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.