Delphi collected works o.., p.484
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 484
‘You are false and accursed,’ she said to them, and her voice was deep and clear, and smote them as if it were a sword. ‘You are false and accursed; and she owed no man or woman a thread in her garments, a crust in her mouth. She was honest and faithful and true, and cheated not a dog nor a mule of his rights. But all she has left — take! Take and scramble for it like the thieves you are; and may the bread and the wine that you buy with it blister your mouths and consume your bodies.’
Then with a single gesture of magnificent rage she dashed the pitcher down through the sunlight on to the floor amidst them; it fell shattered in a score of pieces on the stones, and the coins rolled hither and thither, and their metal gleamed in the sunlight. The women threw themselves on them. The old man screamed.
Musa called Leone to her side, took the linen, and the summer and winter clothing that belonged to her, took the lute and the distaff, and the trifles that were her own, passed into the adjacent chamber where the mule was stabled, bridled him and led him out into the open air, first having bound upon his back her own mattress, with its hempen sheeting and its coarse but warm blankets.
The women were yelling and quarrelling over the scattered coin; the old man was trying to snatch his share, and was buffeted and beaten between them. In their haste and their greed and their struggle they did not notice or know what she did.
Without looking back once she passed out of the old home of her childhood, and went out between the blocks of stone and the stunted aloes, leading the mule and followed by the dog.
She went straight across the tufa mounds, and the narrow paths crossing the reedy, moist soil, the rank grass lands, and the wild undergrowth that stretched around Santa Tarsilla, and walked slowly on and on, on and on, for eight miles, plunging into the deep woodland and entering the vast virgin meadows, until she came within sight of those cliffs of sandstone, where the tombs of the Tyrrhenes were hidden away behind the fence of thorny ruscus and the dense walls of bay. ‘They will not be angered against me, nor will they speak ill of her,’ she thought; and led the mule straight onward to the place she loved, where the tall leafy cork-trees rose up from the thickets, and the white-flowered cistus-bushes, and the hawthorns and the myrtles, and the yellow-blossoming Christ’s-thorn covered the burial-place of the Etruscan dead.
Intense heat still brooded over all the land, but she was used to it; it did not harm her.
For miles around there was nothing visible; not a sail in the distant sea, not a bird in the air, not a boar in the brakes, not a snake in the sand.
She led the old mule, and paced beside him; her heart was like a stone, her feet felt like lead; all at once she realised all that the faithful, kindly, fostering love of Joconda had been to her, and knew that it was gone from her for ever.
She went on with the animal through the hot white light, their shadows lying black behind them on the scorched grass and the grey sand. An immense sorrow had entered into her, and an immense regret. She thought— ‘I was never thankful!’
She had not been thankful because she had not understood. As the child does not comprehend his cost to the mother who bore the burden of him, so she had never understood what she owed to the woman who had sheltered her nameless life.
She had taken all that was about her, as children do, unthinkingly; they do not ask why the sun shines, why the bread is there, why the roof is between their heads and the winter storm; these things are so; they accept them and do not question nor wonder. She had not been thankless; she had only been a child. Now she was a child no more. She had looked on death, and it had left her desolate.
She had made her mind up to go and dwell with those whom she had called her own people, in the twilight of the earth, underneath the grass and canes. She was sure that they would not repulse her.
She preferred their mute mercy to the clamouring greed of the living. What appalled her was, not that she was penniless, but that she was alone.
She went across the moor in the strong unchanging sunlight that, as the day grew apace, ceased to have even the relief of any shade from leaf or blade of reed. She met no living thing. She uncovered the entrance of the tomb and descended the steps into it; and the mule, used to the stone stairs that led to his own stable, was with little trouble induced to follow. She unloaded the things off his back and laid them down; she took her sickle and went up into the air and cut thistles and dry grass for him, and filled a stoup of water at the half-dried pool, and stabled him there in as much comfort as she could. Then she gathered sticks together, and lit a fire on the stones of the entranceplace, and set a little soup-pot on to boil with some herbs and beans and fish in it that she had brought, with some rough bread, to make her midday meal.
The food seemed to choke her, but she ate, being young and in health, so that hunger came to her despite her sorrow.
When she had eaten she laid her bedclothes on the stone couch that had served for the last sleep of the Etruscan Lucumo, and sat down in the soft grey gloom of the twilit place, sheltered from the glare and scorch of day, and said to herself, ‘my home is here.’
Santa Tarsilla was no more her home. It was full of liars and of thieves. She abhorred it. Though its sands were to become full of silver ore, as the soil of Populonia once had been, she said to herself that never again should her feet tread them.
Let them keep the money and kill each other fighting over it!
She almost smiled as she sat there in the gloom and thought of old Andreimo beaten to and fro by the struggling women, and clutching at the coins and shrieking in his feeble treble.
‘One would think that gold were God!’ she thought; remembering how but three days before the galley-slave had robbed her: robbed the tomb that was sacred, the dead that were defenceless.
The terror of her own lonely and hapless fate looked at her from the awful eyes of the sculptured Chimera and the frowning brows of the painted Typhon; yet so consoled was she to be in this silent sanctuary that she began to think of her future maintenance and her future liberty here with a sense of deliverance rather than of danger. There would indeed, she knew, be no means of gaining any livelihood here. She could spin well, but so could every one else in the province, and she could make nets with skill, but so could every fisherman on the seaboard: and there was nothing beyond these to do.
Work is the political economist’s one advice and panacea; but there are many places in the world where it is not possible to work, and the Maremma in summer-time is one of them. There is nothing to labour at; all has been already done by the army of labourers that stream down from the mountains. The few that are left lie in the sun and think themselves blessed if they do not sicken or starve; many do both.
But of sickness she had no fear, and she was not even afraid of famine.
She thought if she could manage to make her bread from the saggina, or wild oats, that grew all around she could live here well enough. She scarcely, indeed, took more thought of what might be her bodily privation than the nightingales coming back, whilst the days are still short and the woodlands still brown with their first budding, take heed of the wild weather that may come to still their song and stay their courting.
She had never known any kind of indulgence or fastidious appetite. She had always eaten sparingly of the simplest food; the idea that she might have only a bit of oaten bread for weeks together did not frighten her. She was very well aware that she would have to depend on what her own hands could gather.
The old mule was lying down on the litter of dry grasses; the dog was asleep, for he was old too and soon drowsy; the twilight of the tomb was like the soft shadows that herald the dawn; the painted shapes upon the walls played on their pipes, and wreathed their garlands, and danced in the border of lotus flower; outside, the burning day was fierce and white, the animal life of the moors was all hidden and still, there was only the rustle of the snake through the tall stalks of the distaff-canes, the hoot of the cicala swinging high on the caroba boughs: the sound of the insects’ odd singing came faintly into the stillness of the tombs.
‘If only she were here!’ thought Musa.
Who had been those vanished people who had known so well how to cherish their dead and put them gently away in their painted chambers with the toys of their infancy, or the weapons of their manhood, or the jewels of their virginal or matronly pride, tenderly placed beside them? Who had they been, those forgotten peoples, who robbed death of half its terrors, and laid the dog beside his master, the toy beside the child, in cool, fresh, sacred chambers where the dead seemed not dead but waiting?
Ah! why was she not here! — she, who was thrust into that hole in the sand, in that box of pitch-pine, thrust out of life with unseemly haste, with a brutal eagerness to be rid of her and forget that ever she had been.
Musa could not have reasoned out the thing she felt; but the ghastly rites, the hideous selfishness, the vulgar hurrying cruelty, that mark out the Christian treatment of the dead weighed on her with their harshness and their horror as she sat in these graves of the Etruscans — made ere men had heard of Christ.
Then for the first time a few great tears rushed into her eyes and she wept bitterly, and, thus weeping, fell at the last asleep, in a merciful sleep that lasted through several hours, while the hot day throbbed itself away without, and the rays of the sun beat in vain upon her resting-place and could not enter.
When she awoke it was dark; night-herons, early come from the north on their voyage to Egypt, flying over the marshes sent forth their loud harsh croak. She mounted the stairs and looked upward, and guessed the hour by the place of the evening star, and the look of the heavens. She went down again and ate a little and drank some water, fed the dog and the mule, shut them both in the chamber, and went out into the open air.
She had an errand to do, with which, undone, it seemed to her she could not sleep. A strange fancy had come to her, and the fancy assumed the shape of duty to her; of a duty of gratitude so imperative that it would have been a guilt in her sight to evade its execution.
The uneducated are perhaps unjustly judged sometimes. To the ignorant both right and wrong are only instincts; when one remembers their piteous and innocent confusion of ideas, the twilight of dim comprehension in which they dwell, one feels that oftentimes the laws of cultured men are too hard on them, and that, in a better sense than that of injustice and reproach, there ought indeed to be two laws for rich and poor.
Musa walked through the still sultry night.
There was a haze of heat over the heavens that obscured the stars, and there was no moon. When she reached the entrance of Santa Tarsilla it was midnight and quite dark. There were no lights in any of the houses; far down the coast there was the gleam of the pharos of Orbetello: all else on sea and earth was in impenetrable gloom.
She, who had known the ways of the place from infancy, made no error in her going. She took her path straight to that field of death where they had laid Joconda.
The walls of the cemetery were low and white; one of them was washed by the sea. Her eyes, grown accustomed to the blackness of the moonless air, discerned the outline of the walls, and over the inland one, nearest to her, she leaped with the agility of her strong youth, and slowly took her road over the rough clods and the rough grass of the enclosure.
Then she lit a lantern she had brought with her, and by its light found her way to the freshest grave that was there, hard by the sea wall.
The earth lay all broken up into hard clods and heavy lumps as the earth, when sun-baked by a scorching midsummer, always lies, beat it as spade and hoe may. She stood by it, looking down on it timidly and tenderly with yearning eyes awhile; then she lifted her lantern and went to the little white-washed shed which served as a funeral chapel.
There was a toolhouse close by it, the door of which was never shut; she went in and got a pickaxe and other tools and returned with them to the grave of Joconda.
She began to loosen the earth; that brutal earth which lay so heavily on the breast of her best friend.
Southward on the sea there was now a crowd of lights burning yellow against the deep blue of the summer night; the men of the Orbetellano were spearing the fish frightened and blinded by the blaze of lanterns. But there was no sound in all the place except the ripple of the water against the low mortared wall. Once a dog, far away in the fields, barked.
She laboured on undisturbed.
The earth loosened when so dry does not readily adhere together again, and the clods were all easy to remove. In an hour’s time she had uncovered the rough deal box that they had called Joconda’s coffin.
She took breath and leaned against the wall and gazed down into the chasm. Before womanhood had fully opened for her she knew the doom that comes with age. She lived with the lost dead instead of with the living.
A deep-toned clock in the house nearest struck faintly the seventh hour; the old way of counting time still prevails in Maremma. It was, as we say, one hour after midnight. The fear of interruption gave her fresh strength and energy. She knew that to raise the coffin would be more difficult than to uncover it; but she descended into the pit, tied cords about it, and, after another hour’s hard and patient toil, raised it up on to the ground above.
Then she trembled; the great dews rolled off her forehead; in the hot night she grew cold.
The only human soul that had ever loved her was there at her feet, helpless and senseless as the clods of clay — no more a human creature, but a thing thrust out of sight and forgotten of all.
She shivered as she looked on it; then she took up her spade and shovelled in the earth; dry as it had been, and loose, she knew that in the morning it would bear no sign of disturbance to careless eyes, and that most likely there would not be even a careless glance cast on that waste corner by the old sea wall.
When it was all filled in, the earth was lower than it had been, but this would seem no more than the natural in-sinking of the soil. She rested once again, a moment, from her labour, and drew breath again for her heaviest trial of strength, the lifting of the coffin over the wall and into the boat beneath. She had great strength in her symmetrical limbs; she was shaped as nobly as a Greek statue, and in her beautiful arms, her straight limbs, her superb hips, there was no less force than grace. From her childhood upward the sea had bathed, the wind had fed, the sweetness of sound sleep and the tonic of athletic exercise had nourished her. Beside the sun-starved, room-cooped prisoners of the factory and of the schoolroom she would have been as Atalanta beside the dried and shrivelled atomy of a specimen-jar. With all her strength now she raised the coffin by the cords she had knotted about it, dragged it up on to the wall beside her, which was of breadth enough to afford safe footing, and thence by degrees lowered it into the old wooden craft, half boat, half tub, belonging to Andreino in which she had spent her happiest hours.
She descended into the punt, laid the coffin reverently at her feet, loosened the chain from the staple, and, taking up her oars, bent over them and began to row back to the place on the sea-shore where she had rescued the galley-slave Mastarna.
She was drenched with the sweat of exertion, she was cold with a nameless terror, she was aching in every muscle with the strain of her over-wrought labour. But she was content. She had done her duty as she saw it. When her eyes rested on the deal surface of the oblong thing at her feet, she thought tenderly,
‘Surely she knows; surely she is glad I take her to them?”
It had seemed to her so brutal, so vile, so thankless to thrust the dead, only because it was dead, into the earth, in a waste hole of ground, and leave it alone to the growth of the rank grass and the thistle, to the companionship of the newt and the worm.
The sea was perfectly placid; the air was still without wind; the moon had now risen, and seemed like a friend in the sky. In Santa Tarsilla no one had awakened; all was still. She was safe, and her errand was done.
When at length the boat reached the place on the sands where the low myrtles and rosemary grew well-nigh to the edge of the sea — the place where Saturnino had sat on the sand and cursed mankind and his own soul — the lovely vermilion hue of early daybreak in the Maremma was slowly spreading over the heavens.
She sprang into the water, and with infinite tenderness and solemn care drew the boat with its freight upon the shore, amidst the sea-stocks and the samphire.
Then she dragged her weary feet over the three miles of heath that lay between her and the Etruscan tomb. She went down into the grave, stirred the old mule from his slumber, and placed his pack-saddle on his back; followed by Leone, she led him by the bridle to the shore. She was now so fatigued that her limbs shook under her, and her head swam. But she pursued her way.
Reaching the edge of the waves, she drew out the coffin from its shelter beneath the shrubs, raised it with great difficulty on to the pack-saddle and fastened it there; then once more, with her hand on the mule’s bridle, and with the dog beside her silent and subdued, she went back, now not alone, to the grave of the kings.
As she went — the mule patiently bearing the burden of the dead mistress who had fed and tended him for twenty years, rendering his owner this last service ere he, too, should fall away into the uselessness of age, into the darkness of death — Musa looked back once at the open sea.
The rose of dawn was all above her head, the waters lay wide and peaceful in the sweet mysterious light.
Her heart was full.
‘Surely she must be glad,’ she thought; ‘she will be with us, and she will know that I did not forget.’
CHAPTER XIII.
THE REMOVAL OF Joconda’s body from its grave was never noticed by the sacristan of Santa Tarsilla, or by any one of her neighbours.
No one ever went nigh that rough space of ground under the sea wall. They had done with her when they had buried her. When the torch of Andreino had flared itself out, the last rite of remembrance had been finished for ever.
