In her, as in most women of her nation, religious faith was very
strong, but vague. It was an intense force, blind and irrational, which
had no more doubt of itself than she had that her feet were planted on
the solid earth. But it was shapeless and dim as the lineaments of the
Scythian Diana, which lay so long under the waters of the Lake of Nemi.
The early years of her childhood had been happy, for her mother had
been good, and Viterbo remained in her recollection transfigured in the
golden light of a lost joy. It was to her a holy place: her mother lay
there. Slowly there entered into her mind and matured in it the idea of
going on pilgrimage to Viterbo, and there beseeching that the saints
and archangels should grant the stranger his desire.
It was a generous, an unselfish, almost an heroic thought, and it grew
apace with her, as a sweet herb grows in a good soil, and the very pain
it gave her stung her into pursuance of it. She had never been beyond
the limits of the Gandolfo Woods since she had been brought under their
broad green shadows one burning July day in her tenth year; but she
knew well where her birthplace lay, to the north-east after crossing
the last boundary of Le Selve.
Pilgrims through many a century had come and gone in one continuous
stream from that little walled city of the Popes to the greater Urbs
on Tiber; but now the Popes go no more to Viterbo, and the sand chokes
its fountains; and the course of life flows away from it, and leaves
it like them dry and silent. This she did not know. It was to her
the city of her childhood; the city of winged angels and clustering
seraphim, and heavenly choirs and miracles and benedictions. She had no
knowledge of its great past; of its fine art, of its sacred memories;
but she loved it because there she had known a mother’s love, there had
made a mother’s grave.
In her solitary musings, during her long hours of toil, the resolution
matured with her. Viterbo seemed, in her recollection of the long
journey from it, immeasurably far off, far as the very moon itself. But
from shepherds and cattle-drivers she learned the way to take, out of
the woods and northward, to join the great high-road.
She walked nine miles, over hills and across streams, to meet the
public vehicle as it passed on its way to Ronciglione, and thence went
to Viterbo itself. She had only a few coins in her pocket, for it was
only when she sold a little piece of hempen cloth of her own making
that she got a trifle. But she had some black bread and two onions in a
handkerchief, and she was used to meagre food.
After the green shade of the forest, the cloud of dust upon the roads
and the grey desolate streets seemed to her very dreary; the city she
remembered with its dancing waters and its glancing spires seemed to
have vanished. Was the Spirit of God here more truly than in the aisles
of pine and ilex? It was twelve years since she had been in these stony
places, and her bare feet, used to the moss and the turf, ached as they
trod the granite of the streets. But the Duomo was there, the temple
dedicated to St Laurence, where she had knelt when a little child
at her mother’s side, whilst the music of the Kyrie Eleison poured
overhead, in sounds, winged like birds, which floated to the roof and
passed out heavenward.
The great church was silent as she pushed aside the leathern curtain of
a side door. The day was almost done; here and there on the pavement
knelt a lonely figure; a sacristan moved noiselessly, lighting the
lamps in the nave. She went to a side chapel, which she remembered,
whither her mother had always gone; and she knelt there, a tired,
dusty, unnoticeable woman, and she prayed with all the force of her
spirit. It might be no good. There might come no answer. But she would
have done what she could.
She prayed as women pray for their sick at Loretto and Lourdes.
There was a silver lamp above the altar; it swayed slowly to and fro.
She bowed her head down upon the stones, and covered her face with her
hands.
“Holy ones, take the only thing I have,” she murmured. “I am poor and
of no account, but hearken unto me. I give you all I have. Grant him
his heart’s desire.”
And she loosened from her throat a little agate heart. It had been her
mother’s; it was hung round her neck by a plaited tress of gray hair.
She laid it down under the silver lamp upon the altar; it was her only
treasure. In all the world she had nothing else. It looked very small,
very poor, very valueless, as it lay, dark and worn, in the light of
the lamp. But she thought they would not despise it or reject it. They
would know it was all she had.
In a little while the church was fully lighted; the service of vespers
began. She got up from her knees and walked away down the side aisle,
leaving the agate heart and the braid of her mother’s hair behind her.
Her throat ached with silent, hidden weeping.
She slept that night in a poor place in the town that she knew, and
left the gates at daybreak in the public vehicle, packed close between
other women and screeching fowls, and wailing babes, and crowded crates
of ducklings, on her homeward way to the cross-road which led to Le
Selve.
She felt as if her heart was of lead now that her amulet was no longer
warm against the pulses of it. But she did not regret what she had
done. In a few hours the walls and towers of Viterbo had faded from the
distance, and she saw again the dark waters of the little lake of Vico,
and the chestnuts and oak forests of the Ciminian slopes.
She left Ronciglione on foot, and on her homeward way met a horseman,
who, passing her, stopped his horse.
“Have you thought of what I offered to you last week?” he asked.
“No,” replied Muriella.
“How long will it be before you do?”
“As long as the earth is old.”
“I am a bad foe, Muriella.”
“Perhaps you are a worse lover.”
“I would give you a string of pearls and a box of clothes.”
“Keep the pearls for your betrothed and the clothes for a beggar, and
ride away to your _dama_ at La Storta.”
“Where have you been?”
“That is naught to you.”
“You look jaded and worn.”
“I am fresh enough to make your ears tingle if you molest me. Get you
gone to your lawful allegiance.”
Fausto scowled, and dug his heels into the flanks of his good grey
horse. He was not used to be flouted or thwarted.
She looked at herself in the brown shallow water of the river’s bed,
clear as a mirror, and wondered what Faustone saw that made him so hot
in her pursuit. She did not see any good looks in herself; she only
saw her sun-browned skin, her dark, rough hair, her strong column-like
throat, her brown arms and hands, her bare feet wet with dew and green
with moss; she seemed no more to herself than a rude bit of wood shaped
into human likeness, such as they found sometimes in the Etruscan
tumuli. Fausto might find her handsome, and rest his wicked hot eyes
upon her; but she saw nothing in herself.
She reached her home, after a long and exhausting walk, and, since the
under-steward had seen her, made no secret of her journey to Viterbo.
They were all angry that she brought them nothing, but otherwise the
matter had no interest for them.
She shut her hope up in her soul and waited. In the saints’ good time
the saints would set him free.
“You mope, girl. What is amiss?” said her uncles to her.
“Do I not do my quota of work?”
“Nay, we do not say you fail in that.”
“Then what matter my looks or my ways to you?”
She would brook no interference. She knew that she was worth much more
than her keep to them, and they knew it too; if the men had shirts to
their backs, and the children had as much bread as they could eat, they
owed it chiefly to her.
“If she likes to be the light-o’-love of that stranger ’tis no matter
to us,” said the women.
“She’d do better to be Fausto’s,” replied Alcide. “We’d get a pig out
of him come winter.”
They would have seen with a favourable eye her welcome of the Roman’s
wooings; he was a man after their own taste, who bought and sold, and
trafficked and lied, and could fake a colt and outwit a dealer with the
best of his time.
“She may take her _damo_ where she likes best. But if she tell tales
she will be sorry for it,” said Alcide to himself, and set himself to
watch her.
To do so was easy, for they knew where her day’s work lay every morning
when she went out to it; it was nearly always the same according to
season. Once or twice he saw her speak with Cyrille. But he saw nothing
which looked to him like amorous intercourse. The more sure therefore
was he that she played informer to the foreigner’s command.
“We have reared a cuckoo,” he said to his wife; but the woman, wiser
and shrewder, answered:
“We did not rear her. She came full grown or nearly so; and she is not
of the temper that makes spies.”
Alcide, however, remained of his own opinion, and Lucio shared it. If a
man and a woman, both young in years, did not talk of love, what could
they talk of when they were together if not of others? Once Lucio got
near enough to hear what they said, and to see that there were some
feet of shallow water between them as they spoke, Muriella cutting
reeds, and the steward, dismounted, leaning against a tree.
“That is a grasshopper warbler,” said the latter, as a small bird flew
up from the pool. “Take care not to cut where they have built.”
“I see the nest,” she answered. “’Tis like a little basket, and the
stalks run through it. There are many of these birds here.”
“They must mean other than they say,” thought the eavesdropper; and
he continued to listen, but all he heard was talk of birds and their
haunts, and the like nonsense, until he saw the rider mount and move
away.
The part of the wood where the pools and marshes were, lay lower and
more level, spreading onward till it reached the Vico lake, and poured
into it its many trickling streams and hidden springs. In the swamps
wild hogs and buffaloes waded, grunted, bathed, and bellowed, and over
many a square league the brown spikes of the bulrush and the purple
plumes of the reeds reigned in undisturbed sovereignty. A raised
causeway of piles and stones ran across it, of which the foundations
were of date remote as the Antonines; and once off that path such
intimate knowledge as the woodlanders possessed was necessary before
venturing amongst the network of _padule_. There was nothing on the
surface of it to mark out the solid land from the bog.
“I wonder your Northman does not want us to pay for the reeds!” said
Lucio, showing himself a little later over the as yet unblossomed
bulrushes.
“No one need pay aught for aught,” replied Muriella. “So long as they
take only in season, and do not cut to waste, there is nothing grudged.”
Lucio snorted with scorn.
“Whoever cut reeds by rule or asked leave to rake in dead wood? The
marshes are free to us as to that bull-calf.”
He pointed to a half-grown buffalo turning on its back in a shallow of
sand and water.
“So you say,” replied Muriella calmly. “The lords of the soil and the
stream do not see it so.”
“You unnatural wench! Do you go against your own folks and their
rights?”
“What rights are denied you?”
“We have the right to take,” said Lucio furiously. “Your upstart
whiteface makes a show of charity in giving us what is our own.”
“The land is no more our own than it is yon bull-calf’s,” said
Muriella, glancing at the uncouth play of the creature in the shallow
water.
“You insolent jade!” shouted Lucio. “I will duck you head foremost!”
“Try,” said his niece, where she stood between the bundles of reeds;
and she folded her hands on her bosom and waited, the edge of the
sickle turned outwards.
Muttering many oaths, he let her be, and went away, shying a stone at
the poor calf, which stumbled up on its uncertain legs and hobbled
away, splashing awkwardly through the shallows to regain its herd.
He was not as clever and resolute a man as his brother; he fretted
and swore about matters which Alcide settled with a lead pellet or a
stiletto blade.
“Could you not find some occupation for that poor girl Muriella?” asked
Cyrille of the Massaja some days later.
“Occupation there is plenty, sir,” said Caterina curtly. “But you know
her folks little if you think we can meddle with them and go scot free.”
“But she is not their slave?”
“No; not as one may call a slave; but they have housed and fed her
ever since she was ten, and they have the first right to her. No one
can gainsay that. If she were to come here, and have bed and board and
wage, they would stick a knife in her and in me, most likely. They
would hold she had disgraced them. Folks don’t go out to service here
as they do in the cities. And what would they do without her? Who
ploughs, who sews, who washes, who keeps the soul in all their lazy,
dirty carcasses if not this one poor wench?”
“I know; but it is unjust.”
“Most things are, sir, in this world,” replied Caterina; “she was
brought there when she was too small to choose, and now she must stay
where she was put, like the grain in furrow. There is only one thing
that she might do----”
“What is that?”
“She might take the veil. If she did that they would not dare to
say aught against it, for they would know they would burn in fire
everlasting if they did.”
“Why should she not marry?”
“Nay, sir; she will not marry such as alone would marry her. Only a
_ciociaro_ would take her, and ’twould be but a change of masters.”
“Poor girl!” said Cyrille, with regret. He knew what to marry a
_ciociaro_ implied.
“You had better not think about her, sir,” said Caterina, with
significance. “Your thoughts can do her no good.”
“They shall do her no harm, I promise you.”
“Fine words! Fine words!” said Caterina, who, though she thought him a
man above others, was doubtful of his regarding a good-looking maiden
in any other manner than as the bee looks at the rose.