A Village Commune, Volume II (1881): a machine-readable transcription

Ouida (1839-1908)


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Victorian Women Writers Project: an Electronic Collection

Perry Willett, General Editor.

A Village Commune, Vol. II

by Ouida
392 p.
Chatto & Windus
London
1881

        The copy transcribed is from the Research Collections, Indiana University



        All chapters occur as DIV0. All quotation marks, hyphens, dashes, apostrophes and colons have been transcribed as entity references.


        All apostrophes and single right quotation marks are encoded as ’.


        Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed; all hyphens are encoded as ‐ and em dashes as —.


        The "New Novels" list appearing before the title page has been omitted. The "Cheap Editions of Popular Novels" list following p.392 has been omitted.



(frontis)

        


        


A VILLAGE COMMUNE

BY

OUIDA


        "L'ÉTAT C'EST MOI"

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



    

A VILLAGE COMMUNE

    

CHAPTER XVI.


        IF you have only killed your father or mother, or sister or neighbour, that is a trifle, which may well stand over for a year or more; and unless you were caught redhanded in the act, you may go scot free meanwhile. This sort of murder is a merely personal affair, and scarcely concerns anybody. But if you have put your hand upon the sacred person of a guard, ay, though he have been, as often
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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


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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


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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


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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


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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,


Page 7

'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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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;


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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.


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CHAPTER XVII.


        ALL the winter would roll away ere he would behold the eyes of his betrothed; he who should have wedded her in the mid-summer months, when the crickets were chaunting in the trees, and the magnolias and the rose-laurels were all ablaze with bloom. During the four months since his arrest he had striven to keep his reason and his patience, saying always to himself that he would be set free at once when his cause should be clearly heard. Hope had sustained him all that while, but now he had no hope.


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        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


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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


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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;


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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


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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


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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.


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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?


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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


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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.


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        '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.


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        '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!--'


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CHAPTER XVIII.


        BEFORE the week was out the trees were all down, and the wood by the mill was a thing of memory alone. Demetrio Pastorini was powerless. He had misunderstood his own rights and the ways of the laws.


        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;


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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.


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        '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.


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CHAPTER XIX.


        BEFORE the week was out the poplars were all down, as I have said, and the birds that had made their homes in them had flown, shrilly piping in their woe, across the Rosa water.


        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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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CHAPTER XX.


        IN Santa Rosalia the winter was hard and, for this country, long. Snow came; not the snow of cold countries, with all the glories of an ice-clad, frost-hung world; not snow pure, serene, beautiful, with holly-berries red against it, and fir-trees dark, not the snow of lands where snow means Noël, Santa Claus, or Father Christmas; but snow that fell in the night and melted in the day, and left a muddy, slushy, watery, slippery slough of despond in its place: snow that killed the olive, broke the arbutus boughs, withered into death the passion-
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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.


Page 38


        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


Page 39

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


Page 40

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


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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.


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        '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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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        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


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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


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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.


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        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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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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-


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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


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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.


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        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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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CHAPTER XXI.


        MEANWHILE in the prison of Pomodoro, Carmelo, thanks rather to his youth than to his leech, recovered despite the bleeding, the camomel, the stench of foul drains, the diet, and the obscurity; in six weeks' time he was almost ready to go back to his prison cell, he looked but a shadow of himself; he was thin and pale, his eyes were moody, and cast downward; his ruddy, sun-tanned skin had grown pallid and yellow.


        He had recovered, but he had a worse poison in him than even the poison of fever,


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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,


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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


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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,


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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


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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


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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-


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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.'


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        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


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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.


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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.


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        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.


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        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.


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        '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.


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CHAPTER XXII.


        AFTER her fruitless journey to Pomodoro, Annunziata could not get about at all, on account of snow that fell, and of a thaw that left the roads mere torrents of slush.


        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


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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


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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.


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        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


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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,


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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.'


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        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


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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.


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        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.


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        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.


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        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.


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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.


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CHAPTER XXIII.


        A LITTLE while after that, there came a hue and cry of mad dogs in Santa Rosalia. These cries are very common. They bring in plenty of dog skins for the guards to sell.


        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.


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        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


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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


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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


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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


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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-


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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.


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        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.


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        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.


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        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.


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        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?'


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CHAPTER XXIV.


        AS by a very irony and wantonness of cruelty, that very night there was left at his house by the usciere a mandate from the court of Pomodoro to pay the sum of fifty-seven francs on account of the little dog.


        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


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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


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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,


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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,


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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;


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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


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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


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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.


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        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?'


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        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


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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


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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,


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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


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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.'


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        '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.'


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        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--'


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        '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.


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CHAPTER XXV.


        THE miller went to a lawyer in Pomodoro; and the lawyer told him he could do nothing; he could perhaps petition the Prefect.


        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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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CHAPTER XXVI.


        IT was the day for Carmelo to come out of prison; it was a lovely May morning, as May is lovely in this land alone.


        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


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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


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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


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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


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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.


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        '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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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


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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--'