Delphi collected works o.., p.977
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 977
‘Open a grave! Nay, nay, the saints forbid.’
‘The saints! That is how all weaklings and cowards talk. What harm could it do any saint in heaven for you to get those magic things? If they be the devil’s toys and tools, as you say, more reason to pluck them out of holy ground.’
‘How you go on!’ muttered Caris, whose slower brain was scared and terrified by his companion’s rapid and fearless strides of thought. ‘Heaven have mercy on us! You would have me commit sacrilege! Rifle a tomb! Holy Christ! and that tomb my mother’s!’
The sweat stood on his brow, and made the chestnut curls of his hair wet as with dew or rain.
Santina poured into his all the magnetic force and fire of her own eyes, shining in the dusk like some wild cat of the woods.
‘Sacrilege! whew! Where got you that big word? You put the things in; you can take the things out. Your mother will sleep sounder without them. I want them, my lad, do you understand? I want them. And what I want I get from those who love me; and those who deny me, hate me, and I hate them.’
Caris shuddered as he heard.
‘I love you,’ he stammered. ‘Do not hate me — for pity’s sake, do not hate me.’
‘Obey me, then,’ she said, with her dark level brows contracting over her luminous eyes.
‘In anything else!’
‘Oh, ay! It is always anything else, except the one thing which is wanted!’
‘But what is it you want?’
‘I want the charms and the wand and the book out of your mother’s grave.’
‘What could you do with them? Without the knowledge, they are no more than a dry twig and a few dirty play-cards.’
‘How know you what knowledge I have? I want the things, that is all, I tell you.’
‘They were accursed if they had any use in them. And what use had they? She who understood them lived and died all but a beggar. If they had any power in them, they cheated and starved her.’
The speech was a long one for Caris, whose thoughts were so little used to fit themselves to utterance.
Santina heard him with the passionate impatience and intolerance of a swift mind with a dull one, of a bold will with a timid nature.
She had set her soul on possessing these magic things; she was convinced that she should find the way to make them work; superstition was intense and overwhelming in her, and allied to a furious ambition, all the more powerful because given loose rein through her complete ignorance.
‘Oh, you white-livered ninny!’ she cried to him, with boundless scorn. ‘Would to Heaven Black Simon had buried his blade into you! It would have rid the earth of a dolt and a dastard!’
‘Then let me be, if I be worth so little,’ said Caris sullenly, whilst his eyes devoured her beauty half seen in the darkness which preceded the late rising of the moon. Then she saw that she had mistaken her path, and she changed it. She let great tears come into her eyes, and her mouth trembled, and her bosom heaved.
‘This was the lad I could have loved!’ she murmured. ‘This was the strong bold youth whom I thought would be my brave and bonny damo before all the countryside. Oh, what fools are women — what fools! — taken by the eye, with a falcon glance and a sheaf of nut-brown curls and a broad breast that looks as if the heart of a true man beat in it. Oh, woe is me! Oh, woe is me! I dreamed a dream, and it has no more truth in it than the slate shingle here has of silver.’
She kicked downward scornfully as she spoke the crumbling slate and mia which showed here and there betwixt the heather plants in the tremulous shadow relics of a quarry worked long centuries before, and forsaken when the fires of the camp of Hun and Goth had blazed upon those hillsides.
III
Caris stared at her as she spoke, his whole frame thrilling and all his senses alive as they had never been before under a woman’s glamour. He heeded not the derision, he thought not of the strangeness of the avowal; delicacy is not often a plant which grows in uncultured soil, and he had none of the intuition and suspicion which an educated man would have been moved by before such an avowal and such an upbraiding. He only knew, or thought he was bidden to know, that he had the power in him to please her fancy and awaken her desire.
‘You love me! You can love me!’ he shouted in a loud, vibrating, exultant voice which wakened all the echoes of the hills around him, and he sprang forward to seize her in his arms. But Santina, agile and strong, pushed him back, and stood aloof.
‘Nay, nay, stand off!’ she cried to him. ‘Ne’er a coward shall touch me. All I said was, you might have won me.’
‘I am no coward,’ said Caris hotly. ‘And why do you fool and tempt one so? ’Tis unfair. ’Tis unfair. You may rue it.’
His face was convulsed, his eyes were aflame, he breathed like a bull in a hard combat.
Santina smiled; that was how she liked to see a man look.
She had all the delight in watching and weighing the effects of the passion which she excited that moved the great queens of Asia and the empresses of Rome. She was only a poor girl, but the love of dominance and the violence of the senses were in her strong and hot and reckless.
In her was all that ferment of ambition and vanity and discontent which drives out from their hamlets those who are born with something in them different to their lot and alien to their fellows. She had never been anywhere farther afield than the hills and woods about Pistanse, but she knew that there were big cities somewhere, where men were made of money, and women wore satin all day long, and everybody ate and drank out of gold plates and silver vessels. She knew that; and to get to these kingdoms of delight was the one longing which possessed her day and night.
She wanted to get one thing out of this man — the means of liberty — and she cared nothing how she won it. Besides, he was so simple, so malleable, so credulous, it diverted her to play on him as one could play on a chitarra, making the strings leap and sigh and thrill and groan. And he was good to look at, too, with his tanned, fresh face, and his clustering curls, and his strong, straight, cleanly limbs.
‘I only said you might have won me,’ she repeated— ‘nay, you may still, if you have the heart of a man and not of a mouse. Hearken!’
‘Do not fool me,’ said Caris sternly, ‘or as the Lord lives above us — —’
She laughed airily.
‘Oh, big oaths cannot frighten me. It shall lie with you. I want those things of your mother’s. When you bring them I will thank you — as you choose.’
He grew gray under his brown, bright skin.
‘Always that,’ he muttered — always that!’
‘Naturally, it is what I want.’
‘Go, get them, since you think it holy work.’
‘I will,’ said Santina, ‘and then good-night to you, my good Caris; you will never see me more.’
She turned on her heel and began to run down the slope in the moonlight.
Santina would not have ventured inside the graveyard at night to get mountains of gold. She would not have passed after nightfall within a mile of its gate without crossing herself and murmuring Aves all the way. Superstition was born and bred in every inch of her bone and every drop of her blood, and she would no more have carried out her threat than she would have carried the mountain upon her shoulders.
But he did not know that. She was so bold, so careless, so self-confident, if she had told him she would split open the earth to its centre he would have believed her.
He overtook her as she fled down the slope and seized her in his arms.
‘No, no!’ he cried, close in her ear. ‘It is not work for you. If it must be done I will do it. Will you swear that you will give yourself to me if I bring you the unholy things?’
‘I love you!’ she said breathlessly, while her lips brushed his throat— ‘yes, I do love you! Go, get the things, and bring them hither at dawn. I will meet you. Oh, I will find the way to use them, never fear. That is my business. Get you gone. They are calling below. They shut the house at the twenty-four.’
No one was calling, but she wished to get rid of him. He was strong, and he was on fire with her touch and her glance; he strained her in his arms until her face was bruised against the hairy sinews and bones of his chest.
She thrust him away with a supreme effort, and ran down the stony side of the hill, and was swallowed up in the duskiness of the tangled scrub.
A little scops owl flitted past, uttering its soft, low note, which echoes so far and long in the silence of evening in the hills.
Caris shook himself like a man who has been half stunned by a heavy fall. He was on fire with the alcohol of passion, and chilled to the marrow by the promise he had made.
Open a tomb! Rifle a grave! See his mother again in her cere clothes — see all the untold and untellable horrors of which the dead and the earth make their secrets!
Oh, why had he ever admitted that he had sealed up the uncanny things in the coffin! He could have bitten his tongue out for its tell-tale folly.
He had thrust them in almost without consciousness of his act as he had hammered the lid down on the deal shell all alone with it in his cabin.
The things had been always under his mother’s pillow at night; it had seemed to him that they ought to go with her down to the grave. He had had a secret fear of them, and he had thought that their occult powers would be nullified once thrust in sacred soil. He had been afraid to burn them.
The churchyard in which his mother lay was on the topmost slope of Genistrello, where the brown brick tower of the massive medieval church of St. Fulvo rose amongst the highest pines, upon a wind-swept and storm-scarred scarp.
Few were the dead who were taken there; meagre and miserable were the lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.
It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the hills and the water-courses and the brushwood.
But it was not the distance which troubled him, nor any possible danger. He knew his way through all that country, and the full round moon was by now showing her broad disc over the edge of the farther mountains on the south-east. But the thought of what he would have to do at the end of his pilgrimage made him sick with fear not altogether unmanly.
He knew that what he would do would be sacrilege and punishable by law, but it was not of that he thought: his mind was filled with those terrors of the nether world, of the unknown, of the unseen, which a lonely life and a latent imagination made at once so indistinct and so powerful to him.
‘Had she but asked me anything else! ‘he thought piteously. ‘Anything! — to cut off my right hand or to take the life of any man!’
But she had set him this task; inexorably as women of old set their lovers to search for the Grail or beard the Saracen in his mosque, and he knew that he must do what she willed or never again feel those warm red lips breathe on his own.
He tightened the canvas belt round his loins, and went home to his cabin to fetch a pickaxe and a spade, and, bidding his dog stay to guard the empty hut, he set out to walk across the vast steep breadth of woodland darkness which separated him from the church and churchyard which were his goal.
A labourer on those hills all his life, and accustomed also to the more perilous and murderous thickets of Maremma, where escaped galley-slaves hid amongst the boxwood and the bearberry, and lived in caves and hollow trees, no physical alarm moved him as he strode on across the uneven ground with the familiar scents and sounds of a woodland night around him on every side.
The moon had now risen so high that the valleys were bathed in her light, and the sky was radiant with a brilliancy which seemed but a more ethereal day.
He had no eyes for its beauty. His whole soul was consumed by the horror of his errand. He only looked up at the pointers and the pole-star which he knew, so as to guide himself by them up the steep slopes to the church, for he had left the cart-tracks and mule-paths and struck perforce through the gorse and undergrowth westward, gradually ascending as he went.
‘Poor mother! poor mother!’ he kept saying to himself. It seemed horrible to him to go and molest her out in her last sleep and take those things which were buried with her. Would she know? Would she awake? Would she rise and strike him?
Then he thought of a dead woman whom he had found once in the ‘macchia’ in Maremma, lying unburied under some myrtle bushes; he remembered how hideous she had looked, how the ants and worms had eaten her, how the wild boars had gnawed her flesh, how the jaws had grinned and the empty eyeballs had stared, and how a black toad had sat on her breast.
Would his mother look like that?
No; for she was safe under ground, under sacred ground, shut up secure from wind and weather in that deal shell which he had himself made and hammered down; and she was in her clothes, all neat and proper, and the holy oil had been upon her.
No, she had been put in her grave like a Christian, witch though they said that she was. She could not look like the woman in Maremma, who had been a vagrant and a gipsy.
Yet he was afraid — horribly afraid.
IV
It was a soft and luminous night; there was the faintest of south winds now and then wandering amongst the tops of the pines, and fanning their aromatic odours out of them. The sound of little threads of water trickling through the sand and moss, and falling downward through the heather, was the only sound, save when a night bird called through the dark, or a night beetle whirred on its way.
The summit of the hillside was sere and arid, and its bold stony expanse had seldom a living thing on it by daylight. By night, when the priest and sacristan of St. Fulvo were sleeping, there was not a single sign of any life, except the blowing of the pine-tops in the breeze.
He had never been there except by broad day; his knees shook under him as he looked up at the tall straight black tower, with the moonlit clouds shining through the bars of its open belfry. If he had not heard the voice of Santina crying to him, ‘No coward shall win me,’ he would have turned and fled.
He was alone as utterly as though all the world were dead.
It was still barely midnight when he saw the bell-tower on high looming darker than the dark clouds about it, and the pine-trees and the presbytery and the walls of the burial-ground gathered round it black and gaunt, their shapes all fused together in one heap of gloom.
The guardians of the place, old men who went early to their beds, were sleeping somewhere under those black roofs against the tower. Below, the hills and valleys were all wrapped in the silence of the country night.
On some far road a tired team of charcoal-bearing mules might be treading woefully to the swing of their heavy bells, or some belated string of wine-carts might be creeping carefully through the darkness, the men half-drunk and their beasts half-asleep.
But there was no sound or sign of them in the vast brooding stillness which covered like great soft wings the peaceful hills overlapping one another, and the serenity of the mountains bathed in the rays of the moon.
There was no sound anywhere: not even the bleat of a sheep from the flocks, nor the bark of a dog from the homesteads.
Caris crossed himself, and mounted the steep path which led to the church-gate.
The last time he had come thither he had climbed up with the weight of his mother’s coffin on his shoulders; the ascent being too steep for a mule to mount and he too poor to pay for assistance.
The walls of the graveyard were high, and the only access to it was through a wooden iron-studded door, which had on one side of it a little hollowed stone for holy water, and above it a cross of iron and an iron crown. To force the door was impossible; to climb the wall was difficult, but he was agile as a wild cat, and accustomed to crawl up the stems of the pines to gather their cones, and the smooth trunks of the poplars in the valleys to lop their crowns.
He paused a moment, feeling the cold dews run like rain off his forehead, and wished that his dog was with him, a childish wish, for the dog could not have climbed: then he kicked off his boots, set his toe-nails in the first crevice in the brick surface, and began to mount with his hands and feet with prehensile agility.
In a few moments he was above on the broad parapet which edged the wall, and could look down into the burial-place below. But he did not dare to look; he shut his eyes convulsively and began to descend, holding by such slight aids as the uneven surface and the projecting lichens afforded him. He dropped at last roughly but safely on the coarse grass within the enclosure.
All was black and still; the graveyard was shut in on three sides by its walls, and at the fourth side by the tower of the church.
The moon had passed behind a cloud and he could see nothing.
He stood ankle-deep in the grass; and as he stirred he stumbled over the uneven broken ground, made irregular by so many nameless graves. He felt in his breeches pockets for his pipe and matches, and drew one of the latter out and struck it on a stone.
But the little flame was too feeble to show him even whereabouts he was, and he could not in the darkness tell one grave from another.
Stooping and stretching out his hands, he could feel the rank grass and the hillocks all round him; there were a few head-stones, but only a few; of such dead as were buried in the graveyard of St. Fulvo, scarce one mourner in a century could afford a memorial stone or even a wooden cross.
He stood still and helpless, not having foreseen the difficulty of the darkness.
He could feel the stirring of wings in the air around him. His sense told him that they were but owls and bats, of which the old tower was full; but he shivered as he heard them go by; who could be sure what devilish thing they might not be?
The horror of the place grew on him.
Still, harmless, sacred though it was, it filled him with a terror which fastened upon him, making his eyeballs start, and his flesh creep, and his limbs shake beneath him.
