Delphi collected works o.., p.509
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 509
‘You promised that I should be sacred to you,’ she said with a timid protest, scarcely daring to recall to him the first hours of his asylum there, lest in so doing she should seem to make of his shelter a debt.
‘What is more sacred than what we love?’ he murmured, with the music in his voice which stole all the strength out of her and lulled to drowsy gladness all her vague unrest.
Then with a sudden pang of memory she said to him:
‘And what is it that you love? Not me. If you were free to-morrow, would you stay, of your own will?’
He was silent.
‘We would go away together,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Go away as the swallows you watch for, go. Ah! why do you speak of the impossible!’
‘If you did love me indeed,’ she said, wistfully and gravely, ‘this place would be to you more than all the palaces of earth. If they offered me a palace such as you tell me of, I would not go to it, for we met here.’
He sighed with impatience and regret.
So once had been dear to him the grass-grown streets, the reed-filled waters, the melancholy ways, of ruined Mantua, because there at evening-time, when the white gnats came in clouds about the old bronze fanali, by the lamp-light, behind a grated casement, he had seen one woman’s face.
That had been love; even though it were dead now, killed with the same daggerthrust that had killed her.
‘You are free to walk abroad,’ he said, with vexed impatience. ‘Were you a prisoner as I have been, and as I am, you would know that one curses one’s prison, and would curse it though its walls were alabaster and its bars were gold. I am not thankless to these tombs, but they are tombs; and in them I am buried, alive, as the Etruscans were buried, dead. Do ever you think of the future? I do, when I dare, and it would soon make me mad if I thought long. Shall we live here together, you and I, till we are old? — here, in the twilight, like two bats? Shall we never breathe without fear? shall we never hear an owl hoot without dread? Shall we see the seasons come and go, and never count the year by more than that? Shall I hear the sheep scamper above my head, and for ever envy them that they can trot at will amongst the thyme? Shall I watch age come upon your face, and you watch it in mine, and have no other record of time than the white hairs that come upon our heads? Shall we grow stupid or desperate, you and I, in all those years? Shall we lose our wits, living like this, shut away from all the world? Will the day come when we shall curse each other as I have lived to curse Aloysia? —— —’
His passionate utterance broke down; the dread and horror of his own visions overcame him; his eyes grew fixed and glazed as if he saw painted on the walls the shadow of those ghastly endless years to come?
She said nothing.
Pain seemed to ache through her heart as if some hard hand closed on and bruised it. If he had loved her indeed, the rocky prison would have smiled to him with heaven’s sunshine; the world of men would have been as nought; the years would have been blent in one long dream without awaking once. Herself she would have asked no better thing than this; to live thus always, hidden from human sight, undivided by any envious claim, alone in the soft twilight of this undisputed home, together, until age or death should find them both and they would rest for ever here, with the myrtle blossoms dropping on the rock above, and the wild-birds calling under the wild olive. She thought that even dead she would hear the murmur of the cushat and the woodlark’s hymn.
He saw the softness come into her gaze, the sigh come upon her lips.
‘Ah, why will you not give me love at least!’ he cried. ‘We should snatch some joy at least from fate! —— —’
He had that skill which always made her feel that she herself had erred.
Was she wrong to shrink away when he spoke thus? Was he not so unhappy that she ought to give him any peace she could? Ought she not to put her arms about his throat and kiss him on the eyes?
She doubted; she wondered; she was dissatisfied and ashamed at herself.
‘So long ago, when I was but a child,’ she said timidly, ‘Joconda made me promise — I did not know well what she meant — that no man’s hand should touch me without the blessimg of God upon it. Now I do know: you and I cannot go up to any house of God in the open day as others can do when they will; and I must keep my word to her, she is not living to release me.’
He looked at her askance in surprise, chagrin, annoyance, and perplexity.
Must these dead souls, so still and helpless, with the lids of their coffins shut down on them, come thus perpetually, one or another, betwixt himself and her? And could she think that, were he free to walk abroad in open day, it was to take the way to the house of God that his steps would turn with her?
A sombre irritation rose up in him.
Could he never pluck it out, this ‘bit of sweet basil’ that was her superstition and defence?
‘You do not love me,’ he said with a great chillness in his voice that sank on her heart like ice. ‘Love does not reason so. It sees no past, because it knows it never lived before. Such ignorant vows women have taken in all ages, and in all ages have broken them for men. You cling to yours because you do not love me. Call the Sicilian back, or Sanctis. They can go out in daylight where you will.’
The injustice was so keenly cruel, so brutal in its very quietude, that it seemed to her to cut her very heart in two as with a knife. With the subtle adroit skill of unscrupulous argument, he turned her truthfulness and her simplicity against her, and made her feel as though in some way she had sinned to him.
‘I want nothing with them; I have sent them away,’ she said, whilst the emotion she repressed made the veins of her throat swell with the sob she checked lest it should weary him. ‘Why cannot we live as we have lived? We were so happy so; now you are always angered, always reproaching me. How can you doubt me? Since that midsummer night you came here, I have had no other thought than you.’
‘Those are words,’ said Este with impatience. ‘Kiss me once, and I will believe —— —’
The colour came up over her throat and cheeks and brow; a tremor went over her.
‘I promised her, and she is dead,’ she said wistfully, while her voice was low and grave.
He flung himself away from her in wayward wrath.
‘You place an old lifeless hag before me, and you dare to say you love me!’ he cried with a child’s petulance and a man’s furious injustice.
‘You hurt me!’ she murmured, with an unconscious cry of pain. He wounded her, stung her, bewildered her, tortured her; and yet she did not turn on him. She only vaguely felt that she had been to blame, and that he was too harsh in punishment and hurt her.
Este did not answer.
He did not even look at her; he picked up his rude modelling tools and set a mass of the river clay on the slab of nenfro where he usually worked.
She watched him awhile, in wistful silence, as a dog chastised watches its master. Receiving no word, no sign, no glance, she took her billhook from its corner and a coil of cord, and went out into the air to go into the thickets and cut heath and broom for firing.
‘Which of your lovers waits for you on the moors today?’ he cried to her with bitterness and irritation.
‘Lovers I have none,’ she said, as she paused in the entrance-place and looked back at him. ‘You I love with all my soul — but you do not understand.’
‘Nor you,’ he said with wrath. ‘You think a living man can be loved as you love a swathed mummy in her coffin. You have lived in these stone graves till you are as cold as they. You think the blood in one’s veins 1s water —— —’
A sigh quivered all through her; the hot blush came on her face again, half in shame and half in anger.
Did he call her cold — she in whose veins the blood was lava?
Cold! Who would do for him what she would do? who would give her life for him as she would give it, fighting for him as the stork and the eagle fight for their nest in the air?
‘Maybe that I am what you think,’ she said with some bitterness. ‘They call me the Musoncella.’
He let her go without more effort to detain her. She went out amidst the wild olive and myrtle and arbutus, and worked hard in the clear winter air, as the bittern sent his loud love-call over the water of the pool, and the brown partridge flitted from under the rosemary.
As she cut the withered shrubs and made them up in bundles, the tears she would not shed before him fell upon the billhook and the heath, and dimmed for her all the purple shadows of the moors and the sapphire heights of the enclosing mountains.
Where the bittern was calling near at hand, there was a broad sheet of water set within a frame of olive and willow and sedge: a shining steel-grey pond, reflecting on its bosom the shapes of the clouds and the blue of the heavens.
In this pond the bos butor stood sending his long deep call to his mate, stooping his head down into the water and spouting its spray into the air as he uttered his continuous music. The female listened with closed eyes and body gently swaying above the yellow reeds, lulled to delight by the sonorous chaunt that he was intoning, in her honour and for her wooing, over those solitary shallows.
The strange sound came to the human creature, to whom love was so perplexed and bitter-sweet a thing; she rested from her work with her hand upon her hip and the dry heath about her; she looked along the grey screen of the willow and olive bough, and saw the wild bird of the marshes and his mate yet unwon.
They were happy together there amidst the glancing water and the winter boughs. Love was the law of life, the gift and glory of all nature. Why not for her? Why not?
She knew so little of it.
She scarcely yet understood what she felt herself, and still less what he felt. To her innocence, his anger was unintelligible; to her ignorance, their life as it had been seemed so sweet that she could not comprehend why it only filled him with dissatisfaction and discontent. Herself, she would have asked no better than to live on so until death should find them out together.
Tenderness had awakened in her long before passion. For many a month it was as a devoted sister that she loved him; and only slowly and at intervals did the deeper, hotter springs of life stir in her; beside there was always, on her, like the cold and heavy hand of a dead thing, the memory of what he had loved in Mantua.
To the concentrated and intense nature which so many hours of solitude and so much silent unuttered thought had made even graver and more passionate than it was by instinct, it seemed impossible that a woman he had adored should have passed out of his life because death had taken her. The terrible might and melancholy of that story, which had thrilled on her ear the first night she heard it told, and sunk into her very heart as she had listened, weighed on her still. He might forget; she could not.
That dagger-stroke in Mantua seemed to her to unite him with that dead woman in indissoluble union.
She did not know that tragedies drift out of the memories of men as wrecked ships sink from sight under a rising tide; she did not know that ‘violent delights have violent endings,’ and that passion is not always love, nor even love always remembrance. She did not know that over a man’s soul the sirocco of the senses blows madly for a day, and then often dies down and leaves but dust behind it.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE DAY FOLLOWING she said to him:
‘There is no more flour and there is no more wine; I must go to Telamone. I have a roll of cloth that I have spun to sell. Shall I go today?’
He looked at her in doubt.
‘Do you go to meet the Sicilian sailor?’ he said bitterly, and was ashamed of himself as he did so.
‘It is not fair to say so to me,’ she answered him patiently. ‘Though I did meet him, what would it matter? I have no eyes that see him. Wherever I go it is you who go with me. You know that.’
‘I know I am not worthy of your answer!’ he said with instant repentance.
‘It is but the truth, she said simply. ‘As for the sailor, I think he is far away, by this time. Shall I go to Telamone today?’
‘Do as you wish; you are wiser than I.’
‘I must take the boat if I go; I cannot carry the cloth all the way by land. Pray, pray be prudent. Do not burn a fire by day, the smoke might be seen; it passes upward through that hole in the rock; I saw it myself yesterday. If a shepherd saw, he might come.’
‘Put the fire out, if it trouble you.’
‘Without it you are cold, I know; down here it is cold, though above the sun is so hot. Ah, that you could but see the light.’
‘I see it through your eyes as blind men do by eyes they love.’
She was silent; she busied herself in getting ready the strong linen cloth she had spun in the winter, and in getting ready also the simple meal that he would require in her absence. For herself a crust of bread taken with her was enough.
‘The first nightingales sang last night,’ she said. ‘Did you hear them?’
‘No; do you know what I hear when I sleep or lie awake at night? I hear your voice always, saying cruel things.’
She coloured and did not answer him.
Was she cruel? — and to him?
It was early day, the sun had but just come over the mountains; there was a loud piping and trilling of birds above ground amongst the myrtle and olive.
She was ready to go; she had the cloth rolled in a bale, which she would carry on her shoulder. She looked at him wistfully; a great longing came over her to drop down at his feet and bury her face upon his knees and cry out to him— ‘I am thy servant, thy dog, thy love!’
But she was haunted by the memory of the dead Mantuan woman, and by the remembered words of Joconda; she restrained the passion of tenderness that welled up in her as the moment of her own departure drew nigh. She placed before him all that he might need during the day, and without meeting his eyes said to him: ‘Farewell for a little while. Be careful, oh I pray you! Be careful.’
‘Why should I take any care?’ he said bitterly. ‘If we are for ever to live thus, Gorgona will be less pain to me than where you are.’
She gave a quick sigh, and without answer took up the bale of homespun cloth and mounted the steps of the entrance.
When she parted the boughs and emerged into the open air the glory of a dazzling morning was sparkling all around her on the brimming waters and the dewy earth.
A hare was peacefully nibbling at the grass; a jay was swaying on a bough and meditating his own homeward flight; further away in the distance, against the light, there was a pretty group of a mare and two foals; down in the dark green rosemary bushes at her feet a pair of green grossbeaks, hardly to be told from the shrub, were pecking in play at one another.
‘If only he could come into the air!’ she thought with passionate pain.
What use are the most loving eyes of others to the blind shut in the impenetrable darkness of their own calamity?
She could do for him what the sister, or wife, or daughter does for the blind man; she could watch for peril for him, bring him food, labour that he should live; but she could not lead him from the gloom up into the light, she could not make him rejoice in the green world that was renewing its youth.
An impulse of longing to look on him once more made her retrace her steps, and made her kneel, leaning down to look through that cleft in the rock roof of the tomb which she had made in the earliest days of her occupation of the tombs, that by its orifice the smoke of her wood fire might escape.
Through the fissure she saw straight down into the chamber where she had first found the golden warrior on his bier. She saw Este as he sat in the stone chair once sculptured there for visitants to the dead. His body was bent, his arms lay outstretched on the table of nenfro that held his modelling tools, his head was bowed down on them; his whole attitude expressed the unnerved, weary, hopeless dejection of a man to whom life was valueless.
The sight of him thus smote her as if with a blow. He called her cruel: was she in truth cruel? Was she cruel as one who denies water to a chained dog, air to a caged eagle? Did she indeed give him a stone when he craved bread?
A vague, heavy sense of wrong done by her to him went with her over the broad moors and meadows, and along the shining sands of the shores.
She got her boat out and pushed it into the water and loosened her little sail.
The wind was favourable to her, and the boat danced buoyantly on its southward way. But her heart was heavy as lead.
When the swell of the Sasso Scritto rose up between her and her moors, she felt as if she had bade him farewell for ever.
For once she had no eyes for the gannets gathering above the sea for their northward flight, for the rock-martins flying along the face of the cliff, for the sandpipers tripping amongst the samphire of the shore, for the curlews screaming above the estuary.
She had told him the truth.
She only saw him wherever she went.
No one would buy her cloth at any reasonable price at Telamone; she knew what she ought to get for it, and was unwilling to sell it for too little. Most of the people there were poor, and the few who were not so were mean. She saw nothing to do but to try at Orbetello. The wind was all in her favour, and the sea, though boisterous, was no stormier than pleased her, sea-gull as she had been called so long.
The boat beneath her, as it rose and sank and leaped the crests of this wave and of that, was to her as the horse is to the fearless rider. The sea was so familiar to her; she was at home upon it as any one of the storm swallows after which they had named her in her babyhood.
The red and green of the tufa land, the deep shadows of the pine-woods, the pale aloe-dotted shores, the distant mountains amethyst and purple as the mists cleared from them, flew by her rapidly; a belt of seething, wind-blown, sunny water flashing and heaving between herself and them.
At Orbetello she could sell her linen, not over well but at a fairly decent price.
She rested a little, ate her bread, and bought for a small bronze coin a plateful of cooked rice; then she purchased the wine and the flour she needed at home, and put the rest of the money she had earned safely away in the breast of her tunic.
