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."