# In Maremma/Volume 2/Chapter 19

CHAPTER XIX.
FORTNIGHT, or a little more, after that curt farewell to Maurice Sanctis, when she was out cutting osiers far away from the tombs, the mule was stolen. When she came home, to fetch him to carry the osiers for her, he was missing from the stable she had made for him in the tombs with a cosy litter of moss and ling, and a plentiful ration of wild oats and grass. He was missing; and she knew in a moment that he had been stolen. He could not have slipped his halter and opened the stone doors himself.
'It is Zirlo!' she said between her tightshut lips. It could be no other than Zirlo.
She went out and saw the wet sand marked with the fresh impress of two little ​naked feet and the four hoofs of the mule. She tracked them till nightfall over the moors and through the shrubs, but night soon fell over the land and then she could see nothing. She returned, and could not sleep, thinking of the poor old animal gone to unknown misery in hard toil and strange hands.
She remained wide awake, listening to the delicious song of the nightingales that came from every knot of thyme and clump of rosemary, crossed discordantly now and again by the croak of the snipe, the mourning of the owl, the scream of the coot seized by the fox.
At dawn she looked for the tracks again, but they were effaced by the dew.
With full daybreak she went across the country to San Lionardo, where it stood naked and white upon its low spur of the Apennines. She had never been there, but she ran all risks rather than not see Zirlo and find the mule. It was three hours' walk, and most of it was climbing work; but she reached there as the sun, that had long been up over the Umbrian pastures and Adrian shores of the east, first reached the dreary little hamlet hidden in the rocks. ​She asked for the house of Zefferino the pastorino, and went straight to it. It was a foul-smelling place, reeking of garlic and stable filth; she saw the father of Zefferino, who was eating an onion and throwing young boughs into a manger for cows.
'Zirlo has stolen my mule,' she said abruptly. 'I am come to you to have it back.'
'You are a bold one, whoever you are,' said the man. 'Why do you think he has robbed you?'
'Because the mule is gone, and he alone knew where I kept it; and because he is a false and wicked creature, and did me a treachery but a few days ago; and I spared him then, and I was foolish———'
'Oh ho!' said the man, 'my little lad has told me about you; you are a gipsy, and a witch, and worse, and you live in the bowels of the earth, and some fine night we will come and smoke you out. As for your spavined beast, I know nought of it, and Zefferino is gone away to Bolsena to his mother's folk who are fishers there, for he was afraid for his life to remain where you could get at him———'
​'Then he has taken the mule to Bolsena!'
'No, no; your mule be burnt! My little lad went away with a good sensale———'
'To whom he has sold it!' she cried, beside herself with powerless rage.
The man's face turned red, but he only swore at her.
'If you say more about that, I will say something to you,' he said savagely. 'Who stole the gold out of the tombs? The tombs were ours as much as yours.'
'I stole nothing,' said Musa; 'but your little liar has robbed me of my mule, and you know it very well, and you have the sensale's silver in your house now, and you are all of you wicked and accursed; and sooner would I that you had cut off my right arm rather than that you had taken that poor beast to misery in its old age.'
She felt a sob choke her as she spoke, thinking of the patient beast that she had known and eared for all her life, and of the baseness and the vileness with which the child she had trusted had rewarded her trust.
She knew her own impotence. She could prove nothing, and she was full sure that Zirlo and the dealer were far away—no ​doubt in some direction the most opposite to the great lake, since this wretch had named Bolsena. She was too proud and too strong to protest when she was powerless to avenge. She turned away and went down the steep street of San Lionardo, roughly paven with rough granite of the mountain.
'We will come and smoke you out some night, as we do the foxes,' yelled the father of Zefferino after her, and muttered to his cow and his pipe, 'They say there were bags full of the Austrians' gold florins in those caves. Zirlo was sure there were none left, else a knife across her throat———'
Happily for her and for himself, he was a very lazy man, and munched on at his big onion without going after her to try the persuasion of his knife.
Musa scarcely saw the mountain side as she descended it for the mist of passionate sorrow that blinded her eyes. The menace to herself passed her ear unheeded; what she grieved for, what she saw in her thoughts, was the poor old mule plodding far away over cruel, stony roads, with no one to give him a draught of water, or pull for him a handful of grass, taken in his old age to the torture-loads of the Carrara marbles, or to the ​hard labour of the bindolo or water-crank, or to those brutal taskmasters, the charcoal burners, who compel their beasts to sleep standing, and kick them up if they dare to lie down, and drive them night and day with the black loads from the forests in long pitiless journeys over stone and sand to the gates of cities.
Poor old Cecco! Never more would he have his fragrant couch of heather, and browse off the sweet shoots of the honeysuckle, and stand at will, knee-deep in the pools, amongst the green water-plantain. Never more would she rest her cheek against his shaggy neck, and say in his long, soft, furry ear: 'You and I,—we do not forget Joconda?'
Those who live in the great world, or the world of haste and toil, may think it a very little thing to lose an old mule to an unknown and almost certainly cruel fate. But to this child, in her loneliness, it was a loss more sad than words can easily tell. He was the only thing left to her of her old life, and he was gone away into misery.
She searched far and wide over the land for many days, and dropped her usual caution to ask questions of the few men she ​met; but Zefferino had been too cunning for her. He and the mule were far away; the animal, in a dealer's hands, being sold at Massa, and the little traitor safe with his mother's brother, who lived not on Bolsena water, but at the foundries at Follonica,
So Zirlo dropped out of her life, and the solitude which she had told Sanctis was so dear to her closed in upon her yet more completely.
She was not alarmed by the threats of Zefferino's father, for she knew there was now nothing in the place to which his kind would attach value; but she was afraid lest others hearing of the tombs would drive her out of them, and often in the night she awoke and listened, hearing the call of the bittern, or the cry of the hare seized by a booted-eagle. She was not afraid, but she was troubled.
Another and a yet greater sorrow also fell upon her at that time. Leone was killed.
To the woods one afternoon two of the smiths of Follonica came with their guns to shoot what they might of the furred and feathered owners of the soil. It was against the law at this season, but there was no one to enforce the law; it would need legions of mounted guards to scour Maremma and ​secure obedience. No one sees, no one cares; the shot beasts and the trapped birds are carried through the very gates of the towns, and the law is a dead letter.
She had been at one work or another all the morning and was tired. In a mossy dell some mile or two distant from the sepulchres—a green shady place, prankt with the blue and the rose-coloured lychnis, and the wild convolvulus, and the clematis both white and purple—she sat down to rest a little while amongst the mosses, and the warmth and the drowsy air overcame her, and her eyelids dropped, and her limbs stretched themselves out at ease, and she fell fast asleep.
There were many a danger there of asps that might creep from under the boulders of tufa, and of vipers that might steal from under the great leaves of the pan di serpe; even the booted-eagle, who passes his summers in the Apennines, might sail across the sky and espy her and do battle with her, as she had once seen him do it with a grand-duke owl till both of them fell dead together. But of these risks she seldom thought, and Leone lay at her feet and watched her quiet breathing.
​As she so slept, there came near the two smiths from Follonica, and they caught sight of her, and, being warm with wine they had carried with them, burst through the network of greenery and were about to put rough hands on her in her unconscious slumber, when the dog, who had seen them approach, and watched without a sound, but with his lips curled back from his teeth and the hair of his shoulders bristling, sprang upon them with a leap of such sudden force that he sent one of them staggering backwards till he fell, and pinned the other at the throat.
The one whom he held with his powerful teeth he shook like a rat to and fro, the man could do nothing; but the other who had fallen, and whose fowling-piece had been unloaded, tottered to his feet, rammed a charge down the muzzle of the gun, and fired.
At the sound of the shot, Musa awaking, sprang to her feet; but it was too late to save her friend: shot through the head, Leone dropped like a stone and fell dead.
Ere her startled eyes were fully awake, her knife was out of her girdle, and the cowards fled for their lives as they saw its ​blade flash in the air. She flew on in their wake, but they dived and dipped beneath the thick oak scrub; she lost them as the gazehound loses its quarry. She threw herself beside the body of the dog, and the green earth and the blue sky seemed to her to grow red as if soaked in his blood.
He had been her playfellow and her protector for so many years. At night she had slept safely, knowing him near; from infancy, when her baby's hand had closed on his white curls, he had been her comrade, her companion, her keeper, and of later years, in her sorrows and her solitude, he had given her all the tender and comprehensive sympathy which the dog so willingly gives, so rarely receives in return.
And now his life was gone out in her defence; never again would his frank brown eyes seek sunshine in her smile.
He lay stone-dead in a pool of his own blood that crimsoned the white bells of the bindweed; and his murderers had escaped and were lost for ever in the wide waste of Maremma. She could not weep, she could not cry out; she took his poor shattered head in her hands and kissed it. If she ​could have avenged him with her own life she would have given it.
She cursed her foolish hour of sleep.
She sat there beside him till the day waned and the deep blue shadows of evening began to lengthen over the wold.
Then she raised his body in her arms and put him over her shoulders as she would have carried a child, and began slowly, and with effort, thus burdened, to make her sad way homeward.
The weight was great; the mile of moorland seemed like ten. She went with bent back and limbs that trembled as if all in a moment she had grown very old; but she did not relinquish her task. He had done more for her. She would not leave him in the woods for the fox and the polecat and the carrion birds to find.
It was long past nightfall when she reached her refuge; her clothes were soaked through with blood, his Weight had chilled, stiffened, numbed her; but she had brought him home.
The next day she made his grave under the alaternus and the myrtle; and now on earth was utterly alone.
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