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."