Part 24

"It's the _son of a mother_, who's been drowned."

Another, clothed in linen, who appeared to be in charge of the corpse, stooped, and raised the cloth.

The little body appeared, inert, stretched on the hard beach. It was the body of a child of eight or nine, a thin and frail blond. For a pillow, they had put beneath his head his poor rags rolled up in a bundle: his shirt, blue breeches, red belt, soft felt hat. His face was scarcely livid, with a snub nose, prominent forehead, very long eyelashes, a half-open mouth with large, violet-colored lips between which showed the white teeth, spaced one from another. His neck was thin, flaccid, like a withered stem, marked with tiny folds. The tendons of the arm were weak; the arms were slender, covered with a down like the fine feathers that cover a newly hatched bird. His ribs were prominent and distinct; a darker line divided the skin in the middle of the chest; the umbilicus protruded like a knot. The feet, a little swollen, had the same yellowish color as the hands; and the small hands were callous, covered with warts, with white nails that were beginning to turn livid. On the left arm, on the thighs near the groin, and lower down, on the knees, along the limbs, reddish spots appeared. All the particularities of this miserable body assumed an extraordinary significance in George's eyes, immobilized as they were, and fixed forever in the rigidity of death.

"How did he get drowned? Where?" he asked in a low voice.

The man clad in linen began, not without some signs of impatience, the story, that, doubtless, he had already repeated too often. He had a square, bestial face, hairy eyebrows, and a broad, hard, fierce mouth. The story he told was as follows:

Immediately after having taken his sheep back to the barn, the child had eaten his lunch and had gone down to bathe in company with a comrade. But scarcely had he put foot in the water than he fell and was drowned. At his comrade's cries, someone had run from the house built on the cliffs, and had drawn him out half-dead, without getting wet above the knees. He had lowered the head to cause vomiting, had shaken him, but uselessly. And, so as to illustrate just where the poor little fellow had gone down, the man picked up a stone and threw it into the sea.

"There, just there--three arms' length from the shore."

The calm sea breathed softly near the head of the little corpse. But the sun blazed on the beach; and, in presence of this pallid corpse, there seemed something implacable in that burning sky and these coarse witnesses.

George asked:

"Why don't you carry him into the shade, to a house, a bed?"

"He mustn't be moved," replied the guardian sententiously. "Until the arrival of the Authorities, he must not be moved."

"But, at least, carry him into the shade--there, under that embankment."

Obstinately, the guardian repeated:

"He must not be moved."

And nothing could be more sad than that frail, lifeless creature, stretched on the strand, and guarded by that impassive brute, who always repeated the same tale in the same words, who always made the same motion when throwing the stone into the sea.

"There, just there."

A woman came up, a hook-nosed scold, with hard eyes and a bitter tongue--the comrade's mother. One could plainly see on her features a suspicious anxiety, as if she feared an accusation against her own son. She spoke sourly, and displayed almost irritation against the victim.

"It was his fate. God told him, 'Go in the sea and die.'"

She gesticulated vehemently.

"Why did he go in when he couldn't swim?"

A child who did not belong to the district, a boatman's son, repeated disdainfully:

"Why did he go in? Yes, we fellows all know how to swim."

People came up, looked on with cold curiosity, stopped or passed on. One group occupied the railway embankment; another group was looking from the top of the promontory, as at a spectacle. Children, seated or kneeling, played with the little pebbles that they threw in the air to catch them alternately on the backs of their hands and in their palms. Everyone displayed profound indifference at the sight of another's misfortune, and at death.

Another woman, on her way back from mass, came up, in a silk dress, decked with all her gold trinkets. To her, also, the weary guardian repeated his story, and showed the place in the water. This woman was loquacious.

"I always say to my children, 'Don't go near the sea, or I'll kill you.' The sea is the sea. You can't save yourself."

She related stories of drowned people. She recalled the case of the headless corpse that the sea had thrown up at San Vito and which a child had discovered among the rocks.

"There, between those rocks you see. The child came running up, saying, 'There's a dead man.' We thought he was joking. All the same, we went, and we found it. The body had no head. The Authorities came. They buried him in a ditch; then, at night, he was taken up again. He was all mangled and decomposed, but he still had his shoes on his feet. The magistrate said, 'Look, they are better than mine.' He must be a rich man. And he was a cattle-dealer. He had been assassinated; they had cut his head off and thrown him into the Tronto." ...

She continued in a shrill treble, swallowing the excessive saliva, from time to time, with a light, whistling sound:

"Where's the mother? When will the mother come?"

All the assembled women uttered exclamations of pity at that name.

"The mother. The mother will come."

They all turned around, thinking they saw her in the distance, on the burning sand. Others gave information concerning her. Her name was Riccangela; she was a widow with seven children. She had placed this one with the farmers to feed the sheep and earn his bread.

One was saying, as she looked at the corpse:

"His mother had so much trouble to raise him!"

Another said:

"She has even begged alms so as to nourish her children."

A third told that, several months previously, the poor youngster had already come near drowning himself in a stable-yard pond--in three inches of water!

Everyone repeated:

"It was his destiny. He was to die so."

Waiting rendered them uneasy, anxious.

"The mother! The mother's coming!"

George, deeply affected, cried:

"Carry him into the shade, won't you? Or into a house, so that his mother will not see him naked on the sand in the broiling sun!"

The guardian objected obstinately:

"He mustn't be moved. Until the arrival of the Authorities, he mustn't be moved."

The assistants looked at _Candia's stranger_ with surprise. Their number increased. Some occupied the embankment, planted with acacias; others crowned the arid promontory rearing up perpendicularly above the rocks. Here and there, lying on the great, monstrous blocks, clumps of reeds shone like gold, at the foot of the enormous slide of the cliffs, resembling a ruin of a cyclopean tower in front of the immense sea.

Suddenly, above the heights, a voice announced:

"Here she is."

Other voices followed:

"The mother, the mother!"

Everybody turned round; some came down from the embankment; those on the promontory leaned forward. Expectation rendered all dumb. The guardian recovered the corpse with the cloth. In the silence, the sea scarcely gasped, the acacias scarcely rustled.

And then, in the silence, one heard the cries of the new arrival.

The mother came along the shore, in the sun, crying. She was dressed in widow's weeds. Her body bent, she stumbled along on the sand, crying:

"My son! My son!"

She raised her hands to heaven, crying:

"My son!"

One of her older sons, with a red handkerchief knotted about his neck, followed her with a stupefied air, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand.

She walked along the shore, bent, striking her knees, directing her steps toward the white cloth. And while she called the dead, her mouth uttered cries that had nothing human about them, like the yelping of a savage dog. The nearer she came the lower she bent, almost stooping on all fours; when she reached the body, she threw herself on the cloth with a shriek.

She arose. With her coarse and blackened hand, a hand hardened by every toil, she uncovered the corpse. She looked at it for a few instants, motionless, as if petrified. Then, several times, in a piercing voice, with all the force of her lungs, she cried as if to awaken the dead:

"My son! My son! My son!"

The sobs choked her. On her knees, furious, she struck her sides with her fists. Her hopeless gaze wandered around on the people present. And during a lull in that violent tempest she seemed to collect herself.

Then she began to chant.

She chanted her sorrow in a rhythm that rose and fell regularly, like the palpitation of a heart.

It was an ancient monody that, from time immemorial, in the region of the Abruzzi, the women chanted over the loss of their kin. It was the melodious eloquence of the sacred sorrow that spontaneously wells up from the depths of the being, that hereditary rhythm in which the mothers of other times had modulated their lament.

She chanted, chanted:

"Open your eyes, arise, walk, my son! How beautiful you are! How beautiful you are!"

She chanted:

"For a morsel of bread, I have drowned you, my son! For a morsel of bread, I sent you to death! It was for this, then, that I raised you!"

But the woman with the hooked nose interrupted her, snappishly:

"No, you have not drowned him. It was Destiny. No, you didn't send him to his death. _You put it in the midst of the bread_."

And with a gesture towards the hill on which stood the house that had given hospitality to the child, she added:

"They took care of him there _like a jewel in its casket_."

The mother continued:

"O my son! Who sent you here? Who sent you here, to be drowned?"

And the snappy woman:

"Who sent him? It was our Lord. He said to him, 'Go into the sea and drown.'"

As George observed in a low voice to one of the bystanders that the child, succored in time, could have been saved, and that they had killed him by putting his head low and suspending him by the feet, he felt the mother's gaze fixed on himself.

"Do something for him, signor," she implored. "Do something for him."

She prayed:

"O Madonna of Miracles, perform the miracle!"

She repeated, touching the head of the dead:

"My son! My son! My son! Arise! Walk!"

Before her, on his knees, was the brother of the dead child; and he sobbed with grief, gazing about him from time to time with a face that had suddenly become indifferent. Another brother, the eldest, remained seated near by in the shadow of a rock, and he simulated grief by hiding his face in his hands. In order to console the mother, the women bent around her with gestures of pity, and accompanied the monody with a few groans.

She chanted:

"Why did I send you away from my house? Why have I sent you to your death? I have done everything to feed my sons, everything but sold myself. And it is for a morsel of bread that I have lost you! That, that is how you were to end. They have drowned you, my son!"

Then the woman with the rapacious nose in a burst of anger raised her skirt, entered the water as far as the knees, and cried:

"Look! He went in this far. Look! The water is like oil. It is a sign that he was to die in this manner."

And she regained the shore in two long strides.

"Look, look!" she repeated, pointing out on the sand the deep imprints of the man who had drawn out the body.

The mother looked on in a stupor; but one would have said that she did not see, that she understood nothing. After the hopeless explosions of grief, there supervened in her short pauses, like the dulling of consciousness. She remained silent; she touched her foot, or leg, mechanically; she dried her tears with her black apron; she seemed to become composed. Then suddenly a new explosion shook her entire frame; she fell on the corpse.

"And I cannot take you away! I cannot take you in my arms to the church! My son! My son!"

She felt him from head to foot, with a slow caress. Her wild anguish became more gentle, more touching. Her hand, sunburnt and callous by work, became infinitely coaxing when she touched her son's eyes, mouth, and forehead.

"How beautiful you are! How beautiful you are!"

She touched his lower lip, already violet-hued; and this slight pressure caused a flow of whitish foam to flow from the mouth. She removed from between the eyelashes a bit of straw, gently, gently, as if she feared to hurt him.

"How beautiful you are, you mother's pet!"

The eyelashes of the child were very long and very blond. On the temples, on the cheeks, a light down gave a golden reflection.

"Don't you hear me? Arise! Walk!"

She took the little hat, worn, soft as a rag. She gazed on him, kissed him. She said:

"I want to keep this as a relic; I want to carry it always on my heart."

She took the red waistband, and said:

"I wish to dress you."

The rough woman who had not left her place approved:

"Yes, let us dress him."

She herself removed the clothes from beneath the head of the corpse, felt in the vest pocket, and found there a piece of bread and a fig.

"You see! They had just given him his meal. They took care of him there _like a jewel in its casket_."

The mother looked at the little shirt, dirty, torn, on which her tears were falling, and she said:

"Put this shirt on him!"

Promptly the woman shouted up to one of her people on the heights above:

"Bring quickly one of Nufrillo's clean shirts."

The clean shirt was brought. When the mother raised the small body, a little water came from the mouth and rolled down the chest.

"O Madonna of Miracles, perform the miracle!" she prayed, raising her eyes to heaven in a supreme supplication.

Then she laid her sweet burden down again. She took the old shirt, the red waistband, the hat; she rolled them all up into a bundle, and said:

"It will be my pillow; at night I shall rest my head on it. I want to die on it."

She placed the poor relic on the sand near the child's head, placed her temple on it, and stretched out as if on a bed.

They both lay there, side by side, the mother and son, on the hard stones, beneath the burning sky, near the homicidal sea. And she chanted the same cantilena that had formerly shed a chaste slumber over the cradle.

"Get up, Riccangela; get up!" repeated the women around her.

She was not listening to them.

"My son is lying on the stones, and I could not rest there, too! Oh! my son, on these stones."

"Get up, Riccangela. Come!"

She rose. She gazed once more and with terrible intensity on the livid face of the corpse. She called once more, with all the force of her lungs:

"My son! My son! My son!"

Then, with her own hands, she re-covered her heavy loss with the cloth.

And the women surrounded her, drew her a little farther away under the shade of a rock, forced her to sit down, lamented with her.

Gradually the spectators disbanded, dispersed. There remained only a few consolers, and also the man clothed in linen, the impassive guardian who waited for the Authorities. The canicular sun beat down on the beach, and imparted to the funereal cloth a dazzling whiteness. The promontory, perpendicular above the jagged rocks, towered up in the conflagration with its desolate aridity. The sea, immense and green, breathed always evenly. And it seemed that the slow hour would never end.

In the shade of the rock, before the white cloth raised by the rigid form of the corpse, the mother continued her monody in the rhythm rendered sacred by so many sorrows, ancient and recent, of her race. And it seemed as if her lamentation would never cease.

*CHAPTER IX.*

On her return from the chapel of the Port, Hippolyte had heard of the accident. Accompanied by Helen, she had wished to rejoin George on the beach. But when near the tragic spot, at the sight of the cloth that made a white spot on the sand, she had felt her strength fail her. Seized by an outburst of sobs, she had retraced her steps, had gone back to the house, had waited for George, weeping.

She felt less compassion for the little body than she felt for herself, haunted by the recollection of the peril she had so lately incurred at the bath. And an instinctive, indomitable repulsion arose in her against that sea.

"I do not want to bathe in the sea any more. I do not want you to bathe there," she enjoined George, almost roughly, in a tone that expressed a firm, unyielding resolution. "I will not have it. Do you hear?"

They passed the rest of that Sunday in an anxious restlessness, returning ceaselessly to the loggia, to look at the white spot, over there, on the beach. George had the image of the corpse constantly before his eyes so strongly outlined that it seemed to him almost tangible. And in his ears was constantly the cadence of the monody chanted by the mother. Was the mother still lamenting in the shade of the rock? Had she stayed there alone with the sea and the dead? He saw again in imagination another unfortunate. He relived the hour of that May morning, long ago, in the house far away, when he had felt all at once the maternal life come in contact with his own life with a sort of adherence, when he had felt the mysterious correspondences of blood, of sorrow, and of destiny suspended over the heads of both. Would he ever see her again with mortal eyes? Would he ever again see that feeble smile, which, without changing a line of the face, seemed to spread a light veil of hope, too fugitive, alas! over the indelible imprints of pain? Would it be permitted him ever to kiss that long and emaciated hand again, whose caress could be compared to no other? And he relived the distant hour of the tears when, at the window, he had received the terrible revelation from the glimmer of a smile: when he had at last heard the dear voice, the only and unforgettable voice, the voice of comfort, of counsel, of forgiveness, of infinite goodness--when he had at last recognized the tender creature of long ago, the adored one. And he relived the hour of the farewell, the farewell tearless, and yet so cruel, when he had lied for shame on reading in his deceived mother's eyes the too sad question: "For whom are you abandoning me?" And all the past sorrows arose again in his memory, with all their dolorous images: that emaciated face, those swollen eyelids, red and burning, Christine's gentle and heart-rending smile, the sickly child whose large head was always resting on a chest barren of all but sighs, the cadaveric mask of the poor idiotic gormand.... And the tired eyes of his mother repeated: "For whom are you abandoning me?"

He felt himself penetrated by a wave of gentle feeling; he languished, dissolved; he felt a vague desire to bend his forehead, to hide his face on a bosom, to be caressed chastely, to savor slowly this secret bitterness, to doze, to perish gradually. It was as if all the effeminations of his soul had blossomed at the same time, and were floating.

A man passed by on the path, bearing on his head a little white-pine coffin.

Later in the afternoon the Authorities arrived at the beach. The little corpse, lifted up away from the stones, had been carried to the heights, disappeared. Piercing shrieks reached the Hermitage. Then all was quiet. The silence, ascending from the calm sea, regained possession of the surrounding parts.

The sea was so calm, the air was so calm, that life seemed suspended. A bluish light spread uniformly over everything.

Hippolyte had reentered, and had thrown herself on her bed. George remained in the loggia, seated on a chair. Both suffered, and they could not speak of their pain. Time slipped by.

"Did you call me?" asked George, who thought he heard his name.

"No, I didn't call you," she answered.

"What are you doing? Are you going to sleep?"

She did not answer.

George reseated himself, and half-closed his eyes. His thoughts always went back towards the mountain. In this silence, he felt the silence of the solitary and abandoned garden in which the little cypress-trees, tall and straight, reared up motionless toward the sky, religiously, like votive wax candles; from which, through the windows of the deserted chambers, still intact like reliquaries, came a religious sweetness of recollections.

And he appeared to him, a mild, meditative man, with a face full of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

"Oh! why," said he to Demetrius, "why did I not obey your suggestion, the last time I entered the chambers inhabited by your spirit? Why did I wish to make a new trial of life, and cover myself with shame before your eyes? How could I have made the mistake of pursuing the _sure possession_ of another soul, when I possessed yours, and when you lived in me?"

After the physical death, the soul of Demetrius had been preserved in the survivor without any diminution, and in him it had even attained, and retained, its supreme intensity. All that the living person had consumed in contact with his fellows, all the words sown in the course of time, all the diverse manifestations that had determined the special character of his being compared with other beings, all the ways, constant or variable, that had distinguished his personality among other personalities and made of him a man apart in the human multitude; in short, all that had differentiated his own life from other lives--all that was collected, concentrated, circumscribed in the unique, ideal tie that attached the defunct to the survivor. And the divine ostensory preserved in the Duomo of the natal town seemed to consecrate this high mystery: _Ego Demetrius Aurispa et unicus Georgius filius meus_.

The impure creature who was now lying on that unchaste bed had interposed between. The terrible corrupter was not only the obstacle to life, but also an obstacle to death--_to that death_. She was the Enemy of both.

And George, in thought, returned to the mountain, once more reached the old mansion, reentered the deserted rooms. As on that May morning, he crossed the tragic threshold. And, as on that day, he felt the obscure obsession over his will. The fifth anniversary was near. In what manner should he celebrate it?

A sudden cry from Hippolyte made him start violently. He jumped up and ran.

"What's the matter?"

Seated up in bed, terrified, she was passing her hands over her brow and eyelids, as though to thrust off something that tormented her. She fixed large, haggard eyes on her lover. Then, with an abrupt gesture, she threw her arms round his neck, covered his face with kisses and tears.

"What's the matter? What's the matter?" he asked, astonished, uneasy.

"Nothing, nothing----"

"Why are you crying?"

"I had a dream----"

"What did you dream? Tell me!"

Instead of replying, she clasped him close, kissed him again.

He seized her wrists, disengaged himself from her grasp, tried to look in her face.

"Tell me, what did you dream?"

"Nothing--a horrid dream----"

"What kind of dream?"

She resisted his persistence. He, on his part, grew more uneasy as his desire to know became greater.

"Tell me!"

Shaken with another shudder, she stammered:

"I dreamed--that I drew aside the shroud--and I saw--you----"

She smothered this last word in kisses.

*VI.*

*THE INVINCIBLE.*

*CHAPTER I.*