These estates, known generally as Le Selve, were vast tracts of forest
and pasture land lying along and beyond the Mons Ciminius, between the
lakes of Bracciano and of Vico. They were of immeasurable antiquity,
but had for more than a century been ill preserved, and much robbed
and desecrated. Their timber was chiefly oak, ilex, and pine, with
occasional groups of silver birch; their undergrowth was of arbutus,
myrtle, bay, privet, and box, with much broom and heather. They covered
many miles, and were the property of a Roman nobleman, and had within
them oaks which might have seen the litters of Poppea and Faustina
pass. In later times they had belonged to the Countess Matilda, and had
been given by her to the Popes with the rest of her superb bequest.
Here and there in them was a farm, a water-mill, a charcoal burner’s
hut, patches of semi-cultivation due to squatters; but these were very
few and isolated. For the most part the woods were little altered since
the days of the Cæsars; wholly unaltered since the days of the Farnese
and the Borgia.
An old hunting-palace, which was now given up to the use of underlings,
stood in the centre of the woods, the only large house in them, a
gray stone building of the fifteenth century, which had once been a
favourite retreat of the sporting cardinal from whom the Gandolfo had
inherited this property. Around it were level grasslands, bordered by
low granite balustrades, with colossal stone hounds seated on the
coping; and, immediately beyond, the great woods began, enclosing the
grassy squares with walls of foliage which were pierced at intervals by
narrow avenues or drives; in full view of the front terraces rose the
peaks of the Sabine mountains; from the back were visible very far off
Monte Amiata and the Cetona range.
It was a distance of five miles and more to this dwelling, and it
was long past midnight when the young steward rode in at the gates.
The stablemen and guards of the place ran to take his horse. But
he followed the animal, and saw it safe in stall before he himself
entered the house, and felt the warmth of the oak logs burning on
an open hearth in the great vaulted hall of which he made his chief
sitting-room.
“Sir, why will you be out so late?” said an old woman, who was the
_Massajà_ or housekeeper of the place, omnipotent over its womenkind
and its stores. “The woods are not as safe as a city street, and even
in the towns it’s ill being out alone after midnight. Daggers are
quickly whipped out; and pistols bark and bite both.”
“My good Caterina,” he answered wearily, “what have I done that anyone
should want my life? Money, as they know, I never carry.”
“So best,” said the old woman. “As for what you’ve done, sir, you’re
put in power here, and you’re a stranger. That’s crime enough.”
He did not answer, but stood a moment or two in silence in the warmth
of the hearth.
“You are from the North,” she added. “That’s bad enough.”
“North or South, what matter. Have we not a common humanity?”
Caterina shook her head.
“You mean well; but you are from the North.”
The argument seemed to her unanswerable. To him it seemed ridiculous;
but he saw that it was one of these ideas based on prejudice,
ignorance, and superstition, which are infinitely more tenacious and
hard to uproot than the strongest opinions founded on reason.
“Your woodlanders are great ruffians, I fear, Caterina,” he said after
a pause.
“They are not lambs, sir,” said the old woman curtly.
“The old man was dead when I reached the place, and they had let him
die all alone.”
“They don’t waste their time on sick folks, sir; and old ones, when
they have naught to leave, have no friends. Won’t you come to table?”
“Is it true that there is no doctor in the whole district?”
“I never heard of one, sir.”
“What do the people do when they are ill?”
“Well, sir, they die or get well, as Heaven pleases. But there are wise
women who know a good deal of herbs and magic, and there is a hermit
who sells charms up by the Sasso Scritto, that bald peak which you
see from the back door here. I bought a ring of him to keep my blood
flowing straight; here it is; look; I have never ailed a minute since I
wore it!”
“Are we in the last years of the nineteenth century?”
Caterina did not reply. She knew nothing about centuries, their
numeration or civilization.
She drew his attention to the supper-table, which she had laden with
good things, or what she thought were good. But he had no appetite.
He drank a cup of coffee, and told her to go to bed. He said he felt
no desire to sleep. His heart was heavy with its own sorrows, and
his mind was oppressed by a fear that he had undertaken a task which
was beyond his strength. “You cannot wash a blackamoor white,” says a
homely proverb; and he began to perceive that those whom he desired
to cleanse were very black indeed. He knew that all the acts which in
moral codes are called thefts, arson, contraband, fraud, were merely
sport in their eyes, and that even murder appeared to almost all of
them a wholly natural and legitimate way of settling old scores and
redressing uneven balances, whilst to cheat the revenue, to defraud the
landlord, to weave a dramatic coil of lies, and to poach, purloin, and
plunder as occasion served, seemed to them all the mere playful pastime
of summer eve and winter dawn, simple as the frisking of young leverets
on a sward.
He was a Russian of Esthonia, a noble, and an officer of the Imperial
Guard; he had been merely a man of pleasure, until he had been
impressed and converted by Tolstoi and other humanitarians. Then the
zeal of his reformation as shown in his acts and his words had led
to condemnation by his military superiors; he had been cashiered,
arrested, and accused of Nihilism; he had been found guilty of
subversive doctrines and collectivist opinions; the influence of his
own powerful family, and others with which he was connected had been
of no avail to save him; he had been condemned to the mines of Siberia
for life, and his estates confiscated by the court-martial before
which he had been brought up for judgment; he had escaped from the
fortress in which he was confined before he was taken to the mines,
and in disguise, and by the help of some of his late comrades, had got
across the frontier and across Germany. When, penniless and famished,
he had chanced to meet in Brussels a friend of earlier years, Alfonso
Gandolfo, that gay and generous prince could induce him to accept
nothing, not even a dinner or a cigar, but at length offered him the
stewardship of the estates of Le Selve, and succeeded with difficulty
in persuading him that in this homely and obscure post he could do
good, and more than earn his maintenance.
“We have been ill served,” said the Roman gentleman; “we have been
the prey of a series of scoundrels; if you can put down the perpetual
thefts, and protect the timber in some degree, my father and I shall be
infinitely grateful.”
He was not deceived by the kindly courtesy of the terms in which the
offer was made, but at last was induced to yield to it; he saw that in
the seclusion of these great neglected forests he would be able to
hide his own identity in safety from the world; and he had been now
eighteen months in the woodlands, regarded by the country people as
a mere agent of their lords, and known only by his baptismal name of
Cyrille, called by the forest-folks Cirillo.
Fortunately for himself, he had learned the language when a youth from
a tutor, who had translated the “Divina Commedia” into German, and wide
as is the gulf between the Italian of scholars and the dialects of
the provinces, he had the facility of his nation in acquiring foreign
tongues, and quickly adapted himself to the idiom of the people of the
forest.
He was intensely unhappy; he was separated from all he had known
and loved from birth; he had lost everything he had possessed and
cherished, and brave men have killed themselves for sorrows less than
his; but the active and open-air life saved him from falling into
despondency or ill health, and he earnestly occupied himself with
the condition of the peasants and the interest of the proprietors.
He had received unlimited powers from the Gandolfo princes, in whose
vast estates these woods in all their antiquity and extent were but a
mere patch of verdure never visited. To a man, exiled, ruined, with a
price set on his head in his own country, and with his heart aching
ceaselessly for all he had left for ever, it was a welcome solitude,
a blessed, a thrice-blessed sanctuary. Sometimes he thought he was
already dead and in the Elysian fields, so profound was the silence, so
sweet the air, so spiritual the green light under the trees.
When the woodlanders climbed the summits of the colossal pines to
gather the ripe cones, they could see if they cared to look, and if
the day were clear, a glistening ray of gold, a shining band of
silver, and the one was the cross of St Peter’s and the other was the
Tyrhemian Sea. To them these said nothing; vaguely they knew that Rome
was the throne of the Viceroy of God, whence sins were remitted and
life eternal was given, but of the sea they had never heard, though the
light of the Pharos of Palo was visible on clear nights from the higher
ground of their forest. But to Cyrille, when he mounted into the high
pine-tops or climbed the crumbling stair of an old watch-tower, to gaze
from its roof over the vast verdure of these woods westward that speck
of sunlit gold, that streak of sparkling light spoke, as they must
ever speak so long as earth and sea shall last, to the scholar and the
student.
Only one highway traversed Le Selve, one which ran crosswise, and
met the old coaching road which goes still, although scarcely ever
used except by muleteers and peasantry, from Viterbo by Ronciglione,
and Sutri to La Storta, and on to Rome itself; a road once the great
artery of life between the Patrimonium Petri and the cities of Umbria,
of Tuscany, and of Lombardy, a road once crowded by pilgrims of all
nations; by the pomp of travelling cardinals, by the litter and
lacqueys of regal women, by the strings of sumpter mules, the massed
multitudes of armed horsemen, the straggling hordes of camp followers,
the splendid retinue of Prince and Nuncio. Now, some dusty public
vehicle, painfully drawn by blown and raw-boned horses, some string of
charcoal-bearing asses, some long line of timber-wagons drawn by great
white oxen, red-eyed, yoke-burdened, with heavy flanks and parching
tongues, are all that the once great highway sees.
But a past of more than two thousand years is touched at every step
in these heather-covered lands, a past which makes the Borgia, the
Farnese, the Medici, seem but as mere parvenues of a near hour.
In the rocks are the sculptured tombs of a perished race; and the
faithful soil holds the vanished nation’s arts and letters, and keeps
their secrets which no living man can read. When he reached those
loftiest summits where the wild doves and their foes the falcons
made their nests, the whole panorama of what had once been Etruria
and Latium was outstretched beneath him, and in the deep green light
of the thick-woven branches he could read his Horace, his Strabo,
his Marcus Aurelius, while, from far down below, the humble music of
the belled flocks rose faintly to his ear in a gentle rhythm which
has never ceased there through thrice a thousand years. And that
resigned sadness which succeeds despair came to him in that sense of
unceasing sorrow, of endless succession of creation and annihilation
of which such a scene must ever speak to those who look upon it with
the eyes which see, and with the ears which hear. He realised his
own infinitesimal nothingness, the infinite beauty and the infinite
ruthlessness of nature, and he seemed to hear, not the passing of the
browsing flocks over the grass below, but the passage of the multitudes
hurrying on their course from the womb to the grave, each runner
passing the torch from his dying hand to the living hand of the runner
who follows him in that fine figure which Lucretius has made immortal.
But in these Elysian Fields there were rude realities, and his
conscience, which was sensitive, never allowed him to evade them. He
was there, not to steep his soul in poppied rest, but to serve the
interests of his employers and of the lands and people committed to his
charge.
Within the forest there were remains of rock-dwellings and of Etruscan
tombs; he would willingly have consecrated his years to their
exploration, and led such a life here as Avvolto of Corneto and the
Campanari of Toscanelli had led amidst the sepulchres of a vanished
race.
He would willingly have spent all his time searching in the soil for
relics such as were at times found by the peasantry, but his duties
allowed him no such leisure. He took those duties to heart with the
conscientious seriousness of temper which had changed him from an
officer of the palace guard to a political reformer, and had exiled him
from all which he held dear.
The Gandolfo princes would have been the first to smile at such a
view of a steward’s duties; but to Cyrille the obligation was a
law of honour. They gave him shelter, food, and wage; he laboured
unremittingly in their service. If none were grateful to him he did not
complain; greater than he had served mankind, and only been beaten with
the rods of the world’s ingratitude in return.
There were small, very poor, holdings here and there, scattered many
miles one from another on patches of more or less cultivated ground.
And in earlier times some wanderer turned adrift by fire or sword, some
criminal fleeing from pursuit, or some nomad tired of roaming had made
a hut of boughs, and called the spot their own; and in the peasantry
living on and by these clearings, the new-comer found his greatest
enemies and his greatest anxieties. Long years of license and centuries
of occupation had made these sons of the soil look on it as their own;
indeed, in a manner, the Latin law confirmed their title, and plunder
had become with them a right divine. All his natural sympathies were
with the poor, and the creeds of his teacher held them excusable in
all errors, and these people were very poor indeed, but their cynical
dishonesty revolted him, and their habitual insubordination met and
thwarted him at every turn. They cringed to him to his face, but
cheated him and mocked at him behind his back. He was sensible of it,
and it strained his patience sorely.
The ancestors of Alcide and Lucio had been squatters in these solitudes
for centuries. They paid a nominal rental in kind and in labour, and
did what they liked on their bit of clearing. This labour had been but
seldom required, and their payment generally excused; generation after
generation had lived in this way, and in earlier times the men of the
family had gone with their lord to battle, and the blood which they had
shed had been esteemed rent enough for their land.
But now that times had changed, and there was no war service except
conscription, they had become averse to paying any rental at all, and
looked not only on their holding as their own, but on the timber, the
grass, the heather, the rushes, and all that was around them as their
own. When they tilled their small croft, they worked for their own
benefit, but grumbled even at doing that. They were brigands in blood
and instinct. The first of their forefathers who had settled there had
been a refugee from justice for the robbing and murder of a priest in
Rome; and they were never at ease save when thieving.
They had no notion of time or of its reckonings; but they declared
that their family was as old as the woods themselves, and there was
nothing to disprove their assertions. They were, in reality, not
more than squatters, as their forefathers had been; but they thought
themselves the lawful lords of the soil. They would cringe and beg,
and even work when it suited them, but they had the old scornful Roman
pride in their veins, and vowed vengeance on any who offended it. The
woods might be the Gandolfo’s or the Pope’s for aught they cared; they
laid their hands on everything they wanted.
There were not more than a dozen such families scattered over the fifty
miles of forest; but every one of these was against the foreigner;
would have been equally against him whatever he might have done, if he
had been St Michael’s self, as Caterina and Muriella sometimes thought
that he was. They had always been poor, but they had enjoyed thieving,
drinking, reiving, sinning as they chose. He wished to make them less
poor, but he strove also to make them more honest. They did not want
to learn thrift, or cleanliness, or common sense. They only wanted to
be filthy, and lazy, and corrupt, and thievish, in the immemorial way
transmitted from their fathers. They wanted no new-fangled virtues. Any
wrong they did, such as kniving a neighbour or lifting a calf, was put
up in a bundle, as they put up weeds to burn, and was thrust away till
Easter, when the priest washed it clean, as once a year their women
washed their shirts in running water. That was the use of priests and
women.
To the people of this volcanic and historic soil the new-comer,
Il Ministro as he was called, was accursed as ‘the northerner’: a
northerner whether from Bologna or Milano, whether from Russia or
Poland, made no difference to them; they did not know one of those
names from another; everybody at the back of their mountains beyond the
barrier of Monte Amiata sent the snow, and the bad winds, and meant
the North to them. He was like a bad wind to them. The very good-will
which he bore them was more offence than would have seemed to them his
enmity, since the latter they would have understood; the former seemed
to them only a deep-laid duplicity to entrap them to their ruin.
There had been various agents of the Gandolfi there since that
memorable day a hundred years before when the cavalry of Murat had
encamped in Le Selve; a day that was still talked of over the oak logs
in winter evenings as freshly as though it had been last winter. They
had been men who had cheated their lords and wrung blood out of a post,
but just because they had been thieves and hypocrites, they had winked
at many evil deeds, and had never interfered with the ways and beliefs,
the robberies and stabbings, the family feuds and drunken brawls of the
country people. It had been their interest to shut their eyes to all
which did not concern the fillings of their own leathern money-bags,
and nod in mute condonation; and they had done so.
One of them, indeed, had been shot dead as he stood at his bedroom
window with the moonlight full upon him; and another had been knived
as he had ridden home from a fair; but on the whole they had been
let alone and not disliked. They had been men of the province, _dei
nostri_; and that fact covers a multitude of sins.
No one of these stewards would have gone to see the old peasant on
his death-bed, and made a fuss about his being left alone, and have
accompanied his corpse to its burial. They would have sent a barrel of
good wine to the survivors to make merry with after the funeral, and
would never have asked where the body was buried or what respect had
been shown to it.
Moreover, they had been men of the people, who had known at most
bookkeeping by double entry, and something of cattle and forestry;
this northerner talked of trees and plants as though they were living
creatures with wills of their own; pretended that the roots of an oak
corresponded in size and shape with its branches, that its leaves were
its lungs, and all sorts of similar trash; he was never drunk, he
never swore, he kissed his horse on the forehead, he bathed in running
streams, he never made love to their daughters, he wanted to open a
school for the woodlanders’ children, and he had heathenish books
and devilish instruments in his rooms of which they caught appalling
glimpses. His employers had sent him a compass, a chronometer, an
aneroid, and a telescope with some globes and atlases from Rome, and
even his friend Caterina, who in a year and a half had grown to believe
him a harmless and even lovable person, could not see these objects
without horror, and she had begged to be allowed to bring over the
vicar from San Vitale to exorcise them.
She was a stout, good-natured, handsome, old woman, who had been born
on the Gandolfo lands, and had lived on them all her life; a good cook
in her own limited, coarse fashion, and a bustling, spirited directress
of the lads and lasses about the house.
“You fash yourself for nought, sir,” she said often to Cyrille. “Our
folks are as Nature made them: you will never alter them. They think
their own ways best, and they see no harm in a knife or a musket-shot
when there is any score to be wiped out. They will never listen to
you, not if you’re here fifty years.”
“They will come to understand me in time,” he said to himself; but
there are some things which even time cannot touch, and amongst these
things are many human hearts. In appealing to their indulgence or to
their gratitude, or to their intelligence, he appealed to qualities
which did not exist.
When he had taken his coffee he sat on, beside the fire, instead of
going to bed, a bad habit as he knew; but he had been a _viveur_ in the
fashionable clubs of S. Petersburg, and used to turn night into day; he
seldom did so now, for his days were laborious, and he kept labourer’s
hours usually. He looked into the wide hearth and on to the red-hot oak
logs and the crimson ashes, and in them he saw faces dear to him, on
which his eyes would probably never look again--one face most often
of all, fair, pale, proud, tender, with the gleam of diamonds in the
hair and at the throat; a woman who loved him and whom he loved--a
woman who was not his. Where was she this night? It was past midnight
now in Russia as here in Latium. Was she, as he had so often seen her,
the sought of all courtiers at some imperial ball? Was she present at
some ice fête on some frozen arm of the Neva, in the light of a million
torches, with the waltz music of Strauss throbbing on her ear?
Anyhow, everywhere, forever, he felt that she was dead to him.