"I shall be in time!" she thought, as she ran down a short cut which led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge.

The usual spot for the a.s.sembly of the malcontents was a gra.s.sy hollow surrounded on all sides with woods, and called the tomb of Asdrubal, from a mound of masonry which bore that name, although it was utterly improbable that Asdrubal, who had been slain a hundred miles to the northeast on the Marecchia water, should have been buried in the Valdedera at all. But the place and the name were well known in the district to hundreds of peasants, who knew no more who or what Asdrubal had been than they knew the names of the stars which form the constellation of Perseus.

Adone had summoned his friends to be there by nightfall, and he was pa.s.sing from the confines of his own lands on to those of the open moors when the child saw him. He was dressed in his working clothes, but he was fully armed: his gun on his shoulder, his great pistols in his sash, his dagger in his stocking. They were ancient arms; but they had served in matters of life and death, and would so serve again. On the three-edged blade of the sixteenth-century poignard was a blood-stain more than a century old which nothing would efface.

"Nerina!" he cried as the girl stopped him, and was more distressed than pleased to see her there; he had not thought of her.

In the moonlight, under the silvery olive foliage her little sunburnt face and figure took a softer and more feminine grace. But Adone had not sight for it. For him she was but a st.u.r.dy little pony, who would trot till she dropped.

He was cruel as those who are possessed by one intense and absorbing purpose always are: he was cruel to Nerina as Garibaldi, in the days of Ravenna, was cruel to Anita.

But through that intense egotism which sees in all the world only its own cause, its own end, its own misery, there touched him for one instant an unselfish pity for the child of whom he had made so mercilessly his servant and his slave.

"Poor little girl! I have been hard to you, I have been cruel and unfair," he said, as a vague sense of her infinite devotion to his cause moved him as a man may be moved by a dog's fidelity.

"You have been good to me," said Nerina; and from the bottom of her heart she thought so. "I came to see if you wanted me," she added humbly.

"No, no. They think ill of you for going my errands. Poor child, I have done you harm enough. I will not do you more."

"You have done me only good."

"What! When my mother has turned you out of the house!"

"It is her right."

"Let it be so for a moment. You shall come back. You are with old Alaida?"

"Yes."

"How can you be out to-night?"

"She sleeps heavily, and the lock is not hard."

"You are a brave child."

"Is there nothing to do to-night?"

"No, dear."

"Where do you go?"

"To meet the men at the tomb of Asdrubal."

"Who summoned them?"

"I myself. You must be sad and sorry, child, and it is my fault."

She checked a sob in her throat. "I am not far away, and old Alaida is kind. Let me go on some errand to-night?"

"No, my dear, I cannot."

He recalled the words of the message which he had received from Don Silverio that day. He knew the justice of this message, he knew that it only forbade what all humanity, hospitality, manhood, and compa.s.sion forbade to him. One terrible pa.s.sion had warped his nature, closed his heart, and invaded his reason to the exclusion of all other thoughts or instincts; but he was not yet so lost to shame as, now that he knew what he had done, to send out a female creature into peril to do his bidding.

"Tell me, then, tell me," pleaded Nerina, "when will anything be done?"

"Whenever the foreign labourers come to work on the water we shall drive them away."

"But if they will not go?"

"Child, the river is deep; we know its ways and its soundings; they do not."

Her great bright eyes flashed fire: an unholy joy laughed in them.

"We will baptize them over again!" she said; and all her face laughed and sparkled in the moonlight. There was fierce mountain blood in her veins; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like the juice of grapes warmed in an August noon.

He laughed slow, savagely. "Their blood will be on their own heads!"

He meant to drive them out, swamp them in the stream, choke them in the sand, hunt them in the heather; make every man of them rue the day that ever they came thither to meddle with the Edera water.

"Curse them! Their blood will be on their own heads!" he said between his teeth. He was thinking of the strange men who it was said would be at work on the land and the water before the moon, young now, should be in her last quarter; men hired by the hundreds, day-labourers of the Romagna and the Puglie, leased by contract, marshalled under overseers, different in nothing from slaves who groan under the white man's lash in Africa.

"Let me come with you to-night," she pleaded again. "I will hide in the bushes. The men shall not see me."

"No, no," he said sternly. "Get you back to your rest at Ruscino. I did wrong, I did basely to use your ignorance and abuse your obedience. Get you gone, and listen to your priest, not to me."

The child, ever obedient, vanished through the olive boughs. Adone went onward northward to his tryst: his soul was dark as night; it enraged him to have been forced by his conscience and his honour to obey the command of Don Silverio.

But she did not go over the bridge to Ruscino. She waited a little while then followed on his track. Gianna was right. She was a wild bird. She had been caught and tamed for a time, but she was always wild. The life which they had given her had been precious and sweet to her, and she had learned willingly all its ways; but at the bottom of her heart the love of liberty, the live of movement, the love of air and sky and freedom were stronger than all else. She was of an adventurous temper also, and brave like all Abruzzese, and she longed to see one of those moonlit midnight meetings of armed men to which she had escaped from Alaida's keeping, she could not have forced herself to go back out of this clear, cool, radiant night into the little, close, dark sleeping-chamber. No, not if Don Silverio himself had stood in her path with the cross raised. She was like a year-old lioness who smells blood.

She knew the way to the tomb of Asdrubal, even in the darkness, as well as he did. It was situated in a gra.s.sy hollow surrounded by dense trees, some five miles or more from the Terra Vergine, on the north bank of the river. The solitude was absolute, and the place large enough to permit the a.s.semblage of several scores of men.

Adone went on, unconscious that he was followed; he went at a swinging trot, easy and swift; the sinews of his lithe limbs were strong as steel, and his rage, all aflame, lent lightning to his feet.

She allowed him to precede her by half a mile or more, for if he had seen her his anger would have been great, and she feared it. She went skipping and bounding along, where the path was clear, in all the joy of liberty and rapture of the fresh night air. The hours spent in Alaida's close house in the village had been as terrible to her as his hours in a birdcatcher's hamper are to a wild bird. Up at Ansalda she had always been out of doors, and at the Terra Vergine she had gone under a roof only to eat and sleep.

The moon, which was in the beginning of its first quarter, had pa.s.sed behind some heavy clouds; there was little light, for there were as yet few stars visible, but that was not matter to her. She knew her way as well as any mountain hare.

The pungent odour of the heaths through which she went seemed to her like a draught of wine, the strong sea breeze which was blowing bore her up like wings. She forgot that she was once more a homeless waif, as she had been that day when she had sat under the dock leaves by the Edera water. He had told her she should go back; she believed him: that was enough. Madonna Clelia would forgive, she felt sure, for what harm had she done? All would be well; she would feed the oxen again, and go again to the spring for water, and all would be as it had been before -- her thoughts, her desires, went no farther than that. So, with a light heart she followed him gaily, running where there was open ground, pushing hard where the heather grew, going always in the same path as Adone had done.

All of a sudden she stopped short, in alarm.

The night was still; the spring of the river was loud upon it, owls hooted and chuckled, now and then a fox in the thickets barked. There are many sounds in the open country at night; sounds of whirring pinions, of stealthy feet, of shrill, lone cries, of breaking twigs, of breaking ferns, of little rivulets unheard by day, of timid creatures taking courage in the dark. But to these sounds she was used; she could give a name to every one of them. She heard now what was unfamiliar to her in these solitudes; she heard the footsteps of men; and it seemed to her, all around her, as though in a moment of time, the heath and bracken and furze grew alive to their tryst with Adone? She did not think so, for she had never known the few men in the village summon courage to join the armed meetings of the men of the valley. She stopped and listened, as a pole-cat which was near her did; the sounds were those of human beings, breathing, creeping, moving under the heather.

Suddenly she felt some presence close to her in the dark; she held her breath; she shrank noiselessly between the plumes of heath. If they were men of the country they would not hurt her, but if not -- she was not sure.

Near her was an open s.p.a.ce where the wild growth had been recently cut. The men debouched on to it from the undergrowth, there was a faint light from the stars on that strip of rough gra.s.s; by it she saw that they were soldiers, five in number.

A great terror cowed her, like a hand of ice at her heart, a terror not for herself, but for those away there, in the green hollow by the three stone-pines.