iron, as she had ruled her husband before him; a woman loud of tongue,
stern of temper, dreaded for miles around as a witch and an evil-eye;
and although the silence and solitude which reigned in the cabin after
her death oppressed him painfully at first, he soon grew used to these,
and found the comfort of them. He brought a dog with him after his
winter in Maremma which followed on his mother's loss--a white dog of
the Maremma breed, and he and the dog kept house together in the lonely
woods in fellowship and peace. Caris was gentle and could never beat or
kick a beast as others of his kind do; and the oxen he drove knew this.
He felt more akin to them and to the dogs than he did to the men with
whom he worked. He could not have expressed or explained this, but he
felt it.
He had little mind, and what he had moved slowly when it moved at all;
but he had a generous nature, a loyal soul, and a simple and manly
enjoyment of his hard life. It did not seem hard to him. He had run
about on his bare feet all his childhood until their soles were as hard
as leather, and he was so used to his daily meal of chestnuts in cold
weather, and of maize or rye-bread with cabbage, or bean-soup, in the
hot season, that he never thought of either as meagre fare. In summer
he wore rough hempen shirt and trousers; in winter goatskin and rough
homespun wool. In appearance, in habits, in clothing, in occupation, he
differed little from the peasant who was on that hillside in the times
of Pliny and of Properticus. Only the gods were changed; Pan piped no
more in the thicket, the Naiad laughed no longer in the brook, the
Nymph and Satyr frolicked never beneath the fronds of the ferns.
In their stead there was only a little gaudy chapel on a stony slope,
and a greasy, double-chinned, yellow-cheeked man in black, who frowned
if you did not give him your hardly-earned pence, and lick the uneven
bricks of the chapel floor when he ordered you a penance.
Caris cared little for that man's frown.
He sat thus at his door one evening when the sun was setting behind the
many peaks and domes of the Apennine spurs which fronted him. The sun
itself had sunk beyond them half an hour before, but the red glow which
comes and stays long after it was in the heavens and on the hills.
Genistrello was a solitary place, and only here and there a hut or cot
like his own was hidden away under the saplings and undergrowth. Far
away down in the valley were the belfries and towers of the little
strong-walled city which had been so often as a lion in the path to the
invading hosts of Germany; and like a narrow white cord the post-road,
now so rarely used, wound in and out until its slender thread was lost
in the blue vapours of the distance, and the shadows from the clouds.
Bells were tolling from all the little spires and towers on the hills
and in the valleys, for it was a vigil, and there was the nearer tinkle
of the goats' bells under the heather and broom as those innocent
marauders cropped their supper off the tender chestnut-shoots, the
trails of ground ivy, and the curling woodbine. Caris, with his bowl
of bean-soup between his knees and his hunch of rye-bread in his hand,
ate hungrily, whilst his eyes filled themselves with the beauty of
the landscape. His stomach was empty--which he knew, and his soul was
empty--which he did not know.
He looked up, and saw a young woman standing in front of him. She was
handsome, with big, bright eyes, and a rosy mouth, and dusky glossy
hair coiled up on her head like a Greek Venus.
He had never seen her before, and her sudden apparition there startled
him.
'Good-even, Caris,' she said familiarly, with a smile like a burst of
sunlight. 'Is the mother indoors, eh?'
Caris continued to stare at her.
'Eh, are you deaf?' she asked impatiently. 'Is the mother in, I want to
know?'
'My mother is dead,' said Caris, without preamble.
'Dead! When did she die?'
'Half a year ago,' said Caris, with the peasant's confusion of dates
and elongation of time.
'That is impossible,' said the young woman quickly. 'I saw her myself
and spoke with her here on this very spot in Easter week. What makes
you say she is dead?'
'Because she is dead!' said Caris doggedly. 'If you do not believe it,
go and ask the sacristan and sexton over there.'
He made a gesture of his head towards the belfry of an old hoary
church, dedicated to St. Fulvo, which was seven miles away amongst the
chestnut woods of an opposing hillside, and where his mother had been
buried by her wish, because it was her birthplace.
The girl this time believed him. She was dumb for a little while
with astonishment and regret. Then she said, in a tone of awe and
expectation, 'She left her learning and power with you, eh?--and the
books?'
'No,' said Caris rudely. 'I had all the uncanny things buried with
her. What use were they? She lived and died with scarce a shift to her
back.'
'Oh!' said the girl, in a shocked tone, as though she reproved a
blasphemy. 'She was a wonderful woman, Caris.'
Caris laughed a little.
'Eh, you say so. Well, all her wisdom never put bit nor drop in her
mouth nor a copper piece in her hand that I did not work for; what use
was it, pray?'
'Hush. Don't speak so!' said the maiden, looking timidly over her
shoulder to the undergrowth and coppice growing dim in the shadows of
the evening.
'Tis the truth!' said Caris stubbornly. 'I did my duty by her, poor
soul; and yet I fear me the Evil One waited for her all the while,
for as soon as the rattle came in her throat, a white owl flapped and
screeched on the thatch, and a black cat had sat on the stones yonder
ever since the sun had set.'
'The saints preserve us!' murmured the girl, her rich brown and red
skin growing pale.
There was silence; Caris finished munching his bread; he looked now
and then at his visitor with open-eyed surprise and mute expectation.
'You have buried the things with her?' she asked him, in a low tone, at
length.
He nodded in assent.
'What a pity! What a pity!'
'Why that?'
'Because if they are underground with her nobody can use them.'
Caris stared with his eyes wider opened still.
'What do you want with the devil's tools, a fresh, fair young thing
like you?'
'Your mother used them for me,' she answered crossly. 'And she had told
me a number of things--ay, a vast number! And just in the middle uncle
spied us out, and he swore at her and dragged me away, and I had never
a chance to get back here till to-night, and now--now you say she is
dead, and she will never tell me aught any more.'
'What can you want so sore to know?' said Caris, with wonder, as he
rose to his feet.
'That is my business,' said the girl.
'True, so it is,' said Caris.
But he looked at her with wonder in his dark-brown, ox-like eyes.
'Where do you live?' he asked; 'and how knew you my name?'
'Everybody knows your name,' she answered. 'You are Caris, the son of
Lisabetta, and when you sit on your doorstep it would be a fool indeed
would not see who you are.'
'So it would,' said Caris. 'But you,' he added after a pause, 'who are
you? And what did you want with Black Magic?'
'I am Santina, the daughter of Neri, the smith, by the west gate in
Pistoia,' she said in reply to the first question, and making none to
the second.
'But what wanted you of my mother?' he persisted.
'They said she knew strange things,' said the girl evasively.
'If she did she had little profit of them,' said Caris sadly.
The girl looked at him with great persuasiveness in her face, and
leaned a little nearer to him.
'You did not really bury the charms with her? You have got them inside?
You will let me see them, eh?'
'As the saints live, I buried them,' said Caris truthfully; 'they were
rubbish, or worse; accursed maybe. They are safe down in the ground
till the Last Day. What can such a bright wench as yourself want with
such queer, unhallowed notions?'
The girl Santina glanced over her shoulders to make sure that no one
was listening; then she said in a whisper:
'There is the Gobbo's treasure in these woods somewhere--and Lisabetta
had the wand that finds gold and silver.'
Caris burst into a loud laugh.
'Ah, truly! That is a good jest. If she could find gold and silver, why
did we always have iron spoons for our soup, and a gnawing imp in our
stomachs? Go to, my maiden. Do not tell such tales. Lisabetta was a
poor and hungry woman all her days, and scarce left enough linen to lay
her out in decently, so help me Heaven!'
The girl shook her head.
'You know there is the treasure in the woods,' she said angrily.
'Nay, I never heard of it. Oh, the Gobbo's? Che-che! For hundreds of
years they have grubbed for it all over the woods, and who ever found
anything, eh?'
'Your mother was very nigh it often and often. She told me.'
'In her dreams, poor soul!'
'But dreams mean a great deal.'
'Sometimes,' said Caris seriously. 'But what is it to you?' he added,
the suspicion always inherent to the peasant struggling with his
admiration of the girl, who, unbidden, had seated herself upon the
stone before the door. With feminine instinct she felt that to make him
do what she wished, she must confide in him, or appear to confide.
And thereon she told him that unless she could save herself, her family
would wed her to a wealthy old curmudgeon who was a cart-maker in
the town; and to escape this fate she had interrogated the stars by
means of the dead Lisabetta and of the astrologer Faraone, who dwelt
also in the hills, but this latter reader of destiny would tell her
nothing, because he was a friend of her father's, and now the witch of
Genistrello was dead and had left her fate but half told!
'What did she tell you?' said Caris, wincing at the word witch.
'Only that I should go over the mountains to some city and grow rich.
But it was all dark--obscure--uncertain; she said she would know more
next time; and how could I tell that before I came again she would have
died?'
'You could not tell that, no,' said Caris absently.
He was thinking of the elderly well-to-do wheelwright in the town,
and he felt that he would have liked to brain him with one of his
own wooden spokes or iron linchpins. For the girl Santina was very
beautiful as she sat there with her large eyes shining in the shadows
and the tears of chagrin and disappointment stealing down her cheeks.
For her faith in her charms and cards had been great, and in her bosom
there smouldered desires and ideas of which she did not speak.
She saw the effect that her beauty produced, and said to herself: 'He
shall dig up the things before he is a week older.'
She got up with apparent haste and alarm; seeing how dark it had grown
around her, only a faint red light lingering far away above the lines
of the mountains.
'I am staying at the four roads with my aunt, who married Massaio,'
she said as she looked over her shoulder and walked away between the
chestnut sapling and the furze.
Caris did not offer to accompany or try to follow her. He stood like
one bewitched watching her lithe, erect figure run down the hill and
vanish as the path wound out of sight amongst the pines. No woman had
ever moved him thus. He felt as if she had poured into him at once
scalded wine and snow-water.
She was so handsome and bold and lissom, and yet she made his flesh
creep talking of his mother's incantations, and bidding him knock at
the door of the grave.
'What an awful creature for tempting a man is a woman,' he thought,
'and they will scream at their own shadows one minute and dare the
devil himself the next!'
That night Caris sat smoking his black pipe on the stone before the
door where she had sat, and the scalded wine and the snow-water coursed
by turns feverishly through his veins, as once through Cymon's.
II
'Where hast been, hussy?' said Massaio crossly, yet jokingly, to his
niece when she went home that night.
The four roads was a place where the four cart-tracks at the foot of
that group of hills met and parted; the man was a seller of wood, and
his cottage and his wood-yards and sheds thatched with furze stood
where the four roads met under some huge stone pines. The aunt of
Santina had married there many years before.
They were people well-off, who ate meat, drank wine, and had a house
full of hardware, pottery, and old oak: people as far removed from
Caris and his like as if they had been lords or princes. He knew them
by sight, and doffed his hat to them in the woods.
The thought that she was the niece of Massaio, the man who paid for his
wood and charcoal with rolls of banknotes, and sent his own mules to
bring the loads down from the hills, placed Santina leagues away from
and above him.
The only women with whom he had ever had any intercourse had been the
rude wenches who tramped with the herds, and dug and hoed and cut grass
and grain on the wastes of the Maremma; creatures burnt black with the
sun and wrinkled by the winds, and with skin hard and hairy, and feet
whose soles were like wood--'la femelle de l'homme,' but not so clean
of hide or sweet of breath as the heifers they drove down along the
sea-ways in autumn weather.
This girl who called herself Santina was wholesome as lavender, fresh
as field thyme, richly and fairly odoured as the flower of the wild
pomegranate.
When supper was over and the house was on the point of being bolted and
barred, Santina threw her brown soft round arm round her uncle's neck.
'I went down to see Don Fabio, and he was out, and I sat talking with
his woman and forgot the time,' she said penitently.
Don Fabio was the priest of the little gaudy church low down in the
valley where the post-road ran.
Massaio patted the cheek, which was like an apricot, and believed her.
Her aunt did not.
'There is still snow where the man of God lives up yonder, and there is
no water, only dust, on her shoes,' thought the shrewd observer.
But she did not say so; for she had no wish to put her husband out of
humour with her kinsfolk.
But to Santina, when with her alone, she said testily:
'I fear you are going again to the black arts of that woman Lisabetta;
no good ever is got of them; it is playing with fire, and the devil
breathes the fire out of his mouth!'
'I cannot play with it if I wished,' said Santina innocently;
'Lisabetta is dead months ago.'
'That is no loss to anybody if it be true,' said Eufemia Massaio
angrily.
Lisabetta had been such an obscure and lonely creature, that her
death had been taken little note of anywhere, and the busy, bustling
housewife of Massaio had had no heed of such an event. She had not even
known the woman by sight; had only been cognizant of her evil repute
for powers of sorcery.
Santina went up to her room, which she shared with three of the Massaio
children. Long after they were sleeping in a tangle of rough hair and
brown limbs and healthy rosy nudity, the girl, their elder, sat up on
the rude couch staring at the moon through the little square window.
She was thinking of words that Lisabetta had said, as she had dealt out
the cards and gazed in a bowl of spring water, 'Over the hills and far
away; wealth and pleasure and love galore--where? how? when?--ay, that
is hid; but we shall see, we shall see; only over the hills you go, and
all the men are your slaves.'
How? when? where? That was hidden with the dead fortune-teller under
the earth.
Santina did not for a moment doubt the truth of the prophecy, but she
was impatient for its fulfilment to begin. She knew she was of unusual
beauty, and the organist at the duomo in Pistoia had told her that her
voice was of rare compass, and only wanted tuition to be such a voice
as fetches gold in the big world which lay beyond these hills. But that
was all.
She could sing well and loudly, and she knew all the 'canzoe' and
'stornelli' of the district by heart; but there her knowledge stopped;
and no one had cared to instruct or enlighten her more. Her own family
thought the words of the organist rubbish.
There are so many of these clear-voiced, flute-throated girls and boys
singing in their adolescence in the fields and woods and highways; but
no one thinks anything of their carols, and life and its travail tell
on them and make them hoarse, and their once liquid tones grow harsh
and rough from exposure to the weather, and from calling so loudly
from hill to hill to summon their children, or their cattle, or their
comrades, home.
The human voice is a pipe soon broken. The nightingale sings on and
on and on, from youth to age, and neither rain nor wind hurt his
throat; but men and women, in rough, rustic lives, soon lose their gift
of song. They sing at all ages, indeed, over their furrows, their
washing-tank, their yoked oxen, their plait of straw or hank of flax;
but the voice loses its beauty as early as the skin its bloom.
Santina had no notion in what way she could make hers a means to reach
those distant parts in which her fate was to await her if the cards
spake truly. Only to get away somewhere, somehow, was her fixed idea;
and she would no more have married the sober, well-to-do wheelwright
her people picked out for her, than she would have thrown her vigorous
and virgin body down the well.
'He shall get me the cards and the treasure wand out of her grave
before this moon is out,' she said, between her white teeth, with which
she could crack nuts and bite through string and grind the black bread
into powder.
Caris took no definite shape in her eyes except as an instrument to get
her will and ways. She was but a country girl just knowing her letters,
and no more; but the yeast of restless ambition was fermenting in her.
She sat staring at the moon, while the tired children slept as
motionless as plucked poppies. The moon was near its full. Before it
waned she swore to herself that she would have Lisabetta's magic tools
in her hands. Could she only know more, or else get money! She was
ignorant, but she knew that money was power. With money she could get
away over those hills which seemed drawn like a screen between her fate
and her.
Marry Matteo! She laughed aloud, and thought the face in the moon
laughed too.
The outfit was made, the pearls were bought, the 'stimatore' who
is called in to appraise every article of a marriage corredo had
fingered and weighed and adjudged the cost of every single thing, and
the wheelwright had bought the bed and the furniture, and many other
matters not usual or incumbent on a bridegroom, and her parents had
said that such a warm man and so liberal a one was never seen in their
day: and very little time was there now left wherein she could escape
her fate.
All unwillingness on her part would have been regarded by her parents
as an insanity, and would have only seemed to her bridegroom as the
spice which is added to the stewed hare. There was no chance for her
but to use this single fortnight which she had been allowed to spend
in farewell at the four roads of Genistrello.
Her uncle and aunt had helped generously in the getting together of
the corredo; and their wish to have her with them had been at once
conceded. Her parents were poor, and the woodsman was rich as rubies
are esteemed, amongst the oak scrub and chestnut saplings of the
Pistoiese Apennines.
The Massaio people liked her and indulged her; but had they dreamed
that she meant to elude her marriage they would have dragged her by
the hair of her head, or kicked her with the soles of their hob-nailed
boots down the hillside into her father's house, and given her up to
punishment without pity, as they would have given a runaway horse or
dog.
The day for the ceremony had not been fixed, for in this country, where
love intrigues speed by as swift as lightning, matrimonial contracts
move slowly and cautiously; but the word was passed, the goods were
purchased, the house was ready; and to break a betrothal at such a
point would have been held a crime and a disgrace.
Santina herself knew that; she was well aware that decent maidens do
not do such things when the dower clothing and linen are all stitched,
and the marriage-bed bought by the bridegroom. She knew, but she did
not care. She was headstrong, changeable, vain and full of thirst for
pleasure and for triumph and for wealth. She would not pass her life in
her little native town, in the wheelwright's old house with a jealous
rheumatic curmudgeon, for all the saints in heaven and all the friends
on earth.
'Not I! Not I! Oh, why did Lisabetta go underground for ever with half
the cards unread?' she thought, as she sat upon her couch of sacking
and dry maize leaves, and she shook her clenched hands at the moon with
anger at its smiling indifference. The moon could sail where it chose
and see what it liked; and she was chained down here by her youth, and
her sex, and her ignorance, and her poverty; and her only one faint
hope of escape and aid lay in the closed grave of a dead old woman.
Though she was voluble and garrulous and imprudent and passionate, she
could keep her own counsel.
Under her Tuscan volubility there was also the Tuscan secretiveness.
Nobody saw inside her true thoughts. Her mind was like a little locked
iron box into which no one could peep.
The Tuscan laughs quickly, weeps quickly, rages, fumes, smiles, jumps
with joy; seems a merely emotional creature, with his whole heart
turned inside out; but in his inmost nature there is always an ego
wholly different to that which is shown to others, always a deep
reserve of unspoken intents and calculations and desires.
It resembles a rosebush all bloom and dew and leaf and sunshine, inside
which is made the nest of a little snake, never seen, but always there;
sometimes, instead of the snake, there is only a flat stone; but
something alien there always is under the carelessly blowing roses.
The Tuscan never completely trusts his nearest or dearest, his oldest
friend, his truest companion, his fondest familiar; be he gentle or
simple, he never gives himself away.
The homeliest son and daughter of the soil will always act as though he
or she were cognizant of the axiom of the fine philosopher of courts:
'Deal with your friend at all times as though some day he would become
your enemy.'
Santina, therefore, had told her secret intent to no living soul, and
only Caris's old weird mother had been shrewd enough to guess it in
the girl's flashing eyes and in her eager questioning of Fate.
The house of Massaio was a very busy house, especially so at this
season of the year, when the purchasing and fetching and stacking of
wood for the coming winter was in full vigour, and all the boys and
girls were up in the woods all day long, seeking out and bringing down
brushwood and pines and cut heather.
Santina with wonderful alacrity entered into the work, although usually
she was averse to rough labour, fearing that it would spoil her hands
and her skin before she could get to that unknown life of delight which
she coveted.
But going with the heedless and unobservant children up on the
hillsides where the heather and chestnut scrub grew, and farther up
still where the tall stone pines grew, she had chances of meeting Caris
or of again getting away to his hut unnoticed. He was usually at this
season occupied in carrying wood or helping the charcoal-burners, and
was now in one place, now in another, as men who have no fixed labour
must be.
Moreover, her just estimate of her own attraction for him made her
guess that this year he would choose to labour nearer the four roads
than usual, if he could get employment, and she was in no manner
surprised when she saw him amongst a group of men who were pulling at
the ropes of one of her uncle's wood-carts, to prevent the cart and the
mules harnessed to it from running amuck down the steep incline which
led to that green nook at the foot of Genistrello, where the woodman's
buildings and sheds were situated.
She gave him a sidelong glance and a shy smile as she passed them, and
Caris, colouring to the roots of his hair, let his rope slacken and
fall, and was sworn at fiercely by his fellow-labourers, for the cart
lurched, and one of the wheels sunk up to its hub in the soft wet sand.
'Get away, lass!' shouted the carter roughly. 'Where women are men's
work is always fouled.'
'You unmannerly churl!' shouted Caris; and he struck the carter sharply
across the shoulders with his end of the rope.
The man flung himself round and tried to strike his assailant in return
with the thong of his long mule-whip; but Caris caught it in his grip
and closed with him.