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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13459 ***
+
+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 red
+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
+gathered up the reins of rope and mounted the waggon, raising the
+heads of the sleepy beasts. He held his goad in his hand; the golden
+gorze was piled behind him; he was in full sunlight, his hair was
+lifted by the breeze from his forehead; his face was flushed and set
+and stern. They saw that he would keep his word and drive down on to
+them, and make his oxen knock them down and the wheels grind their
+bodies into pulp. They had no arms of any kind, they felt they had no
+choice but to submit: and did so, with sore reluctance.
+
+"He looks like a young god," said one of them with an angry laugh.
+"Mortals cannot fight against the gods."
+
+With discomfiture they retreated before him and went along the grassy
+path northward, as Nerina had seen them do on the day of their first
+arrival.
+
+So far Adone had conquered.
+
+But no joy or pride of a victor was with him. He stood and watched
+them pass away with a heavy sense of impending ill upon him; the
+river was flowing joyously, unconscious of its doom, but on him,
+though he knew nothing, and conceived nothing, of the form which the
+approaching evil would take, a great weight of anxiety descended.
+
+He got down from the waggon when he had seen them disappear, and
+continued his uninterrupted work amongst the furze; and he remained
+on the same spot long after the waggon was filled, lest in his
+absence the intruders should return. Only when the sun set did he
+turn the heads of the oxen homeward.
+
+He said nothing to the women, but when he had stalled and fed his
+cattle he changed his leathern breeches and put a clean shirt on his
+back, and went down the twilit fields and across the water to
+Ruscino; he told his mother that he would sup with Don Silverio.
+
+When Adone entered the book-room his friend was seated at a deal
+table laden with volumes and manuscripts, but he was neither writing
+nor reading, nor had he lighted his lamp. The moonlight shone through
+the vine climbing up and covering the narrow window. He looked up and
+saw by Adone's countenance that something was wrong.
+
+"What are they coming for, sir, to the river?" said the young man as
+he uncovered his head on the threshold of the chamber. Don Silverio
+hesitated to reply; in the moonlight his features looked like a mask
+of a dead man, it was so white and its lines so deep.
+
+"Why do they come to the river, these strangers?" repeated Adone.
+"They would not say. They were on my land. I threatened to drive my
+cattle over them. Then they went. But can you guess, sir, why they
+come?"
+
+Don Silverio still hesitated. Adone repeated his question with more
+insistence; he came up to the table and leaned his hands upon it, and
+looked down on the face of his friend.
+
+"Why do they come?" he repeated a fourth time. "They must have some
+reason. Surely you know?"
+
+"Listen, Adone, and control yourself," said Don Silverio. "I saw
+something in a journal a few days ago which made me go to San Beda.
+But there they knew nothing at all of what the newspaper had stated.
+What I said startled and alarmed them. I begged the Prior to acquaint
+me if he heard of any scheme affecting us. To-day, only, he has sent
+a young monk over with a letter to me, for it was only yesterday that
+he heard that there is a project in Rome to turn the river out of its
+course, and use it for hydraulic power; to what purpose he does not
+know. The townsfolk of San Beda are in entire sympathy with this
+district and against the scheme, which will only benefit a foreign
+syndicate. That is all I know, for it is all he knows; he took his
+information direct from the syndic, Count Corradini. My boy, my dear
+boy, control yourself!"
+
+Adone had dropped down on a chair, and leaning his elbow on the table
+hid his face upon his hands. A tremor shook his frame from head to
+foot.
+
+"I knew it was some deviltry," he muttered. "Oh, Lord! oh, Lord!
+would that I had made the oxen trample them into thousand pieces!
+They ought never to have left my field alive!"
+
+"Hush, hush!" said the priest sternly. "I cannot have such language
+in my house. Compose yourself."
+
+Adone raised his head; his eyes were alight as with fire; his face
+was darkly red.
+
+"What, sir! You tell me the river is to be taken away from us, and
+you ask me to be calm! It is not in human nature to bear such a wrong
+in peace. Take away the Edera! Take away the water! They had better
+cut our throats. What! a poor wretch who steals a few grapes off a
+vine, a few eggs from a hen roost, is called a thief and hounded to
+the galleys, and such robbery as this is to be borne in silence
+because the thieves wear broadcloth! It cannot be. It cannot be; I
+swear it shall never be whilst I have life. The river is mine. We
+reigned here three hundred years and more; you have told me so. It is
+written on the parchments. I will hold my own."
+
+Don Silverio was silent; he was silent from remorse. He had told
+Adone what, without him, Adone would have lived and died never
+knowing or dreaming. He had thought only to stimulate the youth to
+gentle conduct, honourable pride, perhaps to some higher use of his
+abilities: no more than this.
+
+He had never seen the young man thus violent and vehement; he had
+always found him tranquil to excess, difficult to rouse, slow to
+anger, indeed almost incapable of it; partaking of the nature of the
+calm and docile cattle with whom so much of his time was passed. But
+under the spur of an intolerable menace the warrior's blood which
+slumbered in Adone leapt to action; all at once the fierce temper of
+the lords of Ruscino displayed its fire and its metal; it was not the
+peasant of the Terra Vergine who was before him now, but the heir of
+the seigneury of the Rocca.
+
+"It is not only what I told him of his race," he thought. "If he had
+known nothing, none the less would the blood in his veins have
+stirred and the past have moved him."
+
+Aloud he said:
+
+"My son, I feel for you from the depths of my soul. I feel with you
+also. For if these foreigners take the river-water from us what will
+become of my poor, desolate people, only too wretched already as they
+are? You would not be alone in your desperation, Adone. But do not
+let us take alarm too quickly. This measure is in gestation; but it
+may never come to birth. Many such projects are discussed which from
+one cause or another are not carried out; this one must pass through
+many preliminary phases before it becomes fact. There must be surely
+many vested rights which cannot with impunity be invaded. Take
+courage. Have patience."
+
+He paused, for he saw that for the first time since they had known
+each other, Adone was not listening to him.
+
+Adone was staring up at the moon which hung, golden and full, in the
+dark blue sky, seeming framed in the leaves and coils of the vine.
+
+"The river is mine," he muttered. "The river and I are as brothers.
+They shall kill me before they touch the water."
+
+"He will go mad or commit some great crime," thought his friend,
+looking at him. "We must move every lever and strain every nerve, to
+frustrate this scheme, to prevent this spoliation. But if the thieves
+see money in it who shall stay their hands?"
+
+He rose and laid his hands on Adone's shoulders.
+
+"To-night you are in no fitting state for calm consideration of this
+possible calamity. Go home, my son. Go to your room. Say nothing to
+your mother. Pray and sleep. In the forenoon come to me and we will
+speak of the measures which it may be possible to take to have this
+matter examined and opposed. We are very poor; but still we are not
+altogether helpless. Only, there must be no violence. You wrong
+yourself and you weaken a good cause by such wild threats.
+Good-night, my son. Go home."
+
+The long habit of obedience to his superior, and the instinctive
+docility of his temper compelled Adone to submit; he drew a long,
+deep breath and the blood faded from his face.
+
+Without a word he turned from the table and wept out of the
+presbytery into the night and the white glory of the moonshine.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Don Silverio drew to him his unfinished letter to the Prior; the
+young monk who would take it back in the morning to San Beda was
+already asleep in a little chamber above. But he could not write, he
+was too perturbed and too anxious. Although he had spoken so calmly
+he was full of carking care; both for the threatened evil in itself,
+and for its effects upon his parishioners; and especially upon Adone.
+He knew that in this age it is more difficult to check the devouring
+monster of commercial covetousness than it ever was to stay the Bull
+of Crete; and that for a poor and friendless community to oppose a
+strong and wealthy band of speculators is indeed for the wooden lance
+to shiver to atoms on the brazen shield.
+
+He left his writing table and extinguished his lamp. Bidding the
+little dog lie still upon his chair, he went through the house to a
+door which opened from it into the bell tower of his church and which
+allowed him to go from the house to the church without passing out
+into the street. He climbed the belfry stairs once more, lighting
+himself at intervals by striking a wooden match; for through the
+narrow loopholes in the walls the moonbeams did not penetrate. He
+knew the way so well that he could have gone up and down those
+rotting stairs even in total darkness, and he safely reached the
+platform of the bell tower, though one halting step might have sent
+him in that darkness head foremost to his death.
+
+He stood there, and gazed downwards on the moonlit landscape far
+below, over the roofs and the walls of the village towards the open
+fields and the river, with beyond that the wooded country and the
+cultured land known as the Terra Vergine, and beyond those again the
+moors, the marshes, and the mountains. The moonlight shone with
+intense clearness on the waters of the Edera and on the stone
+causeway of the old one-arched bridge. On the bridge there was a
+figure moving slowly; he knew it to be that of Adone. Adone was going
+home.
+
+He was relieved from the pressure of one immediate anxiety, but his
+apprehensions for the future were great, both for the young man and
+for the people of Ruscino and its surrounding country. To take away
+their river was to deprive them of the little which they had to make
+life tolerable and to supply the means of existence. Its winter
+overflow nourished the fields which they owned around it, and the
+only cornmill of the district worked by a huge wheel in its water. If
+the river were turned out of its course above Ruscino the whole of
+this part of the vale would be made desolate.
+
+Life was already hard for the human creatures in these fair scenes on
+which he looked; without the river their lot would be intolerable.
+
+"Forbid it, O Lord! Forbid this monstrous wrong," he said, as he stood
+with bared head under the starry skies.
+
+When the people of a remote place are smitten by a public power the
+blow falls on them as unintelligible in its meaning, as invisible in
+its agency, as a thunderbolt is to the cattle whom it slays in their
+stalls. Even Don Silverio, with his classic culture and his
+archæological learning, had little comprehension of the means and
+methods by which these enterprises were combined and carried out; the
+world of commerce and speculation is as aloof from the scholar and
+the recluse as the rings of Saturn or the sun of Aldebaran. Its
+mechanism, its intentions, its combinations, its manners of action,
+its ways of expenditure, its intrigues with banks and governments:
+all these, to men who dwell in rural solitudes, aloof from the babble
+of crowds, are utterly unknown; the very language of the Bourses has
+no more meaning to them than the jar of wheels or roar of steam.
+
+He stood and looked with a sinking heart on the quiet, moonlit
+country, and the winding course of the water where it flowed, now
+silvery in the light, now black in the gloom, passing rapidly through
+the heather and the sallows under the gigantic masses of the Etruscan
+walls. It seemed to him to the full as terrible as to Adone; but it
+did not seem to him so utterly impossible, because he knew more of
+the ways of men and of their unhesitating and immeasurable cruelty
+whenever their greed was excited. If the fury of speculation saw
+desirable prey in the rape of the Edera then the Edera was doomed,
+like the daughter of Ædipus or the daughter of Jephtha.
+
+Adone had gone across the bridge, but he had remained by the
+waterside.
+
+"Pray and sleep!" Don Silverio had said in his last words. But to
+Adone it seemed that neither prayer nor sleep would ever come to him
+again so long as this impending evil hung over him and the water of
+Edera.
+
+He spent the first part of that summer night wandering aimlessly up
+and down his own bank, blind to the beauty of the moonlight, deaf to
+the songs of the nightingales, his mind filled with one thought. An
+hour after midnight he went home and let himself into the silent
+house by a small door which opened at the back, and which he used on
+such rare occasions as he stayed out late. He struck a match and went
+up to his room, and threw himself, dressed, upon his bed. His mother
+was listening for his return, but she did not call to him. She knew
+he was a man now, and must be left to his own will.
+
+"What ails Adone that he is not home?" had asked old Gianna. Clelia
+Alba had been herself perturbed by his absence at that hour, but she
+had answered:--
+
+"What he likes to tell, he tells. Prying questions make false
+tongues. I have never questioned him since he was breeched."
+
+"There are not many women like you," had said Gianna, partly in
+admiration, half in impatience.
+
+"Adone is a boy for you and me," had replied his mother. "But for
+himself and for all others he is a man. We must remember it."
+
+Gianna had muttered mumbled, rebellious words; he did not seem other
+than a child to her; she had been one of those present at this birth
+on the shining sands of the Edera.
+
+He could not sleep. He could only listen to the distant murmur of the
+river. With dawn the women awoke. Nerina came running down the steep
+stone stair and went to let out and feed her charges, the fowls.
+Gianna went to the well in the court with her bronze pitcher and
+pail. Clelia Alba cut great slices of bread at the kitchen table; and
+hooked the cauldron of maize flour to the chain above the fire on the
+kitchen hearth. He could not wait for their greetings, their
+questions, the notice which his changed mien would surely attract.
+For the first time in all his twenty-four years of life he went out
+of the house without a word to his mother, and took his way to the
+river again; for the first time he was neglectful of his cattle and
+forgetful of the land.
+
+Nerina came in from the fowl-house with alarm on her face.
+
+"Madama Clelia!" she said timidly, "Adone has gone away without
+feeding and watering the oxen. May I do it?"
+
+"Can you manage them, little one?"
+
+"Oh, yes; they love me."
+
+"Go then; but take care."
+
+"She is a good child!" said Gianna. "The beasts won't hurt her. They
+know their friends."
+
+Clelia Alba, to whom her own and her son's dignity was dear, said
+nothing of her own displeasure and surprise at Adone's absence. But
+she was only the more distressed by it. Never, since he had been old
+enough to work at all, had he been missing in the hours of labour.
+
+"I only pray," she thought, "that no woman may have hold of him."
+
+Adone hardly knew what he did; he was like a man who has had a blow
+on the temple; his sight was troubled; his blood seemed to burn in
+his brain. He wandered from habit through the field and down to the
+river, to the spot where from his infancy he had been used to bathe.
+He took off his clothes and waded into the water, which was cold as
+snow after the night. The shock of the cold, and the sense of the
+running current laving his limbs, restored him in a measure to
+himself. He swam down the stream in the shadow of the early morning.
+The air was full of the scent of dog-roses and flowering thyme; he
+turned on his back and floated; between him and the sky a hawk
+passed; the bell of the church was tolling for the diurnal mass. He
+ran along in the sun, as it grew warm, to dry his skin by movement,
+as his wont was. He was still stupefied by the fear which had fallen
+upon him; but the water had cooled and braced him.
+
+He had forgotten his mother, the cattle, the labours awaiting him;
+his whole mind was absorbed in this new horror sprung up in his path,
+none knew from where, or by whom begotten. The happy, unconscious
+stream ran singing at his feet as the nightingale sang in the acacia
+thickets, its brown mountain water growing green and limpid as it
+passed over submerged grass and silver sand.
+
+How could any thieves conspire to take it from the country in which
+it was born? How could any dare to catch it, and imprison it, and put
+it to vile uses? It was a living thing, a free thing, a precious
+thing, more precious than jewel or gold. Both jewels and gold the law
+protected. Could it not protect the Edera?
+
+"Something must be done," he said to himself. "But what?"
+
+He had not the faintest knowledge of what could or should be done; he
+regretted that he had not written his mark with the horns and the
+hoofs of his oxen on the foreign invaders; they might never again
+fall into his power.
+
+He had never felt before such ferocious or cruel instincts as arose
+in him now. Don Silverio seemed to him tame and lukewarm before this
+monstrous conspiracy of strangers. He knew that a priest must not
+give way to anger; yet it seemed to him that even a priest should be
+roused to fury here; there was a wrath which was holy.
+
+When he was clothed he stood and looked down again at the gliding
+stream.
+
+A feeble, cracked voice called to him from the opposite bank.
+
+"Adone, my lad, what is this tale?"
+
+The speaker was an old man of eighty odd years, a native of Ruscino,
+one Patrizio Cambi, who was not yet too feeble to cut the rushes and
+osiers, and maintained a widowed daughter and her young children by
+that means.
+
+"What tale?" said Adone, unwilling to be roused from his own dark
+thoughts. "What tale, Trizio?"
+
+"That they are going to meddle with the river," answered the old man.
+"They can't do it, can they?"
+
+"What have you heard?"
+
+"That they are going to meddle with the river."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"The Lord knows, or the devil. There was a waggon with four horses
+came as near as it could get to us in the woods yonder by Ruffo's,
+and the driver told Ruffo that the gentry he drove had come by road
+from that town by the sea-- I forget its name-- in order to see the
+river, this river, our river; and that he had brought another posse
+of gentry two weeks or more on the same errand, and that they were
+a-measuring and a-plumbing it, and that they were going to get
+possession of its somehow or other, but Ruffo could not hear anything
+more than that; and I supposed that you knew, because this part of it
+is yours if it be any man's; this part of it that runs through the
+Terra Vergine."
+
+"Yes, it is mine," answered Adone very slowly. "It is mine here, and
+it was once ours from source to sea."
+
+"Aye, it is ours!" said old Trizio Cambi mistaking him. He was a man
+once tall, but now bent nearly double; he had a harsh, wrinkled face,
+brown as a hazel nut, and he was nearly a skeleton; but he had eyes
+which were still fine and still had some fire in them. In his youth
+he had been a Garibaldino.
+
+"It is ours," repeated Trizio. "At least if anything belongs to poor
+folks. What say you, Adone?"
+
+"Much belongs to the poor, but others take it from them," said Adone.
+"You have seen a hawk take a sparrow, Trizio. The poor count no more
+than the sparrows."
+
+"But the water is the gift of God," said the old man.
+
+Adone did not answer.
+
+"What can we do?" said Trizio, wiping the dew off his sickle. "Who
+knows aught of us? Who cares? If the rich folks want the river they
+will take it, curse them!"
+
+Adone did not answer. He knew that it was so, all over the earth.
+
+"We shall know no more than birds tangled in a net," said Trizio.
+"They will come and work their will."
+
+Adone rose up out of the grass. "I will go and see Ruffo," he said.
+He was glad to do something.
+
+"Ruffo knows no more than that," said Trizio angrily. "The driver of
+the horses knew no more."
+
+Adone paid him no need, but began to push his way through the thick
+network of the interlaced heather. He thought that perhaps Ruffo, a
+man who made wooden shoes, and hoops for casks, and shaped chestnut
+poles for vines, might tell him more than had been told to old
+Trizio; might at least be able to suggest from what quarter and in
+what shape this calamity was rising, to burst over their valley as a
+hailstorm broods above, then breaks, on helpless fields and
+defenceless gardens, beating down without warning the birds and the
+blossoms of spring.
+
+When he had been in Lombardy he had seen once a great steam-engine at
+work, stripping a moorland of its natural growth and turning it into
+ploughed land. He remembered how the huge machine with its stench of
+oil and fire had forced its way through the furze and ferns and wild
+roses and myrtle, and torn them up, and flung them on one side, and
+scattered and trampled all the insect life, and all the bird life,
+and all the hares, and field mice, and stoats, and hedgehogs, who
+made their home there. "A fine sight," a man had said to him; and he
+had answered, "A cursed wickedness." Was this what they would do to
+the vale of Edera? If they took the river they could not spare the
+land. He felt scared, bruised, terrified, like one of these poor
+moorland hares. He remembered a poor stoat which, startled out of its
+sleep, had turned and bitten one of the iron wheels of the machine,
+and the wheel had gone over it and crushed it into a mass of blood
+and fur. He was as furious and as helpless as the stoat had been.
+
+But when he had walked the four miles which separated the Terra
+Vergine from the chestnut woods where the maker of wooden shoes
+lived, he heard nothing else from Ruffo than this: that gentlemen had
+come from Teramo to study the Edera water; they were going to turn it
+aside and use it; more than that the man who had driven them had not
+heard and could not explain.
+
+"There were four horses, and he had nothing to give them but water
+and grass," said the cooper. "The gentry brought wine and food for
+themselves. They came the day before yesterday and slept here. They
+went away this morning. They paid me well, oh, very well. I did what
+I could for them. It is five-and-thirty miles if one off Teramo, aye,
+nearer forty. They followed the old posting road; but you know where
+it enters the woods it is all overgrown, and gone to rack and ruin,
+from want of use. In my grandfather's time it was a fine, well-kept
+highway, with posthouses every ten miles, though a rare place for
+robbery; but nowadays nobody wants it at all, for nobody comes or
+goes. It will soon be blocked, so the driver says; it will soon be
+quite choked up what with brambles, and rocks, and fallen trees, and
+what not. He was black with rage, for he was obliged to go back as he
+had come, and he said he had been cheated into the job."
+
+Adone listened wearily to the garrulous Ruffo, who emphasised each
+phrase with a blow of his little hammer on a shoe. He had wasted all
+his morning hours, and learned nothing. He felt like a man who is
+lost in a strange and deserted country at night; he could find no
+clue, could see no light. Perhaps if he went to the seaport town,
+which was the Prefecture, he might hear something?
+
+But he had never left the valley of the Edera except for that brief
+time which he had passed under arms in the north. He felt that he had
+no means, no acquaintance, no knowledge, whereby he could penetrate
+the mystery of this scheme. He did not even know the status of the
+promoters, or the scope of their speculation. The Prefecture was
+placed in a port on the Adriatic which had considerable trade to the
+Dalmatian and Greek coasts, but he scarcely knew its name. If he went
+there what could he do or learn? Would the stones speak, or the waves
+tell that which he thirsted to know? What use was the martial blood
+in his veins? He could not strike an invisible foe.
+
+"Don't go to meet trouble half way," said the man Ruffo, meaning
+well. "I may have mistaken the driver. They cannot take hold of a
+river, how should they? Water slips through your fingers. Where it
+was set running in the beginning of the world, there it will go on
+running till the crack of doom. Let them look; let them prate; they
+can't take it."
+
+But Adone's reason would not allow him to be so consoled.
+
+He understood a little of what hydraulic science can compass; he knew
+what canalisation meant, and its assistance to traffic and trade; he
+had seen the waterworks on the Po, on the Adige, on the Mincio; he
+had heard how the Velino had been enslaved for the steel foundry of
+Terni, how the Nerino fed the ironworks of Narni; he had seen the
+Adda captive at Lodi, and the lakes held in bond at Mantua; he had
+read of the water drawn from Monte Amiata; and not very many miles
+off him, in the Abruzzo, was that hapless Fuscino, which had been
+emptied and dried up by rich meddlers of Rome.
+
+He knew also enough of the past to know how water had been forced to
+serve the will and the wants of the Roman Consulate and the Roman
+empire, of how the marble aqueducts had cast the shadow of their
+arches over the land, and how the provinces had been tunnelled and
+bridged and canalised and irrigated, during two thousand years, by
+those whose bones were dust under the Latin soil. He could not wholly
+cheat himself, as these unlettered men could do; he knew that if the
+commerce which has succeeded the Caesars as ruler of the world
+coveted the waters of Edera, the river was lost to the home of its
+birth and to him.
+
+"How shall I tell my mother?" he asked himself as he walked back
+through the fragrant and solitary country. He felt ashamed at his own
+helplessness and ignorance. If courage could have availed anything he
+would not have been wanting; but all that was needed here was a
+worldly and technical knowledge, of which he possessed no more than
+did the trout in the stream.
+
+As he neared his home, pushing his way laboriously through the
+interlaced bracken and heaths which had never been cut for a score of
+years, he saw approaching him the tall, slender form of Don Silverio,
+moving slowly, for the heather was breast high, his little dog
+barking at a startled wood-pigeon.
+
+"They are anxious about you at your house," Don Silverio said with
+some sternness. "Is it well to cause your mother this disquietude?"
+
+"No, it is not well," replied Adone. "But how can I see her and not
+tell her, and how can I tell her this thing?"
+
+"Women to bear trouble are braver than men," said the priest. "They
+have more patience in pain than we. I have said something to her; but
+we need not yet despair. We know nothing of any certainty. Sometimes
+such schemes are abandoned at the last moment because too costly or
+too unremunerative. Sometimes they drag on for half a lifetime; and
+at the end nothing comes of them."
+
+"You have told my mother?"
+
+"I told her what troubles you, and made you leave your work undone.
+The little girl was feeding the cattle."
+
+Adone coloured. He was conscious of the implied rebuke.
+
+"Sir," he said in a low tone, "if this accursed thing comes to pass
+what will become of us? What I said in my haste last night I say in
+cold reason to-day."
+
+"Then you are wrong, and you will turn a calamity into a curse. Men
+often do so."
+
+"It is more than a calamity."
+
+"Perhaps. Would not some other grief be yet worse? If you were
+stricken with blindness?"
+
+"No; I should still hear the river running."
+
+Don Silverio looked at him. He saw by the set, sleepless, reckless
+look on his face that the young man was in no mood to be reached by
+any argument, or to be susceptible to either rebuke or consolation.
+The time might come when he would be so; but that time was far off he
+feared. The evenness, the simplicity, the loneliness of Adone's
+existence, made it open to impressions, and absorbed by them, as busy
+and changeful lives never are; it was like the heather plants around
+them, it would not bear transplanting; its birthplace would be its
+tomb.
+
+"Let us go back to your mother," he said. "Why should you shun her?
+What you feel she feels also. Why leave her alone?"
+
+"I will go home," said Adone.
+
+"Yes, come home. You must see that there is nothing to be done or to
+be learned as yet. When they know anything fresh at San Beda they
+will let me know. The Prior is a man of good faith."
+
+Adone turned on him almost savagely; his eyes were full of sullen
+anger.
+
+"And I am to bear my days like this? Knowing nothing, hearing
+nothing, doing nothing to protect the water that is as dear to me as
+a brother, and the land which is my own? What will the land be
+without the river? You forget, sir, you forget!"
+
+"No, I do not forget," said Don Silverio without offence. "But I ask
+you to hear reason. What can you possibly do? Think you no man has
+been wronged before you? Think you that you alone here will suffer?
+The village will be ruined. Do you feel for yourself alone?"
+
+Adone seemed scarcely to hear. He was like a man in a fever who sees
+one set of images and cannot see anything else.
+
+"Sir," he said suddenly, "why will you not go to Rome?"
+
+"To Rome?" echoed the priest in amazement.
+
+"There alone can the truth of this thing be learned," said Adone. "It
+is to Rome that the promoters of this scheme must carry it; there to
+be permitted or forbidden as the Government chooses. All these things
+are brought about by bribes, by intrigues, by union. Without
+authority from high office they cannot be done. We here do not even
+know who are buying or selling us--"
+
+"No, we do not," said Don Silverio; and he thought, "When the
+cart-horse is bought by the knacker what matter to him the name of
+his purchaser or his price?"
+
+"Sir," said Adone, with passionate entreaty. "Do go to Rome. There
+alone can the truth be learnt. You, a learned man, can find means to
+meet learned people. I would go, I would have gone yesternight, but,
+when I should get there, I know no more than a stray dog where to go
+or from whom to inquire. They would see I am a country fellow. They
+would shut the doors in my face. But you carry respect with you. No
+one would dare to flout you. You could find ways and means to know
+who moves this scheme, how far it is advanced, what chance there is
+of our defeating it. Go, I beseech you, go!"
+
+"My son, you amaze me," said Don Silverio. "I? In Rome? I have not
+stirred out of this district for eighteen years. I am nothing. I have
+no voice. I have no weight. I am a poor rural vicar buried here for
+punishment."
+
+He stopped abruptly, for no complaint of the injustice from which he
+suffered had ever in those eighteen years escaped him.
+
+"Go, go," said Adone. "You carry respect with you. You are learned
+and will know how to find those in power and how to speak to them.
+Go, go! Have pity on all of us, your poor, helpless, menaced people."
+
+Don Silverio was silent.
+
+Was it now his duty to go into the haunts of men, as it had been his
+duty to remain shut up in the walls of Ruscino? The idea appalled
+him.
+
+Accomplished and self-possessed though he was, his fine mind and his
+fine manners had not served wholly to protect him from that rust and
+nervousness which come from the disuse of society and the absence of
+intercourse with equals.
+
+It seemed to him impossible that he could again enter cities, recall
+usages, seek out acquaintances, move in the stir of streets, and wait
+in antechambers.
+
+That was the life of the world; he had done with it, forsworn it
+utterly, both by order of his superiors and by willing
+self-sacrifice. Yet he knew that Adone was right. It was only from
+men of the world and amongst them, it was only in the great cities,
+that it was possible to follow up the clue of such speculations as
+now threatened the vale of Edera.
+
+The young man he knew could not do what was needed, and certainly
+would get no hearing--a peasant of the Abruzzo border, who looked
+like a figure of Giorgione's, and would probably be arrested as an
+anarchist if he were to endeavour to enter any great house or public
+office. But to go to Rome himself! To revisit the desecrated city!
+This seemed to him a pilgrimage impossible except for the holiest
+purpose. He felt as if the very stones of Trastevere would rise up
+and laugh at him, a country priest with the moss and the mould of a
+score of years passed in rural obscurity upon him. Moreover, to
+revisit Rome would be to tear open wounds long healed. There his
+studious youth had been passed, and there his ambitious dreams had
+been dreamed.
+
+"I cannot go to Rome," he said abruptly. "Do not ask me, I cannot go
+to Rome."
+
+"Then I will go," said Adone; "and if in no other way, I will force
+myself into the king's palace and make him hear."
+
+"And his guards will seize you, and his judges will chain you up in a
+solitary cell for life! Do not say such mad things. What could the
+king reply, even if he listened, which he would not do? He would say
+that these things were for ministers and prefects and surveyors and
+engineers to judge of, not for him or you. Be reasonable, Adone; do
+not speak or act like a fool. This is the first grief you have known
+in your life, and you are distraught by it. That is natural enough,
+my poor boy. But you exaggerate the danger. It must be far off as
+yet. It is a mere project."
+
+"And I am to remain here, tilling the land in silence and inaction
+until, one day without notice, I shall see a crowd of labourers at
+work upon the river, and shall see appraisers measuring my fields!
+You know that is how things are done. You know the poor are always
+left in the dark until all is ripe for their robbery. Look you, sir,
+if you go to Rome I will wait in such patience as I can for whatever
+you may learn. But if you do not go, I go, and if I can do no better
+I will take the king by the throat."
+
+"I have a mind to take you by the throat myself," said Don Silverio,
+with an irritation which he found it hard to control. "Well, I will
+think over what you wish, and if I find it possible, if I think it
+justified, if I can afford the means, if I can obtain the permission,
+for such a journey, I will go to Rome; for your sake, for your
+mother's sake. I will let you know my decision later. Let us walk
+homeward. The sun is low. At your house the three women must be
+anxious."
+
+Adone accompanied him in silence through the heather, of which the
+blossoming expanse was reddening in the light of the late afternoon
+until the land looked a ruby ocean. They did not speak again until
+they reached the confines of the Terra Vergine.
+
+Then Don Silverio took the path which went through the pasture to the
+bridge, and Adone turned towards his own dwelling.
+
+"Spare your mother. Speak gently," said the elder man; the younger
+man made a sign of assent and of obedience.
+
+"He will go to Rome," said Adone to himself, and almost he regretted
+that he had urged the journey, for in his own veins the fever of
+unrest and the sting of fierce passions were throbbing, and he panted
+and pined for action. He was the heir of the lords of the river.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Like the cooper Ruffo, Clelia Alba had received the tidings with
+incredulity, though aghast at the mere suggestion.
+
+"It is impossible," she said. She had seen the water there ever since
+she had been a babe in swaddling clothes.
+
+"It is not possible," she said, "that any man could be profane enough
+to alter the bed which heaven had given it."
+
+But she was sorely grieved to see the effect such a fear had upon
+Adone.
+
+"I was afraid it was a woman," she thought; "but this thing, could it
+be true, would be worse than any harlot or adulteress. If they took
+away the river the land would perish. It lives by the river."
+
+"The river is our own as far as we touch it," she said aloud to her
+son; "but it was the earth's before it was ours. To sever water from
+the land it lives in were worse than to snatch a child from its
+mother's womb."
+
+Adone did not tell her that water was no more sacred than land to the
+modern contractor. She would learn that all to soon if the conspiracy
+against the Edera succeeded. But he tried to learn from her what
+legal rights they possessed to the stream: what had his father
+thought? He knew well that his old hereditary claim to the Lordship
+of Ruscino, however capable of proof, would be set aside as fantastic
+and untenable; but their claim to the water through the holding of
+Terra Vergine could surely not be set aside.
+
+"Your father never said aught about the water that I can remember,"
+she answered. "I think he would no more have thought it needful to
+say it was his than to say that you were his son. It is certain we
+are writ down in the district as owners of the ground; we pay taxes
+for it; and the title of the water must be as one with that."
+
+"So say I; at least over what runs through our fields we, alone, have
+any title, and for that title I will fight to the death," said Adone.
+"River rights go with the land through which the river passes."
+
+"But, my son," she said with true wisdom, "your father would never
+have allowed any danger to the water to make him faithless to the
+land. If you let this threat, this dread, turn you away from your
+work; if you let your fears make you neglect your field and your
+olives, and your cattle and your vines, you will do more harm to
+yourself than the worst enemy can do you. To leave a farm to itself
+is to call down the vengeance of heaven. A week's abandonment undoes
+the work of years. I and Gianna and the child do what we can, but we
+are women, and Nerina is young."
+
+"No doubt you speak wisely, mother," replied Adone humbly. "But of
+what use is it to dress and manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera
+be in its sap and at its root? What use is it to till these lands if
+they be doomed to perish from thirst?"
+
+"Do your best," said his mother, "then the fault will not lie with
+you, whatever happen."
+
+The counsel was sound; but to Adone all savour and hope were gone out
+of his labour. When he saw the green gliding water shine through the
+olive branches, and beyond the foliage of the walnut-trees, his arms
+fell nerveless to his side, his throat swelled with sobs, which he
+checked as they rose, but which were only the more bitter for
+that--all the joy and the peace of his day's work were gone.
+
+It was but a small space of it to one whose ancestors had reigned
+over the stream from its rise in the oak woods to its fall into the
+sea; but he thought that no one could dispute or diminish or
+disregard his exclusive possession of the Edera water where it ran
+through his fields. They could not touch that, even if they seized it
+lower down, where it ran through other communes. Were they to take it
+above his land, above the bridge of Ruscino, its bed here would be
+dried up, and his homestead and the village both be ruined. The
+clear, intangible right which he meant to defend at any cost, in any
+manner, was his right to have the river run untouched through his
+fields. The documents which proved the rights of the great extinct
+Seigneury might be useless, but the limited, shrunken right of the
+peasant ownership was as unassailable as his mother's right to the
+three strings of pearls; or so he believed.
+
+The rights of the Lords of Ruscino might be but shadows of far-off
+things, things of tradition, of history, of romance, but the rights
+of the peasant proprietors of the Terra Vergine must, he thought, be
+respected if there were any justice upon earth, for they were plainly
+writ down in the municipal registers of San Beda. To rouse others to
+defend their equal rights in the same way, from the source of the
+Edera to its union with the Adriatic, seemed to him the first effort
+to be made. He was innocent enough to believe that it would suffice
+to prove that its loss would be their ruin to obtain redress at once.
+
+Whilst Don Silverio was still hesitating as to what seemed to him
+this momentous and painful journey to Rome his mind was made up by a
+second letter received from the Superior of the Certosa at San Beda,
+the friend to whom he had confided the task of inquiring as to the
+project for the Edera.
+
+This letter was long, and in Latin. They were two classics, who liked
+thus to refresh themselves and each other with epistles such as St.
+Augustine or Tertullian might have penned. The letter was of elegant
+scholarship, but its contents were unwelcome. It said that the Most
+Honourable the Syndic of San Beda had enjoyed a conference with the
+Prefect of the province, and it had therein transpired that the
+project for the works upon the river Edera had been long well known
+to the Prefect, and that such project was approved by the existing
+Government, and therefore by all the Government officials, as was but
+natural. It was not admitted that the Commune of San Beda had any
+local interest or local right sufficiently strong to oppose the
+project, as such a claim would amount to a monopoly, and no monopoly
+could exist in a district through which a running river partially
+passed, and barely one-fifth of the course of this stream lay through
+that district known as the valley of the Edera. The entire
+Circondario, except the valley, was believed to be in favour of the
+project, which the Prefect informed the Syndic could not be otherwise
+than most favourable to the general interests of the country at
+large.
+
+"Therefore, most honoured and revered friend," wrote the Superior of
+the Cistercians, "his most esteemed worship does not see his way to
+himself suggest opposition to this course in our Town Council, or in
+our Provincial Council, and the Most Worshipful the Assessors do not
+either see theirs; it being, as you know, an equivocal and onerous
+thing for either council to express or suggest in their assembly
+views antagonistic to those of the Prefecture, so that I fear, most
+honoured and reverend friend, it will not be in my power farther to
+press this matter, and I fear also that your parish of Ruscino, being
+isolated and sparsely populated, and its chief area uncultivated,
+will be possessed of but one small voice in this matter, the
+interests of the greater number being always in such a case
+preferred."
+
+Don Silverio read the letter twice, its stately and correct Latinity
+not serving to disguise the mean and harsh fact of its truly modern
+logic. "Because we are few and poor and weak we have no rights!" he
+said bitterly. "Because the water comes from others, and goes to
+others, it is not ours whilst in our land!"
+
+He did not blame his friend at San Beda.
+
+Ecclesiastics existed only on sufferance, and any day the Certosa
+might be closed if its inmates offended the ruling powers. But the
+letter, nevertheless, lay like a stone on his heart. All the
+harshness, the narrowness, the disregard of the interests of the
+weak, the rude, rough, tyrannical pressing onward of the strong to
+their own selfish aims, all the characteristics of the modern world
+seemed to find voice in it and jeer at him.
+
+It was not for the first time in his life that he had pressed against
+the iron gates of interest and formula and oppression, and only
+bruised his breast and torn his hands.
+
+He had a little sum of money put by in case of illness and for his
+burial; that was the only fund on which he could draw to take him to
+Rome and keep him when there, and it was so small that it would be
+soon exhausted. He passed the best part of the night doubting which
+way his duty pointed. He fasted, prayed, and communed with his soul,
+and at length it seemed to him as if a voice from without said to
+him, "Take up your staff, and go." For the journey appalled him, and
+where his inclination pointed he had taught himself to see error. He
+shrank inexpressibly from going into the noise and glare and crowd of
+men; he clung to his solitude as a timid animal to its lair; and
+therefore he felt persuaded that he ought to leave Ruscino on his
+errand, because it was so acutely painful to him.
+
+Whilst he should be gone Adone at least would do nothing rash; would
+of course await the issue of his investigations. Time brings council,
+and time, he hoped, would in this instance befriend him. He had
+already obtained the necessary permission to leave his parish; he
+then asked for a young friend from San Beda to take his place in the
+village; left his little dog to the care of Nerina; took his small
+hoard in a leathern bag strapped to his loins, and went on his way at
+daybreak along the southwest portion of the valley, to cover on foot
+the long distance which lay between him and the nearest place at
+which a public vehicle went twice a week to a railway station; whence
+he could take the train to Terni and so to Rome.
+
+Adone accompanied him the first half of the way, but they said little
+to one another; their hearts were full. Adone could not forget the
+rebuke given to him, and Don Silverio was too wise a man to lean
+heavily on a sore and aching wound, or repeat counsels already given
+and rejected.
+
+At the third milestone he stopped and begged, in a tone which was a
+command, the young man to return home.
+
+"Do not leave your land for me," he said. "Every hour is of gold at
+this season. Go back, my son! I pray that I may bring you peace."
+
+"Give me your blessing," said Adone meekly, and he knelt down in the
+dust of the roadside. His friend gave it; then their hands met in
+silent farewell.
+
+The sun had risen, and the cold clear air was yielding to its rays.
+The young man reluctantly turned back, and left the priest to go
+onward alone, a tall, dark figure in the morning light; the river
+running between acacia thickets and rushes on his right. Before long
+he was forced to leave the course of the stream, and ascend a rugged
+and precipitous road which mounted southward and westward through oak
+woods into the mountains between the Leonessa and Gran Sasso, until
+it reached a shrunken, desolate village, with fine Etruscan and Roman
+remains left to perish, and a miserable hostelry, with the miserable
+diligences starting from it on alternate days, the only remains of
+its former posting activity. There he arrived late in the evening,
+and broke his fast on a basin of bean soup, then rested on a bench,
+for he could not bring himself to enter the filthy bed which was
+alone to be obtained, and spent the following morning examining the
+ancient ruins, for the conveyance did not start until four o'clock in
+the afternoon. When that hour came he made one of the travellers, all
+country folks, who were packed close as pigeons in a crate in the
+ramshackle, noisy, broken-down vehicle, which lumbered on its way
+behind its lean and suffering horses, through woods and hills and
+along mountain passes of a grandeur and a beauty on which the eyes of
+educated travellers rarely looked.
+
+The journey by this conveyance occupied seven hours, and he was
+obliged to wait five more at that village station which was the
+nearest point at which he could meet the train which went from Terni
+to Rome. Only parliamentary trains stop at such obscure places; and
+this one seemed to him slower even than the diligence had been. It
+was crammed with country lads going to the conscription levy in the
+capital: some of them drunk, some of them noisy and quarrelsome, some
+in tears, some silent and sullen, all of them sad company. The dusty,
+stinking, sun-scorched waggons, open one to another, with the stench
+of hot unwashed flesh, and the clouds of dust driven through the
+unglazed windows, seemed to Don Silverio a hell of man's own making,
+and in remembrance his empty quiet room, with its vine-hung window,
+at Ruscino, seemed by comparison a lost heaven.
+
+To think that there were thousands of men who travelled thus, every
+day of every year, in every country, many of them from no obligation
+whatever, but from choice!
+
+"What lunatics, what raving idiots we should look to Plato or to
+Socrates, could they see us!" he thought. Was what is called progress
+anything else except increased insanity in human life?
+
+He leaned back in his corner, and bore the dust in his eyes and his
+throat as best he might, and spoke a few kind words to the boys
+nearest to him, and felt as if every bone in his body was broken as
+the wooden and iron cage shook him from side to side. The train
+stopped finally in that area of bricks and mortar and vulgarity and
+confusion where once stood the Baths of Diocletian. It was late in
+the night when he heard the name of Rome.
+
+No scholar can hear that name without emotion. On him it smote with a
+keen personal pain, awakening innumerable memories, calling from
+their graves innumerable dreams.
+
+He had left it a youth, filled with all the aspirations, the fire,
+the courage, the faith, of a lofty and spiritual temper. He returned
+to it a man aged before his time, worn, weary, crushed, spiritless,
+with no future except death.
+
+He descended from the waggon with the crowd of jaded conscripts and
+mingled with that common and cosmopolitan crowd which now defiles the
+city of the Caesars. The fatigue of his body, and the cramped pain of
+his aching spine, added to the moral and the mental suffering which
+was upon him as he moved a stranger and alone along the new,
+unfamiliar streets where, alone here and there, some giant ruin, some
+stately arch, some marble form of god or prophet, recalled to him the
+Urbs that he had known.
+
+But he remembered the mission on which he came; and he rebuked his
+self-indulgence in mourning for his own broken fate.
+
+"I am a faithless servant and a feeble friend," he thought in
+self-reproach. "Let me not weaken my poor remnant of strength in
+egotism and repining. I come hither for Adone and the Edera. Let me
+think of my errand only; not of myself, nor even of this desecrated
+city."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+It was now the season to plough the reapen fields, and he had always
+taken pleasure in his straight furrows; as straight as though
+measured by a rule on the level lands; and of the skill with which on
+the hilly ground Orlando and Rinaldo moved so skillfully, turning in
+so small a space, answering to every inflection of his voice, taking
+such care not to break a twig of the fruit trees, or bend a shoot of
+the vines, or graze a stem of the olives.
+
+"Good hearts, dear hearts, faithful friends and trusty servants!" he
+murmured to the oxen. He leaned his bare arms on the great
+fawn-coloured flanks of Orlando, and his forehead on his arms, which
+grew wet with hidden tears.
+
+The cattle stood motionless, breathing loudly through their distended
+nostrils, the yokes on their shoulders crinking, their hides
+twitching under the torment of the flies. Nerina, who had been
+washing linen in the Edera, approached through the olives; she
+hesitated a few minutes, then put the linen down off her head on to
+the grass, gathered some plumes of featherfew and ferns, and brushed
+the flies off the necks of the oxen. Adone started, looked up in
+displeasure at being thus surprised, then, seeing the intruder was
+only the little girl, he sat down on the side of the plough, and made
+believe to break his noon-day bread.
+
+"You have no wine," said the child. "Shall I run to the house for a
+flask?"
+
+"No, my dear, no. If I am athirst there is water -- as yet there is
+water!" he murmured bitterly, for the menace of this impending horror
+began to grow on him with the fixity and obsession of a mania.
+
+Nerina continued to fan the cattle and drive off the flies from their
+necks. She looked at him wistfully from behind the figures of the
+stately animals. She was afraid of the sorrow which was in the air.
+No one had told her what the evil was which hung over the Terra
+Vergine; and she never asked questions. The two elder women never
+took her into their confidence on any subject, and she had no
+communication with the few people in Ruscino. She had seen that
+something was wrong, but she could not guess what: something which
+made Madonna Clelia's brows dark, and Gianna's temper bad, and Adone
+himself weary and ill at ease.
+
+Seeing him sitting there, not eating, throwing his bread to some wild
+pigeons which followed the plough, she plucked up courage to speak;
+he was always kind to her, though he noticed her little.
+
+"What is it that ails you all?" she asked. "Tell me, Adone, I am not
+a foolish thing to babble."
+
+He did not answer. What use were words? Deeds were wanted.
+
+"Adone, tell me," she said in a whisper; "what is this that seems to
+lie like a stone on you all? Tell me why Don Silverio has gone away.
+I will never tell again."
+
+There was a pathetic entreaty in the words which touched and roused
+him; there was in it the sympathy which would not criticise or doubt,
+and which is to the sore heart as balm and soothes it by its very
+lack of reason.
+
+He told her; told her the little that he knew, the much that he
+feared; he spent all the force of his emotion in the narrative.
+
+The child leaned against the great form of the ox and listened, not
+interrupting by a word or cry.
+
+She did not rebuke him as Don Silverio had done, or reproach him as
+did his mother; she only listened with a world of comprehension in
+her eyes more eloquent than speech, not attempting to arrest the fury
+of imprecation or the prophecies of vengeance which poured from his
+lips. Hers was that undoubting, undivided, implicit faith which is so
+dear to the wounded pride and impotent strength of a man in trouble
+who is conscious that what he longs to do would not be approved by
+law or sanctioned by religion. That faith spoke in her eyes, in her
+absorbed attention, in the few breathless sentences which escaped
+her; there was also on her youthful face a set, stern anger akin to
+his own.
+
+"Could we not slay these men?" she said in a low, firm voice; she
+came of a mountain race by whom life was esteemed little and revenge
+honour.
+
+"We must not even say such a thing," said Adone bitterly, in whose
+ears the rebuke of Don Silverio still rang. "In these days everything
+is denied us, even speech. If we take our rights we are caged in
+their prisons."
+
+"But what will you do, then?"
+
+"For the moment I wait to learn more. These things are done in the
+dark, or at least in no light that we can see. To kill these men as
+you wish, little one, would do nothing. Others of their kind would
+fill their places. The seekers of gold are like ants. Slay thousands,
+tens of thousands come on; if once the scent of gain be on the wind
+it brings men in crowds from all parts, as the smell of carrion
+brings meat-flies. If they think of seizing the Edera it is because
+men of business will turn it into gold. The Edera gives us our grain,
+our fruits, our health, our life; but if it will give money to the
+foreigner, the foreigner will take it as he would take the stars and
+coin them if he could. The brigand of the hills is caged or shot; the
+brigand of the banks is allowed to fatten and die in the odour of
+success. There are two measures."
+
+Nerina failed to understand, but her own mind was busy with what
+seemed to her this monstrous injustice.
+
+"But why do they let them do it? They take and chain the men who rob
+a traveller or a house."
+
+Adone cast his last atom of bread to the birds.
+
+"There are two measures," he answered. "Kill one, you go to the
+galleys for life. Kill half a million, you are a hero in history, and
+get in your own generation titles, and money, and applause."
+
+"Baruffo was a good man and my father's friend," Nerina said,
+following her own thoughts. "Baruffo was in the oak woods always, far
+below us, but he often brought us wine and game at night, and
+sometimes money too. Baruffo was a good man. He was so kind. Twice my
+father aided him to escape. But one night they seized him; there was
+a whole troop of carabineers against him, they took him in a trap,
+they could never have got him else, and I saw him brought down the
+mountain road and I ran and kissed him before they could stop me; and
+he never came back -- they kept him."
+
+"No doubt they kept him," said Adone bitterly. "Baruffo was a peasant
+outlawed; if he had been a banker, or a minister, or a railway
+contractor, he might have gone on thieving all his life, and met only
+praise. They keep poor Baruffo safe in their accursed prisons, but
+they will take care never to keep, or take even for a day,
+law-breakers whose sins are far blacker than his, and whose victims
+are multitudes."
+
+"If Baruffo were here he would help you," said Nerina. "He was such a
+fine strong man and had no fear."
+
+Adone rose and put his hands on the handles of the plough.
+
+"Take up your linen, little one," he said to the girl, "and go home,
+or my mother will be angry with you for wasting time."
+
+Nerina came close to him and her brown dog-like eyes looked up like a
+dog's into his face.
+
+"Tell me what you do, Adone," she said beseechingly, "I will tell no
+one. I was very little when Baruffo came and went to and fro in our
+hut; but I had sense; I never spoke. Only when the guards had him I
+kissed him, because then it did not matter what they knew; there was
+no hope."
+
+"Yes, I will tell you," said Adone. "Maybe I shall end like Baruffo."
+
+Then he called on Orlando and Rinaldo by their names, and they
+lowered their heads and strained at their collars, and with a mighty
+wrench of their loins and shoulders they forced the share through the
+heavy earth.
+
+Nerina stood still and looked after him as he passed along under the
+vine-hung trees.
+
+"Baruffo may have done some wrong," she thought, "but Adone, he has
+done none, he is as good as if he were a saint of God, and if he
+should be obliged to do evil it will be no fault of his, but because
+other men are wicked."
+
+Then she put the load of linen on her head, and went along the grassy
+path homeward, and she saw the rosy gladioli, and the golden tansy,
+by which she passed through tears. Yet she was glad because Adone had
+trusted her; and because she now knew as much as the elder women in
+his house, who had put no confidence in her.
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+"I SHALL not write," Don Silverio had said to Adone. "As soon as I
+know anything for certain I shall return. Of that you may be sure."
+
+For he knew that letters took a week or more to find their slow way
+to Ruscino, and he hoped to return in less than that time; having no
+experience of "what hell it is in waiting to abide," and of the
+endless doublings and goings to earth of that fox-like thing, a
+modern speculation; he innocently believed that he would only have to
+ask a question to have it answered.
+
+Day after day Adone mounted to the bell-tower roof, and gazed over
+the country in vain. Day after day the little dog escaped from the
+custody of Nerina, trotted over the bridge, pattered up the street,
+and ran whining into his master's study. Every night the people of
+Ruscino hung up a lantern on a loophole of the belfry, and another on
+the parapet of the bridge, that their pastor might not miss his way
+if he were coming on foot beside the river; and every night Adone
+himself watched on the river bank or by the town wall, sleepless,
+longing for, yet dreading that which he should hear. But more than a
+week passed, and the priest did not return. The anxiety of Adone
+consumed him like fire. He strove to dull his anxiety by incessant
+work, but it was too acute to be soothed by physical fatigue. He
+counted the days and the hours, and he could not sleep. The women
+watched him in fear and silence; they dared ask nothing, lest they
+should wound him. Only Nerina whispered to him once or twice in the
+fields, "Where is he gone? When will he come back?"
+
+"God knows!" he answered. Every evening that he saw the sun set
+beyond the purple line of the mountains which were heaped in their
+masses of marble and snow between him and the Patrimonium Petrus, he
+felt as if he could never bear another night. He could hear the
+clear, fresh sound of the running river, and it seemed to him like
+the voice of some friend crying aloud to him in peril. Whilst these
+summer days and nights sped away what was being done to save it? He
+felt like a coward; like one who stands by and sees a comrade
+murdered. In his solitude and apprehension he began to lose all
+self-control; he imagined impossible things; he began to see in his
+waking dreams, as in a nightmare, the dead body of Don Silverio lying
+with a knife in its breast in some cut-throat alley of Rome. For two
+weeks passed, and there was no sign of his return, and no message
+from him.
+
+The poor people of Ruscino also were troubled. Their vicar had never
+left them before. They did not love him; he was too unlike them; but
+they honoured him, they believed in him; he was always there in their
+sickness and sorrow; they leaned on his greater strength in all their
+penury and need; and he was poor like them, and stripped himself
+still barer for their sakes.
+
+Through the young friar who had replaced him they had heard something
+of the calamity which threatened to befall them through the Edera. It
+was all dark to them; they could understand nothing. Why others
+should want their river and why they should lose it, or in what
+manner a stream could be turned from its natural course -- all these
+things were to them incomprehensible. In the beginning of the world
+it had been set running there. Who would be impious enough to meddle
+with it?
+
+Whoever tried to do so would be smitten with the vengeance of Heaven.
+Of that they were sure. Nevertheless, to hear the mention of such a
+thing tormented them; and when they opened their doors at dawn they
+looked out in terror lest the water should have been taken away in
+the night.
+
+Their stupidity irritated Adone so greatly that he ceased altogether
+to speak to them of the impending calamity. "They are stocks and
+stones. They have not the sense of sheep nor the courage of goats,"
+he said, with the old scorn which his forefathers had felt for their
+rustic vassals stirring in him.
+
+"I believe that they would dig sand and carry wood for the engineers
+and the craftsmen who would build the dykes!" he said to his mother.
+
+Clelia Alba sighed. "My son, hunger is a hard master; it makes the
+soul faint, the heart hard, the belly ravenous. We have never known
+it. We cannot judge those who know nothing else."
+
+"Even hunger need not make one vile," he answered.
+
+But he did not disclose all his thoughts to his mother.
+
+He was so intolerant of these poor people of Ruscino because he
+foresaw the hopelessness of forging their weak tempers into the metal
+necessary for resistance. As well might he hope to change a
+sword-rush of the river into a steel sabre for combat. Masaniello,
+Rienzi, Garibaldi, had roused the peasantry and led them against
+their foes; but the people they dealt with must, he thought, have
+been made of different stuff than these timorous villagers, who could
+not even be make to comprehend the magnitude of the wrong which was
+plotted against them.
+
+"Tell them," he said to old Trizio: "tell them their wells will run
+dry; their fish will rot on the dry bed of what was once the river;
+their canes, their reeds and rushes, their osiers, will all fail
+them; when they shall go out into their fields nothing which they sow
+or plant will grow, because the land will be cracked and parched;
+there will be no longer the runlets and rivulets to water the soil;
+birds will die of thirst, and thousands of little river creatures
+will be putrid carcasses in the sun; for the Edera, which is life and
+joy and health to this part of the country, will be carried far away,
+imprisoned in brick walls, drawn under ground, forced to labour like
+a slave, put to vile uses, soiled and degraded. Cannot you tell them
+this, and make them see?"
+
+The old man shook his white head. "They would never believe. It is
+too hard for them. Where the river runs, there it will always be. So
+they think."
+
+"They are dolts, they are mules, they are swine!" said Adone. "Nay,
+may the poor beasts forgive me! The beasts cannot help themselves,
+but men can if they choose."
+
+"Humph!" said Trizio doubtfully. "My lad, you have not seen men shot
+down by the hundred. I have -- long ago, long ago."
+
+"There is no chance of their being shot," he said with contempt,
+almost with regret. "All that is wanted of them are common sense,
+union, protestation, comprehension of their rights."
+
+"Aye, you all begin with that," said the old Garabaldino. "But, my
+lad, you do not end there, for it is just those things which are your
+right which those above you will never hear of; and then up come the
+cannon thundering, and when the smoke clears away there are your dead
+-- and that is all you get."
+
+The voice of the old soldier was thin and cracked and feeble, but it
+had a sound in it which chilled the hot blood of his hearer.
+
+Yet surely this was no revolutionary question, no socialistic theory,
+no new alarming demand; it was only a claim old as the hills, only a
+resolve to keep what the formation of the earth had given to this
+province.
+
+As well blame a father for claiming his own child as blame him and
+his neighbours for claiming their own river!
+
+They were tranquil and docile people, poor and patient, paying what
+they were told to pay, letting the fiscal wolf gnaw and glut as it
+chose unopposed, not loving their rulers indeed, but never moving or
+speaking against them, accepting the snarl, the worry, the theft, the
+greed, the malice of the State without questioning.
+
+Were they to stand by and see their river ruined, and do nothing, as
+the helpless fishermen of Fuscino have accepted the ruin of their
+lake?
+
+To all young men of courage and sensibility and enthusiasm the
+vindication of a clear right seems an act so simple that it is only
+through long and painful experience that they realize that there is
+nothing under the sun which is so hard to compass, or which is met by
+such strong antagonism. To Adone, whose nature was unspoilt by modern
+influences, and whose world was comprised in the fields and moors
+around Ruscino, it seemed incredible that such a title as that of his
+native soil to the water of Edera could be made clear to those in
+power without instant ratification of it.
+
+"Whether you do aught or naught it comes to the same thing," said the
+old Garibaldino, who was wiser. "We did much; we spent our blood like
+water, and what good has it been? For one devil we drove out before
+our muskets, a thousand worse devils have entered since."
+
+"It is different," said Adone, impatient. "All we have to do is to
+keep out the stranger. You had to drive him out. No politics or
+doctrines come into our cause; all we mean, all we want, is to be
+left alone, to remain as we are. That is all. It is simple and just."
+
+"Aye, it is simple; aye, it is just," said the old man; but he sucked
+his pipe-stem grimly: he had never seen these arguments prosper; and
+in his own youth he had cherished such mistakes himself, to his own
+hindrance.
+
+Had he not sung in those glorious days of hope and faith,
+
+    "Fratelli d'Italia!
+    L'Italia s'e desta!"
+
+In the night which followed on the fourteenth day of the Vicar's
+absence, Adone, unable either to rest or to labour, went into his
+cattle-stalls and fed and watered all the animals, then he crossed
+the river and went along its north bank by the same path which he had
+followed with Don Silverio two weeks earlier. He had passed to and
+fro that path often since his friend's departure, for by it the
+priest must return; there was no other way to and from the west.
+
+Rain had fallen in the night, and the river was buoyant, and the
+grass sparkled, the mountains were of sapphire blue, and above the
+shallows clouds of flies and gnats were fluttering, waterlilies were
+blossoming where the water was still, and in the marshes buffaloes
+pushed their dark forms amongst the nymphoea and the nuphar.
+
+He had no longer any eyes to see these things; he only strained his
+sight to catch the first glimpse of a tired traveler. The landscape
+here was level for many miles of moor and pasture and a human form
+approaching could be seen from a great distance. It was such a dawn
+as he had used to love beyond all other blessings of nature; but now
+the buffaloes in the pools and swamps were not more blind to its
+charm than he.
+
+The sun rose behind him out of the unseen Adrian waves, and a rosy
+light spread itself over the earth; and at that moment he saw afar
+off a dark form moving slowly. With a loud cry he sprang forward and
+ran with the fleetness of a colt the hundred yards which were between
+him and that familiar figure.
+
+"My son! my dear son!" cried Don Silverio, as Adone reached him and
+fell on his knees on the scorched turf.
+
+"At last!" he murmured, choked with joy and fear. "Oh, where have you
+been? We are half dead, your people and I. What tidings do you bring?
+What comfort?"
+
+"Rise up, and remember that you are a man," said Don Silverio; and
+the youth, gazing upwards keenly into his face, suddenly lost all
+hope, seeing no ray of hope on that weary countenance.
+
+"You cannot save us?" he cried, with a scream like a wounded hare's.
+
+"I cannot, my dear son," answered Don Silverio.
+
+Adone dropped backward as if a bullet had struck him; his head smote
+the dry ground; he had lost consciousness, his face was livid.
+
+Don Silverio raised him and dragged him into the shade of a bay-tree
+and dashed water on him from the river. In a few minutes he was
+roused and again conscious, but on his features there was a dazed,
+stunned look.
+
+"You cannot save us?" he repeated.
+
+"Neither you nor I have millions," said Don Silverio with bitterness.
+"It is with no other weapon that men can fight successfully now."
+
+Adone had risen to his feet; he was pale as a corpse, only the blood
+was set in his forehead.
+
+"Is it true, then?" he muttered. "Do they mean to come here?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who are they? Jews?"
+
+"Jews and Gentiles. There is no difference between those races now;
+they have a common Credo -- greed; they adore one Jehovah -- gold. My
+boy, I am very tired, and you are ill. Let us get home as quickly as
+we can."
+
+"I am not ill. It was nothing. It is passed. Tell me the worst."
+
+"The worst, in a work, is that a foreign company, already established
+for several years in this country, has obtained a faculty to turn
+this water out if its course and use it as the motive power of an
+electric railway and of an acetylene manufactory, and of other
+enterprises."
+
+"And this cannot be undone?"
+
+"I fear not; they are rich and powerful. What are we? Let me get
+home. There you shall hear all, and judge."
+
+Adone asked and said no more. He turned and went backward. His steps
+were slow and unsteady, his head was hung down. The dry, hot air was
+like fire around them; the sun, though still low, darted fierce rays
+upon them, like spears thrown with a sure aim. He had not known how
+much and how strongly he had hoped until now that he heard that there
+was no hope left.
+
+Don Silverio, though he did not speak of himself, was faint with
+fatigue; the return journey had tried him more cruelly than the
+first, since on his way to Rome he had been sustained by the hope to
+find the project abandoned, or at the least uncertain. He had spent
+all his scanty earnings, so hardly and tediously collected through a
+score of years, and he had brought back to his poor people, and to
+the youth he loved, nothing except the confirmation of their worst
+fears. It was with difficulty that he could drag his aching feet over
+the burn grass back to his parish.
+
+When they reached the bridge they were on the village side of the
+stream. Adone, with an effort, raised himself from the trance into
+which he had fallen.
+
+"Forgive me, sir; you are overtired, you must rest. I will come to
+you later."
+
+"No, no," said Don Silverio quickly, for he thought the youth in no
+state to be alone. "I will wash and take a cup of coffee, then I will
+tell you all. Wait in my book-room."
+
+They went together to his house. There was no one in the street or on
+the walls except some children gathering dandelion leaves in the
+ditch. They reached the priest's house unobserved; only the little
+dog, who was making his diurnal search there, rushed out of the
+entrance in a frenzy of rapture.
+
+"Poor little man! Dear Signorino!" murmured Don Silverio, and he took
+the little creature in his arms. Then he opened the door of his
+study. "Wait there," he said to Adone. "I will soon come downstairs.
+I will only wash off the dust of this journey."
+
+Adone obeyed.
+
+The room was dusky, cool, silent; he sat down in it and waited; he
+could hear the loud, uneven beating of his own heart in the
+stillness.
+
+As he felt now, so, he thought, must feel men who have heard their
+own death-sentence, and are thrust alone into a cell.
+
+If Don Silverio could do nothing, to whom could he turn?
+
+Could he induce the people to rise? It would be their ruin as well as
+his, this rape of the river. Would they bear it as they bore
+taxation, neglect, conscription, hunger?
+
+It was not half an hour, although it seemed to him half a day, which
+passed before Don Silverio came down the stone stair, his little dog
+running and leaping about him. He seated himself before Adone, by the
+shuttered window, through which, by chinks and holes in the wood,
+there came rays of light and tendrils of vine.
+
+Then detail by detail, with lucidity and brevity, he narrated all he
+had heard and done in Rome, and which it was exceeding hard to bring
+home to the comprehension of a mind wholly ignorant of such things.
+
+"When I reached Rome," he explained, "I was for some days in despair.
+The deputy of San Beda was not at the Chamber. He was in Sicily.
+Another deputy, a friend of the Prior at San Beda, to whom I had a
+letter, was very ill with typhoid fever. I knew not where to turn. I
+could not knock at the doors of strangers without credentials. Then I
+remembered that one with whom I had been friends, great friends, when
+we were both seminarists, had become a great man at the Vaticano. It
+was scarcely possible that he, in his great elevation, would
+recollect one unseen for a quarter of a century. But I took courage
+and sent in my name. Imagine my surprise and emotion when I was
+admitted at once to his presence, and was received by him with the
+uttermost kindness. He assisted me in every way. He could not of
+course move ostensibly in a matter of the government, himself, but he
+gave me letters to those who could obtain me the information and the
+interviews which I desired. He was goodness itself, and through him I
+was even received by his Holiness. But from all those political and
+financial people whom I saw I learned but the same thing. The matter
+is far advanced, is beyond any alteration. The company is formed. The
+concurrence of parliament is not to be, but has long been, given. The
+ministry favours the project. They all repeated to me the same
+formula: public works are to the public interest. They babbled
+commonplaces. They spoke of great advantages to the province. I
+pleaded as forcibly as I could in the interests of this valley, and I
+opposed fact to formula. But my facts were not those which they
+wanted; and they told me, politely but unmistakably, that a churchman
+should not seek to interfere with civil matters. The promoters are
+masters of the position. They are all of accord: the foreign bankers,
+the Italian bankers; the foreign engineers, the Italian engineers;
+the Technical office, the President of Council, the dicastero of
+Hygiene, of Agriculture, of Public Works, all of them. Our poor
+little valley seems to them a desirable prey; they have seized it,
+they will keep it. They were all courteous enough. They are polite,
+and even unwilling to cause what they call unnecessary friction. But
+they will not give an inch. Their talons are in our flesh as an
+eagle's in a lamb's. One thinks fondly that what a man possesses is
+his own, be it land, house, stream--what not! But we mistake. There
+is a thing stronger, higher, more powerful than any poor title of
+property acquired by heritage, by purchase, or by labour. It is what
+they call expropriation. You think the Edera cannot be touched: it
+can be expropriated. You think the Terra Vergine cannot be touched:
+it can be expropriated. Against expropriation no rights can stand. It
+is the concentration and crystallisation of Theft legitamised by
+Government; that is by Force. A vagrant may not take a sheaf of your
+wheat, a fowl from your hen-house: if he do so, the law protects you
+and punishes him. A syndicate of rich men, of powerful men, may take
+the whole of your land, and the State will compel you to accept any
+arbitrary price which it may choose to put upon your loss. According
+as you are rich or poor yourself, so great or so small will be the
+amount awarded to you. All the sub-prefects, all the syndics, all the
+officials in this province, will be richly rewarded; the people
+defrauded of the soil and the river will get what may be given them
+by an enforced valuation. I have conversed with all kinds and
+conditions of men; and I have heard only one statement in the mouths
+of all: the matter is beyond all alteration. There is money in it;
+the men whose trade is money will not let it go. My son, my dearest
+son, be calm, be prudent. Violence can only injure yourself, and it
+can save nothing."
+
+He had for the moment spoken as he had been speaking for the last two
+weeks to men of education and of the world.
+
+He was recalled to the fact that his present auditor did not reason,
+did not comprehend, only felt, and was drunk with his own force of
+feeling. The look on Adone's face appalled him.
+
+The youth seemed almost to have no intelligence left, almost as if
+all which had been said to him had reached neither his ear nor his
+brain.
+
+Don Silverio had been in the world of men, and unconsciously he had
+adopted their phraseology and their manner. To Adone, who had
+expected some miracle, some rescue almost archangelic, some promise
+of immediate and divine interposition, these calm and rational
+statements conveyed scarcely any sense, so terrible was the
+destruction of his hopes. All the trust and candour and sweetness of
+his nature turned to gall.
+
+He listened, a sullen, savage darkness stealing over his countenance.
+
+"And our rights? Theirs? -- mine?" he said as Don Silverio paused.
+
+"For all rights taken away they will give legal compensation."
+
+"You dare repeat that, sir?"
+
+Don Silverio controlled his indignation with difficulty.
+
+"I dare do whatever I deem right to do. You should know that by this
+time."
+
+"You think this right?"
+
+"I think it right to repeat exactly what has been said to me. I do
+not of necessity approve because I repeat."
+
+"You know no compensation is possible!"
+
+"Morally, none. I speak of but what the law allows."
+
+"The law of pirates, of cut-throats!"
+
+"The law of the State, alas!"
+
+Adone laughed. His hearer had heard such laughter as that in
+madhouses.
+
+"The State kills a soldier, and gives his family a hundred francs!
+That is the compensation of the State. If they emptied their
+treasuries, could they give the soldier back his life? If they
+emptied their treasuries, could they give us back what they will take
+from us?"
+
+"My dear son, do not doubt my sympathy. All my heart is with you. But
+what can be done? Can a poor village, a poor commune, struggle with
+any chance of success against a rich company and a government? Can a
+stalk of wheat resist the sickle? Can an ear of wheat resist the
+threshing-flail? I have told you the story of Don Quixote della
+Mancha. Would you fight the empty air like him?"
+
+Adone did not reply.
+
+His beautiful face grew moody, dark, fierce; in his eyes flamed
+passions which had no voice upon his lips; his white teeth ground
+against one another.
+
+"Believe me, Adone," said his friend, "we are in evil days, when men
+babble of liberty, and are so intent on the mere empty sound of their
+lips that they perceive not the fetters on their wrists and feet.
+There was never any time when there was so little freedom and so
+little justice as in ours. Two gigantic dominions now rule the human
+race; they are the armies and the moneymakers. Science serves them
+turn by turn, and receives from each its wage. The historian Mommsen
+has written that we are probably inferior both in intelligence and in
+humanity, in prosperity and in civilisation, at the close of this
+century to what the human race was under Severus Antonius; and it is
+true."
+
+Adone did not seem to hear. What were these abstract reasonings to
+him? All he cared for were his river and his fields.
+
+"I sought for an old friend of mine in Rome," said Don Silverio,
+endeavouring to gain his attention and divert his thought, "one
+Pamfilio Scoria. He was a learned scholar; he had possessed a small
+competence and a house of his own, small too, but of admirable
+architecture, a Quattrocentisto house. I could not find this house in
+Rome. After long search I learned that it had been pulled down to
+make a new street. Pamfilio Scoria had in vain tried to preserve his
+rights. The city had turned him out and taken his property, paying
+what it chose. His grief was so great to see it destroyed, and to be
+turned adrift with his books and manuscripts, that he fell ill and
+died not long afterwards. On the site of the house there is a
+drinking-place kept by Germans; a street railway runs before it. This
+kind of theft, of pillage, takes place every week. It is masked as
+public utility. We are not alone sufferers from such a crime."
+
+Adone was still silent.
+
+His thoughts were not such as he could utter aloud in the priest's
+presence; and he heard nothing that was said; he heard only little
+Nerina's voice saying: "Could we not kill these men?" That flutelike
+whisper seemed to him to sigh with the very voice of the river
+itself.
+
+Don Silverio rose, his patience, great as it was, exhausted.
+
+"My son, as you do not give ear to me it is useless for me to speak.
+I must go to my office. The friar from San Beda desires to return
+this evening. I have done all I can. I have told you the facts as
+they stand. Take courage, Be peaceable for your mother's sake and
+restrain yourself for your own. It is a frightful calamity which
+hangs over us all. But it is our duty to meet it like men."
+
+"Like men!" muttered Adone as he rose to his feet; had not the child
+from the Abruzzo rocks a better sense of men's duty than this priest
+so calm and wise?
+
+"Men resist," he said very low.
+
+"Men resist," repeated Don Silverio. "They resist when their
+resistance serves any purpose, but when it can only serve to crush
+them uselessly under a mass of iron they are not men if they resist,
+but madmen."
+
+"Farewell, sir," said Adone.
+
+And with an obeisance he went out of the chamber.
+
+"Poor boy! Poor, passionate, dear youth!" thought Don Silverio as the
+door closed. "He thinks me cold and without emotion; how little he
+knows! He cannot suffer as I suffer for him and for my poor wretched
+people. What will they do when they shall know? They will mourn like
+starved sheep bleating in a field of stones, and I, their shepherd,
+shall not have a blade of grass wherewith to comfort them!"
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Adone's sight was troubled as soon as he passed out of the dusky room
+into the blaze of noonday sunshine. His eyes seemed filled with
+blood. His brain was dizzy. That which had been his sheet-anchor in
+all doubts and contrition, his faith in and his reverence for Don
+Silverio, availed him nothing now. A blind sympathy with his most
+violent instincts was the only thing which could now content or
+console him.
+
+He was in that state to which all counsels of moderation appear but
+so much treason and unkindness. As he went out of the priest's house
+in that dazzling light, a hand caught his sleeve and that young
+flutelike voice of which he had thought murmured to him --
+
+"Adone! what tidings? What has he told you?"
+
+Nerina, having run across the bridge and up the street after the
+little dog, had seen him and Don Silverio enter, and had waited for
+Adone to come out of the house.
+
+Adone pushed her away.
+
+"Let me be!" he said impatiently. "It is all bad -- bad -- bad. Bad
+as ill-blood. Bad as crime."
+
+She clung to his arm nevertheless.
+
+"Come into the church and tell me. No one cares as I do."
+
+"Poor little soul!"
+
+He let her draw him into the great porch of the church and thence
+into the church itself; it was dark, as it always was, cold as an
+autumn evening, damp even in the canicular heat.
+
+"No one will hear; tell me!" said the child.
+
+He told her.
+
+"And what are you to do?" she asked, her eyes dilated with horror.
+
+"According to him," said Adone bitterly, "I am to be meek and
+helpless as the heifer which goes to the slaughter. Men must not
+resist what the law permits."
+
+Nerina was mute. To dispute what Don Silverio said was like blasphemy
+to her; she honoured him with all her soul, but she loved Adone.
+
+She loved the Edera water too; that fair green rippling water, on
+whose bank she had sat naked under the dock leaves the day the two
+rams had fought. That which was threatened was an unholy, wicked,
+cruel robbery. Was it indeed necessary to yield to it in submission?
+
+She remembered a saying of Baruffo's: "If a man stand up to me I
+leave him some coins in his pocket, some life in his body; but if he
+crouch and cringe I stick him in the throat. He is a craven."
+
+The doctrine of Baruffo seemed to her the more sound. It warmed the
+blood of the little Abruzzo-born maiden to recall it. In the high
+mountains and forests the meeker virtues are not greatly honoured.
+
+She stood by Adone's side, knitting her brows under her auburn
+curling locks, clenching her hands.
+
+"Is there _one_ who does this evil most of all?" she said at length.
+"_One_ we could reach?"
+
+"You are a brave child, Nerina!" said Adone, and his words made her
+proud. "I fear there is a crowd. Such men are like locusts; they come
+in swarms. But the first man who touches the water--"
+
+"Shall sup of it and drown!"
+
+The little girl added the words with a fierce joy in her great bright
+eyes.
+
+"Hush!" said Adone, "and get you homeward, and tell my mother that
+Don Silverio has returned, and that I will come back to my work in a
+little while. Tell her he says there is no hope."
+
+Nerina obeyed him instantly, her bare feet flying over the stones of
+the street. He was left alone in the sombre church, with the great
+winged angels of stone above his head.
+
+He was grateful for its gloom. He shrank from the light of the
+morning. Every drop of blood in his body, and in his brain, and in
+his limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire -- a fire which all the
+waters of the Edera would never quench.
+
+How could they be accused of rebellion or wrong-doing because they
+wanted to keep the water running in the channel which it had made for
+itself in the very beginning of the world?
+
+The Edera was ancient as its neighbours, the Fiumicino which heard
+the voice of Cæsar, or the Marecchia which was bridged by Augustus;
+ancient as the fountain of Arethusa, as the lake of Diana Nemorensis.
+What sacrilege could be more heinous than to chase it from its chosen
+course? No Lucumon of Etruria, or Esarch of Ravenna, or Pope or Rome,
+had ever dared to touch it. Revolutionists! they, who only sought to
+preserve it? The revolutionists were those who with alien hands and
+vampire's greed would seek to disturb its peace.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+All that day the people of Ruscino crowded round the Presbytery.
+
+"What of the Edera water, sir?" they asked him a hundred times in the
+shrill cries of the women, in the rude bellow of the men, in the
+high-pitched, dissonant clamour of angry speakers. And all the day
+his patience and kindness were abused, and his nerves racked and
+strained, in the effort to persuade them that the river which ran
+beneath their walls was no more theirs than the stars which shone
+above it.
+
+It was hopeless to bring home to their intelligence either the
+invalidity of their claim, or the peril which would lie in their
+opposition.
+
+"'Twas there in the beginning of time," they said. "There it must be
+for our children's children."
+
+He talked nonsense, they thought; who should be able to stop a river
+which was for ever running? The Edera water was carried in the womb
+of the Leonessa: Leonessa gave it fresh birth every day.
+
+Yes! thought Don Silverio, as he walked by the river after sunset,
+and watched its bright, impetuous current dash over the stones and
+shingle whilst two kingfishers flashed along its surface. Yes, truly
+Nature would pour it forth every day from her unfailing breast so
+long as man did not do it outrage. But how long would that be? A
+year, two years, three years, at most; then its place would know it
+no more, and its song would be silent. The water-pipet would make its
+nest no more in its sedges, and the blue porphyrion would woo his
+mate no more on its bosom. As one of the rich men in Rome had said to
+him with a cynical smile, "The river will be there always, only it
+will be dry!"
+
+In the gloaming he went and spoke to Adone's mother. She was at her
+spinning-wheel, but her hands moved mechanically; her face was dark
+and her eyelids swollen.
+
+"My friend," he said, as he sat down on the bench beneath the
+rose-tree, "I have brought you ill-tidings."
+
+"It is true then, sir?"
+
+"Alas!"
+
+"I do not believe it. God will not let it be."
+
+"Would that I could think so."
+
+"'Tis you, sir, who should think so, and not I."
+
+"My good Clelia," he said, with some impatience, "it is no use to
+dream dreams. Try and persuade your son to accept the inevitable. My
+words seem harsh. They are not so. But I dare not let you cherish
+your illusions like this; blind yourself to fact, you expect some
+supernatural intercession. They will take your river; they will take
+your lands. Your house will be yours no more. If you do not go
+peaceably they will have you turned out, as if you were a debtor.
+This may take some time, for it will be done with all due legal
+forms, but it will be done. They will pay you and your son some value
+by appraisement, but they will take your land and your house and all
+that is yours and his; I have seen the plans in Rome. Can you think
+that I should invent this to torture you? There will be a process, a
+sentence, an award; the money the law allots to you will be strictly
+paid to you; but you will be driven away from the Terra Vergine.
+Realise this. Try and keep your reason and save your son from
+madness. Surely, where there is great love between two people, and
+bonds of memory and mutual duty, and strong faith, there a home may
+be made anywhere, even over seas?"
+
+Clelia Alba snapped with violence the thread she span. "They have
+talked you over, sir," she said curtly. "When you went away you were
+with us."
+
+"With you!" he echoed. "In heart, in pity, in sympathy, yes; never
+could I be otherwise. But were I to see you struck with lightning,
+should I save you by telling you that lightning did not kill? I did
+not know that the enterprise was as mature as I found it to be when I
+saw the promoters of it in Rome. But I know now that it has been long
+in incubation; you must remember that every bend and ordnance maps;
+every stream, however small, is known to the technical office, and
+the engineers civil and military. I abhor the project. It is to me a
+desecration, an infamy, a robbery; it will ruin the Valdedera from
+every point of view; but we can do nothing; this is what I implore
+you to realise. We are as helpless as one of your fowls when you cut
+its throat. Violence can only hurry your son into the grip of the
+law. His rights are morally as plain as yonder snow on those
+mountains; but because they will buy his rights at what will be
+publicly estimated as a fair price, the law will not allow him to
+consider himself injured. My dear friend, you are a woman of sense
+and foresight; try to see this thing as it is."
+
+"I will hear what Adone says, sir," replied Clelia Alba doggedly. "If
+he bids me burn the house, I shall burn it."
+
+Don Silverio was heart-sick and impatient. What use was it to argue
+with such minds as these? As well might he waste his words on the
+trunks of the olives, on the oxen in their stalls.
+
+They were wronged.
+
+That the wrong done them was masked under specious pretences, and was
+protected by all the plate armour of law and government, made the
+outrage little the worse to them. The brigand from the hills who used
+to harry their cattle and pillage their strong-box looked to them a
+hero, a saint, a Christ, compared to these modern thieves who were
+environed with all the defences and impunity which the law and the
+State could give. When an earth-shock makes the soil under your feet
+quiver, and gape, and mutter, you feel that unnatural forces are
+being hurled against you, you feel that you are the mere sport and
+jest of an unjust deity. This was what they felt now.
+
+"Nay," said Clelia Alba, "if the earth opened, and took us, it would
+be kinder; it would bury us at least under our own rooftree."
+
+What use was it to speak to such people as these of the right of
+expropriation granted by parliament, of the authority of a
+_dicastero_, and of a prefecture, of the sophistries and arguments of
+lawyers, of the adjudication of values, of the appraisement of
+claims? They were wronged: and they came of a race and of a soil in
+which the only fitting redresser of wrong was revenge.
+
+"Mother," cried Adone, "my father would not have given up his land as
+meekly as a sheep yields up her life."
+
+"No," said Clelia Alba; "whether he came from those war-lords of old
+I know not, but he would have fought as they fought."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+The autumn and winter passed without more being heard in the
+Valdedera of the new invasion. The peasantry generally believed that
+such silence was favourable to their wishes; but Don Silverio knew
+that it was otherwise. The promoters of the work did not concern
+themselves with the local population, they dealt with greater folks;
+with those who administered the various communes, and who controlled
+the valuation of the land through which the course of the Edera ran;
+chiefly those well-born persons who constituted the provincial
+council. A great deal of money would change hands, but it was
+intended, by all through whose fingers those heavy sums would pass,
+that as little of the money as possible should find its way to the
+owners of the soil. A public work is like a fat hog; between the
+slaughterers, the salesmen, the middlemen, and the consumers, little
+falls to the original holder of the hog. The peasants of the
+Valdedera were astonished that no one came to treat with them; but
+they did not understand that they dwelt under a paternal government,
+and the first care of a paternal government is to do everything for
+its children which is likely to promise any profit to itself.
+
+The men of business whom Don Silverio had seen in Rome did not
+trouble themselves with the rustic proprietors of either water or
+land; they treated with the great officials of the department, with
+the deputies, the prefects, and sub-prefects, the syndics and
+assessors; so a perfect silence on the question reigned from the rise
+of the river to its mouth, and many of the men said over their
+wood-fires that they had been scared for nothing. The younger men,
+however, and those who were under Adone's influence, were more wary;
+they guessed that the matter was being matured without them; that
+when the hog should be eaten, the smallest and rustiest flitch would
+then be divided amongst them. Agents, such agents as were ministerial
+instruments of these magnates in election time, went amongst the
+scattered people and spoke to them of the great public utility of the
+contemplated works, and made them dispirited and doubtful of the
+value of their holdings, and uncertain of the legality of their
+tenures. But these agents were cautious and chary of promises, for
+they knew that in this district the temper of men was proud and hot
+and revengeful; and they knew also that when these rural owners
+should be brought into the courts to receive their price they would
+be dealt with just as the great men chose. One by one, so that each
+should be unsupported by his neighbours, the men of the valley were
+summoned, now to this town, now to the other, and were deftly argued
+with, and told that what was projected would be their salvation, and
+assured that the delegates who would be sent in their name by their
+provincial council to the capital would defend all their dearest
+interests.
+
+The rich man, the man of business, the man of cities, may receive in
+such transactions compensation, which is greatly to their advantage,
+because traffic is their trade, because to buy and sell, and turn and
+return, and roll the ball of gold so that it grows bigger every hour,
+is their custom and interest. But the poor man, the rustic, the man
+with the one ewe lamb, loses always, whether he assents to the sale
+or has it forced upon him. These people of the valley might have a
+little ready money given them on valuation, but it would be money
+clipped and cropped by the avarice of intermediates until little of
+it would remain, and they would be driven out to begin life anew;
+away from their old rooftree and the fruits of long years of labour.
+
+From far and near men came to Ruscino to take counsel of its vicar;
+his wisdom being esteemed and his intelligence known in the valley
+beyond the confines of his parish: and what advice could he give
+them? He could but tell them that it was useless to kick against the
+pricks. He knew so well the cold, curt, inflexible official answer;
+the empty, vapouring regrets, false, simpering, pharisaical; the
+parrot-phrases of public interests, public considerations, public
+welfare; the smile, the sneer, the self-complacent shrug of those who
+know that only the people whom they profess to serve will suffer. To
+him, as to them, it seemed a monstrous thing to take away the water
+from its natural channel and force the men who lived on it and by it
+to alter all their ways of life and see their birthplace changed into
+a desert in order that aliens might make money. But he could not
+counsel them to resist; no resistance was possible. It was like any
+other tyranny of the State: like the fiscal brutality which sold up a
+poor man's hayrick or clothing because he could not pay the poll-tax.
+If the poor man resisted, if he fired his old fowling-piece, or used
+his knife on the minions of the State, what use was such resistance?
+He went to rot in prison.
+
+His calling, his conscience, his good sense, his obedience to law,
+all alike compelled him to urge on them patience, submission, and
+inaction before the provocation of a great wrong. He dared not even
+let them see one tithe of the sympathy he felt, lest if he did so
+they should draw from it an incentive to illegal action.
+
+The part which he was obliged to take in thus persuading the people
+to be tranquil under injustice estranged him farther and farther from
+Adone Alba, who found it a cowardice and a treachery, although he
+dared not say so in words. Had he retained the coolness of reason the
+youth would have known and acknowledged that in the position of Don
+Silverio no other course would have been possible or decent. But
+reason had long left him, and inaction and impulse alone remained. He
+would not allow that a wrong might be condemned, and yet endured. To
+him all endurance had in it the meanness of condonation.
+
+He ceased to have any faith in his friend and teacher; and gradually
+grew more and more alienated from him; their intimate affection,
+their frequent intercourse, their long walks and evening meeting were
+over; and even as his spiritual director the vicar had no longer
+power over him. Most of his actions and intentions were concealed;
+except in the younger men of the district, who saw as he saw, he had
+now no confidence in any one. The impending loss of the land and the
+water turned all the sweetness of his nature to gall. He thought that
+never in the history of the world had any wrong so black been done.
+He, himself, flung broadcast the fires of burning incitation without
+heeding or caring whither the flames might reach. Riots had been
+successful before this: why not now? He was young enough and innocent
+enough to believe in the divine right of a just cause. If that were
+denied, what remained to the weak?
+
+If he could, he would have set the valley in flames from one end to
+the other rather than have allowed the foreigners to seize it. Had
+not his forefather perished in fire on yonder hill rather than cede
+to the Borgia?
+
+Evening after evening he looked at the sun setting behind the Rocca
+and felt the black rage in him gnaw at his heart like a vulture.
+
+They would offer him money for this dear earth, for this fair,
+beloved stream! -- the mere thought choked him as a man who loved his
+wife would be choked at the though of her dishonoured sale.
+
+Some were half persuaded that it would be a fine thing to get some
+crisp banknotes in exchange for waste ground which yielded little, or
+a cabin which was falling to pieces, or a strip of woodland which
+gave them fuel, but not much more. But the majority were angry,
+irreconcilable, furious to lose the water, full of their wrongs.
+These were glad to find Adone Alba a spokesman and a leader: they
+were tow which caught fire at his torch. They comprehended little,
+but they knew that they were wronged; and they agreed with him that
+the labourers who should come from over the border to meddle with
+them should be made to rue it bitterly.
+
+The Italian goes over seas, indeed; huddled under the hatches of
+emigrant ships; miserable, starved, confined; unable to move, scarce
+able to breathe, like the unhappy beasts carried with him. But he
+never goes willingly; he never wrenches himself from the soil without
+torn nerves and aching heart; if he lives and makes a little money in
+exile he comes back to the shadow of the village church, to the sound
+of the village bell which he knew in his boyhood, to walk in the
+lanes where he threw his wooden quoit as a lad, and to play dominoes
+under the green bough of the winehouse where as a child he used to
+watch his elders and envy them.
+
+Most of these people dwelling on the Edera water had not been five
+miles away from the river in all their lives. The moorland birds and
+beasts went farther afield than they. They had no interest in what
+was beyond their own freehold; they did not even know or care whither
+the water went, or whence it came. Where it was, they owned it. That
+was enough for them.
+
+"Sir, what is it Adone does?" said Clelia Alba, one dusky and stormy
+eve after vespers. "At nightfall out he goes; and never a word to me,
+only 'Your blessing, mother,' he says, as if he might lose his life
+where he goes. I thought at first it was some love matter, for he is
+young; but it cannot be that, for he is too serious, and he goes
+fully armed, with his father's pistols in his belt and his own long
+dagger in his stocking. True, they go so to a love tryst, if it be a
+dangerous one; if the woman be wedded; only I think it is not that,
+for men in love are different. I think that he broods over some act."
+
+"Neither you nor I can do aught. He is of age to judge for himself,"
+said Don Silverio; "but, like you, I do not think a woman is the
+cause of his absence."
+
+"Can you not speak to him, sir?"
+
+"I have spoken. It is useless. He is moved by a motive stronger than
+any argument we can use. In a word, good Clelia, this coming seizure
+of the water is suffering so great to him that he loses his reason.
+He is trying to make the men of the commune see as he sees. He wants
+to rouse them, to arm them. He might as well set the calves in your
+stalls to butt the mountain granite."
+
+"Maybe, sir," said Clelia Alba, unwillingly; but her eye gleamed, and
+her stern, proud face grew harder. "But he has the right to do it if
+he can. If they touch the water they are thieves, worse than those
+who came down from the hills in the years of my girlhood."
+
+"You would encourage him in insurrection, then?"
+
+"Nay, I would not do that; but neither would I blame him. Every man
+has a right to defend his own. Neither his father nor mine, sir, were
+cowards."
+
+"This is no question of cowardice. It is a question of common sense.
+A few country lads cannot oppose a government. With what weapons can
+they do so? Courage I honour; without it all active virtues are
+supine; but it is not courage to attempt the impossible, to lead the
+ignorant to death -- or worse."
+
+"Of that my son must judge, sir," said Adone's mother, inflexible to
+argument. "I shall not set myself against him. He is master now. If
+he bid me fire the place I shall do it. For four-and-twenty years he
+obeyed me like a little child; never a murmur, never a frown. Now he
+is his own master, and master of the land. I shall do as he tells me.
+It is his turn now, and he is no fool, sir, Adone."
+
+"He is no fool; no. But he is beside himself. He is incapable of
+judgment. His blood is on fire and fires his brain."
+
+"I think not, sir. He is quiet. He speaks little"
+
+"Because he meditates what will not bear speech. Were he violent I
+should be less alarmed. He shuns me -- me -- his oldest friend."
+
+"Because no doubt, sir, he feels you are against him."
+
+"Against him! How can I, being what I am, be otherwise? Could you
+expect me to foment insurrection, and what less than that can
+opposition such as he intends become?"
+
+"You speak as you feel bound to speak, sir, no doubt."
+
+"But think of the end? Must not every action be weighed and
+considered and judgment passed on it by what will be its issue? No
+rising of our poor people can effect anything except their own
+destruction. It is only a demagogue who would urge them on to it.
+Adone is not a demagogue. He is a generous youth frantic from sorrow,
+but helpless. Can you not see that?"
+
+"I do not see that he is helpless," said his mother with obstinacy.
+"The thing that are about to do us is unjust. I would load a gun
+myself against them, and if money be what is wanted I would give
+Adone my pearls. He asks me for nothing, but when he does I will
+strip myself to my shift to aid him."
+
+"It is a terrible madness!" cried Don Silverio. "What can your
+fowling-piece or your necklace do against all the force these
+speculators and contractors will employ? It is a great, a heinous
+wrong which will be done to you; that no one can feel more strongly
+than I. But there are wrongs to which we must submit when we are
+weak; and, my good Clelia, against this we poor folks in the Vale of
+Edera are as weak as the teal in the marshes against the swivel guns
+of the sportsmen's punts."
+
+But he argued in vain; logic and persuasion are alike useless when
+opposed to the rock of ignorance and obstinacy. She held him in deep
+reverence; she brought her conscience to his judgment; she thought
+him beyond ordinary humanity: but when he endeavoured to persuade her
+that her son was wrong he failed.
+
+"Sir, you know that this crime against the river will ruin us," she
+said doggedly. "Why then should you try to tie our hands? I do not
+know what Adone does; his mind is hid from me, but if, as you say, he
+wants a rising of our people, it is natural and just."
+
+When the mind of the peasant -- man or woman -- be made up in its
+stubbornness, all learning, wisdom, experience, even fact, speak in
+vain; it opposes to all proofs the passive resistance of a dogged
+incredulity: to reason with it is as useless as to quarry stone with
+a razor.
+
+Many and many a time had he given up in exhaustion and nausea his
+endeavours to convince the rural mind of some simple fact, some clear
+cause, some elementary principle. He knew that Clelia Alba would
+never believe in the exile which would be her certain fate until the
+armed and liveried creatures of the State should drive her from her
+home by order of the State. He had seen in Rome that there was no
+possible chance of opposing this enterprise against the Edera water.
+It had been decided on by men of money who had the ear of ministers,
+the precedence in ante-chambers, the means of success in political
+departments and in commercial centres. A few scattered provincial
+owners of land and labourers on land might as well try to oppose
+these men as the meek steinbok in the mountain solitudes to escape
+the expanding bullet of a prince's rifle. Yet he also saw how
+impossible it was to expect a young man like Adone, with his lineage,
+his temperament, his courage, and his mingling of ignorance and
+knowledge, to accept the inevitable without combat. As well might he
+be bidden to accept dishonour.
+
+The remorse in his soul was keen, inasmuch as without him Adone would
+never have known of his descent from the lords of Ruscino, and never,
+probably, have acquired that "little learning" which a poet of the
+north has said is a dangerous thing.
+
+"Better," thought Don Silverio, with tormenting self-reproach,
+"better have left him to his plough, to his scythe, to his
+reaping-hook; better have left him in ignorance of the meaning of art
+and of study; better have left him a mere peasant to beget peasants
+like himself. Then he would have suffered less, and might possibly
+have taken peaceably such compensation as the law would have allowed
+him for the loss to his land, and have gone away to the West, as so
+many go, leaving the soil they were born on to pass out of culture."
+
+Would Adone ever have done that? No; he would not; he was wedded to
+the soil like the heaths that grew out of it. He might be violently
+dragged away, but he would never live elsewhere; his heart had struck
+its roots too deeply into the earth which nurtured him.
+
+"Why did you tell him of all the great men that lived?" Clelia Alba
+had often said to him. "Why did you fill his soul with that hunger
+which no bread that is baked can content? We, who work to live, have
+no time to do aught except work, and sleep awhile to get strength for
+more work; and so on, always the same, until age ties knots in our
+sinews, and makes our blood thin and slow. What use is it to open
+gates to him which he must never pass, to make his mind a tangled
+skein that can never be undone? When you work hard you want to rest
+in your resting hours, not to dream. Dreaming is no rest. He is
+always dreaming, and now he dreams of blood and fire."
+
+Don Silverio's heart was with them, and by all the obligations of his
+calling was forced to be against them. He was of a militant temper;
+he would gladly have led them into action as did the martial priests
+of old; but his sense, his duty, his conscience, all forbade him to
+even show them such encouragement as would lie in sympathy. Had he
+been rich he would have taken their cause into the tribunals and
+contested this measure inch by inch, however hopelessly. But who
+would plead for a poor parish, for a penniless priest? What payment
+could he offer, he who could scarcely find the coins to fill his
+salt-box or to mend his surplice?
+
+A great anxiety consumed him. He saw no way out of this calamity. The
+people were wronged, grossly wronged, but how could they right that
+wrong? Bloodshed would not alter it, or even cure it. What was
+theirs, and the earth's, was to be taken from them; and how were they
+to be persuaded that to defend their own would be a crime.
+
+"There is nothing, then, but for the people to lie down and let the
+artillery roll over them!" said Adone once, with bitter emphasis.
+
+"And the drivers and the gunners are their own brothers, sons,
+nephews, who will not check their gallop an instant for that fact;
+for the worst thing about force is that it makes its human
+instruments mere machines like the guns which they manoeuver," thought
+Don Silverio, as he answered aloud: "No; I fear there will be nothing
+else for them to do under any tyranny, until all the nations of the
+earth shall cease to send their children to be made the janissaries
+of the State. No alteration of existing dominions will be possible so
+long as the Armies exist."
+
+Adone was silent; convinced against his will, and therefore convinced
+without effect or adhesion.
+
+He dared not tell his friend of the passionate propaganda which he
+had begun up and down the course of the Edera, striving to make these
+stocks and stones stir, striving to make the blind see, the deaf
+hear, the infirm rise and leap.
+
+"Let us go and make music," said the priest at last. "That will not
+harm any one, and will do our own souls good. It is long since I
+heard your voice."
+
+"It will be longer," thought Adone, as he answered: "Excuse me, sir;
+I cannot think of any other thing than this great evil which hangs
+over us. There is not one of our country people who does not curse
+the scheme. They are frightened and stupid, but they are angry and
+miserable. Those who are their spokesmen, or who ought to be, do not
+say what they wish, do not care what they wish, do not ask what they
+wish. They are the sons of the soil, but they count for nothing. If
+they met to try and do anything for themselves, guards -- soldiery --
+would come from a distance, they say, and break up the meetings, and
+carry those who should speak away to some prison. The Government
+approves the theft of the water: that is to be enough."
+
+"Yet public meeting has been a right of the people on the Latin soil
+ever since the Cæsars."
+
+"What matter right, what matter wrong? No one heeds either."
+
+"We must help ourselves."
+
+He spoke sullenly and under his breath. He did not dare to say more
+clearly what was in his thoughts.
+
+"By brute force?" said Don Silverio. "That were madness. What would
+be the number of the able-bodied men of all three communes? Let us
+say two thousand; that is over the mark. What weapons would they
+have? Old muskets, old fowling-pieces, and not many of those; their
+scythes, their axes, their sticks. A single battalion would cut them
+down as you mow grass. You have not seen rioters dispersed by trained
+troops. I have. I have seen even twenty carabineers gallop down a
+street full of armed citizens, the carabineers shooting right and
+left without selection; and the street, before they had ridden two
+hundred yards, was empty except for a few fallen bodies which the
+horses trampled. You can never hope to succeed in these days with a
+mere _jacquerie_. You might as well set your wheatsheaves up to
+oppose a field battery."
+
+"Garibaldi," muttered Adone, "he had naught but raw levies!"
+
+"Garabaldi was an instinctive military genius, like Aguto, like
+Ferruccio, like Gian delle Bande Neri, like all the great
+Condottieri. But he would probably have rotted in the Spielberg, or
+been shot in some fortress of the Quadrilateral, if he had not been
+supported by that proclamation of Genoa and campaign of Lombardy,
+which were Louis Napoleon's supreme errors in French policy."
+
+Adone was silent, stung by that sense of discomfiture and
+mortification which comes upon those who feel their own inability to
+carry on an argument. To him Garibaldi was superhuman, fabulous, far
+away in the mists of an heroic past, as Ulysses to Greek youths.
+
+"You, sir, may preach patience," he said sullenly. "It is no doubt
+your duty to preach it. But I cannot be patient. My heart would choke
+in my throat."
+
+Don Silverio looked him straight in the face.
+
+"What is it you intend to do?"
+
+"I tell you that you can do nothing, my son."
+
+"How know you that, reverend? You are a priest, not a man."
+
+A faint red colour came over Don Silverio's colourless face.
+
+"One may be both," he said simply. "You are distraught, my son, by a
+great calamity. Try and see yourself as other see you, and do not
+lead the poor and ignorant into peril. Will the Edera waters be freer
+because your neighbours and you are at the galleys? The men of gold,
+who have the men of steel behind them, will be always stronger than
+you."
+
+"God is over us all," said Adone.
+
+Don Silverio was silent. He could not refute that expression of
+faith, but in his soul he could not share it; and Adone had said it,
+less in faith than in obstinacy. He meant to rouse the country if he
+could, let come what might of the rising.
+
+Who could tell the issue? A spark from a poor man's hearth had set a
+city in flames before now.
+
+"How can you think me indifferent?" said Don Silverio. "Had I no
+feeling for you should I not feel for myself? Almost certainly my
+life will be doomed to end here. Think you that I shall see with
+callousness the ruin of this fair landscape, which has been my chief
+consolation through so many dreary years? You, who deem yourself so
+wholly without hope, may find solace if you choose to take it. You
+are young, you are free, all the tenderest ties of life can be yours
+if you choose; if this home be destroyed you may make another where
+you will. But I am bound here. I must obey; I must submit. I cannot
+move; I cannot alter or renew my fate; and to me the destruction of
+the beauty of the Edera valley will be the loss of the only pleasure
+of my existence. Try and see with my eyes, Adone; it may help you to
+bear your burden."
+
+But he might as well have spoken to the water itself, or to the
+boulders of its rocks, or to the winds which swept its surface.
+
+"It is not yours," said Adone, almost brutally. "You were not born
+here. You cannot know! Live elsewhere? My mother and I? Sooner a
+thousand times would we drown in Edera!"
+
+The water was golden under the reflections of the sun as he spoke;
+the great net was swaying in it, clear of the sword rush and iris; a
+kingfisher like a jewel was threading its shallows; there was the
+fresh smell of the heather and the wild tulips on the air.
+
+"You do not know what it is to love a thing! -- how should you? --
+you, a priest!" said Adone.
+
+Don Silverio did not reply. He went on down the course of the stream.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+One morning in early April Adone received a printed invitation to
+attend in five days' time at the Municipality of San Beda to hear of
+something which concerned him. It was brought by the little old
+postman who went the rounds of the district once a week on his
+donkey; the five days had already expired before the summons was
+delivered. Adone's ruddy cheeks grew pale as he glanced over it; he
+thrust it into the soil and drove his spade through it. The old man
+waiting, in hopes to get a draught of wine, looked at him in dismay.
+
+"Is that a way to treat their Honours' commands?" he said aghast.
+
+Adone did not answer or raise his head; he went on with his digging;
+he was turning and trenching the soil to plant potatoes; he flung
+spadefuls of earth over the buried summons.
+
+"What's amiss with you, lad?" said the old fellow, who had known him
+from his infancy.
+
+"Leave me," said Adone, with impatience. "Go to the house if you want
+to drink and to bait your beast."
+
+"Thank ye," said the old man. "But you will go, won't you, Adone? It
+fares ill with those who do not go."
+
+"Who told you to say that?"
+
+"Nobody; but I have lived a' many years, and I have carried those
+printed papers a' many years, and I know that those who do not go
+when they are called rue it. Their Honours don't let you flout them."
+
+"Their Honours be damned!" said Adone. "Go to the house."
+
+The little old man, sorely frightened, dropped his head, and pulling
+his donkey by its bridle went away along the grass path under the
+vines.
+
+Adone went on delving, but his strong hands shook with rage and
+emotion as they grasped the handle of the spade. He knew as well as
+if he had been told by a hundred people that he was called to treat
+of the sale of the Terra Vergine. He forced himself to go on with his
+forenoon's labour, but the dear familiar earth swam and spun before
+his sight.
+
+"What?" he muttered to it, "I who love you am not your owner? I who
+was born on you am not your lawful heir? I who have laboured on you
+ever since I was old enough to use a tool at all am now in my manhood
+to give you up to strangers? I will make you run red with blood
+first!"
+
+It wanted then two hours of noon. When twelve strokes sounded from
+across the river, tolled slowly by the old bronze bell of the church
+tower, he went for the noonday meal and rest to the house.
+
+The old man was not longer there, but Clelia Alba said to him --
+
+"Dario says they summon you to Dan Beda, and that you will not go?"
+
+"He said right."
+
+"But, my son," cried his mother, "go you must! These orders are not
+to be shirked. Those who give them have the law behind them. You know
+that."
+
+"They have the villainy of the law behind them: the only portion of
+the law the people ever suffered to see."
+
+"But how can you know what it is about if you do not go?"
+
+"There is only one thing which it can be. One thing that I will not
+hear."
+
+"You mean for the river -- for the land?"
+
+"What else?"
+
+Her face grew as stern as his own. "If that be so... Still you should
+go, my son; you should go to hold your own."
+
+"I will hold my own," said Adone; and in his thoughts he added, "but
+not by words."
+
+"What is the day of the month for which they call you?" asked his
+mother.
+
+"The date is passed by three days. That is a little feat which
+authority often plays upon the people."
+
+They went within. The meal was eaten in silence; the nut-brown eyes
+of Nerina looked wistfully in their faces, but she asked nothing; she
+guessed enough.
+
+Adone said nothing to Don Silverio of the summons, for he knew that
+the priest would counsel strongly his attendance in person at San
+Beda, even though the date was already passed.
+
+But the Vicar had heard of it from the postman, who confided to him
+the fears he felt that Adone would neglect the summons, and so get
+into trouble. He perceived at once the error which would be committed
+if any sentence should be allowed to go by default through absence of
+the person cited.. By such absence the absentee discredits himself;
+whatsoever may be the justice of his cause, it is prejudiced at the
+outset. But how to persuade of this truth a man so blind with pain
+and rage and so dogged in self-will as Adone had become, Don Silverio
+did not see. He shrank from renewing useless struggles and disputes
+which led to no issue. He felt that Adone and he would only drift
+farther and farther apart with every word they spoke.
+
+The young man viewed this thing through a red mist of hatred and
+headstrong fury; it was impossible for his elder to admit that such
+views were wise or pardonable, or due to anything more than the
+heated visions evoked by a great wrong.
+
+That evening at sunset he saw the little girl Nerina at the river.
+She had led the cows to the water, and they and she were standing
+knee deep in the stream. The western light shone on their soft,
+mottled, dun hides and on her ruddy brown hair and bright young face.
+The bearded bulrushes were round them; the light played on the broad
+leaves of the docks and the red spikes of great beds of willow-herb;
+the water reflected the glowing sky, and close to its surface numbers
+of newly-come swallows whirled and dipped and darted, chasing gnats,
+whilst near at hand on a spray a little woodlark sang.
+
+The scene was fair, peaceful, full of placid and tender loveliness.
+
+"And all this is to be changed and ruined in order that some sons of
+the mammon of unrighteousness may set up their mills to grind their
+gold," he thought to himself as he passed over the stepping-stones,
+which at this shallow place could be crossed dryfoot.
+
+"Where is Adone?" he called to the child.
+
+"He is gone down the river in the punt, most reverend."
+
+"And his mother?"
+
+"Is at the house, sir."
+
+Don Silvero went through the pastures under the great olives. When he
+reached the path leading to the house he saw Clelia Alba seated
+before the doorway spinning. The rose-tree displayed its first
+crimson buds above her head; on the roof sparrows and starlings were
+busy.
+
+Clelia Alba rose and dropped a low courtesy to him, then resumed her
+work at the wheel.
+
+"You have heard, sir?" she said in a low tone. "They summons him to
+San Beda."
+
+"Old Dario told me; but Adone will not go?"
+
+"No sir; he will never go."
+
+"He is in error."
+
+"I do not know sir. He is best judge of that."
+
+"I fear he is in no state of mind to judge calmly of anything. His
+absence will go against him. Instead of an amicable settlement the
+question will go to the tribunals, and if he be unrepresented there
+he will be condemned _in contumacium_."
+
+"Amicable settlement?" repeated his mother, her fine face animated
+and stern, and her deep dark eyes flashing. "Can you, sir, dare you,
+sir, name such a thing? What they would do is robbery, vile robbery,
+a thousand times worse than aught the men of night ever did when they
+came down from the hills to harass our homesteads."
+
+"I do not say this otherwise; but the law is with those who harass
+you now. We cannot alter the times, good Clelia; we must take them as
+they are. Your son should go to San Beda and urge his rights, not
+with violence but with firmness and lucidity; he should also provide
+himself with an advocate, or he will be driven out of his home by
+sheer force, and with some miserable sum as compensation."
+
+Clelia Alba's brown skin grew ashen grey, and its heavy lines
+deepened.
+
+"You mean... that is possible?"
+
+"It is more than possible. It is certain. These things always end so.
+My poor dear friend! do you not understand, even yet, that nothing
+can save your homestead?"
+
+Clelia Alba leaned her elbows on her knees and bowed her face upon
+her hands. She felt as women of her race had felt on some fair morn
+when they had seen the skies redden with baleful fires, and the
+glitter of steel corslets shine under the foliage, and had heard the
+ripe corn crackle under the horses' hoofs, and had heard the
+shrieking children scream, "The lances are coming, mother! Mother!
+save us!"
+
+Those women had had no power to save homestead or child; they had
+seen the pikes twist in the curling locks, and the daggers thrust in
+the white young throats, and the flames soar to heaven, burning
+rooftree and clearing stackyard, and they had possessed no power to
+stay the steel or quench the torch. She was like them.
+
+She lifted her face up to the light.
+
+"He will kill them."
+
+"He may kill one man -- two men -- he will have blood on his hands.
+What will that serve? I have told you again and again. This thing is
+inevitable -- frightful, but inevitable, like war. In war do not
+millions of innocent and helpless creatures suffer through no fault
+of their own, no cause of their own, on account of some king's
+caprice or statesman's blunder? You are just such victims here.
+Nothing will preserve to you the Terra Vergine. My dear old friend,
+have courage."
+
+"I cannot believe it, sir; I cannot credit it. The land is ours; this
+little bit of the good and solid earth is ours; God will not let us
+be robbed of it."
+
+"My friend! no miracles are wrought now. I have told you again and
+again and again you must lose this place."
+
+"I will not believe it!"
+
+"Alas! I pray hat you may not be forced to believe; but I know that I
+pray in vain. Tell me, you are certain that Adone will not answer
+that summons?"
+
+"I am certain."
+
+"He is mad."
+
+"No, sir he is not mad. No more than I, his mother. We have faith in
+Heaven."
+
+Don Silverio was silent. It was not for him to tell them that such
+faith was a feeble staff.
+
+"I must not tarry," he said, and rose. "The night is near at hand.
+Tell your son what I have said. My dear friend, I would almost as
+soon stab you in the throat as say these things to you; but as you
+value your son's sanity and safety make him realise this fact, which
+you and he deny: the law will take your home from you, as it will
+take the river from the province."
+
+"No, sir!" said Clelia Alba fiercely. "No, no, no! There is a God
+above us!"
+
+Don Silverio bade her sadly farewell, and insisted no more. He went
+through the odorous grasslands, where the primrose and wild hyacinth
+grew so thickly and the olive branches were already laden with small
+green berries, and his soul was uneasy, seeing how closed is the mind
+of the peasant to argument or to persuasion. Often had he seen a poor
+beetle pushing its ball of dirt up the side of a sandhill only to
+fall back, and begin again, and again fall; for any truth to
+endeavour to penetrate the brain of the rustic is as hard as for the
+beetle to climb the sand. He was disinclined to seek the discomfiture
+of another useless argument, but neither could he be content in his
+conscience to let this matter wholly alone.
+
+Long and dreary as the journey was to San Beda, he undertook it
+again, saying nothing to any one of his purpose. He hoped to be able
+to put Adone's contumacy in a pardonable light before the Syndic, and
+perhaps to plea his cause better than the boy could plead it for
+himself. To Don Silverio he always seemed a boy still, and therefore
+excusable in all his violence and extravagances.
+
+The day was fine and cool, and walking was easier and less exhausting
+than it had been at the season of his first visit; moreover, his
+journey to Rome had braced his nerves and sinews to exertion, and
+restored to him the energy and self-possession which the long,
+tedious, monotonous years of solitude in Ruscino had weakened. There
+was a buoyant wind coming from the sea with rain in its track, and a
+deep blue sky with grand clouds drifting past the ultramarine hues of
+the Abruzzo range. The bare brown rocks grew dark as bronze, and the
+forest-clothed hills were almost black in the shadows, as the
+clustered towers and roofs of the little city came in sight. He went,
+fatigued as he was, straight to the old ducal palace, which was now
+used as the municipality, without even shaking the dust off his feet.
+
+"Say that I come for the affair of Adone Alba," he said to the first
+persons he saw in the ante-room on the first floor. In the little
+ecclesiastical town his calling commanded respect. They begged him to
+sit own and rest, and in a few minutes returned to say that the most
+illustrious the Count Corradini would receive him at once in his
+private room; it was a day of general council, but the council would
+not meet for an hour. The Syndic was a tall, spare, frail man, with a
+patrician's face and an affable manner. He expressed himself in
+courteous terms as flattered by the visit of the Vicar Ruscino, and
+inquired if in any way he could be of the slightest service.
+
+"Of the very greatest, your Excellency," said Don Silverio. "I have
+ventured to come hither on behalf of a young parishioner of mine,
+Adone Alba, who, having received the summons of your Excellency only
+yesterday, may, I trust, be excused for not having obeyed it on the
+date named. He is unable to come to-day. May I offer myself for his
+substitute as _amicus curie_!"
+
+"Certainly, certainly," said Corradini, relieved to meet an educated
+man instead of the boor he had expected. "If the summons were delayed
+by any fault of my officials, the delay must be inquired into.
+Meanwhile, most reverend, have you instructions to conclude the
+affair?"
+
+"As yet, I venture to remind your Excellency, we do not even know
+what is the affair of which you speak."
+
+"Oh no; quite true. The matter is the sale of the land known under
+the title of the Terra Vergine."
+
+"Thank Heaven I am here, and not Adone," thought Don Silverio.
+
+Aloud he answered, "What sale? The proprietor has heard of none."
+
+"He must have heard. It can be no news to you that the works about to
+be made upon the river Edera will necessitate the purchase of the
+land known as the Terra Vergine."
+
+Here the Syndic put on gold spectacles, drew towards him a black
+portfolio filled by plans and papers, and began to move them about,
+muttering, as he searched, little scraps of phrases out of each of
+them. At last he turned over the sheets which concerned the land of
+the Alba.
+
+"Terra Vergine -- Commune of Ruscino -- owners Alba from 1620 --
+family of good report -- regular taxpayers -- sixty hectares -- land
+productive; value -- just so -- humph, humph, humph!"
+
+Then he laid down the documents and looked at Don Silverio from over
+his spectacles.
+
+"I conclude, most reverend, that you come empowered by this young man
+to treat with us?"
+
+"I venture, sir," replied Don Silverio respectfully, "to remind you
+again that it is impossible I should be so empowered, since Adone
+Alba was ignorant of the reason for which he was summoned here."
+
+Corradini shuffled his documents nervously with some irritation.
+
+"This conference, then, is a mere waste of time? I hold council
+to-day --"
+
+"Pardon me, your Excellency," said Don Silverio blandly. "It will not
+be a waste of time if you will allow me to lay before you certain
+facts, and, first, to ask you one question: Who is, or are, the buyer
+or buyers of this land?"
+
+The question was evidently unwelcome to the Syndic; it was direct,
+which every Italian considers ill-bred, and it was awkward to answer.
+He was troubled for personal reasons, and the calm and searching gaze
+of the priest's dark eyes embarrassed him. After all, he thought, it
+would have been better to deal with the boor himself.
+
+"Why do you ask that?" he said irritably. "You are aware that the
+National Society for the Improvement of Land and the foreign company
+of the Teramo-Tronto Electric Railway combine in these projected
+works?"
+
+"To which of these two societies, then, is Adone Alba, or am I, as
+his _locum tenens_, to address ourselves?"
+
+"To neither. This commune deals with you."
+
+"Why?"
+
+Count Corradini took off his glasses, put them on again, shifted the
+papers and plans in his imposing portfolio.
+
+"May I ask again -- why?" said Don Silverio in the gentlest tones of
+his beautiful voice.
+
+"Because, because," answered the Syndic irritably, "because the whole
+affair is in treaty between our delegates and the companies. Public
+societies do not deal with private individuals directly, but by
+proxy."
+
+"Pardon my ignorance," said Don Silverio, "but why does the commune
+desire to substitute itself for the owner?"
+
+"It is usual."
+
+"Ah! It is usual."
+
+Corradini did not like the repetition of his phrase, which would not
+perhaps bear very close examination. He looked at his watch.
+
+"Excuse me, Reverend Father, but time presses."
+
+"Allow me to crave of your bounty a little more time, nevertheless. I
+am not habituated to business, but I believe, if I understand your
+worshipful self aright, the commune contemplates purchasing from the
+individuals, with power and intent to sell to the companies."
+
+What an unmannerly ecclesiastic! thought Corradini; for indeed, put
+thus bluntly and crudely what the commune, as represented by himself,
+was doing did not look as entirely correct as could be desired.
+
+"I was in Rome, most illustrious," said Don Silverio, "in
+connection with this matter some months ago?"
+
+"In Rome?"
+
+To hear this was unpleasant to the Syndic; it ha never occurred to
+him that his rural, illiterate, and sparsely populated district would
+have contained any person educated enough to think of inquiring in
+Rome about this local matter.
+
+"To Rome! Why did you go to Rome?"
+
+"To acquire information concerning this scheme."
+
+"You are an owner of land?"
+
+"No, sir. I am a poor, very poor, priest."
+
+"It cannot concern you, then."
+
+"It concerns my people. Nothing which concerns them is alien to me."
+
+"Humph, humph! Most proper, most praiseworthy. But we have no time
+for generalities. You came to treat of the Terra Vergine?"
+
+"Pardon me, sir; I came to hear why you summoned Adone Alba, one of
+my flock."
+
+"Could he not have come himself? It had been but his duty."
+
+"He could not, sir; and, to say truth, he would not. He does not
+intend to sell his land."
+
+"What!"
+
+Corradini half rose from his chair, leaning both hands on the table,
+and staring though his glasses across the mass of portfolios and
+papers at the priest.
+
+"He will have no choice allowed him," he said with great anger. "To
+the interests of the State all minor interests must bend. What! a
+mere peasant stand in the way of a great enterprise?"
+
+"You intend expropriation then?"
+
+The voice of Don Silverio was very calm and sweet, but his
+countenance was stern.
+
+Corradini was irritated beyond measure. He did not desire to play
+that great card so early in the game.
+
+"I do not say that," he muttered. "There must be parliamentary
+sanction for any forced sale. I spoke in general terms. Private
+interest must cede to public"
+
+"There is parliamentary sanction already given to the project for the
+Valley of Edera," said Don Silverio, "expropriation included."
+
+Count Corradini threw himself back in his chair with an action
+expressive at once of wrath and of impotence. He had an irritating
+sense that this priest was master of the position, and knew much more
+than he said. In reality Don Silverio knew very little, but he had
+skill and tact enough to give a contrary impression to his auditor.
+He followed up his advantage.
+
+"Expropriation is to be permitted to enforce sales on recalcitrant
+landowners," he continued. "But that measure, even though conceded in
+theory, will take time to translate into practice. I fear, sir, that
+if it be ever put into execution we shall have trouble in your
+commune. Your council has been over hasty in allying itself with
+these speculators. You and they have not taken into account the
+immense injury which will be done to the valley and to my own village
+or town, call it as you will, of Ruscino. The people are quiet,
+patient, meek, but they will not be so if they are robbed of the
+water of the Edera. It is the source of all the little -- the very
+little -- good which comes to them. So it is with Adone Alba. He has
+been God-fearing, law-abiding, a good son, excellent in all
+relations; but he will not recognise as law the seizure of his land.
+Sir, you are the elected chief of this district; all these people
+look to you for support in their emergency. What are these foreign
+speculators to you that you should side with them? You say this
+commune will purchase from its peasant proprietors in the interests
+of these foreigners. Was it to do this that they elected you? Why
+should the interests of the foreigners be upheld by you to the injury
+of those of your own people? Speaking for my own parish, I can affirm
+to you that, simple souls as they are, poor in the extreme, and
+resigned to poverty, you will have trouble with them all if you take
+it on you to enforce the usurpation of the Edera water."
+
+Count Corradini, still leaning back in his large leathern chair,
+listened as if he were hypnotised; he was astounded, offended,
+enraged, but he was fascinated by the low, rich, harmonious
+modulations of the voice which addressed him, and by the sense of
+mastery which the priest conveyed without by a single word asserting
+it.
+
+"You would threaten me with public disorder?" he said feebly, and
+with consciousness of feebleness.
+
+"No sir; I would adjure you, in God's name, not to provoke it."
+
+"It does not rest with me."
+
+He raised himself in his chair: his slender aristocratic hands played
+nervously with the strings of the portfolio, his eyelids flickered,
+and his eyes avoided those of his visitor.
+
+"I have no voice in this matter. You mistake."
+
+"Surely your Excellency speaks with the voice of all you electors?"
+
+"Of my administrative council, then? But they are all in favour of
+the project; so is his Excellency the Prefect, so is the Deputy, so
+is the Government. Can I take upon myself in my own slender
+personality to oppose these?"
+
+"Yes, sir, because you are the mouthpiece of those who cannot speak
+for themselves."
+
+"Euh! Euh! That may be true in a sense. But you mistake; my authority
+is most limited. I have but two votes in Council. I am as wholly
+convinced as you can be that some will suffer for the general good.
+The individual is crushed by the crowd in these days. We are in a
+period of immense and febrile development; of wholly unforeseen
+expansion; we are surrounded by the miracles of science; we are
+witnesses of an increase of intelligence which will lead to results
+whereof no living man can dream; civilisation in its vast and
+ineffable benevolence sometimes wounds, even as the light and heat of
+the blessed sun --"
+
+"Pardon me, sir," said Don Soverio, "at any other moment it would be
+my dearest privilege to listen to your eloquence. But time passes. I
+came here on a practical errand. I desire to take back some definite
+answer to Adone and Clelia Alba. Am I to understand from you that the
+municipality, on behalf of these foreign companies, desires to
+purchase his land, and even insists upon its right to do so?"
+
+The Syndic, accustomed to seek shelter from all plain speaking in the
+cover of flowery periods such as those in which he had been arrested,
+was driven from his usual refuge. He could not resume the noble and
+enlightened discourse which had been thus recklessly cut in two. He
+tied the strings of the portfolio into a bow, and undid them, and
+tied them again.
+
+"I have received you, sir, _ex officio_," he replied after a long
+silence. "You address me as if I possessed some special individual
+power. I have none. I am but the mouthpiece, the representative of my
+administrative council. You, a learned ecclesiastic, cannot want to
+be taught what are the functions of a Syndic."
+
+"I am to understand then that I must address myself on behalf of my
+people to the Prefect?"
+
+Corradini was silent. The last thing he desired was for this
+importunate priest to see the Prefect.
+
+"I must go into council at once," he said, again looking at his
+watch. "Could you return? Are you remaining here?"
+
+"Some hours, sir."
+
+"Will you dine with me at my house at three? You will give me much
+pleasure, and the Countess Corradini will be charmed."
+
+"I am grateful for so much offered honour, but I have promised to
+make my noonday meal with an old friend, the superior of the
+Cistercians."
+
+"An excellent, a holy person," said Corradini, with a bend of his
+head. "Be at my house, reverend sir, at five of the clock. I shall
+then have spoken with the assessors of your errand, and it will be
+dealt with probably in council."
+
+Don Silverio made a low bow, and left him free to go to his awaiting
+councillors, who were already gathered round a long table covered by
+green cloth, in a vaulted and stately chamber, stories from Greek
+mythology carved on its oaken doors and stone cornices.
+
+"Pray excuse me, gentleman," said the courtly mayor to his assessors,
+taking his seat on an old walnut-wood throne at the head of the
+table. "I have been detained by this matter of the Valdedera. I fear
+the people of that valley will show an ungrateful and refractory
+temper. How hard it is to persuade the ignorant where their true
+interests lie! But let us to business."
+
+"It will be a hard matter," said the Prior to Don Silverio as they
+walked together in the little burial-ground of the monastery between
+its lines of rose-trees and its lines of crosses, after the frugal
+noonday meal had been eaten in the refrectory. "It will be a hard
+matter. You will fail, I fear. The municipalities here smell money.
+That is enough to make them welcome the invasion. What can you do
+against the force of gold?"
+
+"Would it avail anything to see the Prefect?"
+
+"Nothing. He is cousin to the Minister of Agriculture, whose brother
+is chairman of the Teramo-Fermo Company. We are governed solely by
+what the French call _tripotage_."
+
+"What character does this Syndic bear?"
+
+"A good one. He is blameless in his domestic relation, an indulgent
+landlord, a gentleman, respectful of religion, assiduous in his
+duties; but he is in debt; his large estates produce little; he has
+no other means. I would not take upon me to say that he would be
+above a bribe."
+
+At five of the clock, as the Syndic had told him to do, Don Silverio
+presented himself at the Palazzo Corradini. He was shown with much
+deference by an old liveried servant into a fine apartment with
+marble busts in niches in the walls, and antique bookcases of oak,
+and doorhangings of Tuscan tapestry. The air of the place was cold,
+and had the scent of a tomb. It was barely luminated by two bronze
+lamps in which unshaded oil wicks burned. Corradini joined him there
+in five minutes' time, and welcomed him to the house with grace and
+warmth of courtesy.
+
+"What does he want of me?" thought Don Silverio, who had not been
+often met in life by such sweet phrases. "Does he want me to be
+blind?"
+
+"Dear and reverend sir," said the mayor, placing himself with his
+back to the brass lamps, "tell me fully about this youth whom you
+protect, who will not sell the Terra Vergine. Here we can speak at
+our ease; yonder at the municipality, there may be always some
+eavesdropper."
+
+"Most worshipful, what I said is matter well known to the whole
+countryside; all the valley can bear witness to its truth," replied
+Don Silverio, and he proceeded to set forth all that he knew of Adone
+and Clelia Alba, and of their great love for their lands; he only did
+not mention what he believed to be Adone's descent, because he feared
+that it might sound fantastical or presumptuous. Nearly three hundred
+years of peasant ownership and residence were surely titles enough
+for consideration.
+
+"If land owned thus, and tilled thus by one family, can be taken away
+from that family by Act of Parliament to please the greedy schemes of
+strangers, why preserve the eighth commandment in the Decalogue? It
+becomes absurd. There cannot be a more absolute ownership than this
+of the Alba to the farm they live on and cultivate. So long as there
+is any distinction at all between _meum et tuum_, how can its violent
+seizure be by any possibility defended?"
+
+"There will be no violent seizure," said Corradini. "The young man
+will be offered a good price; even, since you are interested in him,
+a high price."
+
+"But he will take no price -- no price, if he were paid million; they
+would not compensate for his loss."
+
+"He must be a very singular young man."
+
+"His character is singular, no doubt, in an age in which money is
+esteemed the sole goal of existence, and discontent constitutes
+philosophy. Adone Alba wants nothing but what he has; he only asks to
+be left alone."
+
+"It is difficult to be left alone in a world full of other people! If
+your hero wants a Thebaid, he can go and buy one in La Plata, or the
+Argentine, with the price we shall give for his land."
+
+"We?" repeated Don Silverio with significant emphasis.
+
+Corradini reddened a little. "I only use the word because I am
+greatly interested in the success of this enterprise, being convinced
+of its general utility to the province. Being cognisant as I am of
+the neighbourhood, I hoped I could prevent some friction."
+
+"The shares are, I believe, already on the market?"
+
+It was a harmless remark, yet it was a disagreeable one to the Syndic
+of San Beda.
+
+"What would be the selling price of the Terra Vergine?" he said
+abruptly. "It is valued at twelve thousand francs."
+
+"It is useless to discuss its price," replied Don Silverio, "and the
+question is much wider than the limits of the Terra Vergine. In one
+word, is the whole of the Valdedera to be ruined because a Minister
+has a relation who desires to create an unnecessary railway?"
+
+"Ruined is a large word. These constructions appear to all, except
+primitive and ignorant people, to be improvements, acquisitions,
+benefits. In our province we are so aloof from all movement, so
+remote in our seclusion, so moss-grown in our antiquity, so wedded to
+the past, to old customs, old habits, old ways of act and thought,
+that the modern world shocks us as impious, odious, and intolerable."
+
+"Sir," said Don Silverio with his most caustic smile, "if you are
+here to sing the praises of modernity, allow me to withdraw from the
+duet. I venture to ask you, as I asked you this morning, one plain
+question. To whom is Adone Alba, to whom are my people of Ruscino, to
+appeal against the sequestration?"
+
+"To no one. The Prefect approves; the Minister approves; the local
+deputies approve; I and my municipal and provincial councils approve;
+Parliament has approved and authorised. Who remain opposed? A few
+small landowners and a mob of poor persons living in your village of
+Ruscino and in similar places."
+
+"Who can create grave disorders and will do so."
+
+"Disorders, even insurrections, do not greatly alarm authority
+nowadays; they are easily pressed since the invention of the
+quick-firing guns. The army is always on the side of order."
+
+Don Silverio rose.
+
+"Most honourable Corradini! your views and mine are so far asunder
+that no amount of discussion can assimilate them. Allow me to salute
+you."
+
+"Wait one instant, reverence," said the Syndic. "May I ask how it is
+that an ecclesiastic of your appearance and your intellect can have
+been buried so long in such an owls' nest as Ruscino?"
+
+"Sir," replied Don Silverio very coldly, "ask my superiors: I am but
+one of the least of the servants of the Church."
+
+"You might be one of her greatest servants, if influence --"
+
+"I abhor the word influence. It means a bribe too subtle to be
+punished, too gilded to alarm."
+
+"Nay, sometimes it is but a word in season, a pressure in the right
+place."
+
+"It means that which cannot serve the poor man without degrading
+him."
+
+"But -- but -- if as a reward for duty, advancement cane to you?"
+
+"I fail to understand."
+
+"Let me speak frankly. With your superiority to them you must easily
+rule the embryo rioters of the Valdedera. If, to your efforts it
+should be owing that the population remain quiet, and that this Adone
+Alba and others in a similar position come to me in an orderly manner
+and a pliant spirit, I will engage that this service to us on your
+part shall not be forgotten."
+
+He paused; but Don Silverio did not reply.
+
+"It is lamentable and unjust," continued the mayor, "that any one of
+your evident mental powers and capacity for higher place should be
+wasting your years and wasting your mind in a miserable solitude like
+Ruscino. If you will aid us to a pacific cession of the Valdedera I
+will take upon myself to promise that your translation to a higher
+office shall be favoured by the Government-"
+
+He paused again, for he did not see upon Don Silverio's countenance
+that flattered and rejoiced expression which he expected; there was
+even upon it a look of scorn. He regretted that he had said so much.
+
+"I thank your Excellency for so benevolent an interest in my poor
+personality," said Don Silverio. "But with the King's government I
+have nothing to do. I am content in the place whereto I have been
+called, and have no disposition to assist the speculations of foreign
+companies. I have the honour to bid your Excellency good evening."
+
+He bowed low, and backed out of the apartment this time. Count
+Corradini did not endeavour to detain him.
+
+When he got out into the air the strong mountain wind was blowing
+roughly down the steep and narrow street. He felt it with pleasure
+smite his cheeks and brows.
+
+"Truly only from nature can we find strength and health," he
+murmured. "In the houses of men there are but fever and corruption,
+and uncleanliness."
+
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+To neglect no possible chance, he resolved to see the Prefect, if the
+Prefect consented to see him. This great official dwelt in a seaport
+city, whence he ruled the province, for such a period at least as his
+star should be in the ascendant, that is, whilt his political group
+should be in power. It was scarcely likely that a government official
+would be accessible to any arguments which a poor country priest
+could bring forward against a government project. Still, he resolved
+to make the effort, for at the Prefect's name apprehension, keen and
+quaking, had leapt into Count Corradini's faded eyes.
+
+From San Beda to the seaport city there stretched some forty miles of
+distance; the first part a descent down the spurs of the Apennines,
+the latter half through level sandy country, with pine woods here and
+there. The first half he covered on foot, the second by the
+parliamentary train, which drew its long black line snake-like and
+slow, through the dunes and the stagnant waters. He had but a few
+francs in his waistband, and could ill afford to expend those.
+
+When he reached his destination it was evening; too late for him to
+present himself at the Prefecture with any chance of admittance. The
+Prior at San Beda had given him a letter to the vicar of the church
+of Sant Anselmo in the city, and by this gentleman he was received
+and willingly lodged for the night.
+
+"A government project -- a project approved by ministers and
+deputies?" said his host on hearing what was the errand on which he
+came there. "As well, my brother, might you assail the Gran Sasse
+d'Italia! There must be money in it, much money, for our Conscript
+Fathers."
+
+"I suppose so," said Don Silverio, "but I cannot see where it is to
+come from."
+
+"From the pockets of the taxpayers, my friend!" replied the incumbent
+of Sant Anselmo, with a smile as of a man who knows the world he
+lives in. "The country is honeycombed by enterprises undertaken
+solely to this end -- to pass the money which rusts in the pockets of
+fools into those of wise men who know how to make it run about and
+multiply. In what other scope are all our betterments, our hygiene,
+our useless railway lines, our monstrous new streets, all our
+modernisation, put in the cauldron and kept boiling like a witch's
+supper?"
+
+"I know, I know," said Don Silverio wearily. "The whole land is
+overrun by _affaristi_, like red ants."
+
+"Do not slander the ants!" replied his host; "I would not offend the
+name of any honest, hard-working little insect by giving it to the
+men through whom this country is eaten up by selfish avarice and
+unscrupulous speculation! But tell me, what do you hope for from our
+revered Prefect?"
+
+"I hope nothing, but I wish to leave no stone unturned. Tell me of
+him."
+
+"Of his Excellency, Giovacchino Gallo, senator, Grand Cross, and
+whatnot? There is much to tell, though there is nothing which could
+not be also told of many another gentleman in high place. It is the
+usual story: the supple spine, the sharp eye, the greased foot. He
+was a young lawyer, useful to deputies. He married a lovely woman
+whom a prince had admired beyond him. He asked no questions; her
+dower was large. To do him justice, he has always behaved very well
+to her. He entered Parliament early, and there was useful also, to
+existing institutions. He was instrumental in carrying many railway
+and canal bills through the chamber. He has been always successful in
+his undertakings, and he knows that nothing succeeds like success. I
+am told that he and his wife are _persone gratissime_ at the
+Quirinale, and that her jewels are extremely fine. When he was named
+Senator two years ago the Press, especially the Press of the Right,
+saluted his nomination as strengthening the Senate by the accession
+to it of a person of impeccable virtue, of enlightened intellect, and
+of a character cast in antique moulds of noble simplicity and Spartan
+courage. You think, my brother, that this favourite of fortune is
+likely to favour your plea for your parishioners?"
+
+"Dear and revered brother," replied Don Silverio, "I came hither
+with no such illusions. If I had done, your biography of this
+functionary would have dispelled them."
+
+Nevertheless, although without hope, at two o'clock of that day he
+went to the audience which was granted him at the intervention of the
+bishop of the city, obtained by means of the vicar of Sant Anselmo.
+
+The Prefecture was situated in a palace of sixteenth century
+architecture, a noble and stately place of immense size, greatly
+injured by telegraph and telephone wires stretching all round it, the
+post-office and the tax offices being situated on the ground floor,
+and the great central court daubed over with fresh paint and
+whitewash. Some little soldiers in dingy uniforms, ill-cut and
+ill-fitting, stood about gates and doors. On the first floor were the
+apartments occupied by his Excellency. Don Silverio was kept waiting
+for some time in a vestibule of fine proportions painted by
+Diotisalvi, with a colossal marble group in its centre of the death
+of Caesar.
+
+He looked at it wistfully.
+
+"Ah, Guilio!" he murmured, "what use were your conquests, what use
+was your genius, the greatest perchance the world has ever seen? What
+use? You were struck in the throat like a felled ox, and the land you
+ruled lies bleeding at every pore!"
+
+In a quarter of an hour he was ushered through other large rooms into
+one of great architectural beauty, where the Prefect was standing by
+a writing-table.
+
+Giovacchino Gallo was a short, stout person with a large stomach, a
+bald head, bright restless eyes, and a high, narrow forehead; his
+face was florid, like the face of one to whom the pleasures of the
+table are not alien. His address was courteous but distant, stiff,
+and a little pompous; he evidently believed in himself as a great
+person and only unbent to other greater persons, when he unbent so
+vastly that he crawled.
+
+"What can I do for your Reverence?" he asked, as he seated himself
+behind the writing-table and pointed to a chair.
+
+The words were polite but the tone was curt; it was officialism
+crystallised.
+
+Don Silverio explained the purpose of his visit, and urged the
+prayers of his people.
+
+"I am but the vicar of Ruscino," he said in explanation, "but in this
+matter I plead for all the natives of the Valdedera. Your Excellency
+is Governor of this province, in which the Edera takes its rise and
+has its course. My people, and all those others who are not under my
+ministry, but whose desires and supplications I represent, venture to
+look to you for support in their greatest distress, and intercession
+for them against this calamity."
+
+The face of the Prefect grew colder and sterner, his eyes got an
+angry sparkle, his plump, rosy hands closed on a malachite
+paper-knife; he wished the knife were of steel, and the people of the
+Valdedera had but one head.
+
+"Are you aware, sir," he said impatiently, "that the matter of which
+you speak has had the ratification of Parliament?"
+
+"But it has not had the ratification of the persons whom it most
+concerns."
+
+"Do you supposed, then, when a great public work is to be
+accomplished the promoters are to go hat in hand for permission to
+every peasant resident on the area?"
+
+"A great public work seems to me a large expression: too large for
+this case. The railway is not needed. The acetylene works are a
+private speculation. I venture to recall to your Excellency that
+these people, whom you would ignore, own the land, or, where they do
+not own it, have many interests both in the land and the water."
+"Pardon me, your Excellency, but that is a phrase: it is not a fact.
+You could not, if you gave them millions, compensate them for the
+seizure of their river and their lands. These belong to them and to
+their descendants by natural right. They cannot be deprived of these
+by Act of Parliament without gross injury and injustice."
+"There must be suffering for the individual in all benefit of the
+general!"
+
+"And doubtless, sir, when one is not the individual the suffering
+appears immaterial!"
+
+"What an insolent priest!" thought Giovacchino Gallo, and struck the
+paper-knife with anger on the table.
+
+"Take my own parishioners alone," pursued Don Silverio. "Their small
+earnings depend entirely upon the Edera water; it gives them their
+food, their bed, their occupation; it gives them health and strength;
+it irrigates their little holdings, _extra murus_, on which they and
+their families depend for grain and maize and rice. If you change
+their river-bed into dry land they will starve. Are not your own
+countrymen dearer to you than the members of a foreign syndicate?"
+
+"There will be work for them at the acetylene factory."
+
+"Are they not free men? Are they to be driven like slaves to a work
+which would be hateful to them? These people are country born and
+country bred. They labour in the open air, and have done so for
+generations. Pardon me, your Excellency, but every year the King's
+Government forces into exile thousands, tens of thousands, of our
+hard working peasants with their families. The taxation of the land
+and of all its products lays waste thousands of square miles in this
+country. The country is being depleted and depopulated, and the best
+of its manhood is being sent out of it by droves to Brazil, to La
+Plata, to the Argentines, to anywhere and everywhere, where labour is
+cheap and climate homicidal. The poor are packed on emigrant ships
+and sent with less care than crated of fruit receive. They consent to
+go because they are famished here. Is it well for a country to lose
+its labouring classes, its frugal, willing, and hard-working manhood?
+to pack them off across the oceans by contract with other states? The
+Government has made a contract with a Pacific island for five
+thousand Italians? Are they free men or are they slaves? Can your
+Excellency call my people free who are allowed no voice against the
+seizure of their own river, and to whom you offer an unwholesome and
+indoor labour as compensation for the ruin of their lives? Now, they
+are poor indeed, but they are contented; they keep body and soul
+together, they live on their natal soil, they live as their fathers
+lived. Is it just, is it right, is it wise to turn these people into
+disaffection and despair by an act of tyranny and spoilation through
+which the only gainers will be foreign speculators abroad and at home
+the gamblers of the Bourses? Sir, I do not believe that the world
+holds people more patient, more long-suffering, more pacific under
+dire provocation, or more willing to subsist on the poorest and
+hardest conditions than Italians are; is it right or just or wise to
+take advantage of that national resignation to take from half a
+province the natural aid and the natural beauty with which God
+Himself has dowered it in the gift of the mountainborn stream? You
+are powerful, sir, you have the ear of the Government; you will not
+try to stop this infamous theft of the Edera water whilst there is
+still time?"
+
+Don Silverio spoke with that eloquence and with that melody of voice
+which few could bear unmoved; and even the dull ear and the hard
+heart of the official who heard him were for one brief moment moved
+as by the pathos of a song sung by some great tenor.
+
+But that moment was very brief. Over the face of Giovacchino Gallo a
+look passed at once brutal and suspicious. "Curse this priest!" he
+thought; "he will give us trouble."
+
+He rose, stiff, cold, pompous, with a frigid smile on his red, full,
+_bon viveur's_ lips.
+
+"If you imagine that I should venture to attack, or even presume to
+criticise, a matter which the Most Honourable the Minister of
+Agriculture has in his wisdom approved and ratified, you must have a
+strange conception of my fitness for my functions. As regards
+yourself, Reverend Sir, I regret that you appear to forget that the
+chief duty of your sacred office is to inculcate to your flock
+unquestioning submission to Governmental decrees."
+
+"Is that your Excellency's last word?"
+
+"It is my first, and my last, word."
+
+Don Silverio bowed low.
+
+"You may regret it, sir," he said simply, and left the writing-table
+and crossed the room. But as he approached the door the Prefect,
+still standing, said, "Wait!"
+
+Gallo opened two or three drawers in his table, searched for some
+papers, looked over them, leaving the priest always standing between
+him and the door. Don Silverio was erect; his tall frail form had a
+great majesty in it; his pallid features were stern.
+
+"Return a moment," said Gallo.
+
+"I can hear your Excellency where I am," replied Don Silverio, and
+did not stir.
+
+"I have here reports from certain of my agents," said Gallo,
+fingering his various papers, "that there is and has been for some
+time a subversive movement amongst the sparse population of the
+Valdedera."
+
+Don Silverio did not speak or stir.
+
+"It is an agrarian agitation," continued Gallo, "limited to its area,
+with little probability of spreading, but it exists; there are
+meetings by night, both open-air and secret meetings; the latter take
+place now in one farmhouse, now in another. The leader of this
+noxious and unlawful movement is one Adone Alba. He is of your
+parish."
+
+He lifted his eyelids and flashed a quick, searching glance at the
+priest.
+
+"He is of my parish," repeated Don Silverio, with no visible emotion.
+
+"You know of this agitation?"
+
+"If I did, sir, I should not say so. But I am not in the confidence
+of Adone Alba."
+
+"Of course I do not ask you to reveal the secrets of the
+confessional, but --"
+
+"Neither in the confessional nor out of it have I heard anything
+whatever from him concerning any such matter as that of which you
+speak."
+
+"He is a young man?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And the owner of the land known as the Terra Vergine?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And his land is comprised in that which will be taken by the
+projected works?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Are you sure that he has not sent you here?"
+
+"My parishoners are not in the habit of 'sending' me anywhere. You
+reverse our respective positions."
+
+"Humility is not one of your ecclesiastical virtues, Most Reverend."
+
+"It may be so."
+
+Gallo thrust his papers back into their drawer and locked it with a
+sharp click.
+
+"You saw the Syndic of San Beda?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Much what you say. Official language is always limited and learned
+by rote."
+
+Gallo would willingly have thrown his bronze inkstand at the insolent
+ecclesiastic; his temper was naturally choleric, though years of
+sycophancy and State service had taught him to control it.
+
+"Well, Reverend Sir!" he said, with ill-concealed irritation, "this
+conversation is, I see, useless. You protect and screen your people.
+Perhaps I cannot blame you for that, but you will allow me to remind
+you that it is my duty to see that the order and peace of this
+district are not in any manner disturbed; and that any parish priest
+if he fomented dissatisfaction or countenanced agitation in his
+district, would be much more severely dealt with by me than any
+civilian would be in the same circumstances. We tolerate and respect
+the Church so long as she remains strictly within her own sphere, but
+so long only."
+
+"We are all perfectly well aware of the conditions attached to the
+_placet_ and the _exequatur_ at all times, and we are all conscious
+that even the limited privileges of civilians are denied to us!"
+replied Don Silverio. "I have the honour to wish your Excellency good
+morning."
+
+He closed the door behind him.
+
+"Damnation!" said Giovacchino Gallo; "that is a strong man! Is Mother
+Church blind that she lets such an one rust and rot in the miserable
+parish of Ruscino?"
+
+When Don Silverio rejoined the Vicar of Sant Anselmo the latter asked
+him anxiously how his errand had sped.
+
+"It was a waste of breath and words," he answered. "I might have
+known that it would be so with any Government official."
+
+"But you might have put a spoke in Count Corradini's wheel. If you
+had told Gallo that the other is trafficking --"
+
+"Why should I betray a man who received me in all good faith? And
+what good would it have accomplished if I had done so?"
+
+And more weary than ever in mind and body he returned to Ruscino.
+
+As he had left the Prefect's presence that eminent person had rung
+for his secretary.
+
+"Brandone, send me Sarelli."
+
+In a few moments Sarelli had appeared; he was the usher of the
+Prefecture by appointment; by taste and in addition he was its chief
+spy. He was a native of the city, and a person of considerable acumen
+and excellent memory; he never needed to make memoranda -- there is
+nothing so dangerous to an official as written notes.
+"Sarelli, what are the reports concerning the vicar of Ruscino?"
+
+Sarelli stood respectfully at attention; he had been a
+non-commissioned officer of artillery; and answered in rapid but
+clear tones --
+
+"Great ability -- great eloquence -- disliked by superiors; formerly
+great preacher in Rome; supposed to be at Ruscino as castigation;
+learned -- benevolent -- correct."
+
+"Humph!" said Gallo, disappointed. "Not likely then to cause trouble
+or disorder? -- to necessitate painful measures?"
+
+Sarelli rapidly took his cue.
+
+"Hitherto, your Excellency, uniformly correct; except in one instance
+--"
+
+"That instance?"
+
+"Your Excellency will have heard of Ulisse Ferrero, a great robber of
+the lower Abruzzo Citeriore Primo?"
+
+"I have: continue."
+
+"Ulisse Ferrero was outlawed; his band had been killed or captured,
+every one; he had lost his right arm; he hid for many years in the
+lower woods of Abruzzo; he came down at night to the farmhouses, the
+people gave him food and drink, and aided him --"
+
+"Their criminal habit always: continue."
+
+"Sometimes in one district, sometimes in another, he was often in the
+_macchia_ of the Valdedera. The people of the district, and
+especially of Ruscino, protected him. They thought him a saint,
+because once when at the head of his band, which was then very
+strong, he had come into Ruscino and done them no harm, but only
+eaten and drunk, and left a handful of silver pieces to pay for what
+he and his men had taken. So they protected him now, and oftentimes
+for more than a year he came out of the _macchia_, and the villagers
+gave him all they could, and he went up and down Ruscino as if he
+were a king; and this lasted for several seasons, and, as we learned
+afterwards, Don Silverio Frascara had cognisance of this fact, but
+did nothing. When Ulisse Ferrero was at last captured (it is nine
+years ago come November, and it was not in Ruscino but in the woods
+above), and brought to trial, many witnesses were summoned, and
+amongst them this Don Silverio; and the judge said to him, 'You had
+knowledge that this man came oftentimes into you parish?' and Don
+Silverio answered, 'I had.' 'You knew that he was an outlaw, in
+rupture with justice?' 'I did,' he answered. Then the judge struck
+his fist with anger on his desk. 'And you a priest, a guardian of
+order, did not denounce him to the authorities?' Then Don Silverio,
+your Excellency, quite quietly, but with a smile (I was there close
+to him), had the audacity to answer the judge. 'I am a priest,' he
+said 'and I study my breviary, but do not find in it any command
+which authorises me to betray my fellow creatures.' That made a
+terrible stir in the tribunal, you Excellency. They talked of
+committing him to gaol for contempt of court and for collusion with
+the outlaw. But it took place at San Beda, where they are all
+_papalini_, as your Excellency knows, and nothing was done, sir."
+
+"That reply is verily like this priest!" thought Giovacchino Gallo.
+"A man of ability, of intellect, of incorruptible temper, but a man
+as like as not to encourage and excuse sedition."
+
+Aloud he said, "You may go, Sarelli. Good morning."
+
+"May I be allowed a word, sir?"
+
+"Speak."
+
+"May it not well be, sir, that Don Silverio's organisation or
+suggestion is underneath this insurrectionary movement of the young
+men in the Valdedera?"
+
+"It is possible; yes. See to it."
+
+"Your servant, sir."
+
+Sarelli withdrew, elated. He loved tracking, like a bloodhound, for
+the sheer pleasure of the "cold foot chase." The official views both
+layman and priest with contempt and aversion; both are equally his
+prey, both equally his profit: he lives by them and on them, as the
+galleruca does on the elm-tree, whose foliage it devours, but he
+despises them because they are not officials, as the galleruca
+doubtless, if it can think, despises the elm.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+Of course his absence could not be hidden from any in his parish. The
+mere presence of the rector of an adjacent parish, who had taken his
+duties, sufficed to reveal it. For so many years he had never stirred
+out of Ruscino in winter cold or summer heat, that none of his people
+could satisfactorily account to themselves for his now frequent
+journeys. The more sagacious supposed that he was trying to get the
+project for the river undone; but they did not all have so much faith
+in him. Many had always been vaguely suspicious of him; he was so
+wholly beyond their comprehension. They asked Adone what he knew, or,
+if he knew nothing, what he thought. Adone put them aside with an
+impatient, imperious gesture. "But you knew when he went to Rome?"
+they persisted. Adone swung himself loose from them with a movement
+of anger. It hurt him to speak of the master he had renounced, of the
+friend he had forsaken. His conscience shrank from any distrust of
+Don Silverio; yet his old faith was no more alive. He was going
+rapidly down a steep descent, and in that downward rush he lost all
+his higher instincts; he was becoming insensible to everything except
+the thirst for action, for vengeance.
+
+To the man who lives in a natural state away from cities it appears
+only virile and just to defend himself, to avenge himself, with the
+weapons which nature and art have given him; he feels no satisfaction
+in creeping and crawling through labyrinths of the law, and he cannot
+see why he, the wronged, should be forced to spend, and wait, and
+humbly pray, while the wrongdoer may go, in the end, unchastised.
+Such a tribunal as St. Louis held under an oak-tree, or the Emperor
+Akbar in a mango grove, would be intelligible to him; but the
+procedure, the embarrassments, the sophistries, the whole machinery
+of modern law are abhorrent to him.
+
+He yearned to be the Tell, the Massaniello, the Andreas Hofer, of his
+province; but the apathy and supineness and timidity of his neighbors
+tied his hands. He knew that they were not made of the stuff with
+which a leader could hope to conquer. All his fiery appeals fell like
+shooting stars, brilliant but useless; all his vehement excitations
+did little more than scare the peasants whom he sought to rouse. A
+few bold spirits like his own seconded his efforts and aided his
+propaganda; but these were not numerous enough to leaven the inert
+mass.
+
+His plan was primitive and simple: it was to oppose by continual
+resistance every attempt which should be made to begin the projected
+works upon the river; to destroy at night all which should be done in
+the day, and so harass and intimidate the workmen who should be sent
+there that they should, in fear and fatigue, give up their labours.
+They would certainly be foreign workmen; that is, workmen from
+another province; probably from the Puglie. It was said that three
+hundred of them were coming that week from the Terra d'Otranto to
+work above Ruscino. He reckoned that he and those he led would have
+the advantage of local acquaintance with the land and water, and
+could easily, having their own homes as base, carry on a guerrilla
+warfare for any length of time. No doubt, he knew, the authorities
+would send troops to the support of the labours, but he believed that
+when the resolve of the district to oppose at all hazards any
+interference with the Edera should be made clear, the Government
+would not provoke an insurrection for the sake of favouring a foreign
+syndicate. So far as he reasoned at all, he reasoned thus.
+
+But he forgot, or rather he did not know, that the lives of its
+people, whether soldiers or civilians, matter very little to any
+Government, and that its own vanity, which it calls dignity, and the
+financial interests of its supporters, matter greatly; where the
+Executive has been defied there it is inexorable and unscrupulous.
+
+Both up and down the river there was but one feeling of bitter rage
+against the impending ruin of the water; there was but one piteous
+cry of helpless desperation. But to weld this, which was mere
+emotion, into that sterner passion of which resistance and revolt are
+made, was a task beyond his powers.
+
+"No on will care for us; we are too feeble, we are too small," they
+urged; they were willing to do anything were they sure it would
+succeed, but --
+
+"But who can be sure of anything under heaven?" replied Adone. "You
+are never sure of your crops until the very last day they are reaped
+and carried; yet you sow."
+
+Yes, they granted that; but sowing grain was a safe, familiar
+labour; the idea of sowing lead and death alarmed them. Still there
+were some, most of them those who were dwellers on the river, or
+owners of land abutting on it, who were of more fiery temper, and
+these thought as Adone thought, that never had a rural people juster
+cause for rebellion; and these gathered around him in those meetings
+by night of which information had reached the Prefecture, for there
+are spies in every province.
+
+Adone had changed greatly; he had grown thin and almost gaunt; he had
+lost his beautiful aspect of adolescence; his eyes had no longer
+their clear and happy light; they were keen and fierce, and looked
+out defiantly from under his level brows.
+
+He worked on his own land usually, by day, to stave off suspicion;
+but by night he scoured the country up and down the stream wherever
+he believed he could find proselytes or arms. He had no settled plan
+of action; he had no defined project; his only idea was to resist, to
+resist, to resist. Under a leader he would have been an invaluable
+auxiliary, but he had not the knowledge whatever of stratagem, or
+manoeuvre, or any of the manifold complications of guerrilla warfare.
+His calm and dreamy life had not prepared him to be all at once a man
+of action: action was alien alike to his temperament and to his
+habits. All his heart, his blood, his imagination, were on fire; but
+behind them there was not that genius of conception and command which
+alone makes the successful chief of a popular cause.
+
+His mother said nothing to disturb or deter him on his course, but in
+herself she was sorely afraid. She kept her lips shut because she
+would have thought it unworthy to discourage him, and she could not
+believe in his success, try how she might to compel her faith to
+await miracles.
+
+Little Nerina alone gave him that unquestioning, blind belief which
+is so dear to the soul of man. Nerina was convinced that at his call
+the whole of the Valdedera would rise full-armed, and that no hostile
+power on earth would dare to touch the water. To her any miracle
+seemed possible. Whatever he ordered, she did. She had neither fear
+nor hesitation. She would slip out of her room unheard, and speed
+over the dark country on moonless nights on his errands; she would
+seek for weapons and bring them in and distribute them; she would
+take his messages to those on whom he could rely, and rouse to his
+cause the hesitating and half-hearted by repetition of his words. Her
+whole young life had caught fire at his; and her passionate loyalty
+accepted without comprehending all he enjoined her or told to her.
+
+The danger which she ran and the concealment of which she was guilty,
+never disturbed her for an instant. What Adone ordained was her law.
+Had he not taken pity on her in her misery that day by the river? Was
+she not to do anything and everything to serve him and save the
+river? This was her sole creed; but it sufficed to fill her still
+childish soul. If, with it, there were mingled a more intense and
+more personal sentiment, she was unconscious of, and he indifferent
+to, it. He sent her to do his bidding as he would have sent a boy,
+because he recognised in her that zeal and fervent fidelity to a
+trust of which he was not sure in others.
+
+Although she was a slender brown thing, like a nightingale, she was
+strong, elastic, untiring; nothing seemed to fatigue her; she always
+looked as fresh as the dew, as vigorous as a young cherry-tree. Her
+big hazel eyes danced under their long lashes, and her pretty mouth
+was like one of the four-season roses which bloomed on the house
+wall. She was not thought much to look at in a province where the
+fine Roman type is blended with the Venetian colouring in the beauty
+of its women; but she had a charm and a grace of her own; wild and
+rustic, like that of a spray of grass or a harvest mouse swinging on
+a stalk of wheat.
+
+She was so lithe, so swift, so agile; so strong without effort, so
+buoyant and content, that she carried with her the sense of her own
+perfect health and happiness, as the east wind blowing up the Edera
+water bore with it the scent of the sea.
+
+But of any physical charm in her Adone saw nothing. A great rage
+filled his soul, and a black cloud seemed to float between him and
+all else which was not the wrong done to him and his and the water of
+Edera. Until he should have lifted off the land and the stream this
+coming curse which threatened them, life held nothing for him which
+could tempt or touch him.
+
+He used the girl for his own purposes and did not spare her; but
+those purposes were only those of his self-imposed mission, and of
+all which was youthful, alluring, feminine, in her he saw nothing:
+she was to him no more than a lithe, swift, hardy filly would have
+been which he should have ridden over the moors and pastures to its
+death in pursuit of his end. He who had been always so tender of
+heart had grown cruel; he would have flung corpse upon corpse into
+the water if by such holocaust he could have reached his purpose.
+What had drawn him to Nernia had been that flash of ferocity which he
+had seen in her; that readiness to go to the bitter end in the sweet
+right of vengeance; instincts which formed so singular a contrast to
+the childish gaiety and the sunny goodwill of her normal disposition.
+
+He knew that nothing which could have been done to her would have
+made her reveal any confidence placed in her. That she was often out
+all the hours of the night on errands to the widely scattered
+dwellings of the peasants did not prevent her coming at dawn into the
+cattle stalls to feed and tend the beasts.
+
+And she was so dexterous, so sure, so silent; even the sharp eyes of
+old Gianna never detected her nocturnal absence, even the shrewd
+observation of Clelia Alba never detected any trace of fatigue in her
+or any negligence in her tasks. She was always there when they needed
+her, did all that she was used to do, was obedient to every word or
+sign; they did not know that as she carried the water pails, or cut
+the grass, or swept the bricks, or washed the linen, her heart sung
+proudly within her a joyous song because she shared a secret -- a
+perilous secret -- of which the elder woman knew nothing. Any night a
+stray shot might strike her as she ran over the moors, or through the
+heather; any night a false step might pitch her headlong into a
+ravine or a pool; any night, returning through the shallows of the
+ford, she might miss her footing and fall into one of the bottomless
+holes that the river hid in its depths: but the danger of it only
+endeared her errand the more to her; made her the prouder that she
+was chosen for it.
+
+"I fear nothing," she said to him truthfully; "I fear only that you
+should not be content."
+
+And as signal fires run from point to point, or hill to hill, so she
+ran from one farmhouse to another, bearing the messages which
+organised those gatherings whereof Giavacchino Gallo had the
+knowledge. The men she summoned and spoke with were rough peasants,
+for the most part, rude as the untanned skins they wore at their
+work, but not one of them ever said a gross word or gave a lewd
+glance to the child.
+
+She was _la bimba_ to them all; a brave little soul and honest; they
+respected her as if she were one of their own children, or one of
+their own sisters, and Nernia coming through the starlight, with an
+old musket slung at her back, which Adone had taught her to use, and
+her small, bronzed feet leaping over the ground like a young goat's,
+was a figure which soon became familiar and welcome to the people.
+She seemed to them like a harbinger of hope; she had few words, but
+those words reverberated with courage and energy; she moved the
+supine, she braced the timid; she brought the wavering firmness and
+the nervous strength; she said what Adone had taught her to say, but
+she put into it all her own immense faith in him, all her own
+innocent and undoubting certainty that his cause was just and would
+be blessed by heaven.
+
+The Edera water belonged to them. Would they let it be turned away
+from their lands and given to strangers?
+
+As a little spaniel or beagle threshes a covert, obedient to his
+master's will and working only to please him, so she scoured the
+country-side and drove in, by persuasion, or appeal, or threat, all
+those who would lend ear to her, to the midnight meetings on the
+moors, or in the homesteads, where Adone harangued them, with
+eloquence ever varied, on a theme which was never stale, because it
+appealed at once to the hearts and to the interests of his hearers.
+
+But many of them, though fascinated, remained afraid.
+
+"When all is said, what can we do?" they muttered. "Authority has a
+long arm."
+
+The people of the district talked under their breath of nothing else
+than of this resistance which was being preached as a holy war by the
+youth of Terra Vergine. They were secret and silent, made prudent by
+many generations which had suffered from harsh measures and brutal
+reprisals, but the league he proclaimed fascinated and possessed
+them. Conspiracy has a seduction subtle and irresistible as gambling
+for those who have once become its servants. It is potent as wine,
+and colours the brain which it inflames. To these lowly, solitary
+men, who knew nothing beyond their own fields and coppices and
+wastelands, its excitement came like a magic philter to change the
+monotony of their days. They were most of them wholly unlettered;
+knew not their A B C; had only learned the law of the seasons, and
+the earth, and the trees which grew, and the beasts which grazed; but
+they had imagination; they had the blood of ancient races; they were
+neither dolts not boors, though Adone in his wrath called them so.
+They were fascinated by the call to rise and save their river. A
+feeling, more local than patriotism, but more noble than interest,
+moved them to share in his passionate hatred of the intruders, and to
+hearken to his appeals to them to arm and rise as one man.
+
+But, on the other hand, long years of servitude and hardship had made
+them timid as gallant dogs are made so by fasting or the whip. "What
+are we?" some of them said to him. "We are no more than the
+earthworms in the soil." For there is a pathetic humility in these
+descendants of the ancient rulers of the world; it is a humility born
+of hope deferred, of the sense of every change of masters, of
+knowledge that the sun rises and sets upon their toil, as it did on
+that of their fathers, as it will do on that of their children, and
+will never see it lessened, nor see the fruits thereof given to
+themselves or to their sons. It is a humility which is never ignoble,
+but is infinitely, because hopelessly, sad.
+
+The river was their own, surely, yes; but, like so much else that was
+their own, the State claimed it.
+
+"What can be more yours than the son you beget, the fruit of your
+loins, the child for whom you have laboured through long years?" said
+an old man to him once. "Yet the State, as soon as he is of use to
+you, the State takes him, makes a beast of burden of him, kills his
+youth and his manhood; sends him without a word to you, to be maimed
+and slaughtered in Africa, his very place of death unknown to you;
+his body -- the body you begat and which his mother bore in her womb
+and nourished and cherished -- is devoured by the beasts of the
+desert and the birds of the air. They take all; why shall they not
+take the river also?"
+
+The glowing faith of Adone was flung, as the sunlit salt spray of the
+ocean is cast on a cliff of basalt, against the barrier of that weary
+and prostrate despair which the State dares to tell the poor is their
+duty and their portion upon earth.
+
+But the younger men listened to him more readily, being less bent and
+broken by long labour, and poor food, and many years of unanswered
+prayers. Of these some had served their time in regiments, and aided
+him to give some knowledge of drill and of the use of weapons to
+those who agreed with him to dispute by force the claim of strangers
+to the Edera water.
+
+These gatherings took place on waste lands or bare heaths, or in
+clearings or hollows in the woods, and the tramp of feet and click of
+weapons scared the affrighted fox and the astounded badger. They
+dared not fire lest the sound should betray their whereabouts to some
+unfriendly ear; but they went through all other military exercises as
+far as it lay in their power to do so.
+
+The extreme loneliness of the Edera valley was in their favour. Once
+in half a year, perhaps, half a troop of carabineers might ride
+through the district, but this was only if there had been any notable
+assassination or robbery; and of police there was none nearer than
+the town of San Beda.
+
+It was to arrange these nightly exercises, and summon to or warn off
+men from them, as might be expedient, that Nernia was usually sent
+upon her nocturnal errands. One night when she had been bidden by
+Adone to go to a certain hamlet in the woods to the north, the child,
+as she was about to slip back the great steel bolts which fastened
+the house door, saw a light upon the stairs which she had just
+descended, and turning round, her hand upon the lock, saw Clelia
+Alba.
+
+"Why are you out of your bed at this hour?" said the elder woman. Her
+face was stern and dark.
+
+Nernia did not answer; her gay courage forsook her; she trembled.
+
+"Why?" asked Adone's mother.
+
+"I was going out," answered the child. Her voice shook. She was
+clothed as usual in the daytime, but she had over her head a woollen
+wrapper. She had not her musket, for she kept it in the hen-house,
+and was accustomed to take it as she passed that place.
+
+"Going out! At the fourth hour of the night? Is that an answer for a
+decent maiden?"
+
+Nernia was silent.
+
+"Go back to your room, and I will lock you in it; in the morning you
+will account to me."
+
+Nernia recovered her self-possession, though she trembled still.
+
+"Pardon me, Madama Clelia," she said humbly, "I must go out."
+
+She did not look ashamed, and her small brown face had a resolute
+expression.
+
+A great anguish seized and wrung the heart of Clelia Alba. She knew
+that Adone was not in the house, Did he, the soul of purity and
+honour, seduce a girl who dwelt under his own roof? -- carry on an
+intrigue with a little beggar, to his own shame and the outrage of
+his mother? Was this the true cause of his frequent absence, his many
+nights abroad? Her dark brows contracted, her black eyes blazed.
+
+"Go to your room, wanton!" she said in tones of thunder. "In the
+morning you will answer to me."
+
+But Nernia, who had before this slipped the bolt aside, and who
+always kept her grasp upon the great key in the lock, suddenly turned
+it, pushed the oak door open, and before the elder woman was
+conscious of what she was doing, had dashed out into the air, and
+slammed the door behind her. The rush of wind had blown out the lamp
+in Clelia Alba's hand.
+
+When, after fumbling vainly for some minutes to find the door, and
+bruising her hands against the wall and oaken chair, she at last
+found it and thrust it open, the night without was moonless and
+starless and stormy, and in its unillumined blackness she saw no
+trace of the little girl. She went out on to the doorstep and
+listened, but there was no sound. The wind was high; the perfume of
+the stocks and wallflowers was strong; far away the sound of the
+river rushing through the sedges was audible in the intense
+stillness, an owl hooted, a nightjar sent forth its sweet, strange,
+sighing note. Of Nernia there was no trace. Clelia Alba came within
+and closed the door, and locked and bolted it.
+
+The old woman Gianna had come downstairs with a lighted rush candle
+in her hand; she was scared and afraid.
+
+"What is it? What is it, madama?"
+
+Clelia Alba dropped down on the chair by the door.
+
+"It is -- it is -- that the beggar's spawn you would have me shelter
+is the leman of my son; and he has dishonoured his house and mine."
+
+Gianna shook her grey head in solemn denial and disbelief.
+
+"Sior'a, Clelia, do not say such words or think such thoughts of your
+son or of the child. She is as harmless as any flower that blows out
+there in the garden, and he is a noble youth, though now, by the
+wickedness of me, distraught and off his head. What makes you revile
+them so?"
+
+"They are both out this night. Is not that enough?"
+
+Gianna was distressed; from her chamber above she had heard the words
+which had passed between Adone's mother and Nernia, and knew the girl
+was gone.
+
+"I would condemn others, but not Adone and the child," she returned.
+"For sure they do not do right to have secrets from you, but they are
+not such secrets as you think."
+
+"Enough!" said Clelia Alba sternly. "The morning will show who is
+right. It suffices for me that the son of Valeria Albo, my son, has
+forgot his duty to his mother and his respect for himself."
+
+Clelia Alba rose with effort from her chair, relighted her lamp at
+the old woman's rush candle, and went slowly and heavily up the
+stairs. She felt stunned and outraged. Her son! -- hers! -- to lie
+out of nights with a little nameless vagrant!
+
+Gianna caught hold of her skirt. "Madama -- listen. I saw him born
+that day by the Edera water, and I have seen him every day of his
+life since till now. He would never do a base thing. Do not you, his
+mother, disgrace him by thinking of it for an hour. This thing is
+odd, is ugly, is strange, but wait to judge it --"
+
+Clelia Alba released her skirt from her old servant's grasp.
+
+"You mean well, but you are crazed. Get you gone."
+
+Gianna let go her hold and crept submissively down the stair. She set
+her rushlight on the floor and sat down in the chair beside the door,
+and told her beads with shaking fingers. One or other of them, she
+thought, might come home either soon or late, for she did not believe
+that any amorous intimacy was the reason that they were both out --
+God knew where -- in this windy, pitch-dark night.
+
+"But he does wrong, he does wrong," she thought. "He sends the child
+on his errands perhaps, but he should remember a girl is like a
+peach, you cannot handle it ever so gently but its bloom goes; and he
+leaves us alone, two old women here, and we might have our throats
+cut before we should be able to wake old Ettore in the stable."
+
+The night seemed long to her in the lone stone entrance, with the
+owls hooting round the house, and the winds blowing loud and tearing
+the tiles from the roof. Above, in her chamber, Adone's mother walked
+to and fro all night sleepless.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+Gianna before it was dawn went out in the hope that she might meet
+Adone on his return, and be able to speak to him before he could see
+his mother. She was also in extreme anxiety for Nerina, of whom she
+had grown fond. She did not think the little girl would dare return
+after the words of Clelia Alba. She knew the child was courageous,
+but timid, like an otter or a swallow.
+
+She went to the edge of the river and waited; he must cross it to
+come home; but whether he would cross higher up or lower down she
+could not tell. There was the faint light which preceded the rising
+of the sun. A great peace, a great freshness, were on the water and
+the land.
+
+"Oh Lord, what fools we are!" thought the old woman. "The earth makes
+itself anew for us with every dawn, and our own snarling, and
+fretting, and mourning cloud it all over for us, and we only see our
+own silly souls!"
+
+Soon, before the sun was rising, Adone came in sight, passing with
+firm, accustomed step across the undressed trunks of trees which were
+here thrown across the river to make a passage lower down the stream
+than the bridge of Ruscino. He was walking with spirit and ease, his
+head was erect, his belt was filled with arms, his eyes had sternness
+and command in them; he came from one of the military drillings in
+the woods, and had been content with it. Seeing old Gianna waiting
+there he understood that something must have happened, and his first
+fears were for his mother.
+
+"Is she ill?" he cried, as he reached the bank of his own land.
+
+"No; she is well in health," answered Gianna, "but she is sorely
+grieved and deeply angered; she found the girl Nerina going out at
+the dead of night."
+
+Adone changed colour. He was silent. Gianna came close to him.
+
+"The child and you both out all night, heaven knows where! What but
+one thing can your mother think?"
+
+"If she thinks but one thing, that thing is false."
+
+"Maybe. I believe so myself, but, Sior' Clelia will not. Why do you
+send the child out at such hours?"
+
+"What did she say to my mother?"
+
+"Nothing; only that she had to go."
+
+"Faithful little soul!"
+
+"Aye! And it is when little maids are faithful like this that men
+ruin them. I do not want to speak without respect to you, Adone, for
+I have eaten your bread and been sheltered by your roof through many
+a year; but for whatever end you send that child out of nights, you
+do a bad thing, a cruel thing, a thing unworthy of your stock; and if
+I know Clelia Alba----and who should know her if not I?-- she will
+never let Nerina enter her house again."
+
+Adone's face grew dark.
+
+"The house is mine. Nerina shall not be turned out of it."
+
+"Perhaps it is yours; but it is your mother's too, and you will
+scarce turn out your mother for the sake of a little beggar-girl?"
+
+Adone was silent; he saw the dilemma; he knew his mother's nature; he
+inherited it.
+
+"Go you," he said at last; "go you and tell her that the child went
+out on my errands, indeed, but I have not seen her; there is no
+collusion with her, and she is not and never will be _dama_ of mine."
+
+"I will take her no such message, for she would not listen. Go you;
+say what you choose; perhaps she will credit you, perhaps she will
+not. Anyhow, you are warned. As for me, I will go and search for
+Nerina."
+
+"Do you mean she has not returned?"
+
+"Certainly she has not. She will no more dare to return than a kicked
+dog. You forget she is a young thing, a creature of nothing; she
+thinks herself no more than a pebble or a twig. Besides, your mother
+called her a wanton. That is a word not soon washed out. She is
+humble as a blade of grass, but she will resent that. You have made
+much trouble with your rebellious work. You have done ill -- ill --
+ill!"
+
+Adone submitted mutely to the upbraiding; he knew he had done
+selfishly, wrongfully, brutally, that which had seemed well to
+himself with no consideration of others.
+
+"Get you gone and search for the child," he said at last. "I will go
+myself to my mother."
+
+"It is the least you can do. But you must not forget the cattle.
+Nerina is not there to see to them."
+
+She pushed past him and went on to the footbridge; but midway across
+it she turned and called to him: "I lit the fire, and the coffee is
+on it. Where am I to look for the child? In the heather? in the
+woods? up in Ruscino? down in the lower valley? or may be at the
+presbytery?"
+
+"Don Silverio is absent," Adone called back to her; and he passed on
+under the olive-trees towards his home. Gianna paused on the bridge
+and watched him till he was out of sight; then she went back herself
+by another path which led to the stables. A thought had struck her:
+Nerina was too devoted to the cattle to have let them suffer;
+possible she was even now attending to them in their stalls.
+
+"She is a faithful little thing as he said!" the old servant
+muttered. "Yes; and such as she are born to labour and to suffer, and
+to eat the bread of bitterness."
+
+"Where is she, Pierino?" she said to the old white dog; he was lying
+on the grass; if the girl were lost, she thought, Pierino would be
+away somewhere looking for her.
+
+Gianna's heart was hard against Adone; in a dim way she understood
+the hopes and the schemes which occupied him, but she could not
+forgive him for sacrificing to them his mother and this friendless
+child. It was so like a man, she said to herself, to tear along on
+what he thought a road to glory, and never heed what he trampled down
+as he went -- never heed any more than the mower heeds the daisies.
+
+In the cattle stalls she found the oxen and the cows already watered,
+brushed, and content, with their pile of fresh grass beside them;
+there was no sound in the stables but of their munching and
+breathing, and now and then the rattle of the chains which linked
+them to their mangers.
+
+"Maybe she is amongst the hay," thought Gianna, and painfully she
+climbed the wide rungs of the ladder which led to the hay loft.
+There, sure enough, was Nerina, sound asleep upon the fodder. She
+looked very small, very young, very innocent.
+
+The old woman thought of the first day that she had seen the child
+asleep on the stone bench by the porch; and her eyes grew dim.
+
+"Who knows where you will rest to-morrow?" she thought; and she went
+backwards down the ladder noiselessly so as not to awaken a sleeper,
+whose awaking might be so sorrowful.
+
+Gianna went back to the house and busied herself with her usual
+tasks; she could hear the voices of Adone and Clelia Alba in the
+chamber above; they sounded in altercation, but their words she could
+not hear.
+
+It was at dawn that same day that Don Silverio returned from his
+interviews with Count Corradini and Senatore Gallo. When he reached
+Ruscino the little rector of the village in the woods had already
+celebrated mass. Don Silverio cleansed himself from the dust of
+travel, entered his church for his orisons, then broke his fast with
+bread and a plate of lentils, and whilst the day was still young took
+the long familiar way to the Terra Vergine. Whatever the interview
+might cost in pain and estrangement he felt that he dared not lose an
+hour in informing Adone of what was so dangerously known at the
+Prefecture.
+
+"He will not kill me," he thought; "and if he did, it would not
+matter much;-- except for you, my poor little man," he added to his
+dog Signorino, who was running gleefully in his shadow. Gianna saw
+him approaching as she looked from the kitchen window, and cried her
+thanks to the saints with passionate gratitude. Then she went out and
+met him.
+
+"Praise be to the Madonna that you have come back, reverendissimo!"
+she cried. "There are sore trouble and disputes under our roof."
+
+"I grieve to hear that," he answered; and thought, "I fear I have
+lost my power to cast oil on the troubled waters."
+
+He entered the great vaulted kitchen and sat down, for he was
+physically weary, having walked twenty miles in the past night.
+
+"What you feel at liberty to tell me, let me hear," he said to the
+old servant.
+
+Gianna told him in her picturesque, warmly-coloured phrase what had
+passed between Sior' Clelia and the little girl in the night; and
+what she had herself said to Adone at dawn; and how Nerina was lying
+asleep in the hay-loft, being afraid, doubtless, to come up to the
+house.
+
+Don Silverio listened with pain and indignation.
+
+"What is he about to risk a female child on such errands? And why is
+his mother in such vehement haste to say cruel words and think unjust
+and untrue things?"
+
+"They are unjust and untrue, sir, are they not?" said Gianna. "But it
+looked ill, you see; a little creature going out in the middle of the
+night, and to be sure she was but a vagrant when she came to us."
+
+"And now -- how does the matter stand? Has Adone convinced his mother
+of the girl's innocence?"
+
+"Whew! That I cannot say, sir. They are upstairs; and their voices
+were loud an hour ago. Now they are still. I had a mind to go up, but
+I am afraid."
+
+"Go up; and send Adone to me."
+
+"He is perhaps asleep, sir; he came across the water at dawn."
+
+"If so, wake him. I must speak to him without delay."
+
+Gianna went and came down quickly.
+
+"He is gone out to work in the fields, sir. Madama told me so. If he
+does not work, the land will go out of cultivation, sir."
+
+"He may have gone to Nerina?"
+
+"I do not think so, sir. But I will go back to the stable and see."
+
+"And beg Sior' Clelia to come down to me."
+
+He was left alone a few minutes in the great old stone chamber, with
+its smell of dried herbs hanging from its rafters and of maize leaves
+baking in the oven.
+
+The land would go out of cultivation -- yes! -- and the acetylene
+factories would take the place of the fragrant garden, the olive
+orchards, the corn lands, the pastures. He did not wonder that Adone
+was roused to fury; but what fury would avail aught? What pain, what
+despair, what tears, would stay the desecration for an hour? The
+hatchet would hew it all down, and the steam plough would pass over
+it all, and then the stone and the mortar, the bricks and the iron,
+the engines, and the wheels, and the cauldrons, would be enthroned on
+the ruined soil: the gods of a soulless age.
+
+"Oh, the pity of it! The pity of it!" thought Don Silverio, as the
+blue sky shone through the grated window and against the blue sky a
+rose branch swung and a swallow circled.
+
+"Your servant, Reverendissimo," said the voice of Clelia Alba, and
+Don Silverio rose from his seat.
+
+"My friend," he said to her, "I find you in trouble, and I fear that
+I shall add to it. But tell me first, what is this tale of Nerina?"
+
+"It is but this, sir; if Nerina enter here, I go."
+
+"You cannot be serious!"
+
+"If you think so, look at me."
+
+He did look at her; at her severe aquiline features, at her heavy
+eyelids drooping over eyes of implacable wrath, at her firm mouth and
+jaw, cold as if cut in marble. She was not a woman to trifle or to
+waver; perhaps she was one who having received offence would never
+forgive.
+
+"But it is monstrous!" he exclaimed; "you cannot turn adrift a little
+friendless girl -- you cannot leave your own house, your dead
+husband's house -- neither is possible -- you rave!"
+
+"It is my son's house. He will harbour whom he will. But if the girl
+pass the doorstep I go. I am not too old to labour for myself."
+
+"My good woman -- my dear friend -- it is incredible! I see what you
+believe, but I cannot pardon you for believing it. Even were it what
+you choose to think -- which is not possible -- surely your duty to a
+motherless and destitute girl of her tender years should counsel more
+benevolence?"
+
+The face of Clelia Alba grew chillier and harder still.
+
+"Sir, leave me to judge of my own duties as the mother of Adone, and
+the keeper of this house. He has told me that he is master here. I do
+not deny it. He is over age. He can bring her here if he chooses, but
+I go."
+
+"But you must know the child cannot live here with a young man!"
+
+"Why not?" said Clelia Alba, and a cruel smile passed over her face.
+"It seems to me more decent than lying out in the fields together
+night after night."
+
+"Silence!" said Don Silverio in that tone which awed the boldest. "Of
+what avail is your own virtue if it make you thus harsh, thus
+unbelieving, thus ready to condemn?"
+
+"I claim no more virtue than any clean-living woman should possess;
+but Valerio Alba would not have brought his leman into my presence,
+neither shall his son do so."
+
+"In your present mood, words are wasted on you. Go to your chamber,
+Sior' Clelia, and entreat Heaven to soften your heart. There is
+sorrow enough in store for you without your creating misery out of
+suspicion and unbelief. This house will not long be either yours or
+Adone's."
+
+He left the kitchen and went out into the air; Clelia Alba was too
+proud, too dogged, in her obstinancy to endeavour to detain him or to
+ask him what he meant.
+
+"Where is Adone?" he asked of the old labourer Ettore, who was
+carrying manure in a great skip upon his back.
+
+"He is down by the five apple-trees, sir," answered Ettore.
+
+The five apple-trees were beautiful old trees, gnarled, moss-grown,
+hoary, but still bearing abundant blossom; they grew in a field which
+was that year being trenched for young vines, a hard, back-breaking
+labour; the trenches were being cut obliquely, so as not to disturb
+the apple-trees or injure some fine fig-trees which grew there. Adone
+was at work, stripped to his shirt and hidden in the delved earth to
+his shoulders.
+
+He looked up from the trench and lifted his hat as he saw the priest
+enter the field; then he resumed his labour.
+
+"Come out of your ditch and hearken to me. I will not weary you with
+many words."
+
+Adone, moved by long habit of obedience and deference, leapt with his
+agile feet on to the border of the trench and stood there, silent,
+sullen, ready to repel reproof with insolence.
+
+"Is it worthy of you to ruin the name of a girl of sixteen by sending
+her on midnight errands to your fellow-rebels?"
+
+Don Silverio spoke bluntly; he spoke only on suspicion, but his tone
+was that of a direct charge.
+
+Adone did not doubt for a moment that he was in possession of facts.
+
+"Has the girl played us false?" he said moodily.
+
+"I have not seen the girl," replied Don Silvero. "But it is a base
+thing to do, to use that child for errands of which she cannot know
+either the danger or the illegality. You misuse one whose youth and
+helplessness should have been her greatest protection."
+
+"I had no one else that I could trust."
+
+"Pour little soul! You could trust her, so you abused her trust! No:
+I do not believe you are her lover. I do not believe you care for her
+more than for the clod of earth you stand on. But to my thinking that
+makes what you have done worse; colder, more cruel, more calculating.
+Had you seduced her, you would at least feel that you owed her
+something. She has been a mere little runner and slave to you -- no
+more. Surely your knowledge that she depends on you ought to have
+sufficed to make her sacred?"
+
+Adone looked on the ground. His face was red with the dull flush of
+shame. He knew that he merited all these words and more.
+
+"I will provide temporarily for her; and you will send her out no
+more upon these errands," continued Don Silverio. "Perhaps, with
+time, your mother may soften to her; but I doubt it."
+
+"The house is mine," said Adone sullenly. "She shall not keep Nerina
+out of it."
+
+"You certainly cannot turn your mother away from her own hearth,"
+replied Don Silverio with contempt. "I tell you I will take the girl
+to some place in Ruscino where she will be safe for the present time.
+But I came to say another thing to you as well as this. I have been
+away three days. I have seen the Prefect, Senatore Gallo. He has
+informed me that your intentions, your actions, your plans and
+coadjutors are known to him, and that he is aware that you are
+conspiring to organise resistance and riot."
+
+A great shock struck Adone as he heard; he felt as if an electric
+charge had passed through him. He had believed his secret to be as
+absolutely unknown as the graves of the lucomone under the ivy by the
+riverside.
+
+"How could he know?" he stammered. "Who is the traitor?"
+
+"That matters little," said Don Silverio. "What matters much is, that
+all you do and desire to do is written down at the Prefecture."
+
+Adone was sceptical. He laughed harshly.
+
+"If so, sir, why do they not arrest me? That would be easy enough. I
+do not hide."
+
+"Have you not ofttimes seen a birdcatcher spread his net? Does he
+seize the first bird which approaches it? He is not so unwise. He
+waits until all the feathered innocents are in the meshes: then he
+fills his sack. That is how the Government acts always. It gives its
+enemies full rope to hang themselves. It is cold of blood, and slow,
+and sure."
+
+"You say this to scare me, to make me desist."
+
+"I say it because it is the truth; and if you were not a boy, blind
+with rage and unreason, you would long since have known that such
+actions as yours, in rousing or trying to rouse the peasants of the
+Valdedera, must come to the ear of the authorities. Do not mistake.
+They let you alone as yet, not because they love you or fear you; but
+because they are too cunning and too wise to touch the pear before it
+is ripe."
+
+Adone was silent. He was convinced; and many evil thoughts were black
+within his brain. His first quarrel with a mother he adored had
+intensified all the desperate ferocity awake in him.
+
+"You are as blind as a mole," said Don Silverio, "but you have not
+the skill of the mole in constructing its hidden galleries. You
+scatter your secrets broadcast as you scatter grain over your
+ploughed field. You think it is enough to choose a moonless night for
+you and your companions-in-arms to be seen by no living creature!
+Does the stoat, does the wild cat, make such a mistake as that? If
+you make war on the State, study the ways of your foe. Realise that
+it has as many eyes, as many ears, as many feet as the pagan god;
+that its arm is as long as its craft, that it has behind it
+unscrupulous force and unlimited gold, and the support of all those
+who only want to pursue their making of wealth in ease and in peace.
+Do you imagine you can meet and beat such antagonists with a few
+rusty muskets, a few beardless boys, a poor little girl like Nerina?"
+
+Don Silverio's voice was curt, imperious, sardonic; his sentences cut
+like whips; then after a moment of silence his tone changed to an
+infinite softness and sweetness of pleading and persuasion.
+
+"My son, my dear son! cease to live in this dream of impossible
+issues. Wake to the brutality of fact, to nakedness of truth. You
+have to suffer a great wrong; but will you be consoled for it by the
+knowledge that you have led to the slaughter men whom you have known
+from your infancy? It can but end in one way -- your conflict with
+the power of the State. You, and those who have listened to you, will
+be shot down without mercy, or flung into prison, or driven to lead
+the life of tracked beasts in the woods. There is no other possible
+end to the rising which you are trying to bring about. If you have no
+pity for your mother, have pity on your comrades, for the women who
+bore them, for the women who love them."
+
+Adone quivered with breathless fury as he heard. All the blackness of
+his soul gathered into a storm of rage, burst forth in shameful doubt
+and insult. He set his teeth, and his voice hissed through them,
+losing all its natural music.
+
+"Sir, your clients are men in high places; mine are my miserable
+brethren. You take the side of the rich and powerful; I take that of
+the poor and the robbed. Maybe your reverence has deemed it your duty
+to tell the authorities that which you say they have learned?"
+
+A knife through his breast-bone would have given a kindlier wound to
+his hearer. Amazement under such an outrage was stronger in Don
+Silverio than any other feeling for the first moment. Adone -- Adone!
+-- his scholar, his beloved, his disciple! -- spoke to him thus! Then
+an overwhelming disgust and scorn swept over him, and was stronger
+than his pain. He could have stricken the ungrateful youth to the
+earth. The muscles of his right arm swelled and throbbed; but, with
+an intense effort, he controlled the impulse to avenge his insulted
+honour. Without a word, and with one glance of reproach and of
+disdain, he turned away and went through the morning shadows under
+the drooping apple boughs.
+
+Adone, with his teeth set hard and his eyes filled with savage fire,
+sprang down into the trench and resumed his work.
+
+He was impenitent.
+
+"He is mad! He knows not what he says!" thought the man whom he had
+insulted. But though he strove to excuse the outrage it was like a
+poisoned blade in his flesh.
+
+Adone could suspect him! Adone could believe him to be an informer!
+
+Was this all the recompense for eighteen years of unwearying
+affection, patience, and tuition? Though the whole world had
+witnessed against him, he would have sworn that Adone Alba would have
+been faithful to him.
+
+"He is mad," he thought. "His first great wrong turns his blood to
+poison. He will come to me weeping to-morrow."
+
+But he knew that what Adone had said to him, however repented of,
+however washed away with tears, was one of those injuries which may
+be forgiven, but can never be forgotten, by any living man. It would
+yawn like a pit between them for ever.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+To this apple-tree field there was a high hedge of luxuriant elder
+and ash, myrtle and field-roses. Behind this hedge old Gianna was
+waiting for him; the tears were running down her face. She took the
+skirt of his coat between her hands. "Wait, your reverence, wait! The
+child is in the cattle stable."
+
+Don Silverio looked down on her a few moments without comprehension.
+Then he remembered.
+
+"Is she there indeed? Poor little soul! She must not go to the
+house."
+
+"She does not dream of it, sir. Only she cannot understand why
+Madonna Clelia's anger is so terrible. What can I do -- oh, Lord!"
+
+"Keep her where she is for the present. I am going home. I will speak
+with some of the women in Ruscino, and find her some temporary
+shelter."
+
+"She will go to none, sir. She says she must be where she can serve
+Adone. If she be shut up, she will escape and run into the woods.
+Three years ago she was a wild thing; she will turn wild again."
+
+"Like enough! But we must do what we can. I am going home. I will
+come or send to you in a few hours."
+
+Gianna reluctantly let him go. As he crossed the river he looked down
+on the bright water, here green as emeralds, there brown as peat,
+eddying round the old stone piers of the bridge, and an infinite
+sorrow was on him.
+
+As a forest fire sweeps away under its rolling smoke and waves of
+flame millions of obscure and harmless creatures, so the baneful
+fires of men's greed and speculations came from afar and laid low
+these harmless lives with neither thought of them or pity.
+
+Later in the day he sent word to Gianna to bring Nernia to the
+presbytery. They both came, obedient. The child looked tired and had
+lost her bright colour; but she had a resolute look on her face.
+
+"My poor little girl," he said gently to her, "Madonna Clelia is
+angered against you. We will hope her anger will pass ere long.
+Meanwhile you must not go to the house. You would not make ill-blood
+between a mother and her son?"
+
+"No," said Nernia.
+
+"I have found a home for awhile for you, with old Alaida Manzi; you
+know her; she is a good creature. I am very sorry for you, my child;
+but you did wrong to be absent at night; above all not to go back to
+your chamber when Clelia Alba bade you to do so."
+
+Nernia's face darkened. "I did no harm."
+
+"I am sure you did not mean to do any; but you disobeyed Madonna
+Clelia."
+
+Nernia was silent.
+
+"You are a young girl; you must not roam the country at night. It is
+most perilous. Decent maidens and women are never abroad after
+moonrise."
+
+Nernia said nothing.
+
+"You will promise me never to go out at night again?"
+
+"I cannot promise that, sir."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"If I be wanted, I shall go."
+
+"If Adone Alba bid you -- is that your meaning?"
+
+Nernia was silent.
+
+"Do you think that it is fitting for you to have secrets from me,
+your confessor?"
+
+Nernia was silent; her rosy mouth was closed firmly. It was very
+terrible to have to displease and disobey Don Silverio; but she would
+not speak, not if she should burn in everlasting flames for ever.
+
+"Take her away. Take her to Alaida," he said wearily to Gianna.
+
+"She only obeys Adone, sir," said the old woman. "All I can say
+counts as naught."
+
+"Adone will send her on no more midnight errands, unless he be brute
+and fool both. Take her away. Look to her, you and Alaida."
+
+"I will do what I can, sir," said Gianna humbly, and pushed the girl
+out into the village street before her.
+
+Don Silverio sat down at his deal writing-table and wrote in his
+fine, clear calligraphy a few lines: "_In the name of my holy office
+I forbid you to risk the life and good name of the maiden Nernia on
+your unlawful errands_."
+
+Then he signed and sealed the sheet, and sent it by his sacristan to
+Adone.
+
+He received no answer.
+
+The night which followed was one of the most bitter in its
+meditations that he had ever spent; and he had spent many cruel and
+sleepless nights ere then.
+
+That Adone could for one fleeting moment have harboured so vile a
+thought filled him with nausea and amaze. Betray them! He! -- who
+would willingly have given up such years of life as might remain to
+him could he by such a sacrifice have saved their river and their
+valley from destruction. There was nothing short of vice or crime
+which he would not have done to save the Edera water from its fate.
+But it was utterly impossible to do anything. Even men of eminence
+had often brought all their forces of wealth and argument against
+similar enterprises, and had failed in their opposition. What could a
+few score of peasants, and one poor ecclesiastic, do against all the
+omnipotence of Parliament, of millionaires, of secretaries of State,
+of speculators, of promoters, tenacious and forcible and ravenous as
+the octopus?
+
+In those lonely night hours when the moonbeams shone on his bed and
+the little white dog nestled itself close to his shoulder, he was
+tortured also by the sense that it was his duty to arrest Adone and
+the men of the Valdedera in their mad course, even at the price of
+such treachery to them as Adone had dared to attribute to him. But if
+that were his duty it must be the first duty which consciously he had
+left undone!
+
+If he could only stop them on their headlong folly by betraying them
+they must rush on to their doom!
+
+He saw no light, no hope, no assistance anywhere. These lads would
+not be able to save a single branch of the river water, nor a
+sword-rush on its banks, nor a moorhen in its shallows, nor a cluster
+of myosotis upon its banks, and they would ruin themselves.
+
+The golden glory of the planet Venus shone between the budding
+vine-leaves at his casement.
+
+"Are you not tire?" he said to the shining orb. "Are you not tired of
+watching the endless cruelties and insanities on earth?"
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+The people of Ruscino went early to their beds; the light of the
+oil-wicks of the Presbytery was always the only light in the village
+half an hour after dark. Nerina went uncomplainingly to hers in the
+dark stone house within the walls where she had been told that it was
+her lot to dwell. She did not break her fast; she drank great
+draughts of water; then, with no word except a brief good-night, she
+went to the sacking filled with leaves which the old woman Alaida
+pointed out for her occupancy.
+
+"She is soon reconciled," thought the old crone. "They have trained
+her well."
+
+Relieved of all anxiety, she herself lay down in the dark and slept.
+The girl seemed a good, quiet, tame little thing, and said her
+paternosters as she should do. But Nerina did not sleep. She was
+stifled in this little close room with its one shuttered window. She
+who was used to sleeping with the fresh fragrant air of the dark
+fields blowing over her in her loft, felt the sour, stagnant
+atmosphere take her like a hand by the throat.
+
+As soon as she heard by the heavy breathing of the aged woman that
+she was sunk in the congested slumber of old age, the child got up
+noiselessly -- she had not undressed -- and stole out of the chamber,
+taking the door key from the nail on which Alaida had hung it. A
+short stone stair led down to the entrance. No one else was sleeping
+in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a
+tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as
+she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in
+another moment ran down the steep and stone street. She laughed as
+the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the
+fragrance of Adone's fields.
+
+"I shall be in time!" she thought, as she ran down a short cut which
+led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the
+glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge.
+
+The usual spot for the assembly of the malcontents was a grassy
+hollow surrounded on all sides with woods, and called the tomb of
+Asdrubal, from a mound of masonry which bore that name, although it
+was utterly improbable that Asdrubal, who had been slain a hundred
+miles to the northeast on the Marecchia water, should have been
+buried in the Valdedera at all. But the place and the name were well
+known in the district to hundreds of peasants, who knew no more who
+or what Asdrubal had been than they knew the names of the stars which
+form the constellation of Perseus.
+
+Adone had summoned his friends to be there by nightfall, and he was
+passing from the confines of his own lands on to those of the open
+moors when the child saw him. He was dressed in his working clothes,
+but he was fully armed: his gun on his shoulder, his great pistols in
+his sash, his dagger in his stocking. They were ancient arms; but
+they had served in matters of life and death, and would so serve
+again. On the three-edged blade of the sixteenth-century poignard was
+a blood-stain more than a century old which nothing would efface.
+
+"Nerina!" he cried as the girl stopped him, and was more distressed
+than pleased to see her there; he had not thought of her.
+
+In the moonlight, under the silvery olive foliage her little sunburnt
+face and figure took a softer and more feminine grace. But Adone had
+not sight for it. For him she was but a sturdy little pony, who would
+trot till she dropped.
+
+He was cruel as those who are possessed by one intense and absorbing
+purpose always are: he was cruel to Nerina as Garibaldi, in the days
+of Ravenna, was cruel to Anita.
+
+But through that intense egotism which sees in all the world only its
+own cause, its own end, its own misery, there touched him for one
+instant an unselfish pity for the child of whom he had made so
+mercilessly his servant and his slave.
+
+"Poor little girl! I have been hard to you, I have been cruel and
+unfair," he said, as a vague sense of her infinite devotion to his
+cause moved him as a man may be moved by a dog's fidelity.
+
+"You have been good to me," said Nerina; and from the bottom of her
+heart she thought so. "I came to see if you wanted me," she added
+humbly.
+
+"No, no. They think ill of you for going my errands. Poor child, I
+have done you harm enough. I will not do you more."
+
+"You have done me only good."
+
+"What! When my mother has turned you out of the house!"
+
+"It is her right."
+
+"Let it be so for a moment. You shall come back. You are with old
+Alaida?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How can you be out to-night?"
+
+"She sleeps heavily, and the lock is not hard."
+
+"You are a brave child."
+
+"Is there nothing to do to-night?"
+
+"No, dear."
+
+"Where do you go?"
+
+"To meet the men at the tomb of Asdrubal."
+
+"Who summoned them?"
+
+"I myself. You must be sad and sorry, child, and it is my fault."
+
+She checked a sob in her throat. "I am not far away, and old Alaida
+is kind. Let me go on some errand to-night?"
+
+"No, my dear, I cannot."
+
+He recalled the words of the message which he had received from Don
+Silverio that day. He knew the justice of this message, he knew that
+it only forbade what all humanity, hospitality, manhood, and
+compassion forbade to him. One terrible passion had warped his
+nature, closed his heart, and invaded his reason to the exclusion of
+all other thoughts or instincts; but he was not yet so lost to shame
+as, now that he knew what he had done, to send out a female creature
+into peril to do his bidding.
+
+"Tell me, then, tell me," pleaded Nerina, "when will anything be
+done?"
+
+"Whenever the foreign labourers come to work on the water we shall
+drive them away."
+
+"But if they will not go?"
+
+"Child, the river is deep; we know its ways and its soundings; they
+do not."
+
+Her great bright eyes flashed fire: an unholy joy laughed in them.
+
+"We will baptize them over again!" she said; and all her face laughed
+and sparkled in the moonlight. There was fierce mountain blood in her
+veins; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like the juice of
+grapes warmed in an August noon.
+
+He laughed slow, savagely. "Their blood will be on their own heads!"
+
+He meant to drive them out, swamp them in the stream, choke them in
+the sand, hunt them in the heather; make every man of them rue the
+day that ever they came thither to meddle with the Edera water.
+
+"Curse them! Their blood will be on their own heads!" he said between
+his teeth. He was thinking of the strange men who it was said would
+be at work on the land and the water before the moon, young now,
+should be in her last quarter; men hired by the hundreds,
+day-labourers of the Romagna and the Puglie, leased by contract,
+marshalled under overseers, different in nothing from slaves who
+groan under the white man's lash in Africa.
+
+"Let me come with you to-night," she pleaded again. "I will hide in
+the bushes. The men shall not see me."
+
+"No, no," he said sternly. "Get you back to your rest at Ruscino. I
+did wrong, I did basely to use your ignorance and abuse your
+obedience. Get you gone, and listen to your priest, not to me."
+
+The child, ever obedient, vanished through the olive boughs. Adone
+went onward northward to his tryst: his soul was dark as night; it
+enraged him to have been forced by his conscience and his honour to
+obey the command of Don Silverio.
+
+But she did not go over the bridge to Ruscino. She waited a little
+while then followed on his track. Gianna was right. She was a wild
+bird. She had been caught and tamed for a time, but she was always
+wild. The life which they had given her had been precious and sweet
+to her, and she had learned willingly all its ways; but at the bottom
+of her heart the love of liberty, the love of movement, the love of
+air and sky and freedom were stronger than all else. She was of an
+adventurous temper also, and brave like all Abruzzese, and she longed
+to see one of those moonlit midnight meetings of armed men to which
+she had escaped from Alaida's keeping, she could not have forced
+herself to go back out of this clear, cool, radiant night into the
+little, close, dark sleeping-chamber. No, not if Don Silverio himself
+had stood in her path with the cross raised. She was like a year-old
+lioness who smells blood.
+
+She knew the way to the tomb of Asdrubal, even in the darkness, as
+well as he did. It was situated in a grassy hollow surrounded by
+dense trees, some five miles or more from the Terra Vergine, on the
+north bank of the river. The solitude was absolute, and the place
+large enough to permit the assemblage of several scores of men.
+
+Adone went on, unconscious that he was followed; he went at a
+swinging trot, easy and swift; the sinews of his lithe limbs were
+strong as steel, and his rage, all aflame, lent lightning to his
+feet.
+
+She allowed him to precede her by half a mile or more, for if he had
+seen her his anger would have been great, and she feared it. She went
+skipping and bounding along, where the path was clear, in all the joy
+of liberty and rapture of the fresh night air. The hours spent in
+Alaida's close house in the village had been as terrible to her as
+his hours in a birdcatcher's hamper are to a wild bird. Up at Ansalda
+she had always been out of doors, and at the Terra Vergine she had
+gone under a roof only to eat and sleep.
+
+The moon, which was in the beginning of its first quarter, had passed
+behind some heavy clouds; there was little light, for there were as
+yet few stars visible, but that was not matter to her. She knew her
+way as well as any mountain hare.
+
+The pungent odour of the heaths through which she went seemed to her
+like a draught of wine, the strong sea breeze which was blowing bore
+her up like wings. She forgot that she was once more a homeless waif,
+as she had been that day when she had sat under the dock leaves by
+the Edera water. He had told her she should go back; she believed
+him: that was enough. Madonna Clelia would forgive, she felt sure,
+for what harm had she done? All would be well; she would feed the
+oxen again, and go again to the spring for water, and all would be as
+it had been before -- her thoughts, her desires, went no farther than
+that. So, with a light heart she followed him gaily, running where
+there was open ground, pushing hard where the heather grew, going
+always in the same path as Adone had done.
+
+All of a sudden she stopped short, in alarm.
+
+The night was still; the spring of the river was loud upon it, owls
+hooted and chuckled, now and then a fox in the thickets barked. There
+are many sounds in the open country at night; sounds of whirring
+pinions, of stealthy feet, of shrill, lone cries, of breaking twigs,
+of breaking ferns, of little rivulets unheard by day, of timid
+creatures taking courage in the dark. But to these sounds she was
+used; she could give a name to every one of them. She heard now what
+was unfamiliar to her in these solitudes; she heard the footsteps of
+men; and it seemed to her, all around her, as though in a moment of
+time, the heath and bracken and furze grew alive to their tryst with
+Adone? She did not think so, for she had never known the few men in
+the village summon courage to join the armed meetings of the men of
+the valley. She stopped and listened, as a pole-cat which was near
+her did; the sounds were those of human beings, breathing, creeping,
+moving under the heather.
+
+Suddenly she felt some presence close to her in the dark; she held
+her breath; she shrank noiselessly between the plumes of heath. If
+they were men of the country they would not hurt her, but if not --
+she was not sure.
+
+Near her was an open space where the wild growth had been recently
+cut. The men debouched on to it from the undergrowth, there was a
+faint light from the stars on that strip of rough grass; by it she
+saw that they were soldiers, five in number.
+
+A great terror cowed her, like a hand of ice at her heart, a terror
+not for herself, but for those away there, in the green hollow by the
+three stone-pines.
+
+They were soldiers; yes, they were soldiers; the sounds she had heard
+had been the crushing of the plants under their feet, the click of
+their muskets as they moved; they were soldiers! Where had they come
+from? There were no soldiers at Ruscino.
+
+The only time when she had ever seen soldiers had been when the
+troopers had captured Baruffo. These were not troopers; they were
+small men, on foot, linen-clad, moving stealthily, and as if in fear;
+only the tubes of their muskets glistened in the light of the great
+planets.
+
+She crouched down lower and lower, trying to enter the ground and
+hide; she hoped they would go onward, and then she could run --
+faster than they -- and reach the hollow, and warn Adone and his
+fellows. She had no doubt that they came to surprise the meeting; but
+she hoped from their pauses and hesitating steps that they were
+uncertain what way to take.
+
+"If you come to me to lead you -- aye! I will lead you! -- you will
+not forget where I lead!" she said to herself, as she hid under the
+heather; and her courage rose, for she saw a deed to be done. For
+they were now very near to the place of meeting, and could have taken
+the rebels like mice in a trap, if they had only known where they
+were; but she, watching them stand still, and stare, and look up to
+the stars, and then north, south, east, and west, saw that they did
+not know, and that it might be possible to lead them away from the
+spot by artifice, as the quail leads the sportsman away from the
+place where her nest is hidden.
+
+As the thought took shape in her brain a sixth man, a sergeant who
+commanded them, touched her with his foot, stooped, clutched her, and
+pulled her upward. She did not try to escape.
+
+"What beast of night have we here?" he cried. "Spawn of devils, who
+are you?"
+
+Nerina writhed under the grip of his iron fingers, but she still did
+not try to escape. He cursed her, swore at her, shook her, crushed
+her arm black and blue. She was sick with pain, but she was mute.
+
+"Who are you?" he shouted.
+
+"I come down from the mountains to work here in summer."
+
+"Can any of you speak her dialect?" cried the sergeant to his
+privates: the sergeant was a man of Milan.
+
+One man answered, "I come from Paganica; it is much the same tongue
+there as in these parts."
+
+"Ask her the way, then."
+
+The soldier obeyed.
+
+"What is the way to the Three Pines? -- to the tomb of Asdrubal?"
+
+"The way is long," said Nerina.
+
+"Do you know it?"
+
+"I know it."
+
+"Have you heard tell of it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That men meet at night there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Meet this night there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You know where the tomb of Asdrubal is?"
+
+"Have I not told you?"
+
+The soldier repeated her answer translated to his sergeant; the
+latter kept his grasp on her.
+
+"Ask her if she will take us there."
+
+The soldier asked her and translated her answer.
+
+"If we give her two gold pieces she will take us there."
+
+"Spawn of hell! I will give her nothing. But if she do not lead us
+aright I will give her a bullet for her breakfast."
+
+The soldier translated to Nerina: "He will give you two gold pieces
+if you guide us aright; and you need have no fear; we are honest men
+and the king's servants."
+
+"I will guide the king's servants."
+
+"You are sure of the way?"
+
+"Is the homing pigeon sure of his?"
+
+"Let us be off," said the sergeant. "A bullet for her if she fail."
+
+He had little pleasure in trusting to this girl of the Abruzzo hills,
+but he and his men were lost upon these moors, and might grope all
+night, and miss the meeting, and fail to join his comrades and
+surprise those who gathered at it. He reckoned upon fear as a sure
+agent to keep her true, as it kept his conscripts under arms.
+
+"Bid him take his hand off me," said Nerina, "or I do not move."
+
+The private translated to his superior. "She prays of your mercy to
+leave her free, or she cannot pass through the heather."
+
+The sergeant let her go unwillingly, but pushed her in front of him,
+and levelled his revolver at her.
+
+"Tell her, if she try to get away, I fire."
+
+"Tell him I know that," said Nerina.
+
+She was not afraid, for a fierce, unholy joy was in her veins; she
+could have sung, she could have laughed, she could have danced; she
+held them in her power; they had come to ensnare Adone, and she had
+got them in her power as if they were so many moles!
+
+They tied her hands behind her; she let them do it; she did not want
+her hands. Then she began to push her way doggedly, with her head
+down, to the south. The tomb of Asdrubal was due north; she could see
+the pole star, and turned her back to it and went due south.
+
+Three miles or more southward there was a large _pollino_, or swamp
+as L'Erba Molle, the wet grass; the grass was luxuriant, the flora
+was varied and beautiful; in appearance it was a field, in reality it
+was a morass; to all people of the Valdedera it was dreaded and
+avoided, as quicksand are by the seashore.
+
+She went on as fast as the narrow path, winding in and out between
+the undergrowth, permitted her to go; the armed soldiers, heavy laden
+with their knapsacks and their boots, following her clumsily, and
+with effort, uttering curses on their ill-luck and their sleepless
+night.
+
+The stars were now larger and brighter; the darkness was lightened,
+the river was running away from its southern birthplace in the hills
+which lie like couched lions about the feet of the Gran Sasso. She
+could hear its distant murmur. "They come to capture you," she said
+to it, "and I will kill them. They shall choke and go down, down,
+down -- "
+
+Her heart leapt within her; and she went with the loaded revolver
+pointed at her from behind as though she went to her bridal-bed.
+
+"Where are you taking us, vile little bitch?" the sergeant cried, and
+the soldier from Paganica translated: "Pretty little brown one,
+whither do you go?"
+
+"I take you straight," said Nerina, "only you go to clumsily, for men
+in these parts should not wear leather upon their feet."
+
+The soldiers sighed assent, and would willingly have gone barefoot,
+and the sergeant swore in tones of thunder because he could not
+understand what she said.
+
+Before long they came in sight of the Erba Molle; it looked like a
+fair, peaceful pasture, with thousands of sword rushes golden upon
+its surface. The light of the stars, which was now brilliant, shone
+upon its verdure; there were great flocks of water-birds at roost
+around it, and they rose with shrill cries and great noise of wings,
+with a roar as though a tide were rising.
+
+Across it stretched a line of wooden piles which served as a rude
+causeway to those who had the courage and the steadiness to leap from
+one to another of them. It was not three times in a season that any
+one dared to do so. Adone did so sometimes; and he had taught Nerina
+how to make the passage.
+
+"Pass you after me, and set your feet where I set mine," said Nerina
+to the little soldier of the Abruzzo, and she put down her foot on
+the first pile, sunk almost invisible under the bright green slime,
+where thousands of frogs were croaking.
+
+The soldier of the Abruzzo said to his superior, "She says we must
+set our feet where she sets hers. We are quite near now to the tomb
+of the barbarian."
+
+Nerina, with the light leap of a kid, bounded from pile to pile. They
+thought she went on solid ground; on meadow grass. The sergeant and
+his men crowded on to what they thought was pasture. In the uncertain
+shadows and scarce dawning light, they did not see the row of
+submerged timber. They sank like stones in the thick ooze; they were
+sucked under to their knees, to their waists, to their shoulders, to
+their mouths; the yielding grasses, the clutching slime, the tangled
+weed, the bottomless mud, took hold of them; the water-birds shrieked
+and beat their wings; the hideous clamour of dying men answered them.
+
+Nerina had reached the other side of the morass in safety, and her
+mocking laughter rang upon their ears.
+
+"I have led you well!" she cried to them. "I have led you well, oh
+servants of the king! -- oh swine! -- oh slaves! -- oh spies!-- oh
+hunters and butchers of men!"
+
+And she danced on the edge of the field of death, and the light of
+the great planets shone upon her face.
+
+Had she run onward at once the wood beyond she would have been saved.
+That instant of triumph and mockery lost her.
+
+The sergeant had put his revolver in his teeth; he knew now that he
+was a dead man; the slime was up to his chin, under his feet the
+grass and the mud quaked, yielded, yawned like a grave.
+
+He drew his right arm out of the ooze, seized his revolver, and aimed
+at the dancing, mocking, triumphant figure beyond the border of
+golden sword rushes. With a supreme effort he fired; then he sank
+under the mud and weed.
+
+The child dropped dead on the edge of the morass.
+
+One by one each soldier sank. Not one escaped.
+
+The water-birds came back from their upward flight and settled again
+on the swamp.
+
+Underneath it all was still, save for the loud croaking of the frogs.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+Don Silverio rose with the dawn of day, and entered his church at
+five of the clock. There were but a few women gathered in the gaunt,
+dark vastness of the nave. The morning was hot, and the scent of buds
+and blossoms and fresh-cut grass came in from the fields over the
+broken walls and into the ancient houses.
+
+When Mass was over, old Alaida crept over the mouldy mosaics timidly
+to his side, and kneeled down on the stones.
+
+"Most reverend," she whispered, "'twas not my fault. I slept heavily;
+she must have unlocked the door, for it was undone at dawn; her bed
+is empty, she has not returned."
+
+"You speak of Nerina?"
+
+"Of Nerina, reverence. I did all I could. It was not my fault. She
+was like a hawk in a cage."
+
+"I am grieved," he said; and he thought: "Is it Adone?"
+
+He feared so.
+
+"Is she not at the Terra Vergine?" he asked. Alaida shook her head.
+
+"No, reverend sir. I sent my grandchild to ask there. Gianna has not
+seen her, and says the girl would never dare to go near Clelia Alba."
+
+"I am grieved," said Don Silverio again.
+
+He did not blame the old woman, as who, he thought, blames one who
+could not tame an eaglet?
+
+He went back to the presbytery and broke his fast on a glass of
+water, some bread, and some cresses from the river.
+
+He had sent for Gianna. In half an hour she came, distressed and
+frightened.
+
+"Sir, I know not of her; I should not dare to harbour her, even in
+the cattle-stall. Madonna Clelia would turn me adrift. When Madonna
+Clelia has once spoken --"
+
+"Adone is at home?"
+
+"Alas! No, sir. He went out at nightfall; we have not seen him since.
+He told me he went to a meeting of men at the Three Pines, at what
+they call the Tomb of the Barbarian."
+
+Don Silverio was silent.
+
+"It is very grave," he said at last.
+
+"Aye, sir, grave indeed," said Gianna. "Would that it were love
+between them, sir. Love is sweet and wholesome and kind, but there is
+no such thing in Adone's heart. There it is only, alas! Blackness and
+fire and hatred, sir; bloodlust against those who mean ill to the
+river."
+
+"And his mother has lost all influence over him?"
+
+"All, sir. She is no more to him now than a bent stick. Yet, months
+ago, she gave him her pearls and her bracelets, and he sold them in a
+distant town to buy weapons."
+
+"Indeed? What madness!"
+
+"How else could the men have been armed, sir?"
+
+"Armed!" he repeated. "And of what use is it to arm? What use is it
+for two hundred peasants to struggle against the whole forces of the
+State? They will rot in prison; that is all that they will do."
+
+"Maybe yes, sir. Maybe no," said the old woman, with the obstinacy of
+ignorance. "Some one must begin. They have no right to take the water
+away, sir; no more right than to take the breast from the babe."
+
+Then, afraid of having said so much, she dropped her curtsey and went
+out into the street. But in another moment she came back into the
+study with a scared, blanched face, in which the wrinkles were
+scarred deep like furrows in a field.
+
+"Sir -- sir!" she gasped, "there are the soldiery amongst us."
+
+Don Silverio rose in haste, put the little dog on his armchair,
+closed the door of his study, and went down the narrow stone passage
+which parted his bookroom from the entrance. The lofty doorway showed
+him the stones of the familiar street, a buttress of his church, a
+great branch of one of the self-sown ilex-trees, the glitter of the
+arms and the white leather of the cross belts of a sentinel. The
+shrill lamentations of the women seemed to rend the sunny air. He
+shuddered as he heard. Coming up the street farther off were half a
+troop of carabineers and a score of dragoons; the swords of the
+latter were drawn, the former had their carbines levelled. The
+villagers, screaming with terror, were closing their doors and
+shutters in frantic haste; the door of the presbytery alone remained
+open. Don Silverio went into the middle of the road and addressed the
+officer who headed the carabineers.
+
+"May I ask to what my parish owes this visit?"
+
+"We owe no answer to you, reverend sir," said the lieutenant.
+
+The people were sobbing hysterically, catching their children in
+their arms, calling to the Holy Mother to save them, kneeling down on
+the sharp stones in the dust. Their priest felt ashamed of them.
+
+"My people," he called to them, "do not be afraid. Do not hide
+yourselves. Do not kneel to these troopers. You have done no wrong."
+
+"I forbid you to address the crowd," said the officer. "Get you back
+into your house."
+
+"What is my offence?"
+
+"You will learn in good time," said the commandant. "Get you into
+your presbytery."
+
+"My place is with my people."
+
+The officer, impatient, struck him on the chest with the pommel of
+his sword.
+
+Two carabineers thrust him back into the passage.
+
+"No law justifies your conduct," he said coldly, "or authorises you
+to sever me from my flock."
+
+"The sabre is law here," said the lieutenant in command.
+
+"It is the only law known anywhere in this kingdom," said Don
+Silverio.
+
+"Arrest him," said the officer. "He is creating disorder."
+
+The carabineers drove him into his study, and a brigadier began to
+ransack his papers and drawers.
+
+He said nothing; the seizure of his manuscripts and documents was
+indifferent to him, for there was nothing he had ever written which
+would not bear the fullest light. But the insolent and arbitrary act
+moved him to keen anxiety, because it showed that the military men
+had licence to do their worst, at their will, and his anguish of
+apprehension was for Adone. He could only hope and pray that Adone
+had returned, and might be found tranquilly at work in the fields of
+the Terra Vergine. But his fears were great. Unless more soldiery
+were patrolling the district in all directions it was little likely,
+he thought, that these men would conduct themselves thus in Ruscino;
+he had no doubt that it was a concerted movement, directed by the
+Prefect, and the General commanding the garrisons of the province,
+and intended to net in one haul the malcontents of the Valdedera.
+
+From his study there was no view upon the street; he could hear the
+wailing of women and screaming of children from the now closed
+houses: that was all.
+
+"What is it your men do to my people?" he said sternly.
+
+The brigadier did not reply; he went on throwing papers into a trunk.
+
+"Where is your warrant for this search? We are not in a state of
+siege?" asked Don Silverio.
+
+The man, with a significant gesture, drew his sabre up half way out
+of its sheath; then let it fall again with a clash. He vouchsafed no
+other answer.
+
+Some women's faces pressed in at the grating of the window which
+looked on the little garden, scared, blanched, horrified, the white
+head, and sunburnt features of Gianna foremost.
+
+"Reverendissimo!" they screamed as with one voice. "They are bringing
+the lads in from the moors."
+
+And Gianna shrieked, "Adone! They have got Adone!"
+
+Don Silverio sprang to his feet.
+
+"Adone! Have you taken Adone Alba?"
+
+"The ringleader! By Bacchus! Yes," cried the brigadier, with a laugh.
+"He will get thirty years at the galleys. Your flock does you honour,
+Reverendissimo!"
+
+"Let me go to my flock," said Don Silverio; and some tone in his
+voice, some gesture of his hand, had an authority in them which
+compelled the carabineer to let him pass unopposed.
+
+He went down the stone passage to the archway of the open door. A
+soldier stood sentinel there. The street was crowded with armed men.
+The air was full of clangour and clamour; above all rose the shrill
+screams of the women.
+
+"No one passes," said the sentinel, and he levelled the mouth of his
+musket at Don Silverio's breast.
+
+"I pass," said the priest, and with his bare hand he grasped the
+barrel of the musket and forced it upward.
+
+"I rule here, in the name of God," he said in a voice which rolled
+down the street with majestic melody, dominating the screams, the
+oaths, the hell of evil sound; and he went down the steps of his
+house, and no man dared lay a hand on him.
+
+He could hear the trampling of horses and the jingling of spears and
+scabbards; some lancers who had beaten the moors that night were
+coming up the street. Half a company of soldiers of the line,
+escorted by carabineers, came in from the country, climbing the steep
+street, driving before them a rabble of young men, disarmed, wounded,
+lame, with their hands tied behind them, the remnant of those who had
+met at the tomb of Asdrubal in the night just passed. They had been
+surprised, seized, surrounded by a wall of steel; some had answered
+to their leader's call and had defended themselves, but these had
+been few; most of them had thrown down their weapons and begged for
+mercy when the cold steel of the soldiers was at their throats. Adone
+had fought as though the shade of Asdrubal had passed into him; but
+his friends had failed him; his enemies had outnumbered him a score
+to one; he had been overpowered, disarmed, bound, dragged through his
+native heather backward and upward to Ruscino, reaching the shadow of
+the walls as the sun rose.
+
+The child lay dead by the stagnant pond, and the men she had led to
+their death lay choked with the weeds and the slime; but of that he
+knew naught.
+
+All he knew was that his cause was lost, his life forfeit, his last
+hope dead.
+
+Only by his stature and his bearing could he be recognised. His
+features were black from powder and gore; his right arm hung broken
+by a shot; his clothing had been torn off him to his waist; he was
+lame; but he alone still bore himself erect as he came on up the
+village street. The others were huddled together in a fainting,
+tottering, crazed mob; all were sick and swooning from the long
+march, beaten when they paused by the buckles of belts and the flat
+of sabres.
+
+Don Silverio saw that sight in front of his church, in the white,
+clear light of early morning, and on the air there was a sickly
+stench of sweat, of powder, of wounds, of dust.
+
+He went straight to the side of Adone.
+
+"My son, my son! I will come with you. They cannot refuse me that."
+
+But the soul of Adone was as a pit in which a thousand devils strove
+for mastery. There was no light in it, no conscience, no gratitude,
+no remorse.
+
+"Judas!" he cried aloud; and there was foam on his lips and there was
+red blood in his eyes. "Judas! You betrayed us!"
+
+Then, as a young bull lowers his horns, he bent his head and bit
+through and through to the bone the wrist of the soldier who held
+him; in terror and pain the man shrieked and let go his hold; Adone's
+arms remained bound behind him, but his limbs, though they dripped
+blood, were free.
+
+He fronted the church, and that breach in the blocks of the Etruscan
+wall through which Nerina had taken her path to the river a few hours
+before. He knew every inch of the descent. Hundreds of times in his
+boyhood had he run along the ruined wall and leaped in sport over the
+huge stones, to spring with joyous shouts into the river below.
+
+As the soldier with a scream of agony let go his hold, he broke away
+like a young lion released from the den. Before they could seize him
+he had sprung over the wall, and was tearing down the slope; the
+linesmen, rushing in swift pursuit behind him, stumbled, rolled down
+the slippery grass, fell over the blocks of granite. He, sure of
+foot, knowing the way from childhood, ran down the hill safely,
+though blood poured from his wounds and blinded his sight, and a
+sickness like the swooning of death dulled his brain. Beyond him and
+below him was the river. He dashed into it like a hunted beast
+swimming to sanctuary; he ran along in it, with its brightness and
+coolness rippling against his parched throat. He stooped and kissed
+it for the last time.
+
+"Take me! -- save me! -- comrade, brother, friend!" he cried aloud to
+it with his last breath of life; and he plunged where it was deepest.
+
+Then the sky grew dark, and only the sound of the water was heard in
+his ears. By the bridge its depth was great, and the current was
+strong under the shade of the ruined keep. It swept his body onward
+to the sea.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+It was the beginning of winter when Don Silverio Frascara, having
+been put upon his trial and no evidence of any sort having been
+adduced against him, was declared innocent and set free, no
+compensation or apology being offered to him.
+
+"Were it only military law it had been easy enough to find him
+guilty," said Senator Giovacchino Gallo to the Syndic of San Beda,
+and the Count Corradini warmly agreed with his Excellency that for
+the sake of law, order, and public peace it would be well could the
+military tribunals be always substituted for the civil; but alas! the
+monarchy was not yet absolute!
+
+He had been detained many weeks and months at the city by the sea,
+where the trial of the young men of the Valdedera had been held with
+all the prolonged, tedious, and cruel delays common to the national
+laws. Great efforts had been made to implicate him in the criminal
+charges; but it had been found impossible to verify such suspicions;
+every witness by others, and every action of his own, proved the
+wisdom, the purity, and the excellence in counsel and example of his
+whole life at Ruscino. The unhappy youths who had been taken with
+arms in their hands were condemned for overt rebellion and conspiracy
+against authority, and were sentenced, some to four, some to seven,
+some to ten, and, a few who were considered the ringleaders, to
+twenty-five years of cellular confinement. But against Don Silverio
+it was found impossible even to make out the semblance of an
+accusation, the testimony event of those hostile to him being
+irresistibly in his favour in all ways. He had done his utmost to
+defend the poor peasantry who had been misled by Adone to their own
+undoing, and he had defended also the motives and the character of
+the dead with an eloquence which moved to tears the public who heard
+him, and touched even the hearts of stone of president and advocates;
+and he had done this at his own imminent risk; for men of law can
+never be brought to understand that comprehension is not collusion,
+or that pity is not fellowship.
+
+But all his efforts failed to save the young men from the utmost
+rigour of the law. The judge, agreeing with the State prosecutor,
+declared that the most severe example was necessary to check once for
+all by its terrors the tendency of the common people to resist the
+State and its public works and decrees. Useful and patriotic
+enterprises must not be impeded or wrecked because ignorance was
+opposed to progress: thus said the King's advocate in an impassioned
+oration which gained for him eventually emolument and preferment. The
+rustics were sent in a body to the penitentiaries; and Don Silverio
+was permitted to go home.
+
+Cold northern blasts blew from the upper Apennines, and piled the
+snows upon the grey and yellow rocks of the Abruzzo heights, as he
+crossed the valley of the Edera towards Ruscino. It seemed to him as
+though a century had passed since he had left it. In the icy wind
+which blew form the hills he shivered, for he had only one poor, thin
+coat to cover him. His strength, naturally great, had given way under
+the mental and physical sufferings of the last six months, although
+no word of lament had ever escaped him. Like all generous natures he
+rebuked himself for the sins of others. Incessantly he asked himself
+-- might he not have saved Adone?
+
+As he came to the turn in the road which brought him within sight of
+the river, he sat down on a stone and covered his eyes with his
+hands.
+
+The sacristan had come to meet him, bringing the little dog, grown
+thin, and sad, and old with sorrow.
+
+"I did all I could for him, but he would not be consoled," murmured
+the old man.
+
+From the point which they had reached the course of the Edera, and
+the lands of the Terra Vergine, were visible. With an effort, like
+one who forces his will to look on a dead face, he uncovered his eyes
+and looked downward. The olive-trees were still standing; where the
+house had stood there was a black, charred, roofless shell; the
+untilled fields lay bare beneath the frost.
+
+"Reverend sir," said the old man below his breath, "when Clelia Alba
+knew that Adone was drowned she set fire to the house, and so
+perished. They say she had promised her son."
+
+The wind from the north swept across the valley and drove the river
+in yellow foam and black eddies through the dead sedges. Above
+Ruscino the acacia thickets had been cut down, the herbage was
+crushed under timber and iron and stone, the heather was trampled and
+hacked, the sand and gravel were piled in heaps, the naked soil
+yawned in places like fresh-dug graves; along the southern bank were
+laid the metals of a light railway; on the lines of it were some
+trucks filled with bricks; the wooden huts of the workmen covered a
+dreary, dusty space; the water was still flowing, but on all the
+scene were the soil, the disorder, the destruction, the vulgar
+meanness and disfigurement which accompany modern labour, and affront
+like a coarse bruise the gracious face of Nature.
+
+"There have been three hundred men from the Puglie at work," said the
+sacristan. "They have stopped awhile now on account of the frost, but
+as soon as the weather opens --"
+
+"Enough, enough!" murmured Don Silverio; and he rose, and holding the
+little dog in his arms, went on down the familiar road.
+
+"His body has never been found?" he asked under his breath.
+
+The old man shook his head.
+
+"Nay, sir; what Edera takes it keeps. He dropped where he knew it was
+deepest."
+
+As the vicar returned up the village street there was not a soul to
+give him greeting except old Gianna, who kneeled weeping at his feet.
+The people poured out of their doorways, but they said not a word of
+welcome. The memory of Adone was an idolatry with them, and Adone had
+said that their priest had betrayed them. One woman threw a stone at
+Signorino. Don Silverio covered the little dog, and received the blow
+on his own arm.
+
+"For twenty years I have had no thought but to serve these, my
+people!" he thought; but he neither rebuked nor reproached them.
+
+The women as he passed them hissed at him; "Judas! Judas!"
+
+One man alone said: "Nay, 'tis a shame. Have you forgot what he did
+in the cholera? 'Tis long ago, but still --"
+
+But the women said: "He betrayed the poor lads. He brought the
+soldiers. He sold the water."
+
+Under that outrage, his manhood and his dignity revived.
+
+He drew his tall form erect, and passed through the reviling crowd,
+and gave them his blessing as he passed.
+
+Then he went within his church; and remained there alone.
+
+"He is gone to pray for the soul of Adone," said the sacristan.
+
+When he came out of the church and entered his house, the street was
+empty; the people were afraid of what they had done and of their own
+ingratitude. He crossed the threshold of the presbytery. The sere
+vine veiled his study casement; in the silence he could hear the
+sound of the Edera water; he sat down at his familiar table, with the
+dog upon his knees. His eyes were wet, and his heart was sick; his
+courage was broken.
+
+"How shall I bear my life here?" he thought. All which had made it of
+value and lightened its solitude was gone. Even his people had turned
+against him; suspicious, thankless, hostile.
+
+The old sacristan, standing doubtful and timid at the entrance of the
+chamber, drew near and reverently touched his arm.
+
+"Sir -- here is a letter -- it came three days ago."
+
+Don Silverio stretched out his hand over the little dog's head, and
+took it.
+
+He changed colour as he saw its seal and superscription.
+
+Rome had at last remembered him, and awakened to his value.
+
+At the latest Consistory he had been nominated to the Cardinalate.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+As it may appear strange to the English reader that the Porpora
+Romana should be given to a village priest, I may here say that, to
+my knowledge, a country vicar was himself sweeping out his rural
+church when he was informed of his nomination as Cardinal, and M. S.
+de Mérode was only deacon when raised to that elevation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Waters of Edera
+by Louise de la Ramée, a.k.a. Ouida
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13459 ***