CHAPTER XXIII.
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E was young and by nature strong, and his constitution conquered the insidious poison that had entered his blood from the vaporous marshes in the August heats. The unbroken silence, the cold water, the salutary herbs, all served to contribute to his victory over the fever-fiend of Maremma, and little by little he grew sensible of other things than those deadly chills, those waves of lava heat, which turn by turn had filled his entire consciousness so long. Then he saw that a woman all alone had done this great service for him, and hidden him from his pursuers, and kept vigil by him through many weary days and nights.
The weeks passed. Health very slowly returned to him. He was but five-and-twenty years old, and the clinging to life was strong in him. Little by little, as time wore on, the light came back into his great brown eyes; the blood coursed smoothly beneath the delicate olive of his skin; the traces of fatigue and privation effaced themselves; a sense of safety and of tranquillity came on him. In the strange twilight of this home made with the dead the world seemed very far away. Sometimes it seemed to him as if he were himself dead, and buried there, and dreaming in his tomb. Only she was here too, this girl who waited on him as serenely as a boy, who had neither bashfulness nor boldness, who was without fear as she was without knowledge.
'How can I thank you? What can I say to you?' he muttered, as he became awake to the large debt he owed a stranger.
'I would have done the same for a stag or a boar that had been hunted and hurt,' she answered him a little roughly; for she was unused to talk of what she felt, and she was ashamed to be told she had done well.
He was too weak and too drowsy to say more.
A great catastrophe had shaken all his previous life to pieces, and plunged it into utter darkness. It seemed to him as if he had awakened in some other planet than the familiar earth.
But he was too feeble to reflect long or to ask more. She made him think of those immortals of whom he had read in Greek and Latin and in marbles; they who moved through earth compassionate, yet aloof from love. As she stood before him in the gloom, clothed in her tunic of white wool, and with the birds of night about her, he thought of Persephone, of Nausicaa, of the nymphs looking on whom a man grew mad—of all old-world tales of beings who were on earth, not of it.
Yet they were humble cares she had for him. She made his fire, she made his bread, she made his soup; she wove linen for him; she sought far and wide for roots and berries and mushrooms such as he could eat. Sometimes she went down to the sea and netted fish for him; at night, by the solitary lamp, she spun and sewed diligently to replace the garments of his prison that he wore.
She did the simplest and the humblest things for him, but she did them as of yore they were done in Tempe, in Ilion, in Thessaly, in days when the Sun-god herded and ploughed for Admetus.
And all the while never once did it seem to cross her thoughts that she was a girl and he was a man.
He was weary, worn, full of care and fear; his senses were all absorbed in the one incessant carking anxiety lest his refuge should be found out, and his body, with a dead soul in it, killed by despair, dragged back to the hell of the galleys, As his ear was always strained for the least sound that should tell of his pursuers, so his whole nature and existence seemed to him bound up in that one terror of pursuit; the terror of the deer as he lies in the fern-brake, of the she-wolf as she hides with her cubs.
All other human instincts were momentarily suspended in him; all his being was absorbed into this one intense, overwhelming dread of his hunters and his doom.
'If I but once get free,' he thought, 'never, so help me God, will I hunt to death any poor forest thing again!'
But how was he to get free? This was not freedom, this hiding amidst tombs and darkness. It was a shelter, and as sure a one as earth could offer him, but it was a prison too. Often he thought of the sea, but the sea was guarded yet more closely than the mountains. He had passed the whole of one ghastly day floating on it, with the sun beating on his face and head, and an agony of thirst and an agony of exhaustion making the blue water terrible as Procrustes' bed. He dared not trust himself to it again.
Sunstroke, the jaws of a shark, the paralysis of cramp, death by thirst—any one of these might be his fate if he sought the sea. He would not dare to land anywhere; he would have to swim on and on and on; escape that way was hopeless.
These two passions—the passion of dread, and the passion of desire to escape—were too strong in him to let any other emotion move him. He dwelt on in this Etruscan solitude with this beautiful hand maiden beside him, and he only thought of her with vague doubt.
'Is it true that she will not betray me?' he wondered. 'If they give her gold, will she not lead them hither?'
As he recovered he grew more and more suspicious of her. Yet, had he known it, she watched for him as the stork watches sleepless on tower or tree-top by its wounded mate.
What she feared most was Zirlo. He had sold her secret, and he would, if he could, sell this fugitive; of that she was sure. Every hour her eyes searched the thickets and the hollows for the form of the faithless little goat-herd; but she never saw him. He had been too terrified to venture near the tombs.
From Zirlo she was safe, But it was now autumn; shepherds, hunters, travellers came at times across the moors. Any moment the white cone of the wood smoke might be seen by some passer-by; any moment some one might ask her what she did there under the thick marucca scrub.
She was for ever alarmed and on the watch, like the wild partridges that sleep in their circle, back to back, ready for instantaneous flight at any second.
The very shadows cast across the plains by moving clouds made her heart throb more quickly. When the long dark line of a string of animals, or waggons, crawled across the horizon, small in the distance as a line of ants, she held her breath in terror lest it should draw near. 'The long horns of her old familiar friends the buffaloes seemed to her fancy like the weapons of the carabineers, and when a shot cracked in a far-off swamp full of water-fowl, her pity and her fear were no longer only for the winged dwellers of Maremma.
It was near the season of the year which she had dreaded for herself. She dreaded it a thousand times more keenly now.
Why was it not the windless, vaporous, silent summer, when all the land was empty, and the great heat lay on it like a pall, covering all the motionless mute figures of the drowsy, sweating cattle and colts dropped down beside some reedy drinkingplace—the only multitudes that peopled the great plains of that Etruria which now was dumb as they.
'If it were but the summer!' she thought. If it were but the summer there would be no cause to fear, no need to scan the sky-line and gaze apprehensive through the leaves.
But it was once more the month of October, and the time had again come when the Maremma awoke to motion and noise of men. Already the snow upon the Apennines' crests looked like battlements of ivory round about the citadel of God; already axes were ringing, and tree trunks were falling, on the wooded hillsides, shots were cracking over the still lagoons, and birds began to fly with shrill screams from bush and brake. In the distant plains the plough oxen were moving, white and slow, in long and level lines over the rich, moist red earth; amidst the herds of buffalo the rude buttero was riding to capture the young bull calves of the year. Countless flocks of sheep and goats came down from the far mountains, and chestnut forests of the north, and wended their way across the grasslands, the shepherd, and his women and children and dogs, dragging their tired limbs in their wake through the pale lilac of the blossoming meadow-mint. On the sea-shore the torpid villages were stirring under the autumnal winds as moles bestir themselves from slumber at the sounds of spring-time; tartanes were loading in the weedy, slimy ports, little lateen craft were home-coming or fitting out, and striped sails were shaking merrily in the rough breeze.
The days passed, and the weeks grew into months, and he became able to leave his bed of leaves, and help himself and pull himself, leaning against the wall of the tombs, over the floor of rock. He did not dare to see the light of day; even from his deliverer he was inclined to hide himself as much as it was possible to do; he was shy and suspicious, like a long-hunted animal that fears even the hand that feeds it, and cannot get over the fear that its friend's hand hides a knife. His brain was weakened like his body by long fasting and suffering; when he could think calmly he was ashamed of his own fears.
Meanwhile, she was sorely troubled by the simple question of his presence there, more troubled than she would even acknowledge to herself. Not because he was a man, and young and hunted down; not because she would be taken and punished by the law for harbouring him if the law found him—not for any of these reasons, but because she could not tell how she could maintain him nor how long she could keep his being there unknown. She herself wanted so little; a few berries, a little grain, a little fruit, and like the birds she was satisfied—when she had an egg and a cup of milk she had a banquet. But how to keep this stranger, now exhausted by the most enfeebling of all maladies, and who, each day recovering more, would need more nourishment—this was a terrible problem. Yet it never occurred to her to leave him, as she could so easily have done, and go up to the hill-villages, where her spinning and her rush-plaiting would have kept her very well throughout the winter-time, when all busy hands are welcome. She never thought once of deserting him. All at once a duty seemed to her to have sprung out of the earth for her as the orchid sprang out of the rank grass of the moors, to glow on the dulness of her solitary life as the nupha lutea gleamed, a cup of virgin gold upon the stagnant pools.
She knew what he wanted, and would want more and more—good red wine and animal flesh—to give him back the strength of which the insidious marsh fever had robbed him, emptying his veins of their blood and health and pouring into them instead its own poison. The nausea of the ghastly malady remained with him after the fever had ceased to consume him as though fire were turning his bones to ashes, as the flame of the woodsmen scorched up the strong green wood of robur- and sugher-oak into black sticks and shreds of charcoal. Nothing tasted to him welcome or good; it was the sickness of his own palate that would have found disgust in nectar and wormwood in the honey of the moorland thyme-fed bee.
But she did not know that this was but the inevitable result of the blood-poisoning he had suffered; she thought it was because she had only water for him to drink, only such poor simple food to give to him; and she was distressed beyond any power of her own to express the infinite sorrow she felt at her own poverty, her own incapacity to help him better. All this time she never asked him one question as to himself.
Instinctive in her, as his courage is in the boar, and his gladness in the nightingale, was the sense of the sanctity of a fugitive and a guest, and of the shame that would lie in taking advantage of power to force confidence. She longed very greatly to know his history, to learn what woman had brought him to such a pass, but no word of inquiry or hint of one ever passed her lips. He had said that he was guiltless, and she had said that she believed him: this was enough.
She waited for him of his own free will to tell her more. He did not do so; apathy, and the selfishness of extreme feebleness and misery, kept him mute and indifferent, and absorbed in his own past.
An extreme lassitude and impatience came over him turn by turn; his long malady and his terrible privations had unnerved and paralysed him. Great tears would gather in his eyes and roll down his cheeks. He was heart-sick and bruised, body and soul; and there was no opiate in her pharmacy of simples that could give him rest from his own thoughts. Terror was always with him; and he never escaped from it even in his disturbed and heavy sleep.
As he recovered his strength, this life became irksome and almost unendurable; these darksome chambers of the dead seemed almost as abhorrent to him as the prison cell of Gorgona. There was no change from one morn to another; only when the sun had set did he dare to come to the door of the tomb, and breathe the air, and cast a hurried glance, the glance of the hunted creature, over the silent and lonesome plains. All that made this silence musical, this loneliness lovely to her, he did not see. When he saw the nocturnal plover winging his slow flight over the marsh, he only envied its power of motion; when he heard the great boar pushing its heavy body through the brakes of bay, he only fancied it was the tramp of some pursuing force.
The terror of that life was on him; he had been condemned to thirty years of the chain and the cell. If he were taken, the sentence would not be lessened; all his manhood would go away in agony, as the captive lion's does. When he should be set free, he would be old, grey-headed, miserable beyond compare; a childless and friendless outcast, to whom the unfamiliar world would be full of unknown faces, strange voices, alien ways, who would feel in his hideous loneliness that the galleys had been home.
'Take me back!' said the man who was let out of prison when he was seventy years old; to him the trodden bricks, the bare stone walls, the warder's round, the very chains and bars, were all he had of home.
'What would you do if they took me?' he asked her once.
'They should not take us alive,' she said; and he did not notice how she had identified his fate with her own.
That day she cleaned and burnished and gave a sharper edge to his dagger, and to the long slender stiletto that she always wore inside her girdle.
'It is all we have,' she said sorrowfully, thinking of the rifles of the hunters and the carbines of the guards.
Este shuddered.
He recalled the ghastly struggle of unarmed men with full-armed foes, the horrors of that night of insurrection when blood had run like water, and the flash of musketry had blazed through the darkness, and alone he and Saturnino had dropped into the sea, stunned by the blow that water can give a falling man, and long pursued by the roar of the guns of the fort booming dully through the night.
She did not know what such scenes were, but he knew, and he sickened at the memory of them; his nature had made him for languor, rest, and love, not combat; and he knew that when men wish to die they never can.
With a passion that was almost madness, he longed to escape from the possibility of capture, as strength returned into his limbs and blood, and brought with it all the natural longings and revolt of manhood. He had his dagger close within his bosom: thus, if no other way, he would be free. Musa was right.
But death was terrible to him, even while less terrible than the galleys.
To the sensuous and glad temperament of the Italian, death must ever seem horrible and cruel; a blank darkness that closes in and ends all things, The love of death, morbid and gloomy, which comes upon the northern is the choice of a man who knows not how to live; who knows not the delight of love and light; who has dwelt in mist and in cold, and never has seen the red rose of a woman's mouth, or of a southern dawn, or of a pomegranate flower glowing in the sun.
It is only to those who have never lived that death ever can seem beautiful.
To Este, who had been happy when his mistress kissed him, when his boat floated over the fields of reeds, when the moon came up over the meadows and the waters, and the throb of a lute beat on the soft air like the sigh of Aphrodite herself—to Este, the tomb and the galleys were, alike, a yawning void, in which he would sink and perish. The dread of them—a natural dread like that of the Greeks of old—weighed on him and made his sight blind, his ears deaf, his soul insensible.
Scarcely cared he whether it were a youth or a maiden who waited on him with those tall slender limbs, those short curling locks, those grand pitiful eyes.
To get out, to get away, to flee hard and fast over plain and sea, and put all the width of the earth between him and his prison—that was his one thirst, his one dream, his one craze,
He thought only of escape; meanwhile she thought only of him. She was like the maidens of old to whom a god has descended.
For herself she had had no fear; but now fear filled all her days with a timidity alien to her temper, that made every rustle of a fox amidst the withered canes, every call of a heron across the marshes, terrible.