Project Gutenberg's The Waters of Edera, by Louise de la Ramée, a.k.a. Ouida

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: The Waters of Edera

Author: Louise de la Ramée, a.k.a. Ouida

Release Date: September 15, 2004 [EBook #13459]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WATERS OF EDERA ***




This eBook was prepared by Carol Poster.






THE
WATERS OF EDERA




BY
O U I D A

Author of
"Moths," "Under Two Flags," "The Silver Christ," Etc.



London
T. FISHER UNWIN
Paternoster Square

1900





THE WATERS OF EDERA


I

It was a country of wide pastures, of moors covered with heath, of
rock-born streams and rivulets, of forest and hill and dale, sparsely
inhabited, with the sea to the eastward of it, unseen, and the
mountains everywhere visible always, and endlessly changing in
aspect.

Herdsmen and shepherds wandered over it, and along its almost disused
roads pedlars and pack mules passed at times but rarely. Minerals and
marbles were under its turf, but none sought for them; pools and
lakes slept in it, undisturbed save by millions of water fowl and
their pursuers. The ruins of temples and palaces were overgrown by
its wild berries and wild flowers. The buffalo browsed where emperors
had feasted, and the bittern winged its slow flight over the fields
of forgotten battles.

It was the season when the flocks are brought through this lonely
land, coming from the plains to the hills. Many of them passed on
their way thus along the course of the Edera water. The shepherds,
clothed in goatskin, with the hair worn outward, bearded, brown,
hirsute men, looking like savage satyrs, the flocks they drove before
them travel-worn, lame, heart-broken, the lambs and kids bleating
painfully. They cannot keep up with the pace of the flock, and, when
they fall behind, the shepherds slit their throats, roast their
bodies over an evening fire, or bake them under its ashes, and eat
them; if a town or village be near, the little corpses are sold in
it. Often a sheep dog or a puppy drops down in the same way, footsore
and worn out; then the shepherds do not tarry, but leave the
creatures to their fate, to die slowly of thirst and hunger.

The good shepherd is a false phrase. No one is more brutal than a
shepherd. If he were not so he could not bear his life for a day.

All that he does is brutal. He stones the flock where it would tarry
against his will. He mutilates the males, and drags the females away
from their sucking babes. He shears their fleeces every spring,
unheeding how the raw skin drops blood. He drives the halting,
footsore, crippled animals on by force over flint and slate and
parching dust. Sometimes he makes them travel twenty miles a day.

For his pastime he sets the finest of his beasts to fight. This is
the feast day and holiday sport of all the shepherds; and they bet on
it, until all they have, which is but little, goes on the heads of
the rams; and one will wager his breeches, and another his skin
jacket, and another his comely wife, and the ram which is beaten, if
he have any life left in him, will be stabbed in the throat by his
owner: for he is considered to have disgraced the _branca_.

This Sunday and Saints' day sport was going on a piece of grass land
in the district known as the Vale of Edera.

On the turf, cleared of its heaths and ferns, there was a ring of
men, three of them shepherds, the rest peasants. In the midst of them
were the rams, two chosen beasts pitted against each other like two
pugilists. They advanced slowly at first, then more quickly, and yet
more quickly, till they met with a crash, their two foreheads, hard
as though carven in stone, coming in collision with a terrible force;
then each, staggered by the encounter, drew back, dizzy and bruised,
to recoil, and take breath, and gather fresh force, and so charge one
on the other in successive rounds until the weaker should succumb,
and, mangled and senseless, should arise no more.

One of the rams was old, and one was young; some of the shepherds
said that the old one was more wary and more experienced, and would
have the advantage; in strength and height they were nearly equal,
but the old one had been in such duels before and the young one
never. The young one thought he had but to rush in, head downward, to
conquer; the old one knew that this was not enough to secure victory.
The young one was blind with ardour and impatience for the fray; the
old one was cool and shrewd and could parry and wait.

After three rounds, the two combatants met in a final shock; the
elder ram butted furiously, the younger staggered and failed to
return the blow, his frontal bone was split, and he fell to the
ground; the elder struck him once, twice, thrice, amidst the
uproarious applause of his backers; a stream of blood poured from his
skull, which was pounded to splinters; a terrible convulsion shook
his body and his limbs; he stretched his tongue out as if he tried to
lap water; the men who had their money on him cursed him with every
curse they knew; they did not cut his throat, for they knew he was as
good as dead.

"This is a vile thing you have done," said a little beggar girl who
had been passing, and had been arrested by the horrible fascination
of the combat, and forced against her will to stand and watch its
issue. The shepherds jeered; those who had backed the victor were
sponging his wounds beside a runlet of water which was close at hand;
those who had lost were flinging stones on the vanquished. The girl
knelt down by the dying ram to save him from the shower of stones;
she lifted his head gently upward, and tried to pour water through
his jaws from a little wooden cup which she had on her, and which she
had filled at the river. But he could not swallow; his beautiful
opaline eyes were covered with film, he gasped painfully, a foam of
blood on his lips and a stream of blood coursing down his face; a
quiver passed over him again; then his head rested lifeless on his
knees. She touched his shattered horns, his clotted wool, tenderly.

"Why did you set him to fight?" she said with an indignation which
choked her voice. "It was vile. He was younger than the other, and
knew less."

Those who had won laughed. Those who had lost cursed him again; he
had disgraced his _branca_. They would flay him, and put him in the
cauldron over the wood fire, and would curse him even whilst they
picked his bones for a white-livered spawn of cowards; a son of a
thrice-damned ewe.

The girl knew that was what they do. She laid his battered head
gently down upon the turf, and poured the water out of her cup; her
eyes were blind with tears; she could not give him back his young
life, his zest in his pastoral pleasures, his joy in cropping the
herbage, his rude loves, his merry gambols, his sound sleep, his
odorous breath.

He had died to amuse and excite the ugly passions of men, as, if he
had lived longer, he would, in the end, have died to satisfy their
ugly appetites.

She looked at his corpse with compassion, the tears standing in her
eyes; then she turned away, and as she went saw that her poor ragged
clothes were splashed here and there with blood, and that her arms
and hands were red with blood: she had not thought of that before;
she had thought only of him. The shepherds did not notice her; they
were quarrelling violently in dispute over what had been lost and
won, thrusting their fingers in each other's faces, and defiling the
fair calm of the day with filthy oaths.

The girl shrank away into the heather with the silent swiftness of a
hare; now that she had lost the stimulus of indignant pity she was
afraid of these brutes; if the whim entered into them they would be
as brutal to her as to their flock.

Out of fear of them she did not descend at once to the river, but
pushed her way through the sweet-smelling, bee-haunted, cross-leaved
heaths; she could hear the sound of the water on her right all the
time as she went. She knew little of this country, but she had seen
the Edera, and had crossed it farther up its course on one of its
rough tree-bridges.

When, as well as she could judge, she had got half a mile away from
the scene of the rams' combat, she changed her course and went to the
right, directed by the murmur of the river. It was slow walking
through the heath and gorse which grew above her head, and were
closely woven together, but in time she reached shelving ground, and
heard the song of the river louder on her ear. The heath ceased to
grow within a few yards of the stream and was replaced by various
water plants and acacia thickets; she slid down the banks between the
stems and alighted on her bare feet where the sand was soft and the
water-dock grew thick. She looked up and down the water; there was no
one in sight, nothing but the banks rosehued with the bloom of the
heather, and, beyond the opposite shore, in the distance, the tender
amethystine hues of the mountains. The water was generally low,
leaving the stretches of sand and of shingle visible, but it was
still deep in many parts.

She stripped herself and went down into it, and washed the blood
which had by this time caked upon her flesh. It seemed a pity, she
thought, to sully with that dusky stain this pure, bright, shining
stream; but she had no other way to rid herself of it, and she had in
all the world no other clothes than these poor woollen rags.

Her heart was still sore for the fate of the conquered ram; and her
eyes filled again with tears as she washed his blood off her in the
gay running current. But the water was soothing and fresh, the sun
shone on its bright surface; the comfrey and fig-wart blew in the
breeze, the heather smell filled the atmosphere.

She was only a child, and her spirits rose, and she capered about in
the shallows, and flung the water over her head, and danced to her
own reflection in it, and forgot her sorrow. Then she washed her
petticoats as well as she could, having nothing but water alone, and
all the while she was as naked as a Naiad, and the sun smiled on her
brown, thin, childish body as it smiled on a stem of plaintain or on
the plumage of a coot.

Then when she had washed her skirt she spread it out on the sand to
dry, and sat down beside it, for the heat to bake her limbs after her
long bath. There was no one, and there was nothing, in sight; if any
came near she could hide under the great dock leaves until such
should have passed. It was high noon, and the skirt of wool and the
skirt of hemp grew hot and steamed under the vertical rays; she was
soon as dry as the shingles from which the water had receded for
months. She sat with her hands clasped round her updrawn knees, and
her head grew heavy with the want of slumber, but she would not
sleep, though it was the hour of sleep. Some one might pass by and
steal her clothes, she thought, and how or when would she ever get
others?

When the skirt was quite dried, the blood stains still showed on it;
they were no longer red, but looked like the marks from the sand. She
tied it on round her waist and her shirt over it, and wound an old
crimson sash round both. Then she took up her little bundle in which
were the wooden cup and a broken comb, and some pieces of hempen
cloth and a small loaf of maize bread, and went on along the water,
wading and hopping in it, as the water-wagtails did, jumping from
stone to stone, and sometimes sinking up to her knees in a hole.

She had no idea where she would rest at night, or where she would get
anything to eat; but that reflection scarcely weighed on her; she
slept well enough under stacks or in outhouses, and she was used to
hunger. So long as no one meddled with her she was content. The
weather was fine and the country was quiet. Only she was sorry for
the dead ram. By this time they would have hung him up by his heels
to a tree, and have pulled the skin off his body.

She was sorry; but she jumped along merrily in the water, as a
kingfisher does, and scarcely even wondered where its course would
lead her.

At a bend in it she came to a spot where a young man was seated
amongst the bulrushes, watching his fishing net.

"Aie!" she cried with a shrill cry of alarm, like a bird who sees a
fowler. She stopped short in her progress; the water at that moment
was up to her knees. With both hands she held up her petticoat to save
it from another wetting; her little bundle was balanced on her head,
the light shone in her great brown eyes. The youth turned and saw
her.

She was a very young girl, thirteen at most; her small flat breasts
were those of a child, her narrow shoulders and her narrow loin spoke
of scanty food and privation of all kinds, and her arms and legs were
brown from the play of the sun on their nakedness; they were little
else than skin and bone, nerves and sinew, and looked like stakes of
wood. All the veins and muscles stood revealed as in anatomy, and her
face, which would have been a child's face, a nymph's face, with
level brows, a pure straight profile, and small close ears like
shells, was so fleshless and sunburnt that she looked almost like a
mummy. Her eyes had in them the surprise and sadness of those of a
weaning calf; and her hair, too abundant for such a small head,
would, had it not been so dusty and entangled, have been of a read
golden bronze, the hue of a chestnut which has just burst open its
green husk.

"Who are you?" said the young man, looking at her in surprise.

"I am Nerina," answered the child.

"Where do you come from? What is your country?"

She pointed vaguely to the south-west mountains, where the snow on
the upper ranges was still lying with bands of cloud resting on it.

"From the Abruzzo?"

She was silent. She did not know the mountains of her birthplace by
their names.

"Who was your father?" he asked, with some impatience.

"He was Black Fausto."

"What did he do for a living?"

"He went down with the fair season to the Roman plain."

He understood: the man had no doubt been a labourer, one of those who
descend in bands from the villages of the Abruzzo heights to plough,
and mow, and sow, and reap, on the lands of the Castelli Romani; men
who work in droves, and are fed and stalled in droves, as cattle are,
who work all through the longest and hottest days in summer, and in
the worst storms of winter; men who are black by the sun, are half
naked, are lean and hairy and drip with continual sweat, but who take
faithfully back the small wage they receive to where their women and
children dwell in their mountain-villages.

"He went, you say? Is he ill? Does he work no longer?"

"He died last year."

"Of what?"

She gave a hopeless gesture. "Who knows? He came back with a wolf in
his belly, he said, always gnawing and griping, and he drank water
all day and all night, and his face burned, and his legs were cold,
and all of a sudden his jaw fell, and he spoke no more to us. There
are many of them who die like that after a hot season down in the
plains."

He understood; hunger and heat, foul air in their sleeping places,
infusoria in the ditch and rain water, and excessive toil in the
extremes of heat and cold, make gaps in the ranks of these hired
bands every year as if a cannon had been fired into them.

"Who takes care of you now?" he asked with pity, as for a homeless
bitch.

"Nobody. There is nobody. They are all gone down into the earth."

"But how do you live?"

"I work when I can. I beg when I cannot. People let me sleep in the
stalls, or the barns, and give me bread."

"That is a bad life for a girl."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"I did not make it."

"And where are you going?"

She opened her arms wide and swept the air with them.

"Anywhere. Along the water, until I find something to do."

"I cannot do much," she added, after a pause. "I am little, and no
one has taught me. But I can cut grass and card wool."

"The grass season is short, and the wool season is far off. Why did
you not stay in your village?"

She was mute. She did not know why she had left it, she had come away
down the mountainside on a wandering instinct, with a vague idea of
finding something better the farther she went: her father had always
come back with silver pieces in his pocket after his stay down there
in those lands which she had never seen, lying as they did down far
below under the golden haze of what seemed an immeasurable distance.

"Are you not hungry?" said the fisher.

"I am always hungry," she said, with some astonishment at so simple a
question. "I have been hungry ever since I can remember. We all were
up there. Sometimes even the grass was too dried up to eat. Father
used to bring home with him a sack of maize; it was better so long as
that lasted."

"Are you hungry now?"

"Of course."

"Come to my house with me. We will feed you. Come. Have no fear. I am
Adone Alba, of the Terra Vergine, and my mother is a kind woman. She
will not grudge you a meal."

The child laughed all over her thin, brown face.

"That will be good," she said, and leapt up out of the water.

"Poor soul! Poor soul!" thought the young man, with a profound sense
of pity.

As the child sprang up out of the river, shaking the water off her as
a little terrier does, he saw that she must have been in great want
of food for a long time; her bones were almost through her skin. He
set his fishing pole more firmly in the ground, and left the net sunk
some half a yard below the surface; then he said to the little girl:

"Come, come and break your fast. It has lasted long, I fear."

Nerina only understood that she was to be fed; that was enough for
her. She trotted like a stray cur, beckoned by a benevolent hand,
behind him as he went, first through some heather and broom, then
over some grass, where huge olive trees grew, and then through corn
and vine lands, to an old farmhouse, made of timber and stone; large,
long, solid; built to resist robbers in days when robbers came in
armed gangs. There was a wild garden in front of it, full of cabbage
roses, lavender, myrtle, stocks and wallflowers. Over the arched door
a four-season rose-tree clambered.

The house, ancient and spacious, with its high-pitched roof of ruddy
tiles, impressed Nerina with a sense of awe, almost of terror. She
remained hesitating on the garden path, where white and red stocks
were blossoming.

"Mother," said Adone, "here is a hungry child. Give her, in your
kindness, some broth and bread."

Clelia Alba came out into the entrance, and saw the little girl with
some displeasure. She was kind and charitable, but she did not love
beggars and vagabonds, and this half-naked female tatterdemalion
offended her sense of decency and probity, and her pride of sex. She
was herself a stately and handsome woman.

"The child is famished," said Adone, seeing his mother's displeasure.

"She shall eat then, but let her eat outside," said Clelia Alba, and
went back into the kitchen.

Nerina waited by the threshold, timid and mute and humble, like a
lost dog; her eyes alone expressed overwhelming emotions: fear and
hope and one ungovernable appetite, hunger.

Clelia Alba came out in a few minutes with a bowl of hot broth made
of herbs, and a large piece of maize-flour bread.

"Take them," she said to her son.

Adone took them from her, and gave them to the child.

"Sit and eat here," he said, pointing to a stone settle by the wall
under the rose of four seasons.

The hands of Nerina trembled with excitement, her eyes looked on
fire, her lips shook, her breath came feverishly and fast. The smell
of the soup made her feel beside herself. She said nothing, but
seized the food and began to drink the good herb-broth with thirsty
eagerness though the steam of it scorched her.

Adone, with an instinct of compassion and delicacy, left her
unwatched and went within.

"Where did you find that scarecrow?" asked his mother.

"Down by the river. She has nobody and nothing. She comes from the
mountains."

"There are poor folks enough in Ruscino without adding to them from
without," said Clelia Alba impatiently. "Mind she does not rob the
fowl-house before she slips sway."

"She has honest eyes," said Adone. "I am sure she will do us no
harm."

When he thought that she had been given time enough to finish her
food he went out; the child was stretched at full length on the stone
seat, and was already sound asleep, lying on her back; the empty bowl
was on the ground, of the bread there was no longer a crumb; she was
sleeping peacefully, profoundly, her thin hands crossed on her naked
brown bosom, on which some rose leaves had fallen from the rose on
the wall above.

He looked at her in silence for a little while, then returned to his
mother.

"She is tired. She sleeps. Let her rest."

"It is unsafe."

"How unsafe, mother? She is only a child."

"She may have men behind her."

"It is not likely."

Adone could not say (for he had no idea himself) why he felt sure
that this miserable little waif would not abuse hospitality: "She is
a child," he answered rather stupidly, for children are often
treacherous and wicked, and he knew nothing of this one except what
she had chosen to tell of herself.

"She may have men behind her," repeated his mother.

"Such men as you are thinking of, mother, do not come to this valley
nowadays. Ulisse Ferrero was the last of them. Indeed, I think this
poor little creature is all alone in the world. Go and look at her.
You will see how forlorn and small she is."

She went to the doorway and looked at the sleeping beggar; her eyes
softened as she gazed, the whole attitude and appearance of the child
were so miserable and so innocent, so helpless, and yet so tranquil,
that her maternal heart was touched; the waif slept on the stone
bench beside the door of strangers as though she were in some safe
and happy home.

Clelia Alba looked down on her a few moments, then took the kerchief
off her hair, and laid it gently, without awakening the sleeper, over
the breast and the face of the child, on which flies were settling
and the sun was shining.

Then she picked up the empty earthenware bowl, and went indoors
again.

"I will go back to the river," said Adone. "I have left the net
there."

His mother nodded assent.

"You will not send this little foreigner away till I return?" he
asked. Every one was a foreigner who had not been born in the vale of
Edera.

"No; not till you return."

He went away through the sunshine and shadow of the olive-trees. He
knew that his mother never broke her word. But she thought as she
washed the bowl: "A little stray mongrel bitch like that may bite
badly some day. She must go. She is nothing now; but by and by she
may bite."

Clelia Alba knew human nature, though she had never been out of sight
of the river Edera. She took her spinning-wheel and sat down by the
door. There was nothing urgent to do, and she could from the
threshold keep a watch on the little vagabond, and would be aware if
she awoke. All around was quiet. She could see up and down the
valley, beyond the thin, silvery foliage of the great olive-trees,
and across it to where the ruins of a great fortress towered in their
tragic helplessness. The sun shone upon her fields of young wheat,
her slopes of pasture. The cherry-trees and the pear-trees were in
bloom, her trellised vines running from tree to tree. Ragged-robin,
yellow crowsfoot, purple orchis, filled the grass, intermixed with
the blue of borage and the white and gold of the oxeye. She did not
note these things. Those fancies were for her son. Herself, she would
have preferred that there should be no flower in the grasses, for
before the cow was fed the flowers had to be picked out of the cut
grass, and had served no good end that she could perceive, for she
knew of no bees except the wild ones, whose honey no one ever tasted,
hidden from sight in hollow trees as it was.

Nerina slept on in peace and without dreams. Now and then another
rose let fall some petals on her, or a bee buzzed above her, but her
repose remained undisturbed.

The good food filled her, even in her sleep, with deep contentment,
and the brain, well nourished by the blood, was still.

Clelia Alba felt her heart soften despite herself for this lonely
creature; though she was always suspicious of her, for she had never
known any good thing come down from the high mountains, but only
theft and arson and murder, and men banded together to solace their
poverty with crime. In her youth the great brigands of the Upper
Abruzzo had been names of terror in Ruscino, and in the hamlets lying
along the course of the Edera, and many a time a letter written in
blood had been fastened with a dagger to the door of church or
cottage, intimating the will of the unseen chief to the subjugated
population. Of late years less had been heard and seen of such men;
but they or their like were still heard and felt sometimes, up above
in lonely forests, or down where the moorland and macchia met, and
the water of Edera ran deep and lonely. In her girlhood, a father, a
son, and a grandson had been all killed on a lonely part of the
higher valley because they had dared to occupy a farm and a
water-mill after one of these hillmen had laid down the law that no
one was to live on the land or to set the waterwheel moving.

That had been a good way off, indeed, and for many a year the Edera
had not seen the masked men, with their belts, crammed with arms and
gold, round their loins; but still, one never knew, she thought;
unbidden guests were oftener devils than angels.

And it seemed to her that the child could not really be asleep all
this time in a strange place and the open air. At last she got up,
went again to the bench and drew her handkerchief aside, and looked
down on the sleeper; on the thin, narrow chest, the small, bony
hands, the tiny virginal nipples like wood strawberries.

She saw that the slumber was real, the girl very young and more than
half-starved. "Let her forget while she can," she thought, and
covered her face again. "It is still early in the day."

The bees hummed on; a low wind swept over a full-blown rose and shook
its loose leaves to the ground. The shadow from the ruined tower
began to touch the field which lay nearest the river, a sign that it
was two hours after noon.







II

The large square fresh-water fishing-net had sunk under the surface,
the canes which framed it were out of sight; only the great central
pole, which sustained the whole, and was planted in the ground of the
river-bank, remained visible as it bent and swayed but did not yield
or break. Such nets as this had been washed by the clear green waters
of the pools and torrents of the Edera ever since the days of
Etruscan gods and Latin augurs; religions had changed, but the river,
and the ways of the men of the river, had not altered.

Adone did not touch it, for it was well where it was; he seated
himself on the bank ready to seize and hold it if its pole showed any
sign of yielding and giving way and heeling over into the stream. He
sat thus amongst the bulrushes for many an hour, on many a spring day
and summer night. Although fish were not numerous he never tired of
his vigil, lulled by the sound of the current as it splashed among
the stones and rippled through the rushes; a deeper music coming from
its higher reaches, where it fell over a ledge of rock and leapt like
a live thing into the air. And, indeed, what thing could be more
living than this fresh, pure, untroubled water, glad as a child,
swift as a swallow, singing for sport, as a happy boy sings, as it
ran down on its way from the hills?

To the young man sitting now on its bank amidst the bulrushes it was
as living as himself, his playmate, friend, and master, all in one.
First of all things which he could remember were the brightness and
the coolness of it as it had laved his limbs in his childhood on
mid-summer noons, his mother's hands holding him safely as he waded
with rosy feet and uncertain steps along its pebbly bottom! How many
mornings, when he had grown to boyhood and to manhood, had he escaped
from the rays of the vertical sun into its acacia-shadowed pools; how
many moonlit, balmy nights had he bathed in its still reaches, the
liquid silver of its surface breaking up like molten metal as he
dived! How many hours of peace had he passed, as he was spending
this, waiting for the fish to float into his great net, whilst the
air and the water were alike so still that he could hear the little
voles stealing in and out amongst the reeds, and the water-thrush
pushing the pebbles on its sands in search for insects, though beast
and bird were both unseen by him! How many a time upon the dawn of a
holy-day had he washed and swam in its waters whilst the bells of the
old church in the village above had tolled in the softness of dusk!

He thought of none of these memories distinctly, for he was young and
contented, and those who are satisfied with their lot live in their
present; but they all drifted vaguely through his mind as he sat by
the side of the river, as the memories of friends dear from infancy
drift through our waking dreams.

He was in every way a son of the Edera, for he had been born almost
in the water itself; his mother had been washing linen with other
women at the ford when she had been taken with the pains of labour
two months before her time. Her companions had had no time or thought
to do more than to stretch her on the wet sand, with some hempen
sheets, which had not yet been thrown in the water, between her and
the ground; and the cries of her in her travail had echoed over the
stream and had startled the kingfishers in the osiers, and the wild
ducks in the marshes, and the tawny owls asleep in the belfry tower
of the village. But her pains had been brief though sharp, and her
son had first seen the light beside the water; a strong and healthy
child, none the worse for his too early advent, and the rough
river-women had dipped him in the shallows, where their linen and
their wooden beaters were, and had wrapped him up in a soiled woollen
shirt, and had laid him down with his face on his mother's young
breast, opening his shut unconscious mouth with their rough fingers,
and crying in his deaf ear, "Suck! and grow to be a man!"

Clelia Alba was now a woman of forty-one years old, and he, her only
son, was twenty-four; they had named him Adone; the beautiful Greek
Adonais having passed into the number of the saints of the Latin
Church, by a transition so frequent in hagiology that its strangeness
is not remembered save by a scholar here and there. When he had been
born she had been a young creature of seventeen, with the wild grace
of a forest doe; with that nobility of beauty, that purity of
outline, and that harmony of structure, which still exist in those
Italians in whom the pure Italiote blood is undefiled by Jew or
Gentile. Now her abundant hair was white, and her features were
bronzed and lined by open-air work, and her hands of beautiful shape
were hard as horn through working in the fields. She looked an old
woman, and was thought so by others, and thought herself so: for
youth is soon over in these parts, and there is no half-way house
between youth and age for the peasant.

Clelia Alba, moreover, had lost her youth earlier even than others:
lost it for ever when her husband at five-and-twenty years of age had
been killed by falling from an olive-tree of which the branch
sustaining him had cracked and broken under his weight. His neck had
been broken in the fall. She had been dancing and shouting with her
two-year-old child on the grassland not far off, romping and playing
ball with some dropped chestnuts; and when their play was over she
had lifted her boy on to her shoulder and run with him to find his
father. Under one of the great, gnarled, wide-spreading olives she
had seen him, lying asleep as she thought.

"Oh, lazy one, awake! The sun is only two hours old!" she had cried
merrily, and the child on her shoulder had cooed and shouted in
imitation, "Wake--wake--wake!" and she, laughing, had cast a chestnut
she had carried in her hand upon the motionless figure. Then, as the
prostrate form did not stir, a sudden terror had seized her, and she
had set the baby down upon the grass and run to the olive-tree. There
she had seen that this was death, for when she had raised him his
head had dropped, and seemed to hang like a poppy broken in a blast
of wind, and his eyes had no sight, and his mouth had no breath.

From that dread hour Clelia Alba had never laughed again. Her hair
grew white, and her youth went away from her for ever.

She lived for the sake of her son, but she and joy had parted company
for ever.

His death had made her sole ruler of the Terra Vergine; she had both
the knowledge and the strength necessary for culture of the land, and
she taught her boy to value and respect the soil.

"As you treat the ground ill or well, so will your ground treat you,"
she said to him.

 She always wore the costume of the province, which was similar to
that of the Abruzzo villages, and suited her cast of features and her
strong and haughty carriage. On feast-days she wore three strings of
fine pearls round her throat, and bracelets of massive gold and of
fine workmanship, so many in number that her arms were stiff with
them; they had been her mother's and grandmother's and
great-grandmother's, and had been in her dower. To sell or pawn them
under stress of need, had such occurred, would never have seemed to
any of her race to be possible. It would have seemed as sacrilegious
as to take the chalice off the church altar, and melt its silver and
jewels in the fire. When she should go to her grave these ornaments
would pass to Adone as heirlooms; none of her family were living.

"Never talk of death, mother," he said, whenever she spoke of these
things. "Death is always listening; and if he hear his name he taps
the talker on the shoulder, just to show that he is there and must be
reckoned with."

"Not so, my son!" replied Clelia Alba, with a sigh. "He has every
soul of us written down in his books from the time we are born; we
all have our hour to go and none of us can alter it."

"I do not believe that," said Adone. "We kill ourselves oftentimes;
or we hasten our end, as drunkards do."

"Did your father hasten his end?" said his mother. "Did not some one
break that olive branch? It was not the tree itself, though the
Ruscino folks would have it cut down because they called it a felon."

"Was it not the devil?" said Adone.

He believed in the devil, of course, as he had been taught to do; and
had he not as a child met the infernal effigy everywhere--in marble,
in stone, in wood, in colour, in the church and outside it, on
water-spout and lamp-iron, and even on the leaves of his primer? But
it seemed to him that the devil had "_troppo braccia_" given him, was
allowed too long a tether, too free a hand; if indeed he it were that
made everything go wrong, and Adone did not see who else it could be.
Here, in the vale of Edera, all the world believed in Satan as in
holy water, or in daily bread.

Clelia Alba crossed herself hastily, for she was a pious woman.

"We are talking blasphemy, my son," she said gravely. "Of course
there is the good God who orders the number of our days for each of
us, and is over us all."

Adone was silent. To him it seemed doubtful. Did the good God kill
the pretty little children as the butcher in a city killed his lambs?
But he never contradicted or vexed his mother; he loved her with a
great and tender affection. He was less ignorant than she was, and
saw many things she could not see; he was, as it were, on a hilltop
and she down in a valley, but he had a profound respect for her; he
obeyed her implicitly, as if he were still a child, and he thought
the world held no woman equal to her.

When he went back to his house that evening, with his great net on
his shoulder and swinging in one hand some fresh-water fish, he
looked at the stone bench, which was empty of all except some fallen
rose-leaves, and then anxiously, questioningly, in the face of his
mother.

So he answered the regard.

"The girl is gone to Gianna's custody," she said rather harshly.
"Gianna will give her her supper, and will let her sleep in the loft.
With the morning we will see what we can do for her, and how she can
be sped upon her way."

Adone kissed her hands.

"You are always good," he said simply.

"I am weak," answered his mother, "I am weak, Adone; when you wish
anything I consent to it against my judgment."

But she was not weak; or at least only weak in the way in which all
generous natures are so.

On the morrow Nerina was not sped on her way. The old woman, Gianna,
thought well of her.

"She is as clean as a stone in the water," she said; "she has
foul-smelling rags, but her flesh is clean. She woke at dawn, and
asked for something to do. She knows nought, but she is willing and
teachable. We can make her of use. She has nowhere to go. She is a
stray little puppy. Her people were miserable, but they seem to have
been pious folks. She has a cross pricked on her shoulder. She says
her mother did it when she was a babe to scare the devil off her. I
do not know what to say; she is a poor, forlorn little wretch; if you
like to keep her, I for my part will see to her. I am old: it is well
to do a good work before one dies."

Gianna was an old woman, half house-servant, half farm-servant,
wholly friend; she had lived at the Terra Vergine all her life; big,
gaunt, and very strong, she could do the work of a man, although she
was over seventy years of age; burnt black by the sun, and with a
pile of grey hair like the hank of flax on her distaff, she was
feared by the whole district for her penetrating glance and her
untiring energy. When Gianna was satisfied the stars had changed
their courses, said the people, so rare was the event; therefore,
that this little wanderer contented her was at once a miracle and a
voucher indisputable.

So the child remained there; but her presence troubled Adone's
mother, though Nerina was humble as a homeless dog, was noiseless and
seldom seen, was obedient, agile, and became useful in many manners,
and learned with equal eagerness the farm work taught her by Gianna,
and the doctrine taught her by Don Silverio, for she was intelligent
and willing in every way. Only Clelia Alba thought, "Perhaps Gianna's
good heart misleads her. Gianna is rough; but she has a heart as
tender at bottom as a ripe melon's flesh."

Anyhow, she took her old servant's word and allowed the child to
remain. She could not bring herself to turn adrift a female thing to
stray about homeless and hungry, and end in some bottomless pit. The
child might be the devil's spawn. No one could be sure. But she had
eyes which looked up straight and true, and were as clear as the
river water where it flowed over pebbles in the shade. When the devil
is in a soul he always grins behind the eyes; he cannot help it; and
so you know him; thus, at least, they thought at Ruscino and in all
the vale of Edera; and the devil did not lurk in the eyes of Nerina.

"Have I done right, reverend sir?" asked Clelia Alba of the Vicar of
Ruscino.

"Oh, yes--yes--charity is always right," he answered, unwilling to
discourage her in her benevolence; but in his own mind he thought,
"The child is a child, but she will grow; she is brown, and starved,
and ugly now, but she will grow; she is a female thing and she will
grow, and I think she will be handsome later on; it would have been
more prudent to have put some money in her hand and some linen in her
wallet, and have let her pass on her way down the river. The saints
forbid that I should put aloes into the honey of their hearts; but
this child will grow."

Clelia Alba perceived that he had his doubts as she had hers. But
they said nothing of them to each other. The issue would lie with
Time, whom men always depict as a mower, but who is also a sower,
too. However, for good or ill, she was there; and he knew that,
having once harboured her, they would never drive her adrift. Clelia
Alba was in every sense a good woman; a little hard at times, narrow
of sympathy, too much shut up in her maternal passion; but in the
main merciful and correct in judgment.

"If the child were not good the river would not have given her to
us," said Adone to her; and believed it.

"Good-day, my son," said the voice of the Vicar, Don Silverio
Frascara, behind him, where Adone worked in the fields. "Where did
you find that scarecrow whom your mother has shown me just now?"

"She was in the river, most reverend, dancing along in it, as merry
as a princess."

"But she is a skeleton!"

"Almost."

"And you know nothing of her?"

"Nothing, sir."

"You were more charitable than wise."

"One cannot let a little female thing starve whilst one has bread in
the hutch. My mother is a virtuous woman. She will teach the child
virtue."

"Let us hope so," said Don Silverio. "But all, my son, do not take
kindly to that lesson."

"What will be, will be. The river brought her."

He credited the river with a more than human sagacity. He held it in
awe and in reverence as a deity, as the Greeks of old held their
streams. It would have drowned the child, he thought, if she had been
an evil creature or of evil augury. But he did not say so, for he did
not care to provoke Don Silverio's fine fleeting ironical smile.

A goatherd who passed some few days later with his flock on his way
to the mountains recognised the little girl.

"You are Black Fausto's daughter," he said to her. "Is he dead? Eh,
well, we must all die. May his soul rest."

To Gianna, who questioned him, he said, "Yes, he was a good soul.
Often have I seen him down in the Roman plains. He worked himself to
death. These gangs of labourers get poor pay. I saw him also in the
hills where this girl comes from, ever so high up, you seem to touch
the sky. I summered there two years ago; he had his womankind in a
cabin, and he took all that he got home to them. Aye, he was a good
soul. We can come away out of the heats, but they have to stay down
in them; for the reaping and the sowing are their chief gain, and
they get the fever into their blood, and the worms into their
bellies, and it kills them mostly before they are forty. You see, at
Ansalda, where he came from, it was snow eight months out of the
twelve, so the heats and the mists killed him: for the air you are
born in you want, and if you do not get it in time you sicken."

"Like enough," said Gianna, who herself had never been out of sight
of the river Edera ever since she had been a babe in swaddling
clothes. "Tell me, gossip, was the child born in wedlock?"

"Eh, eh!" said the goatherd grinning. "That I would not take on me
to say. But like enough, like enough; they are always ready to go
before the priest in those high hills."

The little girl glided into her place humbly and naturally, with no
servility but with untiring willingness and thankfulness. It seemed
to her an amazing favour of heaven to live with these good people; to
have a roof over her head and food regularly every day. Up there in
her home, amongst the crags of Ansalda, she had never known what it
was not to have a daily hunger gnawing always in her entrails, and
making her writhe at night on her bed of dry leaves. In her thirteen
years of life she had never once had enough--no one ever had. A full
stomach had been a thing unknown.

She began to grow, she began to put a little flesh on her bones; they
had cut her hair short, for it had been so rough, and it grew again
burnished and bright like copper; colour came into her cheeks and
lips; she seemed to spring upward, visibly, like a young cane. She
worked hard, but she worked willingly, and she was well nourished on
sound food, though it had little variety and was entirely vegetable;
and every day she went down and bathed in the river at the same place
where she had sat nude under the dock leaves whilst her skirt dried
in the sun.

To her the Terra Vergine was Paradise itself; to be fed, to be
clothed, to have a mattress to sleep on, to work amongst the flowers
and the grass and the animals--it was all so beautiful, she thought
sometimes that she must be in heaven.

She spoke little. Since she had been under this roof she had grown
ashamed of the squalor and starvation and wretchedness of her past
existence. She did not like to think of it even; it had been no fault
of hers, but she felt ashamed that she ever should have been that
little, filthy, unkempt, naked thing, grovelling on the clay floor,
and fighting for mouldy crusts with the other children on the rock of
Ansalda.

"If I had only known when father was alive," she thought; but even if
she had known all she knew now, what could she have done? There had
been nothing to use, nothing to eat, nothing to wear, and the rain
and the snow and the wind had come in on them where they had lain
huddled together on their bed of rotten leaves. Now and then she said
something of that rude childhood of hers to Adone; she was afraid of
the women, but not of him; she trotted after him as the little white
curly dog Signorino trotted after Don Silverio.

"Do not think of those dark days, little one," he said to her. "They
are gone by. Think of your parents and pray for their souls; but let
the rest go; you have all your life to live."

"My mother was young when she died," said the child. "If she had had
food she would not have died. She said so. She kept on gnawing a bit
of rag which was soaked in water; you cheat hunger that way, you
know, but it does not fill you."

"Pour soul! Poor soul!" said Adone, and he thought of the great
markets he had seen in the north, the droves of oxen, the piles of
fruits, the long lines of wine carts, the heaps of slaughtered game,
the countless shops with their electric light, the trains running one
after another all the nights and every night to feed the rich; and he
thought, as he had thought when a boy, that the devil had _troppo
braccio_, if any devil indeed there were beside man himself.

Should there be anywhere on the face of the earth, young women, good
women, mothers of babes who died of sheer hunger like this mother of
Nerina's up yonder in the snows of the Abruzzo? He thought not; his
heart revolted at the vision of her, a living skeleton on her heap of
leaves.

"Father brought all he had," continued the child, "but he could not
come back until after harvest, and when he came back she had been in
the ground two months and more. They put him in the same ditch when
his turn came; but she was no longer there, for they take up the
bones every three years and burn them. They say they must, else the
ditch would get too full."

Adone shuddered. He knew that tens of thousands died so, and had died
so ever since the days of Phenicians and Gauls and Goths. But it
revolted him. The few gorged, the many famished--strange
disproportion! unkind and unfair balance!

But what remedy was there?

Adone had read some socialistic and communistic literature; but it
had not satisfied him; it had seemed to him vain, verbose, alluring,
but unreal, no better adapted to cure any real hunger than the soaked
rag of Nerina's mother.





III

The Valdedera is situated on the south of the Marches, on the
confines of what is now the territorial division of the
Abruzzo-Molese, and so lies between the Apennines and the Adriatic,
fanned by cool winds in summer from the eternal snow of the mountain
peaks, and invigorated in all seasons by breezes from the Adrian Sea.

Ruscino, placed midway in the valley, is only a village to which no
traveller has for many years come, and of which no geographer ever
speaks; it is marked on the maps of military topographers, and is, of
course, inscribed on the fiscal rolls, but is now no more than a
village; though once, when the world was young, it was the Etruscan
Rusciae, and then the Latin Ruscinonis; and then, when the Papacy was
mighty, it was the militant principality of the fortified town of
Ruscino. But it was, when the parish of Don Silverio, an almost
uninhabited village; a pale, diminutive, shrunken relic of its heroic
self; and of it scarcely any man knows anything except the few men
who make their dwelling there; sons of the soil, who spring from its
marble dust and return to it.

It had shrunk to a mere hamlet as far as its population was counted;
it shrank more and more with every census. There was but a handful of
poor people who, when gathered together in the great church, looked
no more than a few flies on a slab of marble.

The oldest men and women of the place could recall the time when it
had been still of some importance as a posting place on the mountain
route between the markets of the coast and the western towns, when
its highway had been kept clean and clear through the woods for
public and private conveyance, and when the clatter of horses' hoofs
and merry notes of horns had roused the echoes of its stones. In that
first half of the century, too, they had lived fairly well, and wine
and fowls had cost next to nothing, and home-made loaves had been
always large enough to give a beggar or a stray dog a slice. But
these times had long been over; every one was hungry now, and every
one a beggar, by way of change, and to make things equal, as the
people said, with dreary mirth and helpless acquiescence in their
lot. Like most riverain people, they lived chiefly by the river,
cutting and selling its canes, its sallows, its osiers, its sedges,
catching its fish, digging its sand; but there were few buyers in
this depopulated district.

Don Silverio Frascara, its vicar, had been sent thither as a
chastisement for his too sceptical and inquiring mind, his too
undisciplined temper. Nearly twenty years in this solitude had
chastened both; the fire had died out of his soul and the light out
of his eyes. His days were as monotonous as those of the blinded ass
set to turn the wine-press. All the steel of his spirit rusted, all
the brilliancy of his brain clouded; his life was like a fine rapier
which is left in a corner of a dusty attic and forgotten.

In certain rare states of the atmosphere the gold cross on St.
Peter's is visible from some of the peaks of the Abruzzese Apennines.
It looks like a speck of light far, far away in the silver-green of
the western horizon. When one day he climbed to such an altitude and
saw it thus, his heart contracted with a sickly pain, for in Rome he
had dreamed many dreams; and in Rome, until his exile to the Vale of
Edera, he had been a preacher of noted eloquence, of brilliant
fascination, and of daring thought.

There had been long cypress alleys which at sunset had glowed with
rose and gold, where he had in his few leisure hours builded up such
visions for the future as illumined the unknown years to the eyes of
an Ignatius, a Hildebrand, a Lacordaire, a Bossuet. On the place
where those grand avenues had stretched their green length in the
western light, and the seminarist had paced over the sward, there
were now long, dreary lines of brick and stone, the beaten dust of
roadways, the clang and smoke of engines: as the gardens had passed
away so had passed his ambitions and visions; as the cypresses had
been ground to powder in the steam mill, so was he crushed and
effaced under an inexorable fate. The Church, intolerant of
individuality, like all despotisms, had broken his spirit; like all
despotisms the tyranny had been blind. But he had been rebellious to
doctrine; she had bound him to her stake.

He would have been a great prelate, perhaps even a great Pope; but he
would have been also a great reformer, so she stamped him down into
nothingness under her iron heel. And for almost a score of years she
had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new
creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest
able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he. Some
few of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the Church did
indeed think that it was waste of great powers, but he had the Sacred
College against him, and no one ventured to speak in his favour at
the Vatican. He had no pious women of rank to plead for him, no
millionaires and magnates to solicit his preferment. He was with time
forgotten as utterly as a folio is forgotten on a library shelf until
mildew eats its ink away and spiders nest between its leaves. He had
the thirty pounds a year which the State pays to such parish priests;
and he had nothing else.

He was a tall and naturally stately man, but his form was bent by
that want of good food which is the chronic malady of many parts of
Italy. There was little to eat in Ruscino, and had there been more
there would have been no one who knew how to prepare it. Bread,
beans, a little oil, a little lard, herbs which grew wild, goat's
milk, cheese, and at times a few small river fish; these were all his
sustenance: his feasts and his fasts were much alike, and the little
wine he had he gave away to the sick and the aged. For this reason
his high stature was bent and his complexion was of the clear, yellow
pallor of old marbles; his profile was like the Caesarian outline on
a medallion, and his eyes were deep wells of impenetrable thought;
his finely cut lips rarely smiled, they had always upon them an
expression of bitterness, as though the apple of life in its eating
had been harsh and hard as a crab.

His presbytery was close to his church, a dreary place with only a
few necessaries and many books within it, and his only servant was an
old man, lame and stupid, who served also as sacristan.

It was a cure of souls which covered many miles but counted few
persons. Outside the old walls of Ruscino nearly all the land of vale
of Edera was untilled, and within them a few poverty-stricken people
dragged out their days uncared for by any one, only remembered by the
collectors of fiscal dues. "_They_ never forget," said the people.
"As soon as one is born, always and in every season, until one's
bones rattle down into the ditch of the dead, _they_ remember
always."

The grasp of an invisible power took the crust off their bread, the
toll off their oil, off their bed of sacking, off their plate of
fish, and took their children when they grew to manhood and sent them
into strange lands and over strange seas; they felt the grip of that
hard hand as their forefathers had felt it under the Caesars, under
the Popes, under the feudal lords, under the foreign kings; they felt
it so now under the Casa Sabauda; the same, always the same; for the
manners and titles of the State may change, but its appetite never
lessens, and its greed never spares. For twice a thousand years their
blood had flowed and their earnings had been wrung out of them in the
name of the State, and nothing was changed in that respect; the few
lads they begot amongst them went to Africa, now as under Pompeius or
Scipio; and their corn sack was taken away from them under Depretis
or Crispi, as under the Borgia or the Malatesta; and their grape
skins soaked in water were taxed as wine, their salt for their
soup-pot was seized as contraband, unless it bore the government
stamp, and, if they dared say a word of resistance, there were the
manacles and the prison under Vittorio and Umberto as under Bourbon
or Bonaparte; for there are some things which are immutable as fate.
At long intervals, during the passing of ages, the poor stir, like
trodden worms, under this inexorable monotony of their treatment by
their rulers; and then baleful fires redden the sky, and blood runs
in the conduits, and the rich man trembles; but the cannon are
brought up at full gallop and it is soon over; there is nothing ever
really altered; the iron wheels only press the harder on the unhappy
worm, and there is nothing changed.

Here at Ruscino there were tombs of nenfro which had overhung the
river for thirty centuries; but those tombs have never seen any other
thing than this, nor ever will, until the light and the warmth of the
sun shall be withdrawn for ever, and the earth shall remain alone
with her buried multitudes.

There was only Don Silverio who thought of such a thing as this, a
scholar all alone amongst barbarians; for his heart ached for his
barbarians, though they bore him no love in return for his pity. They
would have liked better a gossiping, rotund, familiar, ignorant,
peasant priest, one of themselves, chirping formula comfortably over
skeleton corpses.

In default of other interests he interested himself in this ancient
place, passing from neglect into oblivion, as his own life was doing.
There were Etruscan sepulchres and Pelasgic caves which had been
centuries earlier rifled of their objects of value, but still
otherwise remained untouched under the acacia woods by the river.
There were columns and terraces and foundations of marble which had
been there when the Latin city of Ruscinonis had flourished, from the
time of Augustus until its destruction by Theodoric. And nearest of
all these to him were the Longobardo church and the ancient houses
and the dismantled fortress and the ruined walls of what had been the
fief of the Toralba, the mediaeval fortified town of Ruscino. It
still kept this, its latest, name, but it kept little else. Thrice a
thousand centuries had rolled over it, eating it away as the sea eats
away a cliff. War and fire and time had had their will with it for so
long that dropped acorns and pine-pips had been allowed leisure to
sink between the stones, and sprout and bud and rise and spread, and
were now hoary and giant trees, of which the roots were sunk deep
into its ruins, its graves, its walls.

It had been Etruscan, it had been Latin, it had been Longobardo, it
had been Borgian and Papal; through all these changes a fortified
city, then a castellated town, then a walled village; and a village
it now remained. It will never be more; before many generations pass
it will probably have become still less; a mere tumulus, a mere
honeycomb of buried tombs. It was now perishing, surely though
slowly, but in peace, with the grass growing on its temple stairs and
the woodbine winding round its broken columns.

The trained and stored intellect of Don Silverio could set each
period of its story apart, and read all the vestiges remaining of
each. Ruscino was now to all others a mere poverty-stricken place,
brown and gaunt and sorrowful, scorching in the sun, with only the
river beneath it to keep it clean and alive. But to him it was as a
palimpsest of surpassing value and interest, which, sorely difficult
to decipher, held its treasures close from the profane and the
ignorant, but tempted and rewarded the scholar, like the lettering on
a Pompeian nuptial ring, the cyphers on a funeral urn of Herculaneum.
"After all, my lot might be worse than it is," he thought with
philosophy. "They might have sent me to a modern manufacturing town
in one of the Lombard provinces, or exiled me to some native
settlement in Eritrea."

Here, at least, he had history and nature, and he enjoyed thousands
of hours undisturbed in which to read or write, or muse and ponder on
this chronicle of brick and stone, this buried mass of dead men's
labours and of dead men's dust.

Doubtless, his manuscripts would lie unknown, unread; no man would
care for them; but the true scholar cares neither for public not
posterity; he lives for the work he loves; and if he knows that he
will have few readers in the future--maybe none--how many read
Grotius, or Boethius, or Chrysostom, or Jerome?

Here, like a colony of ants, the generations had crowded one on
another, now swept away by the stamp of a conqueror's heel and now
succeeded by another toiling swarm, building anew each time out of
ruin, undaunted by the certainty of destruction, taught nothing by
the fate of their precursors. From the profound sense of despair
which the contemplation of the uselessness of human effort, and the
waste of human life, produces on the scholar's mind, it was a relief
to him to watch the gladness of its river, the buoyancy of its
currents, the foam of white blossom on its acacia and syringa
thickets, the gold sceptres and green lances of its iris-pseudacorus,
the sweep of the winds through its bulrushes and canebreaks, the
glory of colour in the blue stars of its veronica, the bright rosy
spikes of its epilobium. The river seemed always happy, even when the
great rainfall of autumn churned it into froth and the lightnings
illumined its ink-black pools.

It was on the river that he had first made friends with Adone, then a
child of six, playing and splashing in the stream, on a midsummer
noon. Don Silverio also was bathing. Adone, a little nude figure, as
white as alabaster in the hot light, for he was very fair of skin,
sprang suddenly out of the water on to the turf above where his
breeches and shirt had been left; he was in haste, for he had heard
his mother calling to him from their fields; an adder started out of
a coil of bindweed and would itself round his ankle as he stooped for
his clothes.

The priest, standing waist-deep in the river a few yards away, saw it
before the child did, and cried out to him: "Stand still till I come!
Be not afraid!" Adone understood, and, although trembling with terror
and loathing as he realised his danger, and felt the slimy clasp of
the snake, remained motionless as he was bidden to do. In a second of
time the priest had leaped through the water to his side, seized the
adder, and killed it.

"Good boy," he said to the child. "If you had moved your foot the
creature would have bitten you."

Adone's eyes filled with tears.

"Thank you, sir; thank you for mother," he said very gently, for he
was a shy child, though courageous.

The priest stroked his curls.

"There is death in the grass very often. We should not fear death,
but neither should we run risk of it uselessly, especially when we
have a mother whom it would grieve. Come and bathe at this spot, at
this hour, to-morrow and every day, if you like. I will be here and
look after you, you are little to be alone."

They were often together from that day onwards.

The brutishness and greed of his flock oppressed him. He was sent
here to have care of their souls, but where were their souls? They
would all have sold them to the foul fiend for a mess of artichokes
fried in oil. In such a solitude as this he had been glad to be able
to teach and move the young malleable mind of Adone Alba; the only
one of them who seemed to have any mind at all. Adone also had a
voice as sweet as a nightingale in the syringa bushes in May; and it
pierced the gloom of the old naked gaunt church as a nightingale's
thrills through the dark hour before dawn.

There was no other music in that choir except the children's or
youths' voices; there was nothing to make music with except those
flexible pipes of the boyish throats; and Don Silverio loved and
understood choral music; he had studied it in Rome. Adone never
refused to sing for him, and when the voice of adolescence had
replaced that of childhood, he would still stand no less docilely by
the old marble lectern, and wake the melodies of early masters from
the yellow pages.

The church was as damp as a vault of the dead; cold even when the
dog-star reigned in the heavens. The brasses and bronzes were rusted
with moisture, and the marbles were black with the spores of mould;
rain dripped through the joints of the roof, and innumberable
sparrows made their nests there; the mosaics of the floor were green
from these droppings, and from those of the rain; the sun never
entered through any of the windows, which were yellow with age and
dust; but here, with a lantern for their only light, they solaced
each other with the song of the great choral masters. Only Adone,
although he never said or showed it, was glad when the huge key
groaned in the lock of the outer door, and he ran out into the
evening starlight, down the steep streets, across the bridge, and
felt the fresh river air blowing on him, and heard the swirling of
the water amongst the frost-stiffened canes, and saw far off in the
darkened fields the glimmer of a light--the light of home.

That old home was the dearest thing on earth to the young man. He had
never been away from it but once, when the conscription called him.
In that time, which had been to him like a nightmare, the time of his
brief exile to the army, because he was the only son of a widow, he
had been sent to a northern city, one of commerce and noise and
crowded, breathless life; he had been cooped up in it like a panther
in a den, like a hawk in a cage. What he saw of the vices and
appetites of men, the pressure of greed and of gain, the harsh and
stupid tyranny of the few, the slavish and ignoble submission of the
many, the brutish bullying, the crouching obedience, the deadly
routine, the lewd licence of reaction--all filled him with disdain
and with disgust. When he returned to his valley he bathed in the
waters of Edera before he crossed his mother's threshold.

"Make me clean as I was when I left you!" he cried, and took the
water in the hollow of his hands and kissed it.

But no water flows on the earth, from land to sea, which can wholly
cleanse the soul as it cleanses the body.

That brief time under arms he cursed as thousands of youths have
cursed it. Its hated stigma and pollution never wholly passed away.
It left a bitterness on his lips, a soil upon his memories. But how
sweet to him beyond expression, on his return, were the sound of the
rushing river in the silence of the night, the pure odours of the
blossoming beanfields, the clear dark sky with its radiant stars, the
sense of home, the peace of his own fields!

"Mother, whether life for me shall be long or short, here its every
hour shall be spent!" he said, as he stood on his own ground and
looked through the olive-trees to the river, running swiftly and
strong beneath the moon.

"Those are good words, my son," said Clelia Alba, and her hands
rested on his bowed head.

He adored both the soil and the water of this place of his birth; no
toil upon either seemed to him hard or mean. All which seemed to him
to matter much in the life of a man was to be free, and he was so. In
that little kingdom of fertile soil and running stream no man could
bid him come and go, no law ruled his uprising and his down lying; he
had enough for his own wants and the wants of those about him, enough
for the needs of the body, and the mind here had not many needs; at
the Terra Vergine he was his own master, except so far as he
cheerfully deferred to his mother; and all which he put into the
earth he could take out of it for his own usage, though indeed the
fiscal authorities claimed well nigh one-half, rating his land at far
more than its worth. No doubt scientific agriculture might have made
it yield more than he did; but he was content to follow the ways of
old; he farmed as men did when the Sun-god was the farm slave of
Admetus. The hellebore and the violets grew at will in his furrows;
the clematis and the ivy climbed his figtrees; the fritillaria and
daphne grew in his pastures, and he never disturbed them, or scared
the starling and the magpie which fluttered in the wake of his wooden
plough. The land was good land, and gave him whatever he wanted; he
grudged nothing off it to bird, or beast, or leaf, or flower, or to
the hungry wayfarer who chanced to pass by his doors. In remote
places the old liberal, frank, open-handed hospitality of an earlier
time is still in Italy a practice as well as a tradition.

The house was their own, and the earth gave them their bread, their
wine, their vegetables, their oil, hemp, and flax for their linen,
and herbs for their soup; of the olive-oil they had more than enough
for use, and the surplus was sold once a year in the nearest town,
San Beda, and served to meet the fiscal demands. They had rarely any
ready money, but no peasant in Italy ever expects, unless by some
luck at lotto, to have money in his pocket.

He worked hard; at some seasons extremely hard; he hired labour
sometimes, but not often, for to pay for the hiring takes the profit
off the land. But he had been used to such work from childhood, and
it was never irksome to him; even though he rose in the dark, and
rarely went home to supper till the stars were shining. He had no
near neighbours except the poor folks in Ruscino. All surrounding him
was grass and moor and wood, called communal property, but in reality
belonging legally to no one; vast, still, fragrant leagues of
uninhabited country stretching away to the blue hills, home of the
fox and the hare and the boar, of the hawk and the woodpecker and the
bittern.

Through those wilds he loved to wander alone; the sweet stillness of
a countryside which was uncontaminated by the residence of men
stilling the vague unrest of his youth, and the mountains towering in
the light lending to the scene the charm of the unknown.

In days of storm or rain he read with Don Silverio or sang in the
church; on fine holy-days he roamed far afield in the lonely
heatherlands and woodlands which were watered by the Edera. He
carried a gun, for defence if need be, for there were boars and
wolves in these solitudes; but he never used it upon bird or beast.

Like St. Francis of Assissi, both he and Don Silverio took more
pleasure in the life than in the death of fair winged things.

"We are witness, twice in every year, of that great and inexplicable
miracle," the priest said often, "that passage of small, frail,
unguided creatures, over seas and continents, through tempests and
simoons, and with every man's hand against them, and death waiting to
take them upon every shore, by merciless and treacherous tricks, and
we think nought of it; we care nought for it; we spread the nets and
the gins--that is all. We are unworthy of all which makes the earth
beautiful--vilely unworthy!"

One of the causes of his unpopularity in Ruscino was the inexorable
persistence with which he broke their gins, lifted their nets,
cleared off their birdlime, dispersed their watertraps, and forbade
the favourite night poaching by lanterns in the woods. More than once
they threatened his life, but he only smiled.

"_Faccia pure_!" he said, "you will cut a knot which I did not tie,
and which I cannot myself undo."

But they held him in too much awe to dare to touch him, and they knew
that again and again he went on bread and water himself to give his
wine to their sick, or his strip of meat to their old people.

Moreover, they feared Adone.

"If you touch a hair of Don Silverio's head, or the hem of his
cassock, I will burn Ruscino," said Adone to one of those who had
threatened his friend, "and you will all burn with it, for the river
will not help you; the river will turn to oil and make the flames
rage tenfold."

The people were afraid as they heard him, for the wrath of the gentle
is terrible from its rarity.

"For sure 'tis the dead Tor'alba as speak in him," they said with
fright under their breath, for there was a tale told in the district
that Adone Alba was descended from the old war-lords.

The veterans of the village and the countryside remembered hearing
their fathers say that the family of the Terra Vergine were descended
from those great marquises who had reigned for centuries in that
Rocca which was now a grim, ivy-covered ruin on the north of the
Edera water. But more than this no one could say; no one could tell
how the warlike race had become mere tillers of the soil, or how
those who had measured out life and death up and down the course of
the valley had lost their power and possessions. There were vague
traditions of a terrible siege, following on a great battle in the
vale; that was all.





IV

The church in which Don Silverio officiated every morning and evening
for the benefit of a few old crones, had once been a Latin temple; it
had been built from the Corinthian pillars, the marble peristyle, the
rounded, open dome, like that of the Pantheon, of a pagan edifice;
and to these had been added a Longobardo belfry and chancel; pigeons
and doves roosted and nested in it, and within it was cold even in
midsummer, and dark always as a vault. It was dedicated to St.
Jerome, and was a world too wide for the shrunken band of believers
who came to worship in it; there was a high, dark altar said to have
been painted by Ribera, and nothing else that spoke in any way of
art, except the capitals of its pillars and the Roman mosaics of its
floor.

The Longobardo bell-tower was of vast height and strength; within it
were various chambers, and these chambers had served through many
ages as muniment-rooms. There were innumerable documents of many
different epochs, almost all in Latin, a few in Greek. Don Silverio,
who was a fine classic as well as a learned archæologist, spent all
his lonely and cold winter evenings in the study of these early
chronicles, his oil lamp burning pale and low, his little white dog
lying on his knees.

These manuscripts gave him great trouble, and were in many parts
almost unintelligible, in others almost effaced by damp, in others
again gnawed by rats and mice. But he was interested in his labours
and in his subject, and after several years of work on them, he was
able to make out a consecutive history of the Valdedera, and he was
satisfied that the peasant of the Terra Vergine had been directly
descended from the feudal-lords of Ruscino. That pittance of land by
the waterside under the shadow of the ruined citadel was all which
remained of the great fief of the youth in whose veins ran the blood
of men who had given princes, and popes, and cardinals, and captains
of condottieri, and patrons of art, and conquerors or revolted
provinces, to the Italy of old from the beginning of the thirteenth
century to the end of the sixteenth. For three hundred years the
Tor'alba had been lords there, owning all their eyes could reach from
mountain to sea; then after long siege the walled town and their
adjacent stronghold had fallen into the hands of hereditary foes
whose forces had been united against them. Fire and steel had done
their worst, and only a month-old child had escaped from the burning
Rocca, being saved in a boat laden with reeds at anchor in the river,
and hidden by a faithful vassal. The child had grown to manhood and
had lived to old age, leading a peasant's life on the banks of the
Edera; the name had been mutilated in common usage amongst those who
spoke only the dialect of the province, and for three more centuries
father and son had succeeded each other, working for their daily
bread where their ancestors had defied Borgia and Della Rovere, and
Feltrio, and Malatesta; the gaunt dark shade of the dismantled
citadel lying athwart their fields between them and the setting sun.

Should he tell Adone this or not?

Would the knowledge of his ancestry put a thorn in the boy's
contented heart? Would it act as a spur to higher things, or be
merely as the useless sting of a nettle?

Who could say?

Don Silverio remembered the gorgeous dreams of his own youth; and
what had been their issue?

At fifty years old he was buried in a deserted village, never hearing
from year's end to year's end one word of friendship or phrase of
culture.

Would it be well or would it be wrong to disturb that tranquil
acquiescence in a humble destiny? He could not decide. He dared not
take upon himself so much responsibility. "In doubt do nothing" has
been the axiom of many wise men. The remembrance of the maxim closed
his lips. He had himself been in early manhood passionately
ambitious; he was only a priest, but of priests are made the
Gregorio, the Bonifazio, the Leone of the Papal throne; to the dreams
of a seminarist nothing is impossible. But Adone had no such dreams;
he was as satisfied with his lot as any young steer which wants
nothing more than the fair, fresh fields of its birth. But one day as
he was sitting with the boy, then fifteen years old, on the south
bank of the Edera, the spirit moved him and he spake. It was the day
of San Benedetto, when the swallows come. The grass was full of pink
lychnis and yellow buttercups. A strong east wind was blowing from
the sea. A number of martins, true to the proverb, were circling
gaily above the stream. The water, reflecting the brilliant hues of
the heavens, was hurrying on its seaward way, swollen by recent rains
and hastened by a strong wind blowing from the eastern mountains.

The lands of the Terra Vergine lay entirely on the south-east bank of
the river, and covered many acres, of which some was moorland still.
Almost opposite to it was the one-arched stone bridge, attributed to
Theodoric, and on the northern bank was the ruined Rocca, towering
above the trees which had grown up around it; whilst hidden by it and
by the remains of the fortifications was that which was now the mere
village of Ruscino.

"Listen, Adone!" he said in his deep, melodious voice, grave and
sweet as a mass of Palestrina. "Listen, and I will tell you the tale
of yonder donjon and village, and of the valley of the Edera, so far
as I have been able to make it out for myself."

According to the writers whose manuscripts he had discovered the town
of Ruscino, like Cremona, had existed before the siege of Troy, that
is, six hundred years before the foundation of Rome. Of this there
was no proof except tradition, but the ruins of the walls and the
tombs by the riverside and in the fields proved that it had been an
Etruscan city, and of some considerable extent and dignity, in those
remote ages.

"The foundations of the Rocca," he continued, "were probably part of
a great stronghold raised by the Gauls, who undoubtedly conquered the
whole of this valley at the time when they settled themselves in what
is now the Marches, and founded Senegallia. It was visited by
Asdrubal, and burned by Alaric; then occupied by the Greek free
lances of Justinian; in the time of the Frankish victories, in common
with greater places, it was forced to swear allegiance to the first
papal Adrian. After that it had been counted as one of the fiefs
comprised in the possessions of the Pentapolis; and later on, when
the Saracens ravaged the shores of the Adriatic, they had come up the
Valdedera and pillaged and burned again. Gregory the Ninth gave the
valley to the family of its first feudal lords, the Tor'alba, in
recompense for military service, and they, out of the remains of the
Gallic, Etruscan, and Roman towns, rebuilt Ruscino and raised the
Rocca on the ruins of the castle of the Gauls. There, though at feud
many time with their foes, the Della Rovere, the Malatesta, and the
Dukes of Urbino, they held their own successfully, favoured usually
by Rome, and for three centuries grew in force and in possessions.
But they lost the favour of Rome by their haughtiness and
independence; and under pretext that they merited punishment, Cesare
Borgia brought troops of mercenaries against them, and after a fierce
conflict in the valley (the terrible battle of which the villagers
preserved the memory) the town was besieged and sacked.

"After this battle, which must have taken place on yonder moor, to
the north-west, for the assailants had crossed the Apennines, the
Tor'alba and the remnant of men remaining to them retreated within
the walls of Ruscino.

"The whole place and the citadel were burning, set on fire by order
of Borgia. The church alone was spared, and the dead men were as
thick as stones on the walls, and in the streets, and in the nave of
the church, and on the streets, and in the houses. This river was
choked with corpses, and dark with blood. The black smoke towered to
the sky in billows like a sea. The mercenaries swarmed over the
bastions and violated the women, and cut off their breasts and threw
their bodies down into the stream and their children after them. The
Lady of Tor'alba, valiant as Caterina Sforza, was the first slain.

"The whole place was given up to flame and carnage, and the great
captains were as helpless as dead oxen. They were all slain amongst
their troopers and their vassals, and their bodies were burnt when
the fortress was fired.

"Only one little child escaped the massacre, a month-old babe, son of
the Marquis of Tor'alba, who was hidden by a faithful servant amongst
the reeds of the Edera in a basket. This servant was the only male
who escaped slaughter.

"The river rushes were more merciful than man, they kept the little
new-born lordling safe until his faithful vassal, under cover of the
night, when the assailants were drunk and stupid with licence
gratified, could take him to a poor woman to be suckled in a cottage
farther down the river. How he grew up I know not, but certain it is
that thirty years later one Federigo Tor'alba was living where you
live, and your house and land have never changed hands or title
since; only your name has been truncated, as often happens in the
speech of the people. How this land called the Terra Vergine was
first obtained I cannot say; the vassal may have saved some gold or
jewels which belonged to his masters, and have purchased these acres,
or the land may have been taken up and put gradually into cultivation
without any legal right to it; of this there is no explanation, no
record. But from that time the mighty lordship of Tor'alba has been
extinct, and scarcely exists now even in local tradition; although
their effigies are on their tombs, and the story of their reign can
be deciphered by any one who can read a sixteenth-century manuscript,
as you might do for yourself, my son, had you been diligent."

Adone was silent. He had listened with attention, as he did to
everything which was said or read to him by Don Silverio. But he was
not astonished, because he had often heard, though vaguely, the
legend of his descent.

"Of what use is it?" he said, as he sat moving the bright water with
his bare slim feet. "Nothing will bring it all back."

"It should serve some great end," said Don Silverio, not knowing very
well what he meant or to what he desired to move the young man's
mind. "Nobility of blood should make the hands cleaner, the heart
higher, the aims finer."

Adone had shrugged his shoulders.

"We are all equal!" he answered.

"We are not all equal," the priest said curtly. "There is not
equality in nature. Are there even two pebbles alike in the bed of
the river?"

Don Silverio, for the first time in his life, could have willingly
let escape him some unholy word. It incensed him that he could not
arouse in the boy any of that interest and excitement which had moved
his own feelings so strongly as he had spent his spare evenings
poring over the crabbed characters and the dust-weighted vellum of
the charred and mutilated archives discovered by him in a secret
closet in the bell-tower of his church. With infinite toil, patience,
and ability he had deciphered the Latin of rolls, registers, letters,
chronicles, so damaged by water, fire, and the teeth of rats and
mice, that it required all an archæologist's ingenuity and devotion
to make out any sense from them. Summer days and winter nights had
found him poring over the enigma of these documents, and now, when he
had conquered and revealed their secret, he who was most concerned in
it was no more stirred by curiosity or pride than if he had been one
of the big tawny owls dwelling in the dusk of the belfry.

Don Silverio was a learned man and a holy man, and should have
despised such vanities, but an historic past had great seduction for
him; a militant race fascinated him against his conscience, and
aristocracy allured him despite all his better judgement; it seemed
to him that if he had learned that he had come from a knightly _gens_
such as this of the Tor'alba, he would have been more strongly moved
to self-glorification than would have become a servant of the Church.
He himself had no knowledge even of his own near parentage; he had
been a forsaken child, left one dark autumn night in the iron cradle
of the gates of a foundling hospital in Reggio Calabrese. His names
had been bestowed on him by the chaplain of the institution; and his
education had been given him by an old nobleman of the town,
attracted by his appearance and intelligence as a child. He was now
fifty years of age; and he had never known anything of kith and kin,
or of the mingled sweetness and importunity of any human tie.

Adone sat silent, looking up at the fortress of his forefathers. He
was more moved than his words showed.

"If we were lords of the land and the town and the people, we were
also lords of the river," was what he was thinking; and that thought
moved him to strong pride and pleasure, for he loved the river with a
great love, only equalled by that which he felt for his mother.

"They were lords of the river?" he asked aloud.

"Undoubtedly," answered the priest. "It was one of the highways of
the province from east to west and _vice versâ_ in that time; the
signoria of this Rocca took toll, kept the fords and bridges and
ferries; none could pass up and down under Ruscino without being seen
by the sentinels on the ramparts here. The Edera was different then;
more navigable, perhaps less beautiful. Rivers change like nations.
There have been landslips which have altered its course and made its
torrents. In some parts it is shallower, in others deeper. The woods
which enclosed its course then have been largely felled, though not
wholly. Sand has been dug from it incessantly, and rocks have fallen
across it. As you know, no boats or barges which draw any depth of
water can ascend or descend it now without being towed by horses; and
in some parts, as here, it is course, too precipitous in its fall for
even small boats to adventure themselves upon it: its shoals of
lilies can blossom unmolested where its surface is level. Yes;
undoubtedly, the lords of Ruscino were also lords of the Edera, from
its mouth to its source; and their river formed at once their
strongest defence and their weakest point. It was difficult
sufficiently to guard so many miles of water; above all because, as I
say, its course was so much clearer, and its depth so much greater,
that a flotilla of rafts or cutters could ascend it from its mouth as
far as this town in the Middle Ages; in fact, more than once,
corsairs from the Levant and from Morocco did so ascend it, and
though they were driven back by the culverins of the citadel, they
every time carried off to slavery some of the youths and maidens of
the plain."

Adone gazed across the river to the moss-grown walls which had once
been fortifications still visible on the side of the hill, and to the
frowning donjon, the blackened towers, the ruined bastions, of what
had been once the Rocca, with the amber light and rosy clouds of the
unseen sun behind them.

"Teach me Latin, your reverence," was all he said.

"I have always offered to do so," said Don Silverio.

Adone was again silent, swinging his slender brown feet in the water,
and looking always upward at the evening sky beyond the great round
shape of the dismantled fortress.

He learned some Latin with much difficulty, studying hard in his
evening leisure in the winters, and with time he could decipher for
himself, with assistance from Don Silverio, the annals of the
Tor'alba; and he saw that it was as certain as anything grown over
with the lichens and cobwebs of time can be that he himself was the
last of the race.

"Your father used to say something of the sort," his mother said;
"but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard
enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it
matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had
been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river. For your
father's father had worn the red shirt in his youth, as I have told
you often, and thought but little of lords and princes."

But Adone was different; the past allured him with the fascination
which it has for poets and scholars; he was neither of these, except
in a vague, unconscious way; but his imagination was strong and
fertile once aroused; the past, as suggested to him by the vicar, by
degrees became to him a living thing and nearer than the present, as
it is to scholars who are poets. He was neither scholar nor poet; but
he loved to muse upon that far-off time when his forefathers had been
lords of the land and of the water.

He did not want the grandeur, he did not envy the power which they
had possessed; but he wished that, like them, he could own the Edera
from its rise in the hills to its fall into the sea.

"Oh, dear river!" he sang to it tenderly, "I love you. I love you as
the dragon-flies do, as the wagtails do, as the water voles do; I am
you and you are me. When I lean over you and smile, you smile back to
me. You are beautiful in the night and the morning, when you mirror
the moon and play with the sunbeams, when you are angry under the
wind, and when you are at peace in the heat of the noon. You have
been purple with the blood of my people, and now you are green and
fresh as the leaves of the young vine. You have been black with
powder and battle, now you are fair with the hue of the sky and the
blue of the myosotis. You are the same river as you were a thousand
years ago, and yet you only come down to-day from the high hills,
young and strong, and ever renewing. What is the life of man beside
yours?"

That was the ode which he sang in the dialect of the province, and
the stream washed his feet as he sang; and with his breath on his
long reed flute--the same flute as youths have made and used ever
since the days that Apollo reigned on Saracte--he copied the singing
of the river, which piped as it ran, like birds at dawn.

But this was only at such times as daybreak or early night when he
was alone.

There were but a few people within the ruined walls of Ruscino; most
of the houses were tenantless and tottering to their fall. A few old
bent men and weather-beaten women and naked children climbed its
steep lanes and slept under its red-brown roofs, bawled to each other
from its deep arched doorways to tell of death or birth, and gathered
dandelion leaves upon its ramparts to cure their shrunken and swollen
bladders. He knew them every one, he was familiar with and kind to
them; but he was aloof from them by temperament and thought, and he
showed them his soul no more than the night birds in the towers
showed their tawny breasts and eyes of topaz to the hungry and ragged
fowls which scratched amongst the dust and refuse on the stones in
the glare of day.

"_Il Bel Adone_!" sighed matrons and the maidens of the scattered
farms and the old gloomy castellated granges which here and there,
leagues distant from one another, broke the green and silent monotony
of the vast historic country whose great woods sloped from hill to
plain. But to these, too, he was indifferent, though they had the
stern and solid beauty of the Latium women on their broad low brows,
their stately busts, their ox-like eyes, their shapely feet and
limbs; and often, joined to that, the red-gold hair and the fair skin
of the Adriatic type. As they bound the sheaves, and bore the
water-jars, and went in groups through the seeding grass to chapel,
or fountain, or shrine, they had the free, frank grace of an earlier
time; just such as these had carried the votive doves to the altars
of Venus and chanted by the waters of the Edera the worship of Isis
and her son. But to Adone they had no charm. What did he desire or
dream of? Himself he could not have said. Perhaps they were too warm;
it was certain that they left him cold.

Sometimes he learned over the river and looked longingly into its
depths.

"Show me the woman I shall love," he said to the water, but it
hastened on, glad, tumultuous, unheeding; and he only saw the
reflection of the white jonquils or of the golden sword rush on its
banks.





V

Fruits ripen quickly in these provinces, and children become women in
a summer hour; but with Nerina, through want and suffering and
hunger, physical growth had been slow, and she remained long a child
in many things and many ways. Only in her skill and strength for work
was she older than her actual age.

She could hoe and reap and sow: she could row and steer the boat
amongst the shallows as well as any man; she could milk the cow, and
put the steers in the waggon; she could card hemp and flax, and weave
and spin either; she could carry heavy weights balanced on her head;
she was strong and healthy and never ill, and with it all she was
happy. Her large bright eyes were full of contentment, and her rosy
mouth often smiled out of the mere gladness of living. Her senses
were still asleep and her young soul wanted nothing more than life
gave her.

"You can earn your bread anywhere now, little one," said Clelia Alba
to her one day, when she had been there three years.

The girl shrank as under a blow; her brown and rosy face grew
colourless. "Do you wish me to go away?" she said humbly.

"No, no," said Clelia, although that was what she did desire. "No,
not while I live. But should I die, you could not stay here with my
son."

"Why?" said Nerina. She did not understand why.

Clelia hesitated.

"You ought to feel that yourself," she said harshly. "Young men and
young maids do not dwell together, unless"

"Unless what?" asked Nerina.

"You are a simpleton indeed, or you are shamming," thought Adone's
mother; but aloud she only said, "It is not in our usage."

"But you will not die," said Nerina anxiously. "Why should you think
of dying, madonna? You are certainly old, but you are not so very,
very old."

Clelia smiled.

"You do not flatter, child. So much the better. Run away and drive in
those fowls. They are making havoc in the beanfield."

She could not feel otherwise than tenderly towards this young
creature, always so obedient, so tractable, so contented, so
grateful; but she would willingly have placed her elsewhere could she
have done so with a clear conscience.

"My son will never do ill by any creature under his roof," she
thought. "But still youth is youth; and the girl grows."

"We must dower her and mate her; eh, your reverence?" she said to Don
Silverio when he passed by later in that day.

"Willingly," he answered. "But to whom? To the owls or the cats at
Ruscino?"

In himself he thought, "She is as straight and as slight as a
chestnut wand, but she is as strong. When you shall try to bend her
where she shall not want to go you will not succeed."

For he knew the character of Nerina in the confessional better than
Clelia Alba judged of it in her house.

"It was not wise to bring her here," he added aloud. "But having
committed that error it would be unfair to charge the child with the
painful payment of it. You are a just woman, my good friend; you must
see that."

Clelia saw it clearly, for she never tried to trick her conscience.

"Your reverence mistakes me," she answered. "I would not give her to
any but a good man and a good home."

"They are not common," said Don Silverio. "Nor are they as easy to
find as flies in summer."

What was the marriage of the poor for the woman? What did it bring?
What did it mean? The travail of child-bearing, the toil of the
fields, the hardship of constant want, the incessant clamour on her
ear of unsatisfied hunger, the painful rearing of sons whom the State
takes away from her as soon as they are of use, painful ending of
life on grudged crusts as a burden to others on a hearth no longer
her own. This, stripped of glamour, is the lot nine times out of ten
of the female peasant -- a creature of burden like the cow she yokes,
an animal valued only in her youth and her prime; in old age or in
sickness like the stricken and barren goat, who has nought but its
skin and its bones.

Poor little Nerina!

As he went home he saw her cutting fodder for a calf; she was
kneeling in a haze of rose colour made by the many blossoms of the
_orchis maculat_ which grew there. The morning light sparkled in the
wet grass. She got up as she saw him cross the field, dropped her
curtsey low with a smile, then resumed her work, the dew, the sun,
the sweet fresh scents shed on her like a benison.

"Poor little soul," thought Don Silverio. "Poor little soul! Has
Adone no eyes?"

Adone had eyes, but they saw other things than a little maiden in the
meadow-grass.

To her he was a deity; she believed in him and worshipped him with
the strongest faith, as a little sister might have done. She would
have fought for him like a little mastiff; she would have suffered in
his service with rapture and pride; she was as vigilant for his
interests as if she were fidelity incarnated. She watched over all
that belonged to him, and the people of Ruscino feared her more than
they feared Pierino the watch-dog. Woe betided the hapless wight who
made free with the ripe olives, or the ripe grapes, with the fig or
the peach or the cherry which grew on Adone's lands; it seemed to
such marauders that she had a thousand eyes and lightning in her
feet.

One day, when she had dealt such vigorous blows with a blackthorn
stick on the back of a lad who had tried to enter the fowl-house,
that he fell down and shrieked for pardon, Adone reproved her.
"Remember they are very poor, Nerina," he said to her. "So were your
own folks, you say."

"I know they are poor," replied Nerina; she held to her opinions.
"But when they ask, you always give. Therefore it is vile to rob you.
Besides," she added, "if you go on and let them steal and steal till
you will have nothing left."

Whatever she saw, whatever she heard, she told Adone; and he gave ear
to her because she was not a chatterer, but was usually of few words.
All her intelligence was spent in the defence and in the culture of
the Terra Vergine; she did not know her alphabet, and did not wish to
do so; but she had the quickest of ears, the keenest of eyes, the
brightest of brains.

One morning she came running to him where he was cutting barley.

"Adone! Adone!" she cried breathlessly, "there were strange men by
the river to-day."

"Indeed," said Adone astonished, because strangers were never seen
there. Ruscino was near no highroad, and the river had long ceased to
be navigable.

"They asked me questions, but I put my hands to my ears and shook my
head; they thought I was deaf."

"What sort of men were they?" he asked with more attention, for there
were still those who lived by violence up in the forests which
overhung the valley of the Edera.

"How do I know? They were clothed in long woollen bed-gowns, and they
had boots on their feet, and on their heads hats shaped like
kitchen-pans."

Adone smiled. He saw men from a town, or country fellows who aped
such men, with a contempt which was born at once of that artistic
sense of fitness which was in him, and of his adherence to the
customs and habits of his province. The city-bred and city-clothed
man looked to him a grotesque and helpless creature, much sillier
than an ape.

"That sounds like citizens or townsfolk. What did they say?"

"I could not understand; but they spoke of the water, I think, for
they pointed to it and said a great deal which I did not understand,
and seemed to measure the banks, and took your punt and threw a chain
into the water in places."

"Took castings? Used my punt? That is odd! I have never seen a
stranger in my life by the Edera. Were they anglers?"

"No."

"Or sportsmen?"

"They had no guns."

"How many were they?"

"Three. They went away up the river talking."

"Did they cross the bridge?"

"No. They were not shepherds, or labourers, or priests," said Nerina.
To these classes of men her own acquaintance was confined.

"Painters, perhaps?" said Adone; but no artists were ever seen there;
the existence even of the valley was scarcely known, except to
topographers.

"What are painters?" said Nerina.

"Men who sit and stare and then make splashes of colour."

"No; they did not do that."

"It is strange."

He felt vaguely uneasy that any had come near the water; as a lover
dislikes the pressure of a crowd about his beloved in a street, so he
disliked the thought of foreign eyes resting on the Edera. That they
should have used his little punt, always left amongst the sedges,
seemed to him a most offensive and unpardonable action.

He went to the spot where the intruders had been seen, but there was
no trace of them, except that the wet sand bore footprints of persons
who had, as she had said of them, worn boots. He followed these
footprints for some mile or more up the edge of the stream, but there
he lost them from sight; they had passed on to the grass of a level
place, and the dry turf, cropped by sheep to its roots, told no
tales. Near this place was a road used by cattle drivers and mules;
it crossed the heather for some thousand yards, then plunged into the
woods, and so went up over the hills to the town of Teramo,
thirty-five kilometres away. It was a narrow, rough, steep road,
wholly unfit for vehicles of any kind more tender than the rude
ox-treggia, slow as a snail, with rounds of a tree-trunk for its
wheels, and seldom used except by country folks.

He would have asked Don Silverio if he had heard or seen anything of
any strangers, but the priest was away that day at one of the lonely
moorland cabins comprised in his parish of Ruscino, where an old man,
who had been a great sinner in his past, was at his last gasp, and
his sons and grandsons and great-grandchildren all left him to meet
his end as he might.

It was a fine day, and they had their grain to get in, and even the
women were busy. They set a stoup of water by him, and put some in
his nostrils, and shut the door to keep out the flies. It was no use
to stay there they thought. If you helped a poor soul to give up the
ghost by a hand on his mouth, or an elbow in his stomach, you got
into trouble; it was safer to leave him alone when he was a-dying.

Don Silverio had given the viaticum to the old man the night before,
not thinking he would outlive the night. He now found the door locked
and saw the place was deserted. He broke the door open with a few
kicks, and found the house empty save for the dying creature on the
sacks of leaves.

"They would not wait! They would not wait -- hell take them!" said
the old man, with a groan, his bony hands fighting the air.

"Hush, hush! the holy oil is on you," said Don Silverio. "They knew I
should be here."

It was a charitable falsehood, but the brain of the old man was still
too awake to be deceived by it.

"Why locked they the door, then? Hell take them! They are reaping in
the lower fields -- hell take them!" he repeated, his bony, toothless
jaws gnashing with each word.

He was eighty-four years old; he had been long the terror of his
district and of his descendants, and they paid him out now that he
was powerless; they left him alone in that sun-baked cabin, and they
had carefully put his crutch out of reach, so that if any force
should return to his paralysed body he should be unable to move.

It was the youngest of them, a little boy of seven years old, who had
thought to do that; the crutch had hit him so often.

The day had been only beginning when Don Silverio had reached the
cabin, but he resolved to await there the return of the family; its
hours were many and long and cruel in the midsummer heat, in this
foetid place, where more than a score of men, women, and children of
all ages, slept and swarmed through every season, and where the
floors of beaten earth were paven with filth three millimetres thick.
The people were absent, but their ordure, their urine, their lice,
their saliva were left there after them, and the stench of all was
concentrated on this bed where the old man wrestled with death.

Don Silverio stayed on in the sultry and pestilent steam which rose
up from the floor. Gnats and flies of all kinds buzzed in the heavy
air, or settled in black knots on the walls and the rafters. With a
bunch of dried maize-leaves he drove them off the old man's face and
hands and limbs, and ever and again at intervals gave the poor
creature a draught of water with a few drops in it from a phial of
cordial which he had brought with him. The hours passed, each seeming
longer than a day; at last the convulsive twitching of the jaws
ceased; the jaw had fallen, the dark cavern of the toothless mouth
yawned in a set grimace, the vitreous eyes were turned up into the
head: the old man was dead. But Don Silverio did not leave him; two
sows and a hog were in a stye which was open to the house; he knew
that they would come and gnaw the corpse if it were left to them;
they were almost starving, and grunted angrily.

He spent so many vigils similar to this that the self-sacrifice
entailed in them never struck either him or those he served.

When the great heat had passed he set the door wide open; the sun was
setting; a flood of light inundated the plain from the near mountains
on the west, where the Leonessa towered, to those shadowy green
clouds which far away in the east were the marshes before the sea.
Through the ruddy glory of the evening the family returned, dark
figures against the gold; brown women, half-nude men, footsore
children, their steps dragging reluctantly homeward.

At the sight of the priest on the threshold they stopped and made
obeisance humbly in reverent salutation.

"Is he dead, most reverend?" said the eldest of the brood, a man of
sixty, touching the ground with his forehead.

"Your father is dead," said Don Silverio.

The people were still; relieved to hear that all was over, yet
vaguely terrified, rather by his gaze than by his words. A woman wept
aloud out of fear.

"We could net let the good grain spoil," said the eldest man, with
some shame in his voice.

"Pray that your sons may deal otherwise with you when your turn shall
come," said Don Silverio; and then he went through them, unmoved by
their prayers and cries, and passed across the rough grass-land out
of sight.

The oldest man, he who was now head of the house, remained prostrate
on the threshold and beat the dust with his hands and heels; he was
afraid to enter, afraid of that motionless, lifeless bag of bones of
which the last cry had been a curse at him.

Don Silverio went on his way over the moors homeward, for he had no
means except his own limbs whereby to go his scattered parishioners.
When he reached the village and climbed its steep stones night had
long fallen and he was sorely tired. He entered by a door which was
never locked, and found an oil wick burning on his table, which was
set out with the brown crockery used for his frugal supper of cheese
and lettuce and bread. His old servant was abed. His little dog alone
was on the watch to welcome him. It was a poor, plain place, with
whitewashed walls and a few necessary articles of use; but it was
clean and sweet, its brick floors were sanded, and the night air blew
in from its open casement with the freshness from the river in it.
Its quiet was seldom disturbed except by the tolling of the bell for
the church services; and it was welcome to him after the toil and
heat and stench of the past day.

"My lot might have been worse," he thought, as he broke his loaf; he
was disinclined to eat; the filthy odours of the cabin pursued him.

He was used to have had a little weekly journal sent to him by the
post; which came at rare intervals on an ass's back to Ruscino, the
ass and his rider, with a meal sack half filled by the meagre
correspondence of the district, making the rounds of that part of the
province with an irregularity which seemed as natural to the
sufferers by it as to the postman himself. "He cannot be everywhere
at once," they said of him with indulgence.

When he reached his home that evening the little news-sheet was lying
on his table beside the brown crockery, the cheese, lettuces, and
bread. He scarcely touched the food; he was saddened and sickened by
the day he had passed, although there had been nothing new in it,
nothing of which he had not been witness a hundred times in the
cabins of his parishioners. The little paper caught his eye, he took
it and opened it. It was but a meagre thing, tardy of news, costing
only two centimes, but it was the only publication which brought him
any intelligence of that outer world from which he was as much
separated as though he had been on a deserted isle in mid-ocean.

By the pale light of the single wick he turned over its thin sheet to
distract his thoughts; there was war news in east and west, Church
news in his own diocese and elsewhere; news all ten days old and
more; political news also, scanty and timidly related. The name of
the stream running underneath the walls of Ruscino caught his regard;
a few lines were headed with it, and these lines said curtly:

"_The project to divert the course of the Edera river will be brought
before the Chamber shortly; the Minister of Agriculture is considered
to favour the project_."

He held the sheet nearer to the light and read the paragraph again,
and yet again. The words were clear and indisputable in their
meaning; they could not be misconstrued. There was but one river
Edera in the whole province, in the whole country; there could be no
doubt as to what river was meant; yet it seemed to him utterly
impossible that any such project could be conceived by any creature.
Divert the course of the Edera? He felt stupefied. He read the words
over and over again; then he read them aloud in the stillness of the
night, and his voice sounded strong in his own ears.

"It must be a misprint; it must be a mistake for the Era of Volterra,
or the Esino, north of Ancona," he said to himself, and he went to
his book closet and brought out an old folio geography which he had
once bought for a few pence on a Roman bookstall, spread it open
before him, and read one by one the names of all the streams of the
peninsula, from the Dora Baltea to the Giarretta. There was no other
Edera river. Unless it were indeed a misprint altogether, the stream
which flowed under his church walls was the one which was named in
the news-sheet.

"But it is impossible, it is impossible!" he said so loudly, that his
little dog awoke and climbed on his knee uneasily and in alarm. "What
could the people do? What could the village do, or the land or the
fisher folk? Are we to have drought added to hunger? Can they respect
nothing? The river belongs to the valley: to seize it, to appraise
it, to appropriate it, to make it away with it, would be as monstrous
as to steal his mother's milk from a yearling babe!"

He shut the folio and pushed it away from him across the table. "If
this is true," he said to himself, "if, anyhow, this monstrous thing
be true, it will kill Adone!"

In the morning he awoke from a short perturbed sleep with that heavy
sense of a vaguely remembered calamity which stirs in the awakening
brain like a worm in the unclosing flower.

The morning-office over, he sought out the little news-sheet, to make
sure that he had read aright; his servant had folded it up and laid
it aside on a shelf, he unfolded it with a hand which trembled; the
same lines stared at him in the warm light of sunrise as in the faint
glimmer of the floating wick. The very curtness and coldness of the
announcement testified to its exactitude. He did not any longer doubt
its truth; but there were no details, no explanations: he pondered on
the possibilities of obtaining them; it was useless to seek them in
the village or the countryside, the people were as ignorant as sheep.

Adone alone had intelligence, but he shrank from taking these tidings
to the youth, as he would have shrunk from doing him a physical hurt.
The news might be false or premature; many projects were discussed,
many schemes sketched out, many speculations set on foot which came
to nothing in the end: were this thing true, Adone would learn it all
too soon and read it on the wounded face of nature. Not at least
until he could himself be certain of its truth would he speak of it
to the young man whose fathers had been lords of the river.

His duties over for the forenoon, he went up the three hundred stairs
of his bell-tower, to the wooden platform, between the
machicolations. It was a dizzy height, and both stairs and roof were
in ruins, but he went cautiously, and was familiar with the danger.
The owls which bred there were so used to him that they did not stir
in their siesta as he passed them. He stood aloft in the glare of
noonday, and looked down on the winding stream as it passed under the
ruined walls of Ruscino, and growing, as it flowed, clearer and
clearer, and wilder and wilder, as it rushed over stones and
boulders, foaming and shouting, rushed through the heather on its way
towards the Marches. Under Ruscino it had its brown mountain colour
still, but as it ran it grew green as emeralds, blue as sapphires,
silver and white and gray like a dove's wings; it was unsullied and
translucent; the white clouds were reflected on it. It went through a
country lonely, almost deserted, only at great distances from one
another was there a group of homesteads, a cluster of stacks, a
conical cabin in some places where the woods gave place to pasture;
here and there were the ruins of a temple, of a fortress, of some
great marble or granite tomb; but there was no living creature in
sight except a troop of buffaloes splashing in a pool.

Don Silverio looked down on its course until his dazzled eyes lost it
from sight in the glory of light through which it sped, and his heart
sank, and he would fain have been a woman to have wept aloud. For he
saw that its beauty and its solitude were such as would likely enough
tempt the spoilers. He saw that it lay fair and defenceless as a
maiden on her bed.

He dwelt out of the world now, but he had once dwelt in it; and the
world does not greatly change, it only grows more rapacious. He knew
that in this age there is only one law, to gain; only one duty, to
prosper: that nature is of no account, nor beauty either, nor repose,
nor ancient rights, nor any of the simple claims of normal justice.
He knew that if in the course of the river there would be gold for
capitalists, for engineers, for attorneys, for deputies, for
ministers, that then the waters of the Edera were in all probability
doomed.

He descended the rotten stairs slowly, with a weight as of lead at
his heart. He did not any longer doubt the truth of what he had read.
Who, or what, shall withstand the curse of its time?

"They have forgotten us so long," he thought, with bitterness in his
soul. "We have been left to bury our dead as we would, and to see the
children starve as they might; they remember us now, because we
possess something which they can snatch from us!"

He did not doubt any more. He could only wait: wait and see in what
form and in what time the evil would come to them. Meantime, he said
to himself, he would not speak of it to Adone, and he burned the
news-sheet. Administrations alter frequently and unexpectedly, and
the money-changers, who are fostered by them, sometimes fall with
them, and their projects remain in the embryo of a mere prospectus.
There was that chance.

He knew that, in the age he lived in, all things were estimated only
by their value to commerce or to speculation; that there was neither
space nor patience amongst men for what was, in their reckoning,
useless; that the conqueror was now but a trader in disguise; that
civilisation was but the shibboleth of traffic; that because trade
follows the flag, therefore to carry the flag afar, thousands of
young soldiers of every nationality are slaughtered annually in
poisonous climes and obscure warfare, because such is the _suprema
lex_ and will of the trader. If the waters of Edera would serve to
grind any grit for the mills of modern trade they would be taken into
bondage with many other gifts of nature as fair and as free as they
were. All creation groaned and travailed in pain that the great
cancer should spread.

"It is not only ours," he remembered with a pang; on its way to and
from the Valdedera the river passed partially through two other
communes, and water belongs to the district in which it runs. True,
the country of each of these was like that of this valley,
depopulated and wild; but, however great a solitude any land may be,
it is still locally and administratively dependent on the chief town
of its commune. Ruscino and its valley were dependent on San Beda;
these two other communes were respectively under a little town of the
Abruzzo and under a seaport of the Adriatic.

The interest of the valley of the Edera in its eponymous stream was a
large share; but it was not more than a share, in this gift of
nature. If it came to any question of conflicting interests, Ruscino
and the valley might very likely be powerless, and could only, in any
event, be represented by and through San Beda; a strongly
ecclesiastical and papal little place, and, therefore, without
influence with the ruling powers, and consequently viewed with an
evil eye by the Prefecture.

He pondered anxiously on the matter for some days, then, arduous as
the journey was, he resolved to go to San Beda and inquire.

The small mountain city was many miles away upon a promontory of
marble rocks, and its many spires and towers were visible only in
afternoon light from the valley of the Edera. It was as old as
Ruscino, a dull, dark, very ancient place with monasteries and
convents like huge fortresses and old palaces still fortified and
grim as death amongst them. A Cistercian monastery, which had been
chiefly built by the second Giulio, crowned a prominent cliff, which
dominated the town, and commanded a view of the whole of the valley
of the Edera, and, on the western horizon, of the Leonessa and her
tributary mountains and hills.

He had not been there for five years; he went on foot, for there was
no other means of transit, and if there had been he would not have
wasted money on it; the way was long and irksome; for the latter
half, entirely up a steep mountain road. He started in the early
morning as soon as Mass had been celebrated, and it was four in the
afternoon before he had passed the gates of the town, and paid his
respects to the Bishop. He rested in the Certosa, of which the
superior was known to him; the monks, like the Bishop, had heard
nothing. So far as he could learn when he went into the streets no
one in the place had heard anything of the project to alter the
course of the river. He made the return journey by night, so as to
reach his church by daybreak, and was there in his place by the high
altar when the bell tolled at six o'clock, and the three or four old
people, who never missed an office, were kneeling on the stones.

He had walked over forty miles, and had eaten nothing except some
bread and a piece of dried fish. But he always welcomed physical
fatigue; it served to send to sleep the restless intellect, the
gnawing regrets, the bitter sense of wasted powers and of useless
knowledge, which were his daily company.

He had begged his friends, the friars, to obtain an interview with
the Syndic of Sand Beda, and interrogate him on the subject. Until he
should learn something positive he could not bring himself to speak
of the matter to Adone: but the fact of his unusual absence had too
much astonished his little community for the journey not to have been
the talk of Ruscino. Surprised and disturbed like others, Adone was
waiting for him in the sacristy after the first mass.

"You have been away a whole day and night and never told me,
reverendissimo!" he cried in reproach and amazement.

"I have yet to learn that you are my keeper," said Don Silverio with
a cold and caustic intonation.

Adone coloured to the roots of his curling hair.

"That is unkind, sir!" he said humbly; "I only meant that -- that --"

"I know, I know!" said the priest impatiently, but with contrition.
"You meant only friendship and good-will; but there are times when
the best intentions irk one. I went to see the Prior of the Certosa,
and old friend; I had business in San Beda."

Adone was silent, afraid that he had shown an unseemly curiosity; he
saw that Don Silverio was irritated and not at ease, and he hesitated
what words to choose.

His friend relented, and blamed himself for being hurried by
disquietude into harshness.

"Come and have a cup of coffee with me, my son," he said in his old,
kind tones. "I am going home to break my fast."

But Adone was hurt and humiliated, and made excuse of field work,
which pressed by reason of the weather, and so he did not name to his
friend and councillor the visit of the three men to the river.

Don Silverio went home and boiled his coffee; he always did this
himself; it was the only luxury he ever allowed himself, and he did
not indulge even in this very often. But for once the draught had
neither fragrance nor balm for him. He was overtired, weary in mind
as in body, and greatly dejected; even though nothing was known at
San Beda he felt convinced that what he had read was the truth.

He knew but little of affairs of speculation, but he knew that it was
only in reason to suppose that such projects would be kept concealed,
as long as might be expedient, from those who would be known to be
hostile to them, in order to minimise the force of opposition.





VI

On the morning of the fourth day which followed on the priest's visit
to San Beda, about ten in the forenoon, Adone, with his two oxen,
Orlando and Rinaldo, were near the river on that part of his land
which was still natural moorland, and on which heather, and ling, and
broom, and wild roses, and bracken grew together. He had come to cut
a waggon load of furze, and had been at work there since eight
o'clock, when he had come out of the great porch of the church after
attending mass, for it was the twentieth of June, the name-day of Don
Silverio.

Scarcely had that day dawned when Adone had risen and had gone across
the river to the presbytery, bearing with him a dozen eggs, two
flasks of his best wine, and a bunch of late-flowering roses. They
were his annual offerings on this day; he felt some trepidation as he
climbed the steep, stony, uneven street lest they should be rejected,
for he was conscious that three evenings before he had offended Don
Silverio, and had left the presbytery too abruptly. But his fears
were allayed as soon as he entered the house; the vicar was already
up and dressed, and was about to go to the church. At the young man's
first contrite words Don Silverio stopped him with a kind smile.

"I was impatient and to blame," he said as he took the roses. "You
heap coals of fire on my head, my son, with your welcome gifts."

Then together they had gone to the quaint old church of which the one
great bell was tolling.

Mass over, Adone had gone home, broken his fast, taken off his velvet
jacket, his long scarlet waistcoat, and his silver-studded belt, and
put the oxen to the pole of the waggon.

"Shall I come?" cried Nerina.

"No," he answered. "Go and finish cutting the oats in the triangular
field."

Always obedient, she went, her sickle swinging to her girdle. She was
sorry, but she never murmured.

Adone had been at work amongst the furze two hours when old Pierino,
who always accompanied the oxen, got up, growled, and then barked.

"What is it, old friend?" asked Adone, and left off his work and
listened. He heard voices by the waterside, and steps on the loose
shingle of its shrunken summer bed. He went out of the wild growth
round him and looked. There were four men standing and talking by the
water. They were doubtless the same persons as Nerina had seen, for
they were evidently men from a city and strangers. Disquietude and
offence took alarm in him at once.

He conquered that shyness which was natural to him, and which was due
to the sensitiveness of his temperament and the solitude in which he
had been reared.

"Excuse me, sirs," he said, as he advanced to them with his head
uncovered; "what is it you want with my river?"

"Your river!" repeated the head of the group, and he smiled. "How is
it more yours than your fellows?"

Adone advanced nearer.

"The whole course of the water belonged to my ancestors," he
answered, "and this portion at least is mine now; you stand on my
ground; I ask you what is your errand?"

He spoke with courtesy, but in a tone of authority which seemed to
the intruders imperious and irritating. But they controlled their
annoyance; they did not wish to offend this haughty young peasant.

"To be owner of the water it is necessary to own both banks of it,"
the stranger replied politely, but with some impatience. "The
opposite bank is communal property. Do not fear, however, whatever
your rights may be they will be carefully examined and considered."

"By whom? They concern only myself."

"None of our rights concern only ourselves. What are those which you
claim in special on the Edera water?"

Adone was silent for a few moments; he was astonished and
embarrassed; he had never reflected on the legal side of his claim to
the river; he had grown up in love and union with it; such
affections, born with us at birth, are not analysed until they are
assailed.

"You are strangers," he replied. "But what right do you question me?
I was born here. What is your errand?"

"You must be Adone Alba?" said the person, as if spokesman for the
others.

"I am."

"And you own the land known as the Terra Vergine?"

"I do."

"You will hear from us in due time, then. Meantime"

"Meantime you trespass on my ground. Leave it, sirs."

The four strangers drew a few paces, and conferred together in a low
tone, consulting a sheaf of papers. Their council over, he who
appeared the most conspicuous in authority turned again to the young
man, who was watching them with a vague apprehension which he could
not explain to himself.

"There is no question of trespass; the river-side is free to all,"
said the stranger, with some contempt. "Courtesy would become you
better, Sir Adone."

Adone coloured. He knew that courtesy was at all times wise, and
useful, and an obligation amongst men; but his anger was stronger
than his prudence and his vague alarm was yet stronger still.

"Say your errand with the water," he replied imperiously. "Then I can
judge of it. No one, sirs, comes hither against my will."

"You will hear from us in due time," answered the intruder. "And
believe me, young man, you may lose much, you cannot gain anything,
by rudeness and opposition."

"Opposition to what?"

The stranger turned his back upon him, rolled up his papers, spoke
again with his companions, and lifted from a large stone on which he
had placed it a case of surveyor's instruments. Adone went close up
to him. "Opposition to what? What is it you are doing here?"

"We are not your servants," said the gentleman with impatience. "Do
not attempt any brawling I advise you; it will tell against you and
cannot serve you in any way."

"The soil and the water are mine, and you meddle with them," said
Adone. "If you were honest men you would not be ashamed of what you
do, and would declare your errand. Brawling is not in my habit; but I
will drive my oxen over you. The land and the waters are mine."

The chief of the group gave a disdainful, incredulous gesture, but
the others pulled him by the sleeve and argued with him in low tones
and a strange tongue, which Adone thought was German. The leader of
the group was a small man with a keen and mobile face and piercing
eyes; he did not yield easily to the persuasions of his companions;
he was disposed to be combative; he was offended by what seemed to
him the insults of a mere peasant.

Adone went back to his oxen, standing dozing with drooped heads; he