Marie Louise de la Ramée

“ The storm was not yet down, but made itself felt in the chill of the air, in the force of the gusts, which fell like blows, in the swirl and surge of the waves, in sunshine so blue, now yellowish-white and leaden-grey. The little boat still flew, elastic and easy, before the wind, rocking and reeling often, but always righting herself, even though drenched again and again with water. Musa was wet through; the shrill wind whistled amongst her curls and blew them upright; it was all she could do to keep her place, and cling to the tiller to keep the boat's head due north. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For men and women do not like pity that interferes with their livelihood.
'Thou art a strange one!' said Joconda many a time, for the splendid, abundant, daring health and strength of the child seemed strange there, in those pale fever mists, amidst those pallid, inert populations. She was good to the child, but she was afraid of her. The crimes of the Mastarna men seemed to her fancies to hover, like a cloud of guilt, above this innocent head. The blood that coursed so buoyantly in those blue veins was the blood of an assassin and a robber. Joconda could not forget that. ”

“ Musa, convulsed with passion that was still but half spent, went slowly away from the spot through the luminous air, and retraced her steps until once more she sat in the shadow of those solemn chambers which now were hers no more, but opened to the world of men.
A shudder of rage shook her from head to foot; then she bowed her head down upon her knees, and wept bitterly.
She had been betrayed.
Kinder than treachery is the knife that severs the cord of life.
It was her home, this temple of the dead, this sanctuary of the lonely moors that sheltered her and Joconda. ”

“ When she had left Santa Tarsilla behind her by a mile, the water was rougher, the wind was brisker, the boat flew faster, the child grew gayer. She was all alone on the sea as far as her eyes could reach, except for a few large vessels away on the horizon, merchant ships bearing grain or spice to the old harbours of the classic world.
The voice that according to her own fancy was not herself, but some bird singing in her, rose unconsciously to her lips as she felt happy; happy in the sense of liberty, of movement, of space, and air, and light. ”

“ Grander pomp than Mantua's there was never known in Italy. Felix Mantua!—and now it is all decaying, mouldering, sinking, fading; it is silent as death; the mists, the waters, the empty palaces, the walls that the marshes are eating little by little every day, the grass and the moss and the wild birds' nests on the roofs, on the temples, on the bridges, all are desolate in Mantua now. Yet is it beautiful in its loneliness, when the sunrise comes over the seas of reeds, and the towers and the arches are reflected in the pools and streams ”

“ In these primeval woods, in these wild untrodden recesses of the almost barbaric isle, the galley-slave was safer than kings are on their thrones. He was once more happy; he sent at pleasure a ball from his rifle down the azure depths of the air; he drank deep and drank often; he had a long fine dagger in his belt; he had danger, plunder, bloodshed, the three things that made the daily bread that he had pined for and hungered for as the first food of life; he felt once more to have hold on his manhood which they had done all they knew to chain down and cudgel out of him. ”

“ Away there, north and south, and east and west, the earth was alive with the mirth and the music and the triumphs and the passions of men.
He forgot that there were pain and privation and struggle and sorrow there also; he only remembered the world as an orchard of fruit and of flowers, fair to behold and to taste, full of sunshine eternal, and musical with tireless song. That Winter came there, and sickness, and grief, and death, he had forgotten.
The boat was on the edge of the sea, tied by a rope to a pine-tree, and with the oars of it lying on the beach. ”

“ They had always met each other as simply, as naturally, as two blossoms that blow together in the summer breeze, as two children that run to meet and play. But already the shadow of the thing she knew, and would not reveal, went before her, and would stand like a ghost from the grave between his life and her own.
The heat was very great; it was a heat as if the fires, burning in the woods and on the mountains, had coursed down in streams of flame and licked up all the beauty of the earth as prairie-fires do. ”

“ It is only to those who have never lived that death ever can seem beautiful.
To Este, who had been happy when his mistress kissed him, when his boat floated over the fields of reeds, when the moon came up over the meadows and the waters, and the throb of a lute beat on the soft air like the sigh of Aphrodite herself—to Este, the tomb and the galleys were, alike, a yawning void, in which he would sink and perish. The dread of them—a natural dread like that of the Greeks of old—weighed on him and made his sight blind, his ears deaf, his soul insensible. ”

“ But she knew she could not be always here; she was eighty-six years old this brilliant day of San Zenone, when the light and the fragrance of spring were beautiful, even in cursed Maremma.
When Musa was asleep that night and all the little place was still, Joconda, behind her barred shutters and bolted doors, by the light of her lantern looked at her little hoard, which was kept under a stone in the paved floor of her kitchen.
She counted it. It was but little, though the fancy of Santa Tarsilla made it much. Fortunes are not made by weaving hemp and mending sails. ”

“ He had not beheld the sun since, tortured with heat and thirst, he had drifted face upwards, hopeless, and seeing no escape from the galleys save in such death as he would find sinking to those depths below him, where the shark and the octopus waited for drowned men. It allured him with sweet unconquerable attraction. He went softly, almost insensibly, on and on, over the sand and the grass; his head held high, his eyes happy, his breath coming quickly and gladly, like the sighs of love that is content.
The sea was there; the world was beyond; men would welcome him back in their midst. ”

“ As long as she could, she looked for the pine-trees that grew by the sea, for the great branches of the cork tree that spread themselves above the place of the tombs, When she could behold these no longer, tears of blood came into her eyes; the sky and the moor and the air grew crimson to her.
The oxen crept on, pulling against their rings of iron, groaning against their heavy yokes; tired and sore, they licked their lips with parched tongues, they sobbed now and then like beaten children when the goad struck them. ”

“ In all that pallor and whiteness of the sickly town and the low-lying shore and the feeble people, the figure of Musa stood out with the grace and the rich colour of some crown imperial lily growing out of sand, straight as a young palm, luminous, golden, distinct.
She knew the danger of the marshes. She did not wish to die: who does that loves? Whilst the earth feels the steps of the feet we adore, to live is beautiful; whilst the eyes that we love unclose to the day, the sunrise that wakens them still smiles at us. ”

“ Saturnino Mastarna had been a robber; and, as she had justly said, a murderer many times. He had swooped down on the lonely mountain paths above the mountain-born Fiora, and along the once consular and imperial highway that runs through Orbetello and Civita Vecchia to Rome, even as the pseudœtus eagle of these hills swoops down from his cliff-nest, made of oak leaves and olive boughs, on to the water-fowls of the pools, until the daring and the frequency of his captures had made his name a household word that had rung far and wide beyond the confines of Maremma. ”

“ To stand erect there, to look over the plains, to breathe, and move, and gaze, and stretch his arms out to the infinite spaces of the sea and sky—this alone was so intense a joy that he felt mad with it.
Never again to hide with the snake and the fox; never again to tremble as his shadow went beside him on the sand; never to waste the sunlit hours hidden in the bowels of the earth: never to be afraid of every leaf that stirred, of every bird that flew, of every moonbeam that fell across his path!—he laughed and sobbed with the ecstasy of his release. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But as she drew nigh this wilderness of stone, of brick, of marble, of iron, she saw no more the purple flower of the great dome: she only saw a labyrinth of men's making in which she would wander miserably; finding not her lover, and losing her hold upon his assassin.
A greater terror than that which she had felt in the prisons and judgment-chamber of Orbetello fell upon her. If she could not find Este, if she lost sight of this man bent on his destruction, what could she do? How could she warn him whom she would have given every drop of her life-blood to save? ”

“ Nothing is so impossible for the uneducated mind to grasp as the idea of time. Musa only understood it with her imagination; her fancy enabled her to conjecture what her knowledge left a blank. But Zirlo had not this fatal gift; his mind had never got beyond the marsh and moor, the flock and fold. The bare bold scarp that was called San Lionardo was the outmost boundary of his world. As he thought that the ivy and the honeysuckle only grew for his goats, so he thought that the sun and the rain were only made for them. ”

“ Her feet moved without her knowing it. Her body seemed one great pulse, beating, beating, beating.
She never thought of his innocence being made known; had she not always known it? What she thought of only was this: as soon as he was told, he would go.
Need he ever be told?
She held him as one holds a bird in the hollow of the hand.
If she never unclosed her hand, he would never go.
No, he need never be told: she said so to herself as she walked: never, never.
If her mouth were shut, no other could speak. He was hers, as the dead are the earth's. ”

“ It is the sea-shore, indeed.
But all the health, and vigour, and strong activity, and pungent fresh odours, and buoyant winds, of the sea elsewhere are too often missing here. No one knows how hateful the blessed and beautiful sea can be who has not seen it, oily, and glassy, and motionless, stretching under a grey sky that looks parched with mists of intensest heat, and with the fever fog of the poisonous summer hovering about the glaring sands.
It is no sin of the sea's; the sin is man's alone. ”

“ Yet over the face of Joconda a grim smile fluttered as she put out her lantern. 'Andreino thinks I have a pretty penny,' she thought; 'and he would like to sell me his ricketty great-grandson that shakes with ague like a jelly-fish in a lobster-pot!'
The smile faded as she laid herself down to sleep; she knew all the niggardly self-seeking ways of the people, and had diverted herself with them through all the silent years of her life on these shores; but they were sorry neighbours to whom to leave a solitary child for care and for mercy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She was more able to feel sorrow for him than she had been before in the unthinking hardness of her ignorance of love. But she was still offended, troubled, and perplexed.
She was silent awhile, watching the motionless body of the kingfisher glancing like a jewel in the sun. The sailor watched her as she stood erect on the edge of the waves.
He thought to himself, should he tell her of Saturnino? Should he tell her whence she took her grand luminous eyes, her passion for freedom, her strength of body and spirit? ”

“ She was absorbed in her efforts to help him; she did not notice that he was a man young, and wonderfully handsome, with the beauty of the Greek ideal; beauty which not exposure, or imprisonment, or shame, or terror, or privation, or the ghastly horrors of the galleys had had any power to destroy, though they had wasted, darkened, and dimmed it, as dust and ill-usage obscure the soilless glory and fine lines of the marble god. Of all this she saw nothing, thought nothing; it was enough for her that he was hunted and in fear, like the beasts and the birds of the Maremma. ”

“ The sea was calm as glass; her boat floated on it with hardly any movement; the great white flood of moonlight fell upon it and her; together they made but a small, dark, motionless thing in the midst of that silvery field of light. How long she slept she never knew; when she awoke with a start the cool of the midnight had come that comes with the descent of the dews.
Used to the look of the sky, she knew that it was midnight by the stars. She awoke refreshed, but conscience-stricken. Every moment she delayed was a pang of hunger and of fear more to the hunted man. ”