CHAPTER V.
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EANWHILE, the child went out to her task. She was always willing to labour in the open air. It was only against four walls that she rebelled.
She had taken a kreel, and a fork, and went down to the black and purple masses of algæ that a rough sea of the night before had cast on the shore. Her feet were bare; her grey linen garment clung close to her graceful and strong limbs; her hair was cut so that it only touched her throat, and was as brilliant in the sunshine as that bronze of emperors which had gold ungrudged in its formation; her noble eyes grave, lustrous, wide opened, gazed over the sunlight, beyond the bay, to the open sea.
She was not unhappy, because Joconda was good to her; because she had perfect health and strength, because she had no sorrow and took no thought, living a simple unconscious existence like any one of the northern birds that she was called after; but she was always restless; she always wanted something, but she never knew what; sometimes she would dive headforemost into the deep water and fancy she might find it there; sometimes she would get away into the moors in the great summer silence, and sit there alone and wonder, but nothing was very clear to her.
Without culture, neither wishes nor wonder are very intelligible, and Musa, though she had been forced to put letters together till she could read the names of the boats and the saints, and other familiar things, was very ignorant. Her mind was a blank,—as her soul was; all that was alive and strong in her, was physical life; life abundant, vigorous, untiring, beautiful, like the life of a forest animal.
The few fishing-cobbles that Santa Tarsilla owned, were out at sea; there was only one man left on the beach who was tinkering up his own old boat and humming to himself that song of the coast,
Chi va in Maremma, saluti il bel giglio
Che sta sulle montagne di Solia!
He was called Andreino, or Little Andrew, perhaps for no other reason than that he was a very tall, lean, angular man; bent and yellow, and very old; so old that his age was lost even to himself in the fog of some irrevocable and inconceivable past.
'Avante 'l regno dei Francesi,' he would say with a vague sense of unlimited ancientness. When a boy he had been very nearly shot by a squadron of French lancers, and this had impressed the epoch of invasion on him; and most things with him were referred to that time.
He was a garrulous man, and had many stories, mythical and fantastical, in which he believed; things that he had seen and done in real truth, but which had become distorted or transfigured, according to their kind through the loss of his many years. To these tales Santa Tarsilla always listened in the long hot evenings of the weary summer, when not a hand had scarcely strength to twang a string of a chitarra, and only the tongues wagged on as their owners lay full length on stone or sand.
Amongst his listeners there was none so attentive as the wild-bird Velia. She would stand or sit with parted lips and wondering eyes, and listen to all he said without a word; mute and awed, and charmed to stillness. For that homage of attention, which she had rendered to him ever since she was old enough to know the meaning of words, old Andreino favoured her.
Santa Tarsilla did not. She was stronger, brighter, bolder, than its sickly children, and moreover it was jealous because it was always thought the woman of Savoy had hidden treasure, and of course what there was the child would have, when in due course the silent life of the Savoyard should sink into the intenser silence of the tomb.
'They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him,' said Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hundredth time of what he had seen once on the Ligurian shore, far away yonder northward, when he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout seafaring man in that time, amongst other peasants of the country side, to help bring in the wood for a funeral pyre by the sea.
He had known nought of the songs or the singer, but he loved to tell the tale he had heard then; and say how he had seen, he himself, with his own eyes, the drowned poet burn, far away yonder where the pines stood by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had done their best to break, and how it had remained unburned in the midst, whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of the Skylark's ode, and nought of the Cor Cordium; but the scene by the seashore had burned itself as though with flame into his mind, and he spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the sea that had killed the singer.
'Will they burn me if I sing too well?' the child asked him this day, the words of Joconda being with her.
'Oh, that is sure,' said Andreino, half in jest and half in earnest. 'They burnt him because he sang better than all of them. So they said. I do not know. I know the resin ran out of the pinewood all golden and hissing, and his heart would not burn, all we could do. You are a female thing, Musa; your heart will be the first to burn, the first of all!'
'Will it?' said Musa, seriously, but not in any way alarmed, for the thought of that flaming pile by the seashore by night was a familiar image to her.
'Aye, for sure; you will be a woman!' said Andreino, hammering into his boat.
She knitted her brows in angry meditation, and went slowly away from him.
Andreino looked after her as Joconda had done.
'She grows fast,' he said, as he took his pipe from his mouth. His wife was sitting near him on a block of stone, a feeble, ague-stricken, wasted creature.
'She grows fast,' he repeated. 'I wish we could get her for little Nando; she has a rare courage, and is as handsome as an almond tree in flower.'
'She is a child,' said the wife; 'how you talk!'
'In a year she will not be a child. The almond tree is first to flower, but it is soon off blossom,' said Andreino, hammering at the crazy timbers of his old boat. 'The woman of Savoy should look out for a stout and honest lad. She is too much alone. She ponders too much. That is not good. Were she my girl I would get a good lad.'
'There are no lads here.'
'But some come ashore from the coasters; a child as handsome as that one, with the pretty penny the woman of Savoy has got under the hearthstone, need never go a begging. If she were like Dina, yonder, she would soon leave off thinking about dead singers and their hearts.'
He pointed with his pipe-stem to his grand-daughter, a young woman, who, with one child on her breast and another on her back, was mending nets on the mole wall.
'She is a baby herself,' said his wife, 'and it is you who tell her all those tales. Why did you tell her if it was anything wrong.'
'It is nothing wrong,' said Andreino, offended. 'Is it likely I would tell a child a wrong thing? All the others they listen and gape; it is only she who takes the tale to heart in that fashion. Things one says are like well-water; it is the pitcher they are poured into that colours them.'
'The pitcher is as it is made,' said the old wife, who was a sensible and positive woman.
'I never said it was not,' said Andreino.
Musa worked on steadily at her task, carrying load after load of marramgrass, cudweed, and seahay, into the house, which stood at the edge of the little mole of Santa Tarsilla between the quay and the beach.
When she had reached her last load, and Joconda, looking up from her own work at the sail, called out from the distance 'enough!' she stood a moment with her hands lightly resting on her hips and looked over the pale sands, the white stones, the blue waves.
Then she pursued her last task of carrying in the weed, as other women were doing also. The morning was young still; there was an opal-hued light on land, and sky and sea; the low, flat beach was wet with recent showers; the air was cool and fragrant; even the stagnant salt-pools and the dreary marsh lands took the sweet hues of the springtime and the morning.
Although she had taken in a good provision of the algæ and salt-water plants and stacked it in the mule's stable, it was still early. Joconda was now baking her black loaves of bread, and the house was full of grey smoke.
'Run out again,' she said to the child. 'You are like a goat; you stay ill at case in stall.'
Musa wanted no other word; she was out and away along the shore almost as soon as it was spoken, the dog Leone with her; though he grew old he seldom left her side.
'May I have the boat?' she asked of her friend Andreino, and he nodded assent; he had to stay at home and mend his nets. His legs were stiff and helpless with rheumatism. He adored his boat, but he could trust her with it. She was as good a sailor as himself, and knew no fear.
She ran down to the place where the punt was drawn up on the low sands, and pushed it to the water; she sprang in, and bade the dog stay and mind Joconda. She set the sail. There was a fair wind blowing from the south; the little boat went with it. Now and then she gave it the aid of the oars, but seldom. She could sit at rest, with the tiller rope round her foot, and let the boat go along the shore.
The land had no loveliness on that bay, but the sea had much in that radiant and tranquil morning, and from the water even the land looked almost lovely, with the dark masses of the mountains at the back still keeping the clouds and the mists about them. They were far away, but they looked almost near, those blue and sombre hills that had held so many secrets and so many sins of the father of whom she knew nothing.
When she had left Santa Tarsilla behind her by a mile, the water was rougher, the wind was brisker, the boat flew faster, the child grew gayer. She was all alone on the sea as far as her eyes could reach, except for a few large vessels away on the horizon, merchant ships bearing grain or spice to the old harbours of the classic world.
The voice that according to her own fancy was not herself, but some bird singing in her, rose unconsciously to her lips as she felt happy; happy in the sense of liberty, of movement, of space, and air, and light. She sang aloud; all that sweet, wild, unwritten music of the people which they sing at marriage feasts and in threshing yards, about the forest fires, and behind the oxen's yoke; natural song, pastoral and amorous, that might thrill the world with its sweetness, only no Theocritus has arisen amongst these singers to make fair in fame this sad Maremma land, and to string strophes that would echo through two thousand years, telling stories of their sorrows of the sea and of their loves and lives on land. Centuries come and go, and every winter the people sing around their fires, and every summer the fever wastes them and they die, and the living still sing because they still love; but the world does not hear the song. Shelley and Theocritus are dead.
Musa sang as the birds do, as the people do, scarce knowing that she did so, and the clear, tender notes, with all the flute-like melody of extreme youth in them, echoed over the waters, and startled the rock-martins working at their conical houses.
The child was happy without any reasoning or any consciousness that she was so, like any other young animal. The sense of motion, of fresh wind, of wide sea, of being able to go wherever she chose, and guide the boat as she liked, appeased the restlessness which tormented her like a fever when she was in the house of Joconda, or in the church with the others, or wherever, as she said, there were four walls imprisoning her. The other children thought her fierce and sullen, the women thought her dull and intractable, the priests thought her heathenish; but she was none of these things; she was only a young creature of splendid health and vigour, with sentiments in her that had no name, and found no home in the world that was around her: she was the child of Saturnino.
The boat went through the waters swiftly, as the wind blew more strongly; the sandy shore with its scrub of low-growing rock-rose[1] and prickly Christ's-thorn did not change its landscape, but what she looked at always was the sea; the sea that in the light had the smiling azure of a young child's eyes, and when the clouds cast shadows on it, had the intense impenetrable brilliancy of a jewel.
In the distance were puffs of white and grey, like smoke or mist; those mists were Corsica and Capraja.
Elba towered close at hand.
Gorgona lay far beyond, with all the other little isles that seem made to shelter Miranda and Ariel, but of Gorgona she knew nothing; she was steering straight towards it, but it was many a league distant on the northerly water. When she at last stopped her boat in its course she was at the Sasso Scritto: a favourite resting-place with her, where, on feast-days, when Joconda let her have liberty from housework and rush-plaiting and spinning of flax, she always came.
Northward, there was a long smooth level beach of sand, and beyond that a lagoon where all the water-birds that love both the sea and the marsh came in large flocks, and spread their wings over the broad spaces in which the salt water and the fresh were mingled. Beyond this there were cliffs of the humid red tufa, and the myrtle and the holy thorn grew down their sides, and met in summer the fragrant hesperis of the shore.
These cliffs were fine bold bluffs, and one of them had been called from time immemorial the Sasso Scritto,—why, no one knew; the only writing on it was done by the hand of Nature. It was steep and lofty; on its summit were the ruins of an old fortress of the middle ages; its sides were clothed with myrtle, aloe, and rosemary, and at its feet were boulders of marble, rose and white in the sun; rock pools, with exquisite network of sunbeams crossing their rippling surface, and filled with green ribbon-grasses and red sea-foliage, and shining gleams of broken porphyry, and pieces of agate and cornelian.
The yellow sands hereabouts were bright just now with the sea-daffodil, and the seastocks, which would blossom later, were pricking upward to the Lenten light; great clusters of southern-wood waved in the wind, and the pungent sea-rush grew in long lines along the shore, where the sand-piper was dropping her eggs, and the blue-rock was carrying dry twigs and grass to his home in the ruins above or the caverns beneath, and the stock-doves in large companies were winging their way over sea towards the Maritime or the Pennine Alps.
This was a place that Musa loved, and she would come here and sit for hours, and watch the roseate cloud of the returning flamingoes winging their way from Sardinia, and the martins busy at their masonry in the cliffs, and the Arctic longipennes going away northward as the weather opened, and the stream-swallows hunting early gnats and frogs on the water, and the kingfisher digging his tortuous underground home in the sand. Here she would lie for hours amongst the rosemary, and make silent friendships with the populations of the air, while the sweet blue sky was above her head, and the sea, as blue, stretched away till it was lost in light.
Once up above, on these cliffs, the eye could sweep over the sea north and south, and the soil was more than ever scented with that fragrant and humble blue-flowered shrub of which the English madrigals and glees of the Stuart and Hanoverian poets so often speak, and seem to smell. Behind the cliffs stretched moorland, marshes, woodland, intermingled, crossed by many streams, holding many pools, blue fringed in May with iris, and osier beds, and vast fields of reeds, and breadths of forest with dense thorny underwood, where all wild birds came in their season, and where all was quiet, save for a bittern's cry, a boar's snort, a snipe's scream, on the lands once crowded with the multitudes that gave the eagle of Persia and the brazen trumpets of Lydia to the legions of Rome.
Under their thickets of the prickly sloe-tree and the sweet-smelling bay lay the winding ways of buried cities; their runlets of water rippled where kings and warriors slept beneath the soil, and the yellow marsh lily, and the purple and the rose of the wind-flower and the pasque-flower, and the bright red of the Easter tulips, and the white and the gold of the asphodels, and the colours of a thousand other rarer and less homelike blossoms, spread their innocent glory in their turn to the sky and the breeze, above the sunken stones of courts and gates and palaces and prisons.
These moors were almost as solitary as the deserts are.
Now and then, against the blue of the sky and the brown of the wood, there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks; now and then herds of young horses went by, fleet and unconscious of their doom; now and then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air; but these came but seldom.
Maremma is wide, and its people are scattered.
In autumn and in winter hunters, shepherds, swineherds, sportsmen, birdcatchers, might spoil the solemn peace of these moors, but in spring and summer no human soul was seen upon them. The boar and the buffalo, the flamingo and the roebuck, the great plover and the woodcock, reigned alone.
The child loved them and came to them. Tireless, she would wander over the grass and moss and thyme for hours and hours; even when the sun was so strong that the very cicalas themselves were silent against their wont, she felt no harm from it, and the fevers that lurked in bush and brake never touched her; in these calm solitary places, where she was alone with the powerful creatures, four-footed or winged, that slept beside her in the drowsy, sultry noons, she was at ease and happy. Even in the sickly drouth of midsummer, when the turf was like sheets of brass, and the very trees seemed to faint and pant, she was well here.
She tied her boat now to a tough shrub growing on the edge of the shore and began to go inland; a slender figure for her age, tall, brown, and lithe, with a proud dauntless carriage of her head and body, and eyes that seemed made like the eagle's to dart their light into the light of the sun.
The road she took now lay over the cliffs and across the moorland; although so much nobler and more beautiful than the marshy ground that stretched so drearily around Santa Tarsilla, it was not much healthier, for heavy vapours hung over it, and stagnant waters intersected it, but it had far more character and a luxuriant vegetation, though both were sombre and mournful from the utter loneliness that prevailed there.
She went onwards, happy though solitary, watching with grave eyes the flight of feathered things and the movements of animal life. She knew their ways better than those of the human people around her at Santa Tarsilla; the turtle-dove and the common coot, the fox and the hare, the mole and the porcupine, and a hundred other tribes that lived their life in the dull waste once peopled by the Pelasgic and Etrurian nation—all were dear to her and familiar; and even of the savage boar, the monarch of the marshes, she was never afraid when he passed her with gleaming tusks and fierce eyes, crushing boughs and branches in his ponderous haste, and pushing his shaggy crest through the reeds.
She used to wish that she were he, great, strong, bold, ruler of the swamps, living his hardy life under the oak shadows, and dying, when he did die, with his front to the foe and his fangs red with vengeance.
'Why cannot they let him alone?' she said to herself once, when she saw hunters pursuing him with their hounds through the hot dank solitudes that were his rightful kingdom. She had sympathy with the hunted, not with the hunters.
The boar, let alone, did no living thing harm; he ate the green leaves, the wet grass, the red reeds, the wild fruits; he only wanted the air to breathe, the moor to roam over, the pool to bathe in. Where was the sin of such a simple need? She did not reason, she only felt, and the fate of the hunted and innocent brutes seemed a wrong to her, a cruel and wanton wrong.
To-day she saw a herd of them, at a little distance, in peace, pushing through the reedy thickets, happy in their own rough clumsy way, lifting their bristling manes above the flower-foam of the spring-snowflakes and the Lenten lilies.
She was glad to see them so, and went on, content.
The sun shone, the birds sang, the roots of the nuphar lutea were beginning to spread their broad leaves on the waters, the primroses and daffodils were making the sombre earth bright in many a nook by the shallows and pools. It was in Maremma, accursed Maremma, but it was springtime, and even here the world was once more young. Musa passed singing—like the poet's Pippa.
She was accursed for no fault of her own, like her native Maremma, but it was springtime with her also, for it was youth.
Suddenly as her light feet went over hills and hillocks that here were of yellow sandstone, not of tufa, and were clothed and covered up in greenery, she felt the earth give way beneath her; she sank through the creeping-moss and maidenhair up to her hips; she thought it was one of the innumerable spots where stagnant water was hidden under foliage and flowers, but her feet were not wet; it was not even mud. She had caught hold of some tangled junipers as she felt herself sink, and by these raised herself on to safer standing ground. Looking down to see why it was the earth had given Way, since there was no water and no swamp, she saw a hole in the ground like a fox's earth. It was into this hole her feet had gone. Thinking always of the creatures of the moorland she leaned down to see which of them might have made his lair there.
The wood grew very thickly everywhere, but the arbutus unedo and bilberry and laurel, the butcher's broom, and mountain-box, and ever-prevailng marucca, grew more luxuriantly still above these mounds.
She stooped nearer and cleared the grasses away; there was an orifice large enough for all her body to enter, and she saw a step of stone down in the dusk of the opening. Musa did not know fear, and enterprise was strong in her.
With some difficulty she thrust herself downward into the aperture; and, groping with head bent and shoulders bowed, got her feet upon the stone. It was the first step of a staircase; of such a staircase as was hewn roughly and laid together in the old house of Joconda, to lead down into the cellar. The descent was difficult, the passage very narrow; the sunbeams slanting in showed her the outline of the stairs, and she thrust herself down them, bruising herself at every step.
At the foot of this rude stairway was a portico, without doors, and with the figure of a winged genius holding a torch, and of a couchant lion, carved boldly on each side of it in the stratified sandstone of the rock. The rank growth, overhead and all around, of vegetation, made a labyrinth of prickly boughs and of entangled foliage before the porch, as above the steps. But the curiosity and the interest of Musa were awakened; she knew it was no shepherd's dwelling, for their huts were always raised upon the open soil, conical in shape, and thatched with rushes and ling. She hacked away the thorny network that made a screen before this open doorway, having in her girdle the large strong knife that she always carried for many uses, and after some long tedious labour, which tore her hands and arms with many a thorn, and sent many a spider and beetle and little snake hurrying from their homes, she cleared the way before the opening enough to pass through it with her shoulders bent, and found herself in a small, square, stone chamber hewn out of the rock, and empty, save for a little grey dust in a niche like a dog's kennel, and an urn or vase of red and black earthenware.
It looked a strange, chill, melancholy place; she could not make out its use or object; there was no scholar near to say to her, 'this dreary vestibule is the imitation of the cellula janitoris; yonder is the dust of some favourite watch-dog; in the urn, doubtless, are the ashes of some favoured and faithful slave; the master must lie beyond; it was only the humble whose bodies were burned.'
Learning was not with her to shed light on her from its lamp; she had no other guide than instinct, and instinct here was naturally curiosity. In her temper timidity had no place. In front of her, in the wall of this entrance-chamber was a stone door, a double, or, as it is commonly termed, folding door, tight closed. She crossed the rock-floor of the place, while a great grand-duke owl, roused and alarmed, flew heavily by her, as owls fly when daybreak overtakes them, and strings of bats hanging to the stone jambs of the roof, clinging to each other by their claws, in a string, like so many onions, now awakened from their winter sleep, swayed to and fro uneasily, and uttered their shrill sibilation of annoyance and fear. Probably for thousands of years, generation after generation of cheiroptera had there made their daily bed, their winter's refuge, undisturbed by man, at nightfall finding their way through the tangle of the shrubs and flying on their moth-hunting quest over the wide face of the moor.
'It is like the cavern of S. Giovanni Bocca d'Oro,' she thought; not that she had much affinity with holy men and legends, but their histories had been all the teaching she had received.
All the while, as she pondered thus, and wondered if she should find S. John Chrysostom here, with the glory round his head, she continued her efforts to unclose the door, above the lintel of which there was painted on the sandstone a strange winged shape with angry countenance and wreathing curls.
She pushed with all her young strength against that mysterious barrier.
A strange excitement and anxiety, such as she had never felt, possessed her. She longed to penetrate the secret of these strange dwellings. She said to herself, 'Joconda found me in the hills; may be these people that dwell in stone lower than the surface of the earth are my own people.'
It was an odd fancy that had come into her head, but she thought it so likely that she had been born in some such place as this, hidden away under the leaves and the furze, where men could not reach, nor the scream of their voices intrude.
She had torn and hacked the shrubs away from about the entrance, and the light from the cloudless skies above shone down steadily. She pushed with her hands against the stone with the innocent unreasoning curiosity of a child. There was no lock nor bolt upon the door, nor were there any hinges. It would turn, if it turned at all, in sockets cut in the stone; and turn at the last it did, slowly opening as though some unwilling hand were behind it. She thrust it backwarder, wider and wider, until she entered it, and stood on the threshold of a narrow chamber hewn in the dark grey rock; on either side couched a stone lion. She entered; timid for the first time in her bold brief life.
Around the walls ran benches of stone; on them stood vases and jars in black ware, and others in white painted pottery, bronze lamps, and amber ornaments, and strange little vessels whose like she had never seen. There was nothing else. An archway, however, in the end wall showed beyond another and larger chamber. Curiosity and wonder mastering fear, the child passed through the first room and entered the second.
On its threshold she paused entranced and appalled.
Upon the walls of this spacious place were painted figures seated at a banquet, dancing before an altar, leading strange forest beasts, playing on lyres, riding on many-coloured steeds: around them and above them were pictured lotus flowers.
But these she scarcely saw in the dim shadowy atmosphere; what her gaze was fastened on, what made her tremble in every limb, was the recumbent figure, stretched upon a bier of stone, of a man in armour of bronze and casque of gold; a gold cup stood beside him on the ground, and a shield of gold was on the bier, and a golden lamp was near, of which the light was spent. About his helmet was a diadem of oak-leaves in gold, and on his breast was an ivory sceptre tipped with an eagle of gold.
When the vast, desolate, lonely lands stretching towards the south had borne on their breast the towers and walls and palaces and sepulchres of Vetulonia and Cosa, of Rusellæ and Tarquinii, of Ardea and Norchia, this man had been a magnate of the land; his women, his children, his servitors, his descendants for many a generation, had doubtless been laid in costly state here, where the mastic-tree and the mountain-box now flourished and built a green wall between them and the world.
Youth laughed and kissed; ships went and came over the sunny sea; street crowds still met for sale and barter; and marble walls still towered up to heaven in man's pretence of majesty and mockery of the imperishable; in cities, and ports, human life was still the same as in the days of pride of Telamon and Populonia, but little changed in substance and in temper, if altered in mere outward form.
Yet, though all living mankind were his brethren, like unto him as one white bean of the fields is like another, unimproved, unpurified—nay, in some senses far more ignorant and unlovely than he—the Etrurian noble had no friend or remembrance amongst modern multitudes, and all his pomp and elegance in death, and all his tenderness for those he loved, had failed to keep him a place upon the earth; and the weeds and the wild shrubs had covered him, even as they covered the empty hole of a dead snake.
The child, who knew nothing of the great Lydian nation that had once reigned in her Maremma, stood silent and immovable in great awe. For a few moments her eyes beheld the form of the dead warrior; then, all in an instant, it crumbled away before her very sight, riveted in amaze upon it.
The air and the light entering with her, after exclusion for two thousand years or more, reached the oxydised armour, the recumbent corpse, and melted them back to dust. Soon, where the warrior, who looked to her but sleeping, had been stretched on his cold bed, there was nothing but a few grey ashes.
She stood motionless as though she were changed to marble; a sort of trance had fallen upon her as the golden king had faded into that heap of pallid ashes. A cloud had obscured the sun, and the feeble light that had reached the subterranean chamber had ceased to come there, the painted figures on the walls faded away in the gloom; it seemed to be already night.
She was afraid, but her fear had the sublimity of awe in it, and nothing of the feebleness of terror. Was it death? was it life? was it a god? was it a devil that was near her now?
All the words that she had heard in the church of Santa Tarsilla, and which had no real meaning for her, thronged on her memory now. She was afraid, but she was enthralled; the horror that was upon her had both beauty and tyranny in it.
This king was dust.
All his gold had availed him nothing; when the air or the light had touched him, he and it had dissolved and perished.
He had been there one moment before, and now was gone for ever.
An immense wonder and an infinite pity began to drive the terror from her soul and take its place. There was his place of rest, there was his bed of stone, and he was gone, taking his treasures with him. Had they melted into the rays of the sun and gone on the wings of the wind? Why had he not taken her too? She would have been so glad to go.
The place grew darker and darker; for up above, in the world of the living, the sun was sinking to its setting into the deep-blue sea.
Absolute night enshrouded her here; the great cold of the tomb began to chill her veins and freeze her heart; for the first time in all her fearless young years she was afraid; she longed for some human voice some touch of warm and moving life, some friendliness of animal or bird. For the ghastly dread of the unknown and of the unseen was for the first time upon her. She tried to call aloud, but she was dumb.
A heavy impenetrable darkness seemed to fall on her, and she thought as it smote her, 'this is death!' That death which Joconda had spoken of that day, which then to her had been unintelligible and without dread. Death had been here so long alone and in peace, and she had broken in upon his rest, and he in wrath had claimed her. So she thought, dully and feebly, as the darkness seemed to bend her under it as under some falling mountain, and she lost all knowledge and all sight.
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