When the morning broke over the Umbrian Mountains on the far east,
the girl was away on foot back to her uncle’s house, before the sun
had risen high enough to be seen over the black ridge of the easterly
woods. Her uncles cast evil looks at her on her arrival, but, to her
surprise, no one said anything in allusion to the incident of the
previous day. They owed her a heavy grudge, but they did not fritter it
out in words. Vengeance would keep in the Selve. It is a good wine; the
best of all wines, to their thinking.
“I should be wiser to leave them,” she thought often in the day which
followed. “I can get my bread anywhere.”
But her heart clung to the woods as she had said; they were her
friends: all she had to love. She knew every big tree in them, as a
priest knows each one of his flock. She loved their liberty, their
solitude, their silence, their brown deep pools, their impenetrable
brakes where none but the wild pig could push his way, their green
twilight, dim even in noonday, the profound stillness of their winter
days and summer eves; she clung to these with all her heart, though
without full measure or consciousness of why she did so.
The hare with its large tender eyes, the bird with its flood of song,
the meadow-sweet with its plume of snow, the birch with its bands of
silver, the oak with its russet-brown trunk--these were all nearer to
her than the family with which she lived. From the silence and shadow
of the woods she derived a pleasure that was inarticulate but keen, and
when she saw the mules straining under a rain of blows, the cows lowing
in vain for their ravished offspring, the troops of weary goats toiling
through the dust of the high-road, the suffering creatures seemed
nearer to her than the men who cut their throats, or stunned their
brains with repeated blows.
To all those around her such victims were no more than bits of wood,
and the torture of them was the chief pastime of young and old; but she
had been created with a different soul. It was dumb, like that of the
cows and the goats, but it was alive.
To her own relatives she seemed a fool; only they knew that she was not
a fool, because they could not fool her; and her brown, well-shaped
hand had before now taken a cruel shepherd by the scruff of his neck
and tossed him into a running stream, or on to a bed of nettles. For
she was very strong, with that marvellous strength created by air and
exertion alone in those whose food is but black bread and herbs.
The work she had to do was of the roughest. The only rest she knew
was when she sat down to the _telaio_, the board at which she weaved
the rude hempen linen in use in the family. But this did not trouble
her; she was young and active, and it would have hurt her more to have
her energies and strength pent up unused than to strain them to the
utmost in the outdoor labours of the croft and wold. The idea of going
elsewhere appalled her, not from any peril which might lie in such
wanderings, but from the force of habit and affection which bound her
to the soil. She knew that in any other place she would feel like the
homeless squirrel whom the forest fire has chased from its familiar
nest in the old chestnut bole, and driven out to wander forlorn over
charred moss and smouldering turf, knowing its homeward path no more.
A few days later Cyrille saw her as he went on one of his daily rides
through the woods. He stopped his horse and spoke to her.
“I have not thanked you for what you did at San Vitale the other day,”
he said, as she straightened her back and looked up at him from her
kneeling posture, where she was cutting dead canes. “But I am afraid it
may have made ill-feeling between you and your uncles. Has it done so?”
“There is little love ever between us,” she answered. “Their thoughts
are not my thoughts, nor their ways mine.”
“Would it not be better to leave them?”
“No doubt.”
“Shall I ask Caterina to find you work with us?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“It would not suit me.”
She grew a little red as she answered. Messir Faustone had persecuted
her with coarse courtship.
“You cannot be happy amongst people whose conduct is alien and
offensive to you,” he said.
She drew down some more canes thoughtfully, and cut them through, and
cast them on the ground beside others already cut.
“Happy! what is that?” she said, with a genuine ignorance which had
nothing cynical. “That is the way you talk. We do not.”
Through Cyrille’s mind there drifted the line of Goethe--“When to
the passing day,” etc.--and that other sentence of Théroigne de
Mericourt--“Doth not the child smile in its mother’s face under
Tiberius as under Trajan?”
“There are natural joys, surely, given even to the humblest in all
times,” he said, with a little hesitation.
The beautiful mouth of Muriella curled with a little scorn.
“Did you ever note the asses that come for the sand which is taken out
of the pits?” she said curtly. “They are put to their work when they
are foals. They never reach their full growth. Their eyes are always
sore. Their coats are always full of dust. No one ever cleans them.
Their hoofs are dry and split. Their bones are through their skin. They
get nothing to eat but mouldy straw and dead leaves. They are beasts of
burden, fed on blows. They have never a minute’s peace. The women of
the poor are like them. They bring forth in hunger and pain, and what
they bring forth is born to their burdens. That is why I will never
marry, if that be what you mean.”
He was astonished at the reflection and observation conveyed in the
reply. It was like a miracle to hear any one of these people speak with
compassion of an animal, and with any comparison of animal to human
destinies.
He was surprised also at the directness of the answer, for a direct
answer is seldom given in these lands.
He pointed to a speck of gold shining far away in the west.
“Yonder, where you see that spark of light, lies Rome. There, more
than one man who was born of a peasant mother has sat enthroned as a
viceregent of God, and emperors and kings have kneeled to kiss his
foot. What woman can say what she may bring forth? Who can tell what
the fruit of her body may be?”
She looked where he pointed, but she did not understand. Of Rome she
had heard, but she had no notion of it, other than as a place whither
the _vetturini_ went as the end of their journeys.
The way is long and the gulf is deep which divides the cultured from
the ignorant mind. Each speaks to the other in an unknown tongue.
He knew that she had not grasped the vague consolation offered in his
words. Silence fell between them, only filled by the sound of her rusty
sickle hacking at the dry canes.
“Why do you stay here?” she said suddenly. “Why? It is not your
country?”
“It is not; no.”
“Have you no friends?”
“Yes, many; but not here.”
“You should go to them.”
“Would that I could!”
“Why cannot you?”
He was silent. How could he make her understand his position? Still
kneeling on the ground with her billhook hacking the canes, she looked
up at him with sudden sympathy.
“You killed someone?” she said in a whisper.
That was the cause which made men fugitives here in Le Selve.
“No,” said Cyrille; “I did worse--I tried to teach men, and they would
not be taught. My rulers thought it a crime. They put me in prison. I
escaped. I am here.”
Muriella was silent, resting the billhook on the ground.
“You try to teach men here,” she said after a while; “they will not put
you in any prison, but they will put you in your grave. They are all
against you. They are not worth teaching. You will not alter them if
you try till your hair is white.”
“I wish to do my duty to my employers and to their people.”
“You are a just man. But they do not want your justice. They want to
do as they have always done, and be as they have always been. The wild
pigs like the swamp. They do not want to go with you to clean straw in
a stable.”
Cyrille was silent.
“I used to believe,” he thought, “I have always believed, that the poor
only needed to be shown the right road to gladly follow it; that they
only wanted to be led to the water-side to willingly wash and be clean.
But I begin to fear that I have deceived myself.”
Aloud he said:
“Were I on my own property, I might allow it to be ruined if I chose,
though to do so would be, not benevolence, but weakness. Here, however,
I have no choice. I am but the servant of others. I must enforce what I
know to be right.”
“They will kill you.”
“That must be as it will. Threatened men usually live long.”
“Not always; and not here.”
Then she resumed her work, and the pallid rustling ribands of the canes
fell beneath her rusty blade.
“And whoever slays you,” she added as she worked, “will never be
found. Everyone will make common cause with him. Everyone will be for
him, risk all for him, hide him in their beds, swear falsely for him
by the Madonna’s self. He will be beloved of all, and pass safely by
signs from house to house, from village to village, from province to
province. The law will never get hold of his little finger. The hatred
of the stranger is more binding than oaths.”
“Then why do you not share it?”
“Why?”
She did not know why. She had not asked herself. Certainly she ought
to be on the side of her own people, and not his. Why was she not so?
“You are in the right,” she said simply; “and you are alone against
hundreds. I have never been at one with my father’s people. My mother
was a woman of Viterbo. I lived with her in Viterbo till she died. She
had left my father because he was wicked and cruel. She was good; so
good! She taught me to see that the ways they follow here are evil.
They are bad men, as my father was. And they have no love for the
woods. You have. And now good-day. They had best not see you here. They
will think we plot some mischief against them.”
She bound all the cut canes together in one bundle, heaved them upward
on to her head, and when loaded went away along the banks of the
stream, walking erect and swiftly, the great sheaf swaying as she
moved.
So passed the women of Etruria and of Latium before her through
these woods. The work of husbandry is the only work which does not
change with time, but remains, at least in Italy, natural, noble, and
beautiful in its attitudes and its simplicity.
He looked at her as he might have looked at some statue exhumed from
the soil. She was as sexless as a statue to him; he wore the ice armour
of an absorbing and despairing passion, which left him neither sight
nor sense for any more fugitive feelings.
But she had shown a comprehension of his position, of his motives, of
his difficulties, which was welcome in the isolation wherein he lived,
and made him grateful to her, as he would have been for the sympathy of
some other man. He discerned the intelligence which shone through the
fog of her ignorance, and he appraised at its due value the courage
which kept her in perpetual opposition to those with whom she lived.
Her warnings did not influence his conduct, but he knew that they were
founded on a just estimate of those around him. They weighed, however,
but little upon him, because his philosophy was fatalistic, and he
had that apathetic indifference to danger which comes from extreme
unhappiness in life. When you have lost all except actual existence, it
seems to matter little if sheer existence be taken as well.
He had been now eighteen months in these woods, seeing no faces but
those of peasants hostile to him, and exchanging no single word with
anyone of cultured intelligence. Muriella was ignorant as any one
of the sheep, who only knew their winter and summer tracks; but she
understood with her heart, if not with her mind, and he found relief
in telling her a little of those “old forgotten far-off things,” which
seemed to him so many æons of time away, though they belonged in truth
only to his own life of a year or two earlier. It did him good to call
up that past, these scenes, all those who had been with him in his
daily life; it relieved him of that dazed sense of unreality which came
upon him as on men in the solitude of a condemned cell.
Once he spoke of the woman he loved: not by name, but as Surrey might
have spoken of Geraldine, with bated breath and unuttered prayer; and
having thus spoken once, he did so again, and yet again, tracing her
portrait in words, pressing the dagger of regret into his heart as
lovers love to do in every age. And Muriella listened, growing pale,
hanging on his words, till in her rude fancy an image shaped itself
from his words clothed in starlight, crowned with the pale hellebore,
fugitive, spiritual, unreachable. Imagination was dormant in her; it
caught light at the flame of his higher intelligence. She could not
see clearly by it, but she saw a ray before her feet--a soft faint
green light like that of the glowworm in the woodland paths, the ray of
awaking comprehension, with its companion pain.
She did not know why she thought of this unknown lady thus. Perhaps it
was because, when he first spoke of her, the hellebore was in blossom
all over the awakening woods.
It did not occur to him that he did a cruel thing in interesting thus
in his fate a poor untutored maiden; he scarcely thought of her at
all; he spoke to her because he read loyalty and sympathy in her gaze
as in the eyes of a dog; and because he was weary of the long, dumb,
friendless front in which his mind and memories were imprisoned.
“You will go back,” she said to him one day when the grief which was in
him broke down his courage and his resignation, and she saw great tears
rise slowly to his eyes.
He gave a gesture of despair. “Ah, never.”
“Yes, you will go back.”
“What should you know, poor child?”
“I know nothing,” said Muriella. “But I pray for you.”
He bent his head.
“I thank you, dear.”
She looked at him with a wistful, yearning look, which he did not
interpret because his thoughts were elsewhere than with her.
“I will pray always,” she said briefly. “I am sure you will go back to
your own land one day.”
“You say so to console me. Those whom I have offended do not pardon.”
“May it not be put in their hearts to relent?”
“As soon will yonder oaks rise and walk.”
Yet, though his reason rejected it, her persistent faith entered into
his heart against his reason, and was sweet to him with the sweetness
of hope.
After all, save death, nothing was absolutely hopeless.
He was still young enough to see many changes in the world--wars,
revolutions, dynasties, policies, might all alter the face of Europe,
and with the larger national life, his own obscure individual fate.
It was the wildest and vaguest dream, but it trembled on the edge of
the unknown future, as far away in the west and the night, at times, a
faint spark of light shone, which was the beacon above the sea at Palo;
not a score of times in a year was that far-off speck visible, but to
know that it was there lent a sense of safety and companionship even
in the darkest murk of storm. So to him was precious that sense of hope
in another soul; he could not share its belief, but it saved him from
despair.
“You will go back to your own land,” said Muriella; and the sound of
the promise was sweet to his ear, though spoken by a poor ignorant girl
who did not even know where his own land lay.