The winter passed, and no one of the threats against the steward had
been fulfilled. The woods with earliest February were again filled with
the fragrance of the hellebore, earliest and sweetest herald of the
spring.
“They will do nothing now, the days are lengthening,” thought Muriella,
as her nostrils breathed that pungent perfume of the pale green bells,
which she associated in fancy with that lady of the north whom she
vaguely and wistfully envied. But though she strove to persuade herself
of this she felt no certainty.
Short days or long, dark nights or fine, are all one and the same to
those who hate another, and the quietude and comparative industry
of her relatives filled her with apprehension as to what evils such
unwonted virtues might pertain.
Her uncles were certain she was a spy of the steward’s, and said
nothing before her which they would not have had repeated from
the tree-tops. But the wife of Alcide was imprudent, and let dark
innuendoes fall from her.
“White birds that come from the North do not always live to go back
there,” she said once, and once again said, “Le Selve is full of trees,
but the trees can bear three fruits--fire, and steel, and lead.”
Muriella knew that they could wait patiently for years when they
meditated a revenge, but that they would strike in the end as
unerringly as the gerfalcon struck the wood-pigeon.
Meantime the saints were long in answering; perhaps what she had done
had been too insignificant, yet she could not think so; they would be
too generous to despise, too merciful to reject it.
“Yes,” she repeated to herself again and again that winter-time; “I
will pray always.”
Weeks and months went by, and she had no sign from heaven. Once she
said to Cyrille:
“Do they not call you home?”
“No,” he answered in surprise; “what makes you think of things which
can never be?”
“You will go home,” she repeated.
Yet if her prayer were granted, she knew that he would go away from
these woods for ever; that his unknown love, of whom she thought as
crowned with green hellebore and clothed with the stars, would stretch
her arms out from the mists and take him.
Meantime the beautiful springtime came and went, with the song of
nightingales in the laurel shadows, and the cuckoos calling from the
pines, and the marvellous flora of the Agro Romano in blossom all
through the woods.
The long hot summer succeeded, with water-lilies, white and gold, on
all the pools. In these woods there is something of a tropical heat;
their deep shade does not bring coolness, for it excludes air; it
is delightful to the eyes, but to the lungs humid and oppressive.
Oftentimes for weeks not a breath stirs the pendant foliage; when
there is fever and ague on the plains around Rome, there is danger
here in the forest in the sultry nights and on the stagnant waters. In
the higher woods there is less danger, but down in the marshes where
the mosquitoes hum in vast clouds, and the swamps dry up and crack,
and the horse-flies swarm in myriads, and the toads and the frogs
die of drought, it were as much as life were worth to sleep there
through a summer night. There was much sickness this year amongst
the woodlanders, and Cyrille supplied as far as he could the place
of medical aid. The remedies for such fevers were simple; and the
greatest obstacle he encountered was in the bodily filth of the people
and their fear of fresh air. They, who in health worked all day long
in the air in all weathers, falling sick huddled together in a foul
corner, and shut their wooden windows close. But though he saved their
lives, they hated him all the more. The report spread amongst them that
he had poisoned the watersprings because he wanted the woods clear of
the squatters; and this preposterous tale found willing and credulous
believers.
“Truly,” he thought bitterly, “I had better let them drop like
murrained sheep. For what crime does one pay half as dear as for the
madness of trying to serve one’s fellow-men?”
But he continued to do what he could, by day and by night, in despite
of their evil glances and their muttered curses, and of the fingers
thrust out at him in exorcism.
Thus in the long course of breathless weeks the summer drew to an end,
and every day the thirsty glades looked for rain, and the parched pools
and dried-up waterways hungered for the first storm in vain.
It was towards the close of a hot day in September. The air was heavy
and the sky dull. He had been out all day on his usual rounds, and came
in as the sun set to his evening meal. He was thirsty and tired; he had
eaten nothing all day. The colourless leaden heat made him think of
summer on his native plains, and even the distant horizons were veiled
by the gray malarious vapours rising from the soil. The courtyard
seemed to him unusually still as he passed through it. There was no one
about, not even a stable-lad.
Only a man on a mule, with a horn slung at his shoulder, and some sacks
on his saddle, was riding out of one of the gates he entered. He saw it
was a letter-carrier from Ronciglione.
The post was a rare thing in these districts; scarcely anyone, in an
area of a hundred miles square, could read, still less write. Once
in half a year Caterina received news from a son who was a trader in
Brazil, and another son who was a soldier in Eritrea, and Fausto had
occasional correspondence concerning stallions or brood mares to be
bought or sold, or bulls and rams to be had for the hiring, but these
were very rarely; business was done on horseback and by word of mouth
in these districts; and to Cyrille himself no single message had ever
come since he had first entered the shadows of Le Selve. Absolute
silence had fallen between him and his own land and his own people;
he hoped that they believed him dead. The Gandolfo had promised him
secrecy as to his existence and employment, and the most that he could
hope for was that he might be allowed to remain in the poor substitute
for resignation which is to be obtained from constant occupation and
undisturbed work.
His mother had been in her grave some years. There was no one living,
he thought bitterly, who loved him well enough to endeavour to learn
his fate. His family, doubtless, and all those who had once formed his
world, thought him dead, and better dead, in some nameless foreign
grave.
Therefore his heart stood still with surprise and emotion as he
returned this day from his usual rounds, and was met by Caterina, who
cried to him:
“The post-boy has been here, sir; the post from Ronciglione; dead beat
he was, and glad enough of bit and sup; he brought a letter for you;
’tis on your table in your chamber.”
He ascended the staircase with beating pulse, and noticed not that the
curious good-will of Caterina brought her up after him and kept her at
the doorway.
There was a large square envelope lying on the table, stamped with the
postmarks of his native land, and sealed with a cypher which he knew.
He tore it open.
All it contained was a photograph of a woman’s head and shoulders; a
likeness of the face which was always in his dreams by night and by
day. Under the portrait was written:
“_Je seraià Rome en hiver._
“_Marie._”
It was to him as though heaven had opened. His limbs shook as with
palsy, his breath came in deep-drawn sobs; he pressed the portrait to
his lips and to his heart.
He was no more alone. He was no more without a future. He did not ask
or care how she had found his refuge or learned his fate, how she had
traced him, what she knew, what they could be or could not be to each
other; it was enough that she remembered; that she was faithful; that
in a few months she would be near him there, where the golden rays of
the cross sparkled in the soft azure of summer eves above Rome. It was
an ecstasy so great, so unlooked for, so overwhelming, that it utterly
unmanned him; he fell on his knees and wept.
Caterina, looking on from the entrance, closed the door softly, and
went down the stairs.
The sultry day was ended; the sun had set. Far to the west on the
Campagna the fever mists were drifting in pale haze, like the wraiths
of the multitudes of dead whose dust made up the soil. The Anio,
shrunken to a runlet in its bed, was slow and almost stagnant. The
distant Tiber was discernible by the thread of fog which hung over its
course. In the woods themselves the heat was noiseless and dusky and
oppressive; the great ilex avenues looked black as the sacrificial
groves of old. Yet never to him, not in April radiance or autumn glory,
had the scene looked so fair. Evening closed in, an evening hot and
heavy, without any moon or any breath of air, but he sat in a rapture
of memory and of hope beside one of the large windows, of which the
embrasure fronted the north. The light from his own oil lamp within
shone on the marbles of the balustrade outside, and across a few yards
of the rough grassland beyond it. Farther than that was all quite dark,
for the heat-mists made the light of the stars dim. Now and then an owl
flew by hooting; many had their dwelling in the roof; and scores of
large bats rushed to and fro pursuing the invisible insect-life of the
night.
At any other time it might have struck him that the house was unusually
silent; that there was not the noise of women’s chatter, or of men’s
laughter and altercation, such as usually rose up from court and stable
and outhouse when the day was done. All was so still that the place
might have been a monastery, with every cell closed, and every friar
sleeping.
But at this moment of supreme happiness, happiness which seemed almost
reunion, with that portrait in his hands, and under his eyes, and that
vague, ineffable promise written for the future beneath it, he would
have scarcely been sensible if the volcanic fires which slept under the
tufa around had burst the soil and thundered through the woods.
He was happy. Once more he was happy, in despite of exile, of poverty,
of attainder, of ruin.
Those fair eyes looked at him with the gaze he knew so well, and those
fair lips said to him, “I am faithful.”