A Rainy June, and Other Stories

by Ouida

IV

It was a soft and luminous night; there was the faintest of south winds now and then wandering amongst the tops of the pines, and fanning their aromatic odours out of them. The sound of little threads of water trickling through the sand and moss, and falling downward through the heather, was the only sound, save when a night bird called through the dark, or a night beetle whirred on its way.

The summit of the hillside was sere and arid, and its bold stony expanse had seldom a living thing on it by daylight. By night, when the priest and sacristan of St. Fulvo were sleeping, there was not a single sign of any life, except the blowing of the pine-tops in the breeze.

He had never been there except by broad day; his knees shook under him as he looked up at the tall straight black tower, with the moonlit clouds shining through the bars of its open belfry. If he had not heard the voice of Santina crying to him, 'No coward shall win me,' he would have turned and fled.

He was alone as utterly as though all the world were dead.

It was still barely midnight when he saw the bell-tower on high looming darker than the dark clouds about it, and the pine-trees and the presbytery and the walls of the burial-ground gathered round it black and gaunt, their shapes all fused together in one heap of gloom.

The guardians of the place, old men who went early to their beds, were sleeping somewhere under those black roofs against the tower. Below, the hills and valleys were all wrapped in the silence of the country night.

On some far road a tired team of charcoal-bearing mules might be treading woefully to the swing of their heavy bells, or some belated string of wine-carts might be creeping carefully through the darkness, the men half-drunk and their beasts half-asleep.

But there was no sound or sign of them in the vast brooding stillness which covered like great soft wings the peaceful hills overlapping one another, and the serenity of the mountains bathed in the rays of the moon.

There was no sound anywhere: not even the bleat of a sheep from the flocks, nor the bark of a dog from the homesteads.

Caris crossed himself, and mounted the steep path which led to the church-gate.

The last time he had come thither he had climbed up with the weight of his mother's coffin on his shoulders; the ascent being too steep for a mule to mount and he too poor to pay for assistance.

The walls of the graveyard were high, and the only access to it was through a wooden iron-studded door, which had on one side of it a little hollowed stone for holy water, and above it a cross of iron and an iron crown. To force the door was impossible; to climb the wall was difficult, but he was agile as a wild cat, and accustomed to crawl up the stems of the pines to gather their cones, and the smooth trunks of the poplars in the valleys to lop their crowns.

He paused a moment, feeling the cold dews run like rain off his forehead, and wished that his dog was with him, a childish wish, for the dog could not have climbed: then he kicked off his boots, set his toe-nails in the first crevice in the brick surface, and began to mount with his hands and feet with prehensile agility.

In a few moments he was above on the broad parapet which edged the wall, and could look down into the burial-place below. But he did not dare to look; he shut his eyes convulsively and began to descend, holding by such slight aids as the uneven surface and the projecting lichens afforded him. He dropped at last roughly but safely on the coarse grass within the enclosure.

All was black and still; the graveyard was shut in on three sides by its walls, and at the fourth side by the tower of the church.

The moon had passed behind a cloud and he could see nothing.

He stood ankle-deep in the grass; and as he stirred he stumbled over the uneven broken ground, made irregular by so many nameless graves. He felt in his breeches pockets for his pipe and matches, and drew one of the latter out and struck it on a stone.

But the little flame was too feeble to show him even whereabouts he was, and he could not in the darkness tell one grave from another.

Stooping and stretching out his hands, he could feel the rank grass and the hillocks all round him; there were a few head-stones, but only a few; of such dead as were buried in the graveyard of St. Fulvo, scarce one mourner in a century could afford a memorial stone or even a wooden cross.

He stood still and helpless, not having foreseen the difficulty of the darkness.

He could feel the stirring of wings in the air around him. His sense told him that they were but owls and bats, of which the old tower was full; but he shivered as he heard them go by; who could be sure what devilish thing they might not be?

The horror of the place grew on him.

Still, harmless, sacred though it was, it filled him with a terror which fastened upon him, making his eyeballs start, and his flesh creep, and his limbs shake beneath him.

Yet he gripped his pickaxe closer and tighter, and held his ground, and waited for the moon to shine from the clouds.

Santina should see he was no white-livered boy. He would get her what she asked, and then she would be his—his—his; and the woods would hide their loves and the cold moss grow warm with their embrace.

Stung into courage and impatience by her memory, he struck violently upon one of the stones his whole handful of brimstone matches; they flared alight with a blue, sharp flash, and he saw there at his feet his mother's grave.

He could not doubt that it was hers; it was a mound of clay on which no grass had had time to grow, and there were the cross-sticks he had set up on it as a memorial, with a bit of an old blue kerchief which had been hers tied to them.

It was just as he had left them there four months before, when the summer had been green and the brooks dry and the days long and light. She was there under his feet where he and the priest had laid her, the two crossed chestnut sticks the only memorial she would ever have, poor soul!

She was there, lying out in all wind and weather alone—horribly, eternally alone; the rain raining on her and the sun shining on her, and she knowing nought, poor, dead woman!

Then the wickedness of what he came to do smote him all of a sudden so strongly that he staggered as under a blow, and a shower of hot tears gushed from his eyes, and he wept bitterly.

'Oh, mother, poor mother!' he cried aloud.

She had been a hard mother to him, and had had ways which he had feared and disliked, and a cruel tongue and a bad name on the hillside, but she had been his mother, and when she had lain dying she had been sorrowful to think that she would leave him alone.

She had been his mother, and he came to rifle her grave.

What a crime! What a foul, black crime, such as men and women would scarce speak of with bated breath by their hearths in the full blaze of day! What a crime! He abhorred himself for doing it, as he would have abhorred a poisoner or a parricide seeing them pass to the gallows.

'Oh, mother, mother, forgive me! She will have it so!' he sobbed with a piteous prayer.

He thought that, being dead, his mother would understand and forgive, as she would never have understood or forgiven when living.

Then he struck his spade down into the heavy clay on which no bird-sown seed of blade or blossom had yet had any time to spring.

He dug and dug and dug, till the sweat rolled off his limbs and his shoulders ached and his arms quivered.

He threw spadefuls of clay one after another out on the ground around, his eyes growing used to the darkness, and his hands gripping the spade handle harder and harder in desperation. The very horror of his action nerved him to feverish force.

'Oh, Santina, Santina, you give my soul to hell fires everlasting!' he cried aloud once, as he jammed the iron spade down deeper and deeper into the ground, tearing the stiff soil asunder and crushing the stones.

The moon came forth from the clouds, and the burial-ground grew white with her light where the shadows of the wall did not fall. He looked up once; then he saw black crosses, black skulls and cross-bones, rank grass, crumbling headstones, nameless mounds all round him, and beyond them the tower of the church.

But his mother's coffin he did not find. In vain he dug, and searched, and frantically tossed aside the earth in such haste to have ended and finished with his horrible task.

His mother's coffin he could not find.

Under the rays of the moon the desecrated ground lay, all broken up and heaped and tossed together, as though an earthquake had riven the soil. But the deal shell which he had made with his own hands and borne thither on his own shoulders, he could not find.

'She will never believe! she will never believe!' he thought.

Santina would never believe that he had come there if he met her at dawn with empty hands. He could hear in fancy her shrill, cruel, hissing shriek of mockery and derision; and he felt that if he did so hear it in reality it would drive him mad.

He dug, and dug, and dug, more furiously, more blindly, going unconsciously farther and farther away from where the two crossed chestnut sticks had been; they had been uprooted and buried long before under the first heap of clay which he had thrown out from the grave.

He had forgotten that they alone were his landmarks and guides; in the darkness which had been followed by the uncertain, misleading light of the moon, he had gone far from them.

His work had become almost a frenzy with him; his nerves were strung to an uncontrollable pitch of excitation, fear, and horror, and obstinacy, and a furious resolve to obtain what he sought, with a terrible dread of what he should see when he should reach it, had together, in their conflict of opposing passions, driven him beside himself.

He dug on and on, without any consciousness of how far he had gone from his goal, and no sense left but the fury of determination to possess himself of what he knew was there in the earth beneath him.

He stood up to his knees in the yawning clay, with the heavy clods of it flung up on either side of him, and the moon hanging up on high in the central heavens, her light often obscured by drifting cloud wrack, and at other times shining cold and white into his face, as though by its searching rays to read his soul.

How long he had been there he knew not; time was a blank to him; his supernatural terrors were lost in the anguish of dread lest he should be unable to do Santina's will.

He felt as though he strove with the fiend himself.

Who but some hideous power of evil could have moved the corpse and baffled and beaten him thus? Perhaps truly the charms had been things born of the devil, and the devil had taken them both to himself, and the body of his mother with them. He dug on and on frantically, deriving relief from the fever within him through that violent exertion which strained every vein and muscle in his body, till he felt as though beaten with iron rods.

He did not see, in the confusion of his mind and the gloom of the night, that he had come close under the graveyard wall, and was digging almost at its base. He believed himself still to be on the spot where he had buried his mother; and he had deepened the pit about him until he was sunk up to his loins. He never remembered the danger of the priest or the sacristan waking and rising and seeing him at his occult labour.

He never remembered that the bell would toll for matins whilst the stars would be still in their places, and the hills and the valleys still dark. All sense had left him except one set, insane resolve to obtain that by which the beauty of a woman was alone to be won.

Of crime he had grown reckless, of emotion he had none left; he was only frantically, furiously determined to find that which he had come to seek. Standing in the damp, clogging soil, with the sense of moving creatures about him which his labours had disturbed in the bowels of the earth, he dug and dug and dug until his actions had no purpose or direction in them, only hurling clod upon clod in breathless, aimless, senseless monotony and haste.

At last his spade struck on some substance other than the heavy soil and the slimy worms; he thrilled through all his frame with triumph and with terror.

At last! At last! He never doubted that it was the coffin he sought; he did not know that his mother's grave lay actually yards away from him. Oh, were there only light, he thought; it was so dark, for the moon had now passed down behind the wall of the graveyard, and there would be only henceforth growing ever darker and darker that dense gloom which precedes the dawn. He dared not go on digging; he was afraid that the iron of his spade should stave in the soft wood of the coffin, and cut and maim the body within it. He stooped and pushed the clay aside with his hands, trying to feel what the tool had struck.

What met his touch was not wood, but metal—rounded, smooth, polished; though clogged and crusted with the clay-bed in which it lay. He pushed the earth farther and farther away, and the object he had reached seemed to lie far down, under the soil, and to be held down by it.

He was himself hemmed in by the broken clods, and stood in the hole he had dug, half imprisoned by it. But he could move enough to strike a few remaining matches on the iron of the spade, and let their light fall on what he had unearthed.

Then it seemed to him that a miracle had been wrought.

Before him lay a silver image of the Child Christ. His knees shook, his whole frame trembled, his lips gasped for breath; the flame of the matches died out; he was left in the dark with the image.

'It is the Gesu! It is the Gesu!' he muttered, sure that his dead mother, or the saints, or both, had wrought this miracle to show him the evil of his ways.

In truth, the statue had lain there many centuries, buried against the wall by pious hands in times when the torch of war had been carried flaming over all the wasted villages and ravaged fields in the plain below.

But no such explanation dawned on the mind of Caris.

To him it was a miracle wrought by the saints or by the dead. In the dark he could feel its round shoulders, its small hands folded as in prayer, its smooth cheek and brow, its little breast; and he touched them reverently, trembling in every nerve.

He had heard of holy images shown thus to reward belief or to confound disbelief.

His faith was vague, dull, foolish, but it was deep-rooted in him. He was a miserable sinner; and the dead and the saints turned him thus backward on his road to hell; so he thought, standing waist-deep in the rugged clay and clutching his spade to keep himself from falling in a swoon.