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

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

"It is the least you can do. But you must not forget the cattle.

Nerina is not there to see to them."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Maybe she is amongst the hay," thought Gianna, and painfully she climbed the wide rungs of the ladder which led to the hay loft.

There, sure enough, was Nerina, sound asleep upon the fodder. She looked very small, very young, very innocent.

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

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

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

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

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

"Praise be to the Madonna that you have come back, reverendissimo!"

she cried. "There are sore trouble and disputes under our roof."

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

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

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

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

Don Silverio listened with pain and indignation.

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

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

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

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

"Go up; and send Adone to me."

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

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

Gianna went and came down quickly.

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

"He may have gone to Nerina?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You cannot be serious!"

"If you think so, look at me."

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

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

"It is my son's house. He will harbour whom he will. But if the girl pa.s.s the doorstep I go. I am not too old to labour for myself."

"My good woman -- my dear friend -- it is incredible! I see what you believe, but I cannot pardon you for believing it. Even were it what you choose to think -- which is not possible -- surely your duty to a motherless and dest.i.tute girl of her tender years should counsel more benevolence?"

The face of Clelia Alba grew chillier and harder still.

"Sir, leave me to judge of my own duties as the mother of Adone, and the keeper of this house. He has told me that he is master here. I do not deny it. He is over age. He can bring her here if he chooses, but I go."

"But you must know the child cannot live here with a young man!"