IN MAREMMA.
CHAPTER XXXV.
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HERE have you been?' said Este with anger and with doubt, when she returned as the afternoon shadows grew into the gloom of evening, and the Ave Maria was tolled or rung by all the belfries along the hills or coast.
'I have been to see him,' said Musa wearily. 'We had one of us to thank him, and you could not. I set out before dawn. It is a long way. Let me rest but a little and I will tell you all.'
She went into her own chamber, made fast the stone door, bathed her face, changed her clothes heavy with dew, and sat while in the solitude, thinking.
What she was called upon to do cost her all her courage.
When she had summoned up her strength, and rested a little her tired limbs, she approached Este. He did not look up from the clay he worked on by the light of the oil wick. He was angered, irritated, suspicious.
She went to him and rested her hands on the slab of nenfro.
'I could not bear that he should think us thankless, so I went. He bade me give you a message from him. If you will, he is ready to buy or to hire a ship, and carry you over the sea. If you like, you can go. That is what he told me to tell you.'
Este started violently and let fall the tool with which he worked.
He rose to his feet and breathed quickly.
'He—a stranger—would do this for me? Are you jesting? It is impossible!———
'No; it is true,' she said in the same measured, low, grave voice in which she had spoken the other words. 'He will do all that, if you wish him. I am to go back and tell him what you answer to-morrow. He says that with gold all things can be done.'
'That is true,' said Este bitterly. 'But why should he do this for me? Why?'
'I do not know. Because he is generous, or because———'
She hesitated; she remembered that Sanctis had said he would do this for her sake.
A sudden light of fell suspicion flashed on Este. His eyes lit up with it as a dark night is lit up by blue fire.
'And the price?' he said between his teeth.
'The price?'
She did not understand him.
'Do you not see? Are you so simple? He will aid me to escape because he will thus sever me from you. He is your lover, or would be so. You are the price that he will claim for freeing me.'
A dark red flush came over her face.
'I do not think it is so,' she said firmly. 'He is a generous man; he is not a traitor. He will save you if you choose.'
For the first moment his natural impulse had been one of rapturous acceptance of his liberty, of passionate ecstasy at the mere thought of feeling the winds of heaven upon him and beholding the width of the sea before his eyes.
Then in another moment that rapture passed, to be succeeded by the memory that he who offered him this possibility of escape was a stranger and an enemy; an enemy because a lover of Musa; one from whose hands he could not and would not take a benefit. A darker suspicion also came upon him. Was not this only the northerner's scheme to sever him and her? Was it not prompted by jealousy rather than by generosity?
He stood silent, with irresolute thoughts chasing each other in tumult through his mind.
He felt that he ought to leave her, to take away from her the burden of his useless existence, to lighten her of the weight and the peril of his concealment there; and yet all the manhood and nobility of descent that were in him told him that it would be but a greater meanness to use the money and the assistance of a man who loved her, and buy his own liberty by the tacit surrender and barter of herself.
The baser motive which Sanctis had known he would attribute to the message seemed the only one which could possibly move a stranger to offer him a boon so immense, to incur a risk so weighty; and the quick suspicion that lies in wait in every Italian nature, for ever watchful and sleepless, suggested to him darker reasons, crueller hopes, that might spur on this foreigner to share his danger and propose his flight. For the crime of which he had been accused, and for which he had been consigned to the galleys, any other nation would give him up, any other civilised country would be compelled by the laws of extradition to deliver him over to his own land to undergo his sentence.
After the first moments of involuntary gratitude and hope, he saw nothing in the message of Maurice Sanctis but an intricate and acute scheme to remove him for ever from Musa and consign him with more or less directness ultimately to the prisons whence he had escaped.
'Your friend forgets,' he said bitterly to her as all these thoughts coursed through his brain, 'or maybe rather he remembers appositely, that I have been accused of and condemned for murder. That is a crime to which nowhere any land is lenient. Go where I would I must hide myself in secrecy and shame, or be given up, the first time I walked abroad, to my own judges. He is a man who knows the world. He must know this very well. He would take me over the sea, indeed; but on the shores whether of France, or Spain, or Greece, I should be assailed by the law and seized as soon as recognised. I am like your poor playfellows the birds; if I escaped from the nets of my own land, it would be but to fall into the traps set on a foreign coast. They have hung this crime like a millstone about my neck, and in whatever waters I may try to swim it will always drown me, like a doomed dog. He talks of saving me!—he cannot do it so long as this charge, this sentence of me as an assassin, clings to me; and the law has fastened it and locked it on me, and the world thinks the law cannot err! Except on some desert island like to Crusoe's, I can never be safe; I can never be sure that any night the hand of the law may not rouse me up from my sleep and shake me awake to my misery like the wretched hunted rat I am!'
'I do not think he knew that. Or at least he believed, I think, that he could protect you some way. He is not false.'
'Why are you concerned to praise him?'
'To praise or to blame, I try and say the thing I see. I do believe he spoke in honesty. If I had not believed that, I would not have brought the message to you.'
'Cannot you see his aim?'
'To save you! I can see no other.'
'Who so blind as those who will not see! He would do this thing, even if he did do it honestly, for the sheer sake of severing you from me. I know I injure you, I hurt you; I know I have no right to let the burden of my fate lie on you. Perhaps long ago I should have gone out into the light and called the soldiers sooner than bring this peril and trouble upon you. No doubt I have been a coward. No hunted man is brave———'
'Do not think of that. You know—you know———'
Her voice failed her; it was not easy to her to find words for what she felt.
'I know!—I know all your goodness to me, though of late you have been hard and cold———'
'No, no—never to you!'
'Yes. You are the Musoncella even to me. That is because you do not love me! Listen. This is the most cruel dilemma you could place me in; I must do what is base, either going with him or remaining by you. Why did you bring me his message? Why did you put me in this strait? A man in my circumstances is like a bird with a broken wing; strive as he may he cannot rise. You have but brought me a torture the more. Take his arms back to him; I will owe him nothing. He sent me this offer only that he might make me feel the impotent thing I am. Whether I owe my bread and my shelter to you or to him, either way I am a beggar and ashamed!'
She heard him with infinite distress.
She could not follow the sudden changes of his thoughts; she did not see the injustice of his upbraiding; she was only stirred to contrition at her own share in this message which it had cost her so much to bear to him. She was overwhelmed with grief that she had seemed to put before him her own service, her own danger, for a single instant.
His rapid facile speech and his more subtle and cultured reasonings always bewildered her and left her at a disadvantage before him; and she who had never feared any living creature did fear him with the tremulous and exquisite timidity of all great love.
'If, indeed,' he continued with passionate emphasis, 'it is you who would have me go to be rid of me———'
'I!———'
Her eyes spoke all the rest.
'Yet I could never go—with his help or by his means. He loves you. There is no more doubt of that than of the earth's turning. I am a felon, that is true; but once I was a free man and a noble, once I was Luitbrand d'Este. I am not so low or so base yet as to give you up in barter for my freedom, or owe an hour's liberty to one who envies you to me!'
Musa shrank away, the hot colour burned in her face; she was astonished, bewildered, confused.
'I am sure there is no thought of me,' she said with effort. 'I am sure he does not think of me in that way. He would aid you because he is a good man; but if you do not choose to go———'
A smile lightened all her face, her mouth trembled, her heart heaved.
'I did tell you truthfully,' she murmured, 'because it was yours to judge. But it was hard to do it—ah! very hard.'
He looked at her with a quick glance.
'Why will you always say you do not love me!' he cried, with a little laugh of gladness and of triumph; the first laugh that had left his lips since his mistress had died in Mantua.
A shadow came back over her face.
'I never said it,' she answered him. 'Only I cannot be what she was to you. She is still there. What is death that it should give us leave to be unfaithful? The dead are but gone before———'
'You need not think of her!' he answered angrily. 'She would not have troubled her soul for you unless she had killed you as her lord killed her!'
She was silent. Her instincts were all true, but to reason on them was beyond her.
'I am tired,' she said at length. 'I am very tired. I want to rest and sleep. In the morning I must go up to the mountains and tell him that you stay: am I to take his weapons?'
'Yes. Tell him I will accept no gift from a man who loves you!'
'He does not love me. Nor can I tell him that.'
'Take them back to him, though they are the most precious things on earth. He shall not despise me more than he does already, and I will owe him nothing. Tell him that whenever, if ever, I am sure you do not love me, then I will rid you of the burden of me without his help. That will be easy enough. Gorgona is on the sea yonder, and death is at hand in every lagoon and pool.'
A shudder went over her.
'You know well that I love you,' she said gravely; then without more words she went into her chamber.
With the dawn she rose, after a long dreamless night's rest, and went out towards the mountains. She put the pistols in her girdle, no thought of disobedience to him ever passed through her mind.
The dawn was red and very cold, the geranium hue of the sky glowing through the whiteness of mist as it had done the previous day; nothing is more beautiful than these winter dawns, so rosy, so luminous, yet so vaporous, with the morning star shining clear and lustrous in the red of the easterly heavens, and the clouds drifting like smoke along the faces of the hills. All is so still, all is so calm; here and there out of the mists looms a belfry or a tower or a group of pines; all the rest of the earth is hidden in vapour which, as the sun rises higher and the day-star is lost to sight, gradually disperses and by noon has cleared away.
In these mists she walked and climbed, her lamb's-wool clothes about her close, her heart light and her step swift.
At the foot of the mountain she saw a figure standing beside a great gnarled olive, many centuries old. Sanctis had come down so far and waited for her. As she drew near he read the answer of Este on her face.
'He has refused?' he said ere she could speak.
'Yes. He says you forget that he is accused of a crime for which he would be nowhere more safe than he is here, since in any land they would surrender him. He bade me thank you and bring you back your pistols. He cannot keep a gift he has no power to return in kind.'
Sanctis said nothing.
He understood that Este had misconstrued his motive and suspected his good faith, and he had expected that it would be so. He was not surprised; only the man seemed to him a coward and of poor spirit.
She said no more. She stood still, awaiting some expression of his anger or his regret, but he made none.
'He has doubted me; he is unwise,' he said coldly at last. 'I would have done well by him. There is nothing more to say.
'You will take the pistols?'
'Nay, keep them yourself. The time may come that you will want them.'
'I cannot keep them. It would vex him. He said that you would despise him———'
Over the face of Sanctis went a passing look of unutterable scorn.
'I do,' he said curtly; 'one little thing more or less can make no difference. Keep the pistols. That ever he has burdened you with need of them is what I despise.'
'Since you insult him, I cannot keep them.'
She laid them on the grass beside him.
He took no notice; he was in no mood to think of trifles.
'You, so brave, can you care for a coward?' he said abruptly. 'I thought like went to like. Your boar of the forests does not mate with the shrinking doe.'
'He is not a coward. It is you who are unjust. He is guiltless, and he is hunted. Even the boar flies from the dogs.'
'He little deserves your faithfulness. Why will you not leave him?'
'I would not leave a fox that had trusted me in such a strait.'
'It was not you who brought it on him, and were he a man, indeed, he would walk straight up to the gates of a guard-house rather than he would bring on you the peril, the secrecy, and the shamefulness he does bring———'
'Those are only words. You said all that yesterday. I will go now. I only came to give you his answer.'
He did not ask her whether she had given his message truthfully. Este might and did doubt her often; he never did so. He understood her nature as Este never could do, though he should live beside her till age came to them both.
'Come up to the house with me a moment,' he said at last. 'I wish to write a word to him; and you need rest and food.'
'I will not eat your bread. You speak ill of him; you call him a coward.'
'And you? Can you say he is not?'
Her face crimsoned with a more painful shame than she would have felt at any fault or folly cast to her own share.
'He is hunted,' she said sadly, 'and he has been accused of crime whilst he is guiltless. Who would be brave that must needs fly and hide, and fear every breath of the wind that blows? The heron and the hawk are both brave, yet they flee away.'
'Come up to the house,' he said to her, seeing that all speech was useless. They went up the steep grass path under the gnarled boughs of the old olive trees, and left the pistols lying on the turf.
'Eat and rest,' he said to her as they reached the marble court and corridor. He had wine and food ready for her, but she refused both.
'I brought some bread with me, and I drank at a spring; that is all I want,' she said, and was steady in her refusal. He was a friend to her, but he was a foe to Este. She would not break bread under his roof. She had the old barbaric honour and resentment in her.
He went to a table where an inkstand stood, as he had signed at it a few days before the deeds that made him master of the castle and the lands of Prœstanella. He dipped a pen in the ink, then pausing, turned and looked at her.
'You are resolved to share his fate?' he said abruptly. 'You will not change in that?'
Her eyes looked at his fully and fearlessly.
'Have I not said twice, if he were but a fox I would not leave him, since he has trusted me?'
'And since he loves you!'
She was silent. She did not choose to speak of that to him.
'Such love!' said Sanctis, with an impetuosity not natural to him, and a passion of scorn for which all words were too poor and small. 'Have you never thought that it is your life you give away almost before it has begun? For you are so young: and this disgrace you take on you will last so long, so long; last till you lie in your grave, however old you be when death comes to you. Why should you give yourself to him? Why should you not be honestly loved in open day? Why should you taint yourself with guilt that is not yours? Who will look at you after years passed in the solitude of those caves with a felon? Who will ever believe in your innocence, if innocent you still be? You shut the doors of fate upon yourself. You turn your life of your own will into stone. Nature has made you glorious gifts, and you throw them all away like rotting leaves. Think not that I speak for myself. I am nothing to you. I know I never touch a fibre of your heart or fancy. In all likelihood you will never see my face again. I speak for you; it is for you I sorrow. Better would it be for you to love a man dead in his coffin, than to love one whom at any hour the law may snatch from you and send to fret his years away in the horror of the prisons. When the law takes him it will never yield him up to you; it will never let you rest your eyes on him one moment; it will take him and keep him. Through his misfortune or his guilt, he belongs to the law. He is not even a free man. All he can bring you, all he has brought to you, are a cruel burden, a shameful secrecy. Why should you give him this fidelity? He can give you nothing but disgrace———'
He paused, suddenly conscious of the futility of any such reasoning, of the utter uselessness of attempting to make her remember her own safety or her own welfare.
'I thought you were proud,' he added abruptly; 'I used to call you "icy flame," as Shelley called the moon. Are you not too proud to live thus—you?'
She had listened peaceably, with no sign of either emotion or anger except in the drawing closer together of her straight dark eyebrows, that looked as though a brush of ink had finely drawn them.
Even now she did not fully gather all his meaning, which his heart failed him to cast at her in coarse words.
'I do not think of myself, and you need not,' she said simply. 'While he needs me, never will I leave him. If ever he do not need me, then will I never trouble him. I wish to go. Will you let me go now?'
He glanced at her, and ground his teeth together with a short, sharp sigh.
What was the use of words?
They would stir her no more than the spray of the sea stirred in a thousand years the stones of the colossal walls of the Pelasgians along the coast.
He turned away his face, and leaned his arms for a moment on the marble table where the manuscripts and documents were, and rested his head upon them. He was struggling with himself to repress what it rose to his lips to utter. He was tempted for the moment to the cruelty that would have said to her—'You are the daughter of Saturnino Mastarna.'
Soon he recovered his self-control, and his resolve was taken. He drew a sheet of paper that lay on a table near, wrote a few lines upon it, folded the paper and sealed it.
'Give that to him,' he said to her.
'You need not have closed it,' she said with a little scorn. 'I should not have read it; it is not for me.'
The stern teaching of Joconda, blending with the wayward honour that she inherited from a race whose boast it had ever been that they never broke a promise though they often dealt a death-blow, had made her grow up in an integrity of good faith that was neither of her sex nor of her country.
'Give it to him,' said Sanctis.
Then he leaned against one of the columns of the corridor; his face was ashy pale and his breath came and went heavily; he looked away from her out over the landscape that was still half covered with billowy clouds that did not break and were transfixed with sunbeams as with golden lances.
'I will give it him,' she answered. 'Farewell.'
He did not reply.
He leaned motionless against the marble pillar and covered his eyes with his hand. She went down the corridor with swift elastic tread, and disappeared beyond the farther archway amidst the grey foliage of the old olive trees that covered the hillside. There were twelve long miles down the mountains and over the meadows and the moors to the tombs; but she was sure of foot and used to fatigue. She went as lightly and as easily most of the way as the fawns did or the kids. When she grew very tired towards the close, she spurred on her aching feet with the thought of Este. He was alone; he was unhappy, perhaps alarmed, at her absence.
She had the folded paper safe; she never thought once of looking at it.
Even so, Saturnino, oftentimes a monster and a murderer, had once, without looking at it, carried a bag of gold ducats from a dying traveller to a woman in a distant city. The traveller had trusted the robber, and had said—'It is all I have, and she whom I love, without me will be penniless.'
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