In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 18

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

Layout 2

 

CHAPTER XVIII.

 

NCE or twice he met her upon the shore, and she gave him a curt word or two, and pushed her boat out into the water and sculled herself out of sight. He was unwilling to alarm or to scare her by too close pursuit, and he began to feel that his journey here would be fruitless. He was a man of honest purpose and clear conscience; he was incapable of wronging, even by a wish, a child bequeathed to the mercy of his people by a dead woman, but he began to grow dissatisfied and angry with his failure. He had obtained some rare drawings of an unmutilated tomb of Etruria; and this was the sole result that seemed likely to accrue to him from the waste of a midsummer month.

The air, too, which gives 'distemper if not death' to the stranger, began to work its evil way on him. He began to lose strength, to feel chilly, to have a touch of fever; the burning suns on the rank soil began to pour their poison into his northern blood. She met him on the twelfth day of his stay at Telamone as she came home towards sunset with wild strawberries and blackberries as her afternoon's gleaning.

She looked at him and smiled a little.

'Maremma makes you ill,' she said with unconcealed contentment; 'you are very unwise to stay in it. The sun is always angry with strangers. Why do you not go away?'

'Dear, you know very well why I stay,' said Sanctis gently and with humility. 'I cannot bear to leave you here, all alone, in so utter a solitude, in so wild a life.'

She frowned impatiently.

'That is not for you to think about; myself I would not live elsewhere. It is foolish of you to stay on at Telamone, You may stay twelve weeks, twelve months, twelve years, and you will not make me live in any other way than I do. You will only lose your own health.'

'You will lose yours. All the people are sickly———'

'They are sickly chiefly because they are dirty. The heats never hurt me; I bathe twice a day. But strangers are always ill here. If they wait too long, they die.'

'Do you wish that I should die?'

'No; I do not. That is why I tell you to go away while it is time. If you stay much longer the fever will get in your blood, in your bones, it will be like fire inside you, and your limbs will feel to you no better than the dry empty canes in autumn. The fever has never touched me, but I have seen it often; and then there is the ague that comes with it, and you shiver as if you were up to your throat in snow, though the air is like the blast of an oven round you. It will be a pity if you wait for that. You will never be the same man again after it, even if you do throw it off you in time.'

'But why are you so well here?'

'I do not know. Why are the roebucks well, and the boars, and the hares? I and they belong to the soil; you are a stranger.'

She belonged to the soil; she was one of those Etruscan Mastarna who had dwelt on the slopes of the Apennines for so many generations. He thought, as he looked at her, should he tell her that she was the daughter of Saturnino, would it make any change in her? Would it render her more willing to come away from a land soaked with the blood of her father's prey? No; he thought she would only cling more closely there if she learned that one of her race was in chains upon these shores; and she was so calm, so bold, so innocent, so proud, he had not the heart to say to her—'the man who stole your gold is the man who gave you your life.'

He let her go home with her summer fruits, and himself returned to the dreary and unhealthy shore

He had the hand of a painter, but he had the heart of a mountaineer. What he loved best were the rush of ice-fed waters, the stillness of the great glaciers, the rarefied air of the peaks and domes that towered above the earth-hiding clouds. This sea-coast in summer was loathsome to him, even whilst his eyes saw and his soul acknowledged the lovely light on its amethystine hills, the transparent wonder of its distances, the rose and the gold of its daybreak.

The enervating atmosphere seemed to steal the strength from his sinews like Delilah; the squalor and the sickness in the clustered hovels that were called a town made him weary and depressed; he grew ill, as Musa had told him that he would do; he began angrily to feel that it was of no use to lose his time and his powers only to force on an unwilling ear what was unwelcome, only to try and offer safety and ease to one who scorned the one and could not understand the other.

It seemed to him that it was his duty to compel this lonely child to accept the succour and the asylum whose benefit she could not comprehend; but then duty could only be done by means that would be base. He must resort to that betrayal of her which would seem to her most vile. He must state what he knew of her to the civic authorities of Grosseto; he must set at work against her the machineries of that law against which Saturnino's life had been one long revolt. He must publish to her and every one that story of her birth which the rude tenderness of Joconda had so carefully concealed. The law would have to take her for him as the decoy took the field-birds, and when that was done he could show no right to her; Joconda's letter would be nothing before the law, and the Musoncella would be only to them the love-child of a galley-slave, to be thrust into some public institute at best, and forced into some social groove without regard to how that pressure hurt or drove her desperate. Very possibly the law would only treat her as a nomad, as a vagabond, and he himself could have no standing-point of legal right from which to oblige her to receive his benefits.

What could he do? It was a difficulty which perplexed and began to sadden him.

This creature, who seemed to him so beautiful, so fearless, and so redundant of animated life that she appeared a very incarnation of Artemis, was happy as she now was, innocent as the wild doe of her own oak-glades, and bold enough to defend her innocence were it menaced.

Would not interference with her do more harm than good?

He knew the danger that accompanies meddlers, and he was of too modest a temper to be sure of his own wisdom. He had no hold on her; that he felt. He might as well have tried to make the wild doe sit by his side.

He knew the force of hereditary instincts, the strange and subtle influence of descent. He knew that though the soul of the Tzigane is full of music, and full of music are his hands and his heart, yet if you try to teach him the science of sound and make him play from written notes he is dumb; his very soul dies in him. So he felt that with her would it be impossible to take her from the melody of the woods and the waters, to set her down amidst conventional life.

Had she been dissatisfied and restless and ashamed, he could have moved her easily to some ambition, some curiosity; but before this absolute tranquillity of content, this fierce repudiation of any possible better thing, he was helpless. It was the content of the pastoral Greek, the content of the Bedouin Arab. It was a kingdom in itself, and a kingdom not easily invaded or impaired. It was like the invisible line drawn by the magician—no step could pass it, no adamant could oppose a barrier as strong.

She had aroused a strong pity within him, and had a seduction for him in that classic charm which hung about her as its fragrance clings to the dried calycanthus.

He would willingly, without a single selfish motive or ignoble thought, have done for her at any cost any service; but since she only saw in the outstretched hand of friendship the grasp of the gaoler, he knew not what to do.

'I am near my end; save the child from the sins she has inherited, from the loneliness in which I leave her,' Joconda had written to her brothers; and this their descendant was almost morbidly anxious to fulfil her prayer. When he had received that letter sent by a dead woman to his father's father, his imagination had been stirred by the few words that spoke with a yearning fear of this storm-bird on the southern seashore.

He was rich in most of the blessings of life, and his name was already illustrious; love of the arts lent their beauty to his days, and wherever he went men welcomed him.

He was a man often lonely amidst troops of friends, and a man to whom the thought of duty was not irksome but readily welcome. It had seemed to him so simple a thing to give a home amongst his kindred to a child who was all alone on earth. Pity and a chivalrous charity had been at work in him, but he found himself before a young Amazon who would have nothing at his hands, an Atalanta whom no golden apple would tempt.

It was midsummer, and the miasma of the country began, as she had said, to steal the health out of his face and the marrow out of his bones. It was time also for him to be beside the high Biscayan waves on the west coast of France, where he had promised to paint the frescoes of a great gallery in a friend's Breton castle. Thinking, alone, in the hot nights as the sails of the tartane grew silvery under the moon, and the lights of the fishing-boats glimmered in the deep blue of the night, he reluctantly came to the conclusion with a sigh that his greatest, his only possible, kindness was to leave her to herself.

The conviction wounded his conscience and hurt his self-love, of which, however, he had less than most people; but to do otherwise he would needs be harsh and treacherous. He could not bring himself to be either; it seemed to him that she was the last of the hamadryads, and he could not bring himself to be the one who should snatch her from her mossy couch and canopy of leaves to drag her into the fictitious wants, the artificial customs, and the, always in a measure, vulgar strife of human life in modern days.

Her manner of existence was like nothing else now on earth; it was like that of a young priestess of Fauna or of Pales in the Golden Age. He could not forcibly disturb it any more than he, of a humane and a poetic nature, could have plucked out of the reeds the little blue warblers' nest in the season of their love and in the spring-time of the year. Would she have come willingly, willingly would he have run all risks of misconstruction and ridicule from his fellows to do her loyal service in any way she chose. But he could not use against her the pricks and bands of that civil law of whose very name she knew nothing: a law always cruel in all lands to the homeless wanderer and to the offspring of a criminal.

The law would not see, as he saw, the innocence and beauty of that woodland life, of that tender fidelity to dead Joconda, of that serene independence of the help of man. She would seem to the law no more than any one of the hill-foxes that burrowed under the centaury and cinquefoil of some fern-grown bank.

True, in this land the pastoral life has been more general and more honoured than in any other; the shepherd still lives under his conical reed-thatched hut, the cattle-keeper still camps out amidst his bullocks and his horses on the thyme-sweet plains; their lives are much the same as that of the peasants of old who looked for the Pleiades as the bringers of spring, and saw, in the great Constellation of the North, oxen drawing the corn-wains of the gods across the sky. True, Maremma was so lonely, so wide, so virgin in its water-fed greenery, so severed by its season of disease from all the moving world, that such a life here was less strange than it would have been elsewhere, and the native mountaineer in the hillside woods, and the shepherd from the north on the rich grasslands, were nomads as utterly as ever were their forefathers in days when Pan and Faunus were the gods of the forest and pasture.

They would have understood well enough that the tombs made a good dwelling-place, and that any one with eye and ear trained to the sights and the sounds of the moors and the woods could, without much hardship, find enough from them to hold body and soul together. On the lonely mountain-sides of Italy many still live as simply as S. Francesco did upon Alvernia; their only bread what the wild oats give, their only esculent the fungi that grow about the roots of the holm-oaks, their only wine the spring that bubbles up amongst the water-cress.

But to Maurice Sanctis, fresh from the world of civilisation and culture, with its infinite multiplication of needs and desires, it appeared terrible for a woman who was scarcely more than a child to dwell thus, to be alone in the winter nights, to face the privations of the winter weather, to be dependent on her own strength of limb and surety of eye for all her maintenance, to have neither dream nor desire of any other life than this, which was no higher than the deer's in the moorlands, the flamingo's in the willowy swamps.

With daybreak on the fifteenth morning of his fruitless stay at sorrowful Telamone he went to speak to her, if he could, for the last time. He had the good fortune to find her as she was returning to the tombs with a load of freshly-cut chair-maker's rush put on the back of the mule. Her hands were quick and clever at the plaiting of the reeds, and wove rude matting and baskets with care and skill. She did not know how she should be able to sell them now that she had no more the assistance of Zirlo; but she continued to make them, and meant, when she had made enough to fill a boat, to sail with them to some place on the coast where she was not known and barter them herself for shoes, and flax, and other necessary things. Of clothing and linen she had still a good store, for Joconda had laid by much of the cloth she wove, and the stout handwoven stuff was tough and lasted long even in the wear and tear of Musa's open-air life.

She saw Sanctis approach with a frown on her straight brows and no greeting on her lips. He wearied her; he importuned her; he rendered her angry and impatient.

Her life was good in her own sight; she could not see why he should want to interfere with it.

On this last day he argued with her almost passionately for a man so calm of temper. He offered her that alpine farm facing the Grand Paradis where the girlhood of Joconda had been spent. He told her, if any thought of cities and of cultured life appalled her, she should have nothing of either; she should dwell there, under the glaciers, as free as any chamois, and since she had so proud and resolute a spirit she should owe him nothing, but maintain herself by her spinning or by any other work she chose. Only, if she would but come thither she would be safe; she would be no longer alone, she would be with good women, and the last wishes of Joconda would be fulfilled.

But Musa only laughed, deep down in her starry blue-black eyes.

'A Sicilian asked me the other day to go to his island,' she answered him; 'and he was a sailor, and he had a fast-sailing brig; and if there be a thing that I would care to have it is a vessel of any sort. But I said to him what I will say to you—I will not go from Maremma.'

'And how did he ask you to go with him?'

'Oh, he said he would marry me,' said Musa, indifferently. 'He owned the ship, and she was a fast and a good one; but I would not go,'

'A sailor is seldom to be trusted in such invitations,' said Sanctis, with some irritation. 'He makes them in most ports. What I offer you, my poor child, is very different; you should go to good women, to-peace and safety and comfort, to knowledge and light and the grace of life. You are as beautiful as a young goddess, but you are as wild and untamed as a kestrel. What I want to do is what Joconda would have wished to have done for you. My dear, is it possible you mistrust me?'

'I neither trust nor mistrust you,' said Musa, a little angrily. 'I do not think about it, because I do not want anything that you offer me. I shall not leave Maremma.'

Sanctis was silent and baffled. He had no means by which to control or coerce, and it began to seem impossible to persuade her.

The northern mind was in him, all artist though he was; order, security, education, protection, seemed to him the very breath of life to any female creature; the liberty, the loneliness, the indifference to the future, the ways of living like any bird or beast of the moors, which were so good in Musa's eyes, were intolerable to him. He sympathised with her passion for her strange dwelling-place as little as the Hollander can sympathise with the Bedouin.

He was a great painter, but his creations were cold, clear, classic, faultless, full of intellect; and even in the colour and movement of Parisian life the influences of the stiff, serene, precise routine of the Swiss home of his boyhood had never entirely left him.

Musa, with her lovely face and her noble regard, had fascinated him, and a pity, so intense as to be pain, had moved him for the child of Saturnino, whose birth-history he knew, though she did not know it. But his pity was rejected, and a certain anger began to grow up in him.

Why should I trouble about her?' he thought; 'she has wild blood in her; doubtless a wild life suits her; and doubtless, too, to take her to that tranquil home on the Lake of Geneva would be to loose a tornado in a greenhouse; yet it is horrible that she should be left here to go to ruin, body and soul, as she must do.'

So he urged her again and again. It seemed his duty, and it was also his desire; he was a man of noble temperament, he had no sinister thought; he meant to do for her what Joconda would have wished done; more, if possible. She seemed so young and so intelligent that he thought there would be little difficulty to make of her a grand and thoughtful woman, although he knew that it is hard to tame the nightingale that has had a single year in the woods; so hard that it dies under the effort.

With all the eloquence that sincere longing to succeed could inspire in him, he used every argument he could think of to shake her resolution, and induce her to trust herself to another land and to another life. But it was utterly in vain.

Musa heard him more or less patiently, but his persuasions passed over her head as if they were thistle-down flying on a breeze.

'Go and see if you can drive a grey-lag goose^[1] into your poultry-byre,' she said once, with a little low laugh; 'do you think you can? You know nothing of wild birds' ways? More pity. Well, I will tell you. The wild goose will very likely walk and fly with your tame ones when they are out on the open grass lands; perhaps he will even go with them part of their road home; but never will you get him to enter with them. Never. When he sees a house-wall he gets up upon his wings and goes away upon the air.'

He saw that he had no effect upon her, took no more hold on her than the water takes upon the glossy laurel leaf, or the plumes of the coot.

'Let her stay!' he thought, angrily; 'she will go away with the Sicilian sailor, no doubt, sooner or later; she will be happier so than amidst culture and repose.'

His heart revolted from leaving her here all alone in the twilight of the sepulchres, and upon the wildness and vastness of the moors. But he saw that if he pressed her more she would very likely say nothing, but go and hide; that if he remained in the Maremma to return and urge her afresh she would very likely on the morrow be flown, as the hunted snipe flies to new willows and to strange waters, thinking its familiar pool deceived it.

He felt that if she did not distrust him she had no friendliness for him.

She had brought him the clear spring water in the graceful rhyton, and tendered it to him with a pile of wood strawberries and a loaf of her own oaten bread, because she had nothing else to give; but he felt that the hospitality was always for the sake of dead Joconda, and her tolerance of his presence due to the same cause.

'Since you cared for Joconda, you should have some kindliness for me,' he said with a sigh.

'You do not recall her to me, though I believe what you say,' she answered him. 'She was so poor, so sad of heart.'

'I am neither, thank heaven,' said Sanctis. 'But it is no merit of mine; my father amassed wealth as I have told you, and I am able to walk in the sunshine and give my years to art.'

'That is no fault,' said Musa. 'But yet one does not care for it.'

'I never knew any one who was well off,' she added after awhile. 'It does not seem right; why should you not work as every one does in Maremma?'

'I work in my own way.'

'To do what you like—that is not work.'

'You are very stern and harsh,' he said with a smile, as he looked at her Antinous-like face, which it seemed to him the lotus-flowers of love and dreamful ease should crown, 'We must not quarrel, for Joconda's sake.'

'No.'

'Is there nothing I can do for you?'

'There is one thing, but you will not like me to say it, perhaps.'

'Yes, say it. Whatever it may be I will do it.'

'I should be glad if you would go away; that is what would please me.'

He was silent and chagrined.

'In this brief time have I made myself so offensive?" he exclaimed bitterly.

'Oh, no,' said Musa, a little eagerly, for she did not wish to pain him. 'I have no dislike to you; you are one of her people; that is enough for me. But I shall be glad if you will go. In the first place it teases me to talk to you. Your Italian is not what we use in Maremma; it may be better, I dare say, but it is not ours; and then, if you go on living anywhere near and come to see me here, somebody on the moors will be certain to observe it, and then they will find out these tombs, and, as I have said to you, the shepherds will come.'

It was so long a speech for her that she drew a deep breath of fatigue after making it. She did not wish to be harsh to Joconda's relative, but she intensely desired him to be gone from Maremma.

Sanctis was mortified and discomfited. She had taken a strong hold on his imagination; also on his pity. She was like nothing he had ever seen, and he could get no hold in return upon her mind. It was closed to him. He was sure that she would never give him a remembrance if he did as she wished, and left Maremma.

'But to leave you thus now, once I have known you,' he said, almost timidly; 'that hurts me and troubles me. You are content in it, but indeed it is not a life for a woman.'

Musa laughed a little, low in her throat.

'It is a life for me, just as it is a life for the moor-hen and the stream-swallow.'

'But it is dangerous———'

'Not for me. I can hide as the mole does, and I can fight as the mole can; I am never without my knife.'

The fierce fire of Saturnino's eyes glowed for a moment in hers; her nostrils dilated, her lips smiled, her breath came quickly, there was blood in her veins that was warm as wine at the vision of conflict.

'Oh, I do not doubt your courage,' said Sanctis; and paused, hesitating how he could awaken this savage innocence to a sense of its own true peril. He felt a momentary shudder go over him at the glance that her eyes gave; he seemed to see the panther in her, as the Greek sailors saw it in the young god Dionysus, when he leapt and rent the garland from the mast.

'If I could but persuade you,' he said, with the timidity she was quick to hear in his voice.

'But you cannot,' she said, rudely. 'Do not make me angry; I do not wish to part with you in anger, for Joconda's sake. But you would never persuade me if you stayed a thousand years; you would only drive me away up into the hills; for if I were not alone here, this place would be nothing to me. If it be true that you wish to please me—go.'

His face flushed; a deep discomfiture and mortification filled him as he heard. He tore a leaf out of his note-book, wrote on it and laid it down beside her.

'That is where I live,' he said to her; 'if ever you want me, send there; I will be here as soon as steam can bring me.'

'Why should I want you?' said Musa, with unconscious cruelty of wonder. 'I thank you for your thought of me; but I need nothing.'

'You may, some day.'

She shook her head.

'What I cannot get myself, I go without. The sun will be soon setting. You will lose your way on the moors, if you do not set out at once.'

'You are hard of heart, Musa.'

'I am the Musoncella,' she said with a little smile.

'Will you not say a kinder word at parting? I came out of goodwill.'

'Of that I am sure. God speed you.'

Then she turned away from him, and began to walk back towards the tombs.

He looked after her while the clematis vitalba, that made a thick screen all around the place as it clung to the shrubs and trees, enclosed her in its starry veil, and shut her from his view.

'The virgin's bower,' he thought, as the peasant's name for the parasite of the woods came on his mind. 'May she be safe in it!'

But his fears were with her though his anger would fain have extinguished them.

'She is only a savage wild creature as the dondola of her moorland is,' he said to himself, as he walked through the blossoming ling which the slanting sun-rays made into 'a path of gold.' But he could not persuade himself that she was only this; he could not banish from his sight the face that was fit for the young Cleopatra's; he could not forgive himself for having missed the way to fulfil Joconda's wishes. Yet his conscience was blameless.

The fault was not his.

She was a pomegranate-flower blooming in the wilderness; a paradise-bird captive in a cellar. He felt a fool, and guilty, because he had been unable to gather the flower, and too weak to persuade the bird that liberty and light were without.

After him Musa did not look back.

She descended into her shadowy home and called the old dog to her.

'Oh, Leone, how good it is to be alone!' she said with a smile on her mouth; then the smile faded and the darkness of wrath and of scorn came upon her face.

'The little asp that bit me by betrayal!' she said bitterly between her teeth.

For never would she feel quite safe again. She was always on the watch for some strange face, some strange step; and the loss of little Zirlo and the sense of his treachery weighed on her. It was her first experience of the human curse.

The little, chattering, good-humoured, selfish boy had been welcome to her at all times. They had blent their young voices together in many a lay of sea and shore; they had been mirthful about nothing, as it is the privilege of childhood to be. Zirlo, trotting to and fro between the mountains and the moors, had been the one note of gaiety, the one touch of affection, which had allied her with that common humanity which she often hated, oftener despised, and always pitied.

 

1. The anser cinereus which migrates here in winter; not of course the chens hyperboreus.