CHAPTER XLIV.
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HE had found thrown up upon the rocks, seaworthy again, and had hung a cluster of pine-cones at its bows, because Este had told her that they were the symbol of Etruscan Nethlans, the god of the deep sea.
'He brought me back to you,' she said, thinking of that night of peril, and, like a child as she still was in some things, she thought to please and to propitiate the Sea-king by thus hanging his emblem at her bows.
But the boat she could use little; he did not choose she should go far afield, and her love of wandering was tamed and stilled, her world was narrowed to one human life; she was like the nightingale that came so far, from Persian rose fields and from Syrian cedar groves, and was content—so content!—to sit all the day long, all the spring through, in one little nest on one low bough, amidst 'the ploughman's spikenard and the blue borage and the prickly safety of the field ononis.
As the birds rested in their nests, so did she, and lost her wish to roam hither and thither over the far meadows stretching to the south and the dense woodlands leading to the Ciminian hills.
If he could have gone with her, indeed, then, with her hand in his, gladly would her steps have passed through the woodspurge and the trefoil and the plumy grasses whilst the blessing of the spring was upon all the land. But since he could not, dearer to her than the sunlight was the twilight of the tombs. She, to whom air was at once the nectar and the necessity of life, gave up the green and golden days without a sigh, except a sigh that he was unable to behold the radiance and smell the fragrance of them.
She was abroad for the inevitable work needful for their maintenance, but no more did she linger amidst the parnassus-grass by the pools to watch the water birds, no more did she lie for hours on the soft wood-moss to watch the clouds move by and change. The sylvan life, the impersonal life, was over for evermore, and she deemed her loss her gain.
Since he durst not trust himself to the daylight, she stayed beside him, and let the starry squills uncurl along the shore, and the tulips spread a scarlet carpet through the meadows, and the royal asphodel uplift its sceptre to the sun, unseen by her eyes, that loved them with the poet's love.
But he could not go out into the light of day, he could not venture forth when his hunters might at every step fall on him: never a syllable escaped her of regret for that which was impossible. The world was so far from her; she knew not of it; she was a law to herself, and her whole duty seemed to her set forth in one simple word—perhaps the noblest word in human language—fidelity. When life is cast in solitary places, filled with high passions, and led aloof from men, the laws which are needful to curb the multitudes, but yet are poor conventional foolish things at their best, sink back into their true signification and lose their fictitious awe.
He and she were as utterly alone as the first human lovers in the allegory of Eden; as in Eden, the only sin that could come nigh them would be unfaithfulness.
She lost her dread of losing him.
It seemed to her that no one could ever reach and hurt him, prayed for as he was daily, hourly, with all her soul sent up in prayer, even in those very moments when she felt most fear that there was no mercy anywhere to hear her more than the hunted doe's and the trapped redbreast's cries were heard.
He was guiltless of the crime they accused him of; she was too young to doubt that innocence was a buckler holy and impenetrable, a defence such as the gatherer of the dove-orchid is thought to hold against all foes of flesh or spirit.
It seemed to her that they might live for ever thus together, in these solemn shadows, in these twilit chambers, where nothing came of the world above save some stray beam of the sun, some echo of a bird's carol, some scent of the woodruff or the sweet herbs blossoming above. She seldom thought of the future—who does that is happy in the present?—but whenever she did so she seemed to see a long vista of the years to come, lengthening away in golden haze as the sea-shore did, winding to the south, till it was lost in soft suffused light: she seemed to see them always. All she asked of fate was to be for ever together thus, till age or death should find them, and lay them gently down, folded in each other's arms, still in the place of their refuge where men would never behold them, but only the wandering wind would sometimes bring the flowers' message to them, and sometimes a ray of the sun would come and kiss them where they slumbered.
She could not divine the intolerable impatience that tormented him, the unutterable nausea of life that at times over came him, so that even she only seemed to him a part of the burden of his days, a portion of the weariness that weighed him down.
He to her was as the daybreak, as the morning, as the smile of the earth in the spring-time, as the rainbow that breaks through the darkness, as the star that guides the mariner into harbour; but to him she was at best but what the humble flower growing in the stones at his feet was to the prisoner. Above her, behind her, beyond her, for ever between him and her, there was the passion of his longing to escape, there was the vision of the world he had lost.
At times, almost he could have cried aloud to her, 'Better to have let me die in the canebrakes of the marshes than have kept me alive to live thus!'
Childlike, he had thought that, could he but break down-a blossom that hung out of his reach, he would amuse himself with it all the year through, and forget how long time was, and cheat his dreary destiny by oblivion of it. But, like the child, having reached and culled the blossom, he cared little to play with it; almost he looked with regret at what his sport had done; almost he wished it once more out of reach, that he might once more long for it.
In their loves men often are but children; and captious children, too.
Who thwarts them rules them best.
The time went on, like a long golden ribbon slowly unwound.
The world was transfigured to her. Now and then the fables of heaven cannot match the ecstasies of earth; only so soon they perish, so soon they pass.
He was not content; that was the only shadow on her path. He was restless, weary often, often impatient of the restraint, the tedium, the emptiness, of all his days.
If she could see his face and feel his touch, all the world could have added nothing to her joy; but with him it was otherwise. His short-lived passion, violent for the time, burnt itself out quickly. What he wanted was to walk among the cities of men, to go whither he would, to hear the laughter of the streets, to move and roam, and like and hate, and change and choose, and lead the life that others led—in a word, to be free.
His captivity was like an eternal night for ever about him. For others the sun shone and the world turned, but he ate his heart out here; and the gloom of his destiny was so great that it even stole from him all warmth out of her cheek, all delight out of her caress, and made her seem to him but a portion of the interminable weariness that enveloped him.
She was beautiful always, and to him most tender; and the humility of a proud nature has in it a homage the most sincere and the most exquisite in flattery that human nature holds. Yet she could never more than half console him; she could never so content him that he did not envy the brown-winged scops as it flew out at evening to wing its way over moor and marsh.
A chained creature grows cruel because of its own endless fret and pain.
He hid this from her as much as he could, conscious with shame of the ingratitude he could not control; and she was less quick to perceive it than she was to note other emotions in him, because her eyes were blinded with the celestial beauty of a love that asked for itself nothing more from earth or heaven than this life it had.
What: to her were privation, alarm, toil, solitude, danger, hunger even, so long as she could hear his voice or feel his touch? They were no more than the raindrops that fall on the leaves around are to the swallow nestled by her mate in the little warm house beneath the coping of the wall.
So time slipped away; and each week, each month, brought more strength and patience and infinite adoration to her love for him; and brought more fatigue, more irritation, more despondency at his fate to him.
This long hot summer, with its damp air, its bursts of tropical rain, its sultry perilous vapours, seemed like one tedious day to him; yet a day that would never end, but was reeled off from the wheel of destiny in horrible, perpetual, unchanging sequence.
All the thrones of the world might have been offered her, and all the anathema of all its various religions hurled at her, and she would never have left his side in that lonely chamber of shadows. But he?
The greatness of her nature escaped him. The beauty of her sacrifice did not touch him to more than a passing emotion.
He did not see that here was a soul on which his own might rise to any heights; that here was a love which could become to him as the 'white genius' of the Etrurian myth.
He failed to comprehend the magnitude of her gifts to him. The reason was simple: he never really loved her.
Happily for her, she was not learned enough in passion's vagaries to perceive that.
To her it seemed for ever wonderful that he looked for her return as the shades of evening fell with longing eyes, that he found any loveliness in her, that he forgot his dead mistress for her sake.
She was nothing in her own sight.
She was proud in some ways, but she was utterly humble in others.
She was but a moorland thing in her own sight, no higher than the loosestrife or the woodspurge was, just fed with sun and dew, and born out of the soil where she took root.
If she were, indeed, fair to see as he and the others said, it was only, like the flowers, by the grace of nature and the smile of heaven. Her character was moulded on too grand lines for any vanity to find place to lurk in it, and that selfishness which is the safeguard and armour of all average women was also absent from her.
It is often said that the strong cannot love the weak, the high-tempered courage cannot cling to the coward; yet it is rather the strong who alone can love the weak, who can have the patience, the pity, the abiding tenderness to bear with feebleness, so unlike itself; it is rather the high courage that can stoop, and, full of infinite compassion, feel that where others despise it can defend, and comprehend what has been made in its own unlikeness.
Moreover, love is for ever unreasoning, and the deepest and most passionate love is that which survives the death of esteem.
Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone. Love is born of a glance, a touch, a murmur, a caress; esteem cannot beget it, nor lack of esteem slay it. Questi che mai da me non fia diviso, shall be for ever its consolation amidst hell. One life alone is beloved, is beautiful, is needful, is desired: one life alone out of all the millions of earth. Though it fall, err, betray, be mocked of Others and forsaken by itself, what does this matter?—this cannot alter love. The more it is injured by itself, derided of men, abandoned of God, the more will love still see that it has need of love, and to the faithless will be faithful.
'You love me as angels might love!' he said once to her, roused to some momentary sense of wonder, recognition, gratitude.
Sometimes she seemed to him, indeed, like some grand young angel leaning down over his weakness. Sometimes that ineffable tenderness, so inexhaustible, so divine, which was in her oppressed and daunted him. It seemed to lay a burden on his life, on his conscience.
If she had but been as other women are, captious, changeful, impatient, uncertain, he would not have felt this vague fear of her which seldom left him, blindly subject to him though she was. Her patience was so perfect, her love was so intense, that at times he felt humbled and unworthy before her, and would cry to her angrily, 'Why make a god of me? I have brought you nothing but woe. Chafe me, deride me, upbraid me, then perhaps I shall love you always—men are made so.'
Those bitter words hurt her without her understanding them.
Her tongue could not have framed a rough word to him. The harmless cunning of feminine wiles was as far away from her as the fret of cities was distant from her calm green woodlands and her solitary shores. As soon could a Greek marble of Electra have stooped to coquetry as she.
'If you would but offend me that I might quarrel with you,' he said once, half in jest. She smiled because he did, but she did not comprehend.
Ah! the fair hours! he thought, when in Mantua he and his love had quarrelled almost to rupture, and black jealousy had been there to sting to life the waning passions, and the burning rage of mutual reproach had melted into the amorous delight of reconciliation, and the gall-apple bitten through had made sweeter the honey of delight.
Unholy memories, base gladness, this he knew, yet he sighed for them.
These grand eyes of Musa, these lips that were always mute unless they spoke in blessing, made him feel feeble, ungenerous, unworthy. Her very silence on it made his debt the greater—too great—it weighed love down.
The spring waned and grew summer, the plains of corn became yellow and ruddy, and the bearded grain fell to the hundreds of sickles reaping there, as to thousands of scythes the high grass had dropped in the May-time. The flocks and the herds wended their way to the cool mountains; the days were long and glowed with heat. The old summer silence, the old summer solitude, were come again; the crickets laughed in all the grass and all the trees, and she was happy because the land was lonely, left to him and her, shared only by the blithe birds and the innocent beasts.
She began to lose the fear of his arrest. As the calm days and weeks glided by they brought by their tranquil recurrence a sense of safety with them. The season of peril had passed, and the sun now put a zone of torrid heat and dazzling light about their refuge, and the fever mists that to others were terror were to her as a welcome wall risen up between them and mankind.
The long, deep, unbroken stillness of the Maremma day was sweet to her in this midsummer time, when even the lusty, full-throated merle was tired of song, and, except the hum of insect life and the mirth of the tree-frogs, there was no sound at all throughout the land from sunrise until sunset. Into the tomb of the Lucumo the heat of the upper air could not penetrate greatly: there was a drowsy warmth in it, no more. Whilst even the moor-hen was hot amongst the mat-grass, and even the eagle flew with languid wing over the olive woods of the hills, in the Etruscan grave it was cool and twilight always.
Once she went to the shore to gather mussels and take them home for him; they would cook in the wood-ashes, and he would tell her the while of Petronius, of Apicius, of Lucullus, of all that luxurious life of Rome, of Greater Greece, and of the otiosa Neapolis.
She took off her shoes and kilted her skirt, and waded almost knee-deep in the shallow sea-water, while the shore beside her was fragrant with the rosemary and the southernwood, and the seapinks were blowing like little puffs of rosy cloud, and a kingfisher, all azure and emerald in the sun, did not fly away at her approach, but went on with his own fishing and meditations.
She gathered her harvest of the sea, and found a few oysters, too, in amongst the rocks and the sea-fennel. The water was blue as the kingfisher's breast, a sweet west wind was stirring it; in the clear air Elba stood forth like a giant's castle in tales of magic; above head the rock-doves and the rock-martins were wheeling and soaring amongst the golden motes of the sunbeams. It was early, and all was still. There was not even a sail on the horizon.
She waded on to the sand, out of the water, and leaned to rest against a great boulder of ruddy tufa, putting her creel down beside her.
She wore one of those straw hats bell-shaped like the hat of Hermes, which still, with the shepherd's crook and the shepherd's reed-pipe, and the water-jar balanced on the women's heads, and the attitudes of the half-nude, symmetrical, and supple limbs, recall the statues of Pheidias and of Cleomenes to the student as he wanders here, wherever the lands are lonely and the goats crop the wild thyme.
With one hand resting on the rock behind her, and her feet lightly crossed and glistening with the yellow sand and the sea-water, she looked out over the broad blue heaving plain of light, and thought with grateful heart of that terrible night when the sea had devoured her and released her.
How dark it had been that night! 'Dark with the thoughts of the Lord,' as a Russian poet has said of the night on the steppes of Ukraine. She had died and come to life again. She had descended into the grave of the deep waters, and been delivered by the hand that she loved.
Her heart swelled with emotion and was thankful as she looked through the sunlight on the sea which had been thus merciful.
How the black wall of water had risen and towered above her! how the foam of it had hissed, and boiled, and seethed! How impenetrable had been the cruel starless skies! how deep and how hoarse the thunder of the storm!
She remembered it, and recalled it with a thrill of awful pleasure, as a child that has been lost, lying safely in his little bed at home, will recall the terrors of the unknown roads and unknown faces that scared him on his way.
Absorbed in those memories, she did not hear a boat approach through the water and ground on the sand, as that of Sanctis had done in the winter noon.
Before she had heard any sound about her, Daniello Villamagna had come beside her.
It was seven months since she had left him standing by the sea-wall by the salt lagoon of Orbetello. Since then he had made another voyage; this time to the surly Flemish coast, to the grey cloudy Scheldt, carrying his rich amber and green Sicilian fruit through the snowstorms and the north winds of the great waves that Scandinavia and Iceland sent rolling in to the Low Country shores.
He was paler and thinner than before, but his eyes were bright and full of eagerness.
'I have found you once more!' he cried to her. 'Ah! do not move, do not go away, you hurt me. Why will you mistrust me?'
All the softness had gone out of her face, and all the light had gone, too, as soon as she had seen him. He was nothing to her but another danger, another difficulty, another trouble the more.
'I do not mistrust you,' she said, remembering how he had lent her his boat and bade his boatswain not follow her. 'I think you are a loyal man; sailors are always loyal. But I am sorry that you do not forget me, and cease to come after me, for though you should so come for twenty years, never shall I say you are welcome.'
Pain and anger both swept over his handsome face, as a cloud sweeps over a landscape.
'I have been seeking you many days, he said, 'to and fro, up and down the coast. I came back from the Flemish seas last month. It was bad weather for the most part; the snowstorms were many. Sometimes the rigging of my brig was hung with icicles. The winter is long in those parts, as long as the summer with us. I think they never see a sunbeam, save such as the oranges we take them have caught on their rinds of gold. You do not listen. I could tell you many things that would divert you, but you will not listen. Well, only hear me say this: I took the memory of you with me all the way over those cold seas. When my men shivered in the frost, I said to myself, "it is not so cold as were her unkind words." I have not looked a woman in the eyes since last I saw you yonder by the stagno. Nay, that I swear———'
'Look at whom you will,' said Musa, angrily, 'only look not at me———'
He pursued his discourse, unheeding her displeasure, though it struck him hardly.
'If you had been with me, the life would have pleased you; it is good. It is good to go and see those poor muffled wretches who scarce ever feel the sun and move like ghosts about beneath their fogs; and then to come back to see our own shores, where all the sunshine is, and where the very moon makes us a second day, and where the lutes sound half the night, and the olive grows down to the sea, and in winter all the air is full of the smell of the orange-flower and of the coltsfoot in the grass.'
She gave an impatient movement as he paused, but he pursued the thread of his own thoughts aloud.
'If you had only come! It is at you only that I look. Though I have not seen your face seven long months, it has been with me always. Out of the grey and yellow fog you seemed to beckon me. Oh, yes! I know well you never do, you never even wish to see me. But I—I love you so well it seems to me that some time or another I must bring you to care a little. I am not much myself, though women have smiled on me before now; but the ship is a good ship, and will cradle you safely on the waves—and you love the sea—and down on my Sicilian shore I would make you a nest as the lory makes his amongst the orange-trees, and your nest should be all amongst the white orange and lemon flowers, and overhang the waves so that you should be able to see the coral and the fish of the deep water, just leaning from your balcony. When I heard the church-bells ringing inland as I went along the black, wintry, bitter coast, it was for you I prayed. I took my good ship into her dock, and then I came back here to find you. Why will you not say something gentler? To love you is no offence.'
'You have seen me twice!'
'When I had seen you once it was enough: I love you, and I was not afraid———'
He was thinking of the fierce Mastarna blood which he knew ran in her veins; he was thinking, 'though I knew that she would live to plunge a knife into my breast, yet would I make her mine—if I could, if I could.'
She heard him with pain and with anger. Her whole nature had softened and changed under the influence of a great passion as bronze melts under the flames. She was more able to feel sorrow for him than she had been before in the unthinking hardness of her ignorance of love. But she was still offended, troubled, and perplexed.
She was silent awhile, watching the motionless body of the kingfisher glancing like a jewel in the sun. The sailor watched her as she stood erect on the edge of the waves.
He thought to himself, should he tell her of Saturnino? Should he tell her whence she took her grand luminous eyes, her passion for freedom, her strength of body and spirit?
But how should she believe him if he did?
How should he persuade her that he spoke the truth? And how much it would wound her, humble her, make her ashamed, to know herself the daughter of that galley-slave, that mountain thief, that murderer, whom she had abhorred whilst she had pitied him! He dared not; she would but hate him himself the more.
He said to her only: 'Do you remember that day by the stagno, when you were sorry to see the brigand of Santa Fiora working like an ox in a yoke?'
'Yes; I remember that. He got away, they said, and was eaten by the sharks.'
'He got away, but he lives still. It was I who made his escape possible. He threw himself from the sea-wall and swam; I picked him up; in the darkness no one saw my boat. I carried him across to Sardinia, where men of his blood live in the forests and on the hills. I did it for you, because you pitied him.'
'You did a brave thing,' she said, and almost she smiled at him, and his heart was glad.
'I did it for you,' he said, and hesitated. Should he tell her?
'He was a bad man,' she answered. 'He was a murderer and a thief many times. But chained there I felt sorry for him, though he did betray me and steal the gold.
'What gold?' said the mariner quickly.
'Gold that was trusted to me,' she said, remembering how nearly she had betrayed herself.
'The gold of the Etruscan grave?' he said.
The blood went out of her lips with fear.
'How did you know of that?' she asked, with terror at her heart.
'Saturnino himself told me. He told me that you showed him a place in the earth—a buca delle fate—and that there were gold toys there and armour, and he stole them, and they led to his own undoing.'
'As he merited,' she said between her lips. She breathed again at ease, remembering that Saturnino had not known she lived there.
'Did ever he speak to you of one who escaped with him,' she asked, desiring to know the worst; 'a noble, sentenced for murder, for whom reward is offered?'
'No; he never spoke of him. Why?'
'There would be money to be made if you knew where he was,' she said, with the subtlety of her race, which ran side by side with their bold passions.
'I am not a bloodhound to track him,' said Daniello Villamagna, with contempt. 'No, I know nought of him, and would not use my knowledge if I did. Nor would you, I think?'
'They offer money,' said Musa, with feigned avarice; 'but I, too, am not a spy.'
'If you love money, look at this,' said the sailor, deceived by her apparent greed.
He brought out from the breast of his shirt a little case, and in the case was a necklace made of that fine gold, lavorato a sfoglua, for which Sicilian goldsmiths are still famous as they were in the old Greek days.
She looked at it with a smile.
'It is pretty. You will give it to your dama.'
'I brought it for you,' he said, with the timidity of true love making his voice tremble and his brown hand shake.
'For me! Ah, I am not like Saturnino of Santa Fiora. I care nothing for trinkets. Go you back with it to your island and give it there to some one who will smile at you. As for me, I have no time to idle with you; I am going home———'
'You will not take it?'
'Certainly I will not.'
He threw the case, with the necklace in it, by a sweep of his arm far out into the sea.
The kingfisher, startled at the splash, rose and took wing regretfully.
'The sea has enough treasure without yours,' said Musa with indifference. 'You scared the bird———'
For the first time he lost patience, and a fierce oath escaped him.
'You have no more heart than a stone,' he said bitterly, as Este once had said it.
She did not answer, bus took up her creel with the mussels and oysters in it.
'Where do you live?' he said abruptly.
'That I shall not tell you.'
That she dwelt in the tombs never occurred to his thoughts. Saturnino had spoken of the place as a hole in the earth, and he himself had only guessed that from containing gold toys it was some Etruscan burial-place. He had heard of such.
'You will not tell me?' he said in his teeth. 'Then I will find out for myself.'
She did not reply; she thought how the kingfisher blinds and baffles men to where his underground home is made: surely she could do as much as the birds did. Yet a great dread was at her heart; it would be hard to rid herself of this persistent wooer.
At last a thought struck her, and she looked him full in the face.
'What can it matter to you where I live? Leave me in peace. You should be too proud to come where you are undesired. As for the other things that you say, thus much I will tell you: I dwell with one I love. All the rest of the world may die—for me.'
There was no colour on her face as she spoke, and no tremor in her voice; she looked him full in the eyes, calmly and coldly; there was sternness and repose in her look. So might Fate itself have spoken.
He grew as pale as though she had struck him a blow which he could not return.
He drew back a step or two, and gazed at her with pain which would have been pathetic to her if she had had any sight or thought to give to him.
'All the rest of the world may die—for me.'
The words seemed to go through him and slay every hope and fancy in him: then and for evermore. They were so entirely the expression of a passion that was only so tranquil because it was so absolute. All in a moment he felt broken, bruised, grown old. His youth all at once seemed to slip away from him, never to return.
'Is that so?' he said at last. 'Then truly have I nothing to do here. I thought your heart white marble, on which no hand had writ any name; and why, I thought, why not write mine—but to you, no doubt, I look mad.'
Then, with those halting words, so inadequate and feeble to utter what he felt, he reached with a stride his little boat, and launched it and plunged his oars into the water.
The jutting wall of the Sasso Scritto in another moment or two hid him from sight.
He was gone over the silent pathway of the sea; while the gold of his necklace hung five fathoms down upon a branch of coral, amongst the gliding incurious fish and the strange foliage of the deep-water weeds.
Neither to the trinket nor to him did she give a regret. She lifted the creel of mussels on her shoulder, and stepped out with wet feet and lightened heart over the sand homeward.
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