youth is going away for years; if it please her to think of this thing,
it can hurt no one. He will forget, and she will forget.'
So he patted her pretty brown cheek, and drew her closer and kissed her.
'You are but a baby, my treasure,' he said softly. 'Put these grave
thoughts out of your head. Many moons will wax and wane before Cecco
will be free again to come to his old home. The future can take care of
itself. I will say neither yea nor nay. We will see what the years will
bring forth.'
'But you would not mind?' she murmured coaxingly.
The tears started to his eyes.
'Ah! God knows, dear, how sweet it would be to me!'
He thought of his little girl safe and happy for her lifetime in that
pleasant and plentiful household under the red-brown roofs where the
big pine grew amongst the pear and cherry trees. The vision of it was
beautiful and impossible. It hurt him to look on it, as the sun dazzles
the eyes at noon.
'But put it out of your head--out of your head, little one!' he said.
'Even if the boy should keep of the same mind, never would Lillo
consent.'
'Cecco will keep in the same mind,' said Lizina, with the serene
undoubting certainty of childhood, and she broke off a little twig of
the lemon-tree, with a bud upon it and three leaves, and gave it to
Cecco that evening in the dusk as they sat again upon the river-wall.
It was all she had to give, except her little waking heart.
The next day he went away along the dusty high-road in his father's
cart to begin his new life. He sobbed as if his heart would break, and
fastened in his shirt was the lemon shoot.
'To break off a bud! Oh, Lizina!' cried her father, in reproof and
reproach. 'A bud means a fruit, and a fruit means a halfpenny, perhaps
a penny.'
'It is only one,' said the child; 'and I have nothing else.'
Lizina did not speak of him, nor did she seem to fret in any way. Her
blithe voice rang in clear carol over the green river water, as she sat
on the wall whilst her father worked below, and she ate her dry bread
with healthy and happy appetite.
'She is only a baby. She has forgotten the boy already,' thought her
father, half disappointed, half relieved, whilst he broke up the earth
about the roots of the lemon-tree, and counted the little pointed
fruits coming out on it, green as malachite, and promising a fair crop.
No letters could arrive to stimulate her memory, for Cecco could
scarcely scrawl his name, and Lizina could not read her A B C. Absence
to the poor is a complete rupture, an absolute blank, over which the
intelligence can throw no bridge.
Fringuello worked early and late, worked like a willing mule, and lost
no chance of doing anything, however hard, which could bring in a
centime; and he was so tired when night fell that he could do little
except swallow his bread-soup and fling himself down on his bed of
dry leaves thrust into an old sack. So that as long as Lizina's voice
was heard in song, and her little bare feet ran busily to and fro, he
noticed nothing else, and was content, believing all was well with her.
The winter which followed on Cecco's departure to his military service
was of unusual rigour for the vale of Arno; the waters were stormy
and dark, and the fields were frozen and brown, and snow lay on the
long lines of the mountains from their summit to their base. But the
lemon-tree flourished before its narrow window, and Lizina was well and
gay in the cold little brick-floored, plaster-walled, unceiled garret;
and her father asked nothing more of Fate, and went out to his work in
the bitter coldness and darkness of the morning dawns with an empty
stomach but a warm heart, leaving her sleeping, easily and dreamlessly,
curled up like a little dormouse in her corner of the room.
The winter passed and the spring came, making all the orchard lands
once more become seas of white flowers, and setting the chaffinches
and linnets and nightingales to work at their nests amongst the lovely
labyrinth of bursting blossom; and one sunlit afternoon, towards the
close of April, the village priest, coming along the road by the river,
saw Fringuello, who was backing his sand-cart into the bed of the now
shallow stream, and beckoned to him. The priest had an open letter in
his hand, and his plump, smooth olive face was sad.
'Dario,' he said gravely, 'I have some terrible news in this paper.
Lillo's son, Cecco, is dead. I have to go and tell the family. The
authorities have written to me.'
He stopped suddenly, surprised by the effect which his news had on his
hearer.
'Saints protect us, how you look!' he cried. 'One would think you were
the lad's father!'
'Is it sure? Is it true?' stammered Fringuello.
'Ay, ay, it is true and sure enough. The authorities write to me,'
answered the vicar, with some pride. 'Poor lad! Poor, good, pretty lad!
They sent him to the Marenna marshes, and the ague and fever got on
him, and he died in the fort a week ago. And only to think that this
time last year he was bringing me armfuls of blooming cherry boughs for
the altar at Easter-day! And now dead and buried. Good lack! Far away
from all his friends, poor lad! The decrees of heaven are inscrutable,
but it is of course for the best.'
He crossed himself and went on his way.
Fringuello doffed his cap mechanically, and crossed himself also, and
rested against the shaft of his cart with his face leaning on his
hands. His hope was struck down into nothingness; the future had no
longer a smile. Though he had told himself, and them, that children
were fickle and unstable, and that nothing was less likely than that
the lad would come back in the same mind, he had nevertheless clung
to and cherished the idea of such a fate for his little daughter with
a tenacity of which he had been unconscious until his air castle was
scattered to the winds by the words of the priest. The boy was dead;
and never would Lizina go to dwell in peace and plenty at the old
farmhouse by the great pine.
'It was too good to be. Patience!' he said to himself, with a groan, as
he lifted his head and bade the mule between the shafts move onward.
His job had to be done; his load had to be carried; he had no leisure
to sit down alone with his regret.
'And it is worse for Lillo than it is for me,' he said to himself, with
an unselfish thought for the lad's father.
He looked up at the little window of his own attic which he could see
afar off; the lemon-tree was visible, and beside it the little brown
head of Lizina as she sat sewing.
'Perhaps she will not care; I hope she will not care,' he thought.
He longed to go and tell her himself lest she should hear it from some
gossip, but he could not leave his work. Yet, he could not bear the
child to learn it first from the careless chattering of neighbouring
gossips.
When he had discharged the load he carried, he fastened the mule to a
post by the water-side, and said to a fellow-carter, 'Will you watch
him a moment whilst I run home?' and on the man's assenting he flew
with lightning speed along the road and up the staircase of his house.
Lizina dropped her sewing in amazement as he burst into the room and
stood on the threshold with a look which frightened her.
She ran to him quickly.
'_Babbo!_ _Babbo!_ What is the matter?' she cried to him. Then, before
he could answer, she said timidly, under her breath, 'Is anything
wrong--with Cecco?'
Then Fringuello turned his head away and wept aloud.
He had hoped the child had forgotten. He knew now that she had
remembered only too well. All through the year which had gone by since
the departure of the youth she had been as happy as a field-mouse
undisturbed in the wheat. The grain was not ripe yet for her, but she
was sure that it would be, and that her harvest would be plenteous. She
had always been sure, quite sure, that Cecco would come back; and now,
in an instant, she understood that he was dead.
Lizina said little then or at any time; but the little gay life of her
changed, grew dull, seemed to shrink into itself and wither up as a
flower will when a worm is at its root. She had been so sure that Cecco
would return!
'She is so young; soon it will not matter to her,' her father told
himself.
But the months went by and the seasons, and she did not recover her
bloom, her mirth, her elasticity; her small face was always grave and
pale. She went about her work in the same way, and was docile, and
industrious, and uncomplaining, but something was wrong with her. She
did not laugh, she did not sing; she seldom even spoke unless she was
spoken to first. He tried to persuade himself that there was no change
in her, but he knew that he tried to feed himself on falsehood. He
might as well have thought his lemon-tree unaltered if he had found it
withered up by fire.
II
Once Lizina said to her father, 'Could one walk there?'
'Where, dear? Where?'
'Where they have put Cecco,' she answered, knowing nothing of distances
or measurements or the meaning of travel or change of place.
She had never been farther than across the ferry to the other bank of
the river.
Her father threw up his hands in despair.
'Lord! my treasure! why it is miles and miles and miles away! I don't
know rightly even where--some place where the sun goes down.'
And her idea of walking thither seemed to him so stupefying, so
amazing, so incredible, that he stared at her timorously, afraid that
her brain was going wrong. He had never gone anywhere in all his life.
'Oh, my pretty, what should we do, you and I, in a strange place?'
moaned Fringuello, weeping with fear at the thought of change and with
grief at the worn, fevered face lifted up to his. 'Never have I stirred
from here since I was born, nor you. To move to and fro--that is for
well-to-do folks, not for us; and when you are so ill, my poor little
one, that you can scarcely stand on your feet--if you were to die on
the way----'
'I shall not die on the way,' said the child firmly.
'But I know nought of the way,' he cried wildly and piteously. 'Never
was I in one of those strings of fire-led waggons, nor was ever any one
of my people that ever I heard tell of. How should we ever get there,
you and I? I know not even rightly what place it is.'
'I know,' said Lizina; and she took a crumpled scrap of paper out of
the breast of her worn and frayed cotton frock. It bore the name of the
seashore town where Cecco had died. She had got the priest to write it
down for her. 'If we show this all along as we go people will put us
right until we reach the place,' she said, with that quiet persistency
which was so new in her. 'Ask how one can get there,' she persisted,
and wound her arm about his throat, and laid her cheek against his in
her old caressing way.
'You are mad, little one--quite mad!' said Fringuello, aghast and
affrighted; and he begged the priest to come and see her.
The priest did come, but said sorrowfully to him:
'Were I you, I would take her down to one of the hospitals in the town;
she is ill.'
He did so. He had been in the town but a few times in his whole life;
she never. It was now wintry weather; the roads were wet, the winds
were cold; the child coughed as she walked and shivered in her scanty
and too thin clothes. The wise men at the hospital looked at her
hastily among a crowd of sick people, and said some unintelligible
words, and scrawled something on a piece of paper--a medicine, as it
proved--which cost to buy more than a day of a sand carter's wage.
'Has she really any illness?' he asked, with wild, imploring eyes, of
the chemist who made up the medicine.
'Oh no--a mere nothing,' said the man in answer; but thought as he
spoke: 'The doctors might spare the poor devil's money. When the blood
is all water like that there is nothing to be done; the life just goes
out like a wind-blown candle.' 'Get her good wine; butcher's meat;
plenty of nourishing food,' he added, reflecting that while there is
youth there is hope.
The father groaned aloud, as he laid down the coins which were the
price of the medicine. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! They might as well have
bidden him feed her on powdered pearls and melted gold. They got home
that day footsore and wet through; he made a little fire of boughs and
vine-branches, and, for the first time ever since it had been planted,
he forgot to look at the lemon-tree.
'You are not ill, my Lizinanina?' he said eagerly. 'The chemist told me
it was nothing.'
'Oh no, it is nothing,' said the child; and she spoke cheerfully and
tried to control the cough which shook her from head to foot.
Tears rolled down her father's cheeks and fell on to the smouldering
heather, which he set all right. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! The three
vain words rang through his head all night. They might as well have
bade him set her on a golden throne and call the stars down from their
spheres to circle round her.
'My poor little baby!' he thought; 'never did she have a finger ache,
or a winter chill, or an hour's discomfort, or a moment's pain in mind
or body until now!'
The child wasted and sickened visibly day by day. Her father looked
to see the lemon-tree waste and sicken also; but it flourished still,
a green, fresh, happy thing, though growing in a place so poor. A
superstitious, silly notion took possession of him, begotten by his
nervous terrors for his child, and by the mental weakness which came
of physical want. He fancied the lemon-tree hurt the child, and drew
nourishment and strength away from her. Perhaps in the night, in some
mysterious way--who knew how? He grew stupid and feverish, working
so hardly all day on hardly more than a crust, and not sleeping at
night through his fears for Lizina. Everything seemed to him cruel,
wicked, unintelligible. Why had the State taken away the boy who was so
contented and useful where he was born? Why had the strange, confined,
wearisome life amongst the marshlands killed him? Why was he himself
without even means to get decent food? Why, after working hard all
these years, could he have no peace? Must he even lose the one little
creature he had? The harshness and injustice of it all disturbed his
brain and weighed upon his soul. He sank into a sullen silence; he
was in the mood when good men turn bad, and burn, pillage, slay--not
because they are wicked or unkind by nature, but because they are mad
from misery.
But she was so young, and had been always so strong, he thought; this
would pass before long, and she would be herself again--brisk, brown,
agile, mirthful, singing at the top of her voice as she ran through
the lines of the cherry-trees. He denied himself everything to get her
food, and left himself scarce enough to keep the spark of life in him.
He sold even his one better suit of clothes and his one pair of boots;
but she had no appetite, and perceiving his sacrifice, took it so
piteously to heart that it made her worse.
The neighbours were good-natured and brought now an egg, now a fruit,
now a loaf for Lizina; but they could not bring her appetite, and were
offended and chilled by her lassitude, her apparent ignorance of their
good intentions, and her indifference to their gifts.
Some suggested this nostrum, others that; some urged religious
pilgrimages, and some herbs, and some charms, and some spoke of a wise
woman, who, if you crossed her hand with silver, could relieve you of
any evil if she would. But amidst the multitude of counsellors, Lizina
only grew thinner and thinner, paler and paler, all her youth seeming
slowly to wane and die out of her.
Her little sick heart was set obstinately on what her father had told
her was impossible.
None of Cecco's own people thought of going to the place where he died.
He was dead, and there was an end to it; even his mother, although she
wept for him, did not dream of throwing away good money in a silly and
useless journey to the place where he had been put in the ground.
Only the little girl, who had laughed at him and flouted him as they
sat on the wall by the river, did think of it constantly, tenaciously,
silently. It seemed to her horrible to leave him all alone in some
unfamiliar, desolate place, where no step was ever heard of any whom
he had ever known. She said nothing of it, for she saw that even her
father did not understand; but she brooded over the thought of it
constantly, turning to and fro in her mind the little she had ever
known or heard of the manner and means by which people transported
themselves from place to place. There were many, of course, in the
village who could have told her how others travelled, but she was
too shy to speak of the matter even to the old man of the ferry, in
whose boat, when it was moored to a _poula_ driven in the sand, she
had spent many an hour of playtime. She had always been a babbling,
communicative, merry child, chattering like a starling or a swift,
until now. Now she spoke rarely, and never of the thing of which her
heart was full.
One day her father looked from her pinched, wan face to the bright
green leaves of the flourishing lemon-tree, and muttered an oath.
'Day and night, for as many years as you are old, I have taken care of
that tree, and sheltered it and fed it; and now it alone is fair to see
and strong, whilst you--verily, oh verily, Lizina, I could find it in
my heart to take a billhook and hew it down for its cruelty in being
glad and full of vigour, whilst you pinch and fade, day by day, before
my sight!'
Lizina shook her head, and looked at the tree which had been the
companion of her fifteen years of life.
'It's a good tree, _babbo_!' she said gently. 'Think how much it has
given us; how many things you bought me with the lemon money! Oh! it
is very good; do not ever say a word against it; but--but--if you are
in anger with it, there is a thing which you might do. You have always
kept the money which it brought for me?'
'Surely, dear. I have always thought it yours,' he answered, wondering
where her thoughts were tending.
'Then--then,' said Lizina timidly, 'if it be as mine really, and you
see it no more with pleasure in its place there, will you sell it, and
with the price of it take me to where Cecco lies?'
Her eyes were intensely wistful; her cheeks grew momentarily red in her
eagerness; she put both hands to her chest and tried to stop the cough
which began to choke her words. Her father stared, incredulous that he
could hear aright.
'Sell the tree?' he asked stupidly.
Not in his uttermost needs had the idea of selling it come to him. He
held it in a superstitious awe.
'Since you say it is mine,' said the child. 'It would sell well. It is
strong and beautiful and bears good fruit. You could take me down where
the sun sets and the sea is--where Cecco lies in the grass.'
'Good Lord!' said Fringuello, with a moan.
It seemed to him that the sorrow for her lost sweetheart had turned the
child's brain.
'Do, father--do!' she urged, her thin brown lips trembling with anxiety
and with the sense of her own powerlessness to move unless he would
consent.
Her father hid his face in his hands; he felt helpless before her
stronger will. She would force him to do what she desired, he knew;
and he trembled, for he had neither knowledge nor means to make such a
journey as this would be to the marshlands in the west, where Cecco lay.
'And the tree--the tree!' he muttered.
He had seen the tree so long by that little square window, it was part
of his life and hers. The thought of its sale terrified him as if he
were going to sell some human friend into bondage.
'There is no other way,' said Lizina sadly.
She, too, was loth to sell the tree, but they had nothing else to
sell; and the intense selfishness of a fixed idea possessed her to the
exclusion of all other feeling.
Then the cough shook her once more from head to foot, and a little
froth of blood came to her lips.
Lizina, in the double cruelty of her childhood and of her ill-health,
was merciless to her father, and to the tree which had been her
companion so long. She was possessed by the egotism of sorrow. She was
a little thing, now enfeebled and broken by long nights without sleep
and long days without food, and her heart was set on this one idea,
which she did not reveal--that she would die down there, and that then
they would put her in the same ground with him. This was her idea.
In the night she got up noiselessly, whilst her father was for awhile
sunk in the deep sleep which comes after hard manual toil, and came up
to the lemon-tree and leaned her cheek against its earthen vase.
'I am sorry to send you away, dearie,' she said to it; 'but there is no
other way to go to him.'
She felt as if it must understand and must feel wounded. Then she broke
off a little branch--a small one with a few flowers on it.
'That is for him,' she said to it.
And she stood there sleepily with the moonlight pouring in on her and
the lemon-tree through the little square hole of the window.
When she got back to her bed she was chilled to the bone, and she
stuffed the rough sacking of her coverture between her teeth to stop
the coughing, which might wake her father. She had put the little
branch of her lemon into the broken pitcher which stood by her at night
to slake her thirst.
'Sell it, _babbo_, quick, quick!' she said in the morning.
She was afraid her strength would not last for the journey, but she did
not say so. She tried to seem cheerful. He thought her better.
'Sell it to-day--quick, quick!' she cried feverishly; and she knew
that she was cruel and ungrateful, but she persisted in her cruelty and
ingratitude.
Her father, in despair, yielded.
It seemed to him as if he were cutting the throat of a friend. Then
he approached the tree to carry it away. He had called in one of his
fellow-carters to help to move it, for it was too heavy for one man.
With difficulty it was forced through the narrow, low door and down the
steep stair, its leaves brushing the walls with a sighing sound, and
its earthen jar grinding on the stone of the steps. Lizina watched it
go without a sigh, without a tear. Her eyes were dry and shining; her
little body was quivering; her face was red and pale in quick, uneven
changes.
'It goes where it will be better than with us,' said Fringuello, in a
vague apology to it, as he lifted it out of the entrance of the house.
He had sold it to a gardener in a villa near at hand.
'Oh yes, it will be better off,' he said feverishly, in the doubtful
yet aggressive tone of one who argues that which he knows is not true.
'With rich people instead of poor; out in a fine garden half the year,
and in a beautiful airy wooden house all winter. Oh yes, it will be
much better off. Now it has grown so big it was choked where it stood
in my little place; no light, no air, no sun, nothing which it wanted.
It will be much better off where it goes; it will have rich, new earth
and every sort of care.'
'It has done well enough with you,' said his comrade carelessly, as he
helped to shove the vase on to the hand-cart.
'Yes, yes,' said Fringuello impatiently, 'but it will do better where
it goes. It has grown too big for a room. It would starve with me.'
'Well, it is your own business,' said the other man.
'Yes, it is his own business,' said the neighbours, who were standing
to see it borne away as if it were some rare spectacle. 'But the tree
was always there; and the money you get will go,' they added, in their
collective wisdom.
He took up the handles of the little cart and placed the yoke of cord
over his shoulders, and began to drag it away. He bent his head down
very low so that the people should not see the tears which were running
down his cheeks.
When he came back to his home he carried its price in his hands--thirty
francs in three paper notes. He held them out to Lizina.
'All is well with it; it is to stand in a beautiful place, close to
falling water, half in shade, half in sun, as it likes best. Oh, all is
well with it, dear! do not be afraid.' Then his voice failed him, and
he sobbed aloud.
The child took the money. She had a little bundle in her hand, and she
had put on the only pair of shoes she possessed.
'Clean yourself, father, and come--come quickly,' she said in a little
hard, dry, panting voice.
'Oh wait, wait, my angel!' he cried piteously through his sobs.
I cannot wait,' said the child, 'not a minute, not a minute. Clean
yourself and come.'
In an hour's time they were in the train. The child did
everything--found the railway-station, asked the way, paid their fares,
took their seats, pushing her father hither and thither as if he were
a blind man. He was dumb with terror and regret; he resisted nothing.
Having sold the tree, there seemed to him nothing left for him to do.
Lizina obeyed him no more--she commanded.