III
Caris stared at her as she spoke, his whole frame thrilling and all his senses alive as they had never been before under a woman's glamour. He heeded not the derision, he thought not of the strangeness of the avowal; delicacy is not often a plant which grows in uncultured soil, and he had none of the intuition and suspicion which an educated man would have been moved by before such an avowal and such an upbraiding. He only knew, or thought he was bidden to know, that he had the power in him to please her fancy and awaken her desire.
'You love me! You can love me!' he shouted in a loud, vibrating, exultant voice which wakened all the echoes of the hills around him, and he sprang forward to seize her in his arms. But Santina, agile and strong, pushed him back, and stood aloof.
'Nay, nay, stand off!' she cried to him. 'Ne'er a coward shall touch me. All I said was, you might have won me.'
'I am no coward,' said Caris hotly. 'And why do you fool and tempt one so? 'Tis unfair. 'Tis unfair. You may rue it.'
His face was convulsed, his eyes were aflame, he breathed like a bull in a hard combat.
Santina smiled; that was how she liked to see a man look.
She had all the delight in watching and weighing the effects of the passion which she excited that moved the great queens of Asia and the empresses of Rome. She was only a poor girl, but the love of dominance and the violence of the senses were in her strong and hot and reckless.
In her was all that ferment of ambition and vanity and discontent which drives out from their hamlets those who are born with something in them different to their lot and alien to their fellows. She had never been anywhere farther afield than the hills and woods about Pistanse, but she knew that there were big cities somewhere, where men were made of money, and women wore satin all day long, and everybody ate and drank out of gold plates and silver vessels. She knew that; and to get to these kingdoms of delight was the one longing which possessed her day and night.
She wanted to get one thing out of this man—the means of liberty—and she cared nothing how she won it. Besides, he was so simple, so malleable, so credulous, it diverted her to play on him as one could play on a chitarra, making the strings leap and sigh and thrill and groan. And he was good to look at, too, with his tanned, fresh face, and his clustering curls, and his strong, straight, cleanly limbs.
'I only said you might have won me,' she repeated—'nay, you may still, if you have the heart of a man and not of a mouse. Hearken!'
'Do not fool me,' said Caris sternly, 'or as the Lord lives above us——'
She laughed airily.
'Oh, big oaths cannot frighten me. It shall lie with you. I want those things of your mother's. When you bring them I will thank you—as you choose.'
He grew gray under his brown, bright skin.
'Always that,' he muttered—always that!'
'Naturally, it is what I want.'
'Go, get them, since you think it holy work.'
'I will,' said Santina, 'and then good-night to you, my good Caris; you will never see me more.'
She turned on her heel and began to run down the slope in the moonlight.
Santina would not have ventured inside the graveyard at night to get mountains of gold. She would not have passed after nightfall within a mile of its gate without crossing herself and murmuring Aves all the way. Superstition was born and bred in every inch of her bone and every drop of her blood, and she would no more have carried out her threat than she would have carried the mountain upon her shoulders.
But he did not know that. She was so bold, so careless, so self-confident, if she had told him she would split open the earth to its centre he would have believed her.
He overtook her as she fled down the slope and seized her in his arms.
'No, no!' he cried, close in her ear. 'It is not work for you. If it must be done I will do it. Will you swear that you will give yourself to me if I bring you the unholy things?'
'I love you!' she said breathlessly, while her lips brushed his throat—'yes, I do love you! Go, get the things, and bring them hither at dawn. I will meet you. Oh, I will find the way to use them, never fear. That is my business. Get you gone. They are calling below. They shut the house at the twenty-four.'
No one was calling, but she wished to get rid of him. He was strong, and he was on fire with her touch and her glance; he strained her in his arms until her face was bruised against the hairy sinews and bones of his chest.
She thrust him away with a supreme effort, and ran down the stony side of the hill, and was swallowed up in the duskiness of the tangled scrub.
A little scops owl flitted past, uttering its soft, low note, which echoes so far and long in the silence of evening in the hills.
Caris shook himself like a man who has been half stunned by a heavy fall. He was on fire with the alcohol of passion, and chilled to the marrow by the promise he had made.
Open a tomb! Rifle a grave! See his mother again in her cere clothes—see all the untold and untellable horrors of which the dead and the earth make their secrets!
Oh, why had he ever admitted that he had sealed up the uncanny things in the coffin! He could have bitten his tongue out for its tell-tale folly.
He had thrust them in almost without consciousness of his act as he had hammered the lid down on the deal shell all alone with it in his cabin.
The things had been always under his mother's pillow at night; it had seemed to him that they ought to go with her down to the grave. He had had a secret fear of them, and he had thought that their occult powers would be nullified once thrust in sacred soil. He had been afraid to burn them.
The churchyard in which his mother lay was on the topmost slope of Genistrello, where the brown brick tower of the massive medieval church of St. Fulvo rose amongst the highest pines, upon a wind-swept and storm-scarred scarp.
Few were the dead who were taken there; meagre and miserable were the lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.
It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the hills and the water-courses and the brushwood.
But it was not the distance which troubled him, nor any possible danger. He knew his way through all that country, and the full round moon was by now showing her broad disc over the edge of the farther mountains on the south-east. But the thought of what he would have to do at the end of his pilgrimage made him sick with fear not altogether unmanly.
He knew that what he would do would be sacrilege and punishable by law, but it was not of that he thought: his mind was filled with those terrors of the nether world, of the unknown, of the unseen, which a lonely life and a latent imagination made at once so indistinct and so powerful to him.
'Had she but asked me anything else! 'he thought piteously. 'Anything!—to cut off my right hand or to take the life of any man!'
But she had set him this task; inexorably as women of old set their lovers to search for the Grail or beard the Saracen in his mosque, and he knew that he must do what she willed or never again feel those warm red lips breathe on his own.
He tightened the canvas belt round his loins, and went home to his cabin to fetch a pickaxe and a spade, and, bidding his dog stay to guard the empty hut, he set out to walk across the vast steep breadth of woodland darkness which separated him from the church and churchyard which were his goal.
A labourer on those hills all his life, and accustomed also to the more perilous and murderous thickets of Maremma, where escaped galley-slaves hid amongst the boxwood and the bearberry, and lived in caves and hollow trees, no physical alarm moved him as he strode on across the uneven ground with the familiar scents and sounds of a woodland night around him on every side.
The moon had now risen so high that the valleys were bathed in her light, and the sky was radiant with a brilliancy which seemed but a more ethereal day.
He had no eyes for its beauty. His whole soul was consumed by the horror of his errand. He only looked up at the pointers and the pole-star which he knew, so as to guide himself by them up the steep slopes to the church, for he had left the cart-tracks and mule-paths and struck perforce through the gorse and undergrowth westward, gradually ascending as he went.
'Poor mother! poor mother!' he kept saying to himself. It seemed horrible to him to go and molest her out in her last sleep and take those things which were buried with her. Would she know? Would she awake? Would she rise and strike him?
Then he thought of a dead woman whom he had found once in the 'macchia' in Maremma, lying unburied under some myrtle bushes; he remembered how hideous she had looked, how the ants and worms had eaten her, how the wild boars had gnawed her flesh, how the jaws had grinned and the empty eyeballs had stared, and how a black toad had sat on her breast.
Would his mother look like that?
No; for she was safe under ground, under sacred ground, shut up secure from wind and weather in that deal shell which he had himself made and hammered down; and she was in her clothes, all neat and proper, and the holy oil had been upon her.
No, she had been put in her grave like a Christian, witch though they said that she was. She could not look like the woman in Maremma, who had been a vagrant and a gipsy.
Yet he was afraid—horribly afraid.