CHAPTER LIX.
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HE tombs were no longer what they had been, when by means of cleanliness, orderliness, and her own sense of beauty she had contrived to make them into the likeness of a home. 'The vases, and bowls, and jars had been for the most part broken in pieces by the rabid fury of the disappointed steward, the sculptured Chimera and Typhon had been hewn from the walls, the best of the bronze utensils and candelabra had been taken, and the statue that Este had made of her had been carried away by the old man in his greed, who, ignorant of all those matters, had imagined it a work of Greek or Roman art. Her mandoline had been thrown down and broken, her spinning-wheel had been treated in the same way; the whole place had been defaced, mutilated, profaned; but she found her bed and bedding, and other things of household use, and all her clothes and linen there; for the bribes of Daniello Villamagna had been at work here also to secure to her the humble necessaries of human life.
She began her existence once more in this lonely abode, sadly content to be once more where all her memories of joy had been garnered, and where her lover, if he looked for her ever, would surely come. She took up the thread of her days where it had been broken, but it was no longer the same.
There was no more the body of the little child beside her; no more did the coffin of Joconda seem to bring a quiet blessing on the place.
And there were no more for her the joys of a light foot and a glad heart, of a happy ignorance of evil, of a simple self-taught philosophy which was content with finding daily bread and living like the birds of the air, careless of to-morrow, trustful of nature. All these were gone for ever.
Love had passed by there.
But they had let her come back. For so much she was thankful. She clung to her home underground as the stormy petrel clings to hers.
Without it she would have strayed, miserably and helplessly, as the rooks do for awhile, when their elm-trees are felled and their nests destroyed. After awhile the rooks go and make their home elsewhere, but she could never have done that; here alone was memory close about her, here alone had love been with her.
She began her life again with something of her old intrepidity, and infinite relief in the peaceful sense of silence round her. She had not a penny in the world; she had only her two hands with which to maintain herself. There was some store of oats and other things which had escaped the notice of the men, and were safe from the quest of rats in an old coffer which she had brought there on the mule's back long before on the day after Joconda's burial. There was also a little store of rice, beans, coffee, and some wine, which had been put there by the Sicilian when he had persuaded the old steward to allow her the use of the tombs. There was enough to live on for some few weeks; she looked no further. She would resume her old habits of work little by little, and so maintain herself.
The consolation of the fresh air, of the sight of the green autumnal earth, of the sounds of fluttering wings and rustling feet of forest creatures, revived the soul in her, gave her back hope and health.
Surely some day he would come.
That was all she thought of: she sat hour after hour looking over the wolds, hoping against hope for a step that never came.
The golden autumnal days went by, beautiful, full of the fragrance of falling leaves, and of the music of the woodlark, and the chaffinch, and the song-sparrow, and the little robins come from the high hills or from foreign lands.
With every dawn that rose she thought, 'Perhaps he will come to-day.' With every nightfall she thought, 'Perhaps to-morrow.'
It was more than a year since Este had sent his messenger to her with his gifts which she had repulsed, and that letter which she had torn in a thousand pieces, when the men of Prince Altamonte had invaded her sanctuary, lest any should take it perforce from her and read it and cause the writer trouble.
A whole year and more had passed by, and she had heard nothing of him, he had given no sign that he remembered her.
True, where he was, amidst his new pleasures and his new riches, her memory passed over him again and again, a score of times each day, with a sharp reproach in it, and he said always to himself, 'tomorrow I will go; next week I will go,' and let the days and the weeks slip away into the abyss of the past.
But she could not tell that. She could only know that he had forgotten. She tried to believe it was but natural and no cruelty. She was young, and she still clung to hope. To-morrow he would come.
One day in early November weather—the grand, buoyant, sunlit weather that comes in this season in these lands, with wondrous pomp of sunsets and lovely noontides warm as midsummer, and a delicious stir and freshness in all the sweet-smelling air—she was sitting at the entrance of the sepulchre, when a figure did appear in the transparent light of early day, and came onward across the grasslands, and she rose and regarded him with dilated eyes, knowing him even though he wore the garb of a Campagna shepherd.
The great, gaunt, sunburnt figure was between her and the sunlight. He looked old; his hair was white, and white were his shaggy eyebrows, from under which his sombre cavernous eyes gazed out in a savage pain, like those of a great animal struck by a bullet. He wore a broad hat and clothes of goatskin, and bore in his hand the crozier-shaped crook of southern shepherds.
He paused before her, leaving some yards of earth between herself and him. He seemed afraid to approach her. She at a glance had known him again.
'You are Saturnino Mastarna,' she said, and her voice had neither pity nor scorn in it, but a weary calmness of indifference. Nothing mattered to her.
'I am Saturnino Mastarna,' he answered mechanically, whilst his eyes rested on her, and he said to himself, 'Yes, it is she; Serapia's child; my child. She has Serapia's face and mine, blended together, as when we stooped over a stream the water blent in one our two reflections; and all the life and the fire are gone out of her, and it is he who has done that.'
'You are Saturnino Mastarna,' she said again. 'What do you do here? Will they not take you if they see you?'
'They shall not see me; I know how to hide. They watch for me in Sardinia. I have been there with mountain men of Mastarna blood. I got away on a good ship: a Sicilian who loves you pitied me.'
She was silent; it was nothing to her. She only wished that he would go away. It was not fear that she felt for him, but apathy; the apathy of a mind which has but one thought, of a heart which has one emotion.
Then she remembered that this man had once sent her Este; her eyes softened.
'Come inside,' she said to him, 'I will give you bread and a little wine that is there; you will be safer within. Come.'
He followed her. He took the food and the drink, but remained standing. His eyes followed her with a pathetic yearning. He was saying always to himself, 'She is mine, she is Serapia's; and all she knows of me is that I stole her gold, and sent to her the coward who has killed her heart in her before she has seen a score of years on earth.'
She served him with the little she possessed, then seated herself with those fatigued movements which now nearly always replaced her once vigorous and agile animation.
He leaned against the stone wall where the dancing-boys and the lotus-flowers were painted and rested his gaze on her timidly, as a dog looks that loves and is yet afraid of a blow from the hand he would caress.
'You sheltered Este?' he said suddenly.
The little colour that there was in her face faded out of it utterly.
'I did,' she answered coldly.
'You fed him, you tended him, you succoured him, you loved him, you gave him all you had to give; and when they set him free he left you and forgot you—is it not so?'
She lifted her face; it was as cold as marble, and as stern.
'When I blame him, then may you. Leave his name alone.'
'I sent him to you—I!'
'It is for that I bid you break my bread,' she said, with so great and exquisite a tenderness melting the coldness of her voice that it thrilled even the savage and brutalised soul of Saturnino.
He said nothing; he was thinking of that night of flight when, under the snows of Monte Labbro, lying beneath the tangle of ruscus and arbutus where the Fiora water ran between the rocks, he had said to his companion of the galleys:
'To that tomb there comes a maiden with grand eyes like two stars. She will let you shelter there, and will not speak, I think; but if you fear her speaking—well, a fawn's neck is soon slit.'
Why had not his tongue rotted with cancer in his mouth ere ever it had spoken those words!
'I sent him to you! I sent him to you!' he muttered; and he could not comprehend why she—his daughter and Serapia's!—did not leap up in rage and curse him. There had been but one answer from the Mastarna to what was faithless. Yet she, she bade him welcome because he had sent this man to her!
He did not understand. He looked down on her with his angry and bloodshot eyes; furious imprecations rose to his lips, but something in the look of her held him mute; he was afraid to say the thing he thought.
Should he tell her what he was to her?
Should he claim her by that tie of parentage?
Should he say to her, 'I, who stole your gold, I, who have a hundred murders on my soul, I, whose name the Maremma has shuddered at and gloried in, I am your father?'
He had been a selfish tyrant always; a brute, with little thought but for his own passions, his own greeds, his own revenge; seldom, since his earliest years, had he felt any single unselfish or generous impulse such as had moved him when he had found the grandson of Joconda sleeping in the snow; and the accursed life of the galleys, that scorches up every wellspring of feeling, and withers up every slender shoot of better instincts, had made him a devil rather than a man.
But now a movement of generosity, of self-sacrifice, stirred in him.
Better, he thought, better and kinder to leave her in ignorance for ever; better not to lean the weight of his own immeasurable guilt, of his own unutterable past, upon her. She had burden enough already.
It was the first instinct of any nobility, of any self-denial, that had ever moved him since the hour that Joconda had held up her stoup of wine to his mouth in the cathedral square of Grosseto.
He longed to fall down before her; to cry aloud to her; to say to her—'Pity me, if you cannot love me; your mother loved me once!'
His heart, so long denied all natural affections, so long without any kind of tenderness given or received, so long barren as the rock in the midst of the salt water on which he had been caged, grew thirsty with longing to slake itself at these simple springs of natural love at which the poorest can drink and for awhile feel rich.
He had been a fierce and cruel creature, often following his instincts as the tiger and the vulture followed theirs; but he had not been without fine impulses here and there, and he had been capable of love.
All his soul looked on her now out of his deep wild eyes. The words rushed to his lips that would tell her the truth; words which never again could be effaced. Almost he had cast himself down before her and cried to her—'I stole your gold, I sent your lover here, I have a thousand crimes upon my head, I am steeped in human blood; but I am yours, and you are mine: take me, hide me, pardon me, pity me!'
But something stronger than himself, more powerful even than this hunger for compassion and affection which possessed him, held him mute.
He had done her harm enough; why should he do her more injury?
The dead woman of Savoy had kept his secret faithfully; should he do less?
He, who never had stayed his tongue in cursing, or held his hand back from a blow, choked down the passionate desire in him and said to himself: 'Nay; why should she know?'
Why should she know?
Why should he lay his burden of foul sins upon the back of this, his lamb? It seemed to him that if he told her he would do the cruellest thing ever done in all his years of cruelty. He, who had hurled a traitor over the rocks like a mere bough of dead wood, and drawn his steel without a pause across the throats of harmless captives, dared not do this one last selfishness.
He would take his life in his hand, he thought, and go out and wander alone, and leave her in ignorance. He would avenge her: that was all he had to do with her.
She, forgetful of him, sat on the stone seat; her head drooping, her hands crossed on her knee.
He looked at her, and said to himself that this one good deed he would do ere he died, he would keep silence; he would not speak in weakness and self-pity, as a woman would have spoken.
He would avenge her; and life might blossom afresh for her. When the summer is young, if the spikenard and the balm are mown down with the grass, they send forth new blooms from the bleeding roots. So he thought.
He leaned against the stone of the wall, and forgot that he was an outlaw and a hunted felon. He only remembered that he was her father, and, so, Este's judge.
He saw the face of her lover as it had been with him in the twilight of the woods, in the scorch of the sunlight on the sea, a beautiful, proud, pensive face, like one of Signorelli's angels; and he stretched his hands out, his sinewy hands, with their grip of steel, that had done to death so many, and in fancy he clenched the slender fair throat that had uttered false words, and made the mouth that had kissed her open wide in the ghastly smile of suffocation, and choked the flickering breath into silence.
A cry of horror from her at his look roused him from his trance.
'What do you see? What do you think of?' she said, as she rose in terror. 'There is no one here who would injure you. I am alone; all alone.'
'Yes; you are alone,' said Saturnino with a strange look, as he withdrew his mind with painful effort from the vision that had absorbed him. She was alone: she who had loved her lover as few women love on earth. |
He gathered himself together with a heavy sigh; such as might burst from the aching heart of a lion that lay dying on the desert sands with the vultures waiting above head in the light.
He shook his rough clothes, and felt for his long knife safe within his bosom.
Then he stood before her a moment and looked at her; he did not speak.
'You will hurt no one?' she said, touched to a vague anxiety at his aspect.
'I will never hurt you,' he answered her, with a tenderness deep as her own when she breathed Este's name.
'Lay your hand on my forehead one moment,' he said a little later, 'and wish me my sins forgiven.'
He stooped to her as he spoke.
She hesitated a brief while; then she made the sign of the cross on his brow, and rested her hand on it an instant as he had asked.
'I wish you well,' she said softly, 'I wish you well on earth, and after death may God be merciful to you. I bless you, for you sent me him!'
Saturnino rose erect, with a curse; his face lost in one moment its fleeting gentleness, and grew black as a night in tempest.
'Do I owe your touch to his memory?' he said savagely through his ground teeth.
Then he gazed at her once more; furiously, longingly, thirstily; and without other words turned his face from her and went out into the open day.
Once he looked back.
Already she had forgotten both his presence and his departure.
She was seated on the low stone chair, thoughtful, passive; her hands were lying on her knee; her eyes rested upon the ground; her whole body seemed to listen for a step that never came; her whole soul was absorbed in remembrance.
He looked one instant, and yet another, and another; and yet another still—his gaze, he knew, would never rest on her again.
Then he drew his long slim dagger from its sheath and let the sun-rays play on it; it was an old friend, a loyal comrade; he had no other upon earth.
Then he took his way across the marshes and the moorlands; going southward, where Rome lay.
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