LI B RAR.Y OF THE U N IVLRSITY Of ILLINOIS 823 D374 V.I '^ ^^V'V^^A /XK %\ ^U.yVvv..AA/^ Ql^ ^QW\ J 8*^ The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books ore reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN / jii ■) L h isis APR 2 «r ^ ■??&' 1S78 f3 IN MAREMM A I. NEW NOVELS AT EVERY LIBRARY. FOR CASH ONLY. By James Payn. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. THE MARTYRDOM OF MADELINE. By Robert Buchanan. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. i_ THE COMET OF A SEASON. By Justin McCarthy. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. A HEART'S PROBLEM. By Charles Gibbon. 2 vols. Crown Bvo. THE BRIDE'S PASS. By Sarah Tytler. 2 vols. Crown Bvo. CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W. IN MAREMMA Jl gforp By OUIDA •amor CH' a NULLO AMATO AMAR PERDONA' IN THREE VOLUMES VOL. I. CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1882 [All rights reserved^ LONDON : PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET (^ ^ 1 & ^ 'v.l OP THOSE HOSPITABLE DOORS WHICH THE ETBUSCAN LION GUARDS • OF AN ETRUSCAN TOMB "4 TO T MY DEAR FRIENDS THE STORYS ^^3^ NOTE. 9 It is needless to recall to the scholar, but it may be as well to tell the general reader, that the ' golden warrior ' stretched on a couch of rock, who vanished as the air entered the long-closed tomb, was thus found by Avvolta in the famous tumuli of the Montarozzi opened in the year 1823. IN MAREMMA. CHAPTER I. [HEPiE was a very busy crowd gathered in the cathedral square of garden-gu'dled Grosseto. It was the end of October, and the town and all the country round it were awakening from the summer desolation and sickness that reif:^n throuc^hout Maremma from springtime till autumn, whilst all the land is sunburnt and storm-harassed and fever- stricken, and no human beings are left in it, save the tired sentinels at their posts along the shore, and a few villagers too poor to get away, sickening amidst the salt and the seaweed. VOL. I. B IN MAREMMA. With late October the forests begin to glov/ with a golden tinge or a scarlet flush, the fever abates and slackens its hold, the ague-trembling limbs grow stronger, the north winds come, and the swamps are healthy with the smell of the sea or the scent of the woods ; the land that has been baked and cracked till it looks like dried lava, or has been soaked by torrential rains till it is one vast smoking morass, becomes ready for cultivation. Then the real life of Maremma be- gins ; down from the mountains of the Lucchese and Pistoiese districts labourers troop by the thousand ; shepherds come from the hills with long lines of flocks ; herds of horses and cattle go daily by the roads ; hunters chase the boar and buck, and charcoal burners and ploughmen pour themselves in busy legions over the plains and the woods. The country is then full of the men come from the liills, from far and near, ' il mon- tanino con scaiye grosse e cervello jine^ whom the Maremmano employs, envies, and de- tests; brown, erect, healthy, smiling, stal- wart; looking, beside the pale, swollen, ague- shaken creatures, who live here all the IK MAitEMMA. year througli, like life beside death. They are all niountain-borii, and chiefly from the chestnut-woods of the northern spurs of the Apennines, Avhere the snow has fallen already ; here, down' in the green Ma- remma, they will, year after year, arrive all their lives through, to plough, and harrow, and sow, to hew, and saw, and burn wood for timber and charcoal, all the winter long ; and then, after waiting perhaps for the first hay stacking or wheat harvest, will go back with the money in their pockets to reap and plough, and gather the nuts, and prune the olive on their own hills; a half nomadic, half home life that is rough and healthy, cliangeful and plea- sant, and makes them half vagrant and lialf husbandman ; bitter foes and hot lovers ; faitliless ones, too ; for when the Maremma girl sings of lier lover, he is always some Pistoiese or Lucchese Ja??i(? from the Apen- nines, and the burden of her song is always one of absence, of doubt, and of incon- stancy. When he goes away with the ricli loads of summer-grass or grain, he goes to his own hamlet up higli in the chestnut foj-ests of a healthier land, and it is seldom in- B 2 IN MAREMMA. deed that he will cast any backward look of regret to misty Maremma steaming beneath its torrid suns. And when he comes back another year there, — then he finds some one else. This day in Grosseto there w^ere many hundreds of these come here for the hiring by owners and stewards of this perilous yet fruitful Maremmano soil ; the same men came for the most part year after year, and were well known ; the market day was the day to find masters and make terms for their wdnter labours ; and from here they would all scatter themselves far and wide, north and south, east and west, on their several roads ; some to the swamps and the thickets ; some to the pine and oak woods ; some to the gea-shore towns for the industries of the coast ; some to the vast wdieat and oat fields that stretch level and dreary as moor- land, and bring forth the finest grain in all Italy. There were o;at]iered toc^ether hundreds and even thousands of them ; but this morn- ing they had other thoughts besides those of their hire and wages ; they were standing under the broad, blue autumnal sky, patient, and yet eager to see a great IN MAEEMMA. sight : no less a sight than the passing through Grosseto of the brigand-chief of Santa-Fiora — Saturnino Mastarna. The news of his capture had startled the town at miduii«;ht when the carabiniers had ridden in, thirty strong, with a man bound hard and fast in the midst of them ; and the Grosseto citizens, for the most part in their beds, had lit their lanterns hurriedly, and thrown open their casements as the tramp of the horses and the clatter of the weapons had awakened them from sleep. ' They have captured some poor soul ! ' the good folks had said with a sigh of sym- pathy and regret, and had murmured to each other mournfully, ' e il nostra Saturnino ! ' As the troop of guards had passed under the Avails of their dull little city, a torch here and there flickering on their naked sabres and the barrels of their short carbines, and a moonbeam here and there glistening on the whiteness of their cross-belts and the foam on the manes of their horses, there had been few in Grosseto who did not pity the captive in their midst, with his arms tied tightly by cords behind his back ; few who did not for his sake wish the troopers a sudden death and a bad one, IN MAREMMA. When the trot of the charijers and the dash of the steel had passed into silence, and the town had lapsed into its wonted quietude, the burs^hers of Grosseto puttiug out their lanterns had sighed : ' Quel povero Satuimino^ Aie I Che jjeccato ! ' For Ma- remma had alwaj^s adored her Satur- nino, and it regretted his capture very greatly ; he had never done any harm, he had only robbed the rich, and killed a foreigner now and then ; he had been a holy man, and the priests had always been the better for anything he had done ; and he had been so precious as a theme for talk in the long dreary ^vinter nights, in the still longer, still drearier, summer days. Without Saturnino Mastarna, the Ma- remma would be more than ever desolate. The province had always been full of sympathy with its great robber, whose popular boast it was that he never had wronged any poor man. All the creatures of the law, soldiers, guards, coastguards, and carabiniers, were hated and shunned throughout the province ; got help from none, and were, again and again, baffled and laughed at by the shrewd finesse of the people in the "woods, and on the shores. To IM MAREMMA. cheat a shirro was a loyal task that brought praise and honour to whosoever had accom- plished it. Therefore for years the seizing of Satur- nino had been impossible, and scai"'cely even desired by the authorities, so great an un- popularity was his capture certain to pro- duce. But at the last the brio^and had cjrown too audacious : he had seized foreigners of note, and foreign governments had bestirred themselves, and it had been thought needful to show some vigour and vigilance against a mocker of the law who would stride about in the towns of the Maremma in festal bravery, secure of immunity, and. boasting that no ruler of them all would dare to touch him. Troops had been put in motion ; mu- nicipalities arraigned by ministers, and at last it was felt that the great days of Satur- nino Mastarna must be numbered. The Government had been told by foreign nations that it behoved its own honour not to leave him at large any longer. So strenu- ous efforts had been made all summer through, and the hill sides had swarmed with scouts and sharpshooters, and at last on one misty October night, tlie State had been one IN MAREMMA. too many for its wary and ferocious son, and Saturnino, asleep and heavy witli wine, had been surprised, and after bitter and murder- ous resistance been vanquished, and dragged from where he dwelt amongst the clouds of the mountain's top, where Monte Labbro reared its silver summit to the whiteness of the moon. All men of the Maremma had been proud that their province boasted so dread a name as Saturnino's : a name sweeping clear, like a scythe, all the country side of travellers, and resounding even down to the very walls of Eome. That terrible shape and rumour up there in the mountain-labyrinths above the stormy Flora water had lent mystery and majesty to the land ; had hung a dread tale to every wayside bush along the lone sea- roads and haunted every thicket of mastic and laurel that grew above the old ways of Porsenna's kingdoms. They had been proud of Saturnino, the great Saturnino, at the lifting of whose voice all the wet grass upon a summer's nigh!: would grow suddenly alive with gleaming eyes, and flashing firelocks, as though he called men up from the very stones to do his bidding, IN MAREMMA. 9 All men in Grosseto this autumn day were talking of that one theme : Saturnino of Santa Fiora — il gran' Saturnino ! So they murmured with one accord, leaving business, and bargains, to crowd to- gether and tell the tale over a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, and. agree amongst each other, cordially and with many an oath, that to have captured Saturnino and slung him across a horse's back, with heels tied together like any sheep's, was a sin and shame in the executive. For Saturnino had been their hero, loom- in «: as laro'e as «^ods loom in the mist of myths. ' He was a man ! ' they muttered one to another : and then the natives of the little city seized the strangers who came down for the first time from the Lucchese hills, and told them wondrous tales in passionate high- vibrating voices, and cried a hundred times : ' Do your mountains breed the like ? Nay, not they. There is but one Saturnino. Never would he hurt the poor. Nay, not a poor soul in the land but had him for a friend. And a dutiful man too has he always been. When he came down into the towns, straightway would he go to the church and be shriven, and to the Madonna lie would 10 IN MAREMMA. send always half the jewels that he might light upon : a good man and a great ! And now, see you, oh the pity of it ! They have trapped him and taken him, like any green- finch in a net. Well, he will not be forgotten. We w^ill tell our children's children.' Then, as talk is always thirsty work, they would go in and drink a good rough red wine, with the Lucchese and Pistoiese strangers, wherever some green bough hung out over a doorway, and over the wine tell how a waggon full of barrels of Neapolitan Lacrima had been stopped but last week by Saturnino on the Orbetello road, and the Avaggoner, because a crusty and unpersuad- able obstinate, had been left in the dust with his feet cut off, Saturnino being intolerant of obstinacy. MeauAvhile the yellow autumnal sun shone on the grey stones of Grosseto, and bells clanged, nudes brayed, horses champed, swords clattered, and towards the doors of the prison a fresh squadron of carabiniers, come to replace the jaded escort of Saturnino, rode slowly across the square amidst the muttering of the hostile people. What mattered the wine-carrier? He had been only a Eomagnolo. IN MABEMMA. 11 Besides, all Maremma knew that it was not for the wine-carrier at all that their demi-god had been hunted down, but for a straniero, that no one cared about except the Government ; a traveller that Saturnino had shot in a paroxysm of jealous rage, and who had been a person of distinction enough for the nation to which he belonged to demand that justice should be done on his assassin. The stranger had been Avaitinfij for a ransom to be sent, and had looked at the beautiful Serapia who dwelt with Saturnino too long or too boldly, and Saturnino with- out waste of words had blown his brains out ; a rash act of violence which had become his own undoing. And now he had been taken ; taken just like any common thief who robbed an old dame of a copper coin ; taken by those general foes, the soldiery, and brought down into the lower lands with his feet tied under a horse's belly, as helpless as though he were a kid in a butcher's hands. They w^ere rest- less, curious, passionately eager to see and hear ; but there was only one emotion amonf^^st them — rein'et. A rcG^ret whicli was full of resentment, and sympathy, and indig- nation, and whicli would have burned fiercer 12 IN MAREMMA. and higher, and become revolt and rescue had not the mihtary force bepn strong, and the mounted guards many. All the multitude was awed and chilled. A heavy sense of the power of the law, of a law which they had no sympathy for, and which they feared with the angry fear of impatient resentment, was weighty upon them, like a sheet of lead. Many of them were sensible of more or less close abetting of the hill thieves, more or less passive or active interest in the lawless acts of the band of Santa Flora. Many a tradesman there had never sought too curi- ously to knoAv how the black-browned seller of rich brocades or costly jewellery had come by them, or how foreign gold had found its way to sunburnt, powder-blackened hands. Even those to whom the great Saturnino Avas but a name, the youngsters come down for work from the high villages of the Carra- rese and Lucchese ranges, were dumbfounded and regretful. Saturnino had always been the friend of the forester and the ploughman and the shepherd ; the lads felt that when no more tales could be told of the kini]: of Maremma, savour would be gone out of the goatsflesh roasted in the charcoal in the IK MAHmiMA. woods, and the wineflask passed round when the last of the \o\m furrows had been turned across the plains. In a gloomy silence, broken only by gloomier mutterings of the crowd, the cara- biniers drew rein before the prison. The closely-packed, loudly chattering groups of men, few women amongst them but many in the doorways of houses and churches, stood gathered together to see him brought out and taken on his next stage to the tribunal of Massa, where his trial was to take place. They were all sorrowful. None blamed him. None thought him a criminal. Poveretto I he had lived a bold, vigorous, manfid life up yonder on the snow-capped hills above the foaming Flora and down in the deep, dark ravines where the Flora water rolls, and in the rich vale of the Albegna, and on the treeless lands that stretch away to Ostia far down in the south. He had been a fierce fellow, indeed, and a terror to all travellers, and many a tale of his ferocity to captives was told from mouth to mouth along the marshy shores of the Maremma, and in the huts of the shep- herds on its moors ; but the travellers were all strangers, and the captives all ricli men, 14 I2i MAREMMA, for from tlie poor he had never been known to levy a crust or a coin, and the sym- pathy of the crowds Avas wholly with him as they hung about the cathedral walls and outside the winehouse doors, waiting until the prisoner should come out with the strong guard that was to march him to his trial at Massa ; which would, they knew, certainly end in his condemnation to the mines of the south or the prisons on the little island that was then glancing to amethyst and gold in the glory of the sunset light, away there to the west on the seas they could not see. They had not to wait very long. As the time grew near, the people became very quiet in the hush of expectation. For many and many a year to come, the imagination of the Italian people will be always captivated and blinded by the bas- tard heroism of the brigand ; he is born of the soil and fast rooted in it ; he has the hearts of the populace with him ; and his most precious strongliold is in their sym- pathy, from which no laws and no logic of their rulers can dislodge him yet. Saturnino Mastarna w^as to all the Ma- remma shore a hero still. A few quiet citizens of Grosseto apart. IN MAREMMA. 16 the people looking on were all for liim, and muttered menaces of the guards. The mountaineers and woodcutters, and rough labourers of all kmds that had come down into the town, were most of them men to w^hom ' to take to the hills ' seemed a bold and right thing to do ; most of them would Lave been not unwillim? to trv it them- selves ; many of them had been often in secret league and complicity witli the terrorism which was no terror to them, because it only struck the rich and never harmed the poor. They would have all been willing to rescue the doomed man, but they paused doubtfully : no one taking the lead. ' Poveretto ! Poveretto I ' they all muttered in regret for him ; and had there been an adventurous spirit amidst them to advise his rescue, those gathered labourers of the forests and the plains might have been formidable in their resistance to the law. But the Italian loves to talk ; he loves not equally to act. And so they stood there., sullen, sympathetic, but inert, as the prison gates opened, and the carabiniers rode out with Saturnino in their midst. The autumnal floods had for the time rendered the railway that runs through Gros- 16 IN MARJEMMA. seto, from north to south, impassable, and the carabiniers had had their orders to ride with him through the twenty odd miles that were under water. It was thought well that the folk of Grosseto, whose traders were suspected of collusion with the brigand, by the purchase of many of his stolen trea- sures, should see the famous marauder in this sorry plight in their streets. Further south, such a spectacle would have pro- voked a rescue, or at least a riot ; but, in Grosseto, blood ran more quietly and more soberly, and the multitude waiting there only muttered a curse or two as the httle troop of horsemen passed out of the court of the prison and came in sight. With his legs tied beneath his horse, Grosseto saw its fallen hero. He was in his own mountaineer's dress, a sheepskin jacket, breeches of untanned leather, a sash of brilliant crimson, w^eather stained, a broad-leafed hat with golden tas- sels, and in its band a little gold image of Our Lady. At his throat, too, was a Madonnina. His pistols, his knife, his earrings, they had taken away from him ; but these little images his captors had left him, from a charitable feelino" that it was as well to leave the man, IN MAREMMA. 17 in such a strait as this, all such aid as he could have from heaven. His great black eyes were sombre and terrible ; his dark locks hung to his throat, slightly curling, for he had been vain of his good looks ; his lips were rich and red ; his features straight and handsome ; his brow was low, his chest and his limbs were massive. He was the true robber-chief of romance. Who could say what blood ran in his veins ? His name was the old Etruscan name that had once been that of Servius Tullius ; he had been the son of wild moun- tain hunters ; who could say what blood of omnipotent Lucumo, of aruspex weighted with the secrets of the stars, of languid and luxurious Lydian, of lustful lord of Sardis, might not be in him, hot and cruel and lascivious ? The Etruscan name had been his forefathers' for hundreds of years counted on the hills. ' Is that truly Saturnino who is taken ? ' asked an old woman on the edge of the piazza, a tall gaunt woman with blue eyes and snow-white hair, who had a different accent and look to those of the crowd. ' Aye, mother, that it is,' the man nearest to her answered sorrowfully. VOL. I. c 18 IN MAREMMA. Grosseto knew him well. He had loved to ruffle it, in all his finery, on feast days, in its wineshops and on its public ways, in open bravado and scorn of the power of the law to touch him. ' Dear God ! ' she muttered, ' how are the mighty fallen ! Only the other day and his name was a terror that made the very dead quake in their graves.' And she pushed a little nearer to see better. ' It is verily he ! ' said the crowds now wistfully gazing up at this fallen majesty, bound there on his horse's saddle, with the muzzle of a trooper's carbine resting on either side of him, as the little band halted for a moment in the midst of the cathedral square while the captain bade farewell to the syndic of the town. ' It is verily he ! ' they sighed, and were full of regret. What would Maremma be without its Saturnino ? ' Ay, it is he ! ' said the old woman, bending her piercing eyes upon the face of Mastarna. She was a plain-featured, clear- skinned ^voman, much beaten about by sea- winds and scorched by poisonous suns ; but she had a frank, straight, and even noble reixard. She dwelt on the low shores of IN MAREMMA. 10 Maremma, but in her youth she • had com- from the Alpine ranges of Savoy. She looked at Saturnino as she stood on the edge of the crowd, and said, ' Ay, ay, it is he ! ' ' You have seen him before, mother ? ' said an eager youth, who had come from the Apennines to go and make charcoal in tlie Ciminian w^oods aw^ay yonder to the south- east. 'Ay, ay,' she said briefly, and said no more, being a woman of few words, wdio, though she had dwelt here fifty years, w^as always called the woman of Savoy, and deemed an alien and a stranger. She was standing near the troop of horse- men, clad in a russet gown, w^ith a yellow handkerchief tied about her wdiite hair. The brigand was sitting in his saddle, sullen, sombre, ashamed : ashamed to be brought thus amidst the people, like a netted calf, like a yoked bull. The old woman with the keen blue eyes, and the face that had once been fair, looked with the rest, and though she was an honest woman, law-abiding. God-fearing, her heart also was heavy for this hawk of the bills that for ever w^as caged. c 2 20 IN MAREMMA. She had been a woman of many sorrows, to whom death had been unkind, and a little son of her dead daughter's had been all that had been left to her of the children of her blood. And one day the little lad had been lost, going with his goats on the high passes above the Albegna valley, and there had been found by the dread Saturnino, asleep, and frozen, where the snows were deep, and Saturnino, who never hurt the poor, had taken him up in his arms and carried him to his own lair miles away, and there fed and tended him, and next day sent him down by one of his own men into his native village safe and sound, and with twenty broad gold pieces in his little woollen breeches. She, being a brave woman and a holy one, no sooner found her one lost lamb thus than she took the most precious thing she had, an image of Our Lady, that had been blessed by God's Vicegerent, and slipped that and the gold coins in her pouch, and said to the mountaineer who had brought her boy, ' Lead me to your chief that I may thank him.' The man demurred .and was afraid, but finally she prevailed, and he took her back IN MAREMMA. 21 with him, a long and toilsome tramp up into the hills, staying one night at a cabin on the way, and when they started on the morrow blindfolding her eyes that she should not see whither she went. When the handkerchief was hfted she was in the presence of Saturnino, whose eyes, according to the people's tales, could send out flame and burn up those on whom his rage lighted. But she was not afraid. She took out of her pouch the holy image and the gold pieces, and she held them both out to him. ' Saturnino,' she said to him, ' I have come up hither to bless you with my own voice, for you have restored to me the only little hving thing I have to love, and night and day I will pray to the saints to have you in their holy keeping. And I have brought you the only bit of value that I own — a Madonna that our Holy Father blessed — and do you ])\\i it by a string about your throat, and it will keep the thoughts and hopes of heaven with you. But this gold that you gave to my boy I bring you back, because I know too well, alas ! alas ! how all your gold is gained.' The men standing around thought that 22 IN MAREMMA. he would cut her clown with a stroke of his sword straight through skull and throat. But he did not harm her. He took the image meekly like a chidden child, and the gold pieces he dashed in the snow. ' A brave soul ! ' he said of her, and she blessed him once more, and kissed his hand that had sent many a one to an untimely death, and took her homeward way again, praying silently that the holy hosts of heaven might be about his steps and win him from his sin. Since that time, when she had gone up into his very lair, she had not seen Satur- nino. Twenty years had gone hj. The little boy that he had saved had died of fever — the ghastly fever that walks these shores all summer through like the ghost of dead Etruria. Twenty years had gone by, and Satur- nino, from a young and generous man who, although fierce and terrible, could be merci- ful and just, had grown year by year a deeper terror, a dreader name ; not to Ma- remma still, for still he spared the poor, but to the law and state. More murders lay upon his soul than he had time to count ; his will, which was unchecked by those IN MAREMMA. 23 around, and unbridled by any fear of conse- quence or qualm of conscience, had grown overbearing, intolerant, exacting, and ca- pricious almost to madness. Amongst his many loves he had conceived a violent passion for the woman whom he had carried off and kept up in his mountain lair by force : that most beautiful Serapia, of whom the stranger waiting for his ransom had been too amorous. Serapia had died, and after her loss all that there had been of any softness in the nature of the man had been burnt out under the fires of his hatred of fate and rebellion against his misery ; lie had become a monster of cruelty, having in him the same temper as of old made the tyrants of Padova and Verona and Brescia the scourges of their generation. Even his men had begun to grow disloyal under the iron heel of his unendurable despotism, and the treachery of one of these had delivered him over into the chains of the State at wliicli he had laughed in secure defiance for so long. Yet the hearts of the folk in Gros- seto were sad for his fate, and the old woman with the northern eyes said to her neighbours : ' Nay, I am sorry he has been 21 IN MAREMMA, taken. You remember how he saved my Carlino. Always I have hoped that with time and my prayers Saturnino woukl some day turn to an honest life.' ' -Nay, mother,' said a Pistoiese, ' of a fox never can you make a house-dog. The pity is that such a man had not luck to the end to die of a shot or a sword -thrust out on his own hills.' The people murmured assent ; that would have been fitting enough certainly. But the galleys ! For Saturnino to be chained and numbered, set to work with an axe or a spade in dockyard or on highway, cowed with the whip of the overseer, and pointed out like a wild beast to strangers, that seemed hard. The thought of it made the blood curdle and grow cold in their veins with the fear of that law which could work this miracle. ' If one may not kill the man who covets our ganza^ what use are powder and shot ? ' said the men of Grosseto. Suddenly the old woman of the north put her hand into her pocket, drew out a piece of money, pushed her way to a wine- shop a few yards behind her, bought a IN MAREMMA. 26 stoup of the best wine, and came out with it. She went straight up to the carabiniers, and said to them : ' Yon man did me a good turn once. Will you let me give him this to wet his lips ? A good man he is not ; but he was good once.' The guards hesitated. They were not churlish ; they had a lingering sympathy themselves for their prisoner, who had been taken in a snare at the last, after having been the hero of all Maremma twenty-five years and more, since he had been a mere lad when he had first captured a great English milord, and had let him go with only the loss of one ear cut off, in consideration of a ransom of thirty thousand scudi. Saturnino, sitting with his head erect, and his great black eyes blazing in a scorn he strove to assume, that he might hide the bitter shame at his heart, heard the voice of the woman, and glanced at her. The carabinier on his right side, relent- ing, held the wine towards his mouth. The brigand's hands were tied behind his back, or he would have dashed the pewter cup down. As it was, he would not drink ; but his sombre eyes dwelt on the woman. 26 IK MAUEMMA, ' Let her speak to me,' he said. The carabiniers were ill-disposed to obey, but they saw that the crowd was- eager and full of pity for Saturnino. They were afraid to irritate, since they had not gagged, him ; and, after all, a woman could do no harm. One of them moved, so as to let her in between his horse and that of the captive. He kept the muzzle of the cocked carbine pointed against her ; but she was a brave woman ; she did not heed that. ' Drink my wine, Mastarna,' she said to him, and lifted the cup herself. ' Is it you, Joconda ? ' he said. But he did not drink. ' It is Joconda,' she said cin^tly, ' How came you in this plight ? ' ' I was betrayed,' said the brigand, while his great despairing eyes flashed as a knife that is raised to kill flashes in the light, and he said it more truthfully than many greater conquered conquerors who excuse their own feebleness and lack of forecast by the plea of treachery. He had been betrayed, and seized as he had sat drinking at sunset at the door of his hut in the hills. ' Joconda, I saved your lamb,' he said, after a pause. IN MAJREMMA. 27 ' You did. You are a butcher ; but you saved my lamb. That is why I am sorry to-day.' ' Save my lamb, then.' ' Have you one ? ' ' I have one that I love. She is Serapia's child. I loved her mother, and her mother is dead. Go and save her! ' ' Where is she ? ' ' Up yonder,' he answered, with a back- ward gesture of his head to where, in the haze of the far distance, the snowy hills of his own lair lay. ' Any one will tell you on the hills. Ask for the Eocca del Giulio. They seized me ; my men fought, but they killed them. She was with women ; but they may have fled. Will you find her, and bring her up in your house ? ' The face of the old woman grew weary and perplexed. ' It will be a burden, Mastarna.' ' Ay, it will. Do as you choose. But she is little and alone.' The woman paused and mused. ' I will take her if I can find her,' she said at length. Across the bold, sombre, fierce face of the fettered man a strong emotion swept. 28 IN MAREMMA. ' Lift your wine to my mouth,' he said. ' I will drink it now.' And he drank. 'Loosen the image from my hat. She has the same about her throat ; her mother hung tliem both. I have your Madonnina still at mine,' he muttered, when he had drained the cup. She put one foot on the stirrup, for she was strong and active, though old ; loosened the golden image, and detached it from its place. At that moment the officer in charge of the escort, arriving in haste, re- proved his men in fury, and the horses started so suddenly that she could scarcely save her- self from falling between their legs and being trampled to pieces on the stones. By good fortune she escaped injury, and only fell on her knees, and rose again unhurt. The troop of carabiniers were trotting out of the square, their carbines pointed at the head of Saturnino. They soon vanished in the golden haze of the rising sun. A hundred hands were stretched to touch her ; a hundred questions rained on her ear. ' What did Saturnino tell you, mother ? ' cried the Grosseto folk jealously, for they IN MAREMMA. 29 had been so kept at musket's length by the guards that no one had heard a syllable of what had been said. ' I knew him years agone,' she answered, 'and he bade me hang this image in some chapel, that Our Lady may have grace to him. Nay, hands off; it shall go where he told me. And he whom you call your Saturnino needs heaven's mercy sorely; for he was a murderer many times — many times.' For these were her foolish notions, she being a woman from the north. More they could not get out of her. She carried the empty wine-cup back to the wine- shop, and then made her way quietly out of the square by a narrow lane. The people stood about in a silent, sad, sullen mob ; discomfited and dissatisfied with themselves that they had not struck a blow for their hero. Saturnino Mastarna had been a robber ; and, as she had justly said, a murderer many times. He had swooped down on the lonely mountain paths above the mountain-born Flora, and along the once consular and im- perial highway that runs through Orbetello and Civita Vecchia to Kome, even as the pseudoetus eagle of these hills swoops down 30 IN MARE MM A. from his cliff-nest, made of oak leaves and olive boughs, on to the water-fowls of the pools, until the daring and the frequency of his captures had made his name a household word that had rung far and wide beyond the confines of Maremma. Therefore Maremma had been proud of him ; proud in a fierce, defiant way that had given him many a nameless ally amidst the scattered gentry of all that wild and lone- some country, and even here in old grave Grosseto, a score of miles away from the foaming waters of the Flora, people had felt the same pride in him, and now, as the trot of the horses and the clangour of weapons died away into silence, there were regret and a smothered rage in the populace to think that their hero should have been brought throu^rh their streets with his feet tied under the belly of his horse, to go to the galleys of Gorgona or the salt mines of Sar- dinia, and be no more seen of men, although for years and years to come the story of his exploits would be told from mouth to mouth wherever a group of woodmen sat about the forest fires at night, or a couple of fishermen wiled the becalmed day away with talk, or in the winter evenings in farmhouses far IX MAREMMA. 31 away on the Luccliese hills men and maidens munched the chestnuts with white teeth. A great stillness and gloom fell on the populace, and the tongues of the people for once ceased to buzz and scream, and were only heard in a few rebellious mutterings against the State, whicli took a frank free- booter like a rat in a trap and dealt with him as it dealt with any paltry thief of the cities. Saturnino was gone : a dead man, or worse than a dead man, and never more would his native Maremma thrill with the Homeric tales of his acts ; never more would this town of Grosseto see him stride through their public places with his pistols and knife in his broad red sash, and his bold black eyes full of challenge and scorn. It was all over, like wine spilt on the ground ; henceforth the Maremma would speak of him only with bated breath, and memo- ries half glorious, half sad, like the memories of dead heroes, Saturnhio Mastarna was gone ; seized by the impalpable, far-reaching, spectral ami of the law, which to a rustic and simple people is so vaguely terrible, so unjust, so incomprehensible, coming out, as it seems to them to do, from the infinite 32 I^" MAREMMA. and the unknown to seize them for their secret sins. He was gone, and there was httle mirth in Grosseto that day, though usually the October weeks are full of merriment and busi- ness, of song and dance, of bargains made, and of wine drunk, and of gladness at the coming winter, and of sportive love offered and returned. But this day the crowds were dull and vexed, and looking in each other's faces read one nnspoken thought there, common to all : — ' We should have rescued him ! ' CHAPTER II. ^EAXWHILE Joconcla Eomanelli, the woman who had had the courage to speak a bold word for his sake, left the town to itself and j)repared to return on her liomeward way to her village of Santa Tarsilla, a long way off upon the coast, a low-lying sickly sea-shore place. Twice a year regularly slie yoked her mule to her cart and drove into Grosseto, making a two days' journey on the road each way, on purpose to sell the homespun linen she had woven from thread she had spun in the six months' time. She knew a hosier in Grosseto who only sold ' nosirair linen, and gave her a fair price for hers at spring and autumn. She thought him honester than Orbetello folk, so made the louger drive ttcrdss the wild and loiiGly couutry. VQI.. I, D 34 IX MAREMMA. She went now to the tavern where she had slept, and wdiere her mule "was put up, harnessed him with her own hands, and drove out of the city gates with her hardly- earned gains in a bag amongst the hay and straw at her feet. She went over the flat desolate lands that lie cheerlessly and barrenly about Gros- seto, past the lime quarries of Alberese, over the narrow ill-made roads that traverse the marshes, and over the rivers by ford or ferry or bridge, and underneath hills dark •with forest where the buck and the boar roamed at liberty. She drove as long as it was light, then reached a miserable little inn, but a friendly one, and slept there ; then at dawn resumed her homeward way. She drove on and on, the old mule ambling slowly, for he only had long journeys twice a year, and resented them mournfully ; the moss and the marshes, the wide fields lying red and bare for the plough, and the little knots of pale dust-coloured houses that made the villages of the hill -sides, were passed in succession until she got across country and down to the level of the sea, and saw little else save stunted aloes and sand, though the distance was dark with IN MAREMMA. 35 the outskirts of the retreating Apennines, and the woods upon the Giglio island rose up in sight. When she could see the isle she hati reached her home, an old house of stone and oak timber standing near the wharf of the small township of Santa Tarsilla, on a little bay, that scholars affirmed had once been, like its neighbours Telamone and Populonia, a port of those sea-kings, the Etruscans. In this little bay some small traffic in fish, and in the stone and charcoal from inland, kept the little place from absolute stagnation and death ; but in the summer nearly all its few souls fled away, and in summer no coast- ing smack cared to lie by its little quay. For it was full of miasma and fever in the hot season, like all these places on the low Maremma coast ; even now in the late days of October the fever mists still hung about it, the pools and the beach still sent out noxious vapours, the scanty population sat about listless and shivering, the children lay on the sand too weak to care to play, and there were but two or three of them in all the place ; a few fishermen were out upon the shore, a coastguardsman paced to and fro, a p 2 36 I2i MAREMMA. little vessel was shipping graiu, anchored amongst the mud-choked shoals : that was all. It was a dreary place at the best of times ; antiquaries said that the sea had receded nearly a mile since the days when the Etruscan pirates had sailed from that bay, and Etruscan lucomonies had had their fortresses and their tombs away yonder where the shore line grew dusky with thickets of bay and rosemary and the prickly mariicca, or holy thorn/ so common here. 'You are safe home, mother?' said the pallid women, as the mule of Joconda picked his way amidst the stones and sand to his own house door. ' Aye, the saints be praised,' said Joconda, and said no more. They knew the woman of Savoy never chattered, and that it was useless to ask from her gossip of Grosseto until she had stabled her beast and broken her fast, and of not very much use after that. Joconda went on to her own dwelling ; it was all of stone with a roof of red tiles; it was old and spacious, and had pointed casements and a massive oak door ; her living-room and her bed-chamber were all the rooms she used^ ' Paliurm aneiraUs> IN MAHEMMA. 37 tlie next room she had given to her mule and her poultry, and a fine black pig. The floors were of stone, and the ceilings too ; there was an open hearth tliat served her for cooking ; the hearth now was cold. She first put her money into a secret place, stabled her mule, counted her fowls, to be sure none were stolen, and then lit a little fire and put on a pot of vegetable soup. Then she sat down and thought while her frugal supper was simmering. She did not tell anyone of what she had seen, and heard, and promised in Grosseto. She was not a sociable woman, and she had only neighbours, no friends. Joconda Eomanelli had been taciturn and grave for forty years ; ever since one summer day, when her man had gone down in a white squall, like that which wrecked Shelley. She had loved the man, and had been sternly faithful to him and to the offspring he had left her. She had always got her own living by carrying cargo to the coasters for her husband's comrades, and taking her linen into Grosseto ; in bad weather she sat at home and span, or made fishing nets and sewed sails. She wag 38 IN MAREMMA. active and very hardy ; slie lived honestly, and in a stern, cleanly fashion that made her village people think her odd and be a little afraid of her. Her sons had died of the marsh fever and her daughter had left her a motherless grandson, a bold fair boy, the lamb that Saturnino had saved ten years before when the boy had gone up with his goats into the mountains ; for which mercy Joconda and her lad had blessed him every day and night they told their beads. But though Saturnino had spared the boy, the fever had not done so ; and ever since his death Joconda had dwelt alone with her dead memories. She had been a sad woman always, but she was a strong one. She worked for her living, and owed nobody a bronze piece, and was half respected and half feared, which she liked better than being loved. Fifty years before she had been brought here from her mountain home fronting^ the high chain of the Grand Paradis by her hus- band after a fishing cruise to the seaboard of lower Savoy, and the tradition of her northern birth made her still * a stranger ' to the people of Santa Tarsilla and all the low- lying shore. She had never seen Savoy for IN MAMEMMA. 89 nigh fifty years, but she was * the woman of Savoy ' to them all. It had been a fatal day for her when her mother's sister, a farmer's wife near S. Martin Lantosque, had lost her cows one by one by disease, and sent to beg that her niece, who was so skilled in dairy matters, would go and spend a summer with her ; and in the course of that summer, up at Lantosque, to visit mountain' neighbours, there had come some seafaring men from Villafranca, away on the seaboard, and amongst them had been a man of Maremma, Sostegno Eoma- nelli, the owner of a tartana then lying off the shores of Savoy. He had been a hand- some young man, and at that time well-to-do as a coaster ; he had persuaded the blue- eyed maiden from the green alps above the Val de Cogne to give a favourable answer to his wooing. She and he had been wedded that same summer at the little church of S. Martin, and she had gone to live with him at his native Maremmana town. Tilings had done very well with them awhile ; then turned and went as ill. The tartana had to be sold, and its owner had to become a deep-water fislierman, working for the gain of others. His wife, ashamed of 40 AY MAHEMMA. tlieir troubles, which her own people had predicted, ceased to write to the chalet under the arolla forests. They were homely people there on the pine-clad heights above Cogne, but there was always a homely plenty, and no penury touched them. They were good-hearted, but hard of mind and scanty in sympatliy. She could never bring herself to tell them that she had married into poverty, and was sick to death of this fatal shore to which her Maremmano had brought her. So silence fell between her and her own family, and up on the mountain slopes that faced the Grand Paradis her brothers and sisters ceased to remember and ceased to regret her. She slept a little now over her supper, being weary ; she was woke by neighbours' voices ; women were looking in at her win- dow and tapping at it, being" unable any longer to subdue their eagerness for news. 'Is it true that Saturnino has been taken, good mother ? ' they asked her. * Ay, ay, why not ? ' she answered crossly. ' He has been taken.' ' Did you see him in Grosseto ? ' ' Yes, the poor soul ! with his legs tied under the horse's belly.' IN MAREMMA. 41 ' Oh, the hard pity of it ! ' mourned the gossips with a wail. * He has got his deserts,' said Joconda. ' A fine long time he has been loose on these hills. Luck always changes.' ' It was that foreign man that made the fuss,' the women muttered. ' He must have been some great prince, else never would they have captured Saturnino for his misfortune.' * Misfortune ' was their fine way of speak- ing ; they knew well that the traveller had been foully murdered. ' He killed the foreigner,' said Joconda curtly. ' He had killed scores. That one was the one too much. That was all.' The women at the window muttered that this was just the caprice and injustice of the government and the soldiers ; a murder more or less (if it were a murder), did it matter so much? Saturnino was a fine bold man, and never had harmed the poor. ' Why, he had good about him,' assented Joconda. ' But murder is not a good thing ; I wish he had had other ways of living. Alas ! poor soul ! upon that rock of Gorgona his crimes will be cold comfort to him.' 42 m MAREMMA, 'And that is true,' said the gossips, crossing themselves ; ' did you speak to him, mother? Was there any chance to say a word ? ' ' Yes ; I spoke to him.' ' What did he say to you ? ' ' He reminded me of my dead lamb, and I told him I had not forgot my debt.' ' Was that all ? ' ' Yes ; get you to your beds ; I want to get to mine.' And she nodded to them, and shut her latticed casement behind its wire grating, and shut out the sight of the moonlit sea, and the shining sands that hid her dead. She heard them under her house wall on the edge of the beach, for the night was still young, talking still of the hero of the hills and of his fate. She heard the deeper tones of a man's voice strike across theirs and say : ' No bolder soul ever lived than Satur- nino Mastarna. They have taken him, and they will cage him out on Gorgona yonder, or send him to the King's mines. If man could free him, I would free him. What did he do ever ? Did he steal from the poor ? No. Did he rob the church ? No. Did ever a peasant miss his sheep, or a woodman IN MAHHMMA. 43 his wallet ; or a labourer that had got his wages in his waistband, was he ever lightened of them by Saturnino ? Nay, never. That we know. We have come and gone on his mountains and never were we the worse. When old Montino was lost in the snow on Santa Flora, what did Mastarna do when he found him ? Took him to his own hut, and warmed, and fed him, and gave him of the best, and when he saw that old Montino had a bag of gold pieces with him, said to him, " Fear nothing ; neither I nor my men will touch your gold, because you are an old man and a steward, and the loss would get you blamed by your masters, maybe thrown in prison." And when full day came, he himself took Montino down the mountain as far as the first ford that crosses the Flora. Five hundred times, if once, have I heard the history from Montino himself. Nay, Saturnino was a brave man, and a generous, and because he aided this stranger to escape from the burden of life, they have caged him in a trap as you catch a dondola. It is vile. The stranger was a rich man in liis own country, a great prince, they say ; what did he do here in Italy ? why not stay where he was? 'It was always the rich that Mastarna 44 IN MABEMMA. made war on ; the poor were sacred to him. That we know. Yet he will lie in chains amidst the waves on Gorgona, or waste his strength in the mines in the bowels of the earth. It is unjust. It is unjust.' Then an assenting and approving murmur rose up from the listening people and joined with the murmur of the sea. Joconda heard them as she lay on her hard straw bed. * And there is a grain of truth in what they say,' she thought. ' Yet his sins were many and deep, poor soul ! and they will be heavier about his neck than the chains he will wear on Gorgona. May Christ lighten them ! ' Then she slept. She was a woman who usually enjoyed the dreamless, heavy sleep of the hard worker ; but all through this night she dreamed and saw the bold form of Satur- nino chained, and with his crimes written on his breast for any who chose to read, even as he would be henceforth in all his years to come on the sunburnt, wave -beaten rock : the eagle of the mountains fettered to a stone in the sea. At daybreak her mind was ma'de up ; IN MAREMMA. 45 she took a stout staff in her hand, skuig her wallet about her, with some bread in it and some goat's ham cured Savoy fashion, and went out towards the mountains. She was a strong woman, though old, and she walked briskly. The pasture lands and marshes were desolate, and she met scarce anyone ; here and there a furze cutter or a ploughman with his oxen, that was all. She soon quitted the sight of the sea, and bore inland by the course of the Albegna river, through solitary untracked thickets, and over rough rocky ground. After some hours slie came to cross roads, and there sat down on a stone, and w^aited for the pubUc waggon running from Orbetello to Monte Murano to come by ; when it jolted near her, its miserable horses straining at their rope harness, she stopped it, and got into it ; it lumbered on imder a volley of blows and oaths rained on the patient, sinking beasts. At Monte Murano she descended, and was forced to sleep ; with daybreak she left the place, and thence had to make her way as best she might up to what had been the brigand's favourite lair, although he had Qther3 in the fastnesses of the Ciuiiuiau 46 73^ MAREMMA. mountains, which he frequented when it pleased him to descend upon the southward road nearer Eome, where more than once he had even stopped the mail train itself as it had rolled over the marshes and beneath the sombre gloom of the maritime pines, and had swerved off the line as it encoun- tered the timber and stones that Saturnino's men had placed there in its path. He had been always called Saturnino of the Santa Fiora, though his range had ex- tended so much farther than these peaks, and towards Santa Fiora she made her way throuo-h the dense underwood and luxuriant vegetation that here cover the soil, where the roads are mere mule tracks, often effaced, and the amphitheatre of the moun- tains enclose a solitude and a silence scarcely ever broken save by sound of sheep-bell, or cry of bittern, or the browsing murmur of the teeth of wild cattle chewing the luscious grass. Here on the wooded cliffs was once Saturnia, whose giant walls still remain, overgrown with laurestinus and mountain box and butcher's broom, and in the hovels that occupy its site, and take its name, where Saturnino forty-five years be- IX MAREMMA. 47 fore had seen the hght, there is a filthy httle driiikiDg-house, whose only customers are the shepherds and the woodcutters and the muleteers. There Mastarna, as the hero and martyr of the soil, was being lamented by a knot of ill- looking foresters as Joconda passed the open door by which they were sitting together playing at dominoes. Being a brave woman, and not caring for their ill looks, she gathered from them what direction to take so as to reach the mountain crest without sinking miserably in a quagmire, or wander- ing till dead of hunger in the intricacy of the pathless jungle. She asked for the Rocca del Giulio, and they pointed it to her ; far, very far away, where the autumn snows lay on the highest lines of the hills. She took her staff and wallet and set out again. ' You cannot reach it to-night, mother,' the men said to her. She said to them, ' Very well. No one will hurt me. I am old and ugly, and I have not a coin to steal.' They laughed and asked her why she went ; she told them ' to get a child to nuriiQ ; ' and with tlie prudence of her country 48 IN MAREMMA. appended to the fact a fiction of a daugliter wliose infant was dead, and wlio needed one to suckle. 'A little lie is always useful,' thought Joconda, though she was not a false or a faithless Avoman. Then she lost sight of the foaming, turbulent Flora, and began her climb to- w^ards the mountain summits. The ways were very steep and very long ; night over- took her. She took shelter in an empty hut of a shepherd, and ate and drank out of her wallet, and slept not ill, for she was tired and not timorous. The great lonely mountain-side, with the water freshets of autumn tearing down it to swell the Flora water, was about her when she awoke. She could not see the rock she wanted above her, a grey speck under the snows. She was stiff, and felt as if she were frozen from sleeping out of her bed on the damp leaves ; but she resumed her upward way. It was again noon when she passed the last robur-oak and cork trees and came up amidst wind- wasted pines and boulders of granite and slate, tossed about on a wild mountain scarp^ as if in the horse- play of giantSi IX MAREMMA. 40 She saw scarce any one ; tlie scattered folk of tlie hills were most of them in hiding, stricken with terror at tlie seizure of Satur- nino, with whom tliey were all in habits of greater or lesser complicity. One old man was met with, very old and bent. He was looking for simples in the many herbs that clothed the liillside. He told her at last where the Eocca del Giuho was, pointing, as he spoke, to a spot far away amidst the snow that had fallen on the heights. ' That was Satm^nino's nest,' he said. ' Poor soul ! They have taken him, and killed most of his men. He never did me any harm.' He was very old, and not curious ; being so, he let her go on upward without question. Here the snow had fallen heavily. It had ceased to fall now, but there was a sharp frost on these heights, and the ground was white and hard. The stunted trees looked black. It was very desolate. The clouds were low upon the mountain side, and their mists were all around her. She could see the white crests of the Labbro and the Santa Fiora loom close on her, it seemed, in the steel-hued fog. She had never been so high VOL. I. E 50 /A^ MARJSMMA; up on tlie mountains since her girlhood, sixty and more years before in the alps about the feet of the Becca di Nona. The sight of the great cones of snow so near beside her, the feeling of the crisp clear air and the icy freshness of it, gave her a strange sensation — the sickness of nostalgia coming on her in old age, after a long life in the swamps and on the shore. A sudden thirst made her throat and her heart ache with longing for her old home, set on a granite ledge of rock, with the valley of Cogne stretching below it, and the white summit of Mont Blanc in sight beyond the gorge, and nearer at hand the peaks and glaciers of the Grand Paradis, her old home, with its girdle of deep green forest, and its ceaseless sound of rushing water, and its alpine winds, that are known no more to the dwellers of the plains than what the condor of the Andes beholds in its flight is known to the hedge-sparrow in the thorn-bush by the road. It was sixty long years since she had felt that wind upon her forehead, and heard that rush of ice-fed waters as they leapt from rock to rock ; since she had hfted her voice in the jodel of the hills, and rested IX MAREMMA. 51 her eyes on that fresh flowering grass, those deep cool shadows of the pines. Yet now and then it all came back upon her as it did now, clear as a dream of the night, and then the sea would fade away, and the sands recede, and the misty scorching dust-grey shores grow dim to her, and her eyes would only be dry because she had grown too old to weep. And when she slept, it was of these she dreamed almost always ; above all, in the stifling midnights of the terrible canicular heat, when the air was like steam, and the soil was like brass, and there was no freshness or peace in the darkness, and with itg fall no dews. She felt for the brigand's image in her bosom, and drew it out and looked at it ; then walked to the first house that lay in her way. They seemed all empty. There was not a sound, except the soughing of wind in the tops of the pines. She called, and no one answered. She shouted again and again, but her voice died on the mountain stillness unanswered. Then she pushed open a door and looked inside. The houses were little more than stone huts, and they were all deserted ; hastily E 2 LI8KARY UNIVERSITY OF ILUNOO 52 IN MABEMMA. deserted, it seemed to her ; for there were things strewn about them, and liere and there pools of blood, and broken arms upon the frozen snow. She could have guessed how it had been, even had she known nothing of the capture of Saturnino ; guessed that there had been a struggle here, and the w^omen had left in hurried flight. * How shall I find his lamb ? ' she thought, with a sigh half of regret, half of relief; and she stood still and looked. The few people who had dwelt there had fled, that w^as plain to her ; most likely out of fear of the soldiery. ' Poor souls ! ' she said, and crossed her- self, seeing the scarcely dried blood on the stones. A dog's bark startled her. It was a bark of anger and of appeal both in one. She rose and w^ent in the direction of the sound. It came from the last of the stone huts. Slie pushed open the door as she had done that of the other. A great dog, snow-white, stood in the centre of the clay floor ; under his body was a child asleep. ' The child of Serapia ! ' she thought, as she looked down on the sleeping inflmt. IN MAREMMA, Serapia had been but a name — a legend — to the dwellers of the shore and ])lains. Wild tales were always told of how Saturnino had ravished her from her people ; people beggared though of noble blood, who dwelt on a wind-swept spur of the Sabine hills, by whom she was cursed, and looked on as one dead. A beautiful, ignorant, mindless thing she had ever been ; foolish and passionate from the hour that she had been borne away, a second Proserpine, to the night of oblivion, peril, and crime in whicli her brute-lover dwelt. One short year only slie had been carried, half a captive, half a willing mistress, to that topmost haunt of tlie hills where all that Saturnino knew as home was made. There she had died ; some said of fever, some said of a blow from Saturnino ; anyway she had died, and had been buried where the tall stone pines rose up like columns of a temple against the marble of the porches. And her child was here, asleep amidst a scene of carnage made more Iiorrible by the dream- ing smile of a baby's rest. In the cabin there were loose coins, gold, and jewels, dropped and stamped on as they had been caught up in the haste of 54 /iV MAREMMA. flight ; a rich shawl was thrown aside iij^on the beaten earth of the ground, a length of gold brocade was tossed against a roiigh- hewn table, overturned ; close to the child's bed there was a carved ivory toy such as are made in India. In the child's hand was a dry half-eaten crust. Joconda looked neither to the gold nor stuffs. Her soul was sick at the sight of the pools of blood still wet, and at the sight of the dream in o- creature who was left a heritage of crime and woe, ' The blood of Saturnino ! ' she thought ; it seemed to her that it must be as a stream of lava and of poison in the veins of a female child. ' This must be the child,' said Joconda to herself, and stood looking ; she was afraid of the white Molossus dog. The child was two years of age, or two and a half, she thought; not more. It had been forsaken, no doubt, when the mistresses and wives of the band had run for their lives after the men's struggle with the carabiniers. Joconda stood wavering, on account of the dog ; at length she spoke to him, and he looked at her. Tlien he ceased to growl, IN MAREMMA, 56 and smelt lier. Then, apparently satis- fied, he let her d^a^\^ near the child, who was sleeping : a lovely creature, half naked, witli long black lashes lying on cheeks like mountain rose-leaves, and loose thick curls like rings of amber. ' It is a woman child ; so much the worse,' said Joconda, looking down on it. If it had been a male, it would have been much easier for her ; a boy could soon have run about and done somethini]^ for his daily bread in the boats, or with the mules, or in the firewoods. However, she remembered that, be it what it would, she had promised Mastarna. She looked timo- rously at the dog, and raised the child without waking it ; he looked at her in return, watchfully, but comprehending that she meant it no injury. She saw at the baby's throat a little golden image ; then she wrapped her shawl about it, and said to the dog ' Come.' For the dog was alone, and Joconda was a woman of hard aspect but good heart. The dog was of the same race as Ulysses' faitliful friend, perhaps the purest and most ancient canine race of all in the world, and one of the boldest and most 66 IN MAREMMA. beautiful ; he was fierce and powerful, but full of sympathy and wisdom ; he bent his head, sniffed at her feet, gazed sorrowfully in her eyes, put his nose to the child's cheek, theii went with her down the path by which she had climbed to what had been, until the night before, the brigand's home. She began to descend the mountain, but night drew nigh, and the child, who still slept, was a heavy weight. She stopped at the first cabin she came to, and asked for shelter. The charcoal-burners, who dwelt there, knew the look of the child and the dog, and would not take her in ; they were afraid Saturnino's daughter might bring them trouble with the police. Joconda cursed them heartily for cowards. She made her way with great fatigue, and with strong^ effort manacled to reach the inn where she had slept the first night. Here they did not know the child nor the dog, or did not say that they did. ' Ah ! thou hast got the baby for thy step-daughter,' was all the woman of the house said to her ; and Joconda answered — 'Ay ; but it has ceased to suck ; that is a pity.' Long before this the child had wakened IN MAREMMA. 57 more than once, and had cried and sobbed, and become very tronblesome. The dog was quiet and sad. They gave her goat's milk and black bread, and let her and the child and the dog sleep altogether in a room full of hay and straw. She and the baby slept well ; the dog but httle. The following morning she resumed her journey, and returned as she had come, only that she had the burden of the infant and the companionship of the animal. The child was now wakeful, impatient, tyrannous ; the dog, as he got farther and farther from his old home, was melancholy, and footsore, and anxious. ' You are like a white lion,' she said to him, and named him Leone : what names either he or the child had borne before she could not tell. It was still fresh, fine weather, happily for her, for she had to walk much, and it took her several days to return on foot, and the diligence only ran once a week, and she missed it at Monte Murano. She was an old woman, and she became very weary. It was evening once more when she drew nigh her own village. 68 IN MAREMMA. The pale sands, the tufa rocks, the back- ground of marshes and stagnant water looked very dreary even to her who had been used to them all her life ; there was a sickly haze upon the sea, and a fog upon the horizon. Two or three of her neighbours, wasted and wan-looking folks, gave her good evening, and glanced at the child and the dog. ' Is that child of thy kin, mother.^ ' they asked curiously. ' Nay ; I have no kin here. It is a dead friend's child,' she answered them wearily, for she was very tired. ' And the dog ? ' ' He was my dead friend's dog ; he fol- lowed me. I could not turn him adrift.' ' They will be hungry mouths, motlier? ' ' Ay ; but I will not ask you to feed them.' Then they laughed and stared and won- dered, but dared not ask more, and let her be. She made her way to her own house, and drew the great key from her girdle, and unlocked her door and opeued it, and entered, leading the child by the hand, and followed by the dog. IN MAREMMA. 69 It was cold and dark and cheerless. The child was awed, and the dog dulled, hj the stillness and solitude, the greyness and gloom. The sound of the sea breaking on the sands below was more mournful than perfect silence. Joconda kneeled down by the crucifix that \\\\\\^ on the wall and made the little limbs of the baby kneel too. ' See me, good saints, and bear ye testi- mony that I have kept my word. Be this 3'oung thing blessing or curse, I have kept my word. Be ye good to us both.' Then she rose and fetched from her closets water and milk, salted fish and bread, and broke her fast, and gave food and drink to both the child and the beast. When she went to rest, the rosy and fresh-washed warmth of the child was on her roui^h couch, and the white Molossus was stretched before her door. She could not tell whether she were sorry or content. She Avas at least no longer alone. ' But the blood of Saturnino ? ' she said doubtfully to herself. Any way, she had kept her word. As she had stimibled down along the stony mountain road, tlie weight of the two- 60 IN MAREMMA. year-old child heavy on her shoulder, she, being a rehgious woman, had bethought her that surely it had never been baptised, and pondered on what holy name to give to this offspring of sinners. She knew her calendar by heart, and called to mind that this autumnal day, with the deep white snow on the heights, and the red and gold ash-foliage in the woods, was the twenty-ninth of October, the day dedicated by the Latin Church to that sad and little remembered eastern saint, Mary the Penitent. Joconda was not a book-learned woman. She could spell out her missal, that was all ; but she vaguely remembered that Santa Maria Penitente had had the grace of heaven given her after sorrow and shame, and that in her story there was a dragon who devoured a dove, and out of the body of the monster the beautiful Avhite bird had come forth un- harmed and spread its wings, and shot up- ward to the Sim. And for sure this is a dove come forth from a dragon, she had said to herself, looking at the sleeping child, and so had resolved that when she should get down back to her own little town, the child should be received into the Church by the name of Maria Penitent^ and no other, CHAPTEE III. ;ANTA TAESILLA was a dreary place midway between Telamone and Orbetello, lying low upon a shore half sand, half swamp, with aloes and sea fennel and the prickly samphire for all its vegetation, and blocks of stone and marble strewn about, some Eoman, some Etruscan. There was beauty indeed on its horizon, in the luminous air whei'e the distant snow-peaks of Corsica and the near crags of iron-bound Elba could be seen, with far Capraja and Monte Cristo, and many another island nameless to the world. But to see these it was needful to go a good way out upon the open water ; from the little crooked land-locked bay there was little to be discerned save the low pale coast and low red tufa hills that locked in C2 IN MABEMMA. the harbour, where the waters were shallow, turgid, almost stagnant, choked with weed and sand, although, beyond, the Ligurian sea, blue as turquoise in some lights, blue as lapis lazuli at others, sometimes rose in fretted tm'bulence, and sometimes rolled in a. sullen swell. A little way inland the moors began ; in grand level stretches of gorse and brush- wood, covering many a buried tomb, and buried town, with the lentiscus and the rosemary weaving above them. Nigh at hand were dark lines of pine forests, al- thous^h their balsamic scent and resinous breath could not purify the miasma of the coast, and eastward were the still wild and scarce-trodden v/oodlands, stretching away to the mountain-ranges where the robber had made his lair. But wood and hill were all too far away to alter the weary monotony of the scene at Santa Tarsilla. It seemed all shore — pale barren shore ; and shallow sea — sea which yet drowned so many that it seemed to the people like a graveyard. On a narrow tongue of sandy land there was a little fort ; sickly soldiers came there and guards to watch the coast. There was also a furnace-house to make the salt that was IX MAJiiilMMA. GiJ raked upon the beach ; but smoke seklom issued from its chimney, though wood was to be had for the getting, and salt for the taking of it. Tlie people had little strength and less spirit. In winter time their lives were very hard, and with the summer came the pestilence, and then ague and fever fed on tliem and drained their bodies, and left them scanty force to do more than sit in tlie shade of their boats or their walls and push out for moonlit fishing when night fell. It was the strong fellows who came down from the mountains of Pistoija and the hills of Lucca that did their work, and reaped the harvest on moor and in forest when autumn came round. Tlie people of tlie shore were nearly all dropsical, and the few soldiers and coast- guardsmen sent on duty along the shores suffered more than tlie native population at most times. But the Pistoiese and the Luc- chese and the armies of winter-workers did not come into Santa Tarsilla itself except at rare odd times, wlien some of them broudit, from the interior, grain or timber or charcoal to load the little coasters that were tlie only vessels insignificant enough to deign to re- member this secluded little l)ay; and even to 6i IN MAREMMA, tliese the port dues were so heavy as to be well nigh ruinous, and the skippers, poor men of Livorno and Genoa for the most part, were scarcely able to scrape a profit from their cargoes. The port dues and shipping taxes have crippled and nearly destroyed all the commerce of the minor merchantmen of Italy, and they have struck a death-blow to the humble industries of the little Marem- mano sea-towns. Before the independence, of which the Maremma heard much but understood little, Santa Tarsilla had been very feeble, but able to get its own living ; since then it had become paralysed, and was perishing off the face of the earth. The waters teemed with fish ; only look- ing down from the side of a boat you could see fish, by the thousand, gleaming like gold and silver in those bright transparent depths, with the feathery weeds, and the branches of coral. There was always fish indeed ; but fish, though it will serve to fill your own mouth, and the mouths of your chil- dren, is of very little further use unless there be buyers for it. The waters teemed, the nets ran over, but as often as not the living- spoils of the sea were thrown down and IN MAREMMA. 65 left to rot in noisome heaps upon the sands, because there was no one to purchase tliem and no means to carry them to otlier towns. Now and then they took tlie fish on mules to Grosseto or other places on the line of rail, but there was little sale for it ; and before it could be passed through the gates of any town there was so heavy a tax on it that it paid no one to load a felucca's deck or a beast's panniers with so perishable a thing. So Santa Tarsilla was sad and solitary always, and usually sickly enough ; there was never any mirth or joviality in it ; the young men grew impatient of its loneliness and povert}^ and always went away as soon as they readied years enough to be their own masters. There were only a few old men, and some women and children ; all the stronger folk who had been born in it were elsewhere, coral fishing in the south, doing forest work on the hills, or gone to live at Follonica wdiere the foundries are. Only the feeble, the old, and the very poor stayed in the little bay that had once been a great port for the galleys of Porsenna, as Joconda did, Avho had neither means nor strength to move away to a cooler laud. VOL. I. Y 66 /iV MAREMMA. An almost absolute silence reigned there, only broken by the booming of milUons of mosquitoes, and the tinkling now and then of the one feeble church bell. The many pedlars that travel through Maremma did not very often aive an hour to Santa Tarsilla, unless their way lay most directly over the Tombolo or sandy shore. Now and then one came with needles and pins, tapes and ker- chiefs, and a hundred other small articles of merchandise, packed in the wooden or leathern case upon his back ; and when he did come, there was much gossip but few pence for him, for every one was poor in the forlorn forgotten town, which would have been no more than a village had it not been for its coasto^uard and its church. By June, when the harvest was reaped, the labourers fled ; a few fisher-folk re- mained, sallow and lean with weakness, or swollen with the dropsy common to the coast. Its very priests w^ere sent to Santa Tarsilla as a penitence ; and its military were stationed as a chastisement ; of late years, even the little garrison of soldiers had been withdrawn by the Government, and there were none nearer than Orbetello. The httle fort was falling to decay, and even the coastguards- IN MAREMMA, 67 men dwelt not at Santa Tarsilla itself, but in a tower on the coast a mile away. JSl'othing could be sadder than this place, or seem more forgotten of God and man. Joconda sometimes, sitting at her door in the heavy parching summer heats, thought with a dull agony of reuiembrance of the mountain home of her birth. In these unhealthy places of Maremma, where no one ever stays who can get away, and nearly all who remain are ague-stricken and fever-w^orn, young children not sel- dom thrive well enough. The poisoned air, so hot, so damp, so laden with seeds ' of disease, seems to have mercy sometimes on these young open lips, and bare, soft, un- certain limbs, and in six years' time from the capture of the brigand of Santa Flora, there was the lithe figure of a beautiful child, bright as a rose, erect as a palm, on the pallid sands under the sultry skies. This child that was Saturnino's throve, and grew without ailment, without accident, without a flaw anywhere, in feature, or limb, or body. When Joconda had come down tlie hills with the weiglit of Saturnino's legacy in her arms, she had pondered long and anxiously r 2 68 IN MAREMMA. as to whether she would tell the people of Santa Tarsilla that it was the daughter of their hero whom she was about to take beneath her roof. She had turned the matter over long and anxiously in her thoughts, as the public waggon had rumbled on its way- down the long stony roads, and at length had decided with herself not to let them knoAV it. Joconda was a woman more truthful than the rest ; that is to say, she saw no harm whatever in an untruth if it were necessary and injured nobody, a distinction that in Italy is rarely drawn ; but she did not think a lie the natural answer to, and lecritimate offspring of, a question, as most of her neighbours did, and she preferred to tell the simple truth when she could, which is esteemed in the country generally as but poor dull work, showing great lack of in- vention in whosoever is content with it. At last, as she had lain the night through wide awake, disturbed by the pre- sence and the thought of Saturnino's off- spring, she had resolved that it would be best not to tell the truth here. The people would make an idol of their hero's offspring, and the child, as she grew older, would be res^tless and perturbed if she heard that her I^' MAREMMA. 69 fatlier had been sent by his judges to pass his life as a galley-slave on Gorgona. Joconda feared no scorn and unkindness on the score of her birtli for the child, if that birth were known ; on the contrary, she feared the vanity and the evil passions that, with the knowledge of the blood of the Mastarna in her veins, might by public sentiment be engendered in her. She would be the child of a hero, almost of a martyr, in the esteem of Maremma. She would hear no account made of his crimes ; she would only hear of his valour ; and if she lived she would grow up to think of her father as a sufferer by the law's in- justice. To the cooler, sturdier, northern sense of ricrht and wroncr which abode in the mountain-born spirit of the woman of Savoy, this prospect carried a fatal future to give to any child ; and she resolved within her- self to keep the secret of the baby's paternity from all, save, of course, her confessor. To him she told the truth. To the rest of the shore people she said merely that it was a friend's child come from over the other side of Monte Labbro, and she, being a close and resolute woman, was 70 IN MAREMMA. impenetrable to the curiosity of her neigh- bours. They were not very curious either. A child was no rare treasure, and there was nothing strange in a lone one being placed with a lone woman who was known to have a little money secured and hidden somewhere. Plenty of people along the coast would have been willing and glad to let Joconda adopt their children, would she have taken them. So witliout more comment or inquiry the child and the dog were domi- ciled at the old stone house by the pier in Santa Tarsilla, and there grew and throve, as they best might, in an air that to many was death. Joconda's first care was to have her friend and director, the priest, baptise the infant, and wash away in holy water the sins of its fathers from its soul. She knew not what it had ever been called, or if it had ever been called anything, but the name of the saint on whose day she had found it, she gave to it, as on the mountain side she had resolved to do. By the sad recluse of Syria the little large-eyed rose-cheeked child of Saturnino and Serapia was named, and Joconda saw a storm-swallow fly beyond m MAEEMMA. 71 the grated casement of the chiircli, and sail to herself that it was a dove. She was not a superstitious woman, but still, if such things once had been, why not again ? ' She is a love child ? ' said the sacristan, as he gave her back to Joconda's arms, weighted henceforward with the name of the Syrian Magdalene. ' A child of crime,' said Joconda ; for she had not the indul- gence to the sins of Saturnino Mastarna that the Maremma had. She was a northern woman. When the old priest died a dozen years later on, Joconda did not tell his successor of the child's parentage. ' They are good as good can be, the holy men,' she said to herself, ' and of com^se they never tell anything out of confessional — no — but still, when their housekeeper gets gos- siping over a nice bit of fried liver, or their cappellano comes in with some new wine, they are but human, and they may mix up a little that they hear in the street with what they hear m the chapel. Why not ? A man must talk, even when he is a holy one ; that stands to reason.' So she, who did not feel the necessity to talk, kept her own counsel. m MAREMMA. She said to herself that it would be better the child should never have known that her father dwelt on that stony face of Medusa. What good could it do ? As the child would grow older tlie thought would torment and fester in her, and lead her to evil, so she thought ; and being a woman with a strong power of silence, the silence of one who has long lived alone with God, she never breathed the secret to any living soul. Slowly the memory of Saturnino w^ould die away, she knew, when he should be no more a living wonder on the hills, to feed their fancies with fresh legends of violence and romance. Saturnino was caged upon that isle whose strange shape lies on the blue waves, carved like a woman's head, with hair out-floating on the deep, and blank eyes staring up at Heaven. Costa has painted it so, and its name of Gorgon is old as the rocks are old. There, galley-slaves (keeping their old name also) are mewed in a bitter company, and every now and then one escapes, and most likely is drowned, or shot, as he struggles in the waves; and every now and then strangers, curious and indifferent, come IN MAREMMA. over the water to see these caged gallows- birds, and stare at them blankly. There are Italian children who look as though they had stepped down from a pre- della or a tryptich ; they are like the singing children of Angelico, the light-bearing angels of Filippino, the pages of Vittorio Carpaccio, the winged boys of the Siennese masters. The old type is there still in all its purity ; the oval face, the level brows, the curling hair, the spiritual eyes, the roselike, smiling, yet serious mouth which the painters of those happier times saw around them in the streets and in the fields. There are so many Italian children still, lookim? on whom one thinks at once of dim rich altars, of gold-starred vaulted niches, of lunettes glowing in the dusk like jewels, of vaulted roofs that are borne up by the wings of sculptured angels. This child, born from a mountain robber and named from the anointed penitent, was like one of these children who, in the works of the early masters, stand with chalice, or lyre, or dove of the Holy Spirit, about the feet of martyrs or around the throne of Mary. Only in the eyes of this creature, who was called a penitent ere she had sinned any sin, 74 IN MAIIEMMA. there was a rebellious light, and in the arched mouth there was a resolute scorn that the masters did not put into their young servi- tors of God. In feature she was strangely like the Ano-el of Annunciation of Carlo Dolce. It is the mode nowadays to deride Carlo Dolce, as it is the mode to deride melody in music ; but let them chatter as they will, none can take away the lovely living light on his Gesu's infant face, nor deny the exquisite beauty of that angel who has all the yearn- ing of humanity and all the grandeur of heaven in that perfect face which bends beneath its cloud of nimbus'd hair. I pity those who can look unmoved on that angel where the painting hangs in the forsaken bed-chamber of the Pitti, whilst, beyond, there are the sweet still sunshine and the sounds of the falhng waters of the gardens. Who can do so, may have the jargon of art on his tongue ; he has not its secret in his soul. I would almost give up even the divine visions of Eaffaelle to have that herald. of Christ for ever before my eyes. There was a bad feeble copy of this seraphic thing in the Church of Santa Tar- ly MAREMMA, silk, but a copy of Carlo Dolce's own time, and therefore one made with reverence and tenderness ; and Joconda would look at it where it hung above a side altar, and "would think to herself, ' If it were not profane, how like the child of Saturnino ! ' This likeness grew more and more strongly visible as she grew^ up to girlhood, and when her hair blew in the sea- wind of autumn, and the sun found the gold in its bronze, then had she an aureole too, and she had the light, the ^strength, the power, the mystery that are in Carlo's angel's face. 'Almost one looks to see wings spread from your shoulders ! ' said old Andreino to her, meaning only that she was like the sea- swallow in her swiftness and her faith in the sea ; but Joconda, hearing him, thought, ' Have you too seen that likeness in her to Carlo's angel ? ' But he had not ; his eyes were always on the fish and the nets. Fed on black bread and dried fish, with rarely anything else, for milk there was none, and fruit there was none, and meat was ever scarce, except when a lamb or kid •was killed from some shepherd's passing 76 IN MAREMMA. flock, she grew erect, strong, bold, bright, handsome ; with a clear, colourless skin ; and brown, lustrous, astonished eyes, and bright bronze-hued hair that Joconda brushed back from her brow in rippling masses, and cut short at the throat. In summer she was clothed in the grey homespun linen that Joconda made, and in winter she was clad in blue or white woollen stuff instead ; both short, straight little garments, very like in form to those of the Florentine choristers of Luca della Eobbia. In all weathers it was her delioht to cast this off, and plunge into the sea and float there, indifferent to wind or sun ; and this passion for the water got for her in her fourth year a popular name in Santa Tar- silla, which quite displaced and effaced the saintly one she had been baptised by ; she was always called by the people — the few sickly suffering people, to whom the sea was but a breeding bed for fish — the velia, or sea-gull, that larus mariniis, with plumage white as his native snows, Avhich came from the northern ocean as soon as the north wind blew. ' C'e una velia I ' an old man had said IX MAREMMA. 77 once, seeing the child in the sea on a stormy day, when she looked no bigger than a sea- bird on the crest of foam ; and from that time she was known by that word chiefly, and also as the Musoncella. ' Mnsoncella ! ' the other children yelled after her ; for in the sonors that are sunjr in the Maremma, round the charcoal burner's fires in the forest, and on the decks of the fishing feluccas on the sea, and behind the driven buffaloes in the reedy swampy plains, the girl that turns her face away is always twitted with this epithet. Far it muso is to be scornful of, and sullen to, your kind : to have the black dog on your back as northerns phrase it. It troubled Joconda to have that good name of Maria Penitente so utterly put aside and abandoned. It seemed as if tlie saints rejected the child of Saturnino, she thought. But when a popular tide of feeling rises high, no one can change it, even when it only sets toward a trick of speech in a fishing village, and Vclia or Musoncella, tlie child was called by one and all, even by Joconda, who could not get out of the con- tagion of the nicknames. She would not play witli others ; she 78 liV MAREMMA. played with tlie sails, Avitli the surf, with the ciystals of the salt, with anything rather than with the children, who, compared with her, were very timid, and were afraid of her, they could not have well told why, except that once, when one of them, twice her age, had worried Leone, she had darted into the hut and rushed out of it with a burning brand, which she would have hurled into the face of the boy who had liurt the dog if the women had not flung themselves on her. When Joconda, wlio was absent that day, returned and heard, she trembled again. ' She is of Saturnino's blood,' she thought with fear. She was herself so old ; she felt unequal to the task of training this lion-cub to lie down amidst the folded lambs. The child certainly was not tender, and could be very fierce. She liked best to be alone and to be always in movement ; she never cared to be still, except in the church when there w^as a requiem or a choral mass, and the sounds went- floating away into the dark dimly lit place and mingled with the sounds of the seas and the winds without. Then she w^ould sit motionless, and sometimes her voice would IN MAREMMA. 79 come out of lier and rise far above lier ken and hover in the air like a bird, and then the people would hold their breath to listen and mutter to one another, ' there must be a saint that thinks about her after all.' For herself, she did not want any saint. The religion of Santa Tarsilla went past her ; it never reached her, still less did it ever enter into her. They had taught her the usual formula, and she had had the 2:)riestly benison on her dusky head like other children ; but it all went by her as the wind did ; it never took hold upon her. ' And yet Saturnino was a true believer,' said the good Priore of Santa Tarsilla; to whom alone Joconda had told the truth. Yes, the murderer and robber had believed devoutly, and had been a true Christian, so far as faith and fear could make him so, but this child was a heathen. ' I do not care for them ; ' that was all she answered to the priest when he strove to make her love Christ and the saints. She cared more for a fish with jewel-like eyes, when she could steal it away from the overflowing net, and let it glide back into the sea, and watch its fins stir, and its languid life (luicken, till with a rush and a dajfh it vanished 80 IN MAREMMA. into the lustrous silent depths where it had its being. The child's desire to set all things free gave often a sharp pang to Joconda's heart. ' What would she say if she knew of her father on those rocks up yonder ? ' she would mutter now and then to the Priore, who would answer : ' There is no reason that she should ever know of him. It could do no good. She would think him a hero, as Maremma has done.' ' She would try to set him free, too, if she swam all night and all day to reach him,' said Joconda. And as she grew older, and age with its many infirmities made her weaker both in brain and body, she began to be afraid, ner- vously afraid — calm, strong woman though she was — that anyone or anything should ever tell the child of that galley-slave at Gorgon a. No one did, and the child but rarely won- dered whence she came ; she took existence as a matter of course, like all ignorant crea- tures ; it was no stranger that she should be alive than that the fish should be so in the water and the birds in the air. Culture IN MAREMMA. 81 alone sets before the baffled brain the cruel problem : idty are ice ? Musa, as she was now oftenest called, was absolutely ignorant. But ignorance is not always stupidity ; and she was full of a restless, though dormant, intelligence which was always groping about blindly for knowledo'e. Of the arts she knew nothing, not so much as their names, but she had an instinct towards the love of them ; the lore of books w^as unknown to her, but she caudit eaojerly at all frao-ments of leo^end and tradition that came to her from the mouths of the old men and women around her ; that earth and sky were lovely no one had ever told her, but their beauty was full of vague delight to her. ' A strange child,' said the people of Santa Tarsilla always, because she would sit for hours quite still, with her dreamy eyes fastened on the stars of a summer night or the sea of an autumn day. Once a fisher-lad, thinking to please her, had given her a branch of coral. Musa had taken it in silence. ' You can sell it,' said another girl of her age. ' It is a brave piece and of rare colour.' ' When you grow bigger, and go in with the mule to the town,' VOL. I. G 82 i:^ MAREMMA. said another, ' you can have it cut into beads to wear ; it is a brave piece.' Musa had said nothing, but she got old Andrea's boat, that day, and rowed out to where the water was deep, and purple in colour, yet transparent as glass in its great depth ; and there, being all alone, leaned over the boat's side and dropped the coral into the water, and watched it sink down, down, down, and join the other coral that grew there, far below. ' It will be happier,' she had said to herself; ' it is not where it came from, I dare say, but it is the best I can do.' It had seemed to her that the coral would be so glad to be once more in those calm, cool and shadowy deeps where never burned the sun, and never sound was heard. When she had reached land afterwards and met all the other children, and the giver of the coral amongst them, and they asked her for it, she had answered, ' I have put it back into the sea,' and they had screamed at her ; and the fisher-iad sworn at her and tried to give her a blow : this was all her gratitude ! they cried in offence and wrath. Questioned, she could not very well have told why she had done it. Only she pitied IX MAREMMA. H:; everything that was taken out of that fresh free hfe of the deep sea, and not seldom when she got a chance shpped back from the net into the waves the shining silver of the stru^zaliiio' fish, caiiQ-ht when tlie moon was high. For which not seldom she got a blow too. For men and women do not like pity that interferes with their livelihood. ' Thou art a strans^e one ! ' said Joconda many a time, for the splendid, abmidant, darino; health and streno^th of the child seemed strange there, in those pale fever mists, amidst those pallid, inert populations. She w^as good to the child, but she was afraid of her. The crimes of the Mastarna men seemed to her fancies to hover, like a cloud of guilt, above this innocent head. The blood that coursed so buoyantly in those blue veins was the blood of an assassin and a robber. Joconda could not forget that. When she looked at the form of the child, leaping naked in the blue waters, she could not but look over to the north where the islands blent with the golden sky, and cross herself as she thought, ' the father is there in chains ! ' She was not even sure that the child cared for lier ; tlie child seemed to love G L> 84 IN MAREMMA. nothing except Leone the dog, and tlie sea. She had a passion for the winds and the waters, for the open moor, for the free air, and was no more to be kept within doors than a mountain beast or sea-bird would have been ; but for human creatures she did not care, and she had none of the caressing, clinging ways of childhood. The thought of her weighed heavily on Joconda ; it was a burden to her, night and day. ' Does one suffer for doing good ? ' she muttered witli a sigh to her priest. 'If one did not, where would be the merit of it ? ' said he. But Joconda shook her head ; the ways of the Saints were hard. Her old ae^e had been already joyless and laborious and bare and meagre. But it had been tranquil, with no heavier care than to get provender for her mule, and bread for her own soup-pot. Now a weary apprehcDsion, an anxious trouble, were with her always. If the child, like the father, should offend God and man ? She knew nothing of transmitted taint and hereditary influence, but her experience told her that what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh ; and her fears made her see IN MAREMMA. 85 for ever behind the proud, bright, noble figure of the child the scarlet spectres of carnage and crime, the shadow of Saturnino Mastarna's sins. ' And I am old,' she would think ; ' I may die — die soon — and what then ? ' Once the child terrified both Joconda and the village. A man threw a stone at Leone and hit the dog in the eye ; she flew on the man and stabbed him with the knife with which she was cleaniDg a gourd. The knife only made a skin wound, and the man was appeased with wine and a little money ; but the terrible fury and convulsive rage of the child scared the people of Santa Tarsi 11a, though they were used to dagger thrusts and long feuds. Joconda reasoned with her, and punished her, and threatened her ; but nothing that she could do could convince the little rebel that she had been wrong. 'Leone bites those who hurt me,' was all that she would say. CHAPTEE IV. |HE grew to eight years old with- out ever seeming to think of ac- counting for lier own existence. Then, abruptly one day she said to Joconda : * Are you my mother ? ' Joconda's weatherbeaten hard flice broke into a laugh. ' Lord ! baby — why I am seventy years old and more ! ' ' Where is my mother, then ? ' ' In heaven,' said Joconda ; and thought, ' poor soul, more like in hell ! ' The child was silent, pondering. ' Where is my father, then ? ' ' Why do you ask such things ? ' ' Because the others, they have a father and a mother apiece, where are mine ? ' ly MAREMMA. 87 Joconda liad often dreaded tlie question tliat sooner or later was sure to come. ' Your father is dead,' she answered. ' Dead in the sea ? ' said the child. People were so often killed by the sea in Santa Tarsilla. 'Yes,' said Joconda, and she looked over to the north where she knew that the isle of Gorgona rose from the waves. ' Did he q;o to fish ? ' asked the child. ' No, dear,' said Joconda, with a pang at her heart. ' No, dear ; he was a mountaineer, he lived up yonder ; in the hills ; do not vex your soul over that, child ; it is of no use.' The child did not understand, nor did she give much heed ; her grave straight brows were drawn too-ether in thouirht, and her curved rosy lips were shut fast. ' I think I do remember him,' she said at last very slowly. ' I remember liim kiss- ing me, and he had something cold and bright that hurt me, and he put it away, and then tliere were smoke, and screaming, and shots, and I crept imder Leone's stomacli and hid. I do remember.' ' You dreamt tliat, baby,' said Joconda harshly, because she was pained ; ' the cold bright tiling ' that had hurt her must have 88 IN MAREMMA. been the dasfgrer red with so much blood ! CO But the child shook her head and persisted : ' No : I do remember.' And she sat down on the earthen floor, and put her arms round Leone, and leaned her head on his, and asked him, did he not remember too ? ' Bless the o-ood God that made the beasts dumb ! ' thought Joconda. She hoped the child would not tell it to the ■ neighbours. The child did not. She was never talkative, but held herself aloof; not out of shyness nor yet out of temper, because she was a bold child, and except for rare fits of untamable passion, was of serene temper, but out of a seriousness and indif- ference that seemed strange in one so young. There was no one to give her guardian counsel in Santa Tarsilla. The priest was a homely, ignorant man, son of a fisherman, one of them- selves in both his ways and thoughts, and the rest were all poor creatures in her estimation, shrunken and sickened with fever, swollen with dropsy, or palsied with the ague of the coast, as they so often were, and living quite away from the world of men, hardly knowing when revolution was IN MAREMMA. 80 running riot in the cities, hardly hearing when ships were sinking, and squadrons were falhng, in war upon sea or land. There is, perhaps, no isolation more complete, no igcorance more absolute, than that of a little obscure town on the ' ac- cursed Maremma,' as the people call this rich and fruitful land, because the greed and the folly of men have cursed it. No one comes nigh it ; nothing is done for it; now and then, with years between each, travellers may wander to the sites of Etruscan cities, or hunters come to kill tlie wild, soft creatures of the marsh and moor ; that is all. The only thing known of government is the tax wrung out of the empty pocket ; the fine, for which the cupboard must go breadless ; no one can write, scarce any one can read ; sub- mission and weakness beget indifference to all things ; if any great tidings are brouglit, no one cares ; it will make no difference to the people. They creep about in the sun, and the slow boats go out, and the sultry heavens hang over the torpid sea, and when the bell rings they all wend tlieir listless way to the old church and pray to Some- thing Avhich tliey believe in, but which does 90 IN MAREMMA, not help them, and so their hves go on and end : and no one cares. It is the sea-shore, indeed. But all the health, and vigour, and strong activity, and pungent fresh odours, and buoy- ant winds, of the sea elsewhere are too often missinsr here. No one knows how hateful the blessed and beautiful sea can be who has not seen it, oily, and glassy, and motion- less, stretching under a gTcy sky that looks parched with mists of intensest heat, and with the fever fog of the poisonous summer hovering about the glaring sands. It is no sin of the sea's ; the sin is man's alone. Centuries upon centuries of carnage, and destruction, and fatal waste, have laid the land bare, and brought disease and desola- tion in their train. Perhaps one day the whole earth will be like this wasted Marem- ma shore ; it is very possible. This land was healthful and lovely enough in the da} s Avhen the legions of Fabius coveted its wealth; and even in the later age, when Kutilius dropped anchor at Populonia, it was still for the most part busy, crowded, prosperous. The sickliness of the shore, however, IN MAREMMA. 91 seems little to affect children, and it hurt not at all the buoyant health and elastic strength of the young child they called Velia and the Musoncella. For one tiling, she was for ever in the water when slie was not scam- pering, fleet of foot as the hill goats, along the sands, or further out to the moor- lands, where the fresher air was. Hardy men came from the mountains, and fell sick, and even died ; strong soldiers came on guard from hot cities, and there grew wasted, and languid, and ill, but she throve there with a splendid vitality and vigour that were the pride of Joconda and her shame ; her shame, because it recalled to her the face and form which she had seen for the last time by the red autumn light in the market place at Grosseto. ' She is his image,' she would say, scan- ning the pure, oval face, the arched, proud lips, the eyes like the eyes of the Braschi Antinous, the whole fiice that had the colour and the beauty of a flower with the firm lines of a classic bronze. Of beauty she was no great judge, her- self, but she knew that this child was beau- tiful with the terrible beauty of Saturnine. 92 IN MAREMMA. The law, with its curious one-sided chastisement which it calls justice, had taken to itself the guilty man, and left tlie innocent offspring alone to perish as it might ; and the heart of Joconda was heavy because she herself was old and the child was so young, and vras not a child to put away in peace within convent walls, nor yet grow up to dwell contentedly in a fisher- man's hut. ' Blood will out,' she thought. Meanwhile the child for the time was content enough ; she fared hardly, for Joconda could do no better for her ; she bit black bread and salt fish with her pearl-like teeth and often was hungry ; she raked in the glass wrack and the ribbon weed for fuel, and wore rough homespun clothes about her supple loins, but she was content enough ; she had the freedom of the shore and the sea, and if any maltreated her it was the worse for them. And she knew nothiug of that wild life which had been caught like a wild beast; and caged hke one, on that island, which lay far off upon the waters like a little light golden cloud. When she grew old enough to listen to what people said, the story of Saturnino had IN MAREMMA. OS grown older also, and few even gave a thought to it. There had been wars and other heroes since then ; he was at the galleys at Gor- gona ; but the Marennna had ceased to talk of him except when, now and then, round a fire in the forests, or becalmed out at sea, a charcoal burner or a coral fisher would say, ' Aie ! he icas a man ! — tliat was in the good thiie ; we have no such men now, we are all afraid.' For as the monotonous years rolled on, all alike, exactly alike, bringing the drouth of summer and the storms of winter over the low sea-shore, twelve years had drifted away like twelve hours, and the child w^as fourteen years old before Joconda could have counted twelve on her fingers ; so she said, one day, looking up at the lithe figure between her and the sunshine. ' Holy Mary, you will be a woman before one knows it!' she cried, with a pang at her heart, for she was now very old herself, and when she was gone — who could tell? ' A woman ! ' repeated the girl : it did not seem a word that suited her. ' Yes, you are not a boy,' said Joconda testily. ' So a woman you will be, worse 94 i^ MAREMMA. luck. If one could only see a little way ahead — woe's me ! ' ' Does it vex you I am not a boy ? ' said the girl. ' Why should it vex you ? I can do all that they can. I can row better than many, and sail and steer ; I can dive too, and I know what to do with the nets ; if I had a boat of my own you would see what I could do.' ' All that is very well,' said Joconda, with a little nod. ' I do not say it is not. .But you have not the boat of your own, that is just it ; that is what women always suffer from ; they have to steer, but the craft is someone else's and the haul too.' The child looked at her from under bent brows. She did not understand the w^ords, she took them literally. ' Eor me,' she said, ' I do not care w^hose it is, not at all ; I care for the fishing, but what does it matter wdio has what it brings ? ' ' It matters when one starves,' said Joconda. ' But we do not starve.' ' No we do not.' She spoke with curtness, but there was a dimness in her eyes that was not merely IN MAHmnfA. 95 from old age. They did not, while she was here, witli her lease of the old house, and her prudent savings, but when she was gone ? The people were very poor ; tliey could seldom get food enough for themselves ; who would cherish a nameless child ? She herself, though she had neighbours, had no friends ; she was always the ' woman of Savoy ' to all the folks of Santa Tarsilla. It made her very anxious, for she was a good woman, and the creature that lay on her bed and ate at her board, slie loved, thouG^h she said but little. ' Do you ever tliink that I shall die ? ' she said abruptly to the child, wlio looked at her in some surprise. 'Die?' she echoed, 'That is a'oino; away into the earth, you mean, as every- thing does, and then it goes upward and lives with God, they say ; would you wish that?' ' I will have to do it wliether I wish or not, and about living with God I do not know. I am a sinful soul, tliough not worse than most. But you do not understand. When I am dead, under the earth as you say, what will you do ? ' S6 IN MAREMMA. ' I do not know/ She did not ; she had never thought of the matter ; her mind was blank, though her body was vigorous. Then she added after a little thought : ' I will give myself to the sea ; tliat is the way I will die.' ' You ! I speak of myself.' ' I will die if you do.' Joconda looked at her amazed and keenly touched. ' Do you love me so much then ? ' she cried suddenly. • Is that love ? ' said the child. ' I should not like to live if you were not here ; I do not know if you call that love.* ' It is love,' said Joconda. She felt her eyes full of the slow tears of age, tears salt as the crystals the sea left on the shore. ' Ah, my dear, my dear ! ' she muttered, 'It is not myself that will cause you to die for love, but it may be some other — wlien I am gone and cannot help you ! Ah, child, why were you born ?' Musa did not hear ; she was standing with her brown hand on the white head of her dog lookin^^ out seaward ; the words that had been spoken had not saddened her IN MAREMMA. 97 because they were vague to her. Joconda had always been there — why should slie go away to earth or sky ? It was an April day ; at this season the sea had no vapour and the shore no miasma ; there was enough breeze to curl the little waves and send the foam in ripples ; the boats were out and the low pale beach was alive with life, as the women shook and tossed the seaweed, and raked up the crystals of the salt, in the morning light. ' If I had only a boat ! ' she said with a sigh. It seemed to her the one supreme glory of life — a boat. A boat altogether one's own, to go out with in wild weather when all others were afraid ; to lie in, all still and alone, on tranquil waters, gazing down into the blue depths where the coral branches were, and tlie starry llowers of the sea, and the gemhke eyes of the fishes ; to steer, all by oneself, tlirough tossing roaring breakers, tlirougli wind and tempest, under inky skies and beetling rocks, with the fierce hurricane in front and the thundering waters beliind ; a boat all one's own ; that was the one triumpli of life. VOL. I. II 98 i2V^ MAREMMA, But slie had no boat ; Joconcla could not give lier one ; and when it was stormy weather the men put her back, and would not let her go with them, because she was a child, because she would be a woman. Yes ; she understood as she thought of the boat ; she understood that it was very bad to be a woman. Joconda broke in on her thoughts. ' Wild bird of sea and cloud,' she said more tenderly than she had ever spoken, ' you are a stormy petrel, but there may come a storm too many — and I am old. I have done my best, but that is little. If you were a lad, one would not be so uneasy. I suppose the good God knows best — if one could be sure of that — I am a hard-working woman, and I have done no great sin that I know of, but up in heaven they never take any thought of me. When I was young, I asked them at my marriage altar to help me, and when my boys were born, I did the same, but they never noticed ; my man w^as drowned, and my l)eautiful boys got the fever, and sickened one by one and died : that was all I got. Priests say it is best ; priests are not mothers.' She was silent awhile, her thoughts tra- IN MAREMMA. 99 veiling backward many a year to tlie time when she had been 3"oung, and had known both the joys and the travails begotten of love. She had been a hard-working woman, toiling for the bare bread of life, until she had grown old; but she had been faithful, and she had not forc^otten. Only heaven had forgotten her. She was one amongst so many, she thought : it was not wonderfal. Then she roused herself and went on with her speech to the child. ' I am old and you are young. Soon I must leave yon, dear, down in the earth, up in the sky, one way or another I must so. I am anxious — there is the little money in the jug under the bricks, and the linen and the mule, that is all ; the house goes back to the master. I cannot tell what you will do — may tlie saints spare me just a little. If you were a woman grown , one would not be so anxious. To please me will you go and learn of the Sisters ? ' ' No,' said the child, resolutely. Tliere was a bare, dreary place near at hand, where a few good women dwelt, who nursed the fever - stricken and taught the children. n 2 100 IN MAREMMA. They would have taught this child, too, but she would never 2:0 to them. 'Within four walls I am stupid as a stone,' she said, and said aright. ' But the Sisters would help you to learn things useful for all your life.' The child shook her head. ' I can sail a boat and cast a net ; they cannot.' ' Some fisher lad must take you in a year or two.' ' They will not take me,' said the child, not understanding the sense that was meant. ' They are jealous, because I am strong. The old men take me ; they are kind, sometimes ; old Andreino most of all.' Joconda said no more ; she would not disturb the innocence and ignorance of the child by saying what she herself had meant. ' These thoughts come soon enough,' she said to herself, and added aloud : 'Don Piero says you sing like all the angels. That is better than even to sail a boat, for it pleases those in heaven.' ' I sing for myself,' said the child, ' and it is on the sea that I sing the best. In the church my throat gets full of dust ; there is no air, and I hate it.' IN MAREMMA. 101 ' Hush, hush ! The church is a holy place, and the sea may drown you some day.' ' It is a good death,' said the child, care- lessl3^ Joconda shuddered ; she remembered the night of fifty years before, when her husband's boat had gone down, heeling over into the white, boiling surf, on the very edge of the shore. ' There are such beautiful things to see dow^n, down, deep down, in the sea,' added the child. ' What good is that to them ? Dead men are blind,' said Joconda wearily. ' Whether you lie in the sand or the sea it matters nothing once you are dead, but it matters to those that are left. Child, do not talk of such things ; death is no toy, and the sea is greedy always.' ' The sea is good,' said the child jea- lously, as if some creature she loved were aspersed. ' The sea is better than the land. You wish me a boy. It is a seagull that I wish I were ; I would be if I could.' ' A seagull cannot sing.' 'I w^ould sooner fly than sing. It is something that sings in my throat, not me ; 102 IX MAREMMA. but when I swim, when I dive, that is all me.' Joconda for her part did not understand. ' You are a strange creature,' she said impatiently. ' It would have been better if you had been ugly and quiet, and without that devil in you that will never let you be still. But it is no fault of yours. There are seagulls and there are barn-door fowls, and the good Lord made them both. Well, go, rake some seaweed together or any other rack of your precious sea that one can burn ; we are very poor ; we shall be poorer, for I get too old and you are too young.' Joconda looked after her as the little erect figure stood out in the light against the turquoise blue of the sky and sea, and the primrose colour of the low sunlit clouds. ' She would never be a house-keeping, heaven-fearing thing,' she thought with a sigh. ' All one can hope for is that she may please some fishing lad and be an honest mother of young sea dogs. There is fierce blood in her ; it will out.' And she felt sorrowful, and as though she herself had done some sin, sitting in the stone archway of her house door with the -heavy brown sail dropped across her knees. CHAPTER y. 'EANWHILE, the child went out to her task. She was always willing to labour in the open air. It was only against four walls that she rebelled. She had taken a kreel, and a fork, aiid went down to the black and purple masses of als^as that a rouoh sea of the ni^iit before had cast on the shore. Her feet were bare ; her grey linen garment clung close to her graceful and strong lim]:)s ; her hair was cut so that it only touched her throat, and was as brilliant in the sunshine as that bronze of emperors which had gold ungrudged in its formation ; her noble eyes grave, lustrous, wide opened, gazed over the sunlight, beyond the bay, to the open sea. 104 IN MAREMMA. She was not unhappy, because Joconcla was good to her ; because she had perfect health and strength, because she had no sorrow and took no thought, hving a simple unconscious existence like any one of the northern birds that she was called after ; but she was always restless ; she always wanted something, but she never knew what ; some- times she would dive headforemost into the deep water and fancy she might find it there ; sometimes she would get away into the moors in the great summer silence, and sit there alone and wonder, but nothing was very clear to her. Without culture, neither wishes nor wonder are very intelhgible, and Musa, though she had been forced to put letters together till she could read the names of the boats and the saints, and other familiar things, was very ignorant. Her mind was a blank, — as her soul was ; all that was alive and strong iii her, was physical life ; life abundant, vigorous, untiring, beautiful, like the life of a forest animal. The few fishing-cobbles that Santa Tarsilla owned, were out at sea ; there was only one man left on the beach who was - IN MAREMMA, 106 tinkering up his own old boat and humming to himself that song of the coast, Chi va in Maremma, saluti il bel giglio Che sta sulle montagne di Solia ! He was called Andrei no, or Little Andrew, perhaps for no other reason than that he was a very tall, lean, angular man ; bent and yellow, and very old ; so old that his age was lost even to himself hi the fog of some irrevocable and inconceivable past. ' Avante '1 regno dei Francesi,' he would say with a vague sense of unlimited ancient- ness. When a boy he had been very nearly shot by a squadron of French lancers, and this had impressed the epoch of invasion on him ; and most things with him were re- ferred to that time. He was a garrulous man, and had many stories, mythical and fantastical, in which he believed ; things that he had seen and done in real truth, but which had become distorted or transfigured, according to their kind through the loss of his many years. To these tales Santa Tarsilla always listened in the long hot evenings of tlio weary summer, when not a liand had scarcely 106 IN MAREMMA. strength to twang a string of a chitarra, and only the tongues wagged on as their owners lay full length on stone or sand. Amono'st his listeners there was none so attentive as the wild-bird Velia. She Avould stand or sit with parted lips and wondering eyes, and listen to all he said without a word ; mute and awed, and charmed to stillness. For that homage of attention, which she had rendered to him ever since she was old enough to know the meaning of ^\'ords, old Andreino favoured her. Santa Tarsilla did not. She was stronger, brisfhter, bolder, than its sickly children, and moreover it Avas jealous because it was always thought the woman of Savoy had hidden treasure, and of course what there A^•as the cliild would have, when in due course the silent life of the Savoyard should sink into the intenser silence of the tomb. ' They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him,' said Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hun- dredth time of what he had seen once on the Ligurian shore, far away yonder northward, when he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout sea- faring man in that time, amongst other IN MAEEMMA, 107 peasants of the country side, to lielp bring in the wood for a funeral p3're by the sea. He had known nouoht of the sonf]:s or the singer, but he loved to tell the tale he had heard then ; and say how he had seen, he himself, with his own eyes, the drowned poet burn, far away yonder where the pines stood by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had done their best to break, and how it had remained unburned in the midst, whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of the Skylark's ode, and nouglit of the Cor Cordium ; but the scene by the sea- shore had burned itself as tliough with flame into his mind, and he spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the sea that had killed the singer. ' Will they burn me if I sing too well ? ' the child asked him this day, the words of Joconda being with her. ' Oh, that is sure,' said Andreiuo, half in jest and half in earnest. ' Tliey burnt him because he sang better than all of them. So they said. I do not know. I know the resin ran out of tlie pine wood all goklen and hissing, and his heart would not burn, 108 J2V MARE.AnfA. all we could do. You are a female thing, Musa ; your heart will be the first to burn, the first of all ! ' ' "Will it ? ' said Musa, seriously, but not in any way alarmed, for the thought of that fiaming pile by the seashore by night was a famihar imasje to her. ' Aye, for sure ; you will be a woman ! ' said Andreino, hammerinsf into his boat. She knitted her brows in angry medi- tation, and went slowly away from him. Andreino looked after her as Joconda had done. ' She grows fast,' he said, as lie took his pipe from his mouth. His wife was sitting near him on a block of stone, a feeble, ague- stricken, wasted creature. ' She gi'ows fast,' he repeated. ' I wish we could get her for little Xando ; she has a rare com-aofe, and is as handsome as an almond tree in flower.' ' She is a child,' said the wife ; ' how you talk ! ' ' In a year she will not be a child. The almond tree is fii'st to flower, but it is soon oflf blossom,' said Andreino, hammering at the crazy timbers of his old boat. ' The woman of Savoy should look out for a stout IN MAREMMA. -109 and honest lad. She is too mucli alone. She ponders too much. That is not good. Were she my girl I would get a good lad.' ' There are no lads here.' ' But some come ashore from the coasters ; a child as handsome as that one, with the pretty penny the woman of Savoy has got under the hearthstone, need never go a begging. If she were like Dina, yonder, she would soon leave off thinking about dead singers and their hearts.' He pointed with his pipe-stem to his grand-daughter, a young woman, who, with one child on her breast and another on her back, was mending nets on the mole wall. 'She is a baby herself,' said his wife, * and it is you who tell her all those tales. Why did you tell her if it was anything wrong.' 'It is nothing wrong,' said Andreino, offended. ' Is it hkely I would tell a child a wrong thing ? All the others they listen and gape ; it is only she who takes the tale to heart in that fashion. Things one says are like well-water; it is the pitcher they are poured into that colours them.' ' The pitcher is as it is made,' said the old wife, who was a sensible and positive woman. 110 IN MAREMMA, ' I never said it was not,' said Andreino. Musa worked on steadily at her task, carrying load after load of marramgrass, cud- w^eed, and sealiay, into the house, which stood at the edge of the little mole of Santa Tarsilla between the quay and the beach. When she had reached her last load, and Joconda, looking up from her own work at the sail, called out from the distance ' enough ! ' she stood a moment with her hands lightly resting on her hips and looked over the pale sands^ the white stones, the blue waves. Then she pursued her last task of carry- ing in the weed, as other women were doing also. The morning was- young still ; there was an opal-hued light on land, and sky and sea ; the low, flat beach was wet with recent showers ; the air was cool and fragrant ; even the stagnant salt-pools and the dreary marsh lands took the sweet hues of the springtime and the morning. Although she had taken in a good pro- vision of the algaa and salt-water plants and stacked it in the mule's stable, it was still early. Joconda was now baking her black loaves of bread, and the house was full of grey smoke. J-JV MAREMMA. lU ' Euu out again,' she said to the child. *you are hke a goat ; you stay ill at ease iu stall' Musa wanted no other word ; she was out and away along the shore almost as soon as it was spoken, the dog Leone with her ; though he grew old he seldom left her side. ' May I have the boat ? ' she asked of her friend Andreino, and he nodded assent ; he had to stay at home and mend his nets. His legs were stiff and helpless with rheumatism. He adored his boat, but he could trust her with it. She was as good a sailor as himself, and knew no fear. She ran down to the place where the punt was drawn up on the low sands, and pushed it to the water ; she sprang in, and bade the dog stay and mind Joconda. She set the sail. There was a fair wind blowing from the south ; the little boat went with it. Now and then she o-ave it the aid of the oars, but seldom. She could sit at rest, with the tiller rope round her foot, and let the boat go along the shore. The land had no loveliness on that bay, but the sea had much in that radiant and tranquil morning, and from the water even 112 IN MAREMMA. the land looked almost lovely, with the dark masses of the mountains at the back still keeping the clouds and the mists about them. They were far away, but they looked almost near, those blue and sombre hills that had held so many secrets and so many sins of the father of whom she knew nothing. When she had left Santa Tarsilla behind her by a mile, the water was rougher, the wind was brisker, the boat flew faster, the child grew gayer. She was all alone on the sea as far as her eyes could reach, except for a few large vessels away on the horizon, merchant ships bearing grain or spice to the old harbours of the classic world. The voice that according to her own fancy was not herself, but some bird singing in her, rose unconsciously to her lips as she felt happy ; happy in the sense of liberty, of movement, of space, and air, and light. She sang aloud ; all that sweet, wild, unwritten music of the people which they sing at mar- riage feasts and in threshing yards, about the forest fires, and behind the oxen's yoke ; natural song, pastoral and amorous, that might thrill the world with its sweetness, only no Theocritus has arisen amongst these IN MAREMMA. 113 singers to make fair in fame this sad Ma- remma land, and to string strophes tliat would echo through two thousand years, telling stories of their sorrows of the sea and of their loves and lives on land. Centuries come and go, and every winter the people sing around their lires, and every summer the fever wastes them and they die, and the living still sing because they still love ; but the world does not hear the song. Shelley and Theocritus are dead. Musa sang as the birds do, as the people do, scarce knowing that she did so, and the clear, tender notes, with all the flute-like melody of extreme youth in them, echoed over the waters, and startled the rock- martins working at their conical houses. The child was happy witliout any reason- ing or any consciousness that she was so, like any other young animal. The sense of motion, of fresh wind, of wide sea, of being able to go Avherever she chose, and guide the boat as she liked, appeased the restlessness which tormented her like a fever when she was in the house of Joconda, or in the churcli witli the others, or wherever, as she said, there were four walls imj)risoning her. The otlier children thought her VOL. I. I lU IN MAREMMA. fierce and sullen, tlie women thought her dull and intractable, the priests thought her heathenish ; but she was none of these things ; she was only a young creature of splendid health and vigour, wdth sentiments in her that had no name, and found no home in the world that was around her : she was the child of Saturnino. The boat went thro ii oh the waters swiftly, as the wind blew more strongly ; the sandy shore with its scrub of low-growing rock- rose ^ and prickly Christ's-thorn did not change its landscape, but what she looked at always was the sea ; the sea that in the light had the smiling azure of a young child's eyes, and wdien the clouds cast shadows on it, had the intense impene- trable brilliancy of a jewel. In the distance were puffs of white and grey, like smoke or mist ; those mists were Corsica and Capraja. Elba towered close at hand, Gorgona lay far beyond, with all the other little isles that seem made to shelter Miranda and Ariel, but of Gorgona she knew nothing ; she was steering straight towards it, but it was many a league distant on the northerly water. ^ Helianthemum cfpenninu?n. IX MAREMMA. 115 When slie at last stopped lier boat in its course she was at the Sasso Scritto : a favourite resting-place with her, where, on feast-days, when Joconda let her have liberty from housework and rush-plaiting and spinning of flax, she always came. Northward, there was a loni? smooth level beach of sand, and beyond that a lagoon where all the w^ater-birds that love both the sea and the marsh came in large flocks, and spread their wings over the broad spaces in which the salt water and the fresh were mingled. Beyond this there were clifls of the humid red tufa, and the myrtle and the holy thorn grew down their sides, and met in summer the fragrant hesperis of the shore. These cliffs were fine bold blufls, and one of them had been called from time imme- morial the Sasso Scritto, — why, no one knew ; the only writing on it was done by the hand of Nature. It was steep and lofty ; on its summit were the ruins of an old fortress of the middle ages ; its sides were clothed with myrtle, aloe, and rosemary, and at its feet were boulders of marble, rose and white in the sun ; rock pools, with exquisite net- work of sunbeams crossing their lippliug surface, and filled with green ribbon-grasses I 2 116 IN MAREMMA. and red sea-foliage, and shining gleams of broken porphyry, and pieces of agate and cornelian. The yellow sands hereabouts were bright just now with the sea-dafFodil, and the sea- stocks, which would blossom later, were pricking upward to the Lenten light ; great chisters of southern- wood waved in the wind, and the pungent sea-rush grew in long lines along the shore, where the sand-piper was dropping her eggs, and the blue-rock was carrying dry twigs and grass to his home in the ruins above or the caverns beneath, and the stock-doves in large companies were wino'inf^ their way over sea towards the Maritime or the Pennine Alps. This was a place that Musa loved, and she would come here and sit for hours, and watch the roseate cloud of tlie returning flamingoes winging their way from Sardinia, and the martins busy at their masonry in the cliffs, and the Arctic longipennes going away northward as the weather opened, and the stream-swallows hunting early gnats and frogs on the water, and the kingfisher digging his tortuous underground home in the sand. Here she would lie for liours amongst tlie rosemary, and make silent friendships with the /2V MAREMMA. 117 populations of the air, while the sweet blue sky was above her head, and the sea, as blue, stretched away till it was lost in light. Once up above, on these cliffs, the eye could sweep over the sea north and south, and the soil was more than ever scented with that fragrant and humble blue-flowered shrub of which the English madrigals and glees of the Stuart and Hanoverian poets so often speak, and seem to smell. Behind the cliffs stretched moorland, marshes, woodland, intermingled, crossed by many streams, hold- ing many pools, blue- fringed in May with iris, and osier beds, and vast fields of reeds, and breadths of forest with dense thorny underwood, where all wild birds came in their season, and where all was quiet, save for a bittern's cry, a boar's snort, a snipe's scream, on the lands once crowded with the multi- tudes that gave the eagle of Persia and the brazen trumpets of Lydia to the legions of Eome. Under their thickets of the prickly sloe- tree and the sweet-smelling bay lay the winding ways of buried cities ; their runlets of water rippled where kings and warriors slept beneath the soil, and the yellow marsh lily, and the purple and the rose 118 IN MAREMMA. of the wind-flower and the pasque-flower, and the bright red of the Easter tulips, and the white and the gold of the aspho- dels, and the colours of a thousand other rarer and less homelike blossoms, spread thek innocent glory in their turn to the sky and the breeze, above the sunken stones of courts and gates and palaces and prisons. These moors were almost as solitary as the deserts are. Now and then, against the blue of the sky and the brown of the wood, there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks ; now and then herds of young horses went by, fleet and unconscious of their doom ; now and then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air ; but these came but seldom. Maremma is wide, and its people are scattered. In autumn and in winter hunters, shep- herds, swineherds, sportsmen, birdcatchers, might spoil the solemn peace of these moors, but in spring and summer no human soul was seen upon them. The boar and the bufialo, the flamingo and the roebuck, the great plover and the woodcock, reigned alone. The child loved them and came to them. IN MAIiEMMA. 119 Tireless, she would wander over tlie grass and moss and thyme for hours and hours ; even when the sun was so strong that the very eicalas themselves were silent against their wont, she felt no harm from it, and the fevers that lurked in bush and brake never touched her ; in these calm solitary places, where she was alone with the powerful creatures, four-footed or winged, that slept beside her in the drowsy, sultry noons, slie w^as at ease and happ}". Even in the sickly drouth of midsummer, when the turf was like sheets of brass, and the very trees seemed to faint and pant, she was well here. She tied her boat now to a tough slunib growing on the edge of the shore and began to go inland ; a slender figure for her age, tall, brown, and lithe, with a proud dauntless carriage of her head and body, and eyes that seemed made like the ea^rle's to dart their lio^lit into the \\