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.