Then she put the load of linen on her head, and went along the gra.s.sy path homeward, and she saw the rosy gladioli, and the golden tansy, by which she pa.s.sed through tears. Yet she was glad because Adone had trusted her; and because she now knew as much as the elder women in his house, who had put no confidence in her.

X

"I SHALL not write," Don Silverio had said to Adone. "As soon as I know anything for certain I shall return. Of that you may be sure."

For he knew that letters took a week or more to find their slow way to Ruscino, and he hoped to return in less than that time; having no experience of "what h.e.l.l it is in waiting to abide," and of the endless doublings and goings to earth of that fox-like thing, a modern speculation; he innocently believed that he would only have to ask a question to have it answered.

Day after day Adone mounted to the bell-tower roof, and gazed over the country in vain. Day after day the little dog escaped from the custody of Nerina, trotted over the bridge, pattered up the street, and ran whining into his master's study. Every night the people of Ruscino hung up a lantern on a loophole of the belfry, and another on the parapet of the bridge, that their pastor might not miss his way if he were coming on foot beside the river; and every night Adone himself watched on the river bank or by the town wall, sleepless, longing for, yet dreading that which he should hear. But more than a week pa.s.sed, and the priest did not return. The anxiety of Adone consumed him like fire. He strove to dull his anxiety by incessant work, but it was too acute to be soothed by physical fatigue. He counted the days and the hours, and he could not sleep. The women watched him in fear and silence; they dared ask nothing, lest they should wound him. Only Nerina whispered to him once or twice in the fields, "Where is he gone? When will he come back?"

"G.o.d knows!" he answered. Every evening that he saw the sun set beyond the purple line of the mountains which were heaped in their ma.s.ses of marble and snow between him and the Patrimonium Petrus, he felt as if he could never bear another night. He could hear the clear, fresh sound of the running river, and it seemed to him like the voice of some friend crying aloud to him in peril. Whilst these summer days and nights sped away what was being done to save it? He felt like a coward; like one who stands by and sees a comrade murdered. In his solitude and apprehension he began to lose all self-control; he imagined impossible things; he began to see in his waking dreams, as in a nightmare, the dead body of Don Silverio lying with a knife in its breast in some cut-throat alley of Rome. For two weeks pa.s.sed, and there was no sign of his return, and no message from him.

The poor people of Ruscino also were troubled. Their vicar had never left them before. They did not love him; he was too unlike them; but they honoured him, they believed in him; he was always there in their sickness and sorrow; they leaned on his greater strength in all their penury and need; and he was poor like them, and stripped himself still barer for their sakes.

Through the young friar who had replaced him they had heard something of the calamity which threatened to befall them through the Edera. It was all dark to them; they could understand nothing. Why others should want their river and why they should lose it, or in what manner a stream could be turned from its natural course -- all these things were to them incomprehensible. In the beginning of the world it had been set running there. Who would be impious enough to meddle with it?

Whoever tried to do so would be smitten with the vengeance of Heaven.

Of that they were sure. Nevertheless, to hear the mention of such a thing tormented them; and when they opened their doors at dawn they looked out in terror lest the water should have been taken away in the night.

Their stupidity irritated Adone so greatly that he ceased altogether to speak to them of the impending calamity. "They are stocks and stones. They have not the sense of sheep nor the courage of goats,"

he said, with the old scorn which his forefathers had felt for their rustic va.s.sals stirring in him.

"I believe that they would dig sand and carry wood for the engineers and the craftsmen who would build the d.y.k.es!" he said to his mother.

Clelia Alba sighed. "My son, hunger is a hard master; it makes the soul faint, the heart hard, the belly ravenous. We have never known it. We cannot judge those who know nothing else."

"Even hunger need not make one vile," he answered.

But he did not disclose all his thoughts to his mother.

He was so intolerant of these poor people of Ruscino because he foresaw the hopelessness of forging their weak tempers into the metal necessary for resistance. As well might he hope to change a sword-rush of the river into a steel sabre for combat. Masaniello, Rienzi, Garibaldi, had roused the peasantry and led them against their foes; but the people they dealt with must, he thought, have been made of different stuff than these timorous villagers, who could not even be make to comprehend the magnitude of the wrong which was plotted against them.

"Tell them," he said to old Trizio: "tell them their wells will run dry; their fish will rot on the dry bed of what was once the river; their canes, their reeds and rushes, their osiers, will all fail them; when they shall go out into their fields nothing which they sow or plant will grow, because the land will be cracked and parched; there will be no longer the runlets and rivulets to water the soil; birds will die of thirst, and thousands of little river creatures will be putrid carca.s.ses in the sun; for the Edera, which is life and joy and health to this part of the country, will be carried far away, imprisoned in brick walls, drawn under ground, forced to labour like a slave, put to vile uses, soiled and degraded. Cannot you tell them this, and make them see?"

The old man shook his white head. "They would never believe. It is too hard for them. Where the river runs, there it will always be. So they think."

"They are dolts, they are mules, they are swine!" said Adone. "Nay, may the poor beasts forgive me! The beasts cannot help themselves, but men can if they choose."

"Humph!" said Trizio doubtfully. "My lad, you have not seen men shot down by the hundred. I have -- long ago, long ago."

"There is no chance of their being shot," he said with contempt, almost with regret. "All that is wanted of them are common sense, union, protestation, comprehension of their rights."

"Aye, you all begin with that," said the old Garabaldino. "But, my lad, you do not end there, for it is just those things which are your right which those above you will never hear of; and then up come the cannon thundering, and when the smoke clears away there are your dead -- and that is all you get."

The voice of the old soldier was thin and cracked and feeble, but it had a sound in it which chilled the hot blood of his hearer.

Yet surely this was no revolutionary question, no socialistic theory, no new alarming demand; it was only a claim old as the hills, only a resolve to keep what the formation of the earth had given to this province.

As well blame a father for claiming his own child as blame him and his neighbours for claiming their own river!

They were tranquil and docile people, poor and patient, paying what they were told to pay, letting the fiscal wolf gnaw and glut as it chose unopposed, not loving their rulers indeed, but never moving or speaking against them, accepting the snarl, the worry, the theft, the greed, the malice of the State without questioning.

Were they to stand by and see their river ruined, and do nothing, as the helpless fishermen of Fuscino have accepted the ruin of their lake?

To all young men of courage and sensibility and enthusiasm the vindication of a clear right seems an act so simple that it is only through long and painful experience that they realize that there is nothing under the sun which is so hard to compa.s.s, or which is met by such strong antagonism. To Adone, whose nature was unspoilt by modern influences, and whose world was comprised in the fields and moors around Ruscino, it seemed incredible that such a t.i.tle as that of his native soil to the water of Edera could be made clear to those in power without instant ratification of it.

"Whether you do aught or naught it comes to the same thing," said the old Garibaldino, who was wiser. "We did much; we spent our blood like water, and what good has it been? For one devil we drove out before our muskets, a thousand worse devils have entered since."

"It is different," said Adone, impatient. "All we have to do is to keep out the stranger. You had to drive him out. No politics or doctrines come into our cause; all we mean, all we want, is to be left alone, to remain as we are. That is all. It is simple and just."

"Aye, it is simple; aye, it is just," said the old man; but he sucked his pipe-stem grimly: he had never seen these arguments prosper; and in his own youth he had cherished such mistakes himself, to his own hindrance.

Had he not sung in those glorious days of hope and faith,

"Fratelli d'Italia!

L'Italia s'e desta!"

In the night which followed on the fourteenth day of the Vicar's absence, Adone, unable either to rest or to labour, went into his cattle-stalls and fed and watered all the animals, then he crossed the river and went along its north bank by the same path which he had followed with Don Silverio two weeks earlier. He had pa.s.sed to and fro that path often since his friend's departure, for by it the priest must return; there was no other way to and from the west.

Rain had fallen in the night, and the river was buoyant, and the gra.s.s sparkled, the mountains were of sapphire blue, and above the shallows clouds of flies and gnats were fluttering, waterlilies were blossoming where the water was still, and in the marshes buffaloes pushed their dark forms amongst the nymphoea and the nuphar.

He had no longer any eyes to see these things; he only strained his sight to catch the first glimpse of a tired traveler. The landscape here was level for many miles of moor and pasture and a human form approaching could be seen from a great distance. It was such a dawn as he had used to love beyond all other blessings of nature; but now the buffaloes in the pools and swamps were not more blind to its charm than he.

The sun rose behind him out of the unseen Adrian waves, and a rosy light spread itself over the earth; and at that moment he saw afar off a dark form moving slowly. With a loud cry he sprang forward and ran with the fleetness of a colt the hundred yards which were between him and that familiar figure.

"My son! my dear son!" cried Don Silverio, as Adone reached him and fell on his knees on the scorched turf.

"At last!" he murmured, choked with joy and fear. "Oh, where have you been? We are half dead, your people and I. What tidings do you bring?

What comfort?"

"Rise up, and remember that you are a man," said Don Silverio; and the youth, gazing upwards keenly into his face, suddenly lost all hope, seeing no ray of hope on that weary countenance.

"You cannot save us?" he cried, with a scream like a wounded hare's.

"I cannot, my dear son," answered Don Silverio.

Adone dropped backward as if a bullet had struck him; his head smote the dry ground; he had lost consciousness, his face was livid.

Don Silverio raised him and dragged him into the shade of a bay-tree and dashed water on him from the river. In a few minutes he was roused and again conscious, but on his features there was a dazed, stunned look.

"You cannot save us?" he repeated.

"Neither you nor I have millions," said Don Silverio with bitterness.

"It is with no other weapon that men can fight successfully now."

Adone had risen to his feet; he was pale as a corpse, only the blood was set in his forehead.