Delphi collected works o.., p.486
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 486
‘If ever she know, she will beat me black and blue, or throw me with one hand into the sea,’ thought the little sinner miserably.
She went down into the tomb, and brought the mule up to pasture while there was still some coolness and shade; then she again descended, lit her little fire and put on her pot with fish and herbs to stew by noontide, and took up her distaff and went and sat in the open air once more.
She was oppressed and absorbed by the tidings of the galley-slave’s capture. She was glad; yes, she was glad; but the gladness began to glow less hotly in her: she thought of the wretched homeless fugitive as he had sat on the sands after her rescue of him: for what had she rescued him? — only for fresh torture.
All was still around her in the hush of early day: the only sound was the insect life that is never still on those moors and marshes night and day. The first heavy rains of September had fallen and the refreshed earth was growing once more green, and the fainted leaves arose and stood out in the clear air. The snakes were sorry the drought was gone, but all other living things were glad.
Zirlo, who had sent his goats farther away, strayed back and stood looking at old Cecco, the mule.
‘He is of no use to you?’ he said timidly.
‘No use; no.’
‘Would you not sell him?’ he said more timidly too, thinking of the sensale.
‘T would not sell him.’
‘You would get money for him — much money —— —’
‘I do not want money.’
‘But you want to eat.’
‘I get enough to do that.’
‘ He is old —— —’
‘The more reason to keep him by me; old things fare ill with strangers.’
Zirlo eyed the mule wistfully, and went away a little sulky and a good deal afraid.
‘What will you do in the winter?’ he said fretfully. ‘I cannot leave the goats to run your errands in the winter. Sometimes it snows, too, and I am always very busy. You must go up and live in San Lionardo; that is what you must do.’
‘I shall not do that,’ said Musa; ‘I shall live where I am. You will do my errands in winter and in summer both when you want a bowl full of soup or a handful of mushrooms.’
Then Zefferino cried.
He did not like her to fancy him selfish.
‘For if she once think me so,’ he thought, ‘she will begin to doubt, and to count the centimes.’
But Musa did not count the centimes.
When the heat of noon came, she took the mule down into the painted chambers of the dead, and sat there herself. Zirlo came too; — a pretty little quaint figure, a childish Faunus; — and asked her for a bowl of soup. Then together they ate, using the black earthenware cups and platters that had been strewn on the floor of the tombs: cups and platters made two thousand years before, made for the banquets of the dead, and perhaps profaned by their young lips, yet innocently so.
CHAPTER XIV.
SO THE DAYS passed by and the weeks and the months, and the life was always the same there.
The death of Joconda had left an awful blank of silence and loneliness around her. In its desolation she realised all that the dead woman had been to, and had done for, her, and a great remorse entered into her. She had been too thankless, she had been indifferent, unthinking, hard of heart, so she thought; and she would have given her life to have those brown, wrinkled, rough hands in hers for one hour.
Apart from this great sorrow she was happy in her wild, lonely life on the moor. She had no one to say her yea or nay. She was as free as the wild boar himself; and the wholesome winds of the west blew against her face, and nigh at hand was the green autumn of Maremma.
So she took up her domicile in earnest there, and ceased to feel desolate.
The jewellery was all that Saturnino had robbed from the tombs, and the utensils of bronze and of pottery served all her daily needs. Untroubled by any knowledge of their history and antiquity, yet vaguely moved to reverent use of them because they belonged to these dead owners of the place, whom she revered, she took the bronze oinochoë with her to the water spring, she set her herb-soup on the embers in the bronze situla, she made her oaten bread in the embossed phiale, she drank the broth out of the painted depas, shaped like that cup of the sun in which the Python Slayer once passed across the sea. She used all these things reverently, washed them with careful hands, and never thought they were dishonoured thus.
The Typhon frowned at her from the ceiling of the tomb, and the Dii Involuti turned their impassive faces on her every time she passed out of the stone doors or climbed the steep stair passage to the open air; but she knew nothing of their dread attributes, and though they awed her they did not fill her with any painful fear. She did not understand them; there was no one to explain to her the meanings of the paintings, and carvings, and the letters on the walls; but she grew into a great and tender sympathy with them which was in itself a sort of comprehension.
Even of the terrible shapes she had no fear; the dread winged boy with hoary locks of age, that the Etruscans feared as higher than the gods, had no terror in his frown for her; and the veiled divinities who sat beside the inner door of the warrior’s tomb, who for the dead had been tyrants of fate, mystic, inscrutable, omnipotent, grew to be to her as playmates and as friends. The very twilight and hush and solemn sadness of this place were but so much added sweetness to her. And in her there seemed to have been always that melancholy, and that obedience to destiny, which were the characteristics of the Etruscan religion, even when most they loved the lyre and the lotus garland and the brimming rhyton.
Here was her refuge, her palace, her place of sanctity and dreams; here the native unconscious poetry and passion in her found a likeness to themselves, a consolation for the unlovely life that seemed to pollute the sea and shore in the only group of human habitations that she knew, and which hurt her without her ever tracing the why or wherefore.
She managed to live very well; her wants were few, and the moors supplied all save one or two of her needs, such as oil to burn, and flax to spin, and hens to keep for eggs, and these Zefferino brought to her, being paid for them with scrupulous punctuality out of the two silver pieces that she possessed.
She found she could cut the wild oats in plenty for the old mule, which was all she needed herself, since she could live on the bread she so made, and she could make enough any day in the year for herself and the dog.
It is wonderful how few are the actual wants of a human life that is far away from all artificial stimulus and necessities.
She was up as soon as the white gleam of dawn showed above the barren mountains of the eastern sky-line, and, long before the heavens there grew warm with that sunrise flush which is as bright and deep a rose as any oleander-flower, she said her Latin prayer at daybreak beside the coffin of Joconda, as she had been used to do by her side, tended the mule and the dog, baked her rude loaves, and swept over and burnished her stone chambers and her bronze utensils with those northern habits of cleanliness and order in which the woman of Savoy had reared her.
Then she was free to roam all the day long, and go out upon the sea as she might choose; every day she dipped and dived and swam like any gannet. She bathed twice daily, either in fresh water or salt water, with as much zest as her winged comrades; and she kept her thick hair, that clustered like the bronze curls of a Greek bust, and all her simple apparel clean and in order, obeying all that dead Joconda had enjoined on her as her daily habits, with as implicit an obedience as ever on that soil the Etruscans had shown to the commands of Tages.
That was her fashion of repentance for many a moment of petulance, and many an hour of wilful indifference, which were to her memory as the sting of the spine of the yucca is to the flesh.
Now and then, faintly from a distance, the bells of some hamlet or of some monastery would ring over the plains, and be wafted by the wind to her ear; now and then some shot would sound from some little lagoon, or some thicket of box elder, and wild olive, where the strangers were slaying the natives of the marsh and the moor; this was all she heard of the living world, and she desired to learn no more. She lived with the dead; and something of their cold repose, their ineffable indifference, their passionless defiance of mankind, had come upon her and entered her soul.
She had quite forgotten she was young. She had never known that she was beautiful.
She was not afraid of anything; she had the courage of Saturnino in her blood, and with it the superb innocence of a child’s soul that has never been dimmed by the breath of folly.
Whilst it was summer weather even shepherds and herdsmen were never seen; the flocks were on the mountain, the harvests had been reaped at midsummer, the chase was forbidden by the law; all Maremma was as silent as the heart of the Sahara. Sometimes, against the law, which is utterly defied in this respect all over the country, men would come over the scorching moor at eventide to set their fell net, the square paratoio with its fettered call-bird, and would watch all night at peril of their lives from the swamp-gases, and at daybreak would carry away their poor fluttering struggling prey. But even these were few and far between, because the fever and ague of the marshes had terrors enough to daunt and conquer greed.
In summer she and Zefferino had these moors to themselves, and even Zefferino had been more alarmed at the heat and the fever than she, and stayed for days together upon the wooded spur of his native mountain, where the miasma seldom reached.
So the long days went by, one by one, and were not long to her; and at noontide she slept soundly and dreamlessly within the cool solitude of the tombs, safe as a mole in his castle, refreshed as a coot on the breast of the pool. In the short nights, above all when they were moonlit, she did not care to sleep; she sat at the entrance of the graves with the white dog like a carved marble thing at her feet, and watched the sylvan life that stirs at dark flit over the face of the sky or the shadows of the earth. She could not see the sea, the growth of the low woodland was too thick, but she could hear the surf breaking on the shore, and often when a steamer was passing, or a brig coasting, or a fishing barque standing in under the wind, she could hear the beat of paddles or the rattling of halyards or the voices of fishermen calling to each other.
The sea was near enough to give the sweet sense of its strong companionship, and if she climbed the sandstone only a little way and overlooked the darksome stretch of myrtle and oak scrub, she could, at any moonlit hour, see it sparkling underneath the stars, flowing away into the infinite space of the clouds and the night, phosphorescent, radiant, hushed — the black fantastic crags of Elba borne upon its waters like a barque.
So the end of the summer passed with her untroubled except by that sense of ingratitude towards her lost friend which lay like a stone on her heart. Whenever she knelt by the coffin she said at the close of her prayers always: ‘Dear and good one, forgive me. I was blind!’
The need of companionship never weighed on her. She was unconsciously happy in the air, in the liberty, in the delightful sense of healthful and untrammelled life.
Her mind busied itself with its own vague imaginations, and her mode of life was filled with that sombre mystery which she loved as the Etruscan race had loved it. If she had been shut in the garret or the factory-room of a city, this temper would have become morbid and dangerous in her; but, braced by the daily physical labours of her life, and by the abundant and vigorous exercise of all her bodily powers, it only served to give a solace, and a sort of sublimity, to a fate which would have seemed to many hard and friendless. The moorlands and the moorland sepulchres were made for her and she for them.
The visits of little Zefferino kept her from that absolute solitude which in time hurts the mind and distorts it. He was a very human little thing; greedy, playful, timid, kindly when it cost him nothing, most kindly when he gained most by it; a complete little epitome of humanity clothed in shaggy goat’s hair.
She grew fond of the child, and was indulgent to him with that indulgence of the strong to the weak which is often misunderstood, abused, and preyed upon by the feeble. She knew that he told lies by the hundred, and pilfered when he could, and had no more real heart in him than the red and white pumpkin that keeps the beauty of its quaint shell whilst the summer sun has sucked up all its pulp inside it. Yet he was loving and lovable in his own way, and Musa, who thought he loved her, was glad to see him always as she was glad to see the birds and flowers.
They were more truly her companions, however, than he. She was always in the air, except when the sudden and frequent storms of the Maremma drove her perforce into the shelter of the sepulchre, although the ‘bolt-hurling gods’ of the tempests had no terror for her as they had had for the Tyrrhenian multitude who had seen divine wrath in every electric flash, and heard imprecation and prophecy in every roll of thunder that echoed from the Apennine to the Ciminian hills.
The white straight rain, the slanting wind-blown showers, the blackness of hurrying storm-charged cloud, the strange yellow light that made the leaves look like foliage cast in copper and the skies like a vault of brass, the ominous hiss and shriek of the wind that made the slow buffaloes gallop fast with fear, and filled the air with the hurrying wings of frightened birds, all these were to her only as the sound of trumpet and the smell of powder to the war-horse. The storms were fierce and swift, and rent like a veil the drowsy languor and heat of the usual atmosphere. She would see them coming over the sea from the west at sunset, or gathering above the southern horizon, where the Roman Campagna and the Pontine marshes were steaming with vapour.
When the autumn arrived, she was undismayed by the prospect of winter there, although she felt afraid that it would be more difficult to keep out of sight of men in the season when the waterfowl and the roebuck and the boar were hunted from dawn to twilight in their native haunts.
At this time of the year, too, the flocks came down from the mountains, footsore, travel-tired, with the shepherd and his woman and children behind them footsore also, and the white dogs that were kin to Leone running among the bleating sheep. She saw these travelling tribes more than once; dusty jaded crowds moving slowly over the marsh and moor. The shepherds are solitary and sullen people for the most part, and instead of a crook they often have a carbine. She avoided them and let them pass on southward to the rich low pastures, afraid that if they knew of her retreat they might rob her of it. As little did she like the hunters who harried the boar in his brake and shot the wildfowl in the marshes. What harm did those wild boars do, living on the roots of the earth and the acorns, or the lovely green-throated drake of the swamp floating his little day away amongst the weeds and lilies?
Except these, there were not many newcomers to fear, her own immediate portion in the Etruscan kingdom was so overgrown with thickets and low timber and matted parasites that walking was almost impracticable, and a bill-hook was needed at almost every step, and the quagmires and swamps that separated it from the vast grain fields to the north deterred all save the boldest and the hardiest from adventuring there.
It never occurred to her that her life would alter. Of love she knew nothing, and marriage, when she thought about it, seemed to her, as she had said to Andreino, an unequal and unjust division of toil.
Her only fear of men was lest, if they knew of her beloved tombs, they might drive her out and rifle them of the bronze and the pottery as the galley-slave had done of the gold. It was for that reason alone that she scanned the horizon with the keenness of the roebuck, and fled at any sound of steps into the shelter of the thorny coverts with the self-preserving instinct of the mountain hare.
The chill season was at hand, but she was not much in awe of it; she was only afraid lest those sportsmen whose guns echoed over the lonely wastes, or the labourers from the north who passed by on their way to level some remnant of sacred wood or of historic forest, should see her and wonder and talk.
She grew learned in all the ways of nature, and, could she have told or written all she saw, would have lent much to the world’s knowledge of fauna and of flora. In proportion as she fled from man so she grew familiar with and endeared to the beasts and birds that filled the moorland with innocent life, and with as deep an interest as ever the Etruscan priests had watched them, to forecast from them augury of the future, did she watch in awe and ecstasy that miracle — perhaps of all the greatest miracle — of nature, the migration of the winged nations of the air.
She did not know what these flights meant, but she observed and pondered on them with intense curiosity and interest as the winged tribes changed their feeding grounds, and came, and went; the northern birds arriving as the songsters of the south fled.
A triangle of silvery grey would float slowly down the yellow light of closing day; it was the phalanx of the storks passing over the country without resting there; wisely distrusting the land beyond all others fatal to all birds. Less wise, though usually so cautious in his ways, there flew here in large bands the bright and gracious lapwing from the frozen canals of the Low Countries and the German forests covered deep in snow.
In a waving line, graceful against the sky as the sway of a reed against the water, a band of the glossy ibis would go by on their aërial voyage to Egypt or to India. The crows sailed over her head from Switzerland or Sweden, not pausing, or, if pausing at all, dropping on the moor for a few days of rest only, and going straight towards the Soudan or the Blue Nile. The ever-wandering quails fell, in autumn as in spring, panting and exhausted in millions on the beach and turf, so strangely ill-fitted by nature for the long, almost perpetual, flight that nature impelled them to undertake.
There would break upon the silence of the moors at night a sound as of flames crackling and hissing over dry turf and through dry wood; and it was but the noise of a mile-long troop of wild ducks coming from the Polar seas to the Tuscan lagoons.
The kittiwake and the tarn and the storm swallow forsook their Finnish fjords and Greenland rocks to come and fish in the blue Ligurian waves. The graceful and vivacious actodroma, and the trustful sanderling, alighted here in simple good faith to escape the death grip of the Arctic ice. The cheery godwits settled upon sea or sand, and looked like clouds of silvery smoke touched by red rays of flame. The shore was peopled with the feathered exiles of the north, whilst, inland, the common buzzards arrived with the first gold of autumn to wage war on rats and snakes in honest open combat; the superb merganser spread his bright plumage to the sun and surf of this unfamiliar shore; and the sea-mew less confidently trusted himself to the south-west sands, where the aloe, and the hesperis, and many an unknown thing growing there, startled him as he made for the inland pools and streams. The laughing-mew and the stream-swallow sought the shelter of the rushes and the reeds, and most of the family of the gulls were to be seen upon the wing above the shallows where sea and river blended. More rarely, and alone, might perchance be seen the northern oyster-catcher (misnamed) hunting his worms and tiny fish in the shallows of the shore, meeting perchance the merry turnstone bent on the same quest, but never wetting his slender feet more than by contact with wet pebbles he was compelled to do. Whilst, by the side of the polar piscatricides, with their plumage of snow-white or grey, there were along the line of the breaking waves, and oftener beside the shallows of the swamps, slender and lofty shapes of radiant rose colour, bending their slim long necks, lithe as wands of willow, or standing motionless and dreaming in the wintry sunshine on the sands; they were the flamingoes.
