Joconda

“ 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. ”

“ She was but a wild creature of the moors herself, with something noble in her instincts born there as in a dog's, and with something of strength and faithfulness taught her by Joconda.
Her first impulses were of passion and of possession.
He was hers, here, in the shadowy caverns of the earth. Why should she lose him to the world of light, that unknown world where she had neither place nor part? ”

“ Joconda sighed and stared.
'Aye, there is nothing to make Him glad in any of us. The wicked never cease from troubling, and the whitest souls are but greyish and spotted, like a fungus in a wood. Sometimes I have thought myself He must repent. ”

“ It seemed his duty, and it was also his desire; he was a man of noble temperament, he had no sinister thought; he meant to do for her what Joconda would have wished done; more, if possible. She seemed so young and so intelligent that he thought there would be little difficulty to make of her a grand and thoughtful woman, although he knew that it is hard to tame the nightingale that has had a single year in the woods; so hard that it dies under the effort. ”

“ Then, apparently satisfied, he let her draw near the child, who was sleeping: a lovely creature, half naked, with long black lashes lying on cheeks like mountain rose-leaves, and loose thick curls like rings of amber.
'It is a woman child; so much the worse,' said Joconda, looking down on it.
If it had been a male, it would have been much easier for her; a boy could soon have run about and done something for his daily bread in the boats, or with the mules, or in the firewoods. However, she remembered that, be it what it would, she had promised Mastarna. ”

“ Her eyes were full of fire; her breath came and went through her clenched teeth; an agony of fear made her ferocious; her hand, as it closed on the handle of the stiletto, trembled with passion; all the mercilessness of Saturnino was up and alive in her.
She longed to strike down this man who menaced her secret and her treasure.
Had he not been kindred to Joconda she would have struck, without giving him a choice. ”

“ Fed on black bread and dried fish, with rarely anything else, for milk there was none, and fruit there was none, and meat was ever scarce, except when a lamb or kid was killed from some shepherd's passing flock, she grew erect, strong, bold, bright, handsome; with a clear, colourless skin; and brown, lustrous, astonished eyes, and bright bronze-hued hair that Joconda brushed back from her brow in rippling masses, and cut short at the throat. ”

“ When the neighbours, apathetic but not brutal, though, being a foreign woman, they had let her live alone, came running in at the sound of that terrible and desolate cry, they found Musa lying senseless by the white dog, and the blanched blest palm hanging above a body already cold in the stiffness of death.
Joconda must have died somewhere about midnight, so the apothecary told them when he came. He said that death had come from sheer old age; the life had ceased, that was all, as an old tree falls, as an old clock refuses to move and grows dumb. ”

“ Her sons had died of the marsh fever and her daughter had left her a motherless grandson, a bold fair boy, the lamb that Saturnino had saved ten years before when the boy had gone up with his goats into the mountains; for which mercy Joconda and her lad had blessed him every day and night they told their beads.
But though Saturnino had spared the boy, the fever had not done so; and ever since his death Joconda had dwelt alone with her dead memories. She had been a sad woman always, but she was a strong one. ”

“ Then he persuaded a huckster of the coast to take her matting too, and altogether made her passing rich.
'Nay, I knew Joconda forty years,' he said, 'and a good soul she was, though silent as a clapperless bell, but good and sturdy and honest, and hospitable always if she had but a crust.'
Then, being a chattering man, a bell with more clapper to it than was needful, he would ask her many questions, all of which embarrassed her to answer. ”

“ No; he is gone as he came. I tell you I want no one. If I did, what would that be to you? I do not know why you torment me. I loved Joconda, but, I told you before, you have nothing of her. You are rich and she was poor; your people forgot her all her life long, and I do not see why you should think of her now. As for me, I am well and I need nothing ”

“ Joconda shuddered; she remembered the night of fifty years before, when her husband's boat had gone down, heeling over into the white, boiling surf, on the very edge of the shore.
'There are such beautiful things to see down, down, deep down, in the sea,' added the child.
'What good is that to them? Dead men are blind, said Joconda wearily. 'Whether you lie in the sand or the sea it matters nothing once you are dead, but it matters to those that are left. Child, do not talk of such things ”

“ And yet it is all long, long ago, Joconda says; so long that the earth has had time to pile rocks and grow trees above their graves, and men have quite forgotten who they were.'
Zirlo was silent; this was a thing he could in no way grasp, and of time he had no notion. If he had been asked how long he had lived, he would have said that he could not remember; he had been always on the moor, always with the goats; he knew what to do for them, and that was all he did know. ”

“ The people would make an idol of their hero's offspring, and the child, as she grew older, would be restless and perturbed if she heard that her father had been sent by his judges to pass his life as a galley-slave on Gorgona.
Joconda feared no scorn and unkindness on the score of her birth for the child, if that birth were known; on the contrary, she feared the vanity and the evil passions that, with the knowledge of the blood of the Mastarna in her veins, might by public sentiment be engendered in her.
She would be the child of a hero, almost of a martyr, in the esteem of Maremma. ”

“ It never occurred to her to be afraid or to summon other help. Distrust of others was an instinct in the child of Saturnino, and the loneliness of her life with Joconda had made independence of human sympathy and aid her second nature.
If she had wished it, moreover, she knew that she would have called for help in vain. Of the sickly timid souls of Santa Tarsilla, not one would have ventured here, and of the rude, scattered herdsmen and husbandmen native to Maremma she knew nothing, and they had their toil, which was their all, to fill their time. ”

“ I can do all that they can. I can row better than many, and sail and steer; I can dive too, and I know what to do with the nets; if I had a boat of my own you would see what I could do.'
'All that is very well,' said Joconda, with a little nod. 'I do not say it is not. But you have not the boat of your own, that is just it; that is what women always suffer from; they have to steer, but the craft is someone else's and the haul too.'
The child looked at her from under bent brows. ”

“ After the momentary excitation following on Joconda's death and legacy, the few inhabitants returned to the dull, dropsical apathy in which they were wont to pass their lives. The girl was somewhere on the moors, and Andreino's boat was missing one night from its mooring by the mole, though replaced the next; but it was no concern of theirs. Curiosity consents to close its unwinking eyes when interest sings its lullaby.
Old Andreino had, indeed, spasms of the pain of conscience, for in his way he had been fond of Musa, and had a regard for the woman of Savoy. But he never sought for her. ”

“ She had a large stock of herbs of all kinds, sweet and bitter; some medicinal, some for kitchen uses. Joconda had taught her all their various properties, and in the autumn of the previous year she had gathered a great store, and dried them and kept them carefully. They were the only things she had to sell; they, and some score of baskets and mats that she had not given to Zefferino.
It was a grand day outside; such days as, here, deck October and November with a glory of colour and of luminance that make all other months of the year seem pale. ”

“ Some instinct led her to make friends with a woman at this time, the only woman she had ever been near since Joconda died; a hard-featured, sunburnt, toil-bent creature prematurely old from a hard toil, who every year came down with her husband and children, and flocks of sheep and goats, all the way by the roads on foot, from the chestnut woods above San Marcello to the green pastures of Maremma. There are many do the same; it is a laborious life, always beaten about by wind and weather, but the hill-shepherds and herdsmen and their families are used to it, and cling to it as gipsies do. ”

“ Another year went by, and the girl grew taller and stronger, and had Santa Tarsilla counted young men amidst its population, they would have looked full well and often at that dark yet luminous face that was by old Joconda's side in the morning mist and the troubled sunlight of the dull church at time of mass. ”

“ The little fort was falling to decay, and even the coastguardsmen dwelt not at Santa Tarsilla itself, but in a tower on the coast a mile away.
Nothing could be sadder than this place, or seem more forgotten of God and man.
Joconda sometimes, sitting at her door in the heavy parching summer heats, thought with a dull agony of remembrance of the mountain home of her birth.
In these unhealthy places of Maremma, where no one ever stays who can get away, and nearly all who remain are ague-stricken and fever-worn, young children not seldom thrive well enough. ”

“ Her fancy, untrained but strong, like the wild 'mother of the woods' that brought forth its blossoms unseen over the waste around, made of the dead Etruscans her own nation, and of their subterranean graves her temple.
'You live too much with these dead people, child,' said Joconda to her.
'They do me no harm,' said Musa. 'The living make me angry often, and I strike them sometimes; the dead make me ashamed that I am ever wicked.'
'They were wicked enough themselves, most like,' grumbled Joconda. 'I will be bound men and women have never differed much.'
'They do me good,' said Musa ”

“ For Joconda was a Puritan at heart, having in her by her mother the Waldensian blood; and she did her best to discourage the gifts of voice in Saturnino's child. But nature is stronger than counsel, and Musa rhymed and sang. Knowing nothing of the metrical laws that govern the sonnet, she yet imitated these so well that she strung many a sonnet like a row of pearls ”

“ But he could not use against her the pricks and bands of that civil law of whose very name she knew nothing: a law always cruel in all lands to the homeless wanderer and to the offspring of a criminal.
The law would not see, as he saw, the innocence and beauty of that woodland life, of that tender fidelity to dead Joconda, of that serene independence of the help of man. She would seem to the law no more than any one of the hill-foxes that burrowed under the centaury and cinquefoil of some fern-grown bank. ”

“ Joconda for her part did not understand.
'You are a strange creature,' she said impatiently. 'It would have been better if you had been ugly and quiet, and without that devil in you that will never let you be still. But it is no fault of yours. There are seagulls and there are barn-door fowls, and the good Lord made them both. Well, go, rake some seaweed together or any other rack of your precious sea that one can burn; we are very poor ”

“ He told her, if any thought of cities and of cultured life appalled her, she should have nothing of either; she should dwell there, under the glaciers, as free as any chamois, and since she had so proud and resolute a spirit she should owe him nothing, but maintain herself by her spinning or by any other work she chose. Only, if she would but come thither she would be safe; she would be no longer alone, she would be with good women, and the last wishes of Joconda would be fulfilled.
But Musa only laughed, deep down in her starry blue-black eyes. ”

“ A child was no rare treasure, and there was nothing strange in a lone one being placed with a lone woman who was known to have a little money secured and hidden somewhere. Plenty of people along the coast would have been willing and glad to let Joconda adopt their children, would she have taken them. So without more comment or inquiry the child and the dog were domiciled at the old stone house by the pier in Santa Tarsilla, and there grew and throve, as they best might, in an air that to many was death. ”

“ What does he care? Only when he comes down into the plains again he goes to another place to work, because men do not love women's tears. That is how it goes in Maremma." [Pg 348]
"So the saints will pluck her to themselves at last," thought Joconda; and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems only stagnation, inanition, death. ”