"They had no guns."

"How many were they?"

"Three. They went away up the river talking."

"Did they cross the bridge?"

"No. They were not shepherds, or labourers, or priests," said Nerina.

To these cla.s.ses of men her own acquaintance was confined.

"Painters, perhaps?" said Adone; but no artists were ever seen there; the existence even of the valley was scarcely known, except to topographers.

"What are painters?" said Nerina.

"Men who sit and stare and then make splashes of colour."

"No; they did not do that."

"It is strange."

He felt vaguely uneasy that any had come near the water; as a lover dislikes the pressure of a crowd about his beloved in a street, so he disliked the thought of foreign eyes resting on the Edera. That they should have used his little punt, always left amongst the sedges, seemed to him a most offensive and unpardonable action.

He went to the spot where the intruders had been seen, but there was no trace of them, except that the wet sand bore footprints of persons who had, as she had said of them, worn boots. He followed these footprints for some mile or more up the edge of the stream, but there he lost them from sight; they had pa.s.sed on to the gra.s.s of a level place, and the dry turf, cropped by sheep to its roots, told no tales. Near this place was a road used by cattle drivers and mules; it crossed the heather for some thousand yards, then plunged into the woods, and so went up over the hills to the town of Teramo, thirty-five kilometres away. It was a narrow, rough, steep road, wholly unfit for vehicles of any kind more tender than the rude ox-treggia, slow as a snail, with rounds of a tree-trunk for its wheels, and seldom used except by country folks.

He would have asked Don Silverio if he had heard or seen anything of any strangers, but the priest was away that day at one of the lonely moorland cabins comprised in his parish of Ruscino, where an old man, who had been a great sinner in his past, was at his last gasp, and his sons and grandsons and great-grandchildren all left him to meet his end as he might.

It was a fine day, and they had their grain to get in, and even the women were busy. They set a stoup of water by him, and put some in his nostrils, and shut the door to keep out the flies. It was no use to stay there they thought. If you helped a poor soul to give up the ghost by a hand on his mouth, or an elbow in his stomach, you got into trouble; it was safer to leave him alone when he was a-dying.

Don Silverio had given the viatic.u.m to the old man the night before, not thinking he would outlive the night. He now found the door locked and saw the place was deserted. He broke the door open with a few kicks, and found the house empty save for the dying creature on the sacks of leaves.

"They would not wait! They would not wait -- h.e.l.l take them!" said the old man, with a groan, his bony hands fighting the air.

"Hush, hush! the holy oil is on you," said Don Silverio. "They knew I should be here."

It was a charitable falsehood, but the brain of the old man was still too awake to be deceived by it.

"Why locked they the door, then? h.e.l.l take them! They are reaping in the lower fields -- h.e.l.l take them!" he repeated, his bony, toothless jaws gnashing with each word.

He was eighty-four years old; he had been long the terror of his district and of his descendants, and they paid him out now that he was powerless; they left him alone in that sun-baked cabin, and they had carefully put his crutch out of reach, so that if any force should return to his paralysed body he should be unable to move.

It was the youngest of them, a little boy of seven years old, who had thought to do that; the crutch had hit him so often.

The day had been only beginning when Don Silverio had reached the cabin, but he resolved to await there the return of the family; its hours were many and long and cruel in the midsummer heat, in this foetid place, where more than a score of men, women, and children of all ages, slept and swarmed through every season, and where the floors of beaten earth were paven with filth three millimetres thick.

The people were absent, but their ordure, their urine, their lice, their saliva were left there after them, and the stench of all was concentrated on this bed where the old man wrestled with death.

Don Silverio stayed on in the sultry and pestilent steam which rose up from the floor. Gnats and flies of all kinds buzzed in the heavy air, or settled in black knots on the walls and the rafters. With a bunch of dried maize-leaves he drove them off the old man's face and hands and limbs, and ever and again at intervals gave the poor creature a draught of water with a few drops in it from a phial of cordial which he had brought with him. The hours pa.s.sed, each seeming longer than a day; at last the convulsive twitching of the jaws ceased; the jaw had fallen, the dark cavern of the toothless mouth yawned in a set grimace, the vitreous eyes were turned up into the head: the old man was dead. But Don Silverio did not leave him; two sows and a hog were in a stye which was open to the house; he knew that they would come and gnaw the corpse if it were left to them; they were almost starving, and grunted angrily.

He spent so many vigils similar to this that the self-sacrifice entailed in them never struck either him or those he served.

When the great heat had pa.s.sed he set the door wide open; the sun was setting; a flood of light inundated the plain from the near mountains on the west, where the Leonessa towered, to those shadowy green clouds which far away in the east were the marshes before the sea.

Through the ruddy glory of the evening the family returned, dark figures against the gold; brown women, half-nude men, footsore children, their steps dragging reluctantly homeward.

At the sight of the priest on the threshold they stopped and made obeisance humbly in reverent salutation.

"Is he dead, most reverend?" said the eldest of the brood, a man of sixty, touching the ground with his forehead.

"Your father is dead," said Don Silverio.

The people were still; relieved to hear that all was over, yet vaguely terrified, rather by his gaze than by his words. A woman wept aloud out of fear.

"We could net let the good grain spoil," said the eldest man, with some shame in his voice.

"Pray that your sons may deal otherwise with you when your turn shall come," said Don Silverio; and then he went through them, unmoved by their prayers and cries, and pa.s.sed across the rough gra.s.s-land out of sight.

The oldest man, he who was now head of the house, remained prostrate on the threshold and beat the dust with his hands and heels; he was afraid to enter, afraid of that motionless, lifeless bag of bones of which the last cry had been a curse at him.

Don Silverio went on his way over the moors homeward, for he had no means except his own limbs whereby to go his scattered parishioners.

When he reached the village and climbed its steep stones night had long fallen and he was sorely tired. He entered by a door which was never locked, and found an oil wick burning on his table, which was set out with the brown crockery used for his frugal supper of cheese and lettuce and bread. His old servant was abed. His little dog alone was on the watch to welcome him. It was a poor, plain place, with whitewashed walls and a few necessary articles of use; but it was clean and sweet, its brick floors were sanded, and the night air blew in from its open cas.e.m.e.nt with the freshness from the river in it.

Its quiet was seldom disturbed except by the tolling of the bell for the church services; and it was welcome to him after the toil and heat and stench of the past day.

"My lot might have been worse," he thought, as he broke his loaf; he was disinclined to eat; the filthy odours of the cabin pursued him.

He was used to have had a little weekly journal sent to him by the post; which came at rare intervals on an a.s.s's back to Ruscino, the a.s.s and his rider, with a meal sack half filled by the meagre correspondence of the district, making the rounds of that part of the province with an irregularity which seemed as natural to the sufferers by it as to the postman himself. "He cannot be everywhere at once," they said of him with indulgence.

When he reached his home that evening the little news-sheet was lying on his table beside the brown crockery, the cheese, lettuces, and bread. He scarcely touched the food; he was saddened and sickened by the day he had pa.s.sed, although there had been nothing new in it, nothing of which he had not been witness a hundred times in the cabins of his parishioners. The little paper caught his eye, he took it and opened it. It was but a meagre thing, tardy of news, costing only two centimes, but it was the only publication which brought him any intelligence of that outer world from which he was as much separated as though he had been on a deserted isle in mid-ocean.

By the pale light of the single wick he turned over its thin sheet to distract his thoughts; there was war news in east and west, Church news in his own diocese and elsewhere; news all ten days old and more; political news also, scanty and timidly related. The name of the stream running underneath the walls of Ruscino caught his regard; a few lines were headed with it, and these lines said curtly:

"_The project to divert the course of the Edera river will be brought before the Chamber shortly; the Minister of Agriculture is considered to favour the project_."

He held the sheet nearer to the light and read the paragraph again, and yet again. The words were clear and indisputable in their meaning; they could not be misconstrued. There was but one river Edera in the whole province, in the whole country; there could be no doubt as to what river was meant; yet it seemed to him utterly impossible that any such project could be conceived by any creature.

Divert the course of the Edera? He felt stupefied. He read the words over and over again; then he read them aloud in the stillness of the night, and his voice sounded strong in his own ears.

"It must be a misprint; it must be a mistake for the Era of Volterra, or the Esino, north of Ancona," he said to himself, and he went to his book closet and brought out an old folio geography which he had once bought for a few pence on a Roman bookstall, spread it open before him, and read one by one the names of all the streams of the peninsula, from the Dora Baltea to the Giarretta. There was no other Edera river. Unless it were indeed a misprint altogether, the stream which flowed under his church walls was the one which was named in the news-sheet.

"But it is impossible, it is impossible!" he said so loudly, that his little dog awoke and climbed on his knee uneasily and in alarm. "What could the people do? What could the village do, or the land or the fisher folk? Are we to have drought added to hunger? Can they respect nothing? The river belongs to the valley: to seize it, to appraise it, to appropriate it, to make it away with it, would be as monstrous as to steal his mother's milk from a yearling babe!"

He shut the folio and pushed it away from him across the table. "If this is true," he said to himself, "if, anyhow, this monstrous thing be true, it will kill Adone!"

In the morning he awoke from a short perturbed sleep with that heavy sense of a vaguely remembered calamity which stirs in the awakening brain like a worm in the unclosing flower.

The morning-office over, he sought out the little news-sheet, to make sure that he had read aright; his servant had folded it up and laid it aside on a shelf, he unfolded it with a hand which trembled; the same lines stared at him in the warm light of sunrise as in the faint glimmer of the floating wick. The very curtness and coldness of the announcement testified to its exact.i.tude. He did not any longer doubt its truth; but there were no details, no explanations: he pondered on the possibilities of obtaining them; it was useless to seek them in the village or the countryside, the people were as ignorant as sheep.

Adone alone had intelligence, but he shrank from taking these tidings to the youth, as he would have shrunk from doing him a physical hurt.

The news might be false or premature; many projects were discussed, many schemes sketched out, many speculations set on foot which came to nothing in the end: were this thing true, Adone would learn it all too soon and read it on the wounded face of nature. Not at least until he could himself be certain of its truth would he speak of it to the young man whose fathers had been lords of the river.

His duties over for the forenoon, he went up the three hundred stairs of his bell-tower, to the wooden platform, between the machicolations. It was a dizzy height, and both stairs and roof were in ruins, but he went cautiously, and was familiar with the danger.

The owls which bred there were so used to him that they did not stir in their siesta as he pa.s.sed them. He stood aloft in the glare of noonday, and looked down on the winding stream as it pa.s.sed under the ruined walls of Ruscino, and growing, as it flowed, clearer and clearer, and wilder and wilder, as it rushed over stones and boulders, foaming and shouting, rushed through the heather on its way towards the Marches. Under Ruscino it had its brown mountain colour still, but as it ran it grew green as emeralds, blue as sapphires, silver and white and gray like a dove's wings; it was unsullied and translucent; the white clouds were reflected on it. It went through a country lonely, almost deserted, only at great distances from one another was there a group of homesteads, a cl.u.s.ter of stacks, a conical cabin in some places where the woods gave place to pasture; here and there were the ruins of a temple, of a fortress, of some great marble or granite tomb; but there was no living creature in sight except a troop of buffaloes splashing in a pool.