The old man was buried next day, the steward lending the mules and the
cart; Lucio alone accompanied the coffin, grumbling at the injustice of
his brother in putting every disagreeable task upon his shoulders. Why
trouble about a dead man more than about a dead fox? Why not tumble out
the deal box into the nearest ditch?
At a turn in the road a horse crossed their path. The rider was Cyrille.
“I will come with you,” he said, “and discharge the fees.” He knew
that if left to himself, Lucio, were he trusted with the money, would
probably toss the coffin into the first ravine which was deep enough
to tell no tales.
“No need to fatigue yourself so, sir,” said Lucio, greatly
disconcerted. “If you be good enough to wish to pay the burying you can
give me the money. There is no need for you to fag yourself coming to
the town.”
“I will go with you,” said Cyrille, knowing that the money, if it left
his hands, would never reach the graveyard.
Lucio cursed him silently for a suspicious, obstinate, niggardly,
foreign brute. “Spies on us even when we are nought but a carcass,” he
thought, where he sat at the coffin head, cracking nuts to beguile the
way. Did no one else pitch their dead into ditches? What matter was
it to this white-faced stranger if the old worn-out body were tumbled
amongst the weeds and toads at the bottom of a gully? And how did the
stranger know that it had been in Lucio’s mind to do away with it so,
and to sell the cart and mules somewhere far away, and come back on
foot, all tattered and torn, with a well-told tale of robbery and a
bare escape with life?
“Damn him! he sees through the bones of one’s head what one is
thinking,” said the man to himself. The scheme had been ingenious and
feasible; it had been planned by Alcide; and now in addition to the
disappointment of not carrying it out, Lucio had the dread of his
elder’s fury when he should return home, having done nothing better
than to really bury the coffin, and return the mules to their stables.
Cyrille, who suspected nothing worse than a possible misuse of the
church fees, had no idea of the schemes which his presence defeated as
he rode on towards the confines of the wood where the high-road passed
which led to the dreary, small, walled place, now scarce more than a
village, although it had been a stronghold of the Popes in the tenth
and eleventh centuries.
“Would the body not do just as well left to itself in the woods?”
muttered Lucio, as he gave the wooden box a sullen kick.
“Yes,” replied Cyrille; “and I should like my own body, when I die,
to be laid down under a tree, and left there. But your law and your
religion bid you bury your dead, and bury them as they command. You can
only obey.”
Lucio grumbled inaudibly. For the law he had contempt and hatred, but
for religion a dull pagan awe; such as in old Etruscan and Latin days,
under these same forest glades, rude men had felt for the terrors of
the gods.
The little borgo of San Vitale, to which they were bound, stood
aloft, looking to the east to Palestrina and Monte Albano. The soil
immediately beneath was honeycombed by ancient sepulchres and volcanic
fissures; and from a small lake mephitic vapours rose; the hill was
barren of vegetation; the walls looked like worm-eaten wood, its towers
were in dusty ruin; it resembled a seagull’s nest, which, moth-eaten
and cobweb-covered, crumbles away in a naturalist’s closet.
Clouds hung about its hillsides, and the air was heavy and cold. The
few people in its narrow street were ragged, miserable, lean. Their
black eyes stared at the mule and its burden with apathy. Their
stomachs were empty, their hearts were hard; they were half dead
themselves; some famished sheep snatched at the grass growing between
the stones; a woman plucked a living pigeon for the priest’s dinner;
thirsty dogs lapped foul waters in the gutter, the sacristan came out
of an arched door in a cloister: was he called for baptism or burial?
The latter? Very well. He had put in three dead that morning. There
was room for a fourth a-top of them. How long were the coffins left in
the ditch? Oh, a year or so. Then the wood split; he mixed the bones
together and put them in a heap. A man in Rome came up and bought these
heaps at intervals; he believed they were ground, and used for making
pastes, or paper, or bread; he was not sure; it was no business of his
what they were turned to; he would call the Priore who was acting in
the absence of his Reverence.
Then he unlocked an iron gate, and showed a dreary enclosed square of
rough brown turf, in which a few iron crosses, and hundreds of sticks
nailed crosswise, were standing in many rows. A tethered kid was trying
to browse, and hurting its tender mouth on the sere stalks. Across the
ground ran two diagonal ditches always marked by freshly-piled lumps of
earth; these were the resting-places of those who were poorest, where
all were poor.
The figure of a woman was standing there.
It was that of the dead man’s granddaughter Muriella.
Muriella Stravolta was a niece of Alcide and Lucio by an older brother,
deceased, who had served in the army, and lived afterwards at Viterbo.
She lived with the family and worked with them, rather because it never
occurred to her that she could go elsewhere than from any welcome she
got from them, or any attachment on either side. She was twenty-two
years old, with one of those faces which have the old Latin beauty, and
one of those fine forms so common in a country where the females walk
barefoot and carry their water vases on their heads, and are erect and
strong and supple as the young pines of the mountain side. She worked
hard, she lived poorly, she seldom heard a kind word; but her uncles
and their wives respected her; she had a strong arm and an eye which
could plunge its rays into a sinful soul and read the secrets thereof.
She always carried a long slim knife in her stays, and she knew how to
use it.
She wore a rough dark skirt and crimson bodice, and a white cloth
folded on her head in the manner of the Agro Romano; the clothes were
poor and torn in places, and showed her skin, which was of a clear
pale brown; her brows were level and dark, her eyes black as a stormy
night, and her mouth was red as any scarlet berry of the spindle-tree
in October. She had wooers as many as a population scattered far and
wide afforded; but no one of them ever had more from her than a curt
salute or a brisk “begone.” She knew what it was to bear children for
poor men, whether in wedlock or outside it, and she was in no haste to
eat “the sweet fruit with the bitter stone.”
“How did you come here?” said Lucio angrily, at the sight of her, as he
backed the coffin and cart into the burial-place.
“You would not bring me, so I walked across by the hill paths,” she
answered.
“Womenkind have no business at these rites,” said Lucio; and the sexton
added, with a leer:
“Bridals and baptisms are for handsome wenches, not burials.”
She did not reply to either; but she took one end of the wooden box and
obliged them to lift it not too roughly to the ground.
“You did well to come,” said Cyrille to her, with sympathy.
She said nothing. She was not there for the sake of her dead
grandsire, but to prevent the scheme of thieving the mules which she
had guessed had been planned between her uncles.
“Meddling, mischievous baggage!” muttered Lucio. What business had
women to cross and mar men’s work?
When the brief rites were over, and the deal box had been tumbled under
clods of clay, she spoke to no one, but climbed into the cart, taking
the reins of rope.
“Lie down on the straw and sleep,” she said curtly to her uncle. He was
cowed; he knew that his intentions had been read. He stretched himself
grumbling in the bottom of the cart, and pulled his pipe out of his
breeches pocket.
“You may ride on,” said the girl to Cyrille. “The mules shall be at
your place before moon-rise, and neither footsore nor wind-blown, I
promise you.”
Then the reason of her presence in the burial-ground occurred to him.
“She is a brave woman,” he thought, “and, I fear, the only honest one
of her brood.”
He saluted her courteously, and rode down the steep street with its
miserably sickly people staring after him, and flocking round his
stirrup leathers with piteous outcries for alms.
As he turned in his saddle and looked back whilst his horse slackened
pace to pass over a little bridge, the clouds had lifted.
Above in the distance was the crumbling indented outline of the little
walled hamlet, brown and gray, solitary and drear, and midway on the
slope below it was a dusky moving patch made on the white dust, a patch
which was Muriella and the mules. Above head the sun was breaking
through the clouds in pale faint gold.
He had been a man of the world, but in his Slav blood romance and
superstition slumbered; he liked to see in that breaking light an
augury of hope; yet what hope could there ever be for him more than for
that old dead body which had been jammed down beneath the clay?
His spirit was heavy as he rode home, and did not rise with the
exhilarating speed of his young horse. The yawning ditch, the gabbled
prayer, the battering spade, the loneliness, the decay, the sense
of unenjoyed and unpitied lives coming to an end there in the clay,
generation after generation, century after century, with no object, no
hope, no mourner, went with him painfully. Were he to die that evening,
such would be his own end. They would bring him there, and shovel him
in, and go away, glad to be rid of him; and the land of his birth, the
land of his love, would not be with him, even by so much as a handful
of its soil thrown in upon him.
“I grow nervous; that brave woman shames me,” he thought.