Maremma

“ The soil of Maremma was treacherous as Iago, and, though she made no count of it, her days were full of danger as the timid snipe's for whom the fox waits in the brushwood, and the muzzle of the gun slips through the reeds, and the hawk watches above in the air, and the dog steals through the fennel and brankursine. She in her courage and ignorance hardly ever thought of these perils, and trusted to the earth and to the water as a child to its progenitors. ”

“ Maremma is wide, and its people are scattered.
In autumn and in winter hunters, shepherds, swineherds, sportsmen, birdcatchers, might spoil the solemn peace of these moors, but in spring and summer no human soul was seen upon them. ”

“ Hers had been but a sorry life; all winter passed on the lonely moist meadows of Maremma, all summer spent in hard work upon the corn lands on the mountain sides and the olive and the chestnut forests up above, where the snow lay on the highest rocks in June. It had made her dull, indifferent, always tired; but being an open-air creature she was faithful. ”

“ She went into the third chamber, and there she found the wooden coffin untouched, the flowers she had laid there undisturbed, and the lamp burning steadily.
She left it, and ascended the stairs, and looked over the moors.
The day was dying down, and the grand red glory of the west blinded her for a moment as she looked on it from the gloom of the tombs. There are no sunsets more gorgeous than those on the sea of the Maremma, and their pomp of gold and purple is a mockery of kings. ”

“ WAY in Mantua the weather was still chill and cheerless, the waters were still yellow with the snows of winter that melted into mud, the sun that warmed the green Maremma land and set a nest under every tussock of grass, and covered with blossoms every inch of the rich red soil, did not as yet shine on the melancholy city in the midst of the northern plains. ”

“ True, Maremma was so lonely, so wide, so virgin in its water-fed greenery, so severed by its season of disease from all the moving world, that such a life here was less strange than it would have been elsewhere, and the native mountaineer in the hillside woods, and the shepherd from the north on the rich grasslands, were nomads as utterly as ever were their forefathers in days when Pan and Faunus were the gods of the forest and pasture. ”

“ Without Saturnino Mastarna, the Maremma would be more than ever desolate.
The province had always been full of sympathy with its great robber, whose popular boast it was that he never had wronged any poor man. All the creatures of the law, soldiers, guards, coastguards, and carabiniers, were hated and shunned throughout the province; got help from none, and were, again and again, baffled and laughed at by the shrewd finesse of the people in the woods, and on the shores. To cheat a sbirro was a loyal task that brought praise and honour to whosoever had accomplished it. ”

“ Saturnino was gone: a dead man, or worse than a dead man, and never more would his native Maremma thrill with the Homeric tales of his acts; never more would this town of Grosseto see him stride through their public places with his pistols and knife in his broad red sash, and his bold black eyes full of challenge and scorn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her footfall was noiseless. He did not know that he was followed; that he had thus been followed all across the wastes of the Maremma.
He passed without a moment's pause through the doorway; whenever he had struck a deathblow, he had always struck quickly as the eagle does.
Within there was a vast and lofty hall, austere with sculpture, its floor mosaic, its ceiling frescoed; a staircase of immense width, made of marble, stretched upward between walls of marble; silver lamps swung from above and lighted it dully. It was deserted and silent ”

“ At evening time a man would walk, the same way always, out westward by the Argine del Mulino, and would watch the sun go down in the west where Maremma lay far away beside the sea, and would say to himself as he looked, 'What does the sun see in that green land?'
The people of Mantua only knew him as a stranger, one of the many travelling painters who were lured there by the sad charm of the pale waters reflecting the domes and towers and walls, and the arches of the bridges, and the tall belfries whose metal tongues called but to mass, and never more to war. ”

“ She sailed in over the seaweed and the sand of the choked-up bay of Telamone under the shadow of its castle on the rock. She moored her boat hastily and went into the sorry place to try her fortune. The townspeople, such a few as they were, would buy nothing; but there chanced to be there a pedlar who had known her as a child in the house of Joconda. He was one of those who bring goods and news together from the outer world into Maremma, and round whose packs the housewives and the gossips gather eagerly. ”

“ There is, perhaps, no isolation more complete, no ignorance more absolute, than that of a little obscure town on the 'accursed Maremma,' as the people call this rich and fruitful land, because the greed and the folly of men have cursed it. ”

“ Then the real life of Maremma begins; down from the mountains of the Lucchese and Pistoiese districts labourers troop by the thousand; shepherds come from the hills with long lines of flocks; herds of horses and cattle go daily by the roads; hunters chase the boar and buck, and charcoal burners and ploughmen pour themselves in busy legions over the plains and the woods. ”

“ Grey rocks, with foliage richly shadowed o’er;
And sighing winds, that murmur thro' the wood,
Fringing the beach of that Hesperian flood.
Fair is that house of solitude—and fair
The green Maremma, far around it spread,
A sun-bright waste of beauty—yet an air
Of brooding sadness o'er the scene is shed,
No human footstep tracks the lone domain,
The desert of luxuriance glows in vain. ”

“ It was all over, like wine spilt on the ground; henceforth the Maremma would speak of him only with bated breath, and memories half glorious, half sad, like the memories of dead heroes. Saturnino Mastarna was gone; seized by the impalpable, far-reaching, spectral arm of the law, which to a rustic and simple people is so vaguely terrible, so unjust, so incomprehensible, coming out, as it seems to them to do, from the infinite and the unknown to seize them for their secret sins. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Its simple beauty, which the seawind and the sun have kissed for seven hundred years, seems to give character to the whole plain, so ample and green, beyond the wont of Italy; but, indeed, here we are on the threshold of the Maremma, that beautiful, wild, deserted country that man has not yet reclaimed from Death, where the summer is still and treacherous in its loveliness, where in winter for a little while the herdsmen come down with their cattle from the Garfagnana, and the hills musical with love songs. ”

“ For many and many a year to come, the imagination of the Italian people will be always captivated and blinded by the bastard heroism of the brigand; he is born of the soil and fast rooted in it; he has the hearts of the populace with him; and his most precious stronghold is in their sympathy, from which no laws and no logic of their rulers can dislodge him yet.
Saturnino Mastarna was to all the Maremma shore a hero still.
A few quiet citizens of Grosseto apart, the people looking on were all for him, and muttered menaces of the guards. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The air, too, which gives 'distemper if not death' to the stranger, began to work its evil way on him. He began to lose strength, to feel chilly, to have a touch of fever; the burning suns on the rank soil began to pour their poison into his northern blood. She met him on the twelfth day of his stay at Telamone as she came home towards sunset with wild strawberries and blackberries as her afternoon's gleaning.
She looked at him and smiled a little.
'Maremma makes you ill,' she said with unconcealed contentment; 'you are very unwise to stay in it. The sun is always angry with strangers. ”

“ There are broken hearts in Maremma when the threshing is done.'
'Yes,' said Musa again.
It was nothing to her, and she heeded but little.
'Yes, because men speak too lightly and women hearken too quickly; that is how the mischief is born. With the autumn the mountaineers come. They are strong and bold; they are ruddy and brown; they work all day, but in the long nights they dance and they sing ”

“ Twenty years had gone by, and Saturnino, from a young and generous man who, although fierce and terrible, could be merciful and just, had grown year by year a deeper terror, a dreader name; not to Maremma still, for still he spared the poor, but to the law and state. More murders lay upon his soul than he had time to count ”

“ 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. ”

“ To her they were but such long heaving mountain-lines, such hills, with barren sides and wooded summits, such downs and moors, with the yellow dragon's-mouth, the amethyst-hued cyclamen, in their grass, as she had had always about her in autumn in Maremma. Even the tumuli and the tombs that often marked the way were familiar features in her home landscape. But that blue dome in the blue air afar off, that bell-flower which seemed to hang downwards from the floating clouds, that was new, strange, marvellous ”

“ The peril of last night will renew itself when I am not there. He may kill you and himself, perhaps, but there will be no other way of escape.'
'That will be as it must be; men have hidden all their life, I think, in Maremma. There are many stories———'
'I do not wish to say what hurts you; we will not speak of him; but listen—for yourself, This man is dear to you—dear, no doubt, through his beauty and his misfortunes—but what future will he give you, with what misery does he not dower you? ”

“ CHAPTER XXI.
EANWHILE, in Maremma, as the August heats lay heavy on the land, fate was at work for Musa; the fate which comes to all, and sometimes, like the prophet of old, blesses and curses in the same breath. ”

“ In Santa Tarsilla the August weather was hot with the cruel, unchanging, misty heat that breeds all manner of disease from the waters and the earth, and which is only good for the lecherous vine that strangles the maples it clings to, and lives on to steal the soul out of man by and by, and vines are there none in Maremma. ”

“ The country is then full of the men come from the hills, from far and near, 'il montanino con scarpe grosse e cervello fine,' whom the Maremmano employs, envies, and detests; brown, erect, healthy, smiling, stalwart; looking, beside the pale, swollen, ague-shaken creatures, who live here all the year through, like life beside death. ”

“ The preference of the multitude may be unsound morality, but it has a wild justice and a rude logic at its base.
Santa Tarsilla once more lamented for Saturnino. It was of the same mind with the mob of Orbetello, which, could it have got at the woman whose stupidity had cost him his liberty, would have made her rue that ever she had been born.
In like manner all the villages and the towns in Maremma mourned for him; feeling pity and pain for the old eagle of their rocks who had broken loose from his cage only to be trapped afresh. He had once been the glory of Maremma ”

“ Poveretto! he had lived a bold, vigorous, manful life up yonder on the snow-capped hills above the foaming Fiora and down in the deep, dark ravines where the Fiora water rolls, and in the rich vale of the Albegna, and on the treeless lands that stretch away to Ostia far down in the south.
He had been a fierce fellow, indeed, and a terror to all travellers, and many a tale of his ferocity to captives was told from mouth to mouth along the marshy shores of the Maremma, and in the huts of the shepherds on its moors ”