CHAPTER LIV.
S she sat at the entrance of the tombs on the day of the vigil of St. John, watching—always watching—for the shadow she never saw, the step she never heard, there crept slowly over the pathless turf two large white bullocks yoked together.
There also was a group of men, seven in all, who led the oxen; and the ox-waggon bore loads of masons' implements and cordage, and empty sacks and baskets.
She did not notice them, except dully to wonder what they came to do there, and to be thankful that they had not come a year earlier, when he had hidden in the earth under their feet.
They crept on straight over the moor, and towards the hidden burial-place.
The foremost of them, who was a sullen-looking, aged man, advanced from the rest a little, and approached her.
'It is you who live below there?' he cried roughly.
She was mute.
The old man was the steward of that absent Neapolitan prince who owned the house at Santa Tarsilla which had been occupied by Joconda for so many years; the steward who at her sudden death had made pretence of a year's rent being due, and under that pretext sold her chattels.
To him there had gone a man of San Lionardo, leading with him his little son, and the two together had told him how on those moors which had been for a thousand years a portion of the fief of the Altamonte princes there had been found buche delle fate by a girl, who had stolen the treasure possibly, and made of the tombs her home. The little boy, who was no other than Zefferino, deposed gravely to having seen mountains of gold and jewels under the earth. In this country vengeance may doze and wait, but does not die.
The imagination and avarice of the steward were inflamed to fever heat. There had of late been discoveries of tombs near Cere to the south, in which had been found vases of great worth, and quantities of armour, shields, crowns, toys, and ornaments of gold, all of which had been sold for large prices to foreign States for their museums. The steward readily believed the little lad's tale, which was confirmed by a buttero of his own, who said that when he had ridden near the blasted suber-oak one twilight time he had seen a maiden with a bronze amphora on her head going down for water at a spring that rose near there.
Musa knew him at a glance, and he knew her.
He came to her and spoke roughly.
'You wicked wench, you stole Joconda's mule away from me, I have not forgotten that. Ever since then I meant to track you when I had time, and at last I come upon you. You are an evil one!'
'It is you who are evil,' she said coldly. 'Joconda had paid her rent beforehand, on the first day of August, and you accused her falsely, and sold her goods out of despite, under pretext of a debt. You are a bad man. It is a pity that the prince your master does not know how bad you are.'
'Oh, ho, vermin!' cried the steward, frantic with rage. 'That is the tongue you dare to use to me, is it? Spawn of the devil you always were, and the pity is that the days are gone by when one could have had you burned as the devil's daughter. Pray you, now, do you know whose ground this is?'
She gave a gesture of negation, of indifference, of ignorance. She had never thought of the ground as any one's property; it belonged to God and his dead. The moor was free to all, so she thought. These great green silent lands seemed too vast, too mute, too solemn, to be parcelled out amidst the legal claims of men. Who claimed the sea? Who would, went on it, gleaned from it, was fed by it, lulled by it, devoured by it when it was in haste and rage. As the sea was free to all, so she had always believed was the plain.
'Well, this land is the prince's, my master's," said the man with great unction and vicious wrath united. 'If we had known that you had harboured here, out you would have gone, long, long ago. And, indeed, it would go hard with you now did my master choose to have the law on you, for who knows what treasures you may not have made away with; but he is merciful, and so am I. and therefore we do not mean to hurt you: only out you go.'
She heard but dully. Only a few months earlier, and she would have fought for her refuge and her rights to it as a tigress may fight for her den; but now the spring of her life was broken, her courage was not gone, but was deadened; her whole spirit was sunk in hopeless apathy. Yet a great terror fell upon her. Without this home she would be desolate as the house-martin, who sees the wall that held his nest crumble into dust. For so long she had lived there, for so long each moment of the day had been given to some thought that centred in these familiar tombs. They had been hers, so entirely hers, borrowed in all humility and gratitude direct from the dead who were with God. Without them she would be not only homeless, but exiled from all she knew, from all she loved. No palace, had they given her one, would have been as dear to her as these hallowed chambers, shared with the lizard and the bat.
'There was gold in these tombs,' he said to her.
She answered him coldly:
'Yes, there was when I saw them first.'
'And you have stolen it?'
'I never steal; I leave that to you to do at your lord's expense. The gold was stolen by a galley-slave, one you have heard of, Saturnino Mastarna. It can do him no harm to say so, for he has escaped.'
He believed nothing that she said. He was certain that the gold was either in the tombs or safe hidden underneath the soil.
'If you will tell me honestly where the treasure is I will not give you up to justice,' he said, thinking so to possess a secret which without her might escape him for ever.
'I cannot tell you what I do not know,' she answered him. 'Ask Saturnino Mastarna, if you can find him.'
'You are a cursed jade,' cried the old man, with the rabbia seizing him, and called her many worse names still. Musa turned her back on him, and stood awaiting his next act. She would not show him what she felt, but her heart was beating to suffocation with fear lest she should be hunted from her home.
'The tombs are my lord's. They are of value, they are full of treasure, they are my master's,' he kept repeating now. Go you down into them, and get your chattels—that I will let you do, but nothing more—and waste no time about it for we are about to clear the entrance and take all the old work there may be there back with us. These are the orders we have had. But I see very well that you have robbed us of all that there was good in it. You look aghast, and you are dumb.'
She was so; she was like the poor hare on the moor who could not understand why she was grudged her form of grass, that caused no loss to any living thing, yet was the whole world to her.
'I have stolen nothing,' she said once more. 'I found these sepulchres. They are not your lord's nor mine, but belong to the dead. I have done no hurt there. It is all I have of home.'
'She is but an impudent jade living thus, in the bowels of the soil, and with a paramour I make no doubt,' said the angry steward. 'Men, get you to work to clear these shrubs away and find the door; we can waste no more time. If there be sculptures we are to hew them off, and that is a long business. Get to work and look for this vixen's earth.'
In an earlier time she would have plunged a knife into the first hand that had touched those sepulchres, but now she was mute and motionless. The greater loss that she had endured made this loss almost light to her. Only she knew not where to lay her head if she was driven out, and every stone was dear to her—'dear as remembered kisses after death.'
When the first blow of the hatchets fell on the shrubs around, the sound roused her; she leaped into their midst with her old force and fire.
'You shall not touch them!' she cried passionately, as she wrenched the first axe away. 'They are not yours, nor mine, nor any one's. You shall not touch them. They belong to God.'
The men laughed. They were, together, stronger than she was. They seized her and tied her wrists with a cord, and then bound her ankles with one, and cast her aside upon the soft sand under the heath as they would have cast a troublesome dog or goat.
They were not cruel, but they thought her a strange wild creature, and they were desirous to get their work over, and lie in the shade, and drink their wine, and sleep the noontide sleep they loved.
Their steward eyed her with a more evil glance. He had long sucked all the best juices out of his lord's properties himself; he was bitterly chagrined that he had missed such treasure-trove as Etruscan tombs unopened yield; he made no doubt that she had stolen all the gold.
He had ridden over this moor in spring twelve months before. Why, he thought, had not his horse's hoofs broken through the crumbling sandstone, the thick soft moss, and shown him this kingdom of the dead? He was angry at his own negligence, and hated her since she, he never doubted, had rifled all the place and now they would find nothing; so he grumbled to his peasants, who were still at work with spade and hatchet, being still ignorant of where the entrance was.
She, bound as they had bound her, lay upon the sward and watched them, mute.
'If you will spare our labour and tell me where the entrance is we will set you free,' they said to her; but she did not unclose her lips.
The calm under torment that the southerner shares with the oriental had come upon her. She was dumb as the dead within. Only her great eyes looked on, wide open, and full of anguish.
Soon the labourers lighted on the entrance-place with a shout, and she saw her sanctuary was discovered. She heard the blows of mallet and axe; she heard the grind of chisel and pickaxe. They were hewing out a wider space by which to enter. Then they lighted on the open portico of the cellula janitoris.
Writhing in her bonds, she called to them in anguish: 'you must not enter; you must not, you shall not; my little child lies there!'
She cried the same thing over and over again a hundred times, struggling and twisting madly in her captivity.
The old man heard, and put but one meaning on her words.
'She has killed her child and hidden it here!' he thought, and searched the place of burial, and perceived that recently the rock of the floor had been broken up in the first chamber.
There was a bronze Etruscan lamp burning where the stone had been cut through, and a little handful of honeysuckle was in an earthen mastos standing by; the 'mother of the woods' is the flower that braves longest of all the summer heats.
'Is that her remorse?' thought the bitter-hearted old man, as he bade his men tear up the pieces of broken rock, where soon they found the small body of the little child, wrapped, heedfully, in linen and lying in the buds of rosemary. There was a gold Madonnina buried with it. There were no marks of violence upon it, and some property of the air or rock, not uncommon in this soil, had preserved the little corpse from all corruption and made it look like a pale waxen image.
Even the hard hearts and dull souls of the men were moved to some emotion as they looked on it, lying dead upon its bed of withered rosemary.
'She never harmed it,' they murmured to one another; but their director grew angry and bid them be silent.
'You are idiots,' he said to them. 'She killed it, and hid it here. If she had not killed it, would she have denied it honest Christian burial?'
Angry and disappointed, and inflamed with baffled cupidity, he roamed from chamber to chamber, making no count of the paintings of the walls, and of the slender grace of the bronze lamps, being too ignorant to know their value in their arts, and being greedy for the yellow glitter of the metal that he loved.
All the traces of her occupation of the place infuriated him more and more, for he saw in each assurance that she had dwelt there long enough to rifle and to rob. He called out to his men to clear the rubbish away, and was the first to fling with his own hand on the ground the black and red earthen vessels that he despised as valueless.
Lying where they had placed her under the sharp foliage of the marucca she saw the violation of the sepulchres that were sacred to her alike for the living and the dead.
All the black earthenware of the tombs they furiously broke upon the ground until, of it all, there only remained a pile of shattered potsherds; the metal lamps they threw upon the cart, these would serve to help light their kitchens; all her own simple things they threw down in a heap, and the old man snapped across his knee the keys of the old tortoiseshell lute.
It seemed to her as if every sound fell on her breast, on her brain.
The men were angry because, entering, they found no metal-work of value, no platters or vases, or cups, or chains, or bracelets of the virgin gold of Etruria, such as were yielded mm such rich harvest by the famous necropoles of Palestrina, of Cervetri, of the Montarozzi.
They were bitterly irritated, the steward most so of all; he having been sure to make a fine gleaning there, a tithe of which he would have given to his master who knew nothing of this day's work, though his name was used so glibly.
It was yet very early.
The old man sat in the shade of the tomb and drank the clear red wine that she had bought for Este, and cast his cunning eyes about in search for some gold or silver or amber that might be hidden in the sand, or lost in the dark where the bats clung. He saw none; all the gold-work that had ever been there had been taken by Saturnino, and finding none, despite all his pains and diligence, he grew more and more angry, more and more suspicious; he had had visions of such wealth within these graves as that which was found by the Prince of Canino—wealth of which he could give his owner a discreet portion, whilst with the rest he would swell that ever-growing hoard which was the sweetest sight his twinkling eyes ever dwelt on; he was wont to feast on it by oil light, when his doors were bolted and barred with locks three hundred years old, in his old grey house set down amidst the marshes and the salt lagoons.
Having at length espied in the darkness the fibula and the few ornaments which Saturnino had overlooked, and which she had once refused to sell even for Este's sake, the sight of these only inflamed his cupidity the more, and made him the surer that there had been some vast treasure seized and sold by her; and this conviction so tormented and enraged him that with his own hands he would have strangled her had it not been that he was timid where the law stepped in and knew he should be punished for doing such rough justice on her.
His gaze roving thus, sullen and eager to discover, fell at last on the coffin of Joconda, where it rested in the twilight behind the stone bier of that Etruscan knight who once had been sole lord there.
His shrewd sense saw at once that this was a thing of yesterday, that no Etruscan dead were slumbering in that long, rough, shapeless box of unplaned pine-wood, with the black cross rudely painted on it. His cunning little soul, steeped all its days in chicaneries, and usuries, and efforts to outwit his lord and to grind down his people, fell all at once on the darkest and the foulest meaning that this strange sight could bear.
Some murder had been done here, hidden away with the dust and ashes of two thousand years: done by this girl no doubt.
So he believed, and his small soul leapt up in gladness.
It would be hard to punish her for the missing gold-work, for there was no proof there ever had been such in these graves, though morally he was sure of it; but for these dead bodies hidden away, justice could be easily summoned. He shook a little, for he was a timid man, and to be thus in company with the dead was ghastly to him, and he called aloud to his men to leave off hewing at the stone lion and come look here.
Between them they got the coffin open, and, shuddering and muttering paternosters, they uncovered the poor, withered, lifeless frame of her that was untouched by corruption as yet, being so shrivelled and fleshless with old age, and further preserved by the dry aromatic air of the painted chamber.
'It is a woman. It is Joconda Romanelli!' he said gasping; and his men shrank together awed and frightened, and shut the coffin down and stood staring.
A thrust of the knife in a brawl, a shot on a lonesome hill, and fierce vengeance deftly worked out—these they were well used to in Maremma, and they saw no great harm in them. But this body, torn from Christian burial and sanctified ground, and shoved away with these Etruscan mummies, seemed to them a ghastly horror; for had not the girl taken all the gold?
Meanwhile, outside in the sunshine, Musa lay with bound limbs, strained ears, and aching eyes; powerless to move, not knowing what they did, judging only of their violence by the broken lute and the heap of broken Etruscan ware that were thrown out beside her on the sand.
'It is God's mercy he is gone,' she thought; that was her chief remembrance.
Yet all her life ached in her as if it were snapped asunder like the lute; she was like the bird who sees rough hands tear down and scatter on the winds the nest that it cost him such anxious care to build, and that he guarded so jealously whilst he sang his love song underneath the leaves. Like the bird she had offended none, making her home as silently and meekly as he did where the wild bay grew and the woodspurge crept with the moss. She had asked nothing of the world more than the bird does; yet they could not let her be.
She heard the blows of the mallet on the marble cease, and all was still. She wondered dully what they were doing now; dully, for pain had numbed her, and the worst that could have come to her seemed already done.
The men, within, held council.
Some were jocose and jested broadly: she was a handsome creature, they said; the old steward was blind to such charms, the chills of age and avarice made him insensible to such a plea; he was angry that the gold was gone, he only longed to punish her, to see her hurt.
She had sold all the jewellery, of that he felt sure, or had buried it somewhere on the moors, to get it when she chose.
And this dead woman's body—if it were not the cover of some crime, why should such a corpse be hid here thus?
No; he was resolute; to justice she should go, away to Orbetello. They would take the dead body in its deal box with them, and the corpse of the little child wrapped in its linen, and let the judges see. He persuaded himself and them that he was acting from pure rectitude and horror of crime; in truth he would never have cared though a hundred corpses had rotted there if he had found the gold vases, the gold platters, the gold chains. Aloud he said that those who would desecrate a sepulchre would do any other sin; such were best dealt with and put aside by law. He washed his hands of it.
So he went out into the sunny air, and bade his men lift her, bound as she was, upon the ox-cart.
But, although bound, she revolted so fiercely at their touch that they were frightened and hung back.
'What have I done?' she cried to them.
'Waste no words on her,' said the steward. 'She shall answer before the judges.'
'I have done no harm,' she said, as she wrenched her ankles free by violent effort and stood before them, her hands still tied behind her back. 'I knew not that those tombs had any owner. They belong to the dead. I did the dead no harm. They were not afraid of me, nor I of them. Why do you touch me? Why do you bind me? I have done no evil. It is you who insult the grave. It is you who break their laws and rob———'
'Where is the gold that was there?' shrieked the old steward, stung into accusation. 'Where is the gold, you wanton? And where is your lover that you screened there? Who was the father of your child?'
She was silent.
They took her silence for guilt; she seemed to them to be overwhelmed with her own crime thus brought before her. Her great luminous eyes stared at them with a terrible, unutterable sadness that they were frightened at, and took for guilt.
'To justice with her,' said the old man cruelly. 'Heave her in the cart, men; she has the mal'occhio.'
She was heaved into the cart by the ropes that tied her limbs; her feet hung over the rail, her head and body were on the hard wood; she was used as they used a young heifer.
They thought her something unnatural and unearthly; they dreaded the evil eye; they had no mercy, and their director hovered round her, tightening a rope with unction, or knotting her hair upon a nail, in vengeance for that gold he had not found. It hurt her more when they touched her bare feet, or their rough movements unloosened the linen off her breast.
All her beauty was Este's, for these to look on it was treachery to him.
To her own fate she was almost callous. He had gone, and she was driven from the place where he had been, and where every stone, every leaf, every grain of sand, seemed to speak to her of him; it was indifferent to her what else befell her. If they broke her on the wheel as they did the saints of old, she would not suffer more than she had done when she had heard his footsteps go away so willingly, so lightly, over the scorched turf.
The oxen moved on; the ponderous wheels turned, the springless waggon rolled upon its road.
The old man and one other came with her; the rest of the men stayed to guard the tomb and hew out the sculptures in the rock.
The way they went was not towards santa Tarsilla, but southward to the marshes which, where the moors sloped to the south, replaced it and made all the earth like a sponge, now white with cotton-grass and billowy water-reeds.
Turning her burning eyes from side to side, she saw the places she had roamed over, hunting for cactus-fruit, and the wild prickly pear, and the blue bilberries of the thickets. She saw the little pools where she had splashed and bathed; the fringes of cane where reluctant she had searched for the eggs of the fluttering water-hen; she saw the broad blue sky above her head, a green ibis on its voyage was the only speck upon it; it flew high above her, straight above her, and winged its wise way eastward, to the lands of sunrise. She envied it.
She lay face upward on the bottom of the waggon, her hands tied so that she could not brush away a gnat or fly. The sun beat on her, the insects tormented her, mosquitoes fastened on her feet as they hung over the rail.
The men took no notice of her; they jolted on as they would have gone with a bound calf or a shot doe behind them.
As long as she could, she looked for the pine-trees that grew by the sea, for the great branches of the cork tree that spread themselves above the place of the tombs, When she could behold these no longer, tears of blood came into her eyes; the sky and the moor and the air grew crimson to her.
The oxen crept on, pulling against their rings of iron, groaning against their heavy yokes; tired and sore, they licked their lips with parched tongues, they sobbed now and then like beaten children when the goad struck them.
The waggon rolled on, over the burned moorland, to the marshes where the earth was still wet, and the stagnant waters were green as the broad leaves of their lilies. Here all was treeless, level, vapourous; the black buffalo wading content in the ooze, the butor sitting motionless in the swamp; here and there came gladiolus flowers, rising like red plumes; everywhere there was a sea of reed-grass and rushes murmurous with clouds of insects; a watery desert where disease walked abroad alike by noonday and by night.
A narrow road, often raised on piles, crossed the morass, and oftentimes a false step of the oxen to right or left would have plunged the waggon into the bog on either side that was hidden under the rank vegetation of grass and rushes. This single road traversed the marshes, and united them with the great fields of grain that lay beyond, square leagues of corn stretching far as the eyes could reach from sea to mountains, and now brown and bending to the sickle.
Before they entered on these great corn lands where harvest was ending mirthfully, despite the pestilence that rode on every sunbeam, the men stayed their tired and beaten oxen, who, footsore and with the water falling from their eyes, would, pressed longer, have dropped down to rise no more.
Then, and then only, they bethought them to look at their burden; as they would have looked at the heifer to see that she did not die before the butcher's mallet should strike her.
They found her unconscious, and breathing heavily; the sun had struck her and made her, for the hour, insensible to all her pain.
'She is a jade, but we must not kill her, or they will call us to account,' said the old steward to his man.
So they halted there for her sake as well as for that of the oxen, and laid her down upon the ground, and tried what rough surgery they knew to call back the senses that the sun had slain.
The illness in a few hours passed off her, and she regained the consciousness of her unutterable misery.
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