by Ouida
She saw the effect that her beauty produced, and said to herself: ‘He shall dig up the things before he is a week older.’
She got up with apparent haste and alarm; seeing how dark it had grown around her, only a faint red light lingering far away above the lines of the mountains.
‘I am staying at the four roads with my aunt, who married Massaio,’ she said as she looked over her shoulder and walked away between the chestnut sapling and the furze.
Caris did not offer to accompany or try to follow her. He stood like one bewitched watching her lithe, erect figure run down the hill and vanish as the path wound out of sight amongst the pines. No woman had ever moved him thus. He felt as if she had poured into him at once scalded wine and snow-water.
She was so handsome and bold and lissom, and yet she made his flesh creep talking of his mother’s incantations, and bidding him knock at the door of the grave.
‘What an awful creature for tempting a man is a woman,’ he thought, ‘and they will scream at their own shadows one minute and dare the devil himself the next!’
That night Caris sat smoking his black pipe on the stone before the door where she had sat, and the scalded wine and the snow-water coursed by turns feverishly through his veins, as once through Cymon’s.
II
‘Where hast been, hussy?’ said Massaio crossly, yet jokingly, to his niece when she went home that night.
The four roads was a place where the four cart-tracks at the foot of that group of hills met and parted; the man was a seller of wood, and his cottage and his wood-yards and sheds thatched with furze stood where the four roads met under some huge stone pines. The aunt of Santina had married there many years before.
They were people well-off, who ate meat, drank wine, and had a house full of hardware, pottery, and old oak: people as far removed from Caris and his like as if they had been lords or princes. He knew them by sight, and doffed his hat to them in the woods.
The thought that she was the niece of Massaio, the man who paid for his wood and charcoal with rolls of banknotes, and sent his own mules to bring the loads down from the hills, placed Santina leagues away from and above him.
The only women with whom he had ever had any intercourse had been the rude wenches who tramped with the herds, and dug and hoed and cut grass and grain on the wastes of the Maremma; creatures burnt black with the sun and wrinkled by the winds, and with skin hard and hairy, and feet whose soles were like wood— ‘la femelle de l’homme,’ but not so clean of hide or sweet of breath as the heifers they drove down along the sea-ways in autumn weather.
This girl who called herself Santina was wholesome as lavender, fresh as field thyme, richly and fairly odoured as the flower of the wild pomegranate.
When supper was over and the house was on the point of being bolted and barred, Santina threw her brown soft round arm round her uncle’s neck.
‘I went down to see Don Fabio, and he was out, and I sat talking with his woman and forgot the time,’ she said penitently.
Don Fabio was the priest of the little gaudy church low down in the valley where the post-road ran.
Massaio patted the cheek, which was like an apricot, and believed her.
Her aunt did not.
‘There is still snow where the man of God lives up yonder, and there is no water, only dust, on her shoes,’ thought the shrewd observer.
But she did not say so; for she had no wish to put her husband out of humour with her kinsfolk.
But to Santina, when with her alone, she said testily:
‘I fear you are going again to the black arts of that woman Lisabetta; no good ever is got of them; it is playing with fire, and the devil breathes the fire out of his mouth!’
‘I cannot play with it if I wished,’ said Santina innocently; ‘Lisabetta is dead months ago.’
‘That is no loss to anybody if it be true,’ said Eufemia Massaio angrily.
Lisabetta had been such an obscure and lonely creature, that her death had been taken little note of anywhere, and the busy, bustling housewife of Massaio had had no heed of such an event. She had not even known the woman by sight; had only been cognizant of her evil repute for powers of sorcery.
Santina went up to her room, which she shared with three of the Massaio children. Long after they were sleeping in a tangle of rough hair and brown limbs and healthy rosy nudity, the girl, their elder, sat up on the rude couch staring at the moon through the little square window.
She was thinking of words that Lisabetta had said, as she had dealt out the cards and gazed in a bowl of spring water, ‘Over the hills and far away; wealth and pleasure and love galore — where? how? when? — ay, that is hid; but we shall see, we shall see; only over the hills you go, and all the men are your slaves.’
How? when? where? That was hidden with the dead fortune-teller under the earth.
Santina did not for a moment doubt the truth of the prophecy, but she was impatient for its fulfilment to begin. She knew she was of unusual beauty, and the organist at the duomo in Pistoia had told her that her voice was of rare compass, and only wanted tuition to be such a voice as fetches gold in the big world which lay beyond these hills. But that was all.
She could sing well and loudly, and she knew all the ‘canzoe’ and ‘stornelli’ of the district by heart; but there her knowledge stopped; and no one had cared to instruct or enlighten her more. Her own family thought the words of the organist rubbish.
There are so many of these clear-voiced, flute-throated girls and boys singing in their adolescence in the fields and woods and highways; but no one thinks anything of their carols, and life and its travail tell on them and make them hoarse, and their once liquid tones grow harsh and rough from exposure to the weather, and from calling so loudly from hill to hill to summon their children, or their cattle, or their comrades, home.
The human voice is a pipe soon broken. The nightingale sings on and on and on, from youth to age, and neither rain nor wind hurt his throat; but men and women, in rough, rustic lives, soon lose their gift of song. They sing at all ages, indeed, over their furrows, their washing-tank, their yoked oxen, their plait of straw or hank of flax; but the voice loses its beauty as early as the skin its bloom.
Santina had no notion in what way she could make hers a means to reach those distant parts in which her fate was to await her if the cards spake truly. Only to get away somewhere, somehow, was her fixed idea; and she would no more have married the sober, well-to-do wheelwright her people picked out for her, than she would have thrown her vigorous and virgin body down the well.
‘He shall get me the cards and the treasure wand out of her grave before this moon is out,’ she said, between her white teeth, with which she could crack nuts and bite through string and grind the black bread into powder.
Caris took no definite shape in her eyes except as an instrument to get her will and ways. She was but a country girl just knowing her letters, and no more; but the yeast of restless ambition was fermenting in her.
She sat staring at the moon, while the tired children slept as motionless as plucked poppies. The moon was near its full. Before it waned she swore to herself that she would have Lisabetta’s magic tools in her hands. Could she only know more, or else get money! She was ignorant, but she knew that money was power. With money she could get away over those hills which seemed drawn like a screen between her fate and her.
Marry Matteo! She laughed aloud, and thought the face in the moon laughed too.
The outfit was made, the pearls were bought, the ‘stimatore’ who is called in to appraise every article of a marriage corredo had fingered and weighed and adjudged the cost of every single thing, and the wheelwright had bought the bed and the furniture, and many other matters not usual or incumbent on a bridegroom, and her parents had said that such a warm man and so liberal a one was never seen in their day: and very little time was there now left wherein she could escape her fate.
All unwillingness on her part would have been r
egarded by her parents as an insanity, and would have only seemed to her bridegroom as the spice which is added to the stewed hare. There was no chance for her but to use this single fortnight which she had been allowed to spend in farewell at the four roads of Genistrello.
Her uncle and aunt had helped generously in the getting together of the corredo; and their wish to have her with them had been at once conceded. Her parents were poor, and the woodsman was rich as rubies are esteemed, amongst the oak scrub and chestnut saplings of the Pistoiese Apennines.
The Massaio people liked her and indulged her; but had they dreamed that she meant to elude her marriage they would have dragged her by the hair of her head, or kicked her with the soles of their hob-nailed boots down the hillside into her father’s house, and given her up to punishment without pity, as they would have given a runaway horse or dog.
The day for the ceremony had not been fixed, for in this country, where love intrigues speed by as swift as lightning, matrimonial contracts move slowly and cautiously; but the word was passed, the goods were purchased, the house was ready; and to break a betrothal at such a point would have been held a crime and a disgrace.
Santina herself knew that; she was well aware that decent maidens do not do such things when the dower clothing and linen are all stitched, and the marriage-bed bought by the bridegroom. She knew, but she did not care. She was headstrong, changeable, vain and full of thirst for pleasure and for triumph and for wealth. She would not pass her life in her little native town, in the wheelwright’s old house with a jealous rheumatic curmudgeon, for all the saints in heaven and all the friends on earth.
‘Not I! Not I! Oh, why did Lisabetta go underground for ever with half the cards unread?’ she thought, as she sat upon her couch of sacking and dry maize leaves, and she shook her clenched hands at the moon with anger at its smiling indifference. The moon could sail where it chose and see what it liked; and she was chained down here by her youth, and her sex, and her ignorance, and her poverty; and her only one faint hope of escape and aid lay in the closed grave of a dead old woman.
Though she was voluble and garrulous and imprudent and passionate, she could keep her own counsel.
Under her Tuscan volubility there was also the Tuscan secretiveness. Nobody saw inside her true thoughts. Her mind was like a little locked iron box into which no one could peep.
The Tuscan laughs quickly, weeps quickly, rages, fumes, smiles, jumps with joy; seems a merely emotional creature, with his whole heart turned inside out; but in his inmost nature there is always an ego wholly different to that which is shown to others, always a deep reserve of unspoken intents and calculations and desires.
It resembles a rosebush all bloom and dew and leaf and sunshine, inside which is made the nest of a little snake, never seen, but always there; sometimes, instead of the snake, there is only a flat stone; but something alien there always is under the carelessly blowing roses.
The Tuscan never completely trusts his nearest or dearest, his oldest friend, his truest companion, his fondest familiar; be he gentle or simple, he never gives himself away.
The homeliest son and daughter of the soil will always act as though he or she were cognizant of the axiom of the fine philosopher of courts: ‘Deal with your friend at all times as though some day he would become your enemy.’
Santina, therefore, had told her secret intent to no living soul, and only Caris’s old weird mother had been shrewd enough to guess it in the girl’s flashing eyes and in her eager questioning of Fate.
The house of Massaio was a very busy house, especially so at this season of the year, when the purchasing and fetching and stacking of wood for the coming winter was in full vigour, and all the boys and girls were up in the woods all day long, seeking out and bringing down brushwood and pines and cut heather.
Santina with wonderful alacrity entered into the work, although usually she was averse to rough labour, fearing that it would spoil her hands and her skin before she could get to that unknown life of delight which she coveted.
But going with the heedless and unobservant children up on the hillsides where the heather and chestnut scrub grew, and farther up still where the tall stone pines grew, she had chances of meeting Caris or of again getting away to his hut unnoticed. He was usually at this season occupied in carrying wood or helping the charcoal-burners, and was now in one place, now in another, as men who have no fixed labour must be.
Moreover, her just estimate of her own attraction for him made her guess that this year he would choose to labour nearer the four roads than usual, if he could get employment, and she was in no manner surprised when she saw him amongst a group of men who were pulling at the ropes of one of her uncle’s wood-carts, to prevent the cart and the mules harnessed to it from running amuck down the steep incline which led to that green nook at the foot of Genistrello, where the woodman’s buildings and sheds were situated.
She gave him a sidelong glance and a shy smile as she passed them, and Caris, colouring to the roots of his hair, let his rope slacken and fall, and was sworn at fiercely by his fellow-labourers, for the cart lurched, and one of the wheels sunk up to its hub in the soft wet sand.
‘Get away, lass!’ shouted the carter roughly. ‘Where women are men’s work is always fouled.’
‘You unmannerly churl!’ shouted Caris; and he struck the carter sharply across the shoulders with his end of the rope.
The man flung himself round and tried to strike his assailant in return with the thong of his long mule-whip; but Caris caught it in his grip and closed with him.
They wrestled savagely for a moment, then the carter, freeing his right arm, snatched out of his breeches belt the knife which every man carries, however severely the law may denounce and forbid such a habit. It would have buried its sharp, narrow blade in the ribs or the breast of Caris had not the other men, at a shout from Massaio, who came hurrying up, thrown themselves on the two combatants, and pulled them apart.
‘To —— with you both!’ cried Massaio, furious to see his cart stuck in the sand, its load of wood oscillating, and the time wasted of men whom he paid by the day.
Santina had stood quietly on the bank above the mules and the men, watching with keen interest and pleasure.
‘Why did you stop them, uncle?’ she cried to Massaio pettishly. ‘I do love to see two good lads fight. ’Tis a sight that warms one’s blood like good communion wine.’
But no one heeded what she said.
On these hills women are used but never listened to by any man.
‘The cows give milk, not opinions,’ the men said to their womenkind.
Only Caris had seen in the sunlight that lithe erect figure amongst the gorse, and those two burning, melting, shining eyes, which had incited him to combat.
He was deeply angered with Massaio for stopping the duello.
A knife? What mattered a knife? He had one, too, in his breeches band; in another second he, too, would have had his out, and then Santina would have seen work fit for a brave, bold woman to watch, with the red blood running merrily through the thirsty sand and the tufted heather.
He was not quarrelsome or bloodthirsty; but any man who goes down into Maremma through the ‘macchia,’ where the ‘mal-viventi’ hide, learns to know very well how to sell his own life dearly, and hold the lives of others cheaply; and these contraband knives, which the law forbids so uselessly, cost very little to buy, and yet do their work surely, quickly, and well.
He cast one longing look up at Santina standing above amongst the gorse, and moved on sullenly with the other men and the mule, when the cart with rare effort had been pulled erect and dragged out of the sand. It was then only an hour or two after daybreak.
The day came and ended without Caris seeing his goddess again.
During the repose at noontide, when he with others broke bread and ate soup at the big table in Massaio’s kitchen, she was not there. They were served by her aunt Eufemia. He had only accepted this work of fetching and s
tacking for sake of the vicinity to her which it offered; and his heart was heavy and his blood was turned, as he would himself have expressed it.
Chagrin and irritation, in the Italian’s opinion, turns the blood as tempest changes milk. He was too shy and tongue-tied to venture to inquire for her; and the instinct of secrecy which characterizes all passion was joined to his natural hesitation in speech.
Massaio’s people seemed, too, to him to be very grand folks, with their byres and stalls filled with beasts, and their casks of wine and great earthen jars of oil standing there for anybody to read in mute declaration of their prosperity.
A barrel of wine had never entered the hut of the Lascarises within the memory of man. No one took any notice of him. He was a ‘bracciante,’ paid by the day, nothing more. Had Eufemia known that he was the old witch’s son he would have attracted her attention; but she did not know it. When there is quick rough work to be done, nobody notices who does it.
When the last wood of the day was brought in, Caris went home by himself, by ways he knew. He was downcast and dull. He had been baulked of his knife-play with the carter, and he had not seen Santina.
At a bend in the hill-path, where the chestnut saplings grew taller than usual, and aged pines with scaly scarred trunks were left standing, he heard a laugh amongst the leafy scrub, and in the dusk of the moonless evening a slender straight figure shot up from its screen of heather.
‘Eh, Caris!’ cried the girl to him. ‘What a poor day’s work! Have you left Black Simon without an inch of steel in him? Fie for shame! A man should always write his name large when he has a stiletto for his pen.’
Caris gazed at her dumb and agitated, the veins in his throat and temples throbbing.