CHAPTER XXXVIII.
.jpg)
HE words of Sanctis haunted her.
Any day, he had said, any day the law might come and snatch him from her and take him where never should she look on his face again. She had always known this; but spoken by him it took shape and substance as it had never done before. When she went into Telamone with her work and sold it to return with meat and wine, she saw indeed that the paper pasted on the wall by the State concerning his escape had rotted away under rainy weather and had not this time been replaced. Perhaps, she thought, the law had forgotten him. The law, no doubt, had as many in its hold as the bird-catchers had songsters in their nets.
Yet she dared not hope this; he said that it was impossible he could be pardoned, that his sentence, deemed a just one by his native city, was one which all other nations also would deem just. Any day, any soldier who sauntered down the grass-grown moles, any carabineer riding along the solitary shores, might hear some story from a shepherd, or a hunter, or a charcoal-burner, some hint that might awaken suspicion and bring mounted troopers over the moors and the gleam of gun-barrels amongst the thickets of briar rose and myrtle.
He, too, grew more irritable at his fate. What Sanctis had written to him, although he disbelieved it utterly, yet had aroused in him a faint hope, a faint sense of some possible eventual eliverance which made in the present his restlessness greater, his captivity almost more unbearable. One man had believed him innocent of the crime laid to him. Might he not find other men who believed also?
To Este it had always seemed so incredible that they had suspected him; that they had overlooked the wrongs received at his hands by the jealous husband; that they had been so readily deceived by the affected grief cf her lord and by the marble mausoleum that he had built to her.
'Why should I have killed her? She loved me always. Him she betrayed for me, he had said again and again to his counsel in Mantua. But none would see it so; even his counsel, affecting to believe, had doubted, and had seen a young lover's jealousy, rather than an aged husband's vengeance, in that wound by the three-edged dagger.
He could not now credit the promise of the stranger to strive for a justice to him that his native city had denied to him; yet the mere fancy of it moved him to a fitful longing and despair that were as a fever to him. One man believed him: that was so much!
As the oil lamp burning at night upon the slab of nenfro only made blacker the dense gloom all around, so this promise, which he disbelieved in, yet shed a ray of hope against hope upon him which only made the darkness and emptiness of his imprisoned life seem worse to him.
Silence and constraint, too, parted him and Musa. Anger on his side and fear on hers made a wall between them.
The words that had been said could not be unsaid. The magic syllable had been spoken which broke up for evermore their simple and innocent good-fellowship.
He had learned that other men found her fair; she had learned that he also could thus regard her. He was angered at what seemed to him her coldness and her obstinacy; she was troubled at his persistence and his irritation. The frank, familiar intercourse of the past was over for ever; constraint and irritability came into their communion; silence and timidity grew up like a barrier between them, builded by invisible hands.
A kind of reverence came to him for this daring and sinless nature, which was so unlike his own; vaguely he feared her as in another way she feared him. Sometimes, when he watched her from the entrance-way come across the moors, with the sunbeams about her head and the shadows about her feet, old classic fancies came to him as they had come to Sanctis, and she seemed to him like a young Immortal for whom all mortal love were too fleeting and profane.
But this mood lasted but a brief space with him; there soon rose up in him the lower impulses, the less noble instincts. She was beautiful as any forest creature, all grace and vigour and harmonious movement, could be; and she had said that she loved him, and yet he had not even touched her cheek with his!
A sombre anger brooded perpetually in him. He ceased to remember all he owed to her; he was absorbed in the sense of all that she denied him.
'I ask for bread and you give me a stone,' he said bitterly to her one day, in that tone which always hurt her, confused her, and filled her with a dumb pain like that of an animal punished cruelly for no fault of which it is conscious.
Sometimes, in her vague terror of this potent influence which stole the strength out of her nature and the peace out of her heart, she almost longed to leave him, to run away into shelter and solitude as she had fled from the hunters and the shepherds.
But it would have been a cowardice, and in her sight therefore a crime.
Without her, what would become of him? How could he, who durst not venture into the light of day, who durst scarce creep out at night for a breath of air, maintain himself by seeking from the woods and moors what she sought for him? Without her he must starve, sink into absolute wretchedness, he most likely like a hunted beast walled up in a cave. Without her, the only link that held him amongst living men would be broken, the only kind of maintenance and of repose possible to his fate would be snatched from him. She had said, and said truly, to Sanctis that she would not leave in such a strait a fox that had trusted her.
He, meanwhile, thought her cold, not choosing to understand the conflict in her of her innate independence, courage, and innocence with the new and subtle and merciless passion which had invaded and dominated all her existence. In his experience, women drank in love as flowers drink the dews and sunbeams; he did not choose to acknowledge that here was a stronger nature than his own, or any he had ever known, which could not bend and accept the yoke of passion and obedience without instinctive revolt against its own subjugation.
'You do not love me!' was all he would say, and even whilst he cast the reproach against her he knew very well that not thus would any of his light-won loves have served him and defended him; not thus would Donna Aloysia have dwelt content in the twilight of the sepulchres and the gloom of his own fate. He was thankless, unjust, exacting, tyrannical, as love oftenest 1s; and his love was but the mere froth and fume of jealousy and sensual covetousness, and so lacked all higher aim or clement, lacked all palliative of tenderness.
All the purer gold of his nature had been burned out of him under the inactivity and torment he had suffered, and little but the dross remained. Men in the Thebaïd might gather strength and purity and spirituality from the desert-silence; but to him the endless lonely hours, the dull heavy hopelessness, the carking sense of perpetual danger, were on his temper like a block of stone upon turf; all grew barren under the continuous pressure and the exclusion of all light and dew.
And in this misery of his there was only one joy near him possible to him, and this she withdrew out of his reach and denied him. He began to think her cruel, as he called her. All that she did for him, all that she endured for him, all that she refused for his sake, grew as nothing. She would not let him take that 'bit of sweet basil' which was on her breast.
Yet he had conscience enough in him to know that he was thankless, and sought to repay good with ill; he had the pride in him that is born of gentle blood; he hesitated to overcome by surprise, or solicitation, the resistance that he met with when he spoke of love.
She grew greater in his sight, holier, at once more womanlike and more divine. Her reserve, her proud timidity, her superb innocence, gave her a power over him she had not had before. When she was absent he missed her, not only as a man misses his dog, but as a lover misses what is the breath of life to him. And her absence was longer and more frequent than even her daily work had before necessitated. She was oftentimes no further away than the nearest group of trees, watching as she worked for any sound or sight of danger to him; but to him, shut in the gloom of the tombs, she was as utterly away when only a few yards distant as when out upon the sea or in some seashore town. Never dared he rise and go and scan the horizon to watch her coming. She was absent; that was all he knew. He, too, though he had read nothing of the poet drowned down northward by Lericia, began to find her 'icy flame.'
The love of her, at first mere jealous fuming, began at once to chill and to consume him.
'Why are you so cruel?' he muttered once, as he stayed her as she passed by him. She had some yellow crocuses in her hands; she was going to put them in a vase of water before Joconda's coffin.
'Are those in the fields already?' he said, touching them. 'Is it another year, then?'
'Yes. Do you forget? I told you February had come.'
'Did you? What is it to me? Here, all months are alike. Shipwrecked men lose count of time.'
He held her hand with the crocuses in it still within his own, his fingers on her wrist. 'If you loved me, then I would count the sunsets!' he murmured.
A blush went over her face; she was silent. With her other hand she loosened his fingers.
'Why are you so harsh?' he said angrily. 'We who are so poor, we might be rich in love. Why are you so cold?'
'You promised that I should be sacred to you,' she said with a timid protest, scarcely daring to recall to him the first hours of his asylum there, lest in so doing she should seem to make of his shelter a debt.
'What is more sacred than what we love?' he murmured, with the music in his voice which stole all the strength out of her and lulled to drowsy gladness all her vague unrest.
Then with a sudden pang of memory she said to him:
'And what is it that you love? Not me. If you were free to-morrow, would you stay, of your own will?'
He was silent.
'We would go away together,' he said, after a pause. 'Go away as the swallows you watch for, go. Ah! why do you speak of the impossible!'
'If you did love me indeed,' she said, wistfully and gravely, 'this place would be to you more than all the palaces of earth. If they offered me a palace such as you tell me of, I would not go to it, for we met here.'
He sighed with impatience and regret.
So once had been dear to him the grass-grown streets, the reed-filled waters, the melancholy ways, of ruined Mantua, because there at evening-time, when the white gnats came in clouds about the old bronze fanali, by the lamp-light, behind a grated casement, he had seen one woman's face.
That had been love; even though it were dead now, killed with the same daggerthrust that had killed her.
'You are free to walk abroad,' he said, with vexed impatience. 'Were you a prisoner as I have been, and as I am, you would know that one curses one's prison, and would curse it though its walls were alabaster and its bars were gold. I am not thankless to these tombs, but they are tombs; and in them I am buried, alive, as the Etruscans were buried, dead. Do ever you think of the future? I do, when I dare, and it would soon make me mad if I thought long. Shall we live here together, you and I, till we are old?—here, in the twilight, like two bats? Shall we never breathe without fear? shall we never hear an owl hoot without dread? Shall we see the seasons come and go, and never count the year by more than that? Shall I hear the sheep scamper above my head, and for ever envy them that they can trot at will amongst the thyme? Shall I watch age come upon your face, and you watch it in mine, and have no other record of time than the white hairs that come upon our heads? Shall we grow stupid or desperate, you and I, in all those years? Shall we lose our wits, living like this, shut away from all the world? Will the day come when we shall curse each other as I have lived to curse Aloysia?———'
His passionate utterance broke down; the dread and horror of his own visions overcame him; his eyes grew fixed and glazed as if he saw painted on the walls the shadow of those ghastly endless years to come?
She said nothing.
Pain seemed to ache through her heart as if some hard hand closed on and bruised it. If he had loved her indeed, the rocky prison would have smiled to him with heaven's sunshine; the world of men would have been as nought; the years would have been blent in one long dream without awaking once. Herself she would have asked no better thing than this; to live thus always, hidden from human sight, undivided by any envious claim, alone in the soft twilight of this undisputed home, together, until age or death should find them both and they would rest for ever here, with the myrtle blossoms dropping on the rock above, and the wild-birds calling under the wild olive. She thought that even dead she would hear the murmur of the cushat and the woodlark's hymn.
He saw the softness come into her gaze, the sigh come upon her lips.
'Ah, why will you not give me love at least!' he cried. 'We should snatch some joy at least from fate!———'
He had that skill which always made her feel that she herself had erred.
Was she wrong to shrink away when he spoke thus? Was he not so unhappy that she ought to give him any peace she could? Ought she not to put her arms about his throat and kiss him on the eyes?
She doubted; she wondered; she was dissatisfied and ashamed at herself.
'So long ago, when I was but a child,' she said timidly, 'Joconda made me promise—I did not know well what she meant—that no man's hand should touch me without the blessimg of God upon it. Now I do know: you and I cannot go up to any house of God in the open day as others can do when they will; and I must keep my word to her, she is not living to release me.'
He looked at her askance in surprise, chagrin, annoyance, and perplexity.
Must these dead souls, so still and helpless, with the lids of their coffins shut down on them, come thus perpetually, one or another, betwixt himself and her? And could she think that, were he free to walk abroad in open day, it was to take the way to the house of God that his steps would turn with her?
A sombre irritation rose up in him.
Could he never pluck it out, this 'bit of sweet basil' that was her superstition and defence?
'You do not love me,' he said with a great chillness in his voice that sank on her heart like ice. 'Love does not reason so. It sees no past, because it knows it never lived before. Such ignorant vows women have taken in all ages, and in all ages have broken them for men. You cling to yours because you do not love me. Call the Sicilian back, or Sanctis. They can go out in daylight where you will.'
The injustice was so keenly cruel, so brutal in its very quietude, that it seemed to her to cut her very heart in two as with a knife. With the subtle adroit skill of unscrupulous argument, he turned her truthfulness and her simplicity against her, and made her feel as though in some way she had sinned to him.
'I want nothing with them; I have sent them away,' she said, whilst the emotion she repressed made the veins of her throat swell with the sob she checked lest it should weary him. 'Why cannot we live as we have lived? We were so happy so; now you are always angered, always reproaching me. How can you doubt me? Since that midsummer night you came here, I have had no other thought than you.'
'Those are words,' said Este with impatience. 'Kiss me once, and I will believe———'
The colour came up over her throat and cheeks and brow; a tremor went over her.
'I promised her, and she is dead,' she said wistfully, while her voice was low and grave.
He flung himself away from her in wayward wrath.
'You place an old lifeless hag before me, and you dare to say you love me!' he cried with a child's petulance and a man's furious injustice.
'You hurt me!' she murmured, with an unconscious cry of pain. He wounded her, stung her, bewildered her, tortured her; and yet she did not turn on him. She only vaguely felt that she had been to blame, and that he was too harsh in punishment and hurt her.
Este did not answer.
He did not even look at her; he picked up his rude modelling tools and set a mass of the river clay on the slab of nenfro where he usually worked.
She watched him awhile, in wistful silence, as a dog chastised watches its master. Receiving no word, no sign, no glance, she took her billhook from its corner and a coil of cord, and went out into the air to go into the thickets and cut heath and broom for firing.
'Which of your lovers waits for you on the moors today?' he cried to her with bitterness and irritation.
'Lovers I have none,' she said, as she paused in the entrance-place and looked back at him. 'You I love with all my soul—but you do not understand.'
'Nor you,' he said with wrath. 'You think a living man can be loved as you love a swathed mummy in her coffin. You have lived in these stone graves till you are as cold as they. You think the blood in one's veins 1s water———'
A sigh quivered all through her; the hot blush came on her face again, half in shame and half in anger.
Did he call her cold—she in whose veins the blood was lava?
Cold! Who would do for him what she would do? who would give her life for him as she would give it, fighting for him as the stork and the eagle fight for their nest in the air?
'Maybe that I am what you think,' she said with some bitterness. 'They call me the Musoncella.'
He let her go without more effort to detain her. She went out amidst the wild olive and myrtle and arbutus, and worked hard in the clear winter air, as the bittern sent his loud love-call over the water of the pool, and the brown partridge flitted from under the rosemary.
As she cut the withered shrubs and made them up in bundles, the tears she would not shed before him fell upon the billhook and the heath, and dimmed for her all the purple shadows of the moors and the sapphire heights of the enclosing mountains.
Where the bittern was calling near at hand, there was a broad sheet of water set within a frame of olive and willow and sedge: a shining steel-grey pond, reflecting on its bosom the shapes of the clouds and the blue of the heavens.
In this pond the bos butor stood sending his long deep call to his mate, stooping his head down into the water and spouting its spray into the air as he uttered his continuous music. The female listened with closed eyes and body gently swaying above the yellow reeds, lulled to delight by the sonorous chaunt that he was intoning, in her honour and for her wooing, over those solitary shallows.
The strange sound came to the human creature, to whom love was so perplexed and bitter-sweet a thing; she rested from her work with her hand upon her hip and the dry heath about her; she looked along the grey screen of the willow and olive bough, and saw the wild bird of the marshes and his mate yet unwon.
They were happy together there amidst the glancing water and the winter boughs. Love was the law of life, the gift and glory of all nature. Why not for her? Why not?
She knew so little of it.
She scarcely yet understood what she felt herself, and still less what he felt. To her innocence, his anger was unintelligible; to her ignorance, their life as it had been seemed so sweet that she could not comprehend why it only filled him with dissatisfaction and discontent. Herself, she would have asked no better than to live on so until death should find them out together.
Tenderness had awakened in her long before passion. For many a month it was as a devoted sister that she loved him; and only slowly and at intervals did the deeper, hotter springs of life stir in her; beside there was always, on her, like the cold and heavy hand of a dead thing, the memory of what he had loved in Mantua.
To the concentrated and intense nature which so many hours of solitude and so much silent unuttered thought had made even graver and more passionate than it was by instinct, it seemed impossible that a woman he had adored should have passed out of his life because death had taken her. The terrible might and melancholy of that story, which had thrilled on her ear the first night she heard it told, and sunk into her very heart as she had listened, weighed on her still. He might forget; she could not.
That dagger-stroke in Mantua seemed to her to unite him with that dead woman in indissoluble union.
She did not know that tragedies drift out of the memories of men as wrecked ships sink from sight under a rising tide; she did not know that 'violent delights have violent endings,' and that passion is not always love, nor even love always remembrance. She did not know that over a man's soul the sirocco of the senses blows madly for a day, and then often dies down and leaves but dust behind it.
_-_end_block_5.png)