It was a cold black night, with neither moon or stars, and an old
peasant lay dying. He was all alone. No one thought it worth while to
waste time beside him. He was eighty-three years old, and, according to
his sons, ought to have been dead long before this autumn.
They and their families sat round a fire of logs and chips, and talked
amongst themselves; not of him, he was no more of any account. On the
morrow, or at farthest the day after, he would be carried to the ditch
in the burial-ground at the nearest village and tumbled into it; and
so--_Addio per sempre_. It would be trouble enough to take him there;
the graveyard was fifteen miles and more away.
The big room, which was kitchen, eating-place, and cellar in one, was
reeking with filth; cobwebs years old hung black and gray from the
rafters; the floor of beaten earth was deep with the dust and mud
brought by scores of dirty feet; the smoke from the yawning chimney
hung in dark mist about the walls. Upstairs there was no fire. Why
waste good fuel in warming cold limbs, cold from age and death?
“I am cold, I am cold!” muttered the old man; but no one heeded. Of
course he was cold; people who were dying always were so. He shivered
and shook under his cotton coverlet; and it was dark, so dark, they had
left him no light; light burns oil, and what could he see or hope to
see? His eyes were already glazing.
“Lazzaro got a whole crown for those turkeys which died of the pip,”
said his elder son in the kitchen below, stretching his hands towards
the blaze. Lazzaro was a neighbour who dwelt on a clearing, and made
cask-hoops and wooden shoes.
“Some folks have luck,” said his son’s wife as she gave her left breast
to her youngest child who stood at her knee. Then they were silent,
and the man cracked a nut with his teeth. The wood crackled, the child
sucked, some big boys gambled with plum-stones for counters on the
dirty bricks, a girl of twelve years old caught a cricket amongst
the ashes, and pulled it in a leisurely way to pieces; two smaller
children, twins, watching enviously and with deep interest.
“The northern birds went overhead at noon,” said the younger brother
Lucio after a time.
“Damn them! they fly too high to be shot,” said the elder, Alcide.
“They were all in a black three-sided mass,” said the younger.
“They always fly like that,” said the elder. “They’re a shrewd lot,
those big birds.”
“How they keep time! ’tis amazing,” said Lucio. “Come regular with the
first frost and go regular when the catkins peer out on the sallows.”
Then silence fell again between them.
The fire burnt more silently and more hotly; the woman put her child
away from her, and thrust her breast back behind the iron busk of her
stays; the twins fell asleep leaning against each other. The boys
gambling with the plum-stones swore and struck at each other. From
between the rafters overhead the sound of a low groan was heard now
and then, and the elder son muttered, with many an oath, “Can’t ye be
quiet, old one?”
Time went on. They had no watch or clock, but they could tell that an
hour had passed by the look of the burning wood. There was a louder
sound as of lamentation from the room above. Alcide got up and went to
the foot of the wooden stair.
“Hold your jaw, old one!” he shouted. “Can’t you die in a quiet way?
You’ve lived a deal too long as it is.”
One small boy nudged his twin brother. “Grandfather’s dying,” he
whispered with glee, and the two little creatures chuckled together.
There would be one mouth the less for the polenta, one throat the less
for the rare thin wine; the tic-tac of his stick on the stones would no
longer come after them when they were truant, the stroke of his crutch
would no longer make their shoulder-blades tingle when he caught them
stealing, the sound of his voice on the stairs would no longer wake
them up out of warm slumber amongst the straw and lumber on black
winter mornings when the cows were lowing to be milked.
Grandfather had been so long to be feared, it was delightful to them to
hear him soundly rated, now that he could not get up and come down with
his ash-stick raised.
“Grandfather’s dying,” they said to each other for the twentieth time
with glee, as the ruddy lights from the blazing billets shone on their
little unwashed brown faces.
“’Tis time we ate something,” said the woman, and she unhooked the pot
hanging on a chain over the fire, and poured the contents out into an
earthenware bowl. It was bean-soup, strongly flavoured with lentils and
fennel; it was turned into pewter plates and supped up noisily with
wooden spoons; pieces of black bread were wrenched off a loaf and eaten
with it. They fed as ravenously as pigs, and with less cleanliness.
Just as they finished a sound of knocking was heard at the door of the
house, which was bolted and barred.
“Who’s there?” shouted Alcide.
“It is I,” answered a voice with a foreign accent.
“’Tis the new steward, perdition seize him!” said Alcide, and he strode
across the bricks and drew back the bolts. “What’s amiss that you
honour us at this time of night, sir?” he said sullenly to the person
who stood on the step holding a horse’s bridle.
“There is much amiss here, they say,” replied the new-comer. “Is it
true that your father, Adamo, is dying?”
“What’s that to anyone?” said Alcide, unwillingly. “Folk usually die
when they get nigh ninety.”
The tone was half jocose, half sullen. The visitor in silence led his
horse over the step into the entrance, hung the bridle on a nail in the
wall, closed the door and said to Alcide:
“Take me to him.”
He was a fair man, tall, slender and young.
All the family gathered near to stare at him.
“There is nothing to see, sir,” muttered Alcide. “He’s as good as dead.”
“What doctor have you?”
“There is no such thing in these parts for forty miles or more.”
“Do you mean the Commune has no medical aid?”
“Safe and sure, it hasn’t.”
“Take me to him; I know something of medicine.”
They were all silent, vaguely frightened and ashamed. The woman nudged
Alcide.
“Best take the gentleman upstairs to poor Nonno, though he’s past all
help.”
And she forced a little water into her eyes and gave a little sob.
Alcide took the one light off the table and tramped up the steep rotten
stair.
“What a piece of work about a dead greybeard!” he muttered. “When
they’re past labour they’re best gone. You don’t leave a sere tree
standing to cumber the ground.”
He pushed open a ricketty, worm-eaten door, and the feeble oil wick
shed a dim flickering light on the miserable room, where all was
silence. The steward took the lamp from him, and went up to the bed of
sacking and dry leaves, of which the odours were foul as a dung-heap.
On it lay a gaunt old man’s lifeless body. The old tree was down; it
cumbered the soil no more.
The steward examined the body. It was still warm, but life was extinct;
the jaw had dropped; one clenched lean hand was knotted in the white
beard.
“You have let him die alone!” said the young man with indignation and
horror.
Alcide grinned, showing his strong white teeth.
“Dying’s the only thing nobody grudges our doing,” he said with
unabashed indifference. “What would you, sir? We work all day. We can’t
wait on sick souls all night.”
“May the measure you have served to your father be served to you by
your sons!”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly,” answered Alcide, which is the
peasant’s synonym for “I will pay you out for that before long.”
“It is frightful! Incredible!” murmured the young man. “You knew he
was dying, and you left him alone, without even a drop of water by his
side!”
“He had his coffin to keep him company,” said Alcide, with a gruesome
grin. “Some have to go naked into the earth.”
He pointed to a corner in which a box, roughly made from unplaned
planks, was leaning against the wall.
“Hush!” said the steward with authority. “Have you no sense of
shame?--no feeling?--no remorse?”
“I have done nothing wrong, sir,” said Alcide sullenly. “I didn’t kill
him. Old age killed him.”
“And neglect!”
Alcide shrugged his shoulders. Whether you hindered or hastened the
death of a man so aged and so useless could not matter much, he
thought; the deceased was eighty-three years of age, and had long been
a burden to everybody.
“It’s more than ten years that he’s not done a stroke of work,” he
replied sullenly, “and yet he expected his share in the polenta and
the broth, just for all the world as if he’d earned it. When they get
childish, they get unreasonable like children. Many’s the time I’ve
said to him, ‘Why aren’t you underground, father?’ We ought to be
allowed to put them there when their time’s come, and they won’t go in
the course of nature.”
The steward turned from him in disgust and pain, and rested his gaze on
the old, worn, rugged form lying on its bed of sacking.
About the doorway, peeping and curious, the children were gathered.
“Is it all over?” said their mother with a whine.
“It is all over indeed!” said the steward gravely, and with a flash of
loathing in his blue eyes. “You will learn what he suffered when you
lie on your own death-bed. I came as soon as I heard of it. Why could
you not even let me know?”
They tittered in concert: men, women, boys, and girls. What a fuss
about old Nonno! But, of course, this young man was a foreigner, and
that was as good as saying he was a fool. Did he not want dogs fed,
and cows kept clean? Did he not say men should wash their bodies and
women should not swaddle their children? Was he not a new-comer, an
interloper, a meddler, a stranger from nobody knew where?
Alcide’s wife, however, had the wit to see that they were on the wrong
tack.
“Good sir,” she said, with tears in her voice, “we have done what we
could, but you know we are poor, poor, poor; and now there will be no
end of money to find for the burial, and we ought to be allowed to
scratch a hole and put him in the woods, but you know the powers that
be won’t let us, and we have to carry him all the way to San Vitale,
and we must borrow a neighbour’s mule, and when we get there pay all
the church and graveyard dues, and sacristans and sextons--they live
like carrion flies getting fat on corpses----”
“Hold your tongue, you idiot!” said her husband. “For sure the
Ministro here will help us through all these troubles. He knows how
poor we are. Not a bit of bread sometimes all the twenty-four hours
through.”
“I will send here early in the forenoon, and will do all that is
necessary,” said the steward. “Let your women folk cleanse and clothe
the body, and watch by it through the night. You may be poor, but
poverty need not be brutality, and you--you would make the wolves of
the steppes seem beside you like angels of mercy.”
His words were unintelligible to his auditors; but they understood that
he was offended and disgusted with them. They did not care a jot for
his opinion, but they cared much for his purse. Without even a glance
at them, he made the sign of the cross reverently on the brow and
breast of the corpse, and in silence went out of the garret; took the
bridle from the nail on the wall, led his horse out over the doorstep,
and vaulted into the saddle.
“Not even a copper piece has he left behind him!” moaned the woman.
Alcide stood on the threshold, and watched the form of the horseman
vanishing into the blackness under the trees. He made a gesture as of
lifting an imaginary gun to his shoulder and pointing it. “Eh?” he said
to his brother Lucio.
Lucio, who was of a slower and weaker temperament, scratched his head.
“I don’t say no,” he answered; “but it’s always a dangerous game to
play at, ’Cide.”
“Pooh!” said Alcide. “The woods are good friends; they never prate. But
one can wait. Perhaps we shall get something out of him to-morrow.”
“Anyhow, he is gone now,” said Lucio, as the sound of the horse’s
hoofs grew faint on the wet moss of the forest road.
The young steward rode through them this dark night very slowly, for
the road was bad, and his horse, though well used to such work, felt
each step carefully, and sometimes whinnied with fear as an owl flew
past or a pole-cat rushed across the path.
But even in this cautious passage through the almost impenetrable gloom
he nearly trampled on a woman who stood in his way and cried to him to
stop. He checked his horse, just in time to avoid collision, and the
animal’s nostrils brushed the woman’s head.
He could see nothing of her except the shine of two great eyes as he
struck a match in front of her.
“It is I, Muriella!” she said quickly. “Is he dead, sir?”
“Yes; your grandfather is dead,” he answered gravely, “and he died
alone and unaided as I would not let a sick steer die.”
“Gone without the holy oil? Gone without shrive?--O Christ, help us!”
she said in a voice of awe.
“He died as I would not let a sick steer die,” repeated the rider.
“I had been to fetch the vicar of San Vitale,” she added; “’twas the
nearest; but he was away, and the sacristan said he would not be back
for two days.”
“Could you not have gone by preference for a doctor?”
“No; there is nobody who would pay, and, besides, one must go to
Ronciglione, twenty-five miles away, and the doctor there would refuse,
for he has nought to do with us. To be sure, there is an apothecary at
San Vitale, but he would have to be paid, and who amongst us could pay
him?”
“This is shocking! A whole commune without medical aid!”
“I am more sorry he is gone unshriven,” she said with regret. “But
perhaps--up yonder--somebody will see to it, and say a good word for
him. I did what I could, sir; those above must see to the rest.”
The young man sighed: the nothingness, the blankness, the horror of
death weighed on him. He saw that she had some vague, shapeless hope
which solaced her; and he forbore to disturb it.
She put her hand on the saddle-bow and reached up nearer to him.
“Don’t ride alone at night like this,” she whispered. “Knives are sharp
amongst us if guns be rusty.”
“I am armed,” he answered briefly.
He felt rather than saw that she gave an impatient gesture.
“What serves it to be armed?” she answered. “They know the lay of the
lands and the ways of the woods better than you, and they will follow
you some night when it is dark like this, and you will know nothing
till you fall on your beast’s neck, or back on his crupper, as it may
be.”
“I do my best by the people. If they please to pay me so, they must,”
he replied. “Good-night. You mean well. Thanks.”
She drew back in silence, discouraged, to let the impatient horse and
his rider go onward.