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.