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(frontis)
BY
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1881
[All rights reserved]
(front)
LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.,
NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET
happens, a whilom thief or an ex-forger, then indeed you have committed something very like high treason, and you must be tried and sentenced as speedily as may be, to pacify the outraged majesty of Law.
Italy is like M. Gambetta; with the cap of liberty on their heads
they both set up a policeman and say 'worship him.'
It seems hardly worth while to have upset all the old religions and
all the old dynasties only to arrive at this.
The crime of Carmelo having been therefore so heinous, the usual
snail's pace of the law was hastened, and by what was almost a
miracle of rapidity, he having done this crime in sultry June, was actually
brought up to trial at the beginning of October, having spent only four
months in prison on suspicion, which is, as things go, really nothing at
all.
The Pretore of Pomodoro put on his
black cap and robes, and mounted his curule chair, with his mind already made up as to Carmelo, before this state prisoner had ever entered the court-house.
Like the wolves in the 'Animaux Parlants,' lawyers,
guards, secretaries, chancellors and syndics make a compact party,
sworn never to quarrel, and to grip all that comes in their way. The
Pretore, Gino Novi, had never seen either accuser or accused in his life
before, but before he had heard two words of the case he had made his mind
up against Carmelo; all these officials are little Gambettas, and the Law
is their fetish. Offend it, and you are vile as a Jesuit; there is no point
in your favour possible.
It was with much impatience that this brisk and smart young man, who
had the administration of justice in his power over something like seven
thousand people, went
through all the forms of trial, as though there were any sort of doubt of the prisoner's criminality.
It was absurd, thought Gino Novi, not to be able to condemn the
wretch off-hand; but the law gave him a trial, and he, as I say,
like M. Gambetta, revered the Law; indeed, there is hardly anything to
which you may not stretch it, and hardly any end it will not answer; when
you hold it as a schoolmaster holds the taws you get quite fond of it. It
is so unpleasant to others, and so elastic and omnipotent. Carmelo's
advocate was fainthearted; he was equally sure of his fees whether his
client were sentenced or set free; and he was afraid that by taking up this
case he made himself obnoxious to the Pretore, and to the governing powers
generally. It is far more compromising to defend a free citizen who has
been wronged by a guard, than it is to defend a brigand who has only murdered travellers and violated women.
His advocate was fainthearted, and his witnesses were not
over-wise; they were his own relatives, who got passionate and
indignant, and were reproved, and neighbours, such as Gigi Canterelli and
Cecco, who were too eager in his defence to be believed. Gigi Canterelli
made indeed a bad impression on the court by swearing heartily that Bindo
Terri was a 'briccone' and a
'scelerato,' but that he was
set on by blackguards in black cloth higher than himself, and that
everybody knew, for the whole commune was a prey to this set of
oppressors and extortioners; for which violent enunciation of the truth
the impetuous old grocer was ordered out of court, with a bad mark
scored against his name, to be of use the next, time that he
should have a case at law there, against carriers who had stolen his bags of rice, or against octroi-duties falsely levelled on his cheeses. Never again would Gigi gain any cause that would be heard at the Pretura of Pomodoro.
It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators
on the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers
for it.
The trial went on all through the golden October day, wasting the
time of many men who should have been at work in the vineyards; and
throughout it Carmelo stood between the carabiniers, faint and sick
from past confinement and present fatigue, and his old father and his
brothers and Pippo listened trembling and indignant, with the sweat
rolling off their brows.
When questioned, the prisoner said only,
'I would do the same to-morrow; he poisoned my dog.'
But of this there was, alas for Carmelo! no proof, and if there had
been, what would it have served? It was the law of the commune of
Vezzaja and Ghiralda that the guardian of the public morals should be
the poisoner of dogs.
'I would do the same to-morrow!' said Carmelo with
eyes that flashed fire from out of the weary pallor of his face.
Gino Novi looked at him from under his black cinque-cento cap of
office, and scowled and shuddered.
'This is the stuff that makes regicides!' he thought.
It is certainly the stuff that made Tell; but the Pretore did not
think of it in that sense.
Carmelo's attorney had summoned two or
three men whose dogs had been poisoned, and who had traced their death to Bindo; and had also summoned Squillace, the apothecary who had supplied the poison; but when the people came up to the tribunal they were frightened, and hemm'd and haw'd and prevaricated, and scratched their heads and blew their noses, and ended in sheer fright by being sure of nothing, while Signore Squillace perjured himself as handsomely as if he had been a deputy arraigned for bribery, instead of a poor devil paid thirty pounds a year to doctor all the commune.
So the long, dull, sad, terrible day wore away, with the sun beating
at the thick panes of the casements, and the dirty, garlic-scented
crowd of Pomodoro pressed together behind the bar, thick as bees in
swarming-time. The advocate's heart was not in his work; it
put him in bad odour, and every now and then
the eye of the Pretore menaced him, and then he lost the thread of his subject, and began to think that a few months in prison would not hurt a young fellow, and to remember that he himself was a very poor man with a jolie ribambelle of hungry children.
He examined his witnesses badly, he helped to hush-hush Gigi
Canterelli, he pleaded loosely, spoke at random, showed he thought ill
of his client, and had not courage to bring into evidence any one of
the many rascalities of Bindo Terri's past, or the many villanies of
his present.
It was one of those trials common enough in Italy, where the verdict
is a foregone conclusion. No one except the Pastorini boys and old
Pippo was astonished when Gino Novi, with his sharp black eyes
glittering like lancets, sentenced Carmelo to seven months'
imprisonment for his assault
upon an officer of the law. He would have been better pleased to give seven years, but he was a wise young man, who never let his passions get the mastery of him, and kept himself close within precedents and statutes.
Seven months!
All the bitter winter, and part of the lovely spring, were to pass
over the young head of Carmelo in the narrow den of the prison.
When he heard, he opened his great blue eyes, with a frantic terror
in them, his lips grew blue, he shivered all over and dropped down in a
dead faint. He had eaten nothing all day, and he had been standing
many hours.
The elder Pastorini, a strong man, shook like a woman; his veins
swelled on his forehead; his eyes grew dull; the men around him forced
him out into the open
air; they thought he would fall in apoplexy.
When he was in the air he staggered, and gave a great gasp for
breath.
'This is for what we toil!' he shouted, 'this is
for what we give our last coin to the tax-gatherer, and our last
child to the barracks, and our last breath to the hospital! God above
us! We are meeker, duller, stupider fools than any sheep that crouches
to the shearing! Men, you have known me all my life. I have been
peaceable, neighbourly, respectful to law and State, heedful to pay
debt and impost; you have known me all my life. I have reared my sons
in honesty and simple worth. I have done no harm, I never wronged man,
woman, child, or beast. Have I deserved this that they do to me? Men,
as God lives, this night would I bear steel and torch through the
kingdom
to kill these wretches that ruin us, these worms that crawl to their masters, but sting the poor as the viper stings. As God lives, I pray--I pray--for revolution, for red blood, for bitter battle, for human justice; I pray.--'
Then his voice choked, and he lifted his arms in the air, and the
men caught him to save his fall.
Meanwhile, in the court old Pippo had risen on trembling limbs, and
with his hat doffed, and his white hair shining in the sunshine, called
aloud to the judge, 'Dear sir, most illustrious, you cannot mean
it; you cannot have the heart to mean it. The lad is good as gold. You
cannot brand him felon and bracket him with thieves? Dear
sir--honoured judge--do hear me. He is to marry my daughter. His
marriage lines are all drawn out, and the girl sits at home
weeping, and the bridal gown lies in a drawer, and the orange flowers are all yellow and shrivelled, and they lie on it to keep it from moth. Good sir! Most high and honourable sir, do hear me! The dear lad already has suffered four mortal months in the town gaol. It is enough. It is too much! He did no harm. If you only but knew the rogue, the thief, the impostor, the villain, that they make a guard--'
'Take that old madman out of court,' hissed the Pretore;
and Pippo was hustled and pulled down by the officials from where he
stood, and thrown, as if he were a stone, through the doors.
'Defamation of an officer of the law,' muttered Gino
Novi, as he closed his great case of papers and hurried from his
throne, as twilight dimmed the court, to go and eat a supper of robins
and tripe, fried ham
and lentils, in his own room behind the chamber of justice, where he had invited Messer Gaspardo Nellemane and Messer Luca Finti to pass a jovial hour with him, and lost a friendly coin or two over draughts and dice.
'Very insubordinate and revolutionary people in this commune,
I fear; no veneration for authority,' said he; and his two
guests, who quite forgot that but for revolution they would at this
hour have been respectively selling their father's battered iron and
rotting fish, shook their heads and said there was a bad spirit
abroad--the people certainly had no respect for authority.
For these good gentlemen were like all their class, the very oddest
mixture of Prussian despotism and Parisian radicalism. They hated all
those who were above them, and despised all those who were below them;
there was only one stratum of humanity that they thought worth consideration or preservation, i.e. their own.
When Italy shall purge herself of these, the opportunists of public
benches and public desks--the licensed and registered brigands of the
public purse--then, and then only may she. lift off the burden of her
taxes, and breathe freely, and have title to be a voice in Europe. Will
this day ever come? By the educated will of the people, perhaps.
Perhaps--never.
Nepotism and Impiegatism are as thorns in her flesh; fixed there in
festered wounds, and maybe, past all surgery. They are as thorns that
pierce, as leeches that suck; when the flesh is bloodless, then it rots
and the body falls.
The sentence had been passed; the doors had closed, the bolts been
fastened on him.
He was in prison for seven months.
Ah! judges and gentlemen of the council, who put youths in your
prison cells for bathing in a river in the heat, for rescuing a dog
from the slaughterer, from begging for a coin when their old mothers or
their young babes starve and perish, how much I should like you to
taste that prison yourselves! The Bastille was the royal dungeon of
the noblesse, and scarcely deserved the rage of the people; but these
petty bastilles all over the land, where by petty laws the honest, the
poor, the helpless, the courageous, for every trifling act of life are
thrown to break their hearts as they may, and from which they can only
issue with blackened names and ruined characters--when will
these accursed places, that mingle the righteous with the unrighteous, the godly and the innocent with the thief and the assassin, surrender to the summons of the nation, and be dismantled and destroyed?
Never so long as Messer Nellemane and his kind shall reign; and make
of every brave impulse of pity, of every despairing cry of want, a
crime.
Carmelo, lying on the hard narrow bed of the prison cell, recovered
from his swoon, stared with dull aching eyes up at the ceiling; the
prison had been an old palace once, and on the ceiling, which was a
section of what had been once a grand and vaulted roofing of a
banqueting hall, there was still in unfaded frescoes a little group of
angels bearing palms and flying up against the stars.
Those angels seemed an innocent mockery to Carmelo; the innocent lad
to whom the saints
and the sons of God had been no whit less real than the poplars on the river shore, hated them now, and thought them cruel deceptions, beautiful fair lies.
'If they were really up there beyond the sun, they would not
let these things be,' he said between his teeth, lying on his
back, and knowing that for seven long months he would be a prisoner,
treated like a felon, because a vile wrong had been done to him, and he
had justly chastised it.
Carmelo had always been in the open air, up whilst the skies were
still dark, on the road with the mule, at work under the trees, fishing
in the Rosa water, dashing the ruddy grain down into the black mouth of
the shaft; on feast days and holy days strolling through the lanes and
fields with a flower behind his ear, or thrumming his mandoline in the
moonlight under the porch;
a free life and a happy one, doing no harm and thinking none, enjoying vaguely but intensely, as the bull enjoys the pastures when the springtide grass is sweet in the dew of dawn; a natural life and a wholesome life, with free movement of the limbs and unpolluted air in the lungs, dumb in outward expression, but keen to inward pleasure from scent, and sight, and sound.
To him every moment in this close den, without a breath of air, with
scarce a gleam of sunlight, was despair. A day in a prison to a
free-born son of the soil, used to work with the broad bright sky
alone above his head, is more agony than a year of it is to a cramped
city-worker used only to the twilight of a machine-room or a
workshop, only to an air full of smuts and smoke, and the stench of acids,
and the dust of filed steel or sifted coal. The suffering of the
two cannot be compared, and one among many of the injustices the law, all over the world, commits is that it never takes into consideration what a man's past has been. There are those to whom a prison is a hell; there are those to whom it is something better than the life they led.
Carmelo lay on his rough sacking, and stared at the painted angels
that the last glow of the sunset had illumined, and he thought that on
the morrow he would be a madman and know nothing. That was his fear.
His brain boiled and burned in his skull, and his heart seemed to pant
and leap like a wounded hare springing before the hounds.
When the gaoler looked in at morning, the lad was in high fever:
they called the parish doctor of Pomodoro, he pronounced it to be
congestion of the brain. They took
him in a litter to the infirmary, a dark, foul smelling, ill-kept place, where the doctor tried experiments on the patients as he pleased, and cut up dogs and cats alive in a back room, and flattered himself that this was science.
When will the truth be written of hospitals anywhere? If ever it
were written, the faculty would swear it all a lie.
No one hardly ever recovered in this infirmary, certainly none were
ever the better for it. All Carmelo's auburn locks were shaved off,
and many ounces of blood were taken from him, and little else was done;
he was a prisoner, and really it did not matter. His father, who was
not allowed to see him, drew his last franc out of the Cassa di
Risparmio1
to bespeak the doctor's care for him and the doctor took the fees;
secretly, as
___________________1 Savings-bank.
Page 23
he was forbidden by the rules to touch a centime.
'The dear lad, he has ruined me!' thought the old man,
who was feeble and broken in health since the fit before the Pretura,
and who had spent nearly his all over the long account of the notary;
'dear lad, he has ruined me! Yet he is as innocent as a babe
unborn!'
The miller was not a weak man, nor given to such weaknesses, but the
hot tears rose in his eyes and fell down his furrowed cheeks as he
left the hospital bed. He was not allowed to stay there, nor to send
any sister or brother of Carmelo's to him, and he felt as though his
tough heart would break, as he got up behind his good grey horse and
jolted over the ruts of the road in the twilight of the November
afternoon.
Why had all this ever come upon him?
Who put these thieves and tyrants there on those stools of office?
The Government had done, he supposed. To him, the Government meant
the King. He cursed the King. How could he tell that the King had no
more to do with these things than with the melons and pumpkins that had
ripened with the summer sun under his garden wall?
It is the White Cross of Savoy which the ink splashes of Messer
Nellemane's documents stain in the people's eyes.
How can you expect them to comprehend the contradictions of
constitutionalism?
The King caused it all, and set Messer Nellemane on that office
throne; so thought Demetrio Pastorini, and so think tens of thousands;
but the thought failed to console the old miller as he went along the
dusky road that he knew so well; indeed it made
his pain the more bitter to him, because he had lost a dearly beloved and only brother in days when they were young, in those wars against the 'stranieri' which they were told had given them freedom.
So weary were his thoughts and so preoccupied, and so dim were his
eyes with tears, that if the good grey horse had not been acquainted
with the way for fifteen years, he might have missed it for aught that
his master did to guide him.
'Hè--o! Ouf!' cried the old man to
the horse in surprise, as his own mill-house loomed through the grey
shadows, and the horse checked his trot without the command.
In the mist of the autumn night that was closing in, he could see
the figure of his eldest daughter as she ran out to him; she was
sobbing, and the sound of her sobs was borne to him through the cold,
quiet, misty air.
'Oh father,' she stammered, 'Oh father!' and
then she came to the side of the cart, and lifted herself up on the
side of the wheel and caught his hand: 'Oh father' she
cried again.
The old man trembled.
'What is it new of sorrow?' he said: he spoke almost
roughly from very fear.
The girl standing up on the shaft caught his hand:
'Oh father, do not mind too much--the trees !'
'The trees!'
He said no more; he got down off the cart and threw the reins of
rope to the youngest boy.
'Lead the horse to the stable,' he said unsteadily.
'The trees? what of the trees?'
He strode off in the darkness towards the river, and the girl
followed him.
'Oh father!' she said again with a great sob.
There was very little light but the gleam of the moon as the clouds
swept by; it was enough to show him what had been done in his absence.
Three of the poplars had been felled.
'Oh father!' said the girl catching at his hands once
more. 'We did all we could to stop them, but they would not
wait. There were six of them with hatchets, and an
overseer. They said they had the right by law. Oh father!--'
When the wood-cutters and the overseer came on the morrow, he
was like one beside himself. He got down his old gun from the shelf, and
would have shot the first man that dared approach the
boschetto, but his young sons and daughters
weeping about him made his nerve and his purpose fail;
they got the weapon from him, and besought him for their sakes to be patient.
'Patient!' he cried to them. 'Shall we be patient
while we are stripped alive as the live lamb is stripped of her skin, she
bleeding at every pore? Patient? you are poltroons! You eat the dust!
You are no children of my blood. Let me be!'
But they clung about him notwithstanding, and pleaded that better
was it to suffer wrong than to do it, and sweeter in heaven's sight;
and so besought him, in the name of Christ and of their own, that he, being
a religious man, and one most affectionate, gave way at last, and dropped
into his wooden chair and wept, and bore as best he could the sound of
crashing axe, of falling trunk, of wrenching wood, of shivering leaf.
'Must the King, who has dominion from sea to sea, over all the
land and the greatness of it, must he grudge me my little all?' he
cried in his agony, as he heard the blows of the hatchet on the trees.
Messer Nellemane visited the spot often.
The municipal soul loves destruction. Whether it beholds a noble and
fair monument of ancient times being changed to dust and rubble by the
hammers of masons, or whether it sees a gracious sylvan haunt alter to a
desolation of sand and stones beneath the hatchets of wood-cutters,
the municipal
soul is equally full of an exceeding joy, of an unspeakable contentment.
Messer Nellemane, who possessed the municipal soul in its entire
perfection, was thus happy now; and his happiness was further pointed by
the acid pungency of a grudge paid off, a vengeance accomplished.
It was a sad sight to other eyes than his: the mossy bank where
Toppa had used to roam stamped down into mud, the brave trees felled, their
yellow leaves churned into a paste of earth and water, the branches piled
in squares to be sold for firewood, the tall trunks trimmed and set in rows
to be disposed of as timber; all the place unsightly, naked, miserable,
where all had been so lately freshness, and peace, and forest
loveliness.
The white wall of the mill-house stood bare and ugly, no friendly
shadows cast on it from waving boughs. The heart of the
miller seemed broken in his breast; he could scarce bear to pass his door; he could not bear to look across the stream.
He never spoke of it to anyone since the trees had gone.
Once his third son, little Dante, said timidly:
'Is it well, father, that they should sell the wood like that?
They have not paid you.'
Then Demetrio Pastorini said to him:
'If they sold your sister to the brothel would you squabble to
share the price? Pay? no, they will never pay. They are thieves. Thieves do
not pay for what they take.'
Then the young man was afraid, and did not dare to speak of the wood
again.
After a while the timber was carried away, and the boughs also; no one
knew where they went; it was understood to go
to the City. No one ventured to inquire, since the stern lips of Pastorini were dumb.
If he had spoken he would have learned little: he would have heard
that the engineers had valued his possession, and the municipality had
contracted to pay for it: that was all he would have been told. He
did not know that he was highly honoured, and that they were treating him
exactly as the princely owner of Farnesina was treated before him.
This destruction of the boschetto, which had been a favourite haunt for
feast days with the neighbours, and the dread of the iron way that was to
follow it, harassed and saddened all the people in Santa Rosalia, and added
to the gloom of a wet and stormy November, which was in turn followed by an
unusual and severe winter.
The harvest had been good, and so had
been the vintage, and so also proved the olive-gathering, rain notwithstanding, and as foreign papers innocently wrote, nothing was wanting to the happiness of the country.
But the foreign papers only read the statistics of corn, wine, and oil,
and did not try to see any further; indeed, having started with this fixed
idea of Italian happiness, would not have believed any explanations proving
the contrary. Foreign papers did not understand that, as the local taxes
always go up in proportion to the excellence of the harvest and vintage,
that excellence is not the unmixed gain which it is supposed to be, and,
indeed, is scant profit to anyone.
The more you have, the more I take, say the municipalities to the
communities; there can be no more admirable recipe for keeping a populace
poor.
flower, and changed to putrefaction the aloe and the cactus; snow that blurred out all the sunny pastoral loveliness, and made the landscape grey and sear.
In this sort of winter-time the poor are the first to pine and
perish everywhere, but soonest of all in this land of sunshine and south
wind.
The impetuous Rosa was as over full of water as it had been low and
shallow in the midsummer; it ran out over its banks and flooded the fields,
where Science brought in with Liberty had felled the trees and hedges that
had been used to serve as dykes.
There was no work in the flooded or in the frozen fields; the contadini
wanted no labourers; there was nothing to be done anywhere; there was a
score of empty hands ready if ever such a little job needed the doing.
The houses, all built for warm weather, with their open loggie and their
ill-fitting windows, were swept through by the north wind as though
they had been canvas tents. There was scant fuel; the old times were gone
when they could glean it on all the hillsides, for the best reason, that
nearly all the woods were felled. Wine was so dear no poor man could drink
it, and bread was frightfully dear, too. The people cowered over their
little brown pots of lighted brace, and did
not complain. When anyone gave them a coin they were passionately
grateful.
Most winters they suffered like this; but this winter the suffering was
greater than usual. A few said something about getting work in the
Maremma, where all the work is done in winter; but they might as well have
spoken of getting work in the
moon; they could as well get to the one as the other. They had no idea how to travel there, and nothing to travel with; besides, nine-tenths of them were women and children, for whom the Maremma had no need and no room.
Of course these people were very thankless and unreasonable. There was
a railway twelve miles off, there was going to be gas in Pomodoro, and
there was Messer Nellemane in their midst, all three monuments of
progress.
But these silly people persisted in feeling that they would prefer cheap
wine, cheap bread, and stomachs full of both, even to a railway, gas, or
Messer Nellemane.
The winter is never very long in Italy, yet this seemed very long
indeed. The mill wheels, after having been immovable from drought, were
now useless from ice, and the
miller, from a plump, jovial, strong man, had become thin, haggard, and silent, feeling the weight of bitter sorrow and the aching of money-cares.
In Pippo's little house the blue Madonna heard no laughter and saw
no fire-gleam.
The old man had grown taciturn and irritable. Misfortune is no sweetener
of temper or of bread. He would sit long together, crouched in a corner
immovable, and his lips were at such times always moving inaudibly; he was
counting up the sums of which they had robbed him; counting them again and
again; a hundred times a day, a hundred times a night.
They had but little to live on: no one bought straw plaiting in
winter, and, as he could not cut the osiers in the river, the
rush-working of Pippo bought but small profit.
When they could have a dish of oil and
beans they were very thankful; when they could not they boiled a little bread in water with a bit of garlic, and tried to believe it was soup.
Now and then they had a drop of bad coffee without milk: that was
all: as wine they had
mezzo-vino, that is, the last juices
of the already-squeezed grape-skins diluted with water, a
drink to which vinegar were sweetness.
The Italian poor know as little of the bacon, and potatoes, and tea of
the English labourer, as they do of the champagne and mutton of the English
mechanic.
In summer time they can do well enough: there is the gracious sun
shining on them, and there is always work to be had; but in winter there is
terrible suffering, the more terrible, I think, because so quiet: the
people die, that is all.
'Patience,' they say, to the last; but their patience brings
them nothing.
In Santa Rosalia there was great want, and there was nobody to succour
it: the nobles of the province were away in the City keeping
carnival, and no fattore ever cares for the
poor: he gets labour cheap if he requires it, that is his view of the
universal misery.
Vezzaja and Ghiralda possessed a charitable society; it was named after
that purest of all saints, the Confraternità di San Francisco di
Asissi, and it dated back to the thirteenth century.
Originally it had been a very noble society, and had owned broad lands,
of which many estates still remained to it. It had been
self-denying, generous, religious, in the highest sense of that
word, and gentle and simple had been proud to be
its ministers; but of this character there did not now remain to it so much as there did remain of its revenues. The rich were very willing to be on its staff; but the poor were not very willing to apply to it; it had a way of considering a case for three months, and then ordering as relief a few pounds of bread, which, when a whole family was waiting, and starving, and dying, was a little too dilatory to be very efficient.
But the fraternity of St. Francis still had its old palace in Pomodoro;
still had its historical archives and its pious repute; still had nobles
and gentlemen on its committee; and if it only gave a little bread now and
then--well--pauperism, they say, should not be encouraged; and if
its funds were never very clearly accounted for, we know these
mediæval institutions cannot be worked in the mediæval way
nowadays: St. Francis
saluted Lady Poverty; but we keep her well outside the door while we ask for her certificate.
Now old 'Nunziatina had an attack of bronchitis at this time, and
though she recovered, which was little short of a miracle, she was by no
means so strong again as she had been; and her draughty room under the
tiles, scorching in summer, and frozen in winter, shared with three other
old women, and without any stove, or any glass in the window, was not an
abode to favour convalescence. The vicario of
Santa Maria seeing this, bethought him of the Fraternity of St. Francis,
and gave her a letter to its committee, urging her age, and honesty, and
recent sickness, as fit reasons why she should benefit by this noble
charity.
There was a quantity of money locked up in the revenues of this
Fraternity, and it
had been intended for the poor; but then the present age, the age of Messer Nellemane, knows better than to spend it on the poor.
Those old times were so different to ours: different methods of
administration become a necessity in modern days. The Fraternity made a
great flourish, and printed long reports, and still charmed the province
into subscriptions and donations; but if St. Francis could have been
present when the accounts were made up, his benignant eyes would have
blazed with the fury of his offended God.
Annunziata blessed Dom Lelio, and took the letter and the sixty
centimes he gave her for the diligence, and betook herself, and her staff,
and her broad hat, and her short petticoat into the rickety vehicle with
much joy and hopefulness of spirit. If she could
get a certain little pension, if it were only a franc a week, she felt that she could praise heaven with a full heart. Her trotting round to all the outlying farm houses and villages with her basket was getting very toilsome to her.
Now, the President of the Fraternity was a certain most noble Count
Saverio, who had a high repute as a philanthropist, and whose villa was
close by to Pomodoro.
The Count gave his services, which were highly appreciated, nominally
for nothing, saying, with much eloquence, that all his life was dedicated
to service of God and the poor; and if he did do a good deal at the Bourse,
and buy a great many terni at Lotto, that was
his own affair, and in no way concerned St. Francis. Besides he did it
through agents; and his own name never was heard except in connection with
philanthropy.
This very noble and pious gentleman received old 'Nunziatina, who
made him a nice curtesy, and wished him every blessing in her cheery
cordial way, which was as pleasant to hear as a bird's chirping; he
was sitting surrounded with ledgers and folios, in the muniment room of the
castellated house of this ancient brotherhood; and he spoke so prettily and
amiably to her that she felt quite sure of ten francs a month.
He was a long time looking over her papers and reading the
priest's recommendation; and then he smiled, and fussed about, and
rang for his clerk, and whispered with him, and scribbled something and
slipped it in a drawer, and then, finally looking across his
writing-table at Annunziata, said very pleasantly:
'Money-charities we never give; but come again on this day
month, and we will
see if any exception can be made in your favour. I will put your case before the board: my compliments and reverence to the good Dom Lelio.'
The old woman made him another deep curtesy, and went away with a cruel
disappointment nipping her old heart.
She did not protest. Italians rarely do.
That day the Count Saverio met Messer Nellemane in the streets of
Pomodoro.
'Oh! by the way,' said the Count, 'one of the people
of your village was sent to me to-day by the
vicario. Perhaps you can tell me something of
her, for Dom Lelio's heart is apt to run away with his head. He wants
us to grant her permanent weekly relief; an old woman, an
odd-looking old trot, by the name Taormina Annunziata, a
widow.'
Messer Nellemane looked shocked.
'Dom Lelio is very unwise,' he said
gravely. 'The person you speak of is one of the worst people in the borgo. A professional beggar. A confirmed beggar. She is very well off, they tell me; but she has that passion and preference for mendicancy which is like a disease.'
'Dear, dear!' said the President. 'That is terrible.
We must never encourage mendicancy. Dom Lelio should not put the society
in such a position.'
'What would you, Signore Conte?--He is a priest!' said
Messer Gaspardo with that scoff which is always on the lips of the Liberal;
but seldom finds an echo in the hearts of the people.
The President smiled a little deprecatory smile, for of course he was a
Liberal too, but as he was head of a semi-religious corporation he
could not quite laugh at the priesthood.
The month passed over Annunziata's grey head painfully; it was
very cold, and she could make but little way about to those outlying farms
where they had given her the most food. But her niece spared her all she
could, and she said to herself every day, 'The gentlemen promised he
would think it over; he will be sure to do something for me when I
go;' and being of a very sanguine temperament, she managed to live on
hope.
Her most dazzling idea was that they might allow her half a franc a day,
but that she felt was too brilliant to be realised; if she got ten francs a
month she felt she could ask nothing better of the saints in heaven or the
gentlemen on earth.
It was with a glad spirit that she set out to Pomodoro on a chilly
morning on the day appointed; she had smartened herself up as
well as she knew how; she liked to look respectable. She had her black hat tied under her chin, with a yellow handkerchief and a blue woollen skirt that a fattoressa up in the hills had given her at Ceppo, and a little rough red jacket that belonged to Viola.
She was very smart, indeed, for Annunziata was far above the idea of a
professed beggar, that rags and dirt were more likely to provoke charity
than cleanliness and order. She was no beggar at all; she never stretched
her hand out for a farthing; she was old and people were kind to her; that
was all.
With a smile of happy expectancy she stood once more before the Signore
Conte Saverio in the muniment room.
But the President had no smile in return for her. He looked up with a
stern glance
from his books and papers, and he frowned as he saw who was the petitioner.
'You were so good as to tell me to come this day, sir,' said
the little old woman, as he remained silent. 'You were so very kind
as to say you would give me something, and all the month I have been living
on your word, sir, for the winter is hard.'
Count Saverio, who had such a
milk-and-honey-reputation to lose that an act of
severity was disagreeable to him, coughed and cleared his throat, and then
said with the air of a father reproving a child:
'Cara mia, it pains me very greatly to
have pained you, but I can say only that the good Dom Lelio has been very
much to blame. This honourable and charitable fraternity is established on
the scope and to the end of relief--the judicious relief--of the
deserving poor, of the honest poor, of the
laborious poor. It was never intended to support a beggar.'
'No sir?' said Annunziata, puzzled and not following his
drift, for she never thought of herself as a beggar.
'It was never intended to encourage mendicancy,' pursued the
President, gathering a heavier frown as he warmed with his theme.
'Mendicancy is a curse of the country. It is the heaviest sin to
foster it. All our efforts are directed to its suppression. The first
qualification to be fit to claim the aid of our society is never to
have begged. Now you--you are an habitual mendicant; you
habitually subsist on public alms. No doubt some frightful improvidence in
your youth has brought you to this pass in your old age? With that we have
nothing to do; all that concerns us is to obey the laws of the Fraternity.
You are not eligible for
election; you are not even eligible for momentary relief from our funds. You are a beggar.'
Annunziata stared hard at him, her little bright bird-like eyes
wide open with amazement.
'A beggar, sir? I?' she stammered. 'No, that I never
was. People are good to me and I bless them. As for spending when I was
young, sir, that I never did, for I was left a widow when I was
forty-two, sir--my man fell off a house-top, and I had
to bring up four children, and I did bring them up well, sir, all beautiful
grown men and maidens, though every one of them are in Paradise
now--and I always was very poor, sir, though it is true that when I
was young the land was happy and the people too, not starved, and pinched,
and squeezed like lemons in a presser as they are now-a-days.
But spend I never could, sir, because I never had but just enough to keep life in my children and me, and now that I am old, sir, seventy-six come the blessed day of St. Peter, the people that have known me all my life are good to me, and may the saints remember them for it, for what can a woman of my age earn, though I do say I can see to plait still?'
'Enough!' said the Count sternly. 'You may gloss it
over as you please, you are a beggar; you have no other means of
subsistence than by the charity of others.'
'No, sir; and that is why I come here,' said Annunziata, who
was not without a spirit.
'Beggars are ineligible,' said the President impatiently as
well as severely this time. 'You are a beggar. Dom Lelio committed
an offence against the law in recom-
mending you for the charity of this community. We have nothing to do with you. Our rules would forbid us if we were inclined. You had no business whatever to come here; I am occupied. I must request you to withdraw.'
'I beg your pardon, sir; pray do not hurt Dom Lelio for me. He
meant what he did in all goodness,' said Annunziata with a quivering
lip; and then she dropped her little curtesy and went out, and going across
the street, at the cold dark shelter of the opposite church sank on her
knees on the pavement before the nearest altar and sobbed bitterly.
We who eat and drink as we wish every day, and on the score of our
appetites suffer nought save perhaps something from the Nemesis of
dyspepsia, we can ill realise what the disappointment is of a denial that
refuses
daily bread, and leaves an old and painful life alone to the menace of a death by hunger; we cannot understand, try how we will, what they mean--the empty cupboard, the cold hearth, the bed of sacking, the gnawing pangs, the famine faintness, the slow, long, cruel hours that creep on from dawn to dark, from dark to dawn again, and bring no friend, no food, no hope, no rescue.
These all faced Annunziata in her future: that poor little
sorrowful future that stood between her and her grave; so short in years as
it must be, so long in misery as it would be.
Rheumatism racked her bones, and she knew that soon she would be
bedridden, and then--well--the people gave to her when they saw
her cheery face and her empty basket, but when she lay in her bed, and they
saw her no more, they would forget.
They would none of them come to her, any more than they would go to her
tomb, when it should be made, a mere nameless hole under the rank grass of
the common burying-ground.
The world does not take into account people who have nothing. They
should be provident enough in their youth, and save money even if they have
not enough to hold body and soul together, and never enough to satisfy
hunger!
They should save money.
Stentorello is the type of Italian on the stage, and the people in truth
are perhaps too miserly and fond of gain; but is there much wonder at that
in this country? There is no poor rate, and no workhouse, and nothing for
the honest poor except a metre or so of ground in the cemeteries.
That is not a prospect to strengthen bare
arms in the battle of life, or moisten parched lips dry with toil. The dead wasp is thought of by its kind, but the dead poor have no such remembrance from theirs.
Viola was watching for her as the diligence rolled heavily into the
piazza at Santa Rosalia. The girl sprang to her and looked in her face,
and her own face fell at what she read there.
'They have refused you!' she cried.
'Yes, dear,' said Annunziata with a quiver in her voice.
'They think I am a beggar, and that I never am and never was, as you
know, for I never ask aught; never, never! they give me what they like to
give me, and I am thankful.'
'When you have nothing, how can you help that?' said the
girl, with a sob of indignation.
Annunziata bore up somehow or other
against her lot and endured her hard pallet, her damp chamber, her dry atom of bread, because she still believed, against all witness to the contrary, that her God cared for her; that somehow or other when her soul should leave her little shrivelled, brown body, she would see the light of a gladder day than ever shone on earth.
She was an old woman, and had been bred up in the old faiths; faiths
that were not clear indeed to her, nor ever reasoned on, but yet gave her
consolation, and a great, if a vague, hope. Now that we tell the poor
there is no such hope, that when they have worked and starved long enough,
then they will perish altogether, like bits of candle that have burnt
themselves out, that they are mere machines made of carbon and hydrogen,
which, when they have had due friction, will then crumble back into the
dust; now that we tell them all this, and call this the spread of education, will they be as patient?
Will not they, too, since this short life is all, insist at any price of
blood that it shall be made sweet and made strong for them?
Will not they seize by violence on violent drugs, and drink themselves
drunk on the alcohol of communism?
Why should they not? Since there is nothing beyond this life, why
should they toil that you and I may be at ease?
Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
The philosopher stands at his desk in the lecture hall, and demonstrates
away the soul of man, and with exact thought measures out his atoms and
resolves him back to gas and air. But the revolutionary, below in the
crowd, hears, and only translates what he
hears thus to his brethren: 'Let us drink while we may; property is robbery; this life is all; let us kill and eat; there is no God.'
The philosopher may cry to the winds, 'Love virtue for its own
sake.'
The communist is more logical than he.
He had recovered, but he had a worse poison in him than even the poison
of fever,
for in the bed next to his there was lying a German with anemia and other ills, and this man talked to him in his own tongue by hours together in the long watches of the night, when they had no other companions than the newts and the rats and the beetles that ran over their couches. The German, a travelling mechanic, was a socialist and an internationalist; and into this ignorant virgin mind of Carmelo, all seething and fermenting now under an unendurable sense of wrong, he poured the black stream of his own beliefs and desires.
Carmelo did not understand a tithe part, but he understood enough, after
many a night's colloquy, to breathe in eagerly this vengeance on
society which looked like justice, this insanity for equality which looked
like reason. Until wrong had been done to him he had been a perfectly
contented lad,
troubling himself about nothing outside his own duties and occupation, for scarcely knowing how to read, he knew nothing of any other world beyond that of the mill-house. He had been bred up to be respectful to the gentry and the clergy; to be decent and honest in life, and to be quite happy so long as his father was pleased with him. This had been always Carmelo, until that hapless hour when poor Toppa had been treacherously done to death.
But injustice and despotism change the pure blood of youth into a dark
and sullen current. Carmelo who had only rightly punished a poisoner, was
treated like a criminal and thrown amongst thieves and assassins.
One of the cruellest sins of any State, in giving petty and tyrannous
authority into petty and tyrannous hands, is that it thus
brings into hatred and disgust the true and high authority of moral law.
'Where is God? He cannot hear, He cannot care; nor can the
saints, since He and they let me lie here and make a king of Bindo
Terri,' thought Carmelo, lying on his bed, with all the bright and
vigorous force of his young limbs gone out of them.
If they were indeed throned in heaven, as the priests always said, would
they let the poor suffer, and the scoundrels thrive, and the fines be wrung
out of starving bodies, and the parasite of the public torture and arraign
and sentence honest winners of their daily bread?
Carmelo still shrank from the bold blasphemies of the socialistic
doctrines; but the German was wary and skillful, he softened for this
foolish young Christian the atheism of the texts he quoted upon all
religions,
and only recited again and again their condemnations of all existing laws, and their invitation to a perfect future, when there would be on all the earth 'only free men in a free fraternity.'
Carmelo listened, and his sick soul was seduced by the dangerous
stimulant of these doctrines, whose greatest danger lies in the fact that
there is in all their exaggeration an essential, an undeniable, truth.
He was at war with all the world, with all these unknown, unseen, forces
which had been stronger than he; his ear and his heart were open, to words
that told; him of the tyranny of property, of the favouritism of law, of
the sins of society by which millions groaned in want, and died
unpitied.
The German, exiled from his own country for his opinions, was a keen and
restless
student and an ardent propagandist; he was a disciple of the most extreme creeds and deemed, as most of those men now do, all remedy useless save 'pan-destruction.'
Well aware that he was dying, and a prey at times to great agony, he
beheld in the young Italian his last proselyte, and threw all the last
energies of his waning life into the rescue, as he deemed it, of this dumb
soul, into the effort to give light to the blind eyes of Carmelo, for he
found that Carmelo was ignorance itself; thought heaven had placed the king
upon the throne; thought heaven had made one set of men to toil, and
another set to do nothing and enjoy; had a vague idea of the Government as
of a sort of god hedged round with cannon; fancied the good weather and the
bad came from divine pleasure or wrath, and was certain
that grain would not come up unless the priest made the round of the fields and blessed them.
The autumn nights were long and cold; in the infirmary they were allowed
no charcoal and no light, but the fiery utterances of the Internationalist
lit up and warmed the darkness. Carmelo who knew naught that occurred
outside the hedges of Santa Rosalia, listened as in his childish days he
had listened to the priest's wonder-stories of S. Ursula or
SS. Cosmo and Damian, to the recital of the movement going secretly onward
in Italy; of the insurrections of San Lupo, of Gallo, of Calatabiano; of
the 'Circoli Barsanti,' and the section of the 'Figli di
Lavoro;' of the memorable words of Garibaldi in 1873, that were there
a society of devils to combat despotism, he would join it; of the
Internationalist federa-
tion of Rimini which decrees 'the earth to who cultivates it, the machine to who uses it, the house to who builds it;' of the programme of Piacenza, 'everyone has right to what is necessary, no one has right to what is superfluous;' of the declaration of the fraternity of Montenero, Antignani, Ardenza, and San Jacopo that 'the State is the negation of liberty; authority creates nothing and corrupts everything; change of government is useless; if a man have a thorn in his foot, it is of no use for him to change his boots, he must pluck out the thorn;' and, with these, of many a burning and bitter paragraph from the Plebe of Milan, from the Petroleo of Ferrara, from the Proletario of Turin, and the unhesitating dictate of the Campana, that 'all authority, human and divine, shall perish and disappear, from God downward to the last agent of police.'
The innocent soul of Carmelo revolted from these arguments which tore
down his Christ from his crucifix, and dashed his stoup of holy water to
the ground; yet the wrong that festered in him made his mind open to all
these dreams of freedom and of justice, all these promises of a millennium
upon earth.
If such minds as Rousseau's, Fourier's, Proudhon's
Bakounine's do not see the falsehood that is mingled with this truth,
how shall Carmelo see it, or the like of Carmelo?
The Italian is as I say, not by nature a revolutionary, but when he is
one he goes beyond all others, because, perhaps, he has more than all
others to suffer in the contrast between his dead hopes and his present
misery. No one seems to remember that the Italian Socialists have rejected
Marx
and decreed Mazzini a reactionist, whilst they subscribe blindly and without change to all the terrible creed of Bakounine.
No one seems to remember this, or heed it; yet Bakounine's is a
creed of nothing less than universal destruction. The disciples of it grow
every day in numbers throughout Italy, but since the arrests of 1874, they
call themselves by a harmless
name1 and so no one is afraid.
No one is afraid; and the State continues to give them justification by
leaving in every commune the breed of Messer Nellemane and of Bindo
Terri.
'It is a question of hunger,' the Marquis Pepeli said once
of the revolts of Budria and Molinella.
Perhaps partly: not altogether. But who makes the hunger? who
keeps the
___________________1 Circoli per i studi
sociali.
Page 73
stomachs empty, the hearths cold, the box of the commune full by fines?
The Municipalities.
Here is the thorn that must be pulled from the foot of Italy if the
canker and fester of it are not to spread through the whole body.
Carmelo, of course, could not understand a hundredth part of what the
German unfolded to him, but the vague meaning that he gleaned dazzled and
awed him, and the poison of injustice already given him to drink had
left him thirsty for this other poison of revenge.
Carmelo was a brave lad, a lad honest, clean-living, and harmless
in thought and deed; he was dealt with as if he were a criminal, and the
bitter sense of his wrongs made it precious to him to hear of sovereign
rights that he shared with all mankind.
He had been dimly conscious of a right to live in his own way so long as
he did no harm to his fellows; he had been by nature independent and of
fearless spirit; but of late the petty tyrannies enfolding the lives of the
poor had been to him like a choking chain, and he had begun to tremble. He
saw men impoverished, and hunted down to beggary, or death, by this thing
which they called Law, and which he knew only to be extortion; and he had
lost hope and manliness; and in the stead of these there had come on him a
moody and morbid resentment, chilled with dread.
He was as ready for the tempting of his teacher, as clay is made moist
for the hand and the wheel of the potter.
One night, when the moon was shining in through the grated hole that
served as casement, the German mechanic died.
Carmelo was too feeble to rise; he sat up in his bed and saw the ghastly
agony, and heard the death-rattle, of this man, who seemed to him
his only friend. He strove to call for help, but his tongue clave to his
mouth, and when at length he could find his trembling voice he shouted in
vain; no one heard.
The horror of that hour aged him by many years.
He dragged his weak limbs out of bed and strove to hold the man in his
convulsions, but death was stronger than he, and flung him backward rudely
on his own mattress.
With the moonlight on his ghastly face the German struggled with his
doom, choking and vomiting blood. Once only, with consciousness in his
eyes, he stared upward in the eyes of Carmelo.
'The people--the people--suffer,' he muttered
through his clenching teeth.
Then he gave a bitter cry and died.
Carmelo was alone through all the long chill night with the body of the
dead man beside him.
She had but little blood in her veins, and but little bread in her
cupboard; she and the three other old souls huddled themselves together
over a single scaldino of charcoal that they
clubbed their pence to get, and spent most of their time in bed, in hope of
so keeping their slow circulation frown absolute stagnation. They were four
miserable little
pallet-beds, one in each corner, and the spiders and beetles and mice ran over them, and the old women were too feeble to chase them away.
Dom Lelio did all he could and Viola went daily, and denied herself that
she might keep her great-aunt from starving, but when all was done
that could be by these two, Annunziata had but little of all that old age
needs. Dom Lelio had but a franc a-day, and in Pippo's house
want was a ghost that had no rest and gave none.
'They cannot call her a beggar now,' said Viola bitterly, as
she stood beside the hard bed in which the old woman was stretched, with
her legs useless from rheumatism.
The heart of the girl was sick with hope deferred, and that vague fear
of something yet worse to come which a long succession
of undeserved misfortunes will leave on the brightest nature.
It was now the end of February and the weather, as it often does here,
grew colder by far than it had been when the days were short. The village
was a sorry scene, the ill-made roads were little better than bogs,
and the angry river went swirling and rushing, yellow and muddy with all
the clay that it washed down from its treeless banks.
'One would say the Rosa were mad to think the
boschetto is gone,' thought the eldest
girl Dina Pastorini, as the north wind, without that screen of trees, beat
with all its might against the millhouse.
Her father had changed as greatly as Pippo.
He was never irritable, because he was a sweet-tempered and just
man, who could not bear to farther afflict his children.
But all the honest mirth and cheery content were gone out of him; he
who had been so loquacious and mirthful now never smiled and seldom spoke;
his brow was always dark and his eyes were always dull. Missing that glad
and pleasant shade, so green through three of the seasons, that had been
before his eyes ever since he had opened them at birth, seemed to him to
have made him half-blind.
Besides, he was always saying in his thoughts: 'How shall we
tell Carmelo? how will he bear it when he sees?' Carmelo, who beyond
them all had loved the bright boschetto, and
had passed so many a holiday hour sitting on the mossy edge of it with his
square net floating on the stream below, and white Toppa sleeping by his
side or hunting lizards in the flower-filled grass.
The father dared not think of it. He
had suffered greatly himself, but he feared that his son would suffer yet more.
As for such solace as might have come to a man struggling with many
burdens from the help of money, none was given to him. The municipality had
offered a certain sum of money indeed for the riverside wood, but they had
not paid it. In Rome they were five years paying for the Farnesina gardens,
destroying them, as it were, on credit; in Santa Rosalia they would
probably be twice as long paying the miller.
If he wanted to make them pay he would have to go to law with them, and
that no one of the class that the Pastorini belonged to would ever dare to
do, knowing the remedy to be worse than the disease. The Giunta was
supposed to deal with these matters, but in reality it only met to give
adhesion to what Cavaliere Durellazzo said,
and what he said was what he had been prompted to say by his right hand and chief counsellor, Messer Nellemane.
Now, as everyone will understand without saying, they could scarcely be
expected to find money for Demetrio Pastorini, since they were obliged to
pay beforehand all those gentlemen who had opposed the tramway.
So the miller's empty pockets were not the heavier by a coin at
the present for the expropriation of his wood, and he suffered in a time of
peace and, as the foreign newspapers had it, of prosperity, precisely what
he would have suffered had an invading army encamped in Vezzaja and
Ghiralda and burned it right and left on leaving it.
'Ah, my girl,' he said once to Viola, of whom he had grown
fond in their mutual trials, 'I almost would sooner our dear lad
stayed on in prison than that he should come come to see what he will
see.'
Viola sighed heavily, and did not say that she felt otherwise, only in
her young heart there was that hope which is in youth like the golden
gorse, always in bloom, even in bad weather and on barren soil.
She thought always: 'When Carmelo comes home things will
change; all will be well.'
It was now the close of February; she was counting the weeks, the days,
the hours till Carmelo's release.
She could not read much, but she had one of those little calendars which
are the oracles of the poor, and she could make out their signs and the
days of the months, and in this she had marked each cruel week as it
crawled by and left her lover shut in prison walls.
There were only two months more now to divide them, and though Carmelo
truly
would return to trouble and pain, she could not, like his father, wish him absent.
Yet so many sorrows fell upon them, that the bit of charcoal with which
she marked evil days in her calendar had made almost every page a smudge of
black.
Early in the year her grandfather had received a long and formal printed
paper, calling on him to remove the nuisance of the water before his door.
Pippo had crammed the thing on to the top of the live cinders in the
brascie bowl, and there had let it smoulder
into ashes.
A few days later Pierino Zaffi had been seen about the place, examining
the little spring and measuring it, and in the name of the commune had
entered the house and traced the offending water to its source amongst the
frozen orto ground. He had said nothing and had gone.
In a week's time there had come another document, and that Viola
took to Cecco to read, her grandfather being absent at the time.
This one ordered Filippo Mazzetti forthwith to execute works that would
direct his spring underground; to cover it was forbidden, because no means
by which it could be covered would fail to obstruct the public path.
He was ordered to commence this work within thirty days; if delayed, the
offender would be fined for every day's delay.
The spectacles rose on Cecco's nose, and the hair upon his head as
he read, and his face grew aghast with horror.
'After all that money that I paid for Pippo,' he gasped;
'after that bit of paper which set him free of all!'
He who was disposed to revere and obey the law was paralysed with
terror.
Was this its justice ? this the way it kept its troth with men?
Cecco gave up faith in humanity, and almost abandoned faith in
heaven.
Viola was crying bitterly.
'What does it mean?' gasped Cecco wildly. 'What does
it mean? Can your grandfather pay masons and plumbers for six months like
a duke?'
'It means ruin!' sobbed the girl. 'He has nothing in
the world; how can he put the water under the earth? And Carmelo coming
home in a month!'
Of this new calamity they were compelled to tell Pippo. He heard quite
quietly, but there was a savage wild light in his eye.
He stretched his hand out and took the paper and folded it up once,
twice, thrice; then the held it in the palm of his hand and spat on it;
then he lighted a lucifer match and set fire to it.
It blazed a moment, then curled up, and became a little heap of black
ash on the stones of the floor.
He stayed Viola and Cecco with a gesture as they would have spoken.
'Never a word,' he said, 'never a word. If they send
me a hundred such, so will I treat them all. They cannot get blood out of a
post. Let them do their worst--'
'But'--his friend began.
'Not a word,' said Pippo, and he spat on the ashes.
Then he went on with his work.
Half an hour later he looked up from his weaving, and his eyes were
shining savagely from under his white hair.
'Girl,' he said to his granddaughter, 'I call to mind
a night before you were born. There came news of a great battle; they
called it San Martino.1 They
told us to light
___________________Solferino is so called by the
Italians.
Page 88
up; so did we all. In your little window I set the oil flaming. They said we were free--God have mercy on us for being fools!'
Then he went on plaiting his osiers.
The girl wept.
If any dog be hunted by boys, be thirsty for water he cannot find, or be
gaunt or faint from hunger and ill-treatment, straightway is he
declared arrabiato, and up on the walls there
appear placards that every dog seen about will be killed. Then Bindo, with
his poisoned polpetti and his pistol, is busy and happy all over the
land.
A woman was bitten the other day by one of these mad dogs, and was
recovered by the bone of a saint being laid by her pillow, but present
municipalities are not desirous to bring out the virtues of saints, and
they do like to sell the skins of dogs; so they scream at every possible
wag of a tail or sign of a growl, and fly to poison and to pistols.
Such a panic seized the municipality of Vezzaja and Ghiralda in this
month of February, when Pippo was being summoned again and again for little
Raggi and putting the summons in the fire.
If you tunnel a mountain and stifle a score of men you are a public
benefactor; if you keep a factory, in which no one lives over thirty years
of age from the notions dust or noxious gas inhaled in the work, no one
finds human life at all too precious
for you to use up as you like in your own interests; but if ever a dog snap at somebody--ah! then of what sanctity is human life! what horror is anything that menaces it!
Messer Nellemane, in the absence of Cavaliere Durellazzo, who was at his
candle-warehouses, took fright now, nothing loth to do so, and had
placards stuck up, announcing that the guards were authorised to destroy
every dog they saw loose.
The dullest imagination can conjecture the 'lovely time'
that Bindo and Angelo had in the commune, and no one dared to check their
slaughtering hand, remembering the fate that had befallen Carmelo.
Viola, terrified, kept little Raggi in the house, and shut her up in the
house, and kept her out of danger all she could, and at night would start
up and feel for the little floss silk curls of the dog as it lay at the
foot of her
bed, waking from a dream that Raggi had been seized and killed.
'I said the dog should never be kept in for those devils,'
growled her grandfather: but the girl pleaded to him that her trouble
for Raggi's own sake.
The old man let her do as she would; he was growing apathetic, yet
desperate; though he had burned the Giunta's order about his brook,
the memory of it and the dread of what they might do to him haunted him
night and day. And he was so very poor; he did not so much mind depriving
himself of wine and tobacco, but it hurt him terribly to see Viola's
clothes mended till they were but patchwork, and her feet going bare.
Viola had always been the neatest and cleanest as well as the comeliest
maiden in the province. Clean she was still, but neat
you cannot be when you are so very poor that even to buy a few pins, a little thread, a bit of tape, is quite beyond your means.
This is the poverty that the world does not understand, and, not
apprehending, does not pity; famine it understands, the famine that
desolates Cashmere and Bombay, but not the poverty which can just put
enough in the body to keep life alive uncomplainingly, but has not a coin
beyond for any need or pleasure of life.
It was a great sorrow, too, to Viola not to be able to be decently
dressed for mass as she had used to be; but she did not think so much of
that as she did of her inability to give her grandfather a scrap or two of
meat in his broth and her equal powerlessness to defend Raggi.
At Christmas she had sold her little string of seed pearls to a richer
maiden, the
big butcher's daughter, and the money they had fetched had long since gone in charcoal and bread for themselves and soup for Annunziata. Money runs away so fast when it has no companions in your drawer.
One morning whilst the placards concerning dogs were still upon the
walls, and the reign of terror still dominated all Vezzaja and Ghiralda,
Viola had her week's washing to do. She needed not to go for this, as
most had to do, to the edge of the river, or to the springs on the
hillsides, because the brook that offended the Giunta filled a tank in
their own little garden.
There she washed the sheets and shirts and other linen that she and
Pippo used, and washed her great-aunt's linen, too, if such
poor little rags can be dignified by the name; and she was at this work all
the chilly forenoon with the bitter north wind whist-
ling round her head and nipping the red flowers of the almond trees near her.
She had shut the house door, and Raggi was with her running loose about
the little place; Pippo was out trying to get an order for skips or baskets
or the osier-covers of wine-flasks.
Viola looked often for the little dog and saw it lying out of the wind
under the wall, but about eleven o'clock, having wrung out her linen,
she was so busied hanging it up on the clothes' line, tied to the
delicate almond trees, that she never heard the wind blow open the entrance
door, and when her work was done at noon she missed Raggi.
The little dog never left her side usually, but Raggi had a little
friend in Cecco's youngest boy, a gentle mite of four years old, a
cripple with a cherub's face and curling golden hair.
Whenever Raggi heard the tic-tac of the poor little man's
crutch, she always trotted out to it, for Lillo, as they called the child,
would share his bread and milk with her, and throw his little wooden ball
to please her, and loved her dearly. Raggi--perhaps with that divine
pity which dogs have--divined the sad destiny of crippled Lillo, and
so gave him her preference.
This forenoon she heard the sound of the crutch on the stones of the
threshold, and got up and went to it, not knowing she was doing any
harm.
Lillo, delighted to see his playmate, covered her with kisses and
hobbled along to his father's house, and there got a bit of bread;
and hobbled farther with the dog by his side out to the few willows that
there fringed the river bank, and sat down in the sun and shared his bread
with her.
Lillo and Raggi were very merry, indeed, about nothing; seeking stones
in the grass, making a feast of the crust, and playing with the dry twigs
that the wind scattered so plentifully. Raggi's yellow curls blew,
and Lillo's blew, too, and the one barked, and the other sang and
laughed, and both were as happy as two little mortals could be, with that
sweetest of all happiness which is born out of nothing beyond the mere glad
sense of living.
But along the road by the river there came a grim shadow; the shadow of
a man in grey clothes, with a feather in his hat and a sword by his
side.
His eyes flashed over the little child and the little dog sitting
together under the willows, and his ear caught the sound of that quick
little bark, that gay little laugh.
He drew his pistol and shot the dog.
As the dog dropped on its side the child fell backward, screaming
violently.
People ran out from their houses, and Bindo Terri walked away as one who
has done his duty and earned his wage.
Viola had run out with the rest; she fell on her knees by Raggi.
Blood was pouring from its mouth, but it moved its little curly tail
feebly in welcome and farewell. Then the little bright eyes glazed and
seemed to sink into its head, its heart beat convulsively through a few
seconds more, it stretched its limbs out feebly, and then was still for
ever.
It lay dead in a pool of its own blood.
Never more would Lillo laugh under the willows, and break his bread with
Raggi. Never more would Raggi dance to the children's piping. And
little Lillo, never very wise, was imbecile from that hour; a frightened,
cowering, mindless thing.
But what mattered that? The law had asserted its majesty and vindicated
its rights.
When the old man Pippo dug a small grave under the blossoming
almond-trees, and laid the blood-stained body of the little
dog in it, covered with moss and grass, he groaned as he turned each
sod.
'Assassins and thieves are set above us, and work their wicked
will, and no one cares. How long, O Lord? How long?'
As he had neglected to answer the summons for contravention, the charges
against him for contumacy had been taken as usual to the senior court, and
had been proved and assessed against him with costs.
Two francs for every time that poor little Raggi had been seen loose
soon told up to a
high sum total, and the public accuser who officiates for the commune on such occasions had stated that, but for the mercifulness of that administration, the number of summonses would have been much greater. They regretted, they said, to be severe on a poor man, but the law must be respected. The law must be respected, said all the officials in a chorus.
That document, like the others, found the fire.
'They may kill me as they killed the little dog,' said
Pippo; ''twould be less trouble, and done once for
all.'
Viola was weeping as though her tears would, to use Dante's words,
destroy her very heart; and in the cooper's house a sad mother sat by
a little bed where a golden-headed child, with vacant, terrified
eyes, was pointing for ever in the air, and stammering
uncouth, shapeless sounds, and then shivering as though with ague, and cowering down under the clothes.
Bright-haired Lillo's body lived, but his mind was as dead
as Raggi's, buried in her grave underneath the almonds.
'Carmelo must not know,' said Viola over and over again in
the darkness of the night, sobbing and missing her little furry friend, who
for seven years had slept upon her bed; and when the morning dawned she
begged of Lillo's mother and father, and of all about the house, that
never would they let Carmelo know that Raggi had been killed by Bindo
Terri, and the child thus lost his wits from terror.
All promised her, but she could not be sure that the promise would be
kept, for she knew how every little story leaks from the dry cask of empty
heads, and she was afraid,
terribly afraid. Sometimes she thought that she would lose her brain, like little timid Lillo.
Her father, too, was for ever saying, 'Let them kill me as they
have killed the dog. They have made me a beggar.'
The cold was passing away. The damp was drying up, the corn lands were
green with young wheat, and soon amidst the grass the violets were giving
place to the daffodils, and on the hill-sides the peach-trees
and pear-trees were throwing out their sprays of blossom, making the
steep slopes beautiful.
But spring brought no joy to the small house of the Madonna; and by the
mill upon the river, in lieu of lovely pillars of lightest green,
thickening and deepening with every day, in lieu of that leafy screen, full
of the nests of doves and merles and nightingales, there was a waste land
of mud and shingle,
barren spot, of no use or good to man or beast or bird.
Nothing had been done with it. The holes yawned where the trees had been
uprooted, and the water-beetles crawled undisturbed over the heaps
of mud. The tramway was not made; the foreign speculators and the home
municipalities were quarrelling, and until their quarrels were ended the
work could not be begun. The speculators said the municipalities had
cheated, and the municipalities gave the speculators a tu-quoque. It
was a quarrel like a croupier's and a gamester's.
Of all these things the population of the commune understood nothing;
they were like a horse who has his mane docked and his chin singed; he
feels uncomfortable, but he does not know what is done to him.
Italy is always being docked and singed;
being amiable, she does not kick her groom, but she is always smarting, and the flies are always raising gall upon her loins.
The sweet spring came; and so sweet is it, here, that it is joy enough
to live only to go out into the fields all laden with blossom, and feel
your heart dance with the daffodils in the full sense of Wordsworth's
words.
But the poor have not leisure for this, nor have they insight for it,
and the spring brought no solace to Santa Rosalia.
Another trouble, and a yet greater anxiety, fell on Demetrio Pastorini
at this time.
There was another miller on the other side of the village, who had never
done very much work, because the water was so much shallower there, and who
indeed did not care about it, being a very well-to-do man,
owning an oil-shop and warehouse in Pomodoro. His name was Remigio
Rossi; he had never been
looked on at all as a rival by Carmelo's family, and did not seek to be one.
But one fine day four oxen appeared on the river-edge dragging a
huge, black, shapeless, uncouth-looking object behind them; and a
few days later, Pippo and Viola, looking out of their house door, saw a
long black chimney, and a cone of black smoke, coming out of the roof of
Remigio's mill, which was within ten yards of them.
Pippo ran and shouted with all his might that the place was
a-fire, but people standing on the bank, looking on, said to
him,
'Be still, you, for an old fool; that is the new machine
a-grinding.'
Demetrio Pastorini, who was a home-biding man, and never went to
public-houses of any kind for gossip, and so never heard anything
that was going on until a dozen days after all Santa Rosalia knew it, saw
this
black thing spitting smoke, and heard all at a blow, as it were, that the miller Remigio Rossi had obtained a steam-engine from the city, by means of which he could grind grain in fair weather or foul, and snap his finger and thumb at all shallow waters.
The steam-mill was a hideous blot on the landscape, and its ugly
iron chimney vomited filthy odours and darkening vapours over all the green
country and glancing waters, and made a mass of ash and cinders and general
blackness and sootiness all about the pretty grass bank on which the
building stood.
The engines were set going with plenty of last year's grain, by
favour of the Cavaliere Durellazzo; and hearing their whirring and booming,
and seeing the heavy veil of its smoke, the eider Pastorini turned away,
'death in his heart,' for hope was for ever gone out of
him.
How could he wrestle against this thing? he with his mill wheels high
and dry, for five months out of the year, since the woods had been cut on
the banks?
'So you bring devils of fire and iron to ruin your old neighbour,
Remigio?' he said reproachfully when he met him at mass on the
Sunday.
Remigio, who was a good-natured man, though, like most of them,
he loved money too well, looked sheepishly.
'I do not wish to injure anybody,' he said, with some
embarrassment. 'But one was sorely wanted now the Rosa is such a
captious thing; and as the Giunta find half the cost, it being for the good
of the place--'
'Oh, the Giunta find half the money, do they?' said
Pastorini, with his heart sinking heavier and heavier. 'And I
suppose they will take half the profits too?'
Remigio winked, then shuffled into church.
The next day Pastorini, who was by no means behind the scenes in these
matters, went and asked innocently for an audience with the Cavaliere
Durellazzo: it was the syndic's day for audiences.
As usual, the Cavaliere Durellazzo was absent; but his secretary would
see anyone. After a little delay the miller found himself in the presence
of Messer Nellemane, who smiled affably, and, without rising from his
writing chair, said, 'Can I be of any use to you, my
friend?'
Then Demetrio Pastorini, not being glib of tongue, except under pressure
of excitement, with some hesitation, and with great repetition and
amplification, related the object of his coming, and set forth the fact
that his people had been millers on the
Rosa water over three hundred years, well counted and proved, and very likely many more; and then he proceeded to urge that having thus a kind of inherited fief and ancestral right as it were in the stream, it was beyond all justice, not to say all law, to have a steam mill set up in face of him.
Messer Nellemane listened very patiently; and when at last the miller
paused for want of breath, said gently:
'You are under an entire misapprehension, my friend. Did not
Remigio Rossi occupy the mill by the piazza for very many years?'
Pastorini admitted the fact.
'And you never, that I heard of, objected to that water mill being
there ?'
'It did no business,' said the miller.
'Excuse me,' said Messer Nellemane, 'that is quite
beside the question. If it had
done, you could not have thought of compelling its removal?'
'I never should have asked it,' said Pastorini.
'Live and let live is my motto. That mill was an honest thing. It
worked by water; and it was in worse water than I was --'
Messer Nellemane grew a trifle impatient; the obtuseness of the public
always irritated him; but he kept his serene smile.
'All that is beyond the question. You contest the legality of
Rossi's mill. Now, whether it be a water mill or a steam mill, it
has, or it has not, the same rights to the ground it stands upon: you
do not seem to me to see that; yet, if you reflect a moment, dear sir, you
will be persuaded that the manner of working the mill has nothing at all to
do with the matter.'
'Merciful heaven!' cried Pastorini,
goaded into torture by this mild and logical reasoning. 'It has everything to do with it. The mill had the same rights as mine--no less; no more. When Rossi was content with the seasons God sent, and the whim of the Rosa, I had nothing to say: the river is free.'
'A moment ago you claimed it as the property of your
family,' said his listener very gently: the miller did not
heed.
'Fair contest I would never be a foe to, nor would any son of
mine,' he said, a little hotly. 'Come rich, come poor, the
river is free; a prince and a beggar may strip and sport in
it--'
'More pity,' said Messer Nellemane, whose propriety was
often offended by little, live, dancing
amorini bent on a bath in the heat of
midsummer.
'The river's a free thing; but use it
fair,' said the miller, growing heated. 'Don't put a hissing boiler on it, and grind, when it's God's will that the water's out; why do you come on the river to do that? it's like the men I've heard of that blow fish out of the waters with gunpowder, and rob all honest anglers with their nets and rods.'
'Dynamite,' corrected Messer Nellemane. 'It is not
allowed by our rules.'
'Then why do you allow the steam mill?' pursued Pastorini.
'It's to me what the blasting is to the fishers. One man will
gorge, and all the others starve. I never said I had a right to the Rosa;
but I do say I have a right to grind grain for Santa Rosalia and all the
farms around. This thing isn't fair; it isn't honest; it will
eat me up, and make my children hunger; for, of course, all the folks will
go where the work is done quickest.'
'You have precisely expressed the reason of its invention,'
said Messer Nellemane blandly, and toying with a pen. 'In these
times work, to please the public, must be done quickly, and done at any
moment. It is most painful to me that this innovation should be displeasing
to you; but we are compelled to think of the general interest, not of
individual aims. It is absurd that, in these times of great inventions, a
whole commune should have to wait with its harvests unground because a
little river has run dry; so many complaints have been made on this subject
to us that we have deemed ourselves bound to find some remedy for them, and
as Remigio Rossi was a public-spirited man with some capital, the
most excellent the Cavaliere Durellazzo and the Giunta decided on giving
him some help to the better carrying out of this project.'
Pastorini stood confounded and dumb. He had intended to cast the loan
for the steam mill in the face of this representative of the municipality;
but lo! it was boasted of to him as an act of public utility and
benignity!
His slow gentle wits were not quick enough or keen enough to combat
those of Messer Nellemane.
He stood turning his straw hat in his hands, and stammering
stupidly: 'But the thing's not honest, It's not
fair. It is to be beat by devils--' till his auditor amiably
reminded him that time was precious, and that there were many persons
awaiting audience below.
'Can I do nothing then?' said the miller, staring blindly
about him.
'Nothing in this matter. When the Giunta has once given its
approbation--'
'Damn the Giunta, and damn you!' said Demetrio Pastorini
bitterly. 'You have thrown my poor lad in prison, and you will now
take the bread out of our mouths.'
Messer Nellemane rang a little bell, and Bindo Terri appeared, and
showed the miller the door.
'All that family is a little amiss here,' said Messer
Nellemane, touching his own forehead with a commiserating smile.
So Pastorini bade him, in mercy's name, draw up the petition,
which was done, and cost forty francs.
The Prefect's secretary read it, and referred it to the Consiglio
Provinciale; the Consiglio Provinciale referred it to their engineer, who
was the engineer of the commune, one Pierino Zaffi. He informed the
Consiglio Provinciale that the mill was
necessary, not insalubrious, and very advantageous to the commune; the Consiglio Provinciale said so in turn to the Prefect, and he certified that he could not go against the decision of the provincial council.
In such a circle does the poor mill horse of the public turn.
Nothing was to be done.
Pastorini knew very well that Ruin would soon look over his white garden
gate.
The steam-mill would take all his custom away, and now that the
trees were felled, the water would most likely be shallower, and sooner
shallow, every summer. Besides the Pastorini felt themselves growing
friendless: for the first time for many years the big butcher had
been asked to direct the procession of Corpus Domini instead of the miller;
people were cool where they had
been cordial. Without more selfishness than is common to human nature, Santa Rosalia felt that it was perilous to be good friends with a family so marked out for punishment by Providence and Messer Nellemane.
'A tin-kettle threshing the corn, and an iron pot grinding
of it! Oh Lord what times!' said old Pippo, as the mill smoke came in
through his window and smothered him in his bed.
Messer Nellemane was in good and affable spirits; all things were going
well with him. The new deputy, not unmindful of the tampering that had gone
on with the election lists, and the plurality of voting achieved by the
gendarmerie, and other signal services to the State, in which the secretary
of Santa Rosalia had been of no small use, both in invention and execution,
was more than cordial to his humble ally, and predicted all
manner of great things for the future of so intelligent a public servant.
'In a free country like this,' said Signore Luca Finti,
'industry and talent can never long fail to obtain recognition. When
these miscreants are out of office, and our turn of power comes, you will
not be forgotten, my dear friend.'
And Messer Nellemane was so clever that the Prefect of the province, who
had been put in his place by the miscreants, also commended him for his
discretion and zeal in certain things that had been convenient to the
Prefecture in those elections, and the sub-Prefect said to
him:
'So long as we are in power, you, I promise, shall not be
forgotten. Such servants of the State as yourself are quite invaluable in
these times when we have so much to fear from the Reactionary and Clerical
element, and yet on the other hand must avoid being swamped by the deluge of Communism.'
Messer Nellemane said earnestly that he had no feeling except of horror
either for Clericalism or Communism.
He thought the good of the State required the strictest moderation and
impartiality, and, as he said it very truthfully, he felt quite safe
whether the Ministry went out or in, and especially as the new deputy and
the sub-prefect would never compare notes because they abhorred each
other as only Ministerialists and Dissidenti can.
Messer Nellemane's Utopia was like that of most Liberals of the
present era; it was a neat cut-and-dried despotism, which
should call itself a democracy, and in which the people should have as
little voice as the nobles, and the church be only permitted to
exist if it became a school-house for the semination of State doctrines.
This Liberalism keeps one eye on Gambetta and the other on Bismarck, and
is so absorbed in these two, and in trying to combine an imitation of both,
that it never sees coming after it with seven-leagued strides the
avenger--Bakounine.
Plentiful rains had fallen in the night; the tall, green-waving
wheat, the mulberry and walnut trees, the willows along the river, the
moss-grown grass between the poplars, all were green and sparkling
with moisture; here and there an acacia rose up in blossom like the white
column of a fountain, here and there glowed a Judas
(circis siliquastrum), with the roseate blush
of its abundant
flowers; over all was blowing a sweet sea wind from the west.
Demetrio Pastorini said to the maiden:
'Alas! that he should come home to see what he will
see!--'
'He will see us all well,' said Viola, with a true
woman's belief that this must compensate for all.
'The lad is sorely changed,' said the father with a sigh;
'remember that, Viola. When wrong is done to a man it changes the
honey of the human heart to gall. He is no more the bright, soft, innocent
youth that you and we have loved. He will need much wisdom from you, and
much consolation.'
'I will try my best,' said the girl, 'I will try to
win him back to his old self, and teach him to forget.'
'That is not easy,' said Pastorini; 'when
the mildew is on the grain, who shall make it fair wheat again? And he comes to two sore troubled households. But he is young and you are good.'
'I love him dearly,' said Viola, with tears in her large
eyes.
'That I know,' said his father.
Then he kissed her, and got ready the grey mare, and Dina walked back
with her to her own little house while the men went on their way.
'That young Pastorini will be out of prison to-day,'
Messer Nellemane was saying at that moment to the brigadier; 'you
will keep him under your eye, for I think he is a dangerous
character.'
'Of course,' said the gendarme.
Once in prison, you are for ever down in the books of the police, and
subject to examination and interrogation at any word or
act that seems to them to be suspicious. You never wholly escape. You are as a bird let loose, and flying with a recall-thread tied to its foot. Human justice is a sadly deficient thing.
Pippo and the Pastorini, father and sons, went to Pomodoro to meet him;
Viola stayed in her house; there is enough of the old sentiment amongst the
people, still, to make them think women should not parade their persons, or
their affections, or meddle with public things.
When they greeted Carmelo, and the formalities were fulfilled that set
him free, he grasped his father's hand and Pippo's, but said
never a word. He walked out into the open air, into the broad sunlight,
with an uncertain step as if he were purblind; his face had a stupid look,
and his mouth, that had been so fresh and smiling, was pale and
sullenly compressed. All his youth seemed to have gone out of him; he was wasted and thin, and his clothes hung on him loosely, twice too large. Only twelve months before he had borne the Maggio so merrily with carol and chant!
'You have had a long time of it,' said the Usciere jocosely
to him. 'You will take good care how you touch a guard again,
birricchino mio.'
Carmelo looked on the ground; there was a fierce fire in his eyes; he
kept a sullen silence.
'My son has been cruelly wronged,' said the elder Pastorini
with tears in his voice. 'If there were any justice in the land, not
an hour would he have spent in your accursed place.'
'The law never wrongs anyone,' said the Usciere, who lived
by the law.
'The real good honest law perhaps does not,' said Pastorini,
'but these rogues who make laws out of their heads that they may fill
their pockets--'
'Hush! or they will lock you up,' whispered Pippo, who ever
since he had mortgaged his house had been timid and yet sullen. 'Let
us be going; there is Viola at home.'
At the maiden's name a momentary light passed over Carmelo's
face and into his heavy eyes; but it soon faded and left again unillumined
the sullen gloom that months of imprisonment had brought there.
'Let us go,' he said, and glanced back over his shoulder
with a shudder at the prison.
They had brought the mill-horse and cart to meet him, and he felt
a sob rise in his throat as he saw the familiar old grey
beast, and heard the whinny of pleasure with which the poor thing recognised him.
Their hearts were rather heavy than joyful as they drove behind the grey
along the dusty road, with the vineyards on either side of them, and the
long low azure forms of the mountains beyond those.
The father felt a bitter pang that one of his sons should go back thus
to his birthplace; his name had always been stainless, and though he knew
that Carmelo had done no wrong, still in all prisons there is a taint of
shame that clings.
The young man never spoke; his brother had the reins; he sat behind with
old Pippo, his face turned backward, so that he saw the red roofs and dusky
towers of Pomodoro grow less and less, until the rise of the road hid
them.
'Accursed place! accursed place!' he
muttered once; then his head dropped on his breast, and lips never unclosed till the cart had jolted over a bridge that crossed the winding Rosa and entered his village. Then he put his hand on his brother's arm, and motioned him to check the horse.
'Let me get down; let me see her alone.'
They let him get down.
He stood an instant, and looked at the white, square, bald building that
was the Palazzo Communale. He looked and lifted his hand in the air.
'I would do the same again were the time to come again!' he
said solemnly. 'My poor dead dog! do they think the prison has made
me forget you--or forgive them?'
His face was very pale and very stern; his eyes had a great darkness and
yet a great
fire in them, as the skies have when behind the purple rain-clouds flash the lightnings.
The men in the cart were afraid.
'He is not in his right mind,' said Pippo in a frightened
voice to his father.
Pastorini shook his head.
'Let him go to his girl. She will be his best cure. We should but
do him harm. You will bring them both up to us a little later, when he is
calm. He is sorely changed, my lad, my poor lad!'
It was early morning; no one saw Carmelo return. He went across the
threshold of the house of the Madonna, and fell at the feet of Viola, who
watched and prayed for him.
His father followed him wistfully with his eyes, shading his own with
his hand.
'What will he say of the trees?' he cried in a sort of
despair. 'I have not broken it
to him. What will he say? what will he say!'
Pippo answered nothing: he thought the trees but a trivial woe
beside his own dead weight of ruin; but he would not say so; he had a kind
heart, which was awake, though his head was failing.
The miller drove on slowly through the village; and Pippo slipped down
and glided away by himself, and sat down by the river-side under the
willows by the reeds.
It was early, and no one scarcely had seen the miller's cart come
through the village, and those who had seen, had kept behind their
door-posts and their casements, saying to themselves, 'Will it
be prudent to be friends with the lad?'
For whosoever would be friends with the liberated criminal, the whole
borgo knew well, would be marked and cashiered in the
black books of the oppressor rusticorum. Their hearts were altogether with Carmelo; he had done thoroughly right, so they all thought, but who would dare to say so, or dare to act as if he thought so?
In these modern times of cowardice, when great Ministers dare not say
the thing they think, and high magistrates stoop to execute decrees that
they abhor, it is scarcely to be hoped for that moral courage will be a
plant of very sturdy growth in the souls of carpenters and coopers, and
bakers and plumbers and day-labourers, who toil for scarce a
shilling a day. A bad name with the guards, a series of fines and taxes,
the loss of municipal work or gentlemen's patronage--these soon
ruin a poor tradesman or workman.
So we will not be too harsh against the little folk of Santa Rosalia
that they hung back somewhat, and were not quick to look
out of their doors as usual when the miller's well-known grey horse trotted slowly through the street.
Only Gigi Canterelli ran out of his shop and waved his hat, and shouted,
'Bravo! benone!' and fearful
Cecco, who was standing at the entrance of his workshop, having no work to
do, seeing Pippo sitting disconsolate amidst the rushes, ran to him and
cried, 'Dear friend! Is he home? Oh the joy of it! Never mind the
gaol now; never mind it a bit; everybody knows the rights of the
tale!'
And when Pippo, who did not think it right to leave the youth and the
maiden together more than ten minutes, got up to go into his house, Cecco
would go with him, and shook the hands of Carmelo, and kissed him on both
cheeks, and said, 'Now you are home all will go well,' and then
kissed Viola
and went on his knees before the crucifix and blessed Christ, and got up again, and laughed and cried, and sang and danced, and behaved altogether so foolishly for a staid old cooper of sixty years, that Pippo could not help laughing too, and the young man and maiden were glad of this cover to their own too great emotion.
'Let us go,' said Pippo, 'your father will be
wondering--'