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.