Chapter 14

And she was so dexterous, so sure, so silent; even the sharp eyes of old Gianna never detected her nocturnal absence, even the shrewd observation of Clelia Alba never detected any trace of fatigue in her or any negligence in her tasks. She was always there when they needed her, did all that she was used to do, was obedient to every word or sign; they did not know that as she carried the water pails, or cut the grass, or swept the bricks, or washed the linen, her heart sung proudly within her a joyous song because she shared a secret -- a perilous secret -- of which the elder woman knew nothing. Any night a stray shot might strike her as she ran over the moors, or through the heather; any night a false step might pitch her headlong into a ravine or a pool; any night, returning through the shallows of the ford, she might miss her footing and fall into one of the bottomless holes that the river hid in its depths: but the danger of it only endeared her errand the more to her; made her the prouder that she was chosen for it.

"I fear nothing," she said to him truthfully; "I fear only that you should not be content."

And as signal fires run from point to point, or hill to hill, so she ran from one farmhouse to another, bearing the messages which organised those gatherings whereof Giavacchino Gallo had the knowledge. The men she summoned and spoke with were rough peasants, for the most part, rude as the untanned skins they wore at their work, but not one of them ever said a gross word or gave a lewd glance to the child.

She was _la bimba_ to them all; a brave little soul and honest; they respected her as if she were one of their own children, or one of their own sisters, and Nernia coming through the starlight, with an old musket slung at her back, which Adone had taught her to use, and her small, bronzed feet leaping over the ground like a young goat's, was a figure which soon became familiar and welcome to the people. She seemed to them like a harbinger of hope; she had few words, but those words reverberated with courage and energy; she moved the supine, she braced the timid; she brought the wavering firmness and the nervous strength; she said what Adone had taught her to say, but she put into it all her own immense faith in him, all her own innocent and undoubting certainty that his cause was just and would be blessed by heaven.

The Edera water belonged to them. Would they let it be turned away from their lands and given to strangers?

As a little spaniel or beagle threshes a covert, obedient to his master's will and working only to please him, so she scoured the country-side and drove in, by persuasion, or appeal, or threat, all those who would lend ear to her, to the midnight meetings on the moors, or in the homesteads, where Adone harangued them, with eloquence ever varied, on a theme which was never stale, because it appealed at once to the hearts and to the interests of his hearers.

But many of them, though fascinated, remained afraid.

"When all is said, what can we do?" they muttered. "Authority has a long arm."

The people of the district talked under their breath of nothing else than of this resistance which was being preached as a holy war by the youth of Terra Vergine. They were secret and silent, made prudent by many generations which had suffered from harsh measures and brutal reprisals, but the league he proclaimed fascinated and possessed them. Conspiracy has a seduction subtle and irresistible as gambling for those who have once become its servants. It is potent as wine, and colours the brain which it inflames. To these lowly, solitary men, who knew nothing beyond their own fields and coppices and wastelands, its excitement came like a magic philter to change the monotony of their days. They were most of them wholly unlettered; knew not their A B C; had only learned the law of the seasons, and the earth, and the trees which grew, and the beasts which grazed; but they had imagination; they had the blood of ancient races; they were neither dolts not boors, though Adone in his wrath called them so. They were fascinated by the call to rise and save their river. A feeling, more local than patriotism, but more noble than interest, moved them to share in his passionate hatred of the intruders, and to hearken to his appeals to them to arm and rise as one man.

But, on the other hand, long years of servitude and hardship had made them timid as gallant dogs are made so by fasting or the whip. "What are we?" some of them said to him. "We are no more than the earthworms in the soil." For there is a pathetic humility in these descendants of the ancient rulers of the world; it is a humility born of hope deferred, of the sense of every change of masters, of knowledge that the sun rises and sets upon their toil, as it did on that of their fathers, as it will do on that of their children, and will never see it lessened, nor see the fruits thereof given to themselves or to their sons. It is a humility which is never ignoble, but is infinitely, because hopelessly, sad.

The river was their own, surely, yes; but, like so much else that was their own, the State claimed it.

"What can be more yours than the son you beget, the fruit of your loins, the child for whom you have laboured through long years?" said an old man to him once. "Yet the State, as soon as he is of use to you, the State takes him, makes a beast of burden of him, kills his youth and his manhood; sends him without a word to you, to be maimed and slaughtered in Africa, his very place of death unknown to you; his body -- the body you begat and which his mother bore in her womb and nourished and cherished -- is devoured by the beasts of the desert and the birds of the air. They take all; why shall they not take the river also?"

The glowing faith of Adone was flung, as the sunlit salt spray of the ocean is cast on a cliff of basalt, against the barrier of that weary and prostrate despair which the State dares to tell the poor is their duty and their portion upon earth.

But the younger men listened to him more readily, being less bent and broken by long labour, and poor food, and many years of unanswered prayers. Of these some had served their time in regiments, and aided him to give some knowledge of drill and of the use of weapons to those who agreed with him to dispute by force the claim of strangers to the Edera water.

These gatherings took place on waste lands or bare heaths, or in clearings or hollows in the woods, and the tramp of feet and click of weapons scared the affrighted fox and the astounded badger. They dared not fire lest the sound should betray their whereabouts to some unfriendly ear; but they went through all other military exercises as far as it lay in their power to do so.

The extreme loneliness of the Edera valley was in their favour. Once in half a year, perhaps, half a troop of carabineers might ride through the district, but this was only if there had been any notable assassination or robbery; and of police there was none nearer than the town of San Beda.

It was to arrange these nightly exercises, and summon to or warn off men from them, as might be expedient, that Nernia was usually sent upon her nocturnal errands. One night when she had been bidden by Adone to go to a certain hamlet in the woods to the north, the child, as she was about to slip back the great steel bolts which fastened the house door, saw a light upon the stairs which she had just descended, and turning round, her hand upon the lock, saw Clelia Alba.

"Why are you out of your bed at this hour?" said the elder woman. Her face was stern and dark.

Nernia did not answer; her gay courage forsook her; she trembled.

"Why?" asked Adone's mother.

"I was going out," answered the child. Her voice shook. She was clothed as usual in the daytime, but she had over her head a woollen wrapper. She had not her musket, for she kept it in the hen-house, and was accustomed to take it as she passed that place.

"Going out! At the fourth hour of the night? Is that an answer for a decent maiden?"

Nernia was silent.

"Go back to your room, and I will lock you in it; in the morning you will account to me."

Nernia recovered her self-possession, though she trembled still.

"Pardon me, Madama Clelia," she said humbly, "I must go out."

She did not look ashamed, and her small brown face had a resolute expression.

A great anguish seized and wrung the heart of Clelia Alba. She knew that Adone was not in the house, Did he, the soul of purity and honour, seduce a girl who dwelt under his own roof? -- carry on an intrigue with a little beggar, to his own shame and the outrage of his mother? Was this the true cause of his frequent absence, his many nights abroad? Her dark brows contracted, her black eyes blazed.

"Go to your room, wanton!" she said in tones of thunder. "In the morning you will answer to me."

But Nernia, who had before this slipped the bolt aside, and who always kept her grasp upon the great key in the lock, suddenly turned it, pushed the oak door open, and before the elder woman was conscious of what she was doing, had dashed out into the air, and slammed the door behind her. The rush of wind had blown out the lamp in Clelia Alba's hand.

When, after fumbling vainly for some minutes to find the door, and bruising her hands against the wall and oaken chair, she at last found it and thrust it open, the night without was moonless and starless and stormy, and in its unillumined blackness she saw no trace of the little girl. She went out on to the doorstep and listened, but there was no sound. The wind was high; the perfume of the stocks and wallflowers was strong; far away the sound of the river rushing through the sedges was audible in the intense stillness, an owl hooted, a nightjar sent forth its sweet, strange, sighing note. Of Nernia there was no trace. Clelia Alba came within and closed the door, and locked and bolted it.

The old woman Gianna had come downstairs with a lighted rush candle in her hand; she was scared and afraid.

"What is it? What is it, madama?"

Clelia Alba dropped down on the chair by the door.

"It is -- it is -- that the beggar's spawn you would have me shelter is the leman of my son; and he has dishonoured his house and mine."

Gianna shook her grey head in solemn denial and disbelief.

"Sior'a, Clelia, do not say such words or think such thoughts of your son or of the child. She is as harmless as any flower that blows out there in the garden, and he is a noble youth, though now, by the wickedness of me, distraught and off his head. What makes you revile them so?"

"They are both out this night. Is not that enough?"

Gianna was distressed; from her chamber above she had heard the words which had passed between Adone's mother and Nernia, and knew the girl was gone.

"I would condemn others, but not Adone and the child," she returned. "For sure they do not do right to have secrets from you, but they are not such secrets as you think."

"Enough!" said Clelia Alba sternly. "The morning will show who is right. It suffices for me that the son of Valeria Albo, my son, has forgot his duty to his mother and his respect for himself."

Clelia Alba rose with effort from her chair, relighted her lamp at the old woman's rush candle, and went slowly and heavily up the stairs. She felt stunned and outraged. Her son! -- hers! -- to lie out of nights with a little nameless vagrant!

Gianna caught hold of her skirt. "Madama -- listen. I saw him born that day by the Edera water, and I have seen him every day of his life since till now. He would never do a base thing. Do not you, his mother, disgrace him by thinking of it for an hour. This thing is odd, is ugly, is strange, but wait to judge it --"

Clelia Alba released her skirt from her old servant's grasp.

"You mean well, but you are crazed. Get you gone."

Gianna let go her hold and crept submissively down the stair. She set her rushlight on the floor and sat down in the chair beside the door, and told her beads with shaking fingers. One or other of them, she thought, might come home either soon or late, for she did not believe that any amorous intimacy was the reason that they were both out -- God knew where -- in this windy, pitch-dark night.

"But he does wrong, he does wrong," she thought. "He sends the child on his errands perhaps, but he should remember a girl is like a peach, you cannot handle it ever so gently but its bloom goes; and he leaves us alone, two old women here, and we might have our throats cut before we should be able to wake old Ettore in the stable."

The night seemed long to her in the lone stone entrance, with the owls hooting round the house, and the winds blowing loud and tearing the tiles from the roof. Above, in her chamber, Adone's mother walked to and fro all night sleepless.

XVII

Gianna before it was dawn went out in the hope that she might meet Adone on his return, and be able to speak to him before he could see his mother. She was also in extreme anxiety for Nerina, of whom she had grown fond. She did not think the little girl would dare return after the words of Clelia Alba. She knew the child was courageous, but timid, like an otter or a swallow.

She went to the edge of the river and waited; he must cross it to come home; but whether he would cross higher up or lower down she could not tell. There was the faint light which preceded the rising of the sun. A great peace, a great freshness, were on the water and the land.

"Oh Lord, what fools we are!" thought the old woman. "The earth makes itself anew for us with every dawn, and our own snarling, and fretting, and mourning cloud it all over for us, and we only see our own silly souls!"

Soon, before the sun was rising, Adone came in sight, passing with firm, accustomed step across the undressed trunks of trees which were here thrown across the river to make a passage lower down the stream than the bridge of Ruscino. He was walking with spirit and ease, his head was erect, his belt was filled with arms, his eyes had sternness and command in them; he came from one of the military drillings in the woods, and had been content with it. Seeing old Gianna waiting there he understood that something must have happened, and his first fears were for his mother.

"Is she ill?" he cried, as he reached the bank of his own land.

"No; she is well in health," answered Gianna, "but she is sorely grieved and deeply angered; she found the girl Nerina going out at the dead of night."

Adone changed colour. He was silent. Gianna came close to him.

"The child and you both out all night, heaven knows where! What but one thing can your mother think?"

"If she thinks but one thing, that thing is false."

"Maybe. I believe so myself, but, Sior' Clelia will not. Why do you send the child out at such hours?"

"What did she say to my mother?"

"Nothing; only that she had to go."

"Faithful little soul!"

"Aye! And it is when little maids are faithful like this that men ruin them. I do not want to speak without respect to you, Adone, for I have eaten your bread and been sheltered by your roof through many a year; but for whatever end you send that child out of nights, you do a bad thing, a cruel thing, a thing unworthy of your stock; and if I know Clelia Alba----and who should know her if not I?-- she will never let Nerina enter her house again."

Adone's face grew dark.

"The house is mine. Nerina shall not be turned out of it."

"Perhaps it is yours; but it is your mother's too, and you will scarce turn out your mother for the sake of a little beggar-girl?"

Adone was silent; he saw the dilemma; he knew his mother's nature; he inherited it.

"Go you," he said at last; "go you and tell her that the child went out on my errands, indeed, but I have not seen her; there is no collusion with her, and she is not and never will be _dama_ of mine."

"I will take her no such message, for she would not listen. Go you; say what you choose; perhaps she will credit you, perhaps she will not. Anyhow, you are warned. As for me, I will go and search for Nerina."

"Do you mean she has not returned?"

"Certainly she has not. She will no more dare to return than a kicked dog. You forget she is a young thing, a creature of nothing; she thinks herself no more than a pebble or a twig. Besides, your mother called her a wanton. That is a word not soon washed out. She is humble as a blade of grass, but she will resent that. You have made much trouble with your rebellious work. You have done ill -- ill -- ill!"

Adone submitted mutely to the upbraiding; he knew he had done selfishly, wrongfully, brutally, that which had seemed well to himself with no consideration of others.

"Get you gone and search for the child," he said at last. "I will go myself to my mother."

"It is the least you can do. But you must not forget the cattle. Nerina is not there to see to them."

She pushed past him and went on to the footbridge; but midway across it she turned and called to him: "I lit the fire, and the coffee is on it. Where am I to look for the child? In the heather? in the woods? up in Ruscino? down in the lower valley? or may be at the presbytery?"

"Don Silverio is absent," Adone called back to her; and he passed on under the olive-trees towards his home. Gianna paused on the bridge and watched him till he was out of sight; then she went back herself by another path which led to the stables. A thought had struck her: Nerina was too devoted to the cattle to have let them suffer; possible she was even now attending to them in their stalls.

"She is a faithful little thing as he said!" the old servant muttered. "Yes; and such as she are born to labour and to suffer, and to eat the bread of bitterness."

"Where is she, Pierino?" she said to the old white dog; he was lying on the grass; if the girl were lost, she thought, Pierino would be away somewhere looking for her.

Gianna's heart was hard against Adone; in a dim way she understood the hopes and the schemes which occupied him, but she could not forgive him for sacrificing to them his mother and this friendless child. It was so like a man, she said to herself, to tear along on what he thought a road to glory, and never heed what he trampled down as he went -- never heed any more than the mower heeds the daisies.

In the cattle stalls she found the oxen and the cows already watered, brushed, and content, with their pile of fresh grass beside them; there was no sound in the stables but of their munching and breathing, and now and then the rattle of the chains which linked them to their mangers.

"Maybe she is amongst the hay," thought Gianna, and painfully she climbed the wide rungs of the ladder which led to the hay loft. There, sure enough, was Nerina, sound asleep upon the fodder. She looked very small, very young, very innocent.

The old woman thought of the first day that she had seen the child asleep on the stone bench by the porch; and her eyes grew dim.

"Who knows where you will rest to-morrow?" she thought; and she went backwards down the ladder noiselessly so as not to awaken a sleeper, whose awaking might be so sorrowful.

Gianna went back to the house and busied herself with her usual tasks; she could hear the voices of Adone and Clelia Alba in the chamber above; they sounded in altercation, but their words she could not hear.

It was at dawn that same day that Don Silverio returned from his interviews with Count Corradini and Senatore Gallo. When he reached Ruscino the little rector of the village in the woods had already celebrated mass. Don Silverio cleansed himself from the dust of travel, entered his church for his orisons, then broke his fast with bread and a plate of lentils, and whilst the day was still young took the long familiar way to the Terra Vergine. Whatever the interview might cost in pain and estrangement he felt that he dared not lose an hour in informing Adone of what was so dangerously known at the Prefecture.

"He will not kill me," he thought; "and if he did, it would not matter much;-- except for you, my poor little man," he added to his dog Signorino, who was running gleefully in his shadow. Gianna saw him approaching as she looked from the kitchen window, and cried her thanks to the saints with passionate gratitude. Then she went out and met him.

"Praise be to the Madonna that you have come back, reverendissimo!" she cried. "There are sore trouble and disputes under our roof."

"I grieve to hear that," he answered; and thought, "I fear I have lost my power to cast oil on the troubled waters."

He entered the great vaulted kitchen and sat down, for he was physically weary, having walked twenty miles in the past night.

"What you feel at liberty to tell me, let me hear," he said to the old servant.

Gianna told him in her picturesque, warmly-coloured phrase what had passed between Sior' Clelia and the little girl in the night; and what she had herself said to Adone at dawn; and how Nerina was lying asleep in the hay-loft, being afraid, doubtless, to come up to the house.

Don Silverio listened with pain and indignation.

"What is he about to risk a female child on such errands? And why is his mother in such vehement haste to say cruel words and think unjust and untrue things?"

"They are unjust and untrue, sir, are they not?" said Gianna. "But it looked ill, you see; a little creature going out in the middle of the night, and to be sure she was but a vagrant when she came to us."

"And now -- how does the matter stand? Has Adone convinced his mother of the girl's innocence?"

"Whew! That I cannot say, sir. They are upstairs; and their voices were loud an hour ago. Now they are still. I had a mind to go up, but I am afraid."

"Go up; and send Adone to me."

"He is perhaps asleep, sir; he came across the water at dawn."

"If so, wake him. I must speak to him without delay."

Gianna went and came down quickly.

"He is gone out to work in the fields, sir. Madama told me so. If he does not work, the land will go out of cultivation, sir."

"He may have gone to Nerina?"

"I do not think so, sir. But I will go back to the stable and see."

"And beg Sior' Clelia to come down to me."

He was left alone a few minutes in the great old stone chamber, with its smell of dried herbs hanging from its rafters and of maize leaves baking in the oven.

The land would go out of cultivation -- yes! -- and the acetylene factories would take the place of the fragrant garden, the olive orchards, the corn lands, the pastures. He did not wonder that Adone was roused to fury; but what fury would avail aught? What pain, what despair, what tears, would stay the desecration for an hour? The hatchet would hew it all down, and the steam plough would pass over it all, and then the stone and the mortar, the bricks and the iron, the engines, and the wheels, and the cauldrons, would be enthroned on the ruined soil: the gods of a soulless age.

"Oh, the pity of it! The pity of it!" thought Don Silverio, as the blue sky shone through the grated window and against the blue sky a rose branch swung and a swallow circled.

"Your servant, Reverendissimo," said the voice of Clelia Alba, and Don Silverio rose from his seat.

"My friend," he said to her, "I find you in trouble, and I fear that I shall add to it. But tell me first, what is this tale of Nerina?"

"It is but this, sir; if Nerina enter here, I go."

"You cannot be serious!"

"If you think so, look at me."

He did look at her; at her severe aquiline features, at her heavy eyelids drooping over eyes of implacable wrath, at her firm mouth and jaw, cold as if cut in marble. She was not a woman to trifle or to waver; perhaps she was one who having received offence would never forgive.

"But it is monstrous!" he exclaimed; "you cannot turn adrift a little friendless girl -- you cannot leave your own house, your dead husband's house -- neither is possible -- you rave!"