Delphi collected works o.., p.499
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 499
The men worked there till ten at night, and then were called off to their prisons, while the sea grew alive with the boats for the spearing, and a myriad of little golden lights sparkled on the water as the fire-flies do on the land, and the whole seafaring population of the coast, from ten miles up and down, strained, and leaped, and cursed, and laughed, and wrangled, and shouted as the shoal of fish was murdered.
All the uproar, and the mirth, and the quarrels, and the triumphs failed to divert the young skipper from his thoughts. He pulled out alone to his good brig, and spent the night on his own deck, astonished and perplexed.
With morning he tried again to get an instant’s speech with Saturnino,
In vain he spent his day by the sea-wall watching the labours of the gang. It was sunset again before he could seize a moment when the overseer was occupied, and Mastarna had been allowed to pause in his ox-like toil. Then he said quickly, in a whisper:
‘Are you truly her father?’
‘She has the face of the woman I loved most; she has the face of Serapia,’ answered the galley-slave. ‘When I was taken first I gave her to a woman of Santa Tarsilla. I see she knows nought of me. Last year she saved and sheltered me; but then I scarce looked at her. I was half-drowned, and mad with hunger. I took the gold toys out of the place she hid me in. I would rather she should never know —— —’
‘Why do you tell me, then?’
‘Because, by your eyes as you walked beside her, I saw that you loved her; and for her sake, perhaps, you will free me.’
‘Free you!’
Daniello stared at him in amaze, forgetting how absolutely the one single longing to escape filled all the thoughts, and ate up all the soul, of this mountain-eagle, who was caged by the hot sea-shore.
The heart of Saturnino had thrilled with a sudden memory of tenderness as he had seen the girl in whom he had recognised Serapia’s daughter; but far stronger and more absorbing in him was his own thirst for deliverance. It was aimost the only instinct left in him, and the few weeks that he had been free on his own hills in the summer before — all wretched, hungry, filled with fear, and compelled to concealment, though they were — had been so sweet to him, that night and day since he had been captured afresh he had meditated escape; schemed for it, lived for it, scarcely felt the heat of the sun or the cold of the wind, the aching of his old wounds or the lash of the overseer’s whip, for thinking every moment — could he get away?
He would have torn himself from his trap as the eagle does, leaving its foot wrenched off behind it. The thirst for the liberty of the hills was like a madness on him.
To his gaolers and his companions in misery he never spoke. If he could have slain them all and so escaped, he would have done it.
‘She is beautiful and her mother was noble,’ he muttered. ‘The woman who took her was a good woman. There was love in your eyes as you looked at her; one gives the world for that — I have not forgotten. Will you help me to get free for her sake?’
‘You would torment her —— —’
‘No; I might have called to the gaolers yesterday, and if I had said to them “yonder child is of my blood,” they would have let me speak to her. But I would not. I stole her gold toys; I would rather she should never know —— — You are a sailor, you have a ship; if you can get me away, take me to Sardinia. There are Mastarna men there; kindred of mine. They, too, live by the mountains; they would make me welcome —— —’
The overseer turned and resumed his walk near them.
Saturnino lapsed into the sullen silence he had preserved since his capture.
‘I will see you again,’ murmured the Sicilian, and for prudence sake he left the sea-wall and went towards the town to summon those of his sailors who were drinking and domino-playing at the wine-houses.
To do what the galley-slave asked him might be utter ruin and disgrace to him; it might cost him his vessel, and his liberty, and his good name. If he helped the captive to cheat the law, the law would most likely find out his complicity and fling him in turn into its prisons; and he knew well that Saturnino Masturna had been a murderer, not once, but many times; that his crimes against the law were dark and numberless, that he was still a wild beast ready to tear even the hand that aided him.
Yet it hurt him to leave the man there in his hourly torment, in his hopeless misery, and who could tell, if he were left thus, growing more and more brutish and desperate every day, how he might not in sheer despair call upon his daughter to drink his cup of bitterness with him? Or if he escaped by himself, might he not seek her out and compel her to shelter him afresh, and bury her youth for ever underneath the weight of his own secrecy and cult? If it were possible to rescue him, would it not be well done for her sake?
He was generous, and he took little thought, and the memory of Musa was with him, potent and intoxicating as the fumes of strong wine; her coldness, her scorn, her strength enhanced her beauty of person to him. The dangerous race she sprang from gave her a mystery and a magic the more. To the northern mind and worldly knowledge of Sanctis this lineage had seemed the most terrible of all inheritance. But to the Sicilian it made her look the lovelier; as Persephone looked to her lover when the darkness of the shades was about her instead of the flowering fields.
That in her veins ran the bold, fierce blood of the Mastarna of the Apennine rocks was but a reason the more for him to long to bear her away on the deck of his own good brig, and dwell with her under the dark green orange-groves beside his own blue sea, and make her the happy mother of dauntless children who would ride the waves like the dolphin and nautilus.
CHAPTER XXVII.
ESTE’S HAD BEEN the usual tranquil, amorous, unoccupied life of young Italian men in old Italian cities that are away from the common track of travel: a life of sleepy calm, of often harmless dalliance, that usually has its story told from birth to death within the circle of the old town walls. Why not? Men used to be greater when they lived only on one spot, and more content. Unhappily, now, the greatness and the content are gone, because that which used to be repose too often 1s now but apathy, languor, rust.
He had studied under monks in an ecclesiastical college, ancient and solemn in art and architecture, where no boy laughed above his breath, and a Greek chorus was second to a Latin hymn. There he had grown up a beautiful, graceful, pensive lad, in a home straitened by penury and made austere by devotion, but keeping something of the stateliness of grander times.
To drop slowly down the wide lagoons and thread the mazes of the reed-thickets was his chief, often his only, occupation; to make his mandoline throb a love-lay under some old sculptured casement, where some fancy of the hour was hiding behind a curtain of frayed velvet or tattered tapestry, was his sole diversion. There was enough to live on; that slender pittance that kept his father and himself in a corner of the dark old palace would be enough for him to live on afterwards. No one spoke to him of action or of ambition; they were unknown words in Mantua; he lived through his years as idly and as thoughtlessly as any one of the dragon-flies above the rushes lived out their summer hour. If he were pensive and serious, it was only because the spirit of the place was on him and the sense of narrow fortunes curbed his youth.
Then, when he was twenty-four, this passion for an old man’s young wife came on him with force and sorcery, and changed the whole tenor of his dreaming, sleepy days. He lived thenceforward only for one woman, in all the beguiling mystery of a secret and mutual love.
What he saw now was the beauty of that dead mistress. There is no coldness so unchanging, so unyielding, so absolute, as the coldness of one who loves what is lost. Actually, he never saw Musa with any eyes that realised her beauty or her girlhood.
He saw some one who was good to him in his sickness and extremity; that was all. The woman slain in Mantua, with the cruel hole in her breast and the datura lilies red with her blood, was for ever between him and this creature who tended him, fed him, sheltered him, saved him.
He had passed through one of those terrible hours in life which even in the most sensual temperaments burn out for the moment all fires of sense and quench desire in horror. He loved with all his force the woman murdered in Mantua; and yet he knew she was dead, dead, dead — a putrid thing pushed away under the friable, watery soil. The terror of that, the ghastliness of it, the despair of it, froze the blood in his veins. What was this girl to him?
No more than the empty lamps of the tomb whose lights had been out two thousand years.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
NAUSICAA, IN THE safe shelter of her father’s halls, had never tended Odysseus with more serenity and purity than the daughter of Saturnino tended his fellow-slave.
The sanctity of the tombs lay on them, the dead were so near; neither profanity or passion seemed to have any place here in this mysterious twilight alive with the memories of a vanished people. Her innocence was a grand and noble thing, like any one of the large white lilies that rose up from the noxious mud of the marshes: a cup of ivory wet with the dewdrops of dawn, blossoming fair on fetid waters. And in him the languor of sickness and of despair borrowed unconsciously for awhile the liveries of chastity; and he spoke no word, he made no gesture, that would have scared from its virginal calm the soul of this lonely creature, who succoured him with so much courage and so much compassion that they awed him with the sense of an eternal, infinite, and overwhelming obligation.
It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.
To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower nature feels it always as a clog that impatiently is dragged only so long as force compels.
Which nature was Este’s he would not have known himself.
At times, indeed, the weight of his debt to the fellow-creature who had sheltered him came upon him with a shock, and startled him at its vastness. But commonly he thought no more of it than the cuckoo thinks of debt to the tree-sparrow in whose nest he lies so safely whilst April storms shake off the April blossoms.
All she did for him was done so simply, so wholly as a matter of course, that no mute claim on her part, even of look or gesture, ever recalled to him that she owed him no more duty than she owed to any hill-fox or wounded scops who should have hidden itself in her retreat.
Sometimes he liked to talk to her; it took him in a measure out of himself to tell her those facts or traditions of science or history which to her seemed like tales of magic. Sometimes he liked to hear her sing the mournful sea-songs of the people, though oftener the sound of the mandoline hurt him with an intolerable pain, recalling to him the moonlit nights in Mantua, when his lyric underneath her walls had told his love that his boat was there, casting its shadow on the reedy waters, white with the shining of the moonbeams.
But always she was no more to him than the slave had been to the Lucumo. Her strength, her courage, her directness of speech, her power of exertion, all made her seem to him rather a youth than a girl. He had loved a woman with soft, idle hands, and languid, inert limbs, no more capable of facing the hurricane or steering through the winter waves than a peacock in his pomp of purple is capable of breasting the breeze, or cleaving the breakers, with the gyps-vulture or the storm-swallow.
He had loved one who was as useless as the painted butterfly, as lovely and as idle as the lotus floating on its broad green leaves, rocked on the rippling water.
This creature, all strength, and daring, and continual effort, had for the moment, at least, no woman’s charm for him as he saw her come home from her day’s hard labour, bearing on her shoulders the faggot of sticks, or the sheave of bracken, and in her hand the fishing-nets, and the sickle or the hatchet. So might have looked any maiden of Tempe or of Calydon; so might have looked Theocritus’ love when the Sicilian vales were lilac with the meadow mint, and rent by autumn gales.
As these she had looked to Maurice Sanctis. But Este, though he knew the pastoral poets by heart, did not see her with those eyes. For him her humble daily cares of him obscured her beauty, as in days of old it obscured for mortals the divinity of those gods who came amidst them, and drove their ploughshares and sat beside their hearths.
If he had known of Daniello Villamagna, with his face like a Veronese portrait, and his sinewy elastic frame, and stately yet supple movements, some pulse of anger might have quickened in him, and with it some smart of sudden appreciation.
But she never spoke of the Sicilian sailor; some vague instinct locked her lips about him, though a little while before she had opened them so carelessly to Maurice Sanctis. So to Este she remained nothing more than a dryad of the lonely woods, who scarcely touched him with any sense of the sea in her; a genius alba who ministered to his dire need and saved him from his hunters, but who came and went without receiving one impulse in him to keep her hand in his, and say to her, ‘I am beggared of love: make me once more rich.’ So nothing troubled the perilous peace in which she dwelt; and the autumn deepened into winter, and the rainstorms deluged the earth above, and she was still innocent as Nansicaa, he was still sacred to her as Odysseus.
She did not know her own heart.
She did not know why all the ardour of the Sicilian left her hard and scornful; why all the gentleness of Sanctis had left her cold and thankless; and why one languid smile from Este’s eyes, one listless word from his mouth, made her grateful and full of joy.
She was drinking at that fatal fountain which Joconda once had feared that she would drink so deeply from that she would drown. But its waters were clear and harmless at her lips as yet; she could not tell that there was poison in them and bitter after-taste.
She did not even know the name of this fount at which all pilgrims of earth drink soon or late. She tended him as she had tended the wounded dotterel from the Polar seas. She loved him as she had loved that; but passion was still dumb and slumbering in her. Often in youth it lies and dreams like Endymion, and would never wake but for the kiss that startles sleep, and changes the dream into desire.
Once awakened, that peaceful rest, careless on the crushed cowslips, can come back no more.
So the months went on, and the days renewed themselves, each like the other; filled to her with bodily exertion that had become delightful because no longer for her own sake alone, and to him with the dull, heavy, stupid pain that men of cultured mind feel when they are barred out from the world of other men and from the face of nature.
He told her all he knew of the Etruscan nation; all (that all so little) which Pliny and Dionysius and Silius Italicus have told; all the old tales that the Etruscans cherished, and he himself had read in dreamy boyish days of drowsy Mantuan summers — the old, old tales of Ulysses and his son; of the Dioscuri, whose images were engraved on the mirror she used; of Diomedes, snatched to the gods upon the Adrian isle, and his companions changed to birds.
He pictured to her the grand and puissant lucumonies that have perished so utterly off the face of the earth that even their records have perished; he pictured to her the people driving their cattle and carrying their corn to the forests dedicated to Feronia, to exchange them with the Umbrians, the Latins, and the Sabines; the white sacred cattle drawing the brazen ploughshare through the moist green soil, to trace the walls of cities to be; the long, prosperous, ease-loving and luxurious life that was led through so many centuries within those cities’ walls when raised, doomed to succumb and change and die out, little by little, when the tramp and the clang of the Legions came over the mountains, and the greed of consul and of emperor robbed the land of her marbles of Luini, of her temple-columns, of her bronze and her gold work, of her delicate potteries, of her colossal statues.
The brother of Fabius Maximus, with his slave, disguised as shepherds of Gaul, with javelins and sickles, wending their perilous way through the darkness of the dreaded Ciminian woods, and descending to the rich plains and the stately cities to propose the admittance of that mission from Rome which was ultimately to be the curse of Etruria; the augurs tracing with their wand the lines of separation on the heavens, watching the flight of herons, of storks, of crows, to gather the secrets of the future, taking warning or counsel from the play of lightning on the heads of the spears, worshipping with blood-sacrifice Jupiter Elicius amidst the thunders of the storm; the fifty-oared armed galleys going out from the sunny crowded ports, some up the tawny Tiber, some away to Spina for the tin and amber come overland from the far Scandinavian waters, some by the Ægean coasts to the gorgeous and languid lands of the East, where the Tyrrhene mariners were welcomed as brethren and sons; the sunlit towns now level with the dust, then strong with colossal bastions and ramparts, graceful with temples and with statues, stately with religious feasts and princely banquets; the son of Atys setting sail with his famished Lydians from Smyrna; the Tyrrhene pirates capturing Dionysos, and changed for their sin into water-spouting dolphins; the Persian faith brought with the Persian eagles to the Italiote soil; the great Etruscan confederations gathering in harmony at the temple of Voltumna; the oxen drawing the fair Carrara marbles into the port of Luna, to make the altars of the beloved orchard-god, or the likeness of the divine Cytharœdus — all these things he set before her in vivid language, and as she followed his words she saw all that they portrayed; she heard the brazen bray of the Lydian trumpets, she saw the purple glow of the Lydian robes; when she went down to the edge of the sea, she thought of the Navigium of Isis, as the people had gathered for it on those very shores with their torches flaming against the daffodil light of a March morning; when she collected the broken boughs of the seapines for fuel, she thought of the tree laid low in symbol of lost Attis, and borne garlanded with flowers to the shrine of the Mighty Mother.
And when he told her that all this Etruscan and Latin life had been lived long ere the Galilean gathered his disciples from the fishers of the lake side; and that before this yet again, in long ages ere the Italiote or the Tyrrhene had turned a sod of the soil of Maremma, all these green, wet, shining woodlands and red blossoming grasslands had been the haunt of the meridional elephant, of the armoured rhinoceros, of the terrible machairodus, of the huge hippopotamus, and, later than that, of the mammoth and the lion and the bear coming down over the Alps as the Goths did after them — then her eager imagination, starved so long, fed itself on all these wonders with entranced delight, and he who told her of them seemed to her a magician as marvellous in power as the Etruscan aruspice had seemed to the Etruscan slave.
