CHAPTER I.

E-text prepared by John Hagerson, Kevin Handy, Graeme Mackreth, and the

Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

THE CHILDREN OF THE KING

A Tale of Southern Italy

by

F. MARION CRAWFORD

With Frontispiece

P. F. Collier & Son New York

By MacMillan & Co.

1885

[Illustration: AN OLD BAREFOOTED FRIAR STOOD BESIDE HER.--_Children of

the King_.]

Dedication

TO

THE MIDDY, THE LADDIE, THE MATE

AND THE MEN

THE SKIPPER OF THE OLD _LEONE_

DEDICATES

THIS STORY

CHAPTER I.

Lay your course south-east half east from the Campanella. If the weather

is what it should be in late summer you will have a fresh breeze on the

starboard quarter from ten in the morning till four or five o'clock in

the afternoon. Sail straight across the wide gulf of Salerno, and when

you are over give the Licosa Point a wide berth, for the water is

shallow and there are reefs along shore. Moreover there is no light on

Licosa Point, and many a good ship has gone to pieces there in dark

winter nights when the surf is rolling in. If the wind holds you may run

on to Palinuro in a long day before the evening calm comes on, and the

water turns oily and full of pink and green and violet streaks, and the

sun settles down in the north-west. Then the big sails will hang like

curtains from the long slanting yards, the slack sheets will dip down to

the water, the rudder will knock softly against the stern-post as the

gentle swell subsides. Then all is of a golden orange colour, then red

as wine, then purple as grapes, then violet, then grey, then altogether

shadowy as the stars come out--unless it chances that the moon is not

yet full, and edges everything with silver on your left hand while the

sunset dyes fade slowly to darkness upon your right.

Then the men forward will bestir themselves and presently a red glow

rises and flickers and paints what it touches, with its own colours. The

dry wood crackles and flares on the brick and mortar hearth, and the

great kettle is put on. Presently the water boils--in go the long

bundles of fine-drawn paste, and everybody collects forward to watch the

important operation. Stir it quickly at first. Let it boil till a bit of

it is tender under the teeth. In with the coarse salt, and stir again.

Up with kettle. Chill it with a quart of cold water from the keg. A hand

with the colander and one with the wooden spoon while the milky boiling

water is drained off. Garlic and oil, or tomato preserve? Whichever it

is, be quick about it. And so to supper, with huge hard biscuit and

stony cheese, and the full wine jug passed from mouth to mouth. To every

man a fork and to every man his place within arm's length of the great

basin--mottled green and white within, red brown and unglazed on the

outside. But the man at the helm has an earthen plate, and the jug is

passed aft to him from time to time.

Not that he has much to do as he lies there on his six-foot deck that

narrows away so sharply to the stern. He has taken a hitch round the

heavy tiller with the slack of the main sheet to keep it off the side of

his head while he eats. There is no current, and there is not a breath

of air. By and by, before midnight, you will smell the soft land breeze

blowing in puffs out of every little bay and indentation. There is no

order needed. The men silently brace the yards and change the sheets

over. The small jib is already bent in place of the big one, for the

night is dark and some of those smart puffs will soon be like little

squalls. Full and by. Hug the land, for there are no more reefs before

Scalea. If you do not get aground on what you can see in Calabria, you

will not get aground at all, says the old proverb. Briskly over two or

three miles to the next point, and the breeze is gone again. While she

is still forging ahead out go the sweeps, six or eight of them, and the

men throw themselves forward over the long slender loom, as they stand.

Half an hour to row, or more perhaps. Down helm, as you meet the next

puff, and the good felucca heels over a little. And so through the

night, the breeze freshening before the rising sun to die away in the

first hot morning hours, just as you are abreast of Camerota. L'Infresco

Point is ahead, not three miles away. It is of no use to row, for the

breeze will come up before long and save you the trouble. But the sea is

white and motionless. Far in the offing a Sicilian schooner and a couple

of clumsy "martinganes"--there is no proper English name for the

craft--are lying becalmed, with hanging sails. The men on board the

felucca watch them and the sea. There is a shadow on the white, hazy

horizon, then a streak, then a broad dark blue band. The schooner braces

her top-sail yard and gets her main sheet aft. The martinganes flatten

in their jibs along their high steeving bowsprits and jib-booms. Shift

your sheets, too, now, for the wind is coming. Past L'Infresco with its

lovely harbour of refuge, lonely as a bay in a desert island, its silent

shade and its ancient spring. The wind is south by west at first, but it

will go round in an hour or two, and before noon you will make

Scalea--stand out for the reef, the only one in Calabria--with a stern

breeze. You have passed the most beautiful spot on the beautiful Italian

coast, without seeing it. There, between the island of Dino and the cape

lies San Nicola, with its grand deserted tower, its mighty cliffs, its

deep, safe bay and its velvet sand. What matter? The wind is fair and

you are for Calabria with twenty tons of macaroni from Amalfi. There is

no time to be lost, either, for you will probably come home in ballast.

Past Scalea, then, where tradition says that Judas Iscariot was born and

bred and did his first murder. Right ahead is the sharp point of the

Diamante, beyond that low shore where the cane brake grows to within

fifty yards of the sea. Now you have run past the little cape, and are

abreast of the beach. Down mainsail--down jib--down foresail. Let go the

anchor while she forges, eight to nine lengths from the land, and let

her swing round, stern to the sand. Clear away the dingy and launch her

from amidships, and send a line ashore. Overboard with everything now,

for beaching, capstan, chocks and all--the swell will wash them in. As

the keel grates on the pebbles, the men jump into the water from the

high stern and catch the drifting wood. Some plant the capstan, others

pass the long hemp cable and reeve it through the fiddle block. A hand

forward to slack out the cable as the heavy boat slowly creeps up out of

the water. The men from other craft, already beached, lend a hand too

and a score of stout fellows breast the long oars which serve for

capstan bars. A little higher still. Now prop her securely and make all

snug and ship-shape, and make fast the blade of an oar to one of the

forward tholes, with the loom on the ground, for a ladder. You are safe

in Calabria.

To-morrow at early dawn you must go into the hills, for you cannot sell

a tenth of your cargo in the little village. Away you trudge on foot,

across the rocky point, along the low flat beach by the cane brake, up

the bed of the rivulet, where the wet green blades of the canes brush

your face at every step. Shoes and stockings in hand you ford the

shallow river, then, shod again, you begin the long ascent. You will

need four good hours, or five, for you are not a landsman, your shoes

hurt you, and you would rather reef top-sails--aye, and take the lee

earing, too, in any gale and a score of times, than breast that

mountain. It cannot be helped. It is a hard life, though there are lazy

days in the summer months, when the wind will do your work for you. You

must live, and earn your share; though they call you the master, neither

boat nor cargo are yours, and you have to earn that share by harder work

and with greater anxiety than the rest. But the world is green to-day.

You remember a certain night last March--off Cape Orso in the gulf, when

the wind they call the Punti di Salerno was raging down and you had a

jib bent for a mainsail, and your foresail close reefed and were

shipping more green water than you like to think of. Pitch dark, too,

and the little lighthouse on the cape not doing its best, as it seemed.

The long line of the Salerno lights on the weather bow. No getting

there, either, and no getting anywhere else apparently. Then you tried

your luck. Amalfi might not be blowing. It was no joke to go about just

then, but you managed it somehow, because you had half a dozen brave

fellows with you. As she came up she was near missing stays and you sang

out to let go the main halyards. The yard came down close by your head

and nearly killed you, but she paid-off all right and went over on the

starboard tack. Just under the cape the water was smooth. Just beyond it

the devil was loose with all his angels, for Amalfi was blowing its own

little hurricane on its own account from another quarter. Nothing for it

but to go about and try Salerno again. What could you do in an open

felucca with the green water running over? You did your best. Five hours

out of that pitch black night you beat up, first trying one harbour and

then the other. Amalfi gave in first, just as the waning moon rose, and

you got under the breakwater at last.

You remember that last of your many narrow escapes to-day as you trudge

up the stony mule-track through the green valleys, and it strikes you

that after all it is easier to walk from Diamante all the way to

Verbicaro, than to face a March storm in the gulf of Salerno in an open

boat on a dark night. Up you go, past that strange ruin of the great

Norman-Saracen castle standing alone on the steep little hill which

rises out of the middle of the valley, commanding the roads on the right

and the left. You have heard of the Saracens but not of the Normans.

What kind of people lived there amongst those bristling ivy-grown

towers? Thieves of course. Were they not Saracens and therefore Turks,

according to your ethnology, and therefore brigands? It is odd that the

government should have allowed them to build a castle just there.

Perhaps they were stronger than the government. You have never heard of

Count Roger, either, though you know the story of Judas Iscariot by

heart as you have heard it told many a time in Scalea. Up you go,

leaving the castle behind you, up to that square house they call the

tower on the brow of the hill. It is a lonely road, a mere sheep track

over the heights. You are over it at last, and that is Verbicaro, over

there on the other side of the great valley, perched against the

mountain side, a rough, grey mass of red-roofed houses cropping up like

red-tipped rocks out of a vast, sloping vineyard. And now there are

people on the road, slender, barefooted, brown women in dark

wine-coloured woollen skirts and scarlet cloth bodices much the worse

for wear, treading lightly under half-a-quintal weight of grapes;

well-to-do peasant men--galantuomini, they are all called in

Calabria--driving laden mules before them, their dark blue jackets flung

upon one shoulder, their white stockings remarkably white, their short

home-spun breeches far from ragged, as a rule, but their queer little

pointed hats mostly colourless and weather-beaten. Boys and girls, too,

meet you and stare at you, or overtake you at a great pace and almost

run past you, with an enquiring backward glance, each carrying

something--mostly grapes or figs. Out at last, by the little chapel,

upon what is the beginning of an inland carriage road--in a land where

even the one-wheeled wheelbarrow has never been seen. The grass grows

thick among the broken stones, and men and beasts have made a narrow

beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice. The new

bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you

came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets. A

glance tells you that the massive-looking piers were hollow, built of

one thickness of stone, shell-fashion, and filled with plain earth.

Somebody must have cheated. Nothing new in that. They are all thieves

nowadays, seeking to eat, as you say in your dialect, with a strict

simplicity which leaves nothing to the imagination. At all events this

bridge was a fraud, and the peasants clamber down a steep footpath they

have made through its ruins, and up the other side.

And now you are in the town. The streets are paved, but Verbicaro is not

Naples, not Salerno, not even Amalfi. The pavement is of the roughest

cobble stones, and the pigs are the scavengers. Pigs everywhere, in the

streets, in the houses, at the windows, on the steps of the church in

the market-place, to right and left, before you and behind you--like the

guns at Balaclava. You never heard of the Six Hundred, though your

father was boatswain of a Palermo grain bark and lay three months in the

harbour of Sebastapol during the fighting.

Pigs everywhere, black, grunting and happy. Red-skirted, scarlet-bodiced

women everywhere, too, all moving and carrying something. Galantuomini

loafing at most of the corners, smoking clay pipes with cane stems, and

the great Jew shopkeeper's nose just visible from a distance as he

stands in the door of his dingy den. Dirtier and dirtier grow the cobble

stones as you go on. Brighter and brighter the huge bunches of red

peppers fastened by every window, thicker and thicker on the upper walls

and shaky balconies the black melons and yellowish grey cantelopes hung

up to keep in the high fresh air, each slung in a hitch of yarn to a

nail of its own.

Here and there some one greets you. What have you to sell? Will you take

a cargo of pears? Good this year, like all the fruit. The figs and

grapes will not be dry for another month. They nod and move on, as you

pass by them. Verbicaro is a commercial centre, in spite of the pigs. A

tall, thin priest meets you, with a long black cigar in his mouth. When

he catches your eye he takes it from between his teeth and knocks the

ash off, seeing that you are a stranger. Perhaps it is not very clerical

to smoke in the streets. But who cares? This is Verbicaro--and besides,

it is not a pipe. Monks smoke pipes. Priests smoke cigars.

One more turn down a narrow lane--darkest and dirtiest of all the lanes,

the cobble stones only showing here and there above the universal black

puddle. Yet the air is not foul and many a broad street by the Basso

Porto in Naples smells far worse. The keen high atmosphere of the

Calabrian mountains is a mighty purifier of nastiness, and perhaps the

pig is not to be despised after all, as sanitary engineer, scavenger and

street sweeper.

This is Don Pietro Casale's house, the last on the right, with the steep

staircase running up outside the building to the second story. And the

staircase has an iron railing, and so narrows the lane that a broad

shouldered man can just go by to the cabbage garden beyond without

turning sideways. On the landing at the top, outside the closed door

and waiting for visitors, sits the pig--a pig larger, better fed and by

one shade of filthiness cleaner than other pigs. Don Pietro Casale has

been seen to sweep his pig with a broken willow broom, after it has

rained.

"Do you take him for a Christian?" asked his neighbour, in amazement, on

the occasion.

"No," answered Don Pietro gravely. "He is certainly not a Christian. But

why should he spoil the tablecloth with his muddy hog's back when my

guests are at their meals? He is always running under the table for the

scraps."

"And what are women for, except to wash tablecloths?" inquired the

neighbour contemptuously.

But he got no answer. Few people ever get more than one from Don Pietro

Casale, whose eldest son is doing well at Buenos Ayres, and in whose

house the postmaster takes his meals now that he is a widower.

For Don Pietro and his wife Donna Concetta sell their own wine and keep

a cook-shop, besides a guest-room with a garret above it, and two beds,

with an old-fashioned store of good linen in old-fashioned iron-bound

chests. At the time of the fair they can put up a dozen or fourteen

guests. People say indeed that the place is not so well managed, nor the

cooking so good since poor Carmela died, the widow of Ruggiero dei Figli

del Rè--Roger of the Children of the King.

For this is the place where the Children of the King lived and died for

many generations, and this house of Don Pietro Casale was theirs, and

the one on the other side of the cabbage garden, a smaller and poorer

one, in which Carmela died. The garden itself was once theirs, and the

vineyard beyond, and the olive grove beyond that, and much good land in

the valley. For they were galantuomini, and even thought themselves

something better, and sometimes, when the wine was new, they talked of

noble blood and said that their first ancestor had indeed been a son of

a king who had given him all Verbicaro for his own. True it is, at

least, that they had no other name. Through generation after generation

they were christened Ruggiero, Guglielmo, and Sebastiano "of the

Children of the King." Thus they had anciently appeared in the ill-kept

parish registers, and thus was Ruggiero inscribed for the conscription

under the new law.

And now, as you know, gaunt, weather-beaten Luigione, licensed master in

the coast trade and just now captain of the Sorrentine felucca

Giovannina, from Amalfi to Diamante with macaroni, there are no more of

the Children of the King in old Verbicaro, and their goods have fallen

into divers hands, but chiefly into those very grasping and

close-holding ones of Don Pietro Casale and his wife. But they are not

all dead by any means, as you know also and you have even lately seen

and talked with one of the fair-haired fellows, who bears the name.

For the Children of the King have almost always had yellow hair and blue

eyes, though they have more than once taken to themselves black-browed,

brown-skinned Calabrian girls as wives. And this makes one, who knows

something more about your country than you do, Luigione--though in a

less practical way I confess--this makes one think that they may be the

modern descendants of some Norman knightling who took Verbicaro for

himself one morning in the old days, and kept it; or perhaps even the

far-off progeny of one of those bright-eyed, golden-locked Goths who

made slaves of the degenerate Latins some thirteen centuries ago or

more, and treated their serfs indeed more like cattle than slaves until

almost the last of them were driven into the sea with their King Teias

by Narses. But a few were left in the southern fastnesses and in the

Samnite hills, and northward through the Apennines, scattered here and

there where they had been able to hold their own; and some, it is said,

forgot Theodoric and Witiges and Totila and Teias, and took service in

the Imperial Guard at Constantinople, as Harold of Norway and some of

our own hard-fisted sailor fathers did in later years.

Be that as it may--and no one knows how it was--the Children of the King

have yellow hair and blue eyes to this present time, and no one would

take them for Calabrians, nor for Sicilians, still less for

monkey-limbed, hang-dog mouthed, lying, lubberly Neapolitans who can

neither hand, reef nor steer, nor tell you the difference between a

bowline and a buntling, though you may show them a dozen times, nor

indeed can do anything but steal and blaspheme and be the foulest,

filthiest crew that Captain Satan ever shipped for the Long Voyage. Not

fit to slush down the mast of a collier, the best of them.

It must be a dozen years since Carmela died in that little house beyond

the cabbage garden. It was a glorious night in September--a strange

night in some ways, and not like other nights one remembers, for the

full moon had risen over the hills to the left, filling the world with a

transparent vapour of silver, so clear and so bright that the very light

seemed good to breathe as it is good to drink crystal water from a

spring. Verbicaro was all asleep behind Don Pietro Casale's house, and

in front, from the terrace before the guest-room, one could see the

great valley far below beyond the cabbages, deep and mysterious, with

silver-dashed shadows and sudden blacknesses, and bright points of white

where the moon's rays fell upon a solitary hut. And on the other side of

the valley, above Grisolia, a great round-topped mountain and on the top

of the mountain an enormous globe of cloud, full of lightning that

flashed unceasingly, so that the cloud was at one instant like a ball of

silver in the moonlight, and at the next like a ball of fire in

darkness. Not a breath stirred the air, and the strange thunderstorm

flashed out its life through the long hours, stationary and alone at its

vast height.

In the great silence two sounds broke the stillness from time to time;

the deep satisfied grunt of a pig turning his fattest side to the cobble

stones as he slept--and the long, low wail of a woman dying in great

pain.

The little room was very dark. A single wick burned in the boat-shaped

cup of the tall earthenware lamp, and there was little oil left in the

small receptacle. On the high trestle bed, upon the thinnest of straw

mattresses, decently covered with a coarse brown blanket, lay a pale

woman, emaciated to a degree hardly credible. A clean white handkerchief

was bound round her brow and covered her head, only a scanty lock or two

of fair hair escaping at the side of her face. The features were calm

and resigned, but when the pain of the death agony seized upon her the

thin lips parted and deep lines of suffering appeared about the mouth;

She seemed to struggle as best she could, but the low, quavering cry

would not be stifled--lower and more trembling each time it was renewed.

An old barefooted friar with a kindly eye and a flowing grey beard stood

beside her. He had done what he could to comfort her and was going away.

But she feebly begged him to stay a little longer. In an interval, while

she had no pain, she spoke to her boys.

"Ruggiero--Sebastiano--dear sons--you could not save me, and I am going.

God bless you. Our Lady help you--remember--you are Children of the

King--remember--ah."

She sighed heavily and her jaw fell as another sort of pallor spread

suddenly over her face. Poor Carmela was dead at last, after weeks of

sickness, worked to death, as the neighbours said, by Pietro Casale and

his wife Concetta.

She left those two boys, lean, poorly clad lads of ten and twelve years,

yellow haired and blue eyed, with big bones and hunger-pinched faces.

They could just remember seeing their father brought home dead with a

knife wound in his breast six years earlier. Now they took hands as

they looked at their dead mother with a sort of wondering gaze. There

were no tears, no cries of despair--least of all did they show any fear.

Old Padre Michele made them kneel down, still hand in hand, while he

recited prayers for the dead. The boys knew some of the responses,

learned by ear with small regard for Latinity, though they understood

what they were saying. When the monk got up they rose also and looked

again at the poor dead face.

"You have no relations, my children," said the old man.

"We are alone," answered the elder boy in a quiet, clear voice. "But I

will take care of Sebastiano."

"And I will help Ruggiero," said the younger in much the same tone.

"You are hungry?"

"Always," answered both together, without hesitation.

Padre Michele would have smiled, but the hungry faces and the mournful

tone told him how true the spoken word must be. He fumbled in the

pockets in the breast of his gown, and presently produced a few

shady-looking red and white sugar sweetmeats, bullet-like in shape and

hardness.

"It is all I have now, my children," said the old man. "I picked them up

yesterday at a wedding, to give them to a poor little girl who was ill.

But she was dead when I got there, so you may have them."

The lads took the stuff thankfully and crunched the stony balls with

white, wolfish teeth.

With Padre Michele's help they got an old woman from amongst the

neighbours to rouse herself and do what was necessary. When all was over

she took the brown blanket as payment without asking for it, smuggling

it out of the mean room under her great black handkerchief. But it was

day then, and Don Pietro Casale was wide awake. He stopped her in the

narrow part of the lane at the foot of his own staircase, and forcibly

undid the bundle, to the old woman's inexpressible discomfiture. He said

nothing, as he took it from her and carried it away, but his thin grey

lips smiled quietly. The old woman shook her fist at him behind his

back and cursed his dead under her breath. From Rome to Palermo, swear

at a man if you please, call him by bad names, and he will laugh at you.

But curse his dead relations or their souls, and you had better keep

beyond the reach of his knife, or of his hands if he have no weapon. So

the old woman was careful that Pietro Casale should not hear her.

"Managgia l'anima di chi t' è morto!" she muttered, as she hobbled away.

Everything in the room where Carmela died belonged to Don Pietro, and he

took everything. He found the two boys standing together, looking across

the fence of the cabbage garden down at the distant valley and over at

the height opposite, beyond which the sea was hidden.

"Eh! You good-for-nothings!" he called out to them. "Is nothing done

to-day because the mother is dead? No bread to-night, then--you know

that."

"We will not work for you any more," answered Ruggiero, the elder, as

both turned round.

Don Pietro went up to them. He had a short stout stick in his hand,

tough and black with age, and he lifted it as though to drive them to

work. They waited quietly till it should please him to come to close

quarters, which he did without delay. I have said that he was a man of

few words. But the Children of the King were not like Calabrian boys,

children though they were. Their wolfish teeth were very white as they

waited for him with parted lips, and there was an odd blue light in

their eyes which is not often seen south of Goth-land.

They were but twelve and ten years old, but they could fight already, in

their small way, and had tried it many a time with shepherd lads on the

hill-side. But Don Pietro despised children and aimed a blow at

Ruggiero's right shoulder. The blow did not take effect, but a moment

had not passed before the old peasant lay sprawling on his back with

both the boys on top of him.

"You cannot hurt the mother now," said Ruggiero. "Hit him as I do,

Bastianello!"

And the four bony boyish fists fell in a storm of savage blows upon Don

Pietro Casale's leathern face and eyes and head and thin grey lips.

"That is for the mother," said Ruggiero. "Another fifty a-piece for

ourselves."

The wiry old peasant struggled desperately, and at last threw himself

free of them and staggered to his feet.

"Quick, Bastianello!" shouted Ruggiero.

In the twinkling of an eye they were over the fence and running at full

speed for the valley. Don Pietro bruised, dazed and half-blinded,

struggled after them, crashing through hedges and stumbling into ditches

while he shouted for help in his pursuit. But his heavy shoes hampered

him, and at best he was no match for them in speed. His face was covered

with purple blotches and his eyelids were swelling at a terrible rate.

Out of breath and utterly worn out he stood still and steadied himself

against a crooked olive-tree. He could no longer hear even the footsteps

of the lads before him.

They were beyond his reach now. The last of the Children of the King had

left Verbicaro, where their fathers had lived and died since darker ages

than Calabrian history has accurately recorded.