The people of Ruscino went early to their beds; the light of the
oil-wicks of the Presbytery was always the only light in the village
half an hour after dark. Nerina went uncomplainingly to hers in the
dark stone house within the walls where she had been told that it was
her lot to dwell. She did not break her fast; she drank great
draughts of water; then, with no word except a brief good-night, she
went to the sacking filled with leaves which the old woman Alaida
pointed out for her occupancy.
"She is soon reconciled," thought the old crone. "They have trained
her well."
Relieved of all anxiety, she herself lay down in the dark and slept.
The girl seemed a good, quiet, tame little thing, and said her
paternosters as she should do. But Nerina did not sleep. She was
stifled in this little close room with its one shuttered window. She
who was used to sleeping with the fresh fragrant air of the dark
fields blowing over her in her loft, felt the sour, stagnant
atmosphere take her like a hand by the throat.
As soon as she heard by the heavy breathing of the aged woman that
she was sunk in the congested slumber of old age, the child got up
noiselessly -- she had not undressed -- and stole out of the chamber,
taking the door key from the nail on which Alaida had hung it. A
short stone stair led down to the entrance. No one else was sleeping
in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a
tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as
she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in
another moment ran down the steep and stone street. She laughed as
the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the
fragrance of Adone's fields.
"I shall be in time!" she thought, as she ran down a short cut which
led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the
glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge.
The usual spot for the assembly of the malcontents was a grassy
hollow surrounded on all sides with woods, and called the tomb of
Asdrubal, from a mound of masonry which bore that name, although it
was utterly improbable that Asdrubal, who had been slain a hundred
miles to the northeast on the Marecchia water, should have been
buried in the Valdedera at all. But the place and the name were well
known in the district to hundreds of peasants, who knew no more who
or what Asdrubal had been than they knew the names of the stars which
form the constellation of Perseus.
Adone had summoned his friends to be there by nightfall, and he was
passing from the confines of his own lands on to those of the open
moors when the child saw him. He was dressed in his working clothes,
but he was fully armed: his gun on his shoulder, his great pistols in
his sash, his dagger in his stocking. They were ancient arms; but
they had served in matters of life and death, and would so serve
again. On the three-edged blade of the sixteenth-century poignard was
a blood-stain more than a century old which nothing would efface.
"Nerina!" he cried as the girl stopped him, and was more distressed
than pleased to see her there; he had not thought of her.
In the moonlight, under the silvery olive foliage her little sunburnt
face and figure took a softer and more feminine grace. But Adone had
not sight for it. For him she was but a sturdy little pony, who would
trot till she dropped.
He was cruel as those who are possessed by one intense and absorbing
purpose always are: he was cruel to Nerina as Garibaldi, in the days
of Ravenna, was cruel to Anita.
But through that intense egotism which sees in all the world only its
own cause, its own end, its own misery, there touched him for one
instant an unselfish pity for the child of whom he had made so
mercilessly his servant and his slave.
"Poor little girl! I have been hard to you, I have been cruel and
unfair," he said, as a vague sense of her infinite devotion to his
cause moved him as a man may be moved by a dog's fidelity.
"You have been good to me," said Nerina; and from the bottom of her
heart she thought so. "I came to see if you wanted me," she added
humbly.
"No, no. They think ill of you for going my errands. Poor child, I
have done you harm enough. I will not do you more."
"You have done me only good."
"What! When my mother has turned you out of the house!"
"It is her right."
"Let it be so for a moment. You shall come back. You are with old
Alaida?"
"Yes."
"How can you be out to-night?"
"She sleeps heavily, and the lock is not hard."
"You are a brave child."
"Is there nothing to do to-night?"
"No, dear."
"Where do you go?"
"To meet the men at the tomb of Asdrubal."
"Who summoned them?"
"I myself. You must be sad and sorry, child, and it is my fault."
She checked a sob in her throat. "I am not far away, and old Alaida
is kind. Let me go on some errand to-night?"
"No, my dear, I cannot."
He recalled the words of the message which he had received from Don
Silverio that day. He knew the justice of this message, he knew that
it only forbade what all humanity, hospitality, manhood, and
compassion forbade to him. One terrible passion had warped his
nature, closed his heart, and invaded his reason to the exclusion of
all other thoughts or instincts; but he was not yet so lost to shame
as, now that he knew what he had done, to send out a female creature
into peril to do his bidding.
"Tell me, then, tell me," pleaded Nerina, "when will anything be
done?"
"Whenever the foreign labourers come to work on the water we shall
drive them away."
"But if they will not go?"
"Child, the river is deep; we know its ways and its soundings; they
do not."
Her great bright eyes flashed fire: an unholy joy laughed in them.
"We will baptize them over again!" she said; and all her face laughed
and sparkled in the moonlight. There was fierce mountain blood in her
veins; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like the juice of
grapes warmed in an August noon.