on her face, who spoke and moved with such feverish decision, and
dragged after her this thin dumb man, her small lean hand shut with
nervous force upon his own. All the way she ate nothing; she only drank
thirstily of water whenever the train stopped.
The novelty and strangeness of the transit, the crowd, and haste, and
noise, the unfamiliar scenes, the pressure of unknown people, and the
stare of unknown eyes--all which was so bewildering and terrible to her
father, had no effect upon her. All she thought of was to get to the
place of which the name was written on the scrap of paper which she had
shown at the ticket-office, and which she continued to show mutely to
anyone who spoke to her. It said everything to her; she thought it must
say everything to everyone else.
Nothing could alarm her or arrest her attention. Her whole mind was set
on her goal.
'Your little lady is very ill!' said more than one in a crowded
railway-waggon, where they jammed one on to another, thick as herrings
in a barrel.
'Ay, ay, she is very ill,' he answered stupidly; and they did not
know whether he was unfeeling or daft. He was dizzy and sick with the
unwonted motion of the train, the choking dust, the giddy landscape
which seemed to run past him, earth and sky together; but on Lizina
they made no impression, except that she coughed almost incessantly.
She seemed to ail nothing and to perceive nothing. He was seized with a
panic of dread lest they should be taken in some wrong direction, even
out of the world altogether; dreaded fire, accident, death, treachery;
felt himself caught up by strong, invisible hands, and whirled away,
the powers of heaven or hell alone knew where. His awful fear grew on
him every moment greater and greater; and he would have given his soul
to be back safe on the sand of the river at his home.
But Lizina neither showed nor felt any fear whatever.
The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the
slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passed
hours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every
little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst,
and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle
suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel
either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there--to
be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange
and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only
wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now
and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the
lemon-tree.
Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank
away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and
they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and
the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.
It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their
destination--a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the
salt water on one side of it, and the _machia_ and marsh on the other.
Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand
and in the other her father's wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching,
trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty
bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did
not faint or fall--she went straight onward as though the place was
familiar to her.
Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of
decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with
sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue
water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the
iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The
sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo
dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand
past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling
belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four
lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which
the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The
gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited.
She motioned to her father to do the same. He was like a poor steer
landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank,
but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned,
tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking
day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first
Mass.
In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the
church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw
the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his
shoulder, said to them, 'You are strangers--what would you?'
Lizina rose and answered him: 'Will you open to me? I come to see my
Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.'
The sacristan looked at her father.
'Cecco?' he repeated, in a doubtful tone.
'A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,' said Fringuello,
hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his
head swam. 'He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man,
where his grave is made?'
The sacristan paused, standing before the leathern curtain of the
church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher
folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went
back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which
the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and
some die in the fort and in the town.
'Cecco? Cecco?' he said doubtfully. 'A Tuscan lad? A conscript? Ay, I
do recall him now. He got the tertian fever and died in barracks. His
reverence wrote about him to his family. Yes, I remember. There were
three soldier lads died last year, all in the summer. There are three
crosses where they lie. I put them there; his is the one nearest the
wall. Yes, you can go in; I have the key.'
He stepped across the road and unlocked the gate. He looked wonderingly
on Lizina as he did so. 'Poor little one!' he muttered, in compassion.
'How small, how ill, to come so far!'
Neither she nor her father seemed to hear him. The child pressed
through the aperture as soon as the door was drawn ajar, and Fringuello
followed her. The burial-ground was small and crowded, covered with
rank grass, and here and there sea-lavender was growing. The sacristan
led them to a spot by the western wall where there were three rude
crosses made of unbarked sticks nailed across one another. The rank
grass was growing amongst the clods of sun-baked yellow clay; the high
white wall rose behind the crossed sticks; the sun beat down on the
place: there was nothing else.
The sacristan motioned to the cross nearest the wall, and then went
back to the church, being in haste, as it was late for matins. Lizina
stood by the two poor rude sticks, once branches of the hazel, which
were all that marked the grave of Cecco.
Her father, uncovering his head, fell on his knees.
The child's face was illuminated with a strange and holy rapture. She
kissed the lemon bough which she held in her hand, and then laid it
gently down upon the grass and clay under the wall.
'I have remembered, dear,' she said softly, and knelt on the ground
and joined her hands in prayer. Then the weakness of her body overcame
the strength of her spirit; she leaned forward lower and lower until
her face was bowed over the yellow grass. 'I came to lie with you,'
she said under her breath; and then her lips parted more widely with a
choking sigh, the blood gushed from her mouth, and in a few minutes she
was dead.
They laid her there in the clay and the sand and the tussocks of grass,
and her father went back alone to his native place and empty room.
* * * * *
One day on the river-bank a man said to him:
'It is odd, but that lemon-tree which you sold to my master never did
well; it died within the week--a fine, strong, fresh young tree. Were
there worms at its root, think you, or did the change to the open air
kill it?'
Fringuello, who had always had a scared, wild, dazed look on his face
since he returned from the sea-coast, looked at the speaker stupidly,
not with any wonder, but like one who hears what he has long known but
only imperfectly understands.
'It knew Lizina was dead,' he said simply; and then thrust his spade
into the sand and dug.
He would never smile nor sing any more, nor any more know any joys of
life; but he still worked on from that habit which is the tyrant and
saviour of the poor.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
Transcriber's Notes:
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected, sometimes by referencing
other editions of these stories.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.