Part 2

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.

III.

The old man was buried next day, the steward lending the mules and the cart; Lucio alone accompanied the coffin, grumbling at the injustice of his brother in putting every disagreeable task upon his shoulders. Why trouble about a dead man more than about a dead fox? Why not tumble out the deal box into the nearest ditch?

At a turn in the road a horse crossed their path. The rider was Cyrille.

“I will come with you,” he said, “and discharge the fees.” He knew that if left to himself, Lucio, were he trusted with the money, would probably toss the coffin into the first ravine which was deep enough to tell no tales.

“No need to fatigue yourself so, sir,” said Lucio, greatly disconcerted. “If you be good enough to wish to pay the burying you can give me the money. There is no need for you to fag yourself coming to the town.”

“I will go with you,” said Cyrille, knowing that the money, if it left his hands, would never reach the graveyard.

Lucio cursed him silently for a suspicious, obstinate, niggardly, foreign brute. “Spies on us even when we are nought but a carcass,” he thought, where he sat at the coffin head, cracking nuts to beguile the way. Did no one else pitch their dead into ditches? What matter was it to this white-faced stranger if the old worn-out body were tumbled amongst the weeds and toads at the bottom of a gully? And how did the stranger know that it had been in Lucio’s mind to do away with it so, and to sell the cart and mules somewhere far away, and come back on foot, all tattered and torn, with a well-told tale of robbery and a bare escape with life?

“Damn him! he sees through the bones of one’s head what one is thinking,” said the man to himself. The scheme had been ingenious and feasible; it had been planned by Alcide; and now in addition to the disappointment of not carrying it out, Lucio had the dread of his elder’s fury when he should return home, having done nothing better than to really bury the coffin, and return the mules to their stables.

Cyrille, who suspected nothing worse than a possible misuse of the church fees, had no idea of the schemes which his presence defeated as he rode on towards the confines of the wood where the high-road passed which led to the dreary, small, walled place, now scarce more than a village, although it had been a stronghold of the Popes in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

“Would the body not do just as well left to itself in the woods?” muttered Lucio, as he gave the wooden box a sullen kick.

“Yes,” replied Cyrille; “and I should like my own body, when I die, to be laid down under a tree, and left there. But your law and your religion bid you bury your dead, and bury them as they command. You can only obey.”

Lucio grumbled inaudibly. For the law he had contempt and hatred, but for religion a dull pagan awe; such as in old Etruscan and Latin days, under these same forest glades, rude men had felt for the terrors of the gods.

The little borgo of San Vitale, to which they were bound, stood aloft, looking to the east to Palestrina and Monte Albano. The soil immediately beneath was honeycombed by ancient sepulchres and volcanic fissures; and from a small lake mephitic vapours rose; the hill was barren of vegetation; the walls looked like worm-eaten wood, its towers were in dusty ruin; it resembled a seagull’s nest, which, moth-eaten and cobweb-covered, crumbles away in a naturalist’s closet.

Clouds hung about its hillsides, and the air was heavy and cold. The few people in its narrow street were ragged, miserable, lean. Their black eyes stared at the mule and its burden with apathy. Their stomachs were empty, their hearts were hard; they were half dead themselves; some famished sheep snatched at the grass growing between the stones; a woman plucked a living pigeon for the priest’s dinner; thirsty dogs lapped foul waters in the gutter, the sacristan came out of an arched door in a cloister: was he called for baptism or burial? The latter? Very well. He had put in three dead that morning. There was room for a fourth a-top of them. How long were the coffins left in the ditch? Oh, a year or so. Then the wood split; he mixed the bones together and put them in a heap. A man in Rome came up and bought these heaps at intervals; he believed they were ground, and used for making pastes, or paper, or bread; he was not sure; it was no business of his what they were turned to; he would call the Priore who was acting in the absence of his Reverence.

Then he unlocked an iron gate, and showed a dreary enclosed square of rough brown turf, in which a few iron crosses, and hundreds of sticks nailed crosswise, were standing in many rows. A tethered kid was trying to browse, and hurting its tender mouth on the sere stalks. Across the ground ran two diagonal ditches always marked by freshly-piled lumps of earth; these were the resting-places of those who were poorest, where all were poor.

The figure of a woman was standing there.

It was that of the dead man’s granddaughter Muriella.

Muriella Stravolta was a niece of Alcide and Lucio by an older brother, deceased, who had served in the army, and lived afterwards at Viterbo. She lived with the family and worked with them, rather because it never occurred to her that she could go elsewhere than from any welcome she got from them, or any attachment on either side. She was twenty-two years old, with one of those faces which have the old Latin beauty, and one of those fine forms so common in a country where the females walk barefoot and carry their water vases on their heads, and are erect and strong and supple as the young pines of the mountain side. She worked hard, she lived poorly, she seldom heard a kind word; but her uncles and their wives respected her; she had a strong arm and an eye which could plunge its rays into a sinful soul and read the secrets thereof. She always carried a long slim knife in her stays, and she knew how to use it.

She wore a rough dark skirt and crimson bodice, and a white cloth folded on her head in the manner of the Agro Romano; the clothes were poor and torn in places, and showed her skin, which was of a clear pale brown; her brows were level and dark, her eyes black as a stormy night, and her mouth was red as any scarlet berry of the spindle-tree in October. She had wooers as many as a population scattered far and wide afforded; but no one of them ever had more from her than a curt salute or a brisk “begone.” She knew what it was to bear children for poor men, whether in wedlock or outside it, and she was in no haste to eat “the sweet fruit with the bitter stone.”

“How did you come here?” said Lucio angrily, at the sight of her, as he backed the coffin and cart into the burial-place.

“You would not bring me, so I walked across by the hill paths,” she answered.

“Womenkind have no business at these rites,” said Lucio; and the sexton added, with a leer:

“Bridals and baptisms are for handsome wenches, not burials.”

She did not reply to either; but she took one end of the wooden box and obliged them to lift it not too roughly to the ground.

“You did well to come,” said Cyrille to her, with sympathy.

She said nothing. She was not there for the sake of her dead grandsire, but to prevent the scheme of thieving the mules which she had guessed had been planned between her uncles.

“Meddling, mischievous baggage!” muttered Lucio. What business had women to cross and mar men’s work?

When the brief rites were over, and the deal box had been tumbled under clods of clay, she spoke to no one, but climbed into the cart, taking the reins of rope.

“Lie down on the straw and sleep,” she said curtly to her uncle. He was cowed; he knew that his intentions had been read. He stretched himself grumbling in the bottom of the cart, and pulled his pipe out of his breeches pocket.

“You may ride on,” said the girl to Cyrille. “The mules shall be at your place before moon-rise, and neither footsore nor wind-blown, I promise you.”

Then the reason of her presence in the burial-ground occurred to him.

“She is a brave woman,” he thought, “and, I fear, the only honest one of her brood.”

He saluted her courteously, and rode down the steep street with its miserably sickly people staring after him, and flocking round his stirrup leathers with piteous outcries for alms.

As he turned in his saddle and looked back whilst his horse slackened pace to pass over a little bridge, the clouds had lifted.

Above in the distance was the crumbling indented outline of the little walled hamlet, brown and gray, solitary and drear, and midway on the slope below it was a dusky moving patch made on the white dust, a patch which was Muriella and the mules. Above head the sun was breaking through the clouds in pale faint gold.

He had been a man of the world, but in his Slav blood romance and superstition slumbered; he liked to see in that breaking light an augury of hope; yet what hope could there ever be for him more than for that old dead body which had been jammed down beneath the clay?

His spirit was heavy as he rode home, and did not rise with the exhilarating speed of his young horse. The yawning ditch, the gabbled prayer, the battering spade, the loneliness, the decay, the sense of unenjoyed and unpitied lives coming to an end there in the clay, generation after generation, century after century, with no object, no hope, no mourner, went with him painfully. Were he to die that evening, such would be his own end. They would bring him there, and shovel him in, and go away, glad to be rid of him; and the land of his birth, the land of his love, would not be with him, even by so much as a handful of its soil thrown in upon him.

“I grow nervous; that brave woman shames me,” he thought.

IV.

As the full moon rose over the eastern mountains that evening, coming from the unseen waves of the Adriatic Sea, the mule-cart was driven into the courtyard of the hunting-lodge as she had promised. She was alone in it; Lucio had slipped off when near the gates, and gone homewards by short cuts known to him across the woods. His heart was black against her with the rage of a wolf robbed of a fine meal off fawn or kid; he was thirsty to pour his chagrin into the yet blacker bosom of his elder brother.

“Stop here to-night, child,” said old Caterina, coming out into the courtyard to greet her. “’Tis late, and you must be tired.”