right arm, snatched out of his breeches belt the knife which every man
carries, however severely the law may denounce and forbid such a habit.
It would have buried its sharp, narrow blade in the ribs or the breast
of Caris had not the other men, at a shout from Massaio, who came
hurrying up, thrown themselves on the two combatants, and pulled them
apart.
'To ---- with you both!' cried Massaio, furious to see his cart stuck
in the sand, its load of wood oscillating, and the time wasted of men
whom he paid by the day.
Santina had stood quietly on the bank above the mules and the men,
watching with keen interest and pleasure.
'Why did you stop them, uncle?' she cried to Massaio pettishly. 'I do
love to see two good lads fight. 'Tis a sight that warms one's blood
like good communion wine.'
But no one heeded what she said.
On these hills women are used but never listened to by any man.
'The cows give milk, not opinions,' the men said to their womenkind.
Only Caris had seen in the sunlight that lithe erect figure amongst the
gorse, and those two burning, melting, shining eyes, which had incited
him to combat.
He was deeply angered with Massaio for stopping the duello.
A knife? What mattered a knife? He had one, too, in his breeches band;
in another second he, too, would have had his out, and then Santina
would have seen work fit for a brave, bold woman to watch, with the red
blood running merrily through the thirsty sand and the tufted heather.
He was not quarrelsome or bloodthirsty; but any man who goes down into
Maremma through the 'macchia,' where the 'mal-viventi' hide, learns
to know very well how to sell his own life dearly, and hold the lives
of others cheaply; and these contraband knives, which the law forbids
so uselessly, cost very little to buy, and yet do their work surely,
quickly, and well.
He cast one longing look up at Santina standing above amongst the
gorse, and moved on sullenly with the other men and the mule, when
the cart with rare effort had been pulled erect and dragged out of the
sand. It was then only an hour or two after daybreak.
The day came and ended without Caris seeing his goddess again.
During the repose at noontide, when he with others broke bread and ate
soup at the big table in Massaio's kitchen, she was not there. They
were served by her aunt Eufemia. He had only accepted this work of
fetching and stacking for sake of the vicinity to her which it offered;
and his heart was heavy and his blood was turned, as he would himself
have expressed it.
Chagrin and irritation, in the Italian's opinion, turns the blood as
tempest changes milk. He was too shy and tongue-tied to venture to
inquire for her; and the instinct of secrecy which characterizes all
passion was joined to his natural hesitation in speech.
Massaio's people seemed, too, to him to be very grand folks, with
their byres and stalls filled with beasts, and their casks of wine and
great earthen jars of oil standing there for anybody to read in mute
declaration of their prosperity.
A barrel of wine had never entered the hut of the Lascarises within the
memory of man. No one took any notice of him. He was a 'bracciante,'
paid by the day, nothing more. Had Eufemia known that he was the old
witch's son he would have attracted her attention; but she did not know
it. When there is quick rough work to be done, nobody notices who does
it.
When the last wood of the day was brought in, Caris went home by
himself, by ways he knew. He was downcast and dull. He had been baulked
of his knife-play with the carter, and he had not seen Santina.
At a bend in the hill-path, where the chestnut saplings grew taller
than usual, and aged pines with scaly scarred trunks were left
standing, he heard a laugh amongst the leafy scrub, and in the dusk of
the moonless evening a slender straight figure shot up from its screen
of heather.
'Eh, Caris!' cried the girl to him. 'What a poor day's work! Have you
left Black Simon without an inch of steel in him? Fie for shame! A man
should always write his name large when he has a stiletto for his pen.'
Caris gazed at her dumb and agitated, the veins in his throat and
temples throbbing.
'It was your uncle stopping the play,' he muttered; 'and I could not
begin to brawl in his house.'
Santina shrugged her shoulders. 'Brave men don't want excuses,' she
said unkindly.
'Ask of me in Maremma,' said Caris sullenly. 'They will tell you
whether men taste my blade.'
'Maremma is far,' said Santina, sarcastic and jeering; 'and the men
there are weak!'
'You shall see what you shall see,' muttered Caris, growing purple,
red, and then pale. 'Tell me a man you have a quarrel with--nay, one
who stands well with you--that will be better.'
'Those are words,' she said, with curt contempt.
'You shall see deeds. Who is it stands well with you?'
'No one. Many wish it.'
'Your promised man should; but he is old, and a poor creature. 'Twould
be no credit to do away with him.'
'He is a poor creature,' said Santina, her lips curling. 'So are you,
when to do a woman a pleasure you will not open a grave.'
'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.
Yet he gripped his pickaxe closer and tighter, and held his ground, and
waited for the moon to shine from the clouds.
Santina should see he was no white-livered boy. He would get her what
she asked, and then she would be his--his--his; and the woods would
hide their loves and the cold moss grow warm with their embrace.
Stung into courage and impatience by her memory, he struck violently
upon one of the stones his whole handful of brimstone matches; they
flared alight with a blue, sharp flash, and he saw there at his feet
his mother's grave.
He could not doubt that it was hers; it was a mound of clay on which no
grass had had time to grow, and there were the cross-sticks he had set
up on it as a memorial, with a bit of an old blue kerchief which had
been hers tied to them.
It was just as he had left them there four months before, when the
summer had been green and the brooks dry and the days long and light.
She was there under his feet where he and the priest had laid her, the
two crossed chestnut sticks the only memorial she would ever have, poor
soul!
She was there, lying out in all wind and weather alone--horribly,
eternally alone; the rain raining on her and the sun shining on her,
and she knowing nought, poor, dead woman!
Then the wickedness of what he came to do smote him all of a sudden so
strongly that he staggered as under a blow, and a shower of hot tears
gushed from his eyes, and he wept bitterly.
'Oh, mother, poor mother!' he cried aloud.