CHAPTER LII.
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HE autumn came and passed, and soon the green moist winter returned to Maremma.
The rose-winged flamingoes and the snow-white birds of the north flew over the sea: her lover returned not with them.
But the knowledge of a great consolation was come to her, and she bore the anguish of her lonely, empty, cruel hours with endurance, since when the March hyacinths and asphodels should open to the light she would hold a human blossom to her breast.
She laboured hard in this winter-time, knowing that the season would soon come when she could work no more.
Some instinct led her to make friends with a woman at this time, the only woman she had ever been near since Joconda died; a hard-featured, sunburnt, toil-bent creature prematurely old from a hard toil, who every year came down with her husband and children, and flocks of sheep and goats, all the way by the roads on foot, from the chestnut woods above San Marcello to the green pastures of Maremma. There are many do the same; it is a laborious life, always beaten about by wind and weather, but the hill-shepherds and herdsmen and their families are used to it, and cling to it as gipsies do. In summer they are up in their own northern hills from hazel-time until the chestnuts drop, and that return consoles them and sustains them.
This woman she saw once, washing linen by beating it with stones in a little stream; Musa gave her some bread she carried and spoke to her; the shepherd and the ewes and rams were further off upon the moors. The woman was not curious or intrusive; the hard life she had led had blown and scorched and chilled and drenched her with rains till she was scarcely higher as an animal than her own mother-sheep, who wanted nothing but to nibble and browse and hear their lambs bleat and lie safe at night.
She was stupid as a stone; but she was not unkind nor unfaithful. She kept the secret of the tombs even from her own man, and took a dull liking to this beautiful woodland solitary so unlike herself, who gave her food and helped her to beat her rags in the water, and who looked to her so grand, so fearless, so young, so fair, and yet had the burden of women on her, and was all alone.
'Never saw I anything like her on these pastures or above on our own hills,' she thought often, and had a dim superstitious fear of her, and obeyed her without hesitation, and deemed herself paid abundantly by a basket full of fungi or of arbutus-fruit for her children, who were growing up as the lambs and the kids do, tumbling with them on the pastures.
Hers had been but a sorry life; all winter passed on the lonely moist meadows of Maremma, all summer spent in hard work upon the corn lands on the mountain sides and the olive and the chestnut forests up above, where the snow lay on the highest rocks in June. It had made her dull, indifferent, always tired; but being an open-air creature she was faithful.
She stayed beside Musa in the beaming days of earliest spring, when the daffodils' trumpets of gold were blowing in all the grass, and the poet's narcissus was shining in every shady place, and the eyes that loved them could not rejoice in them, but were closed on the blindness and languor of pain.
The child of Este was born with the daffodils; but he only breathed a few short days after his birth, and died, softly and painlessly, as the daffodils did when they had bloomed their little hour.
The woman of the Apennines was frightened, because for many hours she could not take his small dead body from Musa's hold; when at last his mother could be made to understand that dead indeed he was, despair seized on her, long convulsions succeeded to her passionate weeping.
If he had lived—if his little feet had run over the grasses to her, if she had heard his first laugh at the first flower; if she had seen Este's eyes smile again in his, and heard the voice of Este in his broken babyish murmurs; if she had taught him to look with tenderness at the little wren in her hole and the brown coot on her waterside nest; if she had carried him on her shoulder to her morning work upon the moors, and borne him homeward with her as the evening bells rang from the far hills and shores—if he had lived, she would have loved her lover in him.
For him she would have worked day and night as she had done for Este; she would have kept him fresh as the rose, fair to see as the white birds from the north; she would have carried him in her strong young arms, she would have taught him love as the nightingale teaches its song to its offspring; she would have prayed for him, tended him, cherished him, made him lovely in all ways, and then perhaps one day she would have taken courage and led him by the hand up to his father's side, and said through him—'Love, who has ever loved as I?'
But he was dead; dead as the faded narcissus shrunk away beneath the leaves.
All that could never be: never, never.
He was dead like the child Itys, for whom his mother mourns through all the ages with every summer eve.