stars are covered and the boats go aground in the dark?'
The planets and the-stars were as great a perplexity to her as the birds, and much less consolation.
Every one knows (or at least every one who takes thought of these things, which, perhaps, is a small minority) that to see birds in their own homes is difficult. The nest of the blackhead is made so like in hue to the thornbush it rests on, the nest of the cisticola is woven so wisely amongst the rushes of the waterside, the flight is so swift, the vigilance 1s so great, the feathers are so often so like the brown of the bark or the grey-green of the sedges, that even the quickest eye may see but little of them, and even the gold of the oriole and the blue of the magnificent chough may escape detection in the shadows of the woods. But with tenderness for them and patience they may be traced in their daily ways and wanderings, and few lives repay attention to them so delightfully as do the lives of the birds.
She was herself so much a native of the woods, she was as motionless as the kingfisher himself beside a stream, she was as solitary and as wary of men as the woodpecker, she was so heedful never to disturb a nest, or startle a callow brood; and as her recompense she grew as acquainted and familiar with the winged tribes as was ever Audubon or Naumann. She had not their knowledge, indeed, but she had more than their love. When the naturalist fires on a sanderling or a bunting, he may be a man of science and culture, but he is no lover of birds.
Musa knew very few even of the common names of either the flowers or the birds; of their names in men's books she knew not one, but she knew the look and the season of every blossom that blew, and she knew the haunts and the habits of most of the singers, and the divers, and the many creatures that made populous the wastes around her, and at night could tell by the manner of their flight whether the barn-owl or the Athene Noctua went past her, whether the wild-duck was going through the shadows or the night-loving plover.
She knew the northern birds went away with the first warm wind of February; she 'had every year since she could remember seen the gulls, and gannets, and storm-swallows, and all their congeners, take their flight due north, never to return until winter returned too.
She missed the timid and yet bold creatures of the Pole, after which the people of Santa Tarsilla had named her; and she missed the little red birds of the north with their tiny sweet song, piping when the full melody of the nightingale was mute.
But whilst the sky was full of storm clouds and the sea of froth and foam, and the snow was still half-way down the sides of the black Argentaro rocks, and wholly clothed the Apennines, she was cheered by the glad exuberant chatter of the dauntless starling.
Then, as the year grew a little older, and the blackthorn of the brakes grew white with blossom before the leaf, and the green silent wolds that enwrapped the dead cities and the dead nations were rosy, and purple, and lilac with the springing of the anemones; then, though the little robin no more showed his red waistcoat under the myrtle scrub, in the stead of him and his came back the truants, the birds which, by the law laid down by naturalists, could claim the country as a home, since it was there they made their nests.
Why some went, some stayed, was a strange, unending perplexity to Musa, and a perplexity indeed it is.
Why does the blue thrush stay on the same spot all the year long and all the years he lives? and why does his brother the stone thrush go off on autumnal equinoxials as far as the White Nile? Why indeed? The birds can laugh at science; their secrets none shall know.
Musa sorely missed her friends of winter, but the budding of the crocus and the daffodil brought her many others in their stead, and soon she grew reconciled to the new comers and knew their looks and haunts and ways as well as those of their predecessors.
With earliest break of the year the red buzzard came, so much more cowardly and cruel than his cousin the python-slayer, to watch all the summer long warily amidst the water-stars, and the pond plaintain, to seize some unwary moorhen, or snatch a coot away as she brought the rushes together to begin a home.
All the moist ground that stretched for leagues on leagues southward, ground that trembled with water as human eyes will do with unshed tears, was covered with little feathered people who loved the marsh, and pool, and found health and nourishment where men found death.
There the sedge thrush hung his nest upon a bulrush, lining it with cobwebs and with shred rosemary as softly as a lady sleeps on down; there the bearded titmouse would slumber upon a reed, covering tenderly with his wing the female he loved so well; there the pewits, and the finches, and the chats, and the cricket singers, and the grasshopper warblers, and all the multitudes of oscines, fluttered and flirted, and darted and dived, and made the lonely wastes mirthful and peopled. The fisher-heron, as timid a solitary as any that the Thebaïd knew, walked by choice rather beside the brackish pools where fresh and salt water met, or along the white line of the rippling surf, eyes downward and head bent, meditative, melancholy, and absorbed. The sheldrake shared his taste for those saline shallows where the salt club-marsh and the pungent sea-rush throve, which have defied and made the despair of all engineering skill from the days of the Etruscans; and Musa grew well acquainted with him on the soaked sand where the many streams of her moorland trickled together, and formed, with the in-running sea, a broad, shining, reedy mere—the breeding-place of many a noxious vapour, but the delight of her and of the birds.
When the asphodel was all golden and white over the green deserts of Southern Maremma, and she left the sea-shore for the inland charm of fresh-born vegetation, and the undergrowth was like snow with the laurestinus flowers, and the thyme and the basil began to be dewy and fragrant underneath her feet, she found the fieldfares that had come from Nubian sands, and the tiny flycatcher that was putting on his ruby coat for spring-time and for courting, and the song-sparrow busy building his high nest in some solitary pine and lining it solidly with bark-fibre or with fish scales, and the bush-singer hanging his upon a branch of thorn or under close leaves of myrtle, and the red-breasted shrike darting on butterflies and locusts as the falcons on the herons, and the bee-eater falling through the bright air on his prey, and the green woodpecker drilling a citadel for himself in the stem of a dwarf cork tree and the hoopoes patiently following the buffaloes' slow march, and the blue nut-thatch holding his seed beneath his claw as a dog holds a bone under his foot, and his cousins the sittæ of the rosy tails descending tree trunks head foremost, and the woodlark making music, from a tuft of rosemary or broom, clearer and sweeter than the love-songs of any lute; and with these countless others, too many to name the half of, and Philomel herself for ever pouring her heart out in rapture, as she does all day long and all night long from the first Lenten lily to the last midsummer rose.
Altogether they made such a jocund company upon these unknown and silent wastes that it was the saddest pity that Milton and Shakespeare and Shelley could not awake and come and hear. Oftentimes in such a place one longs for them, and wonders as the children wonder of the flowers that die with summer—where are they gone?
She had the heaven-born faculty of observation of the poets, and she had that instinct of delight in natural beauty which made Linnæus fall on his knees before the English gorse and thank God for having made so beautiful a thing. This child of the foolish and sensual Serapia and of the murderer Mastarna was a poet at heart; in another land, and under other circumstances, the world might have heard of her and have hearkened as eagerly to her as the people of Santa Tarsilla had listened to her singing. Had study and wise companionship been given to her she might have found utterance for all the thoughts and fancies, the dreams and the affections, that thronged on her amidst the woods and on the sea, but left her dumb and moved to a mute joy, keen almost to pain.
In a freer and a gladder day than hers, in time of Urbinan or Florentine or Venetian greatness, she might have forced her own way up to light and learning, and made the heaven of some great soul, and been crowned with the golden laurel on the Capitol.
As it was, her sympathies and her imaginings spent themselves in solitary song as she made the old strings of the lute throb in low cadence when she sat solitary by her hearth on the rock floor of the grave; and out of doors her eyes filled and her lips laughed when she wandered through the leafy land and found the warbler's nest hung upon the reeds, or the first branching asphodel in flower. She could not have told why these made her happy, why she could watch for half a day untired the little wren building where the gladwyn blossomed on the water's edge. It was only human life that hurt her, embittered her, and filled her with hatred of it.
As she walked one golden noon by the Sasso Scritto, clothed with its myrtle and thyme and its quaint cacti that later would bear their purple heads of fruit, the shining sea beside her, and above her the bold arbutus-covered heights, with the little bells of the sheep sounding on their sides, she saw a large fish, radiant as a gem, with eyes like rubies. Some men had it; a hook was in its golden gills, and they had tied its tail to the hook so that it could not stir, and they had put it in a pail of water that it might not die too quickly, die ere they could sell it. A little further on she saw a large green and gold snake, one of the most harmless of all earth's creatures, that only asked to creep into the sunshine, to sleep in its hole in the rock, to live out its short, innocent life under the honey smell of the rosemary; the same men stoned it to death, heaping the pebbles and broken sandstone on it, and it perished slowly in long agony, being large and tenacious of life. Yet a little further on, again, she saw a big square trap of netting, with a blinded chaffinch as decoy. The trap was full of birds, some fifty or sixty of them, all kinds of birds, from the plain brown minstrel, beloved of the poets, to the merry and amber-winged oriole, from the dark grey or russet-bodied fly-catcher and whinchat to the glossy and handsome jay, cheated and caught as he was going back to the north; they had been trapped and would be strung on a string and sold for a copper coin the dozen; and of many of them the wings or the legs were broken and the eyes were already dim. The men who had taken them were seated on the thymy turf, grinning like apes, with pipes in their mouths and a flask of wine between their knees.
She passed on, helpless.
She thought of words that Joconda had once quoted to her, words which said that men were made in God's likeness!
In the loneliness and meditation of her life the pity of her nature deepened, and her scorn of cowardice grew still stronger. She was brave, self-reliant, and tender to all those creatures whom the human race, because it understands not their language, chooses to call dumb. Of the human beast she had not fear, but a great mistrust.
The short winter, the enchanting springtide, came and went, and none had traced her to her hiding-place; the solitudes around had kept her harmless secret as they kept the mysteries of the buried multitudes. The only creature she ever spoke to was little Zefferino, and he did not tell of her because he loved her herb soup, her pullet's eggs, her store of bilberries, her skill at finding edible mushrooms; and she let him come and nibble when he would, squatting like a little faun upon the floor of the tomb, and holding some platter or bowl of the dead Etruscans tight in his brown hands.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET