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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77040 ***
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+_LE SELVE_
+
+
+
+
+_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME._
+
+=A Gender in Satin.= By RITA.
+
+=The Making of Mary.= By JEAN FORSYTH.
+
+=Diana’s Hunting.= By R. BUCHANAN.
+
+=Sir Quixote of the Moors.= By JOHN BUCHAN.
+
+=Dreams.= By OLIVE SCHREINER. _6th Edition._
+
+=The Honour of the Flag and other Stories.= By W. CLARK RUSSELL.
+
+
+
+
+  Le Selve
+
+  BY
+  OUIDA
+
+  LONDON
+  T. FISHER UNWIN
+  1896
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT BY T. FISHER UNWIN, 1896
+  (_for Great Britain_).
+
+  COPYRIGHT BY
+  BACHELLER, JOHNSON & BACHELLER
+  (_for the United States of America_).
+
+
+
+
+_Le Selve._
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+It was a cold black night, with neither moon or stars, and an old
+peasant lay dying. He was all alone. No one thought it worth while to
+waste time beside him. He was eighty-three years old, and, according to
+his sons, ought to have been dead long before this autumn.
+
+They and their families sat round a fire of logs and chips, and talked
+amongst themselves; not of him, he was no more of any account. On the
+morrow, or at farthest the day after, he would be carried to the ditch
+in the burial-ground at the nearest village and tumbled into it; and
+so--_Addio per sempre_. It would be trouble enough to take him there;
+the graveyard was fifteen miles and more away.
+
+The big room, which was kitchen, eating-place, and cellar in one, was
+reeking with filth; cobwebs years old hung black and gray from the
+rafters; the floor of beaten earth was deep with the dust and mud
+brought by scores of dirty feet; the smoke from the yawning chimney
+hung in dark mist about the walls. Upstairs there was no fire. Why
+waste good fuel in warming cold limbs, cold from age and death?
+
+“I am cold, I am cold!” muttered the old man; but no one heeded. Of
+course he was cold; people who were dying always were so. He shivered
+and shook under his cotton coverlet; and it was dark, so dark, they had
+left him no light; light burns oil, and what could he see or hope to
+see? His eyes were already glazing.
+
+“Lazzaro got a whole crown for those turkeys which died of the pip,”
+said his elder son in the kitchen below, stretching his hands towards
+the blaze. Lazzaro was a neighbour who dwelt on a clearing, and made
+cask-hoops and wooden shoes.
+
+“Some folks have luck,” said his son’s wife as she gave her left breast
+to her youngest child who stood at her knee. Then they were silent,
+and the man cracked a nut with his teeth. The wood crackled, the child
+sucked, some big boys gambled with plum-stones for counters on the
+dirty bricks, a girl of twelve years old caught a cricket amongst
+the ashes, and pulled it in a leisurely way to pieces; two smaller
+children, twins, watching enviously and with deep interest.
+
+“The northern birds went overhead at noon,” said the younger brother
+Lucio after a time.
+
+“Damn them! they fly too high to be shot,” said the elder, Alcide.
+
+“They were all in a black three-sided mass,” said the younger.
+
+“They always fly like that,” said the elder. “They’re a shrewd lot,
+those big birds.”
+
+“How they keep time! ’tis amazing,” said Lucio. “Come regular with the
+first frost and go regular when the catkins peer out on the sallows.”
+
+Then silence fell again between them.
+
+The fire burnt more silently and more hotly; the woman put her child
+away from her, and thrust her breast back behind the iron busk of her
+stays; the twins fell asleep leaning against each other. The boys
+gambling with the plum-stones swore and struck at each other. From
+between the rafters overhead the sound of a low groan was heard now
+and then, and the elder son muttered, with many an oath, “Can’t ye be
+quiet, old one?”
+
+Time went on. They had no watch or clock, but they could tell that an
+hour had passed by the look of the burning wood. There was a louder
+sound as of lamentation from the room above. Alcide got up and went to
+the foot of the wooden stair.
+
+“Hold your jaw, old one!” he shouted. “Can’t you die in a quiet way?
+You’ve lived a deal too long as it is.”
+
+One small boy nudged his twin brother. “Grandfather’s dying,” he
+whispered with glee, and the two little creatures chuckled together.
+There would be one mouth the less for the polenta, one throat the less
+for the rare thin wine; the tic-tac of his stick on the stones would no
+longer come after them when they were truant, the stroke of his crutch
+would no longer make their shoulder-blades tingle when he caught them
+stealing, the sound of his voice on the stairs would no longer wake
+them up out of warm slumber amongst the straw and lumber on black
+winter mornings when the cows were lowing to be milked.
+
+Grandfather had been so long to be feared, it was delightful to them to
+hear him soundly rated, now that he could not get up and come down with
+his ash-stick raised.
+
+“Grandfather’s dying,” they said to each other for the twentieth time
+with glee, as the ruddy lights from the blazing billets shone on their
+little unwashed brown faces.
+
+“’Tis time we ate something,” said the woman, and she unhooked the pot
+hanging on a chain over the fire, and poured the contents out into an
+earthenware bowl. It was bean-soup, strongly flavoured with lentils and
+fennel; it was turned into pewter plates and supped up noisily with
+wooden spoons; pieces of black bread were wrenched off a loaf and eaten
+with it. They fed as ravenously as pigs, and with less cleanliness.
+Just as they finished a sound of knocking was heard at the door of the
+house, which was bolted and barred.
+
+“Who’s there?” shouted Alcide.
+
+“It is I,” answered a voice with a foreign accent.
+
+“’Tis the new steward, perdition seize him!” said Alcide, and he strode
+across the bricks and drew back the bolts. “What’s amiss that you
+honour us at this time of night, sir?” he said sullenly to the person
+who stood on the step holding a horse’s bridle.
+
+“There is much amiss here, they say,” replied the new-comer. “Is it
+true that your father, Adamo, is dying?”
+
+“What’s that to anyone?” said Alcide, unwillingly. “Folk usually die
+when they get nigh ninety.”
+
+The tone was half jocose, half sullen. The visitor in silence led his
+horse over the step into the entrance, hung the bridle on a nail in the
+wall, closed the door and said to Alcide:
+
+“Take me to him.”
+
+He was a fair man, tall, slender and young.
+
+All the family gathered near to stare at him.
+
+“There is nothing to see, sir,” muttered Alcide. “He’s as good as dead.”
+
+“What doctor have you?”
+
+“There is no such thing in these parts for forty miles or more.”
+
+“Do you mean the Commune has no medical aid?”
+
+“Safe and sure, it hasn’t.”
+
+“Take me to him; I know something of medicine.”
+
+They were all silent, vaguely frightened and ashamed. The woman nudged
+Alcide.
+
+“Best take the gentleman upstairs to poor Nonno, though he’s past all
+help.”
+
+And she forced a little water into her eyes and gave a little sob.
+
+Alcide took the one light off the table and tramped up the steep rotten
+stair.
+
+“What a piece of work about a dead greybeard!” he muttered. “When
+they’re past labour they’re best gone. You don’t leave a sere tree
+standing to cumber the ground.”
+
+He pushed open a ricketty, worm-eaten door, and the feeble oil wick
+shed a dim flickering light on the miserable room, where all was
+silence. The steward took the lamp from him, and went up to the bed of
+sacking and dry leaves, of which the odours were foul as a dung-heap.
+On it lay a gaunt old man’s lifeless body. The old tree was down; it
+cumbered the soil no more.
+
+The steward examined the body. It was still warm, but life was extinct;
+the jaw had dropped; one clenched lean hand was knotted in the white
+beard.
+
+“You have let him die alone!” said the young man with indignation and
+horror.
+
+Alcide grinned, showing his strong white teeth.
+
+“Dying’s the only thing nobody grudges our doing,” he said with
+unabashed indifference. “What would you, sir? We work all day. We can’t
+wait on sick souls all night.”
+
+“May the measure you have served to your father be served to you by
+your sons!”
+
+“Thank you, sir. Thank you kindly,” answered Alcide, which is the
+peasant’s synonym for “I will pay you out for that before long.”
+
+“It is frightful! Incredible!” murmured the young man. “You knew he
+was dying, and you left him alone, without even a drop of water by his
+side!”
+
+“He had his coffin to keep him company,” said Alcide, with a gruesome
+grin. “Some have to go naked into the earth.”
+
+He pointed to a corner in which a box, roughly made from unplaned
+planks, was leaning against the wall.
+
+“Hush!” said the steward with authority. “Have you no sense of
+shame?--no feeling?--no remorse?”
+
+“I have done nothing wrong, sir,” said Alcide sullenly. “I didn’t kill
+him. Old age killed him.”
+
+“And neglect!”
+
+Alcide shrugged his shoulders. Whether you hindered or hastened the
+death of a man so aged and so useless could not matter much, he
+thought; the deceased was eighty-three years of age, and had long been
+a burden to everybody.
+
+“It’s more than ten years that he’s not done a stroke of work,” he
+replied sullenly, “and yet he expected his share in the polenta and
+the broth, just for all the world as if he’d earned it. When they get
+childish, they get unreasonable like children. Many’s the time I’ve
+said to him, ‘Why aren’t you underground, father?’ We ought to be
+allowed to put them there when their time’s come, and they won’t go in
+the course of nature.”
+
+The steward turned from him in disgust and pain, and rested his gaze on
+the old, worn, rugged form lying on its bed of sacking.
+
+About the doorway, peeping and curious, the children were gathered.
+
+“Is it all over?” said their mother with a whine.
+
+“It is all over indeed!” said the steward gravely, and with a flash of
+loathing in his blue eyes. “You will learn what he suffered when you
+lie on your own death-bed. I came as soon as I heard of it. Why could
+you not even let me know?”
+
+They tittered in concert: men, women, boys, and girls. What a fuss
+about old Nonno! But, of course, this young man was a foreigner, and
+that was as good as saying he was a fool. Did he not want dogs fed,
+and cows kept clean? Did he not say men should wash their bodies and
+women should not swaddle their children? Was he not a new-comer, an
+interloper, a meddler, a stranger from nobody knew where?
+
+Alcide’s wife, however, had the wit to see that they were on the wrong
+tack.
+
+“Good sir,” she said, with tears in her voice, “we have done what we
+could, but you know we are poor, poor, poor; and now there will be no
+end of money to find for the burial, and we ought to be allowed to
+scratch a hole and put him in the woods, but you know the powers that
+be won’t let us, and we have to carry him all the way to San Vitale,
+and we must borrow a neighbour’s mule, and when we get there pay all
+the church and graveyard dues, and sacristans and sextons--they live
+like carrion flies getting fat on corpses----”
+
+“Hold your tongue, you idiot!” said her husband. “For sure the
+Ministro here will help us through all these troubles. He knows how
+poor we are. Not a bit of bread sometimes all the twenty-four hours
+through.”
+
+“I will send here early in the forenoon, and will do all that is
+necessary,” said the steward. “Let your women folk cleanse and clothe
+the body, and watch by it through the night. You may be poor, but
+poverty need not be brutality, and you--you would make the wolves of
+the steppes seem beside you like angels of mercy.”
+
+His words were unintelligible to his auditors; but they understood that
+he was offended and disgusted with them. They did not care a jot for
+his opinion, but they cared much for his purse. Without even a glance
+at them, he made the sign of the cross reverently on the brow and
+breast of the corpse, and in silence went out of the garret; took the
+bridle from the nail on the wall, led his horse out over the doorstep,
+and vaulted into the saddle.
+
+“Not even a copper piece has he left behind him!” moaned the woman.
+
+Alcide stood on the threshold, and watched the form of the horseman
+vanishing into the blackness under the trees. He made a gesture as of
+lifting an imaginary gun to his shoulder and pointing it. “Eh?” he said
+to his brother Lucio.
+
+Lucio, who was of a slower and weaker temperament, scratched his head.
+
+“I don’t say no,” he answered; “but it’s always a dangerous game to
+play at, ’Cide.”
+
+“Pooh!” said Alcide. “The woods are good friends; they never prate. But
+one can wait. Perhaps we shall get something out of him to-morrow.”
+
+“Anyhow, he is gone now,” said Lucio, as the sound of the horse’s
+hoofs grew faint on the wet moss of the forest road.
+
+The young steward rode through them this dark night very slowly, for
+the road was bad, and his horse, though well used to such work, felt
+each step carefully, and sometimes whinnied with fear as an owl flew
+past or a pole-cat rushed across the path.
+
+But even in this cautious passage through the almost impenetrable gloom
+he nearly trampled on a woman who stood in his way and cried to him to
+stop. He checked his horse, just in time to avoid collision, and the
+animal’s nostrils brushed the woman’s head.
+
+He could see nothing of her except the shine of two great eyes as he
+struck a match in front of her.
+
+“It is I, Muriella!” she said quickly. “Is he dead, sir?”
+
+“Yes; your grandfather is dead,” he answered gravely, “and he died
+alone and unaided as I would not let a sick steer die.”
+
+“Gone without the holy oil? Gone without shrive?--O Christ, help us!”
+she said in a voice of awe.
+
+“He died as I would not let a sick steer die,” repeated the rider.
+
+“I had been to fetch the vicar of San Vitale,” she added; “’twas the
+nearest; but he was away, and the sacristan said he would not be back
+for two days.”
+
+“Could you not have gone by preference for a doctor?”
+
+“No; there is nobody who would pay, and, besides, one must go to
+Ronciglione, twenty-five miles away, and the doctor there would refuse,
+for he has nought to do with us. To be sure, there is an apothecary at
+San Vitale, but he would have to be paid, and who amongst us could pay
+him?”
+
+“This is shocking! A whole commune without medical aid!”
+
+“I am more sorry he is gone unshriven,” she said with regret. “But
+perhaps--up yonder--somebody will see to it, and say a good word for
+him. I did what I could, sir; those above must see to the rest.”
+
+The young man sighed: the nothingness, the blankness, the horror of
+death weighed on him. He saw that she had some vague, shapeless hope
+which solaced her; and he forbore to disturb it.
+
+She put her hand on the saddle-bow and reached up nearer to him.
+
+“Don’t ride alone at night like this,” she whispered. “Knives are sharp
+amongst us if guns be rusty.”
+
+“I am armed,” he answered briefly.
+
+He felt rather than saw that she gave an impatient gesture.
+
+“What serves it to be armed?” she answered. “They know the lay of the
+lands and the ways of the woods better than you, and they will follow
+you some night when it is dark like this, and you will know nothing
+till you fall on your beast’s neck, or back on his crupper, as it may
+be.”
+
+“I do my best by the people. If they please to pay me so, they must,”
+he replied. “Good-night. You mean well. Thanks.”
+
+She drew back in silence, discouraged, to let the impatient horse and
+his rider go onward.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+These estates, known generally as Le Selve, were vast tracts of forest
+and pasture land lying along and beyond the Mons Ciminius, between the
+lakes of Bracciano and of Vico. They were of immeasurable antiquity,
+but had for more than a century been ill preserved, and much robbed
+and desecrated. Their timber was chiefly oak, ilex, and pine, with
+occasional groups of silver birch; their undergrowth was of arbutus,
+myrtle, bay, privet, and box, with much broom and heather. They covered
+many miles, and were the property of a Roman nobleman, and had within
+them oaks which might have seen the litters of Poppea and Faustina
+pass. In later times they had belonged to the Countess Matilda, and had
+been given by her to the Popes with the rest of her superb bequest.
+Here and there in them was a farm, a water-mill, a charcoal burner’s
+hut, patches of semi-cultivation due to squatters; but these were very
+few and isolated. For the most part the woods were little altered since
+the days of the Cæsars; wholly unaltered since the days of the Farnese
+and the Borgia.
+
+An old hunting-palace, which was now given up to the use of underlings,
+stood in the centre of the woods, the only large house in them, a
+gray stone building of the fifteenth century, which had once been a
+favourite retreat of the sporting cardinal from whom the Gandolfo had
+inherited this property. Around it were level grasslands, bordered by
+low granite balustrades, with colossal stone hounds seated on the
+coping; and, immediately beyond, the great woods began, enclosing the
+grassy squares with walls of foliage which were pierced at intervals by
+narrow avenues or drives; in full view of the front terraces rose the
+peaks of the Sabine mountains; from the back were visible very far off
+Monte Amiata and the Cetona range.
+
+It was a distance of five miles and more to this dwelling, and it
+was long past midnight when the young steward rode in at the gates.
+The stablemen and guards of the place ran to take his horse. But
+he followed the animal, and saw it safe in stall before he himself
+entered the house, and felt the warmth of the oak logs burning on
+an open hearth in the great vaulted hall of which he made his chief
+sitting-room.
+
+“Sir, why will you be out so late?” said an old woman, who was the
+_Massajà_ or housekeeper of the place, omnipotent over its womenkind
+and its stores. “The woods are not as safe as a city street, and even
+in the towns it’s ill being out alone after midnight. Daggers are
+quickly whipped out; and pistols bark and bite both.”
+
+“My good Caterina,” he answered wearily, “what have I done that anyone
+should want my life? Money, as they know, I never carry.”
+
+“So best,” said the old woman. “As for what you’ve done, sir, you’re
+put in power here, and you’re a stranger. That’s crime enough.”
+
+He did not answer, but stood a moment or two in silence in the warmth
+of the hearth.
+
+“You are from the North,” she added. “That’s bad enough.”
+
+“North or South, what matter. Have we not a common humanity?”
+
+Caterina shook her head.
+
+“You mean well; but you are from the North.”
+
+The argument seemed to her unanswerable. To him it seemed ridiculous;
+but he saw that it was one of these ideas based on prejudice,
+ignorance, and superstition, which are infinitely more tenacious and
+hard to uproot than the strongest opinions founded on reason.
+
+“Your woodlanders are great ruffians, I fear, Caterina,” he said after
+a pause.
+
+“They are not lambs, sir,” said the old woman curtly.
+
+“The old man was dead when I reached the place, and they had let him
+die all alone.”
+
+“They don’t waste their time on sick folks, sir; and old ones, when
+they have naught to leave, have no friends. Won’t you come to table?”
+
+“Is it true that there is no doctor in the whole district?”
+
+“I never heard of one, sir.”
+
+“What do the people do when they are ill?”
+
+“Well, sir, they die or get well, as Heaven pleases. But there are wise
+women who know a good deal of herbs and magic, and there is a hermit
+who sells charms up by the Sasso Scritto, that bald peak which you
+see from the back door here. I bought a ring of him to keep my blood
+flowing straight; here it is; look; I have never ailed a minute since I
+wore it!”
+
+“Are we in the last years of the nineteenth century?”
+
+Caterina did not reply. She knew nothing about centuries, their
+numeration or civilization.
+
+She drew his attention to the supper-table, which she had laden with
+good things, or what she thought were good. But he had no appetite.
+He drank a cup of coffee, and told her to go to bed. He said he felt
+no desire to sleep. His heart was heavy with its own sorrows, and
+his mind was oppressed by a fear that he had undertaken a task which
+was beyond his strength. “You cannot wash a blackamoor white,” says a
+homely proverb; and he began to perceive that those whom he desired
+to cleanse were very black indeed. He knew that all the acts which in
+moral codes are called thefts, arson, contraband, fraud, were merely
+sport in their eyes, and that even murder appeared to almost all of
+them a wholly natural and legitimate way of settling old scores and
+redressing uneven balances, whilst to cheat the revenue, to defraud the
+landlord, to weave a dramatic coil of lies, and to poach, purloin, and
+plunder as occasion served, seemed to them all the mere playful pastime
+of summer eve and winter dawn, simple as the frisking of young leverets
+on a sward.
+
+He was a Russian of Esthonia, a noble, and an officer of the Imperial
+Guard; he had been merely a man of pleasure, until he had been
+impressed and converted by Tolstoi and other humanitarians. Then the
+zeal of his reformation as shown in his acts and his words had led
+to condemnation by his military superiors; he had been cashiered,
+arrested, and accused of Nihilism; he had been found guilty of
+subversive doctrines and collectivist opinions; the influence of his
+own powerful family, and others with which he was connected had been
+of no avail to save him; he had been condemned to the mines of Siberia
+for life, and his estates confiscated by the court-martial before
+which he had been brought up for judgment; he had escaped from the
+fortress in which he was confined before he was taken to the mines,
+and in disguise, and by the help of some of his late comrades, had got
+across the frontier and across Germany. When, penniless and famished,
+he had chanced to meet in Brussels a friend of earlier years, Alfonso
+Gandolfo, that gay and generous prince could induce him to accept
+nothing, not even a dinner or a cigar, but at length offered him the
+stewardship of the estates of Le Selve, and succeeded with difficulty
+in persuading him that in this homely and obscure post he could do
+good, and more than earn his maintenance.
+
+“We have been ill served,” said the Roman gentleman; “we have been
+the prey of a series of scoundrels; if you can put down the perpetual
+thefts, and protect the timber in some degree, my father and I shall be
+infinitely grateful.”
+
+He was not deceived by the kindly courtesy of the terms in which the
+offer was made, but at last was induced to yield to it; he saw that in
+the seclusion of these great neglected forests he would be able to
+hide his own identity in safety from the world; and he had been now
+eighteen months in the woodlands, regarded by the country people as
+a mere agent of their lords, and known only by his baptismal name of
+Cyrille, called by the forest-folks Cirillo.
+
+Fortunately for himself, he had learned the language when a youth from
+a tutor, who had translated the “Divina Commedia” into German, and wide
+as is the gulf between the Italian of scholars and the dialects of
+the provinces, he had the facility of his nation in acquiring foreign
+tongues, and quickly adapted himself to the idiom of the people of the
+forest.
+
+He was intensely unhappy; he was separated from all he had known
+and loved from birth; he had lost everything he had possessed and
+cherished, and brave men have killed themselves for sorrows less than
+his; but the active and open-air life saved him from falling into
+despondency or ill health, and he earnestly occupied himself with
+the condition of the peasants and the interest of the proprietors.
+He had received unlimited powers from the Gandolfo princes, in whose
+vast estates these woods in all their antiquity and extent were but a
+mere patch of verdure never visited. To a man, exiled, ruined, with a
+price set on his head in his own country, and with his heart aching
+ceaselessly for all he had left for ever, it was a welcome solitude,
+a blessed, a thrice-blessed sanctuary. Sometimes he thought he was
+already dead and in the Elysian fields, so profound was the silence, so
+sweet the air, so spiritual the green light under the trees.
+
+When the woodlanders climbed the summits of the colossal pines to
+gather the ripe cones, they could see if they cared to look, and if
+the day were clear, a glistening ray of gold, a shining band of
+silver, and the one was the cross of St Peter’s and the other was the
+Tyrhemian Sea. To them these said nothing; vaguely they knew that Rome
+was the throne of the Viceroy of God, whence sins were remitted and
+life eternal was given, but of the sea they had never heard, though the
+light of the Pharos of Palo was visible on clear nights from the higher
+ground of their forest. But to Cyrille, when he mounted into the high
+pine-tops or climbed the crumbling stair of an old watch-tower, to gaze
+from its roof over the vast verdure of these woods westward that speck
+of sunlit gold, that streak of sparkling light spoke, as they must
+ever speak so long as earth and sea shall last, to the scholar and the
+student.
+
+Only one highway traversed Le Selve, one which ran crosswise, and
+met the old coaching road which goes still, although scarcely ever
+used except by muleteers and peasantry, from Viterbo by Ronciglione,
+and Sutri to La Storta, and on to Rome itself; a road once the great
+artery of life between the Patrimonium Petri and the cities of Umbria,
+of Tuscany, and of Lombardy, a road once crowded by pilgrims of all
+nations; by the pomp of travelling cardinals, by the litter and
+lacqueys of regal women, by the strings of sumpter mules, the massed
+multitudes of armed horsemen, the straggling hordes of camp followers,
+the splendid retinue of Prince and Nuncio. Now, some dusty public
+vehicle, painfully drawn by blown and raw-boned horses, some string of
+charcoal-bearing asses, some long line of timber-wagons drawn by great
+white oxen, red-eyed, yoke-burdened, with heavy flanks and parching
+tongues, are all that the once great highway sees.
+
+But a past of more than two thousand years is touched at every step
+in these heather-covered lands, a past which makes the Borgia, the
+Farnese, the Medici, seem but as mere parvenues of a near hour.
+In the rocks are the sculptured tombs of a perished race; and the
+faithful soil holds the vanished nation’s arts and letters, and keeps
+their secrets which no living man can read. When he reached those
+loftiest summits where the wild doves and their foes the falcons
+made their nests, the whole panorama of what had once been Etruria
+and Latium was outstretched beneath him, and in the deep green light
+of the thick-woven branches he could read his Horace, his Strabo,
+his Marcus Aurelius, while, from far down below, the humble music of
+the belled flocks rose faintly to his ear in a gentle rhythm which
+has never ceased there through thrice a thousand years. And that
+resigned sadness which succeeds despair came to him in that sense of
+unceasing sorrow, of endless succession of creation and annihilation
+of which such a scene must ever speak to those who look upon it with
+the eyes which see, and with the ears which hear. He realised his
+own infinitesimal nothingness, the infinite beauty and the infinite
+ruthlessness of nature, and he seemed to hear, not the passing of the
+browsing flocks over the grass below, but the passage of the multitudes
+hurrying on their course from the womb to the grave, each runner
+passing the torch from his dying hand to the living hand of the runner
+who follows him in that fine figure which Lucretius has made immortal.
+
+But in these Elysian Fields there were rude realities, and his
+conscience, which was sensitive, never allowed him to evade them. He
+was there, not to steep his soul in poppied rest, but to serve the
+interests of his employers and of the lands and people committed to his
+charge.
+
+Within the forest there were remains of rock-dwellings and of Etruscan
+tombs; he would willingly have consecrated his years to their
+exploration, and led such a life here as Avvolto of Corneto and the
+Campanari of Toscanelli had led amidst the sepulchres of a vanished
+race.
+
+He would willingly have spent all his time searching in the soil for
+relics such as were at times found by the peasantry, but his duties
+allowed him no such leisure. He took those duties to heart with the
+conscientious seriousness of temper which had changed him from an
+officer of the palace guard to a political reformer, and had exiled him
+from all which he held dear.
+
+The Gandolfo princes would have been the first to smile at such a
+view of a steward’s duties; but to Cyrille the obligation was a
+law of honour. They gave him shelter, food, and wage; he laboured
+unremittingly in their service. If none were grateful to him he did not
+complain; greater than he had served mankind, and only been beaten with
+the rods of the world’s ingratitude in return.
+
+There were small, very poor, holdings here and there, scattered many
+miles one from another on patches of more or less cultivated ground.
+And in earlier times some wanderer turned adrift by fire or sword, some
+criminal fleeing from pursuit, or some nomad tired of roaming had made
+a hut of boughs, and called the spot their own; and in the peasantry
+living on and by these clearings, the new-comer found his greatest
+enemies and his greatest anxieties. Long years of license and centuries
+of occupation had made these sons of the soil look on it as their own;
+indeed, in a manner, the Latin law confirmed their title, and plunder
+had become with them a right divine. All his natural sympathies were
+with the poor, and the creeds of his teacher held them excusable in
+all errors, and these people were very poor indeed, but their cynical
+dishonesty revolted him, and their habitual insubordination met and
+thwarted him at every turn. They cringed to him to his face, but
+cheated him and mocked at him behind his back. He was sensible of it,
+and it strained his patience sorely.
+
+The ancestors of Alcide and Lucio had been squatters in these solitudes
+for centuries. They paid a nominal rental in kind and in labour, and
+did what they liked on their bit of clearing. This labour had been but
+seldom required, and their payment generally excused; generation after
+generation had lived in this way, and in earlier times the men of the
+family had gone with their lord to battle, and the blood which they had
+shed had been esteemed rent enough for their land.
+
+But now that times had changed, and there was no war service except
+conscription, they had become averse to paying any rental at all, and
+looked not only on their holding as their own, but on the timber, the
+grass, the heather, the rushes, and all that was around them as their
+own. When they tilled their small croft, they worked for their own
+benefit, but grumbled even at doing that. They were brigands in blood
+and instinct. The first of their forefathers who had settled there had
+been a refugee from justice for the robbing and murder of a priest in
+Rome; and they were never at ease save when thieving.
+
+They had no notion of time or of its reckonings; but they declared
+that their family was as old as the woods themselves, and there was
+nothing to disprove their assertions. They were, in reality, not
+more than squatters, as their forefathers had been; but they thought
+themselves the lawful lords of the soil. They would cringe and beg,
+and even work when it suited them, but they had the old scornful Roman
+pride in their veins, and vowed vengeance on any who offended it. The
+woods might be the Gandolfo’s or the Pope’s for aught they cared; they
+laid their hands on everything they wanted.
+
+There were not more than a dozen such families scattered over the fifty
+miles of forest; but every one of these was against the foreigner;
+would have been equally against him whatever he might have done, if he
+had been St Michael’s self, as Caterina and Muriella sometimes thought
+that he was. They had always been poor, but they had enjoyed thieving,
+drinking, reiving, sinning as they chose. He wished to make them less
+poor, but he strove also to make them more honest. They did not want
+to learn thrift, or cleanliness, or common sense. They only wanted to
+be filthy, and lazy, and corrupt, and thievish, in the immemorial way
+transmitted from their fathers. They wanted no new-fangled virtues. Any
+wrong they did, such as kniving a neighbour or lifting a calf, was put
+up in a bundle, as they put up weeds to burn, and was thrust away till
+Easter, when the priest washed it clean, as once a year their women
+washed their shirts in running water. That was the use of priests and
+women.
+
+To the people of this volcanic and historic soil the new-comer,
+Il Ministro as he was called, was accursed as ‘the northerner’: a
+northerner whether from Bologna or Milano, whether from Russia or
+Poland, made no difference to them; they did not know one of those
+names from another; everybody at the back of their mountains beyond the
+barrier of Monte Amiata sent the snow, and the bad winds, and meant
+the North to them. He was like a bad wind to them. The very good-will
+which he bore them was more offence than would have seemed to them his
+enmity, since the latter they would have understood; the former seemed
+to them only a deep-laid duplicity to entrap them to their ruin.
+
+There had been various agents of the Gandolfi there since that
+memorable day a hundred years before when the cavalry of Murat had
+encamped in Le Selve; a day that was still talked of over the oak logs
+in winter evenings as freshly as though it had been last winter. They
+had been men who had cheated their lords and wrung blood out of a post,
+but just because they had been thieves and hypocrites, they had winked
+at many evil deeds, and had never interfered with the ways and beliefs,
+the robberies and stabbings, the family feuds and drunken brawls of the
+country people. It had been their interest to shut their eyes to all
+which did not concern the fillings of their own leathern money-bags,
+and nod in mute condonation; and they had done so.
+
+One of them, indeed, had been shot dead as he stood at his bedroom
+window with the moonlight full upon him; and another had been knived
+as he had ridden home from a fair; but on the whole they had been
+let alone and not disliked. They had been men of the province, _dei
+nostri_; and that fact covers a multitude of sins.
+
+No one of these stewards would have gone to see the old peasant on
+his death-bed, and made a fuss about his being left alone, and have
+accompanied his corpse to its burial. They would have sent a barrel of
+good wine to the survivors to make merry with after the funeral, and
+would never have asked where the body was buried or what respect had
+been shown to it.
+
+Moreover, they had been men of the people, who had known at most
+bookkeeping by double entry, and something of cattle and forestry;
+this northerner talked of trees and plants as though they were living
+creatures with wills of their own; pretended that the roots of an oak
+corresponded in size and shape with its branches, that its leaves were
+its lungs, and all sorts of similar trash; he was never drunk, he
+never swore, he kissed his horse on the forehead, he bathed in running
+streams, he never made love to their daughters, he wanted to open a
+school for the woodlanders’ children, and he had heathenish books
+and devilish instruments in his rooms of which they caught appalling
+glimpses. His employers had sent him a compass, a chronometer, an
+aneroid, and a telescope with some globes and atlases from Rome, and
+even his friend Caterina, who in a year and a half had grown to believe
+him a harmless and even lovable person, could not see these objects
+without horror, and she had begged to be allowed to bring over the
+vicar from San Vitale to exorcise them.
+
+She was a stout, good-natured, handsome, old woman, who had been born
+on the Gandolfo lands, and had lived on them all her life; a good cook
+in her own limited, coarse fashion, and a bustling, spirited directress
+of the lads and lasses about the house.
+
+“You fash yourself for nought, sir,” she said often to Cyrille. “Our
+folks are as Nature made them: you will never alter them. They think
+their own ways best, and they see no harm in a knife or a musket-shot
+when there is any score to be wiped out. They will never listen to
+you, not if you’re here fifty years.”
+
+“They will come to understand me in time,” he said to himself; but
+there are some things which even time cannot touch, and amongst these
+things are many human hearts. In appealing to their indulgence or to
+their gratitude, or to their intelligence, he appealed to qualities
+which did not exist.
+
+When he had taken his coffee he sat on, beside the fire, instead of
+going to bed, a bad habit as he knew; but he had been a _viveur_ in the
+fashionable clubs of S. Petersburg, and used to turn night into day; he
+seldom did so now, for his days were laborious, and he kept labourer’s
+hours usually. He looked into the wide hearth and on to the red-hot oak
+logs and the crimson ashes, and in them he saw faces dear to him, on
+which his eyes would probably never look again--one face most often
+of all, fair, pale, proud, tender, with the gleam of diamonds in the
+hair and at the throat; a woman who loved him and whom he loved--a
+woman who was not his. Where was she this night? It was past midnight
+now in Russia as here in Latium. Was she, as he had so often seen her,
+the sought of all courtiers at some imperial ball? Was she present at
+some ice fête on some frozen arm of the Neva, in the light of a million
+torches, with the waltz music of Strauss throbbing on her ear?
+
+Anyhow, everywhere, forever, he felt that she was dead to him.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+The old man was buried next day, the steward lending the mules and the
+cart; Lucio alone accompanied the coffin, grumbling at the injustice of
+his brother in putting every disagreeable task upon his shoulders. Why
+trouble about a dead man more than about a dead fox? Why not tumble out
+the deal box into the nearest ditch?
+
+At a turn in the road a horse crossed their path. The rider was Cyrille.
+
+“I will come with you,” he said, “and discharge the fees.” He knew
+that if left to himself, Lucio, were he trusted with the money, would
+probably toss the coffin into the first ravine which was deep enough
+to tell no tales.
+
+“No need to fatigue yourself so, sir,” said Lucio, greatly
+disconcerted. “If you be good enough to wish to pay the burying you can
+give me the money. There is no need for you to fag yourself coming to
+the town.”
+
+“I will go with you,” said Cyrille, knowing that the money, if it left
+his hands, would never reach the graveyard.
+
+Lucio cursed him silently for a suspicious, obstinate, niggardly,
+foreign brute. “Spies on us even when we are nought but a carcass,” he
+thought, where he sat at the coffin head, cracking nuts to beguile the
+way. Did no one else pitch their dead into ditches? What matter was
+it to this white-faced stranger if the old worn-out body were tumbled
+amongst the weeds and toads at the bottom of a gully? And how did the
+stranger know that it had been in Lucio’s mind to do away with it so,
+and to sell the cart and mules somewhere far away, and come back on
+foot, all tattered and torn, with a well-told tale of robbery and a
+bare escape with life?
+
+“Damn him! he sees through the bones of one’s head what one is
+thinking,” said the man to himself. The scheme had been ingenious and
+feasible; it had been planned by Alcide; and now in addition to the
+disappointment of not carrying it out, Lucio had the dread of his
+elder’s fury when he should return home, having done nothing better
+than to really bury the coffin, and return the mules to their stables.
+
+Cyrille, who suspected nothing worse than a possible misuse of the
+church fees, had no idea of the schemes which his presence defeated as
+he rode on towards the confines of the wood where the high-road passed
+which led to the dreary, small, walled place, now scarce more than a
+village, although it had been a stronghold of the Popes in the tenth
+and eleventh centuries.
+
+“Would the body not do just as well left to itself in the woods?”
+muttered Lucio, as he gave the wooden box a sullen kick.
+
+“Yes,” replied Cyrille; “and I should like my own body, when I die,
+to be laid down under a tree, and left there. But your law and your
+religion bid you bury your dead, and bury them as they command. You can
+only obey.”
+
+Lucio grumbled inaudibly. For the law he had contempt and hatred, but
+for religion a dull pagan awe; such as in old Etruscan and Latin days,
+under these same forest glades, rude men had felt for the terrors of
+the gods.
+
+The little borgo of San Vitale, to which they were bound, stood
+aloft, looking to the east to Palestrina and Monte Albano. The soil
+immediately beneath was honeycombed by ancient sepulchres and volcanic
+fissures; and from a small lake mephitic vapours rose; the hill was
+barren of vegetation; the walls looked like worm-eaten wood, its towers
+were in dusty ruin; it resembled a seagull’s nest, which, moth-eaten
+and cobweb-covered, crumbles away in a naturalist’s closet.
+
+Clouds hung about its hillsides, and the air was heavy and cold. The
+few people in its narrow street were ragged, miserable, lean. Their
+black eyes stared at the mule and its burden with apathy. Their
+stomachs were empty, their hearts were hard; they were half dead
+themselves; some famished sheep snatched at the grass growing between
+the stones; a woman plucked a living pigeon for the priest’s dinner;
+thirsty dogs lapped foul waters in the gutter, the sacristan came out
+of an arched door in a cloister: was he called for baptism or burial?
+The latter? Very well. He had put in three dead that morning. There
+was room for a fourth a-top of them. How long were the coffins left in
+the ditch? Oh, a year or so. Then the wood split; he mixed the bones
+together and put them in a heap. A man in Rome came up and bought these
+heaps at intervals; he believed they were ground, and used for making
+pastes, or paper, or bread; he was not sure; it was no business of his
+what they were turned to; he would call the Priore who was acting in
+the absence of his Reverence.
+
+Then he unlocked an iron gate, and showed a dreary enclosed square of
+rough brown turf, in which a few iron crosses, and hundreds of sticks
+nailed crosswise, were standing in many rows. A tethered kid was trying
+to browse, and hurting its tender mouth on the sere stalks. Across the
+ground ran two diagonal ditches always marked by freshly-piled lumps of
+earth; these were the resting-places of those who were poorest, where
+all were poor.
+
+The figure of a woman was standing there.
+
+It was that of the dead man’s granddaughter Muriella.
+
+Muriella Stravolta was a niece of Alcide and Lucio by an older brother,
+deceased, who had served in the army, and lived afterwards at Viterbo.
+She lived with the family and worked with them, rather because it never
+occurred to her that she could go elsewhere than from any welcome she
+got from them, or any attachment on either side. She was twenty-two
+years old, with one of those faces which have the old Latin beauty, and
+one of those fine forms so common in a country where the females walk
+barefoot and carry their water vases on their heads, and are erect and
+strong and supple as the young pines of the mountain side. She worked
+hard, she lived poorly, she seldom heard a kind word; but her uncles
+and their wives respected her; she had a strong arm and an eye which
+could plunge its rays into a sinful soul and read the secrets thereof.
+She always carried a long slim knife in her stays, and she knew how to
+use it.
+
+She wore a rough dark skirt and crimson bodice, and a white cloth
+folded on her head in the manner of the Agro Romano; the clothes were
+poor and torn in places, and showed her skin, which was of a clear
+pale brown; her brows were level and dark, her eyes black as a stormy
+night, and her mouth was red as any scarlet berry of the spindle-tree
+in October. She had wooers as many as a population scattered far and
+wide afforded; but no one of them ever had more from her than a curt
+salute or a brisk “begone.” She knew what it was to bear children for
+poor men, whether in wedlock or outside it, and she was in no haste to
+eat “the sweet fruit with the bitter stone.”
+
+“How did you come here?” said Lucio angrily, at the sight of her, as he
+backed the coffin and cart into the burial-place.
+
+“You would not bring me, so I walked across by the hill paths,” she
+answered.
+
+“Womenkind have no business at these rites,” said Lucio; and the sexton
+added, with a leer:
+
+“Bridals and baptisms are for handsome wenches, not burials.”
+
+She did not reply to either; but she took one end of the wooden box and
+obliged them to lift it not too roughly to the ground.
+
+“You did well to come,” said Cyrille to her, with sympathy.
+
+She said nothing. She was not there for the sake of her dead
+grandsire, but to prevent the scheme of thieving the mules which she
+had guessed had been planned between her uncles.
+
+“Meddling, mischievous baggage!” muttered Lucio. What business had
+women to cross and mar men’s work?
+
+When the brief rites were over, and the deal box had been tumbled under
+clods of clay, she spoke to no one, but climbed into the cart, taking
+the reins of rope.
+
+“Lie down on the straw and sleep,” she said curtly to her uncle. He was
+cowed; he knew that his intentions had been read. He stretched himself
+grumbling in the bottom of the cart, and pulled his pipe out of his
+breeches pocket.
+
+“You may ride on,” said the girl to Cyrille. “The mules shall be at
+your place before moon-rise, and neither footsore nor wind-blown, I
+promise you.”
+
+Then the reason of her presence in the burial-ground occurred to him.
+
+“She is a brave woman,” he thought, “and, I fear, the only honest one
+of her brood.”
+
+He saluted her courteously, and rode down the steep street with its
+miserably sickly people staring after him, and flocking round his
+stirrup leathers with piteous outcries for alms.
+
+As he turned in his saddle and looked back whilst his horse slackened
+pace to pass over a little bridge, the clouds had lifted.
+
+Above in the distance was the crumbling indented outline of the little
+walled hamlet, brown and gray, solitary and drear, and midway on the
+slope below it was a dusky moving patch made on the white dust, a patch
+which was Muriella and the mules. Above head the sun was breaking
+through the clouds in pale faint gold.
+
+He had been a man of the world, but in his Slav blood romance and
+superstition slumbered; he liked to see in that breaking light an
+augury of hope; yet what hope could there ever be for him more than for
+that old dead body which had been jammed down beneath the clay?
+
+His spirit was heavy as he rode home, and did not rise with the
+exhilarating speed of his young horse. The yawning ditch, the gabbled
+prayer, the battering spade, the loneliness, the decay, the sense
+of unenjoyed and unpitied lives coming to an end there in the clay,
+generation after generation, century after century, with no object, no
+hope, no mourner, went with him painfully. Were he to die that evening,
+such would be his own end. They would bring him there, and shovel him
+in, and go away, glad to be rid of him; and the land of his birth, the
+land of his love, would not be with him, even by so much as a handful
+of its soil thrown in upon him.
+
+“I grow nervous; that brave woman shames me,” he thought.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+As the full moon rose over the eastern mountains that evening, coming
+from the unseen waves of the Adriatic Sea, the mule-cart was driven
+into the courtyard of the hunting-lodge as she had promised. She was
+alone in it; Lucio had slipped off when near the gates, and gone
+homewards by short cuts known to him across the woods. His heart was
+black against her with the rage of a wolf robbed of a fine meal off
+fawn or kid; he was thirsty to pour his chagrin into the yet blacker
+bosom of his elder brother.
+
+“Stop here to-night, child,” said old Caterina, coming out into the
+courtyard to greet her. “’Tis late, and you must be tired.”
+
+The girl demurred and resisted, but the old woman, who had known her as
+a swaddled baby, would take no denial. Cyrille came out of the great
+doorway, the light of the moon shining on his face, which looked to her
+so strange, so fair, so angelic, like the St Michael above a side altar
+in the Cathedral at her birthplace of Viterbo.
+
+She thought the stranger of another race, another humanity, to Lucio or
+herself. She had never seen a man so fair, so calm, so delicately pale,
+and yet so cool in courage as any tusked boar in the woods.
+
+She had noticed him much oftener and more curiously than he had noticed
+her; and she knew, as he did not know, the hate against him which
+smouldered in the breasts of all the people scattered through the
+solitudes of Le Selve.
+
+“Yes, rest here to-night,” he said, “we should be churls to let you go.
+Take her within, good Caterina.”
+
+Though her muscles were as steel, and her limbs as untiring as those
+of a deer’s, she was fatigued that night, and she did not care to sup
+off the black looks and bitter upbraidings of her uncles, who, to her,
+would make no secret of their disappointment and their rage.
+
+The old woman took her to the kitchen, and warmed, and fed, and
+welcomed her.
+
+“You are as strong as a man,” said Caterina enviously, for her own
+strength had also once been great.
+
+“Stronger than many men,” said Muriella with pride. “They know it all
+through the Selve.”
+
+“Strength is a guardian angel,” said the elder woman. “But a woman’s
+strength is a devil in disguise sometimes; she trusts to it; and
+lo!--it snaps, and she falls.”
+
+“That may well be,” said Muriella gravely.
+
+As she bent down over the brazier its red reflection shone on the fine
+outline of her brow and cheek, on the thickness of her raven hair, on
+the dark line of her up-curling lashes.
+
+“You are a morsel for a monarch,” thought Caterina, but she did not say
+it; it was known that the girl did not like such jokes.
+
+Instead, she said:
+
+“I am going to change the mattress in Ser Cirillo’s room. Come and give
+me a helping hand.”
+
+Muriella went without demur.
+
+When the lifting and changing of the mattress on the great mediæval bed
+with its gilded baldachino and crown was done, she stood and looked
+around her.
+
+“What are these?” she said, pointing to the telescope upon its stand
+and the celestial globe.
+
+“Uncanny things that bring no good to anyone,” answered Caterina. “That
+big tube lets you get up to the moon quite close; you can hear the
+people in it talking.”
+
+“Saints above us!” said the girl, much astonished; “I always thought
+the moon was a lamp.”
+
+“So do all folks as keep their senses,” said Caterina, with that
+contempt of ignorance for knowledge, which is of all scorn the most
+derisive.
+
+The eyes of Muriella surveyed the chamber with awe. It was very large,
+with vast windows, a tessellated floor, faded frescoed walls, and the
+grand bed with hangings in purple satin, once a cardinal’s. There were
+some oaken tables and dressers, and a few huge chairs with leathern
+seats, and from the centre of the ceiling hung a bronze Etruscan lamp
+found centuries earlier in the forest underground. On one of the tables
+stood an earthen jar filled with the autumn colchicum, and there were
+many books and many drawings. Bare and plain though the room was, it
+had that nobility which comes from ancient usage, and the indefinable
+grace in it which is given to their habitations by those whose pursuits
+are intellectual and whose tastes are artistic.
+
+“It feels like a church,” said Muriella to herself: she had always in
+her memory the churches of Viterbo, where she had gone with her mother,
+and above all of the Duomo of San Lorenzo there, where Guy de Montfort
+slew Henry of Cornwall before the high altar, and where an English Pope
+forced a German Emperor to hold his stirrup as vassal of the Holy See.
+This chamber, with its three great windows facing the west, filled
+her with a dim pleasure and veneration as the altars and aisles of San
+Lorenzo had done.
+
+But she looked for one thing which she did not see.
+
+“There are no arms,” she said to Caterina; “not even a hunting-knife.”
+
+“He has a revolver,” said the old woman. “But you are right, my dear.
+There should be more weapons nigh at hand. The _guardiani_ have all
+guns, it is true.”
+
+Muriella said nothing. She had little faith in the forest guards. Were
+they the stranger’s friends or foes? Of one’s own hand one is sure--but
+of any other?
+
+“Tell your master to get more defence for himself,” she said as she
+lingered on the threshold.
+
+“He is not my master,” said Caterina, huffed and on her dignity. “He
+is a mere servant of the Gandolfo, like me, like Fausto and Gian, and
+Falko, and Dreino, and all the rest.”
+
+“No; he rules those,” said Muriella quickly. “He is in authority over
+them. Perhaps not over you, but over them certainly.”
+
+“And God and the Gandolfo are over us all,” said Caterina testily.
+“Over him as well as the least of us. Come to supper, wench.”
+
+Supper was eaten in the wide long kitchen, black with smoke and age,
+with the sweet herbs and the dried pork hanging from the rafters, and
+a great fire burning in a hearth vast enough to hold a dozen men on
+its settles. There were more than a dozen men and women seated along
+the tables with the light from the brass _lucerne_ shining on their
+swarthy faces. The males looked greedily and glowingly at Muriella,
+but they did not delay the great business of their hungry jaws and
+thirsty throats to pay her compliments. Moreover, Caterina ruled them
+with a rod of iron, and tolerated no amorous follies in her presence.
+Bean-soup, roast kid, fennel and salsify and macaroni were their fare,
+washed down by a rough, stinging red wine. Their strong and comely
+women ate and drank as copiously as the men: they had few words to
+waste, and their white teeth worked like a mill. Italians have not
+always as much as they could eat, but when they get the chance they
+can feed like Gargantua’s self. Two Franciscan friars who were passing
+through the woods and slept at the fattoria as a matter of course,
+were as loudly munching and as thirstily drinking as the others, and
+conveying at short intervals remnants of meat and bread into their
+wallets, under pretext of feeding the dogs who lay under the table.
+
+“Trust the holy men to take all they can lay their hands on,” thought
+Caterina, noting their adroit manœuvres. Through as many centuries as
+the oaks without were old, monks of all orders had come and gone, and
+eaten, and drunk, and been feasted, and welcomed at those tables in Le
+Selve. The mendicant-friars were now few in number, and poor in worldly
+goods, but at all the Gandolfo’s houses they were ever as honoured as
+they had been of old, except in the innermost heart of Caterina.
+
+Cyrille supped later, alone, in a small stone chamber which opened out
+of his bedroom. His place at the steward’s table was filled by the
+under-steward, Fausto.
+
+Fausto was a Roman, with the head and face, the throat and shoulders,
+of a gladiator in the galleries of the Vatican; thickly-curling locks
+encircled his broad low brow, and rich blood mantled in his olive
+cheeks.
+
+He and the Franciscans spoke in cordial amity where they sat together
+at his end of his table.
+
+“You have a stranger here since we passed by this time two years,” said
+one of the friars.
+
+“We have,” said Fausto, and his tone was sullen.
+
+“A man from the North, a schismatic,” said the friar.
+
+“Of that I know naught,” replied Fausto.
+
+“A pagan, one may say,” added the monk. “Why did your good lord place
+him here? ’Tis a sin against the Holy Ghost.”
+
+Fausto shrugged his shoulders; he was no theologian.
+
+“Does he know aught of forestry?” asked the other Franciscan.
+
+“Yes,” said Fausto reluctantly. “But all new-fangled northern ways. We
+always used to cut wood when we wished, and fell timber when we wanted
+a sum of money. But under his rule there is to be none of that. Only
+one tree in eight, and never even so much as this save in November and
+December, and no pollarding or cropping, and no fuel-making, and even
+the furze and heather cut by rule, and rarely.”
+
+He snorted scornfully like an angry bull, and drank a draught of the
+rough red wine.
+
+He had taken the extreme step of going to solicit audience at the
+palace of his employers in Rome, but had not been received by anyone
+higher than the house steward, who in answer to his grievances had
+declared that he could not place them before their lords, since he knew
+well that in regard to Le Selve all the new-comer did was well done--an
+unanswerable Italian formula.
+
+“All the old feudal rights are swept away,” Fausto continued. “Rights
+of pasturage, of dead wood, of snaring, of shooting, of barking and
+burning, of grazing and broom cutting--all are done away with I tell
+you, holy men. ’Tis enough to make the folks of the soil rise and fire
+the forests. Maybe they will do it one day.”
+
+“To be sure, poor souls,” said the friar with compassion, “and the
+saints will excuse them.”
+
+Who would now give a Franciscan, when he passed through the Selve, a
+plump quail, or a young hare, or a brace of coots shot on the pond?
+
+“To be sure, indeed!” echoed Fausto; “whoever saw wild forest land kept
+as though it were a Madonna’s garden? No goats must crop, no mules must
+browse, no guns go on the marshes, no nests be taken high or low, no
+bark be stripped, no undergrowth be cut, no gins be set, nor netting;
+the Lord grant me patience! The people look to me for help. They come
+to me weeping and groaning; what can I say? What did he do when I had
+covered a teal with my gun last June? Struck the barrel up with his
+stick; and the bird away over the reeds. ‘It’s close time,’ said he.
+‘Close time, close time!’ By the Lord! was ever ‘close time’ heard of
+in those woods? Have we not shot when and where as we chose all the
+year round? Eh? Many’s the head of game I have got shooting a sitting
+hare or nesting plover. ‘Close time!’ Great powers above us! Who ever
+heard tell of the like since the hills were piled one a-top of another?
+But so it is now, and no redress against it to be got in Rome. ‘All
+that he does is well done’--no other answer but that. Damnation! I am
+nothing here any more. I am no more than a sere twig, than a strangled
+mole. I go to Rome; and what say they to me there? ‘All that he does
+is well done.’ They will not even hear or enquire, and even the wild
+boar hunting is stopped. He is a second St Francis. He talks with the
+pigs and the wolves!”
+
+“Do not speak the name of a saint of our Church in the same breath with
+a vile schismatic outside her pale,” said the elder Franciscan; and he
+was so greatly shocked that he drank out of the flask of wine nearest
+him instead of out of his glass tumbler, and only set it down when it
+was half empty.
+
+Muriella, where she sat beside the Massaja, was too far off to hear
+much that they said, but a little reached her, and she saw the lowering
+brows and tempestuous gestures of Fausto. She spoke across the length
+of the table to him.
+
+“Your pardon, Messir Fausto,” she said in a clear, steady voice; “you
+forget to add one thing. For all the feudal rights taken up, there
+has been paid compensation; it is but the abuse of them which has been
+checked and stopped.”
+
+Fausto looked over the lighted wicks of the brass lamps at the speaker.
+He was betrothed to the daughter of a wealthy vintner in Montefiascone,
+but that fact had not closed his eyes to the other fact that the niece
+of Alcide and Lucio had great and uncommon beauty.
+
+He had often seen her, for her uncles were favourites with him; men
+who understood that he was in his place for his own interests, not for
+those of Le Selve, or of the owners of Le Selve. “Between the wise a
+wink suffices,” says an Italian proverb; and that wink had been often
+exchanged betwixt him and Alcide and Lucio. The coldness with which
+she had always treated him, when any other young woman between the
+Apennines and the Liris was but too proud of his notice, had attracted
+him all the more by its rarity and offence, for _il bel Faustone_ was
+accustomed to easy conquests. He was disconcerted now by what she said
+to him; for he knew that it was true. He was saved from reply by a
+great clamour which uprose from the throats of all the farm servants
+and others present; for whenever yet since the world began would people
+of their kind admit that any compensation, however generous and just,
+could make amends for the loss of old and dear abuses enjoyed with
+impunity, and turned to profit unexamined?
+
+Such abuse is the very marrow of their bones, the supreme joy of their
+souls; no bird which is brought has the flavour of the bird which is
+poached; no oaken log which is given burns so boisterously and so
+warmly as the one which is hewn by stealth and stolen.
+
+In speaking as she did Muriella aroused against her all the wrath of
+her own class; she seemed to them an apostate allied with the enemy.
+Time, temperament, inclination, habit, were all arrayed against her;
+the dearest privilege of all who heard her was to pilfer and to
+plunder, a privilege confirmed by centuries of usage; who was she,
+forest bred if not forest born, to take the part of one who suppressed
+the time-honoured thefts of foresters?
+
+_L’uso fa legge_ in this country more than in all others.
+
+Who was she to set herself up against that time-honoured axiom?
+
+The hubbub was so great, the roar of crossing voices, and the scream of
+angry denunciation, were so loud that Caterina rapped sharply on the
+table with her horn-handled carving knife.
+
+“Silence, children! Who dares speak here? Quiet! Quiet at once, or no
+wine will be drunk by anyone to-morrow.”
+
+Under so dire a threat, which they knew would be inexorably carried out
+if they disobeyed her, the men and women held their peace, and hung
+their heads sheepishly. Even the mendicant-friars were mute.
+
+“Come, wenches,” said Caterina, and as she rose all the other women
+rose also and left the kitchen in her train, Muriella with them.
+Against the will of the Massaja there is no appeal in the household
+which she rules. When she had sent the servants to their several
+evening tasks, Caterina took the girl to her own room, and showed her a
+little closet out of it where she was to sleep.
+
+“You are plunging your arm into a hornet’s nest,” she said, with
+not unkind severity. “The woodlanders will never suffer you to go
+preaching against them and their rights.”
+
+“What they call rights are not rights,” said Muriella. “They are
+wicked, thievish, knavish ways. They should be grateful for all your
+gentleman does for them. He is merciful and just. They should rejoice.”
+
+Caterina gave a short gruff laugh like an owl’s hoot.
+
+“A clear cloudless night is a nice thing,” she answered, “but when a
+man is going to tryst with a neighbour’s wife, or waiting with his
+knife to avenge an old grudge, he likes a murky night better, doesn’t
+he, my dear? Ways are crooked, and plunder has been easy got in Le
+Selve. No one of the woodlanders wants to be set straight. Each one
+likes to crawl on his belly and go crooked as he chooses. Your uncles
+as much as any.”
+
+“That I know,” said Muriella. “But to crawl on the belly is for
+snakes, not men.”
+
+“Fine words, my dear, but they’ll cost you heavy,” answered the old
+woman. “Look after yourself, child; you’ll find that enough to do. I
+don’t like Faustone’s hot look at you. He is a lewd fellow, and stands
+pledged to wed with a wench in Montefiascone come next Easter.”
+
+Muriella smiled slightly. “Messir Faustone may look as he likes, and
+wed when he wishes. He will not trouble my peace, be sure.”
+
+“Best that nobody should,” said Caterina. “You should leave those bad
+men you belong to, and marry,” she added.
+
+Muriella shook her head. “Not I.”
+
+“Why not?” said Caterina. “There are only two things for a woman to
+choose between--the nuptial bed or the convent cell; and you are not
+one for a convent life, my wench.”
+
+“Nor yet one to be a man’s beast of burden,” said the girl. “It is a
+cow’s life; for ever yoked to the plough, though pregnant and in pain;
+for ever toiling over the furrows, though with udders throbbing and
+aching in milk. Not for me! Not for me! Death sooner!”
+
+“There are good men to be had,” said Caterina, not very firmly nor with
+much conviction.
+
+“Not in these woods,” said Muriella; “and even were one of our men
+good, what could he do? His woman is his for his pleasure and her pain,
+like the cow in the yoke.”
+
+“’Tis nature,” said Caterina.
+
+“I do not say otherwise,” replied Muriella, and she leant her arms
+on her knees and her cheeks on her hands, and looked into the fire.
+Nature was rude and rough, brutal and ugly, in its human shapes; only
+beautiful in its trees, in its waters, in its clouds. She did not know
+much, she could not read a line, she had never been out of the woods,
+but she could read human faces and human hearts, and she generally
+found what she read in them to be as foul as the forest swamps, where
+the newts and the adders lived, and the night-shade hung over the slime.
+
+Caterina went on with her spinning by the light of the three-wicked
+brass lamps.
+
+“If you won’t marry, I do not see what can become of you,” she said
+with some severity.
+
+Muriella smiled. “I am a good worker; I can earn my day’s wage any time
+anywhere. I would go away to-morrow, but I am loth to leave the woods.
+They are like father and mother, child and cradle, to me.”
+
+“That is rubbish,” said the older woman roughly. “The woods are dumb,
+like the beasts they harbour.”
+
+Muriella did not reply. They were not dumb to her, nor were the beasts
+either, but she was shy in speech, and the sympathies which moved
+within her were rather instincts than conscious feelings. She was not
+often capable of unravelling and explaining them, and the good Caterina
+did not invite such confidences.
+
+“You are a ripe cherry, and Fausto is a wasp,” said Caterina darkly,
+clinging to her ideas.
+
+“I am a cherry that stings like a nettle,” answered the younger woman
+with her slow, faint smile.
+
+“Don’t trust to that,” said the older woman. “Well, it is late; get you
+to bed.”
+
+In a few minutes’ time both she and her guest were sound asleep in the
+dreamless slumber of healthy fatigue.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+When the morning broke over the Umbrian Mountains on the far east,
+the girl was away on foot back to her uncle’s house, before the sun
+had risen high enough to be seen over the black ridge of the easterly
+woods. Her uncles cast evil looks at her on her arrival, but, to her
+surprise, no one said anything in allusion to the incident of the
+previous day. They owed her a heavy grudge, but they did not fritter it
+out in words. Vengeance would keep in the Selve. It is a good wine; the
+best of all wines, to their thinking.
+
+“I should be wiser to leave them,” she thought often in the day which
+followed. “I can get my bread anywhere.”
+
+But her heart clung to the woods as she had said; they were her
+friends: all she had to love. She knew every big tree in them, as a
+priest knows each one of his flock. She loved their liberty, their
+solitude, their silence, their brown deep pools, their impenetrable
+brakes where none but the wild pig could push his way, their green
+twilight, dim even in noonday, the profound stillness of their winter
+days and summer eves; she clung to these with all her heart, though
+without full measure or consciousness of why she did so.
+
+The hare with its large tender eyes, the bird with its flood of song,
+the meadow-sweet with its plume of snow, the birch with its bands of
+silver, the oak with its russet-brown trunk--these were all nearer to
+her than the family with which she lived. From the silence and shadow
+of the woods she derived a pleasure that was inarticulate but keen, and
+when she saw the mules straining under a rain of blows, the cows lowing
+in vain for their ravished offspring, the troops of weary goats toiling
+through the dust of the high-road, the suffering creatures seemed
+nearer to her than the men who cut their throats, or stunned their
+brains with repeated blows.
+
+To all those around her such victims were no more than bits of wood,
+and the torture of them was the chief pastime of young and old; but she
+had been created with a different soul. It was dumb, like that of the
+cows and the goats, but it was alive.
+
+To her own relatives she seemed a fool; only they knew that she was not
+a fool, because they could not fool her; and her brown, well-shaped
+hand had before now taken a cruel shepherd by the scruff of his neck
+and tossed him into a running stream, or on to a bed of nettles. For
+she was very strong, with that marvellous strength created by air and
+exertion alone in those whose food is but black bread and herbs.
+
+The work she had to do was of the roughest. The only rest she knew
+was when she sat down to the _telaio_, the board at which she weaved
+the rude hempen linen in use in the family. But this did not trouble
+her; she was young and active, and it would have hurt her more to have
+her energies and strength pent up unused than to strain them to the
+utmost in the outdoor labours of the croft and wold. The idea of going
+elsewhere appalled her, not from any peril which might lie in such
+wanderings, but from the force of habit and affection which bound her
+to the soil. She knew that in any other place she would feel like the
+homeless squirrel whom the forest fire has chased from its familiar
+nest in the old chestnut bole, and driven out to wander forlorn over
+charred moss and smouldering turf, knowing its homeward path no more.
+
+A few days later Cyrille saw her as he went on one of his daily rides
+through the woods. He stopped his horse and spoke to her.
+
+“I have not thanked you for what you did at San Vitale the other day,”
+he said, as she straightened her back and looked up at him from her
+kneeling posture, where she was cutting dead canes. “But I am afraid it
+may have made ill-feeling between you and your uncles. Has it done so?”
+
+“There is little love ever between us,” she answered. “Their thoughts
+are not my thoughts, nor their ways mine.”
+
+“Would it not be better to leave them?”
+
+“No doubt.”
+
+“Shall I ask Caterina to find you work with us?”
+
+“No, sir.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“It would not suit me.”
+
+She grew a little red as she answered. Messir Faustone had persecuted
+her with coarse courtship.
+
+“You cannot be happy amongst people whose conduct is alien and
+offensive to you,” he said.
+
+She drew down some more canes thoughtfully, and cut them through, and
+cast them on the ground beside others already cut.
+
+“Happy! what is that?” she said, with a genuine ignorance which had
+nothing cynical. “That is the way you talk. We do not.”
+
+Through Cyrille’s mind there drifted the line of Goethe--“When to
+the passing day,” etc.--and that other sentence of Théroigne de
+Mericourt--“Doth not the child smile in its mother’s face under
+Tiberius as under Trajan?”
+
+“There are natural joys, surely, given even to the humblest in all
+times,” he said, with a little hesitation.
+
+The beautiful mouth of Muriella curled with a little scorn.
+
+“Did you ever note the asses that come for the sand which is taken out
+of the pits?” she said curtly. “They are put to their work when they
+are foals. They never reach their full growth. Their eyes are always
+sore. Their coats are always full of dust. No one ever cleans them.
+Their hoofs are dry and split. Their bones are through their skin. They
+get nothing to eat but mouldy straw and dead leaves. They are beasts of
+burden, fed on blows. They have never a minute’s peace. The women of
+the poor are like them. They bring forth in hunger and pain, and what
+they bring forth is born to their burdens. That is why I will never
+marry, if that be what you mean.”
+
+He was astonished at the reflection and observation conveyed in the
+reply. It was like a miracle to hear any one of these people speak with
+compassion of an animal, and with any comparison of animal to human
+destinies.
+
+He was surprised also at the directness of the answer, for a direct
+answer is seldom given in these lands.
+
+He pointed to a speck of gold shining far away in the west.
+
+“Yonder, where you see that spark of light, lies Rome. There, more
+than one man who was born of a peasant mother has sat enthroned as a
+viceregent of God, and emperors and kings have kneeled to kiss his
+foot. What woman can say what she may bring forth? Who can tell what
+the fruit of her body may be?”
+
+She looked where he pointed, but she did not understand. Of Rome she
+had heard, but she had no notion of it, other than as a place whither
+the _vetturini_ went as the end of their journeys.
+
+The way is long and the gulf is deep which divides the cultured from
+the ignorant mind. Each speaks to the other in an unknown tongue.
+
+He knew that she had not grasped the vague consolation offered in his
+words. Silence fell between them, only filled by the sound of her rusty
+sickle hacking at the dry canes.
+
+“Why do you stay here?” she said suddenly. “Why? It is not your
+country?”
+
+“It is not; no.”
+
+“Have you no friends?”
+
+“Yes, many; but not here.”
+
+“You should go to them.”
+
+“Would that I could!”
+
+“Why cannot you?”
+
+He was silent. How could he make her understand his position? Still
+kneeling on the ground with her billhook hacking the canes, she looked
+up at him with sudden sympathy.
+
+“You killed someone?” she said in a whisper.
+
+That was the cause which made men fugitives here in Le Selve.
+
+“No,” said Cyrille; “I did worse--I tried to teach men, and they would
+not be taught. My rulers thought it a crime. They put me in prison. I
+escaped. I am here.”
+
+Muriella was silent, resting the billhook on the ground.
+
+“You try to teach men here,” she said after a while; “they will not put
+you in any prison, but they will put you in your grave. They are all
+against you. They are not worth teaching. You will not alter them if
+you try till your hair is white.”
+
+“I wish to do my duty to my employers and to their people.”
+
+“You are a just man. But they do not want your justice. They want to
+do as they have always done, and be as they have always been. The wild
+pigs like the swamp. They do not want to go with you to clean straw in
+a stable.”
+
+Cyrille was silent.
+
+“I used to believe,” he thought, “I have always believed, that the poor
+only needed to be shown the right road to gladly follow it; that they
+only wanted to be led to the water-side to willingly wash and be clean.
+But I begin to fear that I have deceived myself.”
+
+Aloud he said:
+
+“Were I on my own property, I might allow it to be ruined if I chose,
+though to do so would be, not benevolence, but weakness. Here, however,
+I have no choice. I am but the servant of others. I must enforce what I
+know to be right.”
+
+“They will kill you.”
+
+“That must be as it will. Threatened men usually live long.”
+
+“Not always; and not here.”
+
+Then she resumed her work, and the pallid rustling ribands of the canes
+fell beneath her rusty blade.
+
+“And whoever slays you,” she added as she worked, “will never be
+found. Everyone will make common cause with him. Everyone will be for
+him, risk all for him, hide him in their beds, swear falsely for him
+by the Madonna’s self. He will be beloved of all, and pass safely by
+signs from house to house, from village to village, from province to
+province. The law will never get hold of his little finger. The hatred
+of the stranger is more binding than oaths.”
+
+“Then why do you not share it?”
+
+“Why?”
+
+She did not know why. She had not asked herself. Certainly she ought
+to be on the side of her own people, and not his. Why was she not so?
+
+“You are in the right,” she said simply; “and you are alone against
+hundreds. I have never been at one with my father’s people. My mother
+was a woman of Viterbo. I lived with her in Viterbo till she died. She
+had left my father because he was wicked and cruel. She was good; so
+good! She taught me to see that the ways they follow here are evil.
+They are bad men, as my father was. And they have no love for the
+woods. You have. And now good-day. They had best not see you here. They
+will think we plot some mischief against them.”
+
+She bound all the cut canes together in one bundle, heaved them upward
+on to her head, and when loaded went away along the banks of the
+stream, walking erect and swiftly, the great sheaf swaying as she
+moved.
+
+So passed the women of Etruria and of Latium before her through
+these woods. The work of husbandry is the only work which does not
+change with time, but remains, at least in Italy, natural, noble, and
+beautiful in its attitudes and its simplicity.
+
+He looked at her as he might have looked at some statue exhumed from
+the soil. She was as sexless as a statue to him; he wore the ice armour
+of an absorbing and despairing passion, which left him neither sight
+nor sense for any more fugitive feelings.
+
+But she had shown a comprehension of his position, of his motives, of
+his difficulties, which was welcome in the isolation wherein he lived,
+and made him grateful to her, as he would have been for the sympathy of
+some other man. He discerned the intelligence which shone through the
+fog of her ignorance, and he appraised at its due value the courage
+which kept her in perpetual opposition to those with whom she lived.
+
+Her warnings did not influence his conduct, but he knew that they were
+founded on a just estimate of those around him. They weighed, however,
+but little upon him, because his philosophy was fatalistic, and he
+had that apathetic indifference to danger which comes from extreme
+unhappiness in life. When you have lost all except actual existence, it
+seems to matter little if sheer existence be taken as well.
+
+He had been now eighteen months in these woods, seeing no faces but
+those of peasants hostile to him, and exchanging no single word with
+anyone of cultured intelligence. Muriella was ignorant as any one
+of the sheep, who only knew their winter and summer tracks; but she
+understood with her heart, if not with her mind, and he found relief
+in telling her a little of those “old forgotten far-off things,” which
+seemed to him so many æons of time away, though they belonged in truth
+only to his own life of a year or two earlier. It did him good to call
+up that past, these scenes, all those who had been with him in his
+daily life; it relieved him of that dazed sense of unreality which came
+upon him as on men in the solitude of a condemned cell.
+
+Once he spoke of the woman he loved: not by name, but as Surrey might
+have spoken of Geraldine, with bated breath and unuttered prayer; and
+having thus spoken once, he did so again, and yet again, tracing her
+portrait in words, pressing the dagger of regret into his heart as
+lovers love to do in every age. And Muriella listened, growing pale,
+hanging on his words, till in her rude fancy an image shaped itself
+from his words clothed in starlight, crowned with the pale hellebore,
+fugitive, spiritual, unreachable. Imagination was dormant in her; it
+caught light at the flame of his higher intelligence. She could not
+see clearly by it, but she saw a ray before her feet--a soft faint
+green light like that of the glowworm in the woodland paths, the ray of
+awaking comprehension, with its companion pain.
+
+She did not know why she thought of this unknown lady thus. Perhaps it
+was because, when he first spoke of her, the hellebore was in blossom
+all over the awakening woods.
+
+It did not occur to him that he did a cruel thing in interesting thus
+in his fate a poor untutored maiden; he scarcely thought of her at
+all; he spoke to her because he read loyalty and sympathy in her gaze
+as in the eyes of a dog; and because he was weary of the long, dumb,
+friendless front in which his mind and memories were imprisoned.
+
+“You will go back,” she said to him one day when the grief which was in
+him broke down his courage and his resignation, and she saw great tears
+rise slowly to his eyes.
+
+He gave a gesture of despair. “Ah, never.”
+
+“Yes, you will go back.”
+
+“What should you know, poor child?”
+
+“I know nothing,” said Muriella. “But I pray for you.”
+
+He bent his head.
+
+“I thank you, dear.”
+
+She looked at him with a wistful, yearning look, which he did not
+interpret because his thoughts were elsewhere than with her.
+
+“I will pray always,” she said briefly. “I am sure you will go back to
+your own land one day.”
+
+“You say so to console me. Those whom I have offended do not pardon.”
+
+“May it not be put in their hearts to relent?”
+
+“As soon will yonder oaks rise and walk.”
+
+Yet, though his reason rejected it, her persistent faith entered into
+his heart against his reason, and was sweet to him with the sweetness
+of hope.
+
+After all, save death, nothing was absolutely hopeless.
+
+He was still young enough to see many changes in the world--wars,
+revolutions, dynasties, policies, might all alter the face of Europe,
+and with the larger national life, his own obscure individual fate.
+It was the wildest and vaguest dream, but it trembled on the edge of
+the unknown future, as far away in the west and the night, at times, a
+faint spark of light shone, which was the beacon above the sea at Palo;
+not a score of times in a year was that far-off speck visible, but to
+know that it was there lent a sense of safety and companionship even
+in the darkest murk of storm. So to him was precious that sense of hope
+in another soul; he could not share its belief, but it saved him from
+despair.
+
+“You will go back to your own land,” said Muriella; and the sound of
+the promise was sweet to his ear, though spoken by a poor ignorant girl
+who did not even know where his own land lay.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+In her, as in most women of her nation, religious faith was very
+strong, but vague. It was an intense force, blind and irrational, which
+had no more doubt of itself than she had that her feet were planted on
+the solid earth. But it was shapeless and dim as the lineaments of the
+Scythian Diana, which lay so long under the waters of the Lake of Nemi.
+The early years of her childhood had been happy, for her mother had
+been good, and Viterbo remained in her recollection transfigured in the
+golden light of a lost joy. It was to her a holy place: her mother lay
+there. Slowly there entered into her mind and matured in it the idea of
+going on pilgrimage to Viterbo, and there beseeching that the saints
+and archangels should grant the stranger his desire.
+
+It was a generous, an unselfish, almost an heroic thought, and it grew
+apace with her, as a sweet herb grows in a good soil, and the very pain
+it gave her stung her into pursuance of it. She had never been beyond
+the limits of the Gandolfo Woods since she had been brought under their
+broad green shadows one burning July day in her tenth year; but she
+knew well where her birthplace lay, to the north-east after crossing
+the last boundary of Le Selve.
+
+Pilgrims through many a century had come and gone in one continuous
+stream from that little walled city of the Popes to the greater Urbs
+on Tiber; but now the Popes go no more to Viterbo, and the sand chokes
+its fountains; and the course of life flows away from it, and leaves
+it like them dry and silent. This she did not know. It was to her
+the city of her childhood; the city of winged angels and clustering
+seraphim, and heavenly choirs and miracles and benedictions. She had no
+knowledge of its great past; of its fine art, of its sacred memories;
+but she loved it because there she had known a mother’s love, there had
+made a mother’s grave.
+
+In her solitary musings, during her long hours of toil, the resolution
+matured with her. Viterbo seemed, in her recollection of the long
+journey from it, immeasurably far off, far as the very moon itself. But
+from shepherds and cattle-drivers she learned the way to take, out of
+the woods and northward, to join the great high-road.
+
+She walked nine miles, over hills and across streams, to meet the
+public vehicle as it passed on its way to Ronciglione, and thence went
+to Viterbo itself. She had only a few coins in her pocket, for it was
+only when she sold a little piece of hempen cloth of her own making
+that she got a trifle. But she had some black bread and two onions in a
+handkerchief, and she was used to meagre food.
+
+After the green shade of the forest, the cloud of dust upon the roads
+and the grey desolate streets seemed to her very dreary; the city she
+remembered with its dancing waters and its glancing spires seemed to
+have vanished. Was the Spirit of God here more truly than in the aisles
+of pine and ilex? It was twelve years since she had been in these stony
+places, and her bare feet, used to the moss and the turf, ached as they
+trod the granite of the streets. But the Duomo was there, the temple
+dedicated to St Laurence, where she had knelt when a little child
+at her mother’s side, whilst the music of the Kyrie Eleison poured
+overhead, in sounds, winged like birds, which floated to the roof and
+passed out heavenward.
+
+The great church was silent as she pushed aside the leathern curtain of
+a side door. The day was almost done; here and there on the pavement
+knelt a lonely figure; a sacristan moved noiselessly, lighting the
+lamps in the nave. She went to a side chapel, which she remembered,
+whither her mother had always gone; and she knelt there, a tired,
+dusty, unnoticeable woman, and she prayed with all the force of her
+spirit. It might be no good. There might come no answer. But she would
+have done what she could.
+
+She prayed as women pray for their sick at Loretto and Lourdes.
+
+There was a silver lamp above the altar; it swayed slowly to and fro.
+She bowed her head down upon the stones, and covered her face with her
+hands.
+
+“Holy ones, take the only thing I have,” she murmured. “I am poor and
+of no account, but hearken unto me. I give you all I have. Grant him
+his heart’s desire.”
+
+And she loosened from her throat a little agate heart. It had been her
+mother’s; it was hung round her neck by a plaited tress of gray hair.
+She laid it down under the silver lamp upon the altar; it was her only
+treasure. In all the world she had nothing else. It looked very small,
+very poor, very valueless, as it lay, dark and worn, in the light of
+the lamp. But she thought they would not despise it or reject it. They
+would know it was all she had.
+
+In a little while the church was fully lighted; the service of vespers
+began. She got up from her knees and walked away down the side aisle,
+leaving the agate heart and the braid of her mother’s hair behind her.
+Her throat ached with silent, hidden weeping.
+
+She slept that night in a poor place in the town that she knew, and
+left the gates at daybreak in the public vehicle, packed close between
+other women and screeching fowls, and wailing babes, and crowded crates
+of ducklings, on her homeward way to the cross-road which led to Le
+Selve.
+
+She felt as if her heart was of lead now that her amulet was no longer
+warm against the pulses of it. But she did not regret what she had
+done. In a few hours the walls and towers of Viterbo had faded from the
+distance, and she saw again the dark waters of the little lake of Vico,
+and the chestnuts and oak forests of the Ciminian slopes.
+
+She left Ronciglione on foot, and on her homeward way met a horseman,
+who, passing her, stopped his horse.
+
+“Have you thought of what I offered to you last week?” he asked.
+
+“No,” replied Muriella.
+
+“How long will it be before you do?”
+
+“As long as the earth is old.”
+
+“I am a bad foe, Muriella.”
+
+“Perhaps you are a worse lover.”
+
+“I would give you a string of pearls and a box of clothes.”
+
+“Keep the pearls for your betrothed and the clothes for a beggar, and
+ride away to your _dama_ at La Storta.”
+
+“Where have you been?”
+
+“That is naught to you.”
+
+“You look jaded and worn.”
+
+“I am fresh enough to make your ears tingle if you molest me. Get you
+gone to your lawful allegiance.”
+
+Fausto scowled, and dug his heels into the flanks of his good grey
+horse. He was not used to be flouted or thwarted.
+
+She looked at herself in the brown shallow water of the river’s bed,
+clear as a mirror, and wondered what Faustone saw that made him so hot
+in her pursuit. She did not see any good looks in herself; she only
+saw her sun-browned skin, her dark, rough hair, her strong column-like
+throat, her brown arms and hands, her bare feet wet with dew and green
+with moss; she seemed no more to herself than a rude bit of wood shaped
+into human likeness, such as they found sometimes in the Etruscan
+tumuli. Fausto might find her handsome, and rest his wicked hot eyes
+upon her; but she saw nothing in herself.
+
+She reached her home, after a long and exhausting walk, and, since the
+under-steward had seen her, made no secret of her journey to Viterbo.
+They were all angry that she brought them nothing, but otherwise the
+matter had no interest for them.
+
+She shut her hope up in her soul and waited. In the saints’ good time
+the saints would set him free.
+
+“You mope, girl. What is amiss?” said her uncles to her.
+
+“Do I not do my quota of work?”
+
+“Nay, we do not say you fail in that.”
+
+“Then what matter my looks or my ways to you?”
+
+She would brook no interference. She knew that she was worth much more
+than her keep to them, and they knew it too; if the men had shirts to
+their backs, and the children had as much bread as they could eat, they
+owed it chiefly to her.
+
+“If she likes to be the light-o’-love of that stranger ’tis no matter
+to us,” said the women.
+
+“She’d do better to be Fausto’s,” replied Alcide. “We’d get a pig out
+of him come winter.”
+
+They would have seen with a favourable eye her welcome of the Roman’s
+wooings; he was a man after their own taste, who bought and sold, and
+trafficked and lied, and could fake a colt and outwit a dealer with the
+best of his time.
+
+“She may take her _damo_ where she likes best. But if she tell tales
+she will be sorry for it,” said Alcide to himself, and set himself to
+watch her.
+
+To do so was easy, for they knew where her day’s work lay every morning
+when she went out to it; it was nearly always the same according to
+season. Once or twice he saw her speak with Cyrille. But he saw nothing
+which looked to him like amorous intercourse. The more sure therefore
+was he that she played informer to the foreigner’s command.
+
+“We have reared a cuckoo,” he said to his wife; but the woman, wiser
+and shrewder, answered:
+
+“We did not rear her. She came full grown or nearly so; and she is not
+of the temper that makes spies.”
+
+Alcide, however, remained of his own opinion, and Lucio shared it. If a
+man and a woman, both young in years, did not talk of love, what could
+they talk of when they were together if not of others? Once Lucio got
+near enough to hear what they said, and to see that there were some
+feet of shallow water between them as they spoke, Muriella cutting
+reeds, and the steward, dismounted, leaning against a tree.
+
+“That is a grasshopper warbler,” said the latter, as a small bird flew
+up from the pool. “Take care not to cut where they have built.”
+
+“I see the nest,” she answered. “’Tis like a little basket, and the
+stalks run through it. There are many of these birds here.”
+
+“They must mean other than they say,” thought the eavesdropper; and
+he continued to listen, but all he heard was talk of birds and their
+haunts, and the like nonsense, until he saw the rider mount and move
+away.
+
+The part of the wood where the pools and marshes were, lay lower and
+more level, spreading onward till it reached the Vico lake, and poured
+into it its many trickling streams and hidden springs. In the swamps
+wild hogs and buffaloes waded, grunted, bathed, and bellowed, and over
+many a square league the brown spikes of the bulrush and the purple
+plumes of the reeds reigned in undisturbed sovereignty. A raised
+causeway of piles and stones ran across it, of which the foundations
+were of date remote as the Antonines; and once off that path such
+intimate knowledge as the woodlanders possessed was necessary before
+venturing amongst the network of _padule_. There was nothing on the
+surface of it to mark out the solid land from the bog.
+
+“I wonder your Northman does not want us to pay for the reeds!” said
+Lucio, showing himself a little later over the as yet unblossomed
+bulrushes.
+
+“No one need pay aught for aught,” replied Muriella. “So long as they
+take only in season, and do not cut to waste, there is nothing grudged.”
+
+Lucio snorted with scorn.
+
+“Whoever cut reeds by rule or asked leave to rake in dead wood? The
+marshes are free to us as to that bull-calf.”
+
+He pointed to a half-grown buffalo turning on its back in a shallow of
+sand and water.
+
+“So you say,” replied Muriella calmly. “The lords of the soil and the
+stream do not see it so.”
+
+“You unnatural wench! Do you go against your own folks and their
+rights?”
+
+“What rights are denied you?”
+
+“We have the right to take,” said Lucio furiously. “Your upstart
+whiteface makes a show of charity in giving us what is our own.”
+
+“The land is no more our own than it is yon bull-calf’s,” said
+Muriella, glancing at the uncouth play of the creature in the shallow
+water.
+
+“You insolent jade!” shouted Lucio. “I will duck you head foremost!”
+
+“Try,” said his niece, where she stood between the bundles of reeds;
+and she folded her hands on her bosom and waited, the edge of the
+sickle turned outwards.
+
+Muttering many oaths, he let her be, and went away, shying a stone at
+the poor calf, which stumbled up on its uncertain legs and hobbled
+away, splashing awkwardly through the shallows to regain its herd.
+He was not as clever and resolute a man as his brother; he fretted
+and swore about matters which Alcide settled with a lead pellet or a
+stiletto blade.
+
+“Could you not find some occupation for that poor girl Muriella?” asked
+Cyrille of the Massaja some days later.
+
+“Occupation there is plenty, sir,” said Caterina curtly. “But you know
+her folks little if you think we can meddle with them and go scot free.”
+
+“But she is not their slave?”
+
+“No; not as one may call a slave; but they have housed and fed her
+ever since she was ten, and they have the first right to her. No one
+can gainsay that. If she were to come here, and have bed and board and
+wage, they would stick a knife in her and in me, most likely. They
+would hold she had disgraced them. Folks don’t go out to service here
+as they do in the cities. And what would they do without her? Who
+ploughs, who sews, who washes, who keeps the soul in all their lazy,
+dirty carcasses if not this one poor wench?”
+
+“I know; but it is unjust.”
+
+“Most things are, sir, in this world,” replied Caterina; “she was
+brought there when she was too small to choose, and now she must stay
+where she was put, like the grain in furrow. There is only one thing
+that she might do----”
+
+“What is that?”
+
+“She might take the veil. If she did that they would not dare to
+say aught against it, for they would know they would burn in fire
+everlasting if they did.”
+
+“Why should she not marry?”
+
+“Nay, sir; she will not marry such as alone would marry her. Only a
+_ciociaro_ would take her, and ’twould be but a change of masters.”
+
+“Poor girl!” said Cyrille, with regret. He knew what to marry a
+_ciociaro_ implied.
+
+“You had better not think about her, sir,” said Caterina, with
+significance. “Your thoughts can do her no good.”
+
+“They shall do her no harm, I promise you.”
+
+“Fine words! Fine words!” said Caterina, who, though she thought him a
+man above others, was doubtful of his regarding a good-looking maiden
+in any other manner than as the bee looks at the rose.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+The position of a steward in Italy, if he be an honest man, is
+necessarily a position of continual friction in relation to the
+tenantry, and above all to those who, as in so many instances, pay in
+kind and pay in labour. Their perpetual effort is to cheat, and his to
+frustrate their cheating, for even if he be himself a trickster to his
+lord, it is not to his interests that their tricks should succeed.
+
+To Cyrille, with his political views, his poetic communism, and his
+genuine tenderness of temper, it was a daily torment to mark, track,
+and prevent the continual petty thefts and crooked intrigues of those
+forest-squatters. More than once he was on the point of writing to
+Adolfo Gandolfo, and begging him to tender his resignation to the old
+prince. But many reasons restrained him: in the first place, gratitude;
+in the second, that natural reluctance of every high-spirited man to
+confess himself beaten; besides this, there was always a feeling which
+had entered into him of affection for the trees and for the animals,
+and a great sense of repose in the dim green solitudes which closed in
+around his refuge. If he went away, in impatience and thanklessness,
+what could await him? Only the stifling life of cities, the sordid
+struggle of intellect with want. Where again if he left Le Selve would
+he see the light of morning on the snows of Soracte? Where again behold
+the evening’s gold gleam on the line of the sea by Ostia? Where smell
+the bourgeonning blossoms of the lime? Where stroke the velvet antlers
+of the deer? Where watch the nightingales pluck the small white moths
+off the pale azure discs of the succory? Where see the day decline in
+pomp behind the hoary boughs of oaks which as saplings saw the armies
+of Theodoric and of Constantine pass beneath their sapling shadows; the
+spell of Rome held him and the sorcery of Nature; of that Nature which
+is eternally young, yet allied with the greatest ages of the earth.
+
+The year did not pass without the warning of the women to him being
+verified. Once a bullet whistled past him as he rode, and cut off the
+oak leaves at his shoulder. But the forest growth hid the would-be
+assassin from his sight; and another night, when he rode over the
+wooden bridge often used by him in returning homeward, the planks gave
+way beneath his horse’s tread, and the animal and he escaped by a
+miracle from a bad fall on to jagged rocks and into deep water; and
+when he examined it by daylight it seemed to him that the timbers had
+been sawn nearly asunder, so as to give way under vibration. But of
+the guilty persons there was no trace. What affected him more was when
+his dog, a greyhound of large size and great beauty, sent to him by
+Gandolfo, was found dead one noonday stretched out on the terrace, with
+all the signs of death, by a poison which the woodlanders extracted
+from adders which they caught and robbed of their venom, treating it
+as they did also the poison of the night-shade, and the hemlock, and
+the corn-crowfoot, in a manner learned by oral recipes handed down from
+remote Etruscan times. It was only the eldest living son who received
+that teaching from the head of the family, and in turn passed it to
+his heir, with many another dark secret of subterranean waters, and
+buried passages, and rock tombs and hollow ways in which a fugitive
+from justice might dwell safely many a year. Muriella had no doubt as
+to who had slain the greyhound; for Alcide was so good-natured, so
+industrious, so quiet, by comparison with his ordinary habit, that she
+felt sure he had done some evil successfully. Cyrille offered rewards
+and made investigations as to the dog’s death uselessly. Concerning
+his own danger he said nothing; he sent workmen to mend the bridge,
+affecting to take for granted that the timber had been rotten and old.
+If any were disappointed by his escape, they kept their chagrin to
+themselves and bided their time.
+
+Vengeance is like a good Falernian or Chianti wine; it only mellows
+with keeping.
+
+After the pleasure of trapping and shooting, in and out of season,
+the main and favourite diversion of the squatters of Le Selve was
+smuggling; the smuggling of all kinds of game netted out of season,
+of ingeniously-hidden wines, carried across the woods from the Este
+districts to the very gates of Rome, or as far as Nepi and Corneto;
+of charcoal burned by themselves from the stolen wood of the violated
+groves around them, and taken in sacks under the walls of villages and
+little towns; even of the very pips of the pine-cones baked in their
+ovens they made traffic, and carried them away and sold them for what
+they could get; they took everything across the forest by night, with
+their poor starved cows or buffaloes harnessed to the wagons; and it
+was not only the small gains which were dear to them but the pleasure
+in the contraband-dealing, and the relish of cheating the _gabellotti_
+at the gates of the capital itself. More than one of them had stabbed a
+guard and taken to the hills, where such a fugitive could no more be
+traced than if he were an adder under a pile of stones. The ground was
+honeycombed with subterranean places, in the past Etruscan sepulchres,
+now the storehouses of these men, their entrances known to them alone,
+and their retreat safe from discovery.
+
+“Every man may be betrayed, for Christo was,” said Alcide once; “but an
+outlaw is almost always safe and welcome.”
+
+It was quite true. There is an universal feeling amongst the people of
+fraternal unison against the law and the fiscal agents; and the little
+children will carry bread and wine to such a fugitive from justice and
+never speak, or tell where they have found him. Whatever feud there
+might be between the families in other matters, they are of one accord,
+of strict and mutual support concerning their enterprises in smuggling
+and in brigandage.
+
+“This contraband carrying is an organised conspiracy,” said Cyrille to
+the under-steward, when he had become aware of the practice.
+
+“No doubt,” said Fausto, with a gesture of indifference.
+
+“And you have never attempted to put it down?”
+
+“No; before me nobody ever did. Why should I?”
+
+“Do you think it right?”
+
+Fausto shrugged his shoulders. “I do not say whether it is right or it
+is wrong. It has always been done. The people would not like it meddled
+with, be sure. They regard it as one of their rights.”
+
+“But it is a bad, dangerous, and dishonest life.”
+
+“They do not see it so. It pleases them.”
+
+“And you connive at it?”
+
+“It hurts nobody,” said Fausto sullenly. “There is no thief so big as
+the Revenue.”
+
+Cyrille said no more; but he resolved to make an example of the first
+convoy which he could surprise. He saw that Fausto, for some gain of
+his own, or out of personal fear, closed his eyes to the practice. He
+determined to lie in waiting himself to hear the wagon wheels passing
+over the road on the first moonless night after this conversation. He
+understood why he had so often heard afar off in the still hours after
+midnight the faint grinding of wheels on rutty paths, and the far-off
+voices of swearing men. He took up his stand where three woodland paths
+met, on the edge of the only road which led across the woods of the
+Gandolfo to Montefiascone northwards, and south-westwards to Rome. He
+had reason to believe that it was a frequent route with the forest
+thieves.
+
+He was alone, for he trusted no one enough to ask their company. It was
+pitch dark; the moving of night birds and beasts was audible as they
+stirred in branch or brake; a deep runlet of water fell down through
+the undergrowth, rippling and splashing. He had a seven-chambered
+revolver in his belt; he hoped not to be forced to use it. It was
+extremely cold, as nights in February are even in the south; but he
+had known what it was to pace up and down on guard on the terraces
+of Gatschina when snow was six feet deep around, and the cold of the
+Patrimony of St Peter had small terrors for him. He stood immovable,
+his back against the trunk of an ilex tree; his repeating watch told
+him that five quarters had passed since he came there. He was not sure
+that the smugglers were out this night, though he had reason to believe
+so. It might well be that he had come there for nothing; but he was
+resolved to wait until the dawn.
+
+At last, in the darkness and stillness, he heard the distant sound of
+cleft hoofs moving through muddy earth, and springless carts groaning
+as the rough wooden spokeless discs of the wheels alone can groan on
+their rusty axles. All the soldier in him was roused; he had not felt
+so much alive since the day that he had passed the frontier of his
+country. They were distant perhaps half a mile. By one of these three
+paths fronting him they were forced to enter on the high-road; there
+was no other. Nearer and nearer came the creaking of the carts, the
+crushing of the soil, the low voices of men: he waited until he could
+hear the heavy breathing of the cattle, then he flashed a lantern on
+them, and levelled his revolver.
+
+“It is I--halt!” he said in a clear voice.
+
+They instinctively pulled the buffaloes backward, and fell back
+themselves one against another. They thought he had guards with him.
+The cattle paused willingly, the gasping of their breath, the blowing
+of their nostrils, sounding painfully on the stillness.
+
+“Stir not a step, or you are dead men,” he said to them. “You are
+carrying contraband.”
+
+He was by no means certain what they had with them, but his venture
+sped home. They had crapes over their faces. They had charcoal and
+game in their carts. They huddled together in fear, and did not speak
+lest he should recognise their voices. There were three carts, yoked
+severally to four buffaloes and two cows; the men were but three. They
+had no firearms, only their knives. They eyed him evilly, but they were
+afraid to strike him. His revolver, they knew, would be quicker than
+their steel; and they thought that he had armed force behind him hidden
+in the brake. They muttered under their breath dreadful curses against
+him, but they did not rebel.
+
+“Take your carts to the Fattoria,” he said. “Go on before me. If you
+stir out of the road a bullet will find you.”
+
+Sullenly but timidly they pulled their cattle across out of the
+high-road, and into the avenue which led to the house. He walked behind
+them, his revolver covering them, as they knew and felt in every nerve
+of their spines. Cattle move slowly on the best of roads, and this road
+was thick with half-frozen mud, and crossed by runlets of water, and
+the beasts splashed heavily through the slush on their leaden-footed
+way.
+
+But at last the half-mile of distance was traversed, and the lamp
+burning before a shrine on the balustrade before the house shone across
+the sward like a beacon. To his infinite surprise, no one of the men
+had attempted any rebellion.
+
+He fired a shot in the air, and all the members of the household
+tumbled up from their slumbers and came out, as he had bade them do
+when they should hear the signal, with arms and torches. He caused
+the cattle to be stabled, the carts with their loads locked up in an
+outhouse, and consigned the prisoners to one of the strong-rooms made
+for such use in earlier ages. When he saw their faces he recognised in
+one the peasant Alcide. He was amazed at the extreme ease of his own
+victory; what to do with it was more perplexing.
+
+“Take them bread and water, Caterina,” he said to her.
+
+“Not I, sir. Let the rogues fast.”
+
+“If you will not, I must.”
+
+She obeyed, with great reluctance.
+
+“Think of yourself, sir,” she said when she returned. “Get to rest.”
+
+“No, I shall remain up; I do not altogether trust our household. There
+is a great deal of tribal feeling in your woods.”
+
+“Is that why you went alone, sir?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+Caterina groaned aloud. “’Tis sheer madness. I wonder they did not
+knife you like a sheep. You trust too much to that little steel
+honeycomb of yours.”
+
+“One can only die once,” said Cyrille, and thought: “I died when I left
+my love and my country.”
+
+He remained the rest of the night awake and armed; seated by the
+kitchen fire, where he could hear the slightest movement which might
+take place in any of the long stone passages and basement chambers.
+
+There was no sound anywhere till the cocks crowed at dawn. An hour
+after sunrise he had the men whom he had captured brought before him.
+In one he recognised, as he expected to do, the peasant Alcide; the
+other two were neighbours of his, young, unintelligent, ill-looking
+boors who had followed Alcide’s lead.
+
+The dark-browed, lean, unwashed man scowled at him as he had done in
+the death-chamber of the old Adamo; his eyes were like jewels and
+scintillated dangerously. He had been disarmed when brought there, but
+his fingers fingered nervously at his hairy breast seeking the poignard
+which was always used to lie within his belt. Cyrille cross-questioned
+him minutely, but failed to get any confession out of him.
+
+“You took me in the act,” he said sullenly. “Make what you can of that.”
+
+In his own mind Alcide was certain that his niece had betrayed him;
+but he would let no word escape him which could be construed into
+confession or facilitate condemnation.
+
+The theft of the charcoal and game, and the intent to run them
+contraband, were evident, and he did not deny them; but he did not
+admit either. He left his accuser to collect evidence as he could.
+
+There was enough of it to justify Cyrille in sending him and his
+companions to the nearest guardhouse, which was a dozen miles on the
+other side of the woods.
+
+It would have been the wisest course to pursue, and Alcide would have
+had a year or more of prison; his companions, more excusable, as
+tempted by him, perhaps less.
+
+But his present judge was a man who held the creeds of Tolstoi;
+who abhorred the eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth of modern
+legislation; who had infinite compassion for the poor and ignorant, and
+even for the most vicious. He took a course which he thought would be
+just both for his employers and to the thief.
+
+“I could send you to take your trial,” he said in conclusion, “and your
+trial would undoubtedly end in your conviction. I perhaps shall do
+wrong if I spare you. But my employers leave me large discretion, and
+I shall exercise it in your favour. I confiscate the stolen charcoal;
+it is the property of my masters; and the game I shall send to the
+hospitals of Rome; but I will restore to you your carts and cattle, and
+I will set you free. All I ask of you is to offend no more.”
+
+Alcide’s face did not change; he shrugged his shoulders slightly; the
+other two offenders fell on their knees and blessed the saints, and
+swore their willingness to lead a cleanly life.
+
+“Of what are you thinking, Alcide?” said Cyrille, looking at the dark
+savage, sunburnt face of Muriella’s uncle, with its glittering eyes
+and its deep lines of dirt and smoke.
+
+“I was thinking that you have not learned much since you have come
+here!” replied the man in tones of rasping contempt.
+
+“You mean that I am a fool to spare you?”
+
+Alcide showed his white even teeth flashing in his swarthy face with a
+grin of satirical scorn. He did not answer in words.
+
+“I fear that I am,” said Cyrille. “But I have given you my word. I
+cannot withdraw it now. If any hear of this matter it will not be from
+me. Go. You are free. Your knife will be given back to you. Treat your
+cattle decently if you know how; and if I take you, when engaged in
+this work, a second time, I shall not spare you.”
+
+Alcide turned on his heel, and went out of the chamber without a word
+of gratitude.
+
+“The girl betrayed me to him,” he thought. “Thank him? Not I! What does
+he here? Interloper, and spy, and meddler. He drew me before him last
+night as if I had been an ox. I will be quits with him before long.”
+
+“He dealt better with you than you deserve, you gallows-bird,” said
+Caterina, as he went across the courtyard. Alcide showed his white even
+teeth again like a wolf’s, and grinned in her face.
+
+No one had betrayed him. Cyrille’s own observations had alone furnished
+him with indices which he had followed up to proof. But the Italian
+always believes betrayal to be the cause of all disaster, public or
+private, and these men were convinced that they had been betrayed;
+their suspicions settled, naturally, on Muriella. “She was ever an
+unnatural, ill-feeling wench,” said Alcide. “Always caring for birds
+and beasts and reptiles, and frowning where we laughed. It is but of a
+piece with her to serve the stranger and rob us all.”
+
+But he did not let her see his suspicions since he had no confirmation
+of them; he, indeed, went out of his way to be civil and flatter her.
+“If you can make our poor girls like yourself we shall thank you,” he
+said more than once. “’Tis those good ways your mother taught you; they
+were never in our wild blood.”
+
+Muriella weighed his compliments at their right worth, and distrusted
+all he said; but she did not know how passionately he hated her. He was
+a bad man, she knew, but after all he was her father’s brother, and had
+given her a home, such as it was. It was miserable in many ways, and
+made more so than it need have been by filth and want of thrift; but it
+was a home; it saved her from that errant and lonely life which brings
+down on any woman so much contempt and derision, and in a rough way
+they estimated her use to them and feared to lose her.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+The winter passed, and no one of the threats against the steward had
+been fulfilled. The woods with earliest February were again filled with
+the fragrance of the hellebore, earliest and sweetest herald of the
+spring.
+
+“They will do nothing now, the days are lengthening,” thought Muriella,
+as her nostrils breathed that pungent perfume of the pale green bells,
+which she associated in fancy with that lady of the north whom she
+vaguely and wistfully envied. But though she strove to persuade herself
+of this she felt no certainty.
+
+Short days or long, dark nights or fine, are all one and the same to
+those who hate another, and the quietude and comparative industry
+of her relatives filled her with apprehension as to what evils such
+unwonted virtues might pertain.
+
+Her uncles were certain she was a spy of the steward’s, and said
+nothing before her which they would not have had repeated from
+the tree-tops. But the wife of Alcide was imprudent, and let dark
+innuendoes fall from her.
+
+“White birds that come from the North do not always live to go back
+there,” she said once, and once again said, “Le Selve is full of trees,
+but the trees can bear three fruits--fire, and steel, and lead.”
+
+Muriella knew that they could wait patiently for years when they
+meditated a revenge, but that they would strike in the end as
+unerringly as the gerfalcon struck the wood-pigeon.
+
+Meantime the saints were long in answering; perhaps what she had done
+had been too insignificant, yet she could not think so; they would be
+too generous to despise, too merciful to reject it.
+
+“Yes,” she repeated to herself again and again that winter-time; “I
+will pray always.”
+
+Weeks and months went by, and she had no sign from heaven. Once she
+said to Cyrille:
+
+“Do they not call you home?”
+
+“No,” he answered in surprise; “what makes you think of things which
+can never be?”
+
+“You will go home,” she repeated.
+
+Yet if her prayer were granted, she knew that he would go away from
+these woods for ever; that his unknown love, of whom she thought as
+crowned with green hellebore and clothed with the stars, would stretch
+her arms out from the mists and take him.
+
+Meantime the beautiful springtime came and went, with the song of
+nightingales in the laurel shadows, and the cuckoos calling from the
+pines, and the marvellous flora of the Agro Romano in blossom all
+through the woods.
+
+The long hot summer succeeded, with water-lilies, white and gold, on
+all the pools. In these woods there is something of a tropical heat;
+their deep shade does not bring coolness, for it excludes air; it
+is delightful to the eyes, but to the lungs humid and oppressive.
+Oftentimes for weeks not a breath stirs the pendant foliage; when
+there is fever and ague on the plains around Rome, there is danger
+here in the forest in the sultry nights and on the stagnant waters. In
+the higher woods there is less danger, but down in the marshes where
+the mosquitoes hum in vast clouds, and the swamps dry up and crack,
+and the horse-flies swarm in myriads, and the toads and the frogs
+die of drought, it were as much as life were worth to sleep there
+through a summer night. There was much sickness this year amongst
+the woodlanders, and Cyrille supplied as far as he could the place
+of medical aid. The remedies for such fevers were simple; and the
+greatest obstacle he encountered was in the bodily filth of the people
+and their fear of fresh air. They, who in health worked all day long
+in the air in all weathers, falling sick huddled together in a foul
+corner, and shut their wooden windows close. But though he saved their
+lives, they hated him all the more. The report spread amongst them that
+he had poisoned the watersprings because he wanted the woods clear of
+the squatters; and this preposterous tale found willing and credulous
+believers.
+
+“Truly,” he thought bitterly, “I had better let them drop like
+murrained sheep. For what crime does one pay half as dear as for the
+madness of trying to serve one’s fellow-men?”
+
+But he continued to do what he could, by day and by night, in despite
+of their evil glances and their muttered curses, and of the fingers
+thrust out at him in exorcism.
+
+Thus in the long course of breathless weeks the summer drew to an end,
+and every day the thirsty glades looked for rain, and the parched pools
+and dried-up waterways hungered for the first storm in vain.
+
+It was towards the close of a hot day in September. The air was heavy
+and the sky dull. He had been out all day on his usual rounds, and came
+in as the sun set to his evening meal. He was thirsty and tired; he had
+eaten nothing all day. The colourless leaden heat made him think of
+summer on his native plains, and even the distant horizons were veiled
+by the gray malarious vapours rising from the soil. The courtyard
+seemed to him unusually still as he passed through it. There was no one
+about, not even a stable-lad.
+
+Only a man on a mule, with a horn slung at his shoulder, and some sacks
+on his saddle, was riding out of one of the gates he entered. He saw it
+was a letter-carrier from Ronciglione.
+
+The post was a rare thing in these districts; scarcely anyone, in an
+area of a hundred miles square, could read, still less write. Once
+in half a year Caterina received news from a son who was a trader in
+Brazil, and another son who was a soldier in Eritrea, and Fausto had
+occasional correspondence concerning stallions or brood mares to be
+bought or sold, or bulls and rams to be had for the hiring, but these
+were very rarely; business was done on horseback and by word of mouth
+in these districts; and to Cyrille himself no single message had ever
+come since he had first entered the shadows of Le Selve. Absolute
+silence had fallen between him and his own land and his own people;
+he hoped that they believed him dead. The Gandolfo had promised him
+secrecy as to his existence and employment, and the most that he could
+hope for was that he might be allowed to remain in the poor substitute
+for resignation which is to be obtained from constant occupation and
+undisturbed work.
+
+His mother had been in her grave some years. There was no one living,
+he thought bitterly, who loved him well enough to endeavour to learn
+his fate. His family, doubtless, and all those who had once formed his
+world, thought him dead, and better dead, in some nameless foreign
+grave.
+
+Therefore his heart stood still with surprise and emotion as he
+returned this day from his usual rounds, and was met by Caterina, who
+cried to him:
+
+“The post-boy has been here, sir; the post from Ronciglione; dead beat
+he was, and glad enough of bit and sup; he brought a letter for you;
+’tis on your table in your chamber.”
+
+He ascended the staircase with beating pulse, and noticed not that the
+curious good-will of Caterina brought her up after him and kept her at
+the doorway.
+
+There was a large square envelope lying on the table, stamped with the
+postmarks of his native land, and sealed with a cypher which he knew.
+
+He tore it open.
+
+All it contained was a photograph of a woman’s head and shoulders; a
+likeness of the face which was always in his dreams by night and by
+day. Under the portrait was written:
+
+  “_Je seraià Rome en hiver._
+                      “_Marie._”
+
+It was to him as though heaven had opened. His limbs shook as with
+palsy, his breath came in deep-drawn sobs; he pressed the portrait to
+his lips and to his heart.
+
+He was no more alone. He was no more without a future. He did not ask
+or care how she had found his refuge or learned his fate, how she had
+traced him, what she knew, what they could be or could not be to each
+other; it was enough that she remembered; that she was faithful; that
+in a few months she would be near him there, where the golden rays of
+the cross sparkled in the soft azure of summer eves above Rome. It was
+an ecstasy so great, so unlooked for, so overwhelming, that it utterly
+unmanned him; he fell on his knees and wept.
+
+Caterina, looking on from the entrance, closed the door softly, and
+went down the stairs.
+
+The sultry day was ended; the sun had set. Far to the west on the
+Campagna the fever mists were drifting in pale haze, like the wraiths
+of the multitudes of dead whose dust made up the soil. The Anio,
+shrunken to a runlet in its bed, was slow and almost stagnant. The
+distant Tiber was discernible by the thread of fog which hung over its
+course. In the woods themselves the heat was noiseless and dusky and
+oppressive; the great ilex avenues looked black as the sacrificial
+groves of old. Yet never to him, not in April radiance or autumn glory,
+had the scene looked so fair. Evening closed in, an evening hot and
+heavy, without any moon or any breath of air, but he sat in a rapture
+of memory and of hope beside one of the large windows, of which the
+embrasure fronted the north. The light from his own oil lamp within
+shone on the marbles of the balustrade outside, and across a few yards
+of the rough grassland beyond it. Farther than that was all quite dark,
+for the heat-mists made the light of the stars dim. Now and then an owl
+flew by hooting; many had their dwelling in the roof; and scores of
+large bats rushed to and fro pursuing the invisible insect-life of the
+night.
+
+At any other time it might have struck him that the house was unusually
+silent; that there was not the noise of women’s chatter, or of men’s
+laughter and altercation, such as usually rose up from court and stable
+and outhouse when the day was done. All was so still that the place
+might have been a monastery, with every cell closed, and every friar
+sleeping.
+
+But at this moment of supreme happiness, happiness which seemed almost
+reunion, with that portrait in his hands, and under his eyes, and that
+vague, ineffable promise written for the future beneath it, he would
+have scarcely been sensible if the volcanic fires which slept under the
+tufa around had burst the soil and thundered through the woods.
+
+He was happy. Once more he was happy, in despite of exile, of poverty,
+of attainder, of ruin.
+
+Those fair eyes looked at him with the gaze he knew so well, and those
+fair lips said to him, “I am faithful.”
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+How long he had sat there since he had entered the chamber he did not
+know; he had had no consciousness of the old woman having entered the
+room with the lamp, and having told him that his dinner awaited him in
+the smaller room beyond.
+
+It was with difficulty that he roused himself to a perception of her
+voice, when she stood again at his elbow, and called him thrice in a
+low, shrill, startled voice.
+
+“Let me alone, my friend,” he said to her; “I am occupied--I do not
+need to dine.”
+
+“It is not that. Hearken!” said Caterina, and something in her tone
+awakened him to attention. “Sir--sir--there is no one in the house.”
+
+He turned and looked at her.
+
+“No one in the house? There must be some of the men--some of the women.
+Have they not supped?”
+
+“That is it, sir,” she answered. “Supper-hour is long past, and never
+yet did they fail to get together to fill their bellies. Save old
+Matteo, who is daft, and Dreina, who is lame, there is not a soul in
+the place. There must be some meaning in it, sir. Never did my folks
+dare to cross the threshold without leave.”
+
+“It is strange,” said Cyrille, as he comprehended the singularity of
+her intelligence. “They do indeed obey you usually like children. Where
+can they all be gone?”
+
+“The Lord knows, sir. But I am afraid----”
+
+Her ruddy face was blanched.
+
+“Of what are you afraid?”
+
+“That they have left the house because they know there will be an
+attack on it.”
+
+“Is it possible?”
+
+“Possible enough. People who are warned and do not wish to take either
+side always go away like this. Matteo is daft, but even he knows
+something; he laughs, and draws his finger across his throat. Dreina is
+crying, but will not speak though I beat her. You had best close the
+windows, sir, and fasten up the doors.”
+
+He still scarcely gathered the full meaning of her words; his brain was
+still dizzy with the sweetness of sudden hope, the rush of reviving
+memories, and he had never been alive to the true dangers of the life
+around him, to its enmities, its risks, its possibilities. He meant
+so well by the people, that he could not consent to believe that they
+meant less well by him.
+
+“You must be mistaken,” he said to the old woman. “The household must
+be playing you some trick to affright you. Let us go and look over the
+outbuildings. The _guardiani_ must at least be about the place.”
+
+He put the portrait he had received in his breast, and buttoned his
+coat over it; then he took his revolver from the table and put it in
+his chest-pocket.
+
+“Do not go out of doors, sir,” said Caterina, as she laid her hand
+on his arm. “I do not believe there is one of our men within call
+anywhere, and who knows what gang of thieves and ruffians may not be
+hid all round already? If you knew the things I have seen in my youth
+and my womanhood! I fear me you will meet your God to-night, for there
+is no hand but your own to defend you!”
+
+This time he believed her; he saw that whether she deceived herself or
+not, she thought some deadly peril awaited himself.
+
+“What will they do?” he asked, “and why should they seek to kill me?”
+
+She answered almost sullenly:
+
+“I have told you a score of times, and so has the girl Muriella, that
+you are hated because you are a stranger, a meddler, as folks think,
+a reformer as you call it. You would never believe us because we were
+women. Well, this night I fear you will find we said truth. But let us
+waste no time in talk. Let us fasten up the doors. They are strong;
+they have stood a siege before now.”
+
+“I shall look a poor cowardly fool if the household return.”
+
+“They will not return, sir, till they see the house ablaze.”
+
+“Good heavens! Do you _know_ this?”
+
+“I do not know it, for if I had heard tell of it, I should have told
+you, and you could have got the carabineers or the soldiery here; but
+I know what an empty house like this means, when there are forty folks
+all gone out of it at the same time on the same errand, and I know that
+the woodlanders of Le Selve are no lambs.”
+
+He was silent a moment; then he said:
+
+“I will sell my life dearly, Caterina. As for you, slip out while you
+can, and hide in the outhouses or the underwood till morning. You
+cannot alter my fate. Do not stay to share it.”
+
+“I am no poltroon, sir, and my years anyhow cannot be many. Come to
+work.”
+
+She led the way carrying the lamp, and held the light up whilst
+he put up the enormous bars and turned the gigantic keys of the
+iron-barred doors, and shut and bolted the shutters. There was no sound
+without. The imbecile Matteo and the lame woman Dreina he drove,
+as a precaution, into a little room off the kitchen, which had no
+communication with the outer court, and locked them in there. The woman
+would not speak.
+
+He caused Caterina to light as many lamps as there were in the
+building, and placed them in various corridors and chambers; he looked
+for the guns belonging to the men, but they were gone, and those of the
+under-steward likewise.
+
+“Fausto must be in this matter,” he said to Caterina.
+
+“He is probably the mainspring of it, sir,” she answered. “But no one
+will ever prove it on him. He went away yesterday eve to go to shoot in
+the macchia over by Ostia; there is no close time there. You recollect
+he asked your leave to go and buy cattle; but he told several of the
+men he was going shooting. If this plan succeed, he will come back and
+act innocence. If it fail, he will take ship to one of the Americas.
+He has feathered his nest.”
+
+“He did ask leave--yes,” replied Cyrille, still incredulous. “But after
+all, there may be nothing of what you think; your lads and lasses may
+only have taken holiday.”
+
+“They have taken holiday, sir, indeed,” said Caterina grimly. She was
+angered against him for his incredulity. To her the conspiracy was
+clear as crystal.
+
+He was still very doubtful of the truth of her suspicions, but he
+thought it well to take such measures for protection as he could. He
+made the basement as safe from attack as he could with the means at his
+disposal, and no man’s strength to aid him, and closed all passages
+which led outward; there were some subterranean passages, of the
+existence even of which he had possessed no previous knowledge.
+
+Caterina showed him an iron door in the side of a well. The door was
+just above the level of the water, which glimmered far down below;
+steps in the stonework descended to it.
+
+“It goes out to the woods under the long avenue, and opens up under
+that great ilex which they call Pope Paul’s,” she said. “You might get
+away so if you would. The passage is low and narrow, but it has been
+kept clear. You know the woods well enough to find your way at daybreak
+to the guardhouse.”
+
+“I could not hide and fly like that,” answered Cyrille. “I am placed in
+charge here. I can only lay down my charge with my life.”
+
+Caterina nodded in approval, but sighed.
+
+“If you will not fly, they will have you before the night is passed.
+’Tis a conspiracy of the whole Selve folk.”
+
+She knew nothing, but she had many memories, and she was a native of
+the woods.
+
+“Did they not poison your dog?” she added.
+
+When he had made all as secure as it was possible to make it (and he
+thought, except against explosives or petroleum, the doors would stand
+all night), he went up to an open loggia at the top of the building,
+with a dark lanthorn, and thence looked to all points of the compass.
+On a clear night he could see from the light at Palo on the west to
+the Sabine Hills and to Soracte on the east. Many a night in the full
+moonlight he had traced the profiles of the beautiful mountains lying
+like the silver waves of a phosphorescent sea. Now they were all hidden
+under a haze of heat and vapour; he could scarcely distinguish farther
+than the stone benches and balustrades immediately below, and the
+outlines of the nearest trees.
+
+The stillness was intense. Leaning against one of the columns of the
+loggia, invisible to anyone who might be below, he waited and listened.
+But the sense of the possible peril near was less realised by him
+than the knowledge of the happiness which had come across steppe and
+mountain, and plain and forest, to bring him its blessing.
+
+With all the tide of recovered hope coursing like warm wine through
+his veins, he could not believe that he was about to be besieged like
+a rat in his hole, hunted out like a fox from his earth. The man whom
+Princess Marie loved, whom she remembered, whom she smiled on in
+banishment, disgrace, and poverty, must wear an amulet too potent, he
+thought, to be done to death by a tribe of ingrate peasants. There
+could not be such devilish derision in fate, that at the very moment
+when his barren life blossomed like the rose, it was to be cut down by
+a yelling rabble against whom he had no sin but to have served them in
+sickness and to his own peril.
+
+He leaned against the marble pilaster, and let his thoughts drift away
+from the present hour to the past, which was so dear; to the future,
+which was still dearer. Come what may, be what might, nothing save
+death itself could slay that ecstasy which sang like a bird in his
+breast.
+
+The clock tolled at the stables more than once the passing hours, and
+the stillness was broken by no other sound. It was midnight; he thought
+the old woman had been misled by her fears: the men and women would no
+doubt return at sunrise from revel at some distant town to which they
+had known it would be useless to ask the Massaja to grant leave of
+absence.
+
+Suddenly he heard a sound, distant, slight, such a sound as the passing
+of goats or sheep over grass produces; scarcely perceptible by day, but
+audible in the deep hush of night.
+
+“That is the movement of men,” thought Cyrille, with a sick sense of
+certainty. He listened a moment longer to make sure that it was not
+a breeze rising which stirred the foliage; then, with his impression
+confirmed, he left the loggia, and descended the stairway to where old
+Caterina sat in his chamber telling her beads.
+
+“There are persons approaching,” he said to her; “and they can come for
+no good.”
+
+“They come, thinking you are asleep, and that one of the doors has been
+left open for them. How many are there?”
+
+“I cannot tell. But several.”
+
+Caterina shook her head.
+
+“If help could come--but how should any help come? We are cut off from
+all.”
+
+“Hark! they are crossing the grass. In a moment they will be at the
+great doors.”
+
+“They expect Dreina will open for them, the wretched baggage!”
+
+For a moment or two there was silence, then a crossing of confused
+voices became audible through the heavy timber of the closed doors.
+
+“Let them think me asleep,” murmured Cyrille, and he covered the
+entrance with his revolver. He could not tell who were there without,
+nor in what numbers; their purpose it was easy to imagine. It was also
+probable that they were for the instant nonplussed finding no one there
+ready to admit them. But he knew that they would not long let this
+baffle them.
+
+“Go and hide somewhere, good Caterina,” he murmured to her. “It
+unnerves me to know you are here.”
+
+“Do not think of me, sir,” said the stout old woman. “I am of no use,
+but I will be of no hindrance. It is strange to me that the girl
+Muriella did not hear of this and warn us. When did you see her last?”
+
+“Three days ago, I think.”
+
+His voice was drowned in the sound of iron striking wood as the blow of
+hatchets fell on the oak of the great doors. But every inch of the wood
+was studded with great nails in front and plated with iron behind, and
+the axes made but little progress.
+
+“Try the side doors,” said a voice in which he recognised Alcide’s.
+“The strumpet Dreina has played us false.”
+
+The feet of a score of men trampled on the marble of the terrace
+running round the buildings. But the side doors were armoured in the
+same way, and had been all bolted and barred. The assailants realised
+that they would not enter by those means; they began to swear savagely
+amongst each other.
+
+They had not crossed the turf as yet.
+
+“Poor Caterina!” said Cyrille; “would to heaven you were in safety.”
+
+“It is not me whom they come after. Forgive me, sir; but is there much
+money in the strong-box?”
+
+“Happily not. I sent an express with the proceeds of three months’
+sales to Rome last week.”
+
+“That will make them mad.”
+
+“If they get in. I hope to keep them out. I shall not open to them--of
+that you may be sure.”
+
+She was a stout-hearted old woman; she laughed a little grimly.
+
+In the centre of the great doors, as in most old Italian entrances,
+there was a small barred square panel, the width of a man’s hand which
+could be slid back, leaving the grating open, and thus a parley could
+be effected without danger.
+
+Cyrille drew back the panel, and standing on one side of the grating,
+where none could see or touch him, said in a clear voice:
+
+“Why come you here armed?”
+
+“Open, and you will know,” answered the voice of Alcide, and they
+cursed him.
+
+“I do not open to threats. Say your errand, or depart.”
+
+They cursed him again.
+
+“We shall have your blood,” said their spokesman. “We come for that. We
+shall not be balked. We will burn you out like a live hog smoked from
+his lair.”
+
+Cyrille closed the panel.
+
+The group without roared with fury like wild boars, and threw
+themselves with all their weight against the doors.
+
+“You could have shot him through the grating,” said Caterina, with her
+face gray and stern. “Why did you not? It was Alcide who spoke.”
+
+“I know it was,” replied Cyrille.
+
+“Why did you not shoot him?”
+
+He was silent. He could not have made her understand the reluctance to
+shed blood which had held his hand.
+
+The hideous uproars of a ravenous pack was now let loose upon the
+stillness of the summer midnight. They fired at the doors. The shots
+recoiled harmlessly. They were all armed merely in the rude manner
+of the woods. They had expected to be admitted from within, and the
+disappointment baffled and drove them mad.
+
+“Burn him out!” cried their ringleader. “There is brushwood in the
+sheds.”
+
+By the sound of the trampling feet and lessening shouts he could tell
+that they were gone where the firewood used by the household was
+stored in sheds beside the stackyard and stables.
+
+“They will try to burn us out,” said Cyrille. “But the house is like a
+rock.”
+
+The old woman shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“You could have shot the worst of them and you did not. He will roast
+you, as he says, like a spitted hog.”
+
+“I cannot kill a man in cold blood,” he replied, and he pressed the
+portrait in his breast closer to him.
+
+But he knew that they would doubtless do what they threatened.
+
+The solid house would resist long, but it could not resist all night.
+If they brought wood enough and fired it, sooner or later those within
+would perforce fall a prey to the smoke and the flames.
+
+Rather than perish so, he thought he would open and go out, and fall
+fighting. But to do so would be to expose the whole place to certain
+pillage; and he was there as the representative and trustee of the
+owners.
+
+In a few minutes there was no doubt as to the intentions of the
+marauders. They returned dragging with them quantities of brushwood
+and faggots, and by the sound he could tell that they were piling them
+up before the principal entrance; the voice of Alcide was loudest in
+command and objurgation.
+
+“Fire you through the peephole, sir,” said Caterina. She was gray with
+horror, but she did not cry out, or give any sign of cowardice.
+
+“Not yet,” said Cyrille. “These wretched people were confided to my
+care. If I have missed the way to their souls it is my fault.”
+
+Caterina gave a snort of scorn.
+
+“They will not miss the way to your vitals, be sure! Much good will
+your fine thoughts do you when the scoundrels shall haul you out
+through the smoke, and hack you to pieces as they would hack a wild
+boar’s limbs off his trunk.”
+
+Despite his courage and composure a shudder ran through him at the
+horrible words. But he did not open the panel and fire.
+
+The men without were mad with rage because they had not found the house
+opened to them as arranged with the absent household.
+
+They had planned an easy entrance, unmolested pillage, and the
+slaughter of the foreigner in his bed. They could not tell why they
+found him up and armed; and all the entrances of the house closed.
+
+“’Tis that traitress Muriella,” muttered Lucio; “she warned him, be
+sure,” and as he spoke the other men screamed in chorus with rage and
+hate. Let them find her! let them only find her! She should rue the day
+that her mother, the cursed woman of Viterbo, bore her!
+
+They heaped the dry heather and pine branches up in a great pile before
+the doorway; they lighted matches and resinous cones, and tried to set
+fire to the pile. They had not brought petroleum, because of its name
+and use they were all ignorant. The wood failed to catch alight; the
+air was heavy, and there was no wind to stir a flame.
+
+Cyrille debated whether it would not be best for the place and for the
+woman to give himself up to the will of the assailants, on condition
+that she and it should be spared. But he knew that he could not trust
+them to fulfil any conditions, and the soldier and the noble in him
+loathed the thought of surrender to this rabble, and at last he fired
+through one of the inch-wide squares of the grating. His shot broke the
+wrist of the man lighting the heather.
+
+They all for a moment fell back demoralised; Alcide was safe out
+of reach, for he had expected shots from within, and had given his
+comrades the posts of danger.
+
+“I would willingly spare you,” said Cyrille, and his voice came clearly
+to them through the little aperture. “But you shall not fire the house
+whilst I live; I will break the bone of every man’s arm used to set
+light to this wood.”
+
+There was a brief pause. They were cunning, vindictive, merciless, but
+they were not brave, and they could not be certain that he was alone.
+They drew back from the doorway, and took counsel amongst themselves.
+No one of them cared to be the second to have his wrist snapped in two;
+the first man who had met this fate was howling like a wounded wolf,
+calling curses down on the head of Alcide. It was one thing to enter a
+defenceless and open house, and pillage all it contained, and kill a
+stranger in his sleep, and another to force entrance under the deadly
+fire of a revolver whose owner was masked and protected by iron-plated
+doors.
+
+They had unlit torches with them, brought to light their way about
+the cellars and store-rooms when they should enter the house. Alcide
+lighted one, and standing where Cyrille could not see him, hurled its
+blazing mass on to the piled brushwood, and three other men did the
+same. But the torches fell short and dropped on the marble pavement
+before the door; as they flared there harmlessly their red glare glowed
+on the black figures of the woodlanders, which looked like the forms of
+demons as they danced and yelled with rage and thirst for blood, hidden
+by the darkness of the night, save where the fitful glimmer of the
+torches touched them.
+
+Owing to the narrowness of the slit through which he fired, Cyrille
+could only aim at those immediately before the door or on the grass in
+front of him.
+
+The peasants could, without going far, keep out of range, and from
+their station beyond the balustrade they flung two other torches;
+these fell full on the piled heather, which caught alight, and sent
+a rolling, stifling cloud of smoke up through the grating. As they
+saw the success of their effort they lost caution, they shouted with
+rapture, and crowded nearer to enjoy the sport; the fire ran from
+heather to bramble and branch; the cones caught alight with jets of
+flame; the dry faggots cracked and flared, the volumes of smoke rolled
+up to the sculptured arms and crown about the doorways.
+
+“Their blood be on their own heads,” said Cyrille, and he fired--once,
+twice, thrice. Each time a man fell. But Alcide still kept out of
+range. The fire was fierce, and its red waves licked hungrily the old
+oak and iron which opposed their entrance.
+
+Resistance could be but a question of time.
+
+“If I could believe they would keep faith with me, I would let them
+torture me to death, to save the house and the woman. But they do not
+know what faith means. Were I once dead, they would sack the place from
+loggia to cellar, and get drunk on wine and blood.”
+
+Suddenly there came to his ears a sound of galloping horses. The sound
+came from the long avenue in front of the house to the north. The men
+did not heed it; they were leaping and shouting and bellowing with
+triumph as the fire waxed higher and fiercer, and the smoke ran up
+amongst the bronze scroll-work of the balconies above.
+
+He could now see nothing, for the burning wood hid all save itself,
+but he could hear, and the gallop of the horses grew nearer, and there
+blent with it the jingling of chains and of scabbards, and a shrill
+yell of terror rose from the grassland beyond the balustrade.
+
+“The saints be praised!” cried Caterina, and she fell on her knees and
+burst into tears. “’Tis the carabineers of Ronciglione!”
+
+Cyrille went to a side door which the fire had not reached, unfastened
+its bolts and bars, and went out on to the grass.
+
+The gendarmes had slid from their saddles, had surrounded and seized
+the woodlanders, who made a fierce but short resistance. Against
+a horse from which she had dismounted there leaned a woman--pale,
+dishevelled, exhausted, staring with dilated eyes at the burning pile.
+She was drenched with sweat; discoloured with heat and dust; her mouth
+was wide open with parching thirst; her bare feet were bleeding.
+
+It was Muriella.
+
+Great tears were falling down her cheeks, for she had delivered her
+own kinsmen over to justice, and she was ashamed of the guilt of her
+father’s people.
+
+“You brought the guards?” cried Cyrille, as he recognised her.
+
+“I overheard--this afternoon--late,” she said, her breath deep drawn
+and laboured, like a worn-out steer’s; “it would have done no good to
+come here, and I knew the men at the picquet were absent. I ran to
+Ronciglione in four hours for the soldiery. There was no other way. I
+could trust no one.”
+
+Alcide was standing, pinioned by a gendarme, his gun having been taken
+from him; his eyes were red with a wicked, furious flame. There was
+little light, except such as was shed by the glare of the burning wood;
+but that was enough to enable him to see who it was who had been his
+undoing.
+
+With a sudden movement, lithe and quick and unexpected as a snake’s,
+he twisted himself from the hold of the carabineer who was about to
+manacle him, and with one leap like a deer’s he sprang to the side of
+his niece.
+
+“Traitress!” he hissed in her ear, as he snatched a knife hidden in his
+waistbelt, and stabbed her full in the breast.
+
+They seized him instantly again, but he had aimed too well not to have
+slain.
+
+“It does not matter,” she said, as she pressed the haft of the knife to
+her bosom. “I was in time--it was that which mattered.”
+
+The blood from her pierced lungs choked her.
+
+“You will go home,” she murmured feebly. “The saints did hear!”
+
+A moment later she was dead.
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
+
+
+  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
+
+  Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
+
+  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77040 ***
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+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      Le Selve | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
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+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77040 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter hide"><img src="images/coversmall.jpg" width="450" alt=""></div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_colophon.jpg" alt=""></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h1><i>LE SELVE</i></h1>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="bbox">
+<p class="ph1"><i>UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME.</i></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_009.jpg" alt=""></div>
+
+<p><b>A Gender in Satin.</b> By <span class="smcap">Rita</span>.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Making of Mary.</b> By <span class="smcap">Jean
+Forsyth</span>.</p>
+
+<p><b>Diana’s Hunting.</b> By <span class="smcap">R. Buchanan</span>.</p>
+
+<p><b>Sir Quixote of the Moors.</b> By <span class="smcap">John
+Buchan</span>.</p>
+
+<p><b>Dreams.</b> By <span class="smcap">Olive Schreiner</span>. <i>6th
+Edition.</i></p>
+
+<p><b>The Honour of the Flag and other
+Stories.</b> By <span class="smcap">W. Clark Russell</span>.</p>
+</div></div></div></div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="title page"></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="titlepage">
+<p><span class="xxlarge">Le Selve</span></p>
+
+<p>BY<br>
+<span class="large">OUIDA</span></p>
+
+<p>LONDON<br>
+<span class="large">T. FISHER UNWIN</span><br>
+1896</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center">  <span class="smcap">Copyright by</span> T. FISHER UNWIN, 1896<br>
+  (<i>for Great Britain</i>).<br>
+  <br>
+  <span class="smcap">Copyright by</span><br>
+  BACHELLER, JOHNSON &amp; BACHELLER<br>
+  (<i>for the United States of America</i>).</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
+<p class="ph2"><i>Le Selve.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_009.jpg" alt=""></div>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">I.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IT was a cold black night,
+with neither moon or stars,
+and an old peasant lay dying.
+He was all alone. No one
+thought it worth while to waste time
+beside him. He was eighty-three
+years old, and, according to his
+sons, ought to have been dead long
+before this autumn.</p>
+
+<p>They and their families sat round
+a fire of logs and chips, and talked
+amongst themselves; not of him,
+he was no more of any account. On
+the morrow, or at farthest the day
+after, he would be carried to the
+ditch in the burial-ground at the
+nearest village and tumbled into it;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>and so—<i>Addio per sempre</i>. It would
+be trouble enough to take him
+there; the graveyard was fifteen
+miles and more away.</p>
+
+<p>The big room, which was kitchen,
+eating-place, and cellar in one, was
+reeking with filth; cobwebs years
+old hung black and gray from the
+rafters; the floor of beaten earth
+was deep with the dust and mud
+brought by scores of dirty feet; the
+smoke from the yawning chimney
+hung in dark mist about the walls.
+Upstairs there was no fire. Why
+waste good fuel in warming cold
+limbs, cold from age and death?</p>
+
+<p>“I am cold, I am cold!” muttered
+the old man; but no one heeded.
+Of course he was cold; people who
+were dying always were so. He
+shivered and shook under his cotton
+coverlet; and it was dark, so dark,
+they had left him no light; light
+burns oil, and what could he see or
+hope to see? His eyes were already
+glazing.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>“Lazzaro got a whole crown for
+those turkeys which died of the
+pip,” said his elder son in the kitchen
+below, stretching his hands towards
+the blaze. Lazzaro was a neighbour
+who dwelt on a clearing, and
+made cask-hoops and wooden shoes.</p>
+
+<p>“Some folks have luck,” said his
+son’s wife as she gave her left breast
+to her youngest child who stood at
+her knee. Then they were silent,
+and the man cracked a nut with
+his teeth. The wood crackled, the
+child sucked, some big boys gambled
+with plum-stones for counters on
+the dirty bricks, a girl of twelve
+years old caught a cricket amongst
+the ashes, and pulled it in a leisurely
+way to pieces; two smaller children,
+twins, watching enviously and with
+deep interest.</p>
+
+<p>“The northern birds went overhead
+at noon,” said the younger
+brother Lucio after a time.</p>
+
+<p>“Damn them! they fly too high
+to be shot,” said the elder, Alcide.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>“They were all in a black three-sided
+mass,” said the younger.</p>
+
+<p>“They always fly like that,” said
+the elder. “They’re a shrewd lot,
+those big birds.”</p>
+
+<p>“How they keep time! ’tis amazing,”
+said Lucio. “Come regular
+with the first frost and go regular
+when the catkins peer out on the
+sallows.”</p>
+
+<p>Then silence fell again between
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The fire burnt more silently and
+more hotly; the woman put her
+child away from her, and thrust her
+breast back behind the iron busk of
+her stays; the twins fell asleep leaning
+against each other. The boys
+gambling with the plum-stones
+swore and struck at each other.
+From between the rafters overhead
+the sound of a low groan was heard
+now and then, and the elder son
+muttered, with many an oath,
+“Can’t ye be quiet, old one?”</p>
+
+<p>Time went on. They had no watch
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>or clock, but they could tell that an
+hour had passed by the look of the
+burning wood. There was a louder
+sound as of lamentation from the
+room above. Alcide got up and
+went to the foot of the wooden stair.</p>
+
+<p>“Hold your jaw, old one!” he
+shouted. “Can’t you die in a quiet
+way? You’ve lived a deal too long
+as it is.”</p>
+
+<p>One small boy nudged his twin
+brother. “Grandfather’s dying,”
+he whispered with glee, and the
+two little creatures chuckled together.
+There would be one mouth
+the less for the polenta, one throat
+the less for the rare thin wine; the tic-tac
+of his stick on the stones would
+no longer come after them when
+they were truant, the stroke of his
+crutch would no longer make their
+shoulder-blades tingle when he
+caught them stealing, the sound
+of his voice on the stairs would
+no longer wake them up out of
+warm slumber amongst the straw
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>and lumber on black winter mornings
+when the cows were lowing to
+be milked.</p>
+
+<p>Grandfather had been so long
+to be feared, it was delightful to
+them to hear him soundly rated,
+now that he could not get up
+and come down with his ash-stick
+raised.</p>
+
+<p>“Grandfather’s dying,” they said
+to each other for the twentieth time
+with glee, as the ruddy lights
+from the blazing billets shone on
+their little unwashed brown faces.</p>
+
+<p>“’Tis time we ate something,”
+said the woman, and she unhooked
+the pot hanging on a chain over the
+fire, and poured the contents out
+into an earthenware bowl. It was
+bean-soup, strongly flavoured with
+lentils and fennel; it was turned
+into pewter plates and supped up
+noisily with wooden spoons; pieces
+of black bread were wrenched off a
+loaf and eaten with it. They fed
+as ravenously as pigs, and with less
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>cleanliness. Just as they finished a
+sound of knocking was heard at the
+door of the house, which was bolted
+and barred.</p>
+
+<p>“Who’s there?” shouted Alcide.</p>
+
+<p>“It is I,” answered a voice with
+a foreign accent.</p>
+
+<p>“’Tis the new steward, perdition
+seize him!” said Alcide, and he
+strode across the bricks and drew
+back the bolts. “What’s amiss that
+you honour us at this time of night,
+sir?” he said sullenly to the person
+who stood on the step holding a
+horse’s bridle.</p>
+
+<p>“There is much amiss here, they
+say,” replied the new-comer. “Is
+it true that your father, Adamo, is
+dying?”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s that to anyone?” said
+Alcide, unwillingly. “Folk usually
+die when they get nigh ninety.”</p>
+
+<p>The tone was half jocose, half
+sullen. The visitor in silence led his
+horse over the step into the entrance,
+hung the bridle on a nail in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>wall, closed the door and said to
+Alcide:</p>
+
+<p>“Take me to him.”</p>
+
+<p>He was a fair man, tall, slender
+and young.</p>
+
+<p>All the family gathered near to
+stare at him.</p>
+
+<p>“There is nothing to see, sir,”
+muttered Alcide. “He’s as good as
+dead.”</p>
+
+<p>“What doctor have you?”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no such thing in these
+parts for forty miles or more.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you mean the Commune
+has no medical aid?”</p>
+
+<p>“Safe and sure, it hasn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“Take me to him; I know something
+of medicine.”</p>
+
+<p>They were all silent, vaguely
+frightened and ashamed. The
+woman nudged Alcide.</p>
+
+<p>“Best take the gentleman upstairs
+to poor Nonno, though he’s
+past all help.”</p>
+
+<p>And she forced a little water into
+her eyes and gave a little sob.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>Alcide took the one light off the
+table and tramped up the steep
+rotten stair.</p>
+
+<p>“What a piece of work about
+a dead greybeard!” he muttered.
+“When they’re past labour they’re
+best gone. You don’t leave a sere
+tree standing to cumber the ground.”</p>
+
+<p>He pushed open a ricketty,
+worm-eaten door, and the feeble oil
+wick shed a dim flickering light on
+the miserable room, where all was
+silence. The steward took the
+lamp from him, and went up to the
+bed of sacking and dry leaves, of
+which the odours were foul as a
+dung-heap. On it lay a gaunt old
+man’s lifeless body. The old tree
+was down; it cumbered the soil no
+more.</p>
+
+<p>The steward examined the body.
+It was still warm, but life was
+extinct; the jaw had dropped; one
+clenched lean hand was knotted in
+the white beard.</p>
+
+<p>“You have let him die alone!”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>said the young man with indignation
+and horror.</p>
+
+<p>Alcide grinned, showing his
+strong white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>“Dying’s the only thing nobody
+grudges our doing,” he said with
+unabashed indifference. “What
+would you, sir? We work all day.
+We can’t wait on sick souls all
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>“May the measure you have
+served to your father be served to
+you by your sons!”</p>
+
+<p>“Thank you, sir. Thank you
+kindly,” answered Alcide, which is
+the peasant’s synonym for “I will
+pay you out for that before long.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is frightful! Incredible!”
+murmured the young man. “You
+knew he was dying, and you left
+him alone, without even a drop of
+water by his side!”</p>
+
+<p>“He had his coffin to keep him
+company,” said Alcide, with a gruesome
+grin. “Some have to go
+naked into the earth.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>He pointed to a corner in which
+a box, roughly made from unplaned
+planks, was leaning against the wall.</p>
+
+<p>“Hush!” said the steward with
+authority. “Have you no sense of
+shame?—no feeling?—no remorse?”</p>
+
+<p>“I have done nothing wrong, sir,”
+said Alcide sullenly. “I didn’t
+kill him. Old age killed him.”</p>
+
+<p>“And neglect!”</p>
+
+<p>Alcide shrugged his shoulders.
+Whether you hindered or hastened
+the death of a man so aged and so
+useless could not matter much, he
+thought; the deceased was eighty-three
+years of age, and had long
+been a burden to everybody.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s more than ten years that
+he’s not done a stroke of work,”
+he replied sullenly, “and yet he
+expected his share in the polenta
+and the broth, just for all the world
+as if he’d earned it. When they
+get childish, they get unreasonable
+like children. Many’s the time I’ve
+said to him, ‘Why aren’t you underground,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>father?’ We ought to be
+allowed to put them there when
+their time’s come, and they won’t
+go in the course of nature.”</p>
+
+<p>The steward turned from him in
+disgust and pain, and rested his
+gaze on the old, worn, rugged form
+lying on its bed of sacking.</p>
+
+<p>About the doorway, peeping and
+curious, the children were gathered.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it all over?” said their
+mother with a whine.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all over indeed!” said
+the steward gravely, and with a
+flash of loathing in his blue eyes.
+“You will learn what he suffered
+when you lie on your own death-bed.
+I came as soon as I heard
+of it. Why could you not even
+let me know?”</p>
+
+<p>They tittered in concert: men,
+women, boys, and girls. What a fuss
+about old Nonno! But, of course,
+this young man was a foreigner, and
+that was as good as saying he was
+a fool. Did he not want dogs fed,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>and cows kept clean? Did he not
+say men should wash their bodies
+and women should not swaddle
+their children? Was he not a new-comer,
+an interloper, a meddler, a
+stranger from nobody knew where?</p>
+
+<p>Alcide’s wife, however, had the
+wit to see that they were on the
+wrong tack.</p>
+
+<p>“Good sir,” she said, with tears
+in her voice, “we have done what
+we could, but you know we are
+poor, poor, poor; and now there
+will be no end of money to find for
+the burial, and we ought to be
+allowed to scratch a hole and put
+him in the woods, but you know
+the powers that be won’t let us, and
+we have to carry him all the way to
+San Vitale, and we must borrow a
+neighbour’s mule, and when we get
+there pay all the church and graveyard
+dues, and sacristans and sextons—they
+live like carrion flies getting
+fat on corpses——”</p>
+
+<p>“Hold your tongue, you idiot!”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>said her husband. “For sure the
+Ministro here will help us through
+all these troubles. He knows how
+poor we are. Not a bit of bread
+sometimes all the twenty-four hours
+through.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will send here early in the
+forenoon, and will do all that is
+necessary,” said the steward. “Let
+your women folk cleanse and clothe
+the body, and watch by it through
+the night. You may be poor, but
+poverty need not be brutality, and
+you—you would make the wolves
+of the steppes seem beside you
+like angels of mercy.”</p>
+
+<p>His words were unintelligible to
+his auditors; but they understood
+that he was offended and disgusted
+with them. They did not care a
+jot for his opinion, but they cared
+much for his purse. Without even
+a glance at them, he made the sign
+of the cross reverently on the brow
+and breast of the corpse, and in
+silence went out of the garret; took
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>the bridle from the nail on the wall,
+led his horse out over the doorstep,
+and vaulted into the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>“Not even a copper piece has
+he left behind him!” moaned the
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>Alcide stood on the threshold, and
+watched the form of the horseman
+vanishing into the blackness under
+the trees. He made a gesture as
+of lifting an imaginary gun to his
+shoulder and pointing it. “Eh?”
+he said to his brother Lucio.</p>
+
+<p>Lucio, who was of a slower and
+weaker temperament, scratched his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t say no,” he answered;
+“but it’s always a dangerous game
+to play at, ’Cide.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pooh!” said Alcide. “The
+woods are good friends; they never
+prate. But one can wait. Perhaps
+we shall get something out of him
+to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>“Anyhow, he is gone now,” said
+Lucio, as the sound of the horse’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>hoofs grew faint on the wet moss of
+the forest road.</p>
+
+<p>The young steward rode through
+them this dark night very slowly,
+for the road was bad, and his horse,
+though well used to such work, felt
+each step carefully, and sometimes
+whinnied with fear as an owl flew past
+or a pole-cat rushed across the path.</p>
+
+<p>But even in this cautious passage
+through the almost impenetrable
+gloom he nearly trampled on a
+woman who stood in his way and
+cried to him to stop. He checked
+his horse, just in time to avoid
+collision, and the animal’s nostrils
+brushed the woman’s head.</p>
+
+<p>He could see nothing of her except
+the shine of two great eyes
+as he struck a match in front of her.</p>
+
+<p>“It is I, Muriella!” she said
+quickly. “Is he dead, sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; your grandfather is dead,”
+he answered gravely, “and he died
+alone and unaided as I would not
+let a sick steer die.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>“Gone without the holy oil?
+Gone without shrive?—O Christ,
+help us!” she said in a voice of
+awe.</p>
+
+<p>“He died as I would not let a
+sick steer die,” repeated the rider.</p>
+
+<p>“I had been to fetch the vicar
+of San Vitale,” she added; “’twas
+the nearest; but he was away, and
+the sacristan said he would not be
+back for two days.”</p>
+
+<p>“Could you not have gone by
+preference for a doctor?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; there is nobody who
+would pay, and, besides, one must
+go to Ronciglione, twenty-five
+miles away, and the doctor there
+would refuse, for he has nought to
+do with us. To be sure, there is an
+apothecary at San Vitale, but he
+would have to be paid, and who
+amongst us could pay him?”</p>
+
+<p>“This is shocking! A whole
+commune without medical aid!”</p>
+
+<p>“I am more sorry he is gone
+unshriven,” she said with regret.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>“But perhaps—up yonder—somebody
+will see to it, and say a good
+word for him. I did what I could,
+sir; those above must see to the
+rest.”</p>
+
+<p>The young man sighed: the
+nothingness, the blankness, the
+horror of death weighed on him.
+He saw that she had some vague,
+shapeless hope which solaced her;
+and he forbore to disturb it.</p>
+
+<p>She put her hand on the saddle-bow
+and reached up nearer to him.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t ride alone at night like
+this,” she whispered. “Knives
+are sharp amongst us if guns be
+rusty.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am armed,” he answered
+briefly.</p>
+
+<p>He felt rather than saw that she
+gave an impatient gesture.</p>
+
+<p>“What serves it to be armed?”
+she answered. “They know the
+lay of the lands and the ways of the
+woods better than you, and they
+will follow you some night when it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>is dark like this, and you will know
+nothing till you fall on your beast’s
+neck, or back on his crupper, as it
+may be.”</p>
+
+<p>“I do my best by the people.
+If they please to pay me so, they
+must,” he replied. “Good-night.
+You mean well. Thanks.”</p>
+
+<p>She drew back in silence, discouraged,
+to let the impatient horse
+and his rider go onward.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">II.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">THESE estates, known
+generally as Le Selve,
+were vast tracts of forest
+and pasture land lying
+along and beyond the Mons Ciminius,
+between the lakes of Bracciano
+and of Vico. They were of immeasurable
+antiquity, but had for more
+than a century been ill preserved,
+and much robbed and desecrated.
+Their timber was chiefly oak, ilex,
+and pine, with occasional groups of
+silver birch; their undergrowth
+was of arbutus, myrtle, bay, privet,
+and box, with much broom and
+heather. They covered many
+miles, and were the property of a
+Roman nobleman, and had within
+them oaks which might have seen
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>the litters of Poppea and Faustina
+pass. In later times they had
+belonged to the Countess Matilda,
+and had been given by her to the
+Popes with the rest of her superb
+bequest. Here and there in them
+was a farm, a water-mill, a charcoal
+burner’s hut, patches of semi-cultivation
+due to squatters; but these
+were very few and isolated. For the
+most part the woods were little
+altered since the days of the
+Cæsars; wholly unaltered since the
+days of the Farnese and the
+Borgia.</p>
+
+<p>An old hunting-palace, which
+was now given up to the use of
+underlings, stood in the centre of
+the woods, the only large house in
+them, a gray stone building of the
+fifteenth century, which had once
+been a favourite retreat of the
+sporting cardinal from whom the
+Gandolfo had inherited this property.
+Around it were level grasslands,
+bordered by low granite
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>balustrades, with colossal stone
+hounds seated on the coping; and,
+immediately beyond, the great
+woods began, enclosing the grassy
+squares with walls of foliage which
+were pierced at intervals by narrow
+avenues or drives; in full view of
+the front terraces rose the peaks of
+the Sabine mountains; from the
+back were visible very far off Monte
+Amiata and the Cetona range.</p>
+
+<p>It was a distance of five miles
+and more to this dwelling, and it
+was long past midnight when the
+young steward rode in at the
+gates. The stablemen and guards
+of the place ran to take his horse.
+But he followed the animal, and
+saw it safe in stall before he
+himself entered the house, and felt
+the warmth of the oak logs burning
+on an open hearth in the great
+vaulted hall of which he made
+his chief sitting-room.</p>
+
+<p>“Sir, why will you be out so
+late?” said an old woman, who was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>the <i>Massajà</i> or housekeeper of the
+place, omnipotent over its womenkind
+and its stores. “The woods
+are not as safe as a city street,
+and even in the towns it’s ill
+being out alone after midnight.
+Daggers are quickly whipped out;
+and pistols bark and bite both.”</p>
+
+<p>“My good Caterina,” he answered
+wearily, “what have I done
+that anyone should want my life?
+Money, as they know, I never
+carry.”</p>
+
+<p>“So best,” said the old woman.
+“As for what you’ve done, sir,
+you’re put in power here, and
+you’re a stranger. That’s crime
+enough.”</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer, but stood a
+moment or two in silence in the
+warmth of the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>“You are from the North,” she
+added. “That’s bad enough.”</p>
+
+<p>“North or South, what matter.
+Have we not a common humanity?”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina shook her head.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>“You mean well; but you are
+from the North.”</p>
+
+<p>The argument seemed to her
+unanswerable. To him it seemed
+ridiculous; but he saw that it was
+one of these ideas based on prejudice,
+ignorance, and superstition,
+which are infinitely more tenacious
+and hard to uproot than the
+strongest opinions founded on
+reason.</p>
+
+<p>“Your woodlanders are great
+ruffians, I fear, Caterina,” he said
+after a pause.</p>
+
+<p>“They are not lambs, sir,” said
+the old woman curtly.</p>
+
+<p>“The old man was dead when
+I reached the place, and they had
+let him die all alone.”</p>
+
+<p>“They don’t waste their time on
+sick folks, sir; and old ones, when
+they have naught to leave, have
+no friends. Won’t you come to
+table?”</p>
+
+<p>“Is it true that there is no
+doctor in the whole district?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>“I never heard of one, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“What do the people do when
+they are ill?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, sir, they die or get well,
+as Heaven pleases. But there are
+wise women who know a good deal
+of herbs and magic, and there is a
+hermit who sells charms up by the
+Sasso Scritto, that bald peak which
+you see from the back door here.
+I bought a ring of him to keep my
+blood flowing straight; here it is;
+look; I have never ailed a minute
+since I wore it!”</p>
+
+<p>“Are we in the last years of the
+nineteenth century?”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina did not reply. She
+knew nothing about centuries, their
+numeration or civilization.</p>
+
+<p>She drew his attention to the
+supper-table, which she had laden
+with good things, or what she thought
+were good. But he had no appetite.
+He drank a cup of coffee, and told
+her to go to bed. He said he felt
+no desire to sleep. His heart was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>heavy with its own sorrows, and his
+mind was oppressed by a fear that
+he had undertaken a task which
+was beyond his strength. “You
+cannot wash a blackamoor white,”
+says a homely proverb; and he
+began to perceive that those whom
+he desired to cleanse were very
+black indeed. He knew that all
+the acts which in moral codes are
+called thefts, arson, contraband,
+fraud, were merely sport in their
+eyes, and that even murder
+appeared to almost all of them a
+wholly natural and legitimate way
+of settling old scores and redressing
+uneven balances, whilst to
+cheat the revenue, to defraud the
+landlord, to weave a dramatic coil
+of lies, and to poach, purloin, and
+plunder as occasion served, seemed
+to them all the mere playful
+pastime of summer eve and winter
+dawn, simple as the frisking of
+young leverets on a sward.</p>
+
+<p>He was a Russian of Esthonia,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>a noble, and an officer of the Imperial
+Guard; he had been merely
+a man of pleasure, until he had
+been impressed and converted by
+Tolstoi and other humanitarians.
+Then the zeal of his reformation
+as shown in his acts and his words
+had led to condemnation by his
+military superiors; he had been
+cashiered, arrested, and accused of
+Nihilism; he had been found guilty
+of subversive doctrines and collectivist
+opinions; the influence of his
+own powerful family, and others
+with which he was connected had
+been of no avail to save him; he
+had been condemned to the mines
+of Siberia for life, and his estates
+confiscated by the court-martial
+before which he had been brought
+up for judgment; he had escaped
+from the fortress in which he was
+confined before he was taken to the
+mines, and in disguise, and by
+the help of some of his late comrades,
+had got across the frontier
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>and across Germany. When,
+penniless and famished, he had
+chanced to meet in Brussels a
+friend of earlier years, Alfonso
+Gandolfo, that gay and generous
+prince could induce him to accept
+nothing, not even a dinner or
+a cigar, but at length offered
+him the stewardship of the estates
+of Le Selve, and succeeded with
+difficulty in persuading him that
+in this homely and obscure post he
+could do good, and more than earn
+his maintenance.</p>
+
+<p>“We have been ill served,” said
+the Roman gentleman; “we have
+been the prey of a series of
+scoundrels; if you can put down
+the perpetual thefts, and protect the
+timber in some degree, my father
+and I shall be infinitely grateful.”</p>
+
+<p>He was not deceived by the
+kindly courtesy of the terms in
+which the offer was made, but at
+last was induced to yield to it;
+he saw that in the seclusion of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>these great neglected forests he
+would be able to hide his own
+identity in safety from the world;
+and he had been now eighteen
+months in the woodlands, regarded
+by the country people as a mere
+agent of their lords, and known only
+by his baptismal name of Cyrille,
+called by the forest-folks Cirillo.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for himself, he had
+learned the language when a youth
+from a tutor, who had translated
+the “Divina Commedia” into
+German, and wide as is the gulf
+between the Italian of scholars and
+the dialects of the provinces, he
+had the facility of his nation in
+acquiring foreign tongues, and
+quickly adapted himself to the
+idiom of the people of the forest.</p>
+
+<p>He was intensely unhappy; he
+was separated from all he had known
+and loved from birth; he had lost
+everything he had possessed and
+cherished, and brave men have
+killed themselves for sorrows less
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>than his; but the active and open-air
+life saved him from falling into
+despondency or ill health, and he
+earnestly occupied himself with the
+condition of the peasants and the
+interest of the proprietors. He
+had received unlimited powers from
+the Gandolfo princes, in whose vast
+estates these woods in all their
+antiquity and extent were but a
+mere patch of verdure never visited.
+To a man, exiled, ruined, with a
+price set on his head in his own
+country, and with his heart aching
+ceaselessly for all he had left for
+ever, it was a welcome solitude, a
+blessed, a thrice-blessed sanctuary.
+Sometimes he thought he was
+already dead and in the Elysian
+fields, so profound was the silence,
+so sweet the air, so spiritual the
+green light under the trees.</p>
+
+<p>When the woodlanders climbed
+the summits of the colossal pines
+to gather the ripe cones, they could
+see if they cared to look, and if the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>day were clear, a glistening ray of
+gold, a shining band of silver, and
+the one was the cross of St Peter’s
+and the other was the Tyrhemian
+Sea. To them these said nothing;
+vaguely they knew that Rome was
+the throne of the Viceroy of God,
+whence sins were remitted and life
+eternal was given, but of the sea
+they had never heard, though the
+light of the Pharos of Palo was
+visible on clear nights from the
+higher ground of their forest. But
+to Cyrille, when he mounted into
+the high pine-tops or climbed the
+crumbling stair of an old watch-tower,
+to gaze from its roof over
+the vast verdure of these woods
+westward that speck of sunlit gold,
+that streak of sparkling light spoke,
+as they must ever speak so long
+as earth and sea shall last, to the
+scholar and the student.</p>
+
+<p>Only one highway traversed Le
+Selve, one which ran crosswise, and
+met the old coaching road which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>goes still, although scarcely ever
+used except by muleteers and peasantry,
+from Viterbo by Ronciglione,
+and Sutri to La Storta, and on to
+Rome itself; a road once the great
+artery of life between the Patrimonium
+Petri and the cities of
+Umbria, of Tuscany, and of Lombardy,
+a road once crowded by
+pilgrims of all nations; by the
+pomp of travelling cardinals, by the
+litter and lacqueys of regal women,
+by the strings of sumpter mules,
+the massed multitudes of armed
+horsemen, the straggling hordes of
+camp followers, the splendid retinue
+of Prince and Nuncio. Now, some
+dusty public vehicle, painfully drawn
+by blown and raw-boned horses,
+some string of charcoal-bearing
+asses, some long line of timber-wagons
+drawn by great white
+oxen, red-eyed, yoke-burdened,
+with heavy flanks and parching
+tongues, are all that the once great
+highway sees.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>But a past of more than two
+thousand years is touched at every
+step in these heather-covered lands,
+a past which makes the Borgia, the
+Farnese, the Medici, seem but as
+mere parvenues of a near hour.
+In the rocks are the sculptured
+tombs of a perished race; and the
+faithful soil holds the vanished
+nation’s arts and letters, and keeps
+their secrets which no living man
+can read. When he reached those
+loftiest summits where the wild
+doves and their foes the falcons
+made their nests, the whole panorama
+of what had once been
+Etruria and Latium was outstretched
+beneath him, and in the
+deep green light of the thick-woven
+branches he could read his Horace,
+his Strabo, his Marcus Aurelius,
+while, from far down below, the
+humble music of the belled flocks
+rose faintly to his ear in a gentle
+rhythm which has never ceased
+there through thrice a thousand
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>years. And that resigned sadness
+which succeeds despair came to
+him in that sense of unceasing
+sorrow, of endless succession of
+creation and annihilation of which
+such a scene must ever speak to
+those who look upon it with the
+eyes which see, and with the ears
+which hear. He realised his own
+infinitesimal nothingness, the infinite
+beauty and the infinite ruthlessness
+of nature, and he seemed to hear,
+not the passing of the browsing
+flocks over the grass below, but the
+passage of the multitudes hurrying
+on their course from the womb to
+the grave, each runner passing the
+torch from his dying hand to the
+living hand of the runner who
+follows him in that fine figure which
+Lucretius has made immortal.</p>
+
+<p>But in these Elysian Fields
+there were rude realities, and his
+conscience, which was sensitive,
+never allowed him to evade them.
+He was there, not to steep his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>soul in poppied rest, but to serve
+the interests of his employers and
+of the lands and people committed
+to his charge.</p>
+
+<p>Within the forest there were
+remains of rock-dwellings and of
+Etruscan tombs; he would willingly
+have consecrated his years to their
+exploration, and led such a life
+here as Avvolto of Corneto and the
+Campanari of Toscanelli had led
+amidst the sepulchres of a vanished
+race.</p>
+
+<p>He would willingly have spent
+all his time searching in the soil for
+relics such as were at times found
+by the peasantry, but his duties
+allowed him no such leisure. He
+took those duties to heart with the
+conscientious seriousness of temper
+which had changed him from an
+officer of the palace guard to a
+political reformer, and had exiled
+him from all which he held dear.</p>
+
+<p>The Gandolfo princes would
+have been the first to smile at such
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>a view of a steward’s duties; but to
+Cyrille the obligation was a law of
+honour. They gave him shelter,
+food, and wage; he laboured unremittingly
+in their service. If none
+were grateful to him he did not
+complain; greater than he had
+served mankind, and only been
+beaten with the rods of the world’s
+ingratitude in return.</p>
+
+<p>There were small, very poor,
+holdings here and there, scattered
+many miles one from another on
+patches of more or less cultivated
+ground. And in earlier times some
+wanderer turned adrift by fire or
+sword, some criminal fleeing from
+pursuit, or some nomad tired of
+roaming had made a hut of boughs,
+and called the spot their own; and
+in the peasantry living on and by
+these clearings, the new-comer found
+his greatest enemies and his greatest
+anxieties. Long years of license
+and centuries of occupation had
+made these sons of the soil look
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span>on it as their own; indeed, in a
+manner, the Latin law confirmed
+their title, and plunder had become
+with them a right divine. All his
+natural sympathies were with the
+poor, and the creeds of his teacher
+held them excusable in all errors,
+and these people were very poor
+indeed, but their cynical dishonesty
+revolted him, and their habitual
+insubordination met and thwarted
+him at every turn. They cringed
+to him to his face, but cheated him
+and mocked at him behind his
+back. He was sensible of it, and
+it strained his patience sorely.</p>
+
+<p>The ancestors of Alcide and
+Lucio had been squatters in these
+solitudes for centuries. They paid a
+nominal rental in kind and in labour,
+and did what they liked on their bit
+of clearing. This labour had been
+but seldom required, and their payment
+generally excused; generation
+after generation had lived in
+this way, and in earlier times the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>men of the family had gone with
+their lord to battle, and the blood
+which they had shed had been
+esteemed rent enough for their
+land.</p>
+
+<p>But now that times had changed,
+and there was no war service
+except conscription, they had become
+averse to paying any rental
+at all, and looked not only on their
+holding as their own, but on the
+timber, the grass, the heather, the
+rushes, and all that was around
+them as their own. When they
+tilled their small croft, they worked
+for their own benefit, but grumbled
+even at doing that. They were
+brigands in blood and instinct. The
+first of their forefathers who had
+settled there had been a refugee
+from justice for the robbing and
+murder of a priest in Rome; and
+they were never at ease save when
+thieving.</p>
+
+<p>They had no notion of time or of
+its reckonings; but they declared
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>that their family was as old as the
+woods themselves, and there was
+nothing to disprove their assertions.
+They were, in reality, not more than
+squatters, as their forefathers had
+been; but they thought themselves
+the lawful lords of the soil. They
+would cringe and beg, and even
+work when it suited them, but they
+had the old scornful Roman pride
+in their veins, and vowed vengeance
+on any who offended it. The
+woods might be the Gandolfo’s or
+the Pope’s for aught they cared;
+they laid their hands on everything
+they wanted.</p>
+
+<p>There were not more than a
+dozen such families scattered over
+the fifty miles of forest; but every
+one of these was against the
+foreigner; would have been equally
+against him whatever he might
+have done, if he had been St
+Michael’s self, as Caterina and
+Muriella sometimes thought that he
+was. They had always been poor,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>but they had enjoyed thieving,
+drinking, reiving, sinning as they
+chose. He wished to make them
+less poor, but he strove also to make
+them more honest. They did not
+want to learn thrift, or cleanliness, or
+common sense. They only wanted
+to be filthy, and lazy, and corrupt,
+and thievish, in the immemorial
+way transmitted from their fathers.
+They wanted no new-fangled
+virtues. Any wrong they did, such
+as kniving a neighbour or lifting a
+calf, was put up in a bundle, as
+they put up weeds to burn, and was
+thrust away till Easter, when the
+priest washed it clean, as once a
+year their women washed their
+shirts in running water. That was
+the use of priests and women.</p>
+
+<p>To the people of this volcanic
+and historic soil the new-comer, Il
+Ministro as he was called, was
+accursed as ‘the northerner’: a
+northerner whether from Bologna or
+Milano, whether from Russia or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>Poland, made no difference to them;
+they did not know one of those
+names from another; everybody
+at the back of their mountains
+beyond the barrier of Monte Amiata
+sent the snow, and the bad winds,
+and meant the North to them. He
+was like a bad wind to them. The
+very good-will which he bore them
+was more offence than would have
+seemed to them his enmity, since
+the latter they would have understood;
+the former seemed to them
+only a deep-laid duplicity to entrap
+them to their ruin.</p>
+
+<p>There had been various agents
+of the Gandolfi there since that
+memorable day a hundred years
+before when the cavalry of Murat
+had encamped in Le Selve; a day
+that was still talked of over the oak
+logs in winter evenings as freshly
+as though it had been last winter.
+They had been men who had cheated
+their lords and wrung blood out of
+a post, but just because they had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>been thieves and hypocrites, they
+had winked at many evil deeds, and
+had never interfered with the ways
+and beliefs, the robberies and stabbings,
+the family feuds and drunken
+brawls of the country people. It
+had been their interest to shut their
+eyes to all which did not concern
+the fillings of their own leathern
+money-bags, and nod in mute condonation;
+and they had done so.</p>
+
+<p>One of them, indeed, had been
+shot dead as he stood at his bedroom
+window with the moonlight
+full upon him; and another had
+been knived as he had ridden home
+from a fair; but on the whole they
+had been let alone and not disliked.
+They had been men of the province,
+<i>dei nostri</i>; and that fact covers a
+multitude of sins.</p>
+
+<p>No one of these stewards would
+have gone to see the old peasant
+on his death-bed, and made a fuss
+about his being left alone, and have
+accompanied his corpse to its burial.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>They would have sent a barrel of
+good wine to the survivors to make
+merry with after the funeral, and
+would never have asked where the
+body was buried or what respect
+had been shown to it.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, they had been men of
+the people, who had known at most
+bookkeeping by double entry, and
+something of cattle and forestry;
+this northerner talked of trees and
+plants as though they were living
+creatures with wills of their own;
+pretended that the roots of an oak
+corresponded in size and shape with
+its branches, that its leaves were its
+lungs, and all sorts of similar trash;
+he was never drunk, he never swore,
+he kissed his horse on the forehead,
+he bathed in running streams, he
+never made love to their daughters,
+he wanted to open a school for the
+woodlanders’ children, and he had
+heathenish books and devilish instruments
+in his rooms of which they
+caught appalling glimpses. His
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>employers had sent him a compass,
+a chronometer, an aneroid, and a
+telescope with some globes and
+atlases from Rome, and even
+his friend Caterina, who in a
+year and a half had grown to
+believe him a harmless and even
+lovable person, could not see these
+objects without horror, and she
+had begged to be allowed to bring
+over the vicar from San Vitale to
+exorcise them.</p>
+
+<p>She was a stout, good-natured,
+handsome, old woman, who had
+been born on the Gandolfo lands,
+and had lived on them all her life;
+a good cook in her own limited,
+coarse fashion, and a bustling,
+spirited directress of the lads and
+lasses about the house.</p>
+
+<p>“You fash yourself for nought,
+sir,” she said often to Cyrille. “Our
+folks are as Nature made them: you
+will never alter them. They think
+their own ways best, and they see no
+harm in a knife or a musket-shot
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>when there is any score to be wiped
+out. They will never listen to you,
+not if you’re here fifty years.”</p>
+
+<p>“They will come to understand
+me in time,” he said to himself; but
+there are some things which even
+time cannot touch, and amongst
+these things are many human hearts.
+In appealing to their indulgence or
+to their gratitude, or to their intelligence,
+he appealed to qualities which
+did not exist.</p>
+
+<p>When he had taken his coffee he
+sat on, beside the fire, instead of
+going to bed, a bad habit as he
+knew; but he had been a <i>viveur</i> in
+the fashionable clubs of S. Petersburg,
+and used to turn night into
+day; he seldom did so now, for his
+days were laborious, and he kept
+labourer’s hours usually. He looked
+into the wide hearth and on to the
+red-hot oak logs and the crimson
+ashes, and in them he saw faces
+dear to him, on which his eyes
+would probably never look again—one
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>face most often of all, fair, pale,
+proud, tender, with the gleam of
+diamonds in the hair and at the
+throat; a woman who loved him
+and whom he loved—a woman who
+was not his. Where was she this
+night? It was past midnight now
+in Russia as here in Latium. Was
+she, as he had so often seen her,
+the sought of all courtiers at some
+imperial ball? Was she present at
+some ice fête on some frozen arm
+of the Neva, in the light of a million
+torches, with the waltz music of
+Strauss throbbing on her ear?</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, everywhere, forever, he
+felt that she was dead to him.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">III.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">THE old man was buried
+next day, the steward
+lending the mules and
+the cart; Lucio alone
+accompanied the coffin, grumbling
+at the injustice of his brother in
+putting every disagreeable task upon
+his shoulders. Why trouble about
+a dead man more than about a dead
+fox? Why not tumble out the deal
+box into the nearest ditch?</p>
+
+<p>At a turn in the road a horse
+crossed their path. The rider was
+Cyrille.</p>
+
+<p>“I will come with you,” he said,
+“and discharge the fees.” He knew
+that if left to himself, Lucio, were
+he trusted with the money, would
+probably toss the coffin into the first
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>ravine which was deep enough to
+tell no tales.</p>
+
+<p>“No need to fatigue yourself so,
+sir,” said Lucio, greatly disconcerted.
+“If you be good enough to wish to
+pay the burying you can give me
+the money. There is no need for
+you to fag yourself coming to the
+town.”</p>
+
+<p>“I will go with you,” said Cyrille,
+knowing that the money, if it left
+his hands, would never reach the
+graveyard.</p>
+
+<p>Lucio cursed him silently for
+a suspicious, obstinate, niggardly,
+foreign brute. “Spies on us even
+when we are nought but a carcass,”
+he thought, where he sat at
+the coffin head, cracking nuts to
+beguile the way. Did no one
+else pitch their dead into ditches?
+What matter was it to this white-faced
+stranger if the old worn-out
+body were tumbled amongst the
+weeds and toads at the bottom of
+a gully? And how did the stranger
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>know that it had been in Lucio’s
+mind to do away with it so, and to
+sell the cart and mules somewhere
+far away, and come back on foot,
+all tattered and torn, with a well-told
+tale of robbery and a bare
+escape with life?</p>
+
+<p>“Damn him! he sees through the
+bones of one’s head what one is
+thinking,” said the man to himself.
+The scheme had been ingenious and
+feasible; it had been planned by
+Alcide; and now in addition to the
+disappointment of not carrying it
+out, Lucio had the dread of his
+elder’s fury when he should return
+home, having done nothing better
+than to really bury the coffin, and
+return the mules to their stables.</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille, who suspected nothing
+worse than a possible misuse of the
+church fees, had no idea of the
+schemes which his presence defeated
+as he rode on towards the confines
+of the wood where the high-road
+passed which led to the dreary,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>small, walled place, now scarce more
+than a village, although it had been
+a stronghold of the Popes in the
+tenth and eleventh centuries.</p>
+
+<p>“Would the body not do just as
+well left to itself in the woods?”
+muttered Lucio, as he gave the
+wooden box a sullen kick.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” replied Cyrille; “and I
+should like my own body, when I
+die, to be laid down under a tree,
+and left there. But your law and
+your religion bid you bury your
+dead, and bury them as they
+command. You can only obey.”</p>
+
+<p>Lucio grumbled inaudibly. For
+the law he had contempt and hatred,
+but for religion a dull pagan awe;
+such as in old Etruscan and Latin
+days, under these same forest glades,
+rude men had felt for the terrors
+of the gods.</p>
+
+<p>The little borgo of San Vitale,
+to which they were bound, stood
+aloft, looking to the east to Palestrina
+and Monte Albano. The soil
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>immediately beneath was honeycombed
+by ancient sepulchres and
+volcanic fissures; and from a small
+lake mephitic vapours rose; the hill
+was barren of vegetation; the walls
+looked like worm-eaten wood, its
+towers were in dusty ruin; it
+resembled a seagull’s nest, which,
+moth-eaten and cobweb-covered,
+crumbles away in a naturalist’s
+closet.</p>
+
+<p>Clouds hung about its hillsides,
+and the air was heavy and cold.
+The few people in its narrow street
+were ragged, miserable, lean.
+Their black eyes stared at the mule
+and its burden with apathy. Their
+stomachs were empty, their hearts
+were hard; they were half dead
+themselves; some famished sheep
+snatched at the grass growing
+between the stones; a woman
+plucked a living pigeon for the
+priest’s dinner; thirsty dogs lapped
+foul waters in the gutter, the sacristan
+came out of an arched door in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>a cloister: was he called for baptism
+or burial? The latter? Very well.
+He had put in three dead that
+morning. There was room for a
+fourth a-top of them. How long
+were the coffins left in the ditch?
+Oh, a year or so. Then the wood
+split; he mixed the bones together
+and put them in a heap. A man in
+Rome came up and bought these
+heaps at intervals; he believed they
+were ground, and used for making
+pastes, or paper, or bread; he was
+not sure; it was no business of his
+what they were turned to; he
+would call the Priore who was
+acting in the absence of his
+Reverence.</p>
+
+<p>Then he unlocked an iron gate,
+and showed a dreary enclosed square
+of rough brown turf, in which a
+few iron crosses, and hundreds of
+sticks nailed crosswise, were standing
+in many rows. A tethered kid
+was trying to browse, and hurting
+its tender mouth on the sere stalks.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>Across the ground ran two diagonal
+ditches always marked by freshly-piled
+lumps of earth; these were
+the resting-places of those who
+were poorest, where all were
+poor.</p>
+
+<p>The figure of a woman was standing
+there.</p>
+
+<p>It was that of the dead man’s
+granddaughter Muriella.</p>
+
+<p>Muriella Stravolta was a niece of
+Alcide and Lucio by an older
+brother, deceased, who had served
+in the army, and lived afterwards
+at Viterbo. She lived with the
+family and worked with them,
+rather because it never occurred to
+her that she could go elsewhere
+than from any welcome she got from
+them, or any attachment on either
+side. She was twenty-two years
+old, with one of those faces which
+have the old Latin beauty, and one
+of those fine forms so common in
+a country where the females walk
+barefoot and carry their water vases
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>on their heads, and are erect and
+strong and supple as the young
+pines of the mountain side. She
+worked hard, she lived poorly, she
+seldom heard a kind word; but her
+uncles and their wives respected
+her; she had a strong arm and an
+eye which could plunge its rays into
+a sinful soul and read the secrets
+thereof. She always carried a long
+slim knife in her stays, and she
+knew how to use it.</p>
+
+<p>She wore a rough dark skirt and
+crimson bodice, and a white cloth
+folded on her head in the manner of
+the Agro Romano; the clothes were
+poor and torn in places, and showed
+her skin, which was of a clear pale
+brown; her brows were level and
+dark, her eyes black as a stormy
+night, and her mouth was red as
+any scarlet berry of the spindle-tree
+in October. She had wooers as
+many as a population scattered far
+and wide afforded; but no one of
+them ever had more from her than
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>a curt salute or a brisk “begone.”
+She knew what it was to bear
+children for poor men, whether in
+wedlock or outside it, and she was
+in no haste to eat “the sweet fruit
+with the bitter stone.”</p>
+
+<p>“How did you come here?” said
+Lucio angrily, at the sight of her,
+as he backed the coffin and cart
+into the burial-place.</p>
+
+<p>“You would not bring me, so I
+walked across by the hill paths,” she
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Womenkind have no business
+at these rites,” said Lucio; and the
+sexton added, with a leer:</p>
+
+<p>“Bridals and baptisms are for
+handsome wenches, not burials.”</p>
+
+<p>She did not reply to either; but
+she took one end of the wooden
+box and obliged them to lift it not
+too roughly to the ground.</p>
+
+<p>“You did well to come,” said
+Cyrille to her, with sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing. She was not
+there for the sake of her dead
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>grandsire, but to prevent the scheme
+of thieving the mules which she had
+guessed had been planned between
+her uncles.</p>
+
+<p>“Meddling, mischievous baggage!”
+muttered Lucio. What
+business had women to cross and
+mar men’s work?</p>
+
+<p>When the brief rites were over,
+and the deal box had been tumbled
+under clods of clay, she spoke to no
+one, but climbed into the cart, taking
+the reins of rope.</p>
+
+<p>“Lie down on the straw and
+sleep,” she said curtly to her uncle.
+He was cowed; he knew that his intentions
+had been read. He stretched
+himself grumbling in the bottom of
+the cart, and pulled his pipe out of
+his breeches pocket.</p>
+
+<p>“You may ride on,” said the girl
+to Cyrille. “The mules shall be
+at your place before moon-rise, and
+neither footsore nor wind-blown, I
+promise you.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the reason of her presence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>in the burial-ground occurred to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>“She is a brave woman,” he
+thought, “and, I fear, the only
+honest one of her brood.”</p>
+
+<p>He saluted her courteously, and
+rode down the steep street with its
+miserably sickly people staring after
+him, and flocking round his stirrup
+leathers with piteous outcries for
+alms.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned in his saddle
+and looked back whilst his horse
+slackened pace to pass over a
+little bridge, the clouds had
+lifted.</p>
+
+<p>Above in the distance was the
+crumbling indented outline of the
+little walled hamlet, brown and gray,
+solitary and drear, and midway on
+the slope below it was a dusky
+moving patch made on the white
+dust, a patch which was Muriella
+and the mules. Above head the
+sun was breaking through the
+clouds in pale faint gold.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>He had been a man of the world,
+but in his Slav blood romance and
+superstition slumbered; he liked
+to see in that breaking light an
+augury of hope; yet what hope
+could there ever be for him more
+than for that old dead body which
+had been jammed down beneath
+the clay?</p>
+
+<p>His spirit was heavy as he rode
+home, and did not rise with the
+exhilarating speed of his young
+horse. The yawning ditch, the
+gabbled prayer, the battering spade,
+the loneliness, the decay, the sense
+of unenjoyed and unpitied lives
+coming to an end there in the clay,
+generation after generation, century
+after century, with no object, no
+hope, no mourner, went with him
+painfully. Were he to die that evening,
+such would be his own end.
+They would bring him there, and
+shovel him in, and go away, glad to
+be rid of him; and the land of his
+birth, the land of his love, would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>not be with him, even by so much
+as a handful of its soil thrown in
+upon him.</p>
+
+<p>“I grow nervous; that brave
+woman shames me,” he thought.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">IV.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap2">AS the full moon rose over
+the eastern mountains
+that evening, coming
+from the unseen waves
+of the Adriatic Sea, the mule-cart
+was driven into the courtyard of the
+hunting-lodge as she had promised.
+She was alone in it; Lucio had
+slipped off when near the gates,
+and gone homewards by short cuts
+known to him across the woods.
+His heart was black against her
+with the rage of a wolf robbed of a
+fine meal off fawn or kid; he was
+thirsty to pour his chagrin into the
+yet blacker bosom of his elder
+brother.</p>
+
+<p>“Stop here to-night, child,” said
+old Caterina, coming out into the
+courtyard to greet her. “’Tis late,
+and you must be tired.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>The girl demurred and resisted,
+but the old woman, who had
+known her as a swaddled baby,
+would take no denial. Cyrille
+came out of the great doorway, the
+light of the moon shining on his
+face, which looked to her so strange,
+so fair, so angelic, like the St
+Michael above a side altar in the
+Cathedral at her birthplace of
+Viterbo.</p>
+
+<p>She thought the stranger of
+another race, another humanity, to
+Lucio or herself. She had never
+seen a man so fair, so calm, so
+delicately pale, and yet so cool in
+courage as any tusked boar in the
+woods.</p>
+
+<p>She had noticed him much
+oftener and more curiously than
+he had noticed her; and she
+knew, as he did not know, the
+hate against him which smouldered
+in the breasts of all the
+people scattered through the solitudes
+of Le Selve.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>“Yes, rest here to-night,” he
+said, “we should be churls to let
+you go. Take her within, good
+Caterina.”</p>
+
+<p>Though her muscles were as
+steel, and her limbs as untiring as
+those of a deer’s, she was fatigued
+that night, and she did not care to
+sup off the black looks and bitter
+upbraidings of her uncles, who, to
+her, would make no secret of their
+disappointment and their rage.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman took her to the
+kitchen, and warmed, and fed, and
+welcomed her.</p>
+
+<p>“You are as strong as a man,”
+said Caterina enviously, for her
+own strength had also once been
+great.</p>
+
+<p>“Stronger than many men,” said
+Muriella with pride. “They know
+it all through the Selve.”</p>
+
+<p>“Strength is a guardian angel,”
+said the elder woman. “But a
+woman’s strength is a devil in
+disguise sometimes; she trusts to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>it; and lo!—it snaps, and she
+falls.”</p>
+
+<p>“That may well be,” said
+Muriella gravely.</p>
+
+<p>As she bent down over the
+brazier its red reflection shone on
+the fine outline of her brow and
+cheek, on the thickness of her
+raven hair, on the dark line of her
+up-curling lashes.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a morsel for a
+monarch,” thought Caterina, but
+she did not say it; it was known
+that the girl did not like such
+jokes.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, she said:</p>
+
+<p>“I am going to change the
+mattress in Ser Cirillo’s room.
+Come and give me a helping
+hand.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella went without demur.</p>
+
+<p>When the lifting and changing
+of the mattress on the great
+mediæval bed with its gilded
+baldachino and crown was done, she
+stood and looked around her.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>“What are these?” she said,
+pointing to the telescope upon its
+stand and the celestial globe.</p>
+
+<p>“Uncanny things that bring no
+good to anyone,” answered
+Caterina. “That big tube lets you
+get up to the moon quite close;
+you can hear the people in it talking.”</p>
+
+<p>“Saints above us!” said the girl,
+much astonished; “I always
+thought the moon was a lamp.”</p>
+
+<p>“So do all folks as keep their
+senses,” said Caterina, with that
+contempt of ignorance for knowledge,
+which is of all scorn the most
+derisive.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of Muriella surveyed
+the chamber with awe. It was
+very large, with vast windows, a
+tessellated floor, faded frescoed
+walls, and the grand bed with
+hangings in purple satin, once a
+cardinal’s. There were some
+oaken tables and dressers, and a
+few huge chairs with leathern seats,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>and from the centre of the ceiling
+hung a bronze Etruscan lamp found
+centuries earlier in the forest underground.
+On one of the tables stood
+an earthen jar filled with the autumn
+colchicum, and there were many
+books and many drawings. Bare
+and plain though the room was,
+it had that nobility which comes
+from ancient usage, and the indefinable
+grace in it which is given to
+their habitations by those whose
+pursuits are intellectual and whose
+tastes are artistic.</p>
+
+<p>“It feels like a church,” said
+Muriella to herself: she had always
+in her memory the churches of
+Viterbo, where she had gone with
+her mother, and above all of the
+Duomo of San Lorenzo there,
+where Guy de Montfort slew
+Henry of Cornwall before the high
+altar, and where an English Pope
+forced a German Emperor to hold
+his stirrup as vassal of the Holy
+See. This chamber, with its three
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>great windows facing the west,
+filled her with a dim pleasure and
+veneration as the altars and aisles
+of San Lorenzo had done.</p>
+
+<p>But she looked for one thing
+which she did not see.</p>
+
+<p>“There are no arms,” she said
+to Caterina; “not even a hunting-knife.”</p>
+
+<p>“He has a revolver,” said the
+old woman. “But you are right,
+my dear. There should be more
+weapons nigh at hand. The
+<i>guardiani</i> have all guns, it is
+true.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella said nothing. She had
+little faith in the forest guards.
+Were they the stranger’s friends or
+foes? Of one’s own hand one is
+sure—but of any other?</p>
+
+<p>“Tell your master to get more
+defence for himself,” she said as
+she lingered on the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>“He is not my master,” said
+Caterina, huffed and on her dignity.
+“He is a mere servant of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>Gandolfo, like me, like Fausto and
+Gian, and Falko, and Dreino, and
+all the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>“No; he rules those,” said
+Muriella quickly. “He is in
+authority over them. Perhaps not
+over you, but over them certainly.”</p>
+
+<p>“And God and the Gandolfo
+are over us all,” said Caterina
+testily. “Over him as well as
+the least of us. Come to supper,
+wench.”</p>
+
+<p>Supper was eaten in the wide
+long kitchen, black with smoke and
+age, with the sweet herbs and the
+dried pork hanging from the rafters,
+and a great fire burning in a hearth
+vast enough to hold a dozen men
+on its settles. There were more
+than a dozen men and women
+seated along the tables with the
+light from the brass <i>lucerne</i> shining
+on their swarthy faces. The males
+looked greedily and glowingly at
+Muriella, but they did not delay
+the great business of their hungry
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>jaws and thirsty throats to pay her
+compliments. Moreover, Caterina
+ruled them with a rod of iron, and
+tolerated no amorous follies in her
+presence. Bean-soup, roast kid,
+fennel and salsify and macaroni were
+their fare, washed down by a rough,
+stinging red wine. Their strong
+and comely women ate and drank
+as copiously as the men: they had
+few words to waste, and their white
+teeth worked like a mill. Italians
+have not always as much as they
+could eat, but when they get the
+chance they can feed like Gargantua’s
+self. Two Franciscan friars
+who were passing through the
+woods and slept at the fattoria as
+a matter of course, were as loudly
+munching and as thirstily drinking
+as the others, and conveying at
+short intervals remnants of meat
+and bread into their wallets, under
+pretext of feeding the dogs who lay
+under the table.</p>
+
+<p>“Trust the holy men to take all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>they can lay their hands on,” thought
+Caterina, noting their adroit manœuvres.
+Through as many centuries
+as the oaks without were old,
+monks of all orders had come and
+gone, and eaten, and drunk, and
+been feasted, and welcomed at
+those tables in Le Selve. The
+mendicant-friars were now few in
+number, and poor in worldly goods,
+but at all the Gandolfo’s houses they
+were ever as honoured as they had
+been of old, except in the innermost
+heart of Caterina.</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille supped later, alone, in a
+small stone chamber which opened
+out of his bedroom. His place at
+the steward’s table was filled by the
+under-steward, Fausto.</p>
+
+<p>Fausto was a Roman, with the
+head and face, the throat and
+shoulders, of a gladiator in the
+galleries of the Vatican; thickly-curling
+locks encircled his broad
+low brow, and rich blood mantled
+in his olive cheeks.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>He and the Franciscans spoke
+in cordial amity where they sat
+together at his end of his table.</p>
+
+<p>“You have a stranger here since
+we passed by this time two years,”
+said one of the friars.</p>
+
+<p>“We have,” said Fausto, and his
+tone was sullen.</p>
+
+<p>“A man from the North, a schismatic,”
+said the friar.</p>
+
+<p>“Of that I know naught,” replied
+Fausto.</p>
+
+<p>“A pagan, one may say,” added
+the monk. “Why did your good
+lord place him here? ’Tis a sin
+against the Holy Ghost.”</p>
+
+<p>Fausto shrugged his shoulders;
+he was no theologian.</p>
+
+<p>“Does he know aught of
+forestry?” asked the other Franciscan.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” said Fausto reluctantly.
+“But all new-fangled northern
+ways. We always used to cut
+wood when we wished, and fell
+timber when we wanted a sum of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>money. But under his rule there
+is to be none of that. Only one
+tree in eight, and never even so
+much as this save in November
+and December, and no pollarding
+or cropping, and no fuel-making,
+and even the furze and heather cut
+by rule, and rarely.”</p>
+
+<p>He snorted scornfully like an
+angry bull, and drank a draught of
+the rough red wine.</p>
+
+<p>He had taken the extreme step
+of going to solicit audience at the
+palace of his employers in Rome,
+but had not been received by anyone
+higher than the house steward,
+who in answer to his grievances
+had declared that he could not place
+them before their lords, since he
+knew well that in regard to Le
+Selve all the new-comer did was
+well done—an unanswerable Italian
+formula.</p>
+
+<p>“All the old feudal rights are
+swept away,” Fausto continued.
+“Rights of pasturage, of dead
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>wood, of snaring, of shooting, of
+barking and burning, of grazing
+and broom cutting—all are done
+away with I tell you, holy men.
+’Tis enough to make the folks of the
+soil rise and fire the forests. Maybe
+they will do it one day.”</p>
+
+<p>“To be sure, poor souls,” said
+the friar with compassion, “and
+the saints will excuse them.”</p>
+
+<p>Who would now give a Franciscan,
+when he passed through the
+Selve, a plump quail, or a young
+hare, or a brace of coots shot on
+the pond?</p>
+
+<p>“To be sure, indeed!” echoed
+Fausto; “whoever saw wild forest
+land kept as though it were a
+Madonna’s garden? No goats
+must crop, no mules must browse,
+no guns go on the marshes, no
+nests be taken high or low, no
+bark be stripped, no undergrowth
+be cut, no gins be set, nor netting;
+the Lord grant me patience! The
+people look to me for help. They
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>come to me weeping and groaning;
+what can I say? What did he do
+when I had covered a teal with
+my gun last June? Struck the
+barrel up with his stick; and the
+bird away over the reeds. ‘It’s
+close time,’ said he. ‘Close time,
+close time!’ By the Lord! was
+ever ‘close time’ heard of in those
+woods? Have we not shot when
+and where as we chose all the
+year round? Eh? Many’s the
+head of game I have got shooting
+a sitting hare or nesting plover.
+‘Close time!’ Great powers above
+us! Who ever heard tell of the
+like since the hills were piled one
+a-top of another? But so it is now,
+and no redress against it to be
+got in Rome. ‘All that he does
+is well done’—no other answer but
+that. Damnation! I am nothing
+here any more. I am no more
+than a sere twig, than a strangled
+mole. I go to Rome; and what
+say they to me there? ‘All that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>he does is well done.’ They will
+not even hear or enquire, and even
+the wild boar hunting is stopped.
+He is a second St Francis. He
+talks with the pigs and the
+wolves!”</p>
+
+<p>“Do not speak the name of a
+saint of our Church in the same
+breath with a vile schismatic outside
+her pale,” said the elder Franciscan;
+and he was so greatly
+shocked that he drank out of the
+flask of wine nearest him instead
+of out of his glass tumbler, and
+only set it down when it was half
+empty.</p>
+
+<p>Muriella, where she sat beside
+the Massaja, was too far off to
+hear much that they said, but a
+little reached her, and she saw the
+lowering brows and tempestuous
+gestures of Fausto. She spoke
+across the length of the table to him.</p>
+
+<p>“Your pardon, Messir Fausto,”
+she said in a clear, steady voice;
+“you forget to add one thing.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>For all the feudal rights taken up,
+there has been paid compensation;
+it is but the abuse of them which
+has been checked and stopped.”</p>
+
+<p>Fausto looked over the lighted
+wicks of the brass lamps at the
+speaker. He was betrothed to the
+daughter of a wealthy vintner in
+Montefiascone, but that fact had
+not closed his eyes to the other
+fact that the niece of Alcide and
+Lucio had great and uncommon
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>He had often seen her, for her
+uncles were favourites with him;
+men who understood that he was in
+his place for his own interests, not
+for those of Le Selve, or of the
+owners of Le Selve. “Between
+the wise a wink suffices,” says an
+Italian proverb; and that wink had
+been often exchanged betwixt him
+and Alcide and Lucio. The coldness
+with which she had always
+treated him, when any other young
+woman between the Apennines and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>the Liris was but too proud of his
+notice, had attracted him all the
+more by its rarity and offence, for
+<i>il bel Faustone</i> was accustomed to
+easy conquests. He was disconcerted
+now by what she said to
+him; for he knew that it was true.
+He was saved from reply by a great
+clamour which uprose from the
+throats of all the farm servants and
+others present; for whenever yet
+since the world began would people
+of their kind admit that any compensation,
+however generous and
+just, could make amends for the loss
+of old and dear abuses enjoyed with
+impunity, and turned to profit unexamined?</p>
+
+<p>Such abuse is the very marrow of
+their bones, the supreme joy of their
+souls; no bird which is brought has
+the flavour of the bird which is
+poached; no oaken log which is
+given burns so boisterously and so
+warmly as the one which is hewn
+by stealth and stolen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>In speaking as she did Muriella
+aroused against her all the wrath of
+her own class; she seemed to them
+an apostate allied with the enemy.
+Time, temperament, inclination,
+habit, were all arrayed against her;
+the dearest privilege of all who
+heard her was to pilfer and to
+plunder, a privilege confirmed by
+centuries of usage; who was she,
+forest bred if not forest born, to
+take the part of one who suppressed
+the time-honoured thefts of
+foresters?</p>
+
+<p><i>L’uso fa legge</i> in this country
+more than in all others.</p>
+
+<p>Who was she to set herself
+up against that time-honoured
+axiom?</p>
+
+<p>The hubbub was so great, the roar
+of crossing voices, and the scream
+of angry denunciation, were so loud
+that Caterina rapped sharply on the
+table with her horn-handled carving
+knife.</p>
+
+<p>“Silence, children! Who dares
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>speak here? Quiet! Quiet at once,
+or no wine will be drunk by anyone
+to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>Under so dire a threat, which
+they knew would be inexorably
+carried out if they disobeyed her,
+the men and women held their
+peace, and hung their heads
+sheepishly. Even the mendicant-friars
+were mute.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, wenches,” said Caterina,
+and as she rose all the other women
+rose also and left the kitchen
+in her train, Muriella with them.
+Against the will of the Massaja
+there is no appeal in the household
+which she rules. When she had
+sent the servants to their several
+evening tasks, Caterina took the
+girl to her own room, and showed
+her a little closet out of it where
+she was to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>“You are plunging your arm
+into a hornet’s nest,” she said, with
+not unkind severity. “The woodlanders
+will never suffer you to go
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>preaching against them and their
+rights.”</p>
+
+<p>“What they call rights are not
+rights,” said Muriella. “They are
+wicked, thievish, knavish ways.
+They should be grateful for all
+your gentleman does for them.
+He is merciful and just. They
+should rejoice.”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina gave a short gruff laugh
+like an owl’s hoot.</p>
+
+<p>“A clear cloudless night is a nice
+thing,” she answered, “but when
+a man is going to tryst with a
+neighbour’s wife, or waiting with
+his knife to avenge an old grudge,
+he likes a murky night better,
+doesn’t he, my dear? Ways are
+crooked, and plunder has been
+easy got in Le Selve. No one of
+the woodlanders wants to be set
+straight. Each one likes to crawl
+on his belly and go crooked as he
+chooses. Your uncles as much as
+any.”</p>
+
+<p>“That I know,” said Muriella.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span>“But to crawl on the belly is for
+snakes, not men.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine words, my dear, but they’ll
+cost you heavy,” answered the old
+woman. “Look after yourself,
+child; you’ll find that enough to do.
+I don’t like Faustone’s hot look at
+you. He is a lewd fellow, and
+stands pledged to wed with a
+wench in Montefiascone come next
+Easter.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella smiled slightly. “Messir
+Faustone may look as he likes, and
+wed when he wishes. He will not
+trouble my peace, be sure.”</p>
+
+<p>“Best that nobody should,” said
+Caterina. “You should leave
+those bad men you belong to, and
+marry,” she added.</p>
+
+<p>Muriella shook her head. “Not I.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?” said Caterina.
+“There are only two things for
+a woman to choose between—the
+nuptial bed or the convent cell; and
+you are not one for a convent life,
+my wench.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>“Nor yet one to be a man’s
+beast of burden,” said the girl. “It
+is a cow’s life; for ever yoked to the
+plough, though pregnant and in
+pain; for ever toiling over the
+furrows, though with udders throbbing
+and aching in milk. Not for
+me! Not for me! Death sooner!”</p>
+
+<p>“There are good men to be
+had,” said Caterina, not very firmly
+nor with much conviction.</p>
+
+<p>“Not in these woods,” said
+Muriella; “and even were one of
+our men good, what could he do?
+His woman is his for his pleasure
+and her pain, like the cow in the
+yoke.”</p>
+
+<p>“’Tis nature,” said Caterina.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not say otherwise,” replied
+Muriella, and she leant her arms on
+her knees and her cheeks on her
+hands, and looked into the fire.
+Nature was rude and rough, brutal
+and ugly, in its human shapes; only
+beautiful in its trees, in its waters,
+in its clouds. She did not know
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>much, she could not read a line, she
+had never been out of the woods,
+but she could read human faces and
+human hearts, and she generally
+found what she read in them to be
+as foul as the forest swamps, where
+the newts and the adders lived, and
+the night-shade hung over the slime.</p>
+
+<p>Caterina went on with her spinning
+by the light of the three-wicked
+brass lamps.</p>
+
+<p>“If you won’t marry, I do not
+see what can become of you,” she
+said with some severity.</p>
+
+<p>Muriella smiled. “I am a good
+worker; I can earn my day’s wage
+any time anywhere. I would go
+away to-morrow, but I am loth to
+leave the woods. They are like
+father and mother, child and cradle,
+to me.”</p>
+
+<p>“That is rubbish,” said the older
+woman roughly. “The woods are
+dumb, like the beasts they harbour.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella did not reply. They
+were not dumb to her, nor were the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>beasts either, but she was shy in
+speech, and the sympathies which
+moved within her were rather
+instincts than conscious feelings.
+She was not often capable of unravelling
+and explaining them, and
+the good Caterina did not invite
+such confidences.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a ripe cherry, and
+Fausto is a wasp,” said Caterina
+darkly, clinging to her ideas.</p>
+
+<p>“I am a cherry that stings like
+a nettle,” answered the younger
+woman with her slow, faint smile.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t trust to that,” said the
+older woman. “Well, it is late;
+get you to bed.”</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes’ time both she
+and her guest were sound asleep in
+the dreamless slumber of healthy
+fatigue.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">V.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">WHEN the morning
+broke over the Umbrian
+Mountains on
+the far east, the girl
+was away on foot back to her uncle’s
+house, before the sun had risen
+high enough to be seen over the
+black ridge of the easterly woods.
+Her uncles cast evil looks at her on
+her arrival, but, to her surprise, no
+one said anything in allusion to the
+incident of the previous day. They
+owed her a heavy grudge, but they
+did not fritter it out in words.
+Vengeance would keep in the Selve.
+It is a good wine; the best of all
+wines, to their thinking.</p>
+
+<p>“I should be wiser to leave
+them,” she thought often in the day
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>which followed. “I can get my
+bread anywhere.”</p>
+
+<p>But her heart clung to the
+woods as she had said; they were
+her friends: all she had to love.
+She knew every big tree in them,
+as a priest knows each one of his
+flock. She loved their liberty,
+their solitude, their silence, their
+brown deep pools, their impenetrable
+brakes where none but the
+wild pig could push his way, their
+green twilight, dim even in noonday,
+the profound stillness of their
+winter days and summer eves; she
+clung to these with all her heart,
+though without full measure or
+consciousness of why she did so.</p>
+
+<p>The hare with its large tender
+eyes, the bird with its flood of song,
+the meadow-sweet with its plume
+of snow, the birch with its bands of
+silver, the oak with its russet-brown
+trunk—these were all nearer to her
+than the family with which she
+lived. From the silence and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span>shadow of the woods she derived
+a pleasure that was inarticulate but
+keen, and when she saw the mules
+straining under a rain of blows, the
+cows lowing in vain for their
+ravished offspring, the troops of
+weary goats toiling through the
+dust of the high-road, the suffering
+creatures seemed nearer to her than
+the men who cut their throats, or
+stunned their brains with repeated
+blows.</p>
+
+<p>To all those around her such
+victims were no more than bits of
+wood, and the torture of them was
+the chief pastime of young and old;
+but she had been created with a
+different soul. It was dumb, like
+that of the cows and the goats, but
+it was alive.</p>
+
+<p>To her own relatives she seemed
+a fool; only they knew that she
+was not a fool, because they could
+not fool her; and her brown, well-shaped
+hand had before now taken
+a cruel shepherd by the scruff of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span>his neck and tossed him into a
+running stream, or on to a bed of
+nettles. For she was very strong,
+with that marvellous strength
+created by air and exertion alone in
+those whose food is but black bread
+and herbs.</p>
+
+<p>The work she had to do was of
+the roughest. The only rest she
+knew was when she sat down to
+the <i>telaio</i>, the board at which she
+weaved the rude hempen linen in
+use in the family. But this did not
+trouble her; she was young and
+active, and it would have hurt her
+more to have her energies and
+strength pent up unused than to
+strain them to the utmost in the
+outdoor labours of the croft and
+wold. The idea of going elsewhere
+appalled her, not from any
+peril which might lie in such
+wanderings, but from the force of
+habit and affection which bound
+her to the soil. She knew that
+in any other place she would feel
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>like the homeless squirrel whom
+the forest fire has chased from its
+familiar nest in the old chestnut
+bole, and driven out to wander
+forlorn over charred moss and
+smouldering turf, knowing its homeward
+path no more.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later Cyrille saw her
+as he went on one of his daily rides
+through the woods. He stopped
+his horse and spoke to her.</p>
+
+<p>“I have not thanked you for
+what you did at San Vitale the
+other day,” he said, as she straightened
+her back and looked up at
+him from her kneeling posture,
+where she was cutting dead canes.
+“But I am afraid it may have
+made ill-feeling between you and
+your uncles. Has it done so?”</p>
+
+<p>“There is little love ever between
+us,” she answered. “Their thoughts
+are not my thoughts, nor their ways
+mine.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would it not be better to leave
+them?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span>“No doubt.”</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I ask Caterina to find you
+work with us?”</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why not?”</p>
+
+<p>“It would not suit me.”</p>
+
+<p>She grew a little red as she
+answered. Messir Faustone had
+persecuted her with coarse courtship.</p>
+
+<p>“You cannot be happy amongst
+people whose conduct is alien and
+offensive to you,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>She drew down some more canes
+thoughtfully, and cut them through,
+and cast them on the ground beside
+others already cut.</p>
+
+<p>“Happy! what is that?” she
+said, with a genuine ignorance
+which had nothing cynical. “That
+is the way you talk. We do not.”</p>
+
+<p>Through Cyrille’s mind there
+drifted the line of Goethe—“When
+to the passing day,” etc.—and that
+other sentence of Théroigne de
+Mericourt—“Doth not the child
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>smile in its mother’s face under
+Tiberius as under Trajan?”</p>
+
+<p>“There are natural joys, surely,
+given even to the humblest in all
+times,” he said, with a little hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful mouth of Muriella
+curled with a little scorn.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you ever note the asses
+that come for the sand which is taken
+out of the pits?” she said curtly.
+“They are put to their work when
+they are foals. They never reach
+their full growth. Their eyes are
+always sore. Their coats are always
+full of dust. No one ever cleans
+them. Their hoofs are dry and
+split. Their bones are through
+their skin. They get nothing to
+eat but mouldy straw and dead
+leaves. They are beasts of burden,
+fed on blows. They have never a
+minute’s peace. The women of the
+poor are like them. They bring
+forth in hunger and pain, and what
+they bring forth is born to their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>burdens. That is why I will never
+marry, if that be what you mean.”</p>
+
+<p>He was astonished at the reflection
+and observation conveyed in
+the reply. It was like a miracle to
+hear any one of these people speak
+with compassion of an animal, and
+with any comparison of animal to
+human destinies.</p>
+
+<p>He was surprised also at the
+directness of the answer, for a direct
+answer is seldom given in these
+lands.</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to a speck of gold
+shining far away in the west.</p>
+
+<p>“Yonder, where you see that
+spark of light, lies Rome. There,
+more than one man who was born of
+a peasant mother has sat enthroned
+as a viceregent of God, and
+emperors and kings have kneeled
+to kiss his foot. What woman can
+say what she may bring forth?
+Who can tell what the fruit of her
+body may be?”</p>
+
+<p>She looked where he pointed, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>she did not understand. Of Rome
+she had heard, but she had no
+notion of it, other than as a place
+whither the <i>vetturini</i> went as the
+end of their journeys.</p>
+
+<p>The way is long and the gulf is
+deep which divides the cultured
+from the ignorant mind. Each
+speaks to the other in an unknown
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that she had not
+grasped the vague consolation
+offered in his words. Silence fell
+between them, only filled by the
+sound of her rusty sickle hacking
+at the dry canes.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you stay here?” she
+said suddenly. “Why? It is not
+your country?”</p>
+
+<p>“It is not; no.”</p>
+
+<p>“Have you no friends?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, many; but not here.”</p>
+
+<p>“You should go to them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Would that I could!”</p>
+
+<p>“Why cannot you?”</p>
+
+<p>He was silent. How could he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>make her understand his position?
+Still kneeling on the ground with
+her billhook hacking the canes, she
+looked up at him with sudden sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>“You killed someone?” she
+said in a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>That was the cause which made
+men fugitives here in Le Selve.</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said Cyrille; “I did worse—I
+tried to teach men, and they
+would not be taught. My rulers
+thought it a crime. They put me
+in prison. I escaped. I am here.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella was silent, resting the
+billhook on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>“You try to teach men here,”
+she said after a while; “they will
+not put you in any prison, but they
+will put you in your grave. They
+are all against you. They are not
+worth teaching. You will not alter
+them if you try till your hair is
+white.”</p>
+
+<p>“I wish to do my duty to my
+employers and to their people.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>“You are a just man. But they
+do not want your justice. They
+want to do as they have always
+done, and be as they have always
+been. The wild pigs like the
+swamp. They do not want to go
+with you to clean straw in a
+stable.”</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille was silent.</p>
+
+<p>“I used to believe,” he thought,
+“I have always believed, that the
+poor only needed to be shown the
+right road to gladly follow it; that
+they only wanted to be led to the
+water-side to willingly wash and be
+clean. But I begin to fear that I
+have deceived myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Aloud he said:</p>
+
+<p>“Were I on my own property, I
+might allow it to be ruined if I
+chose, though to do so would be,
+not benevolence, but weakness.
+Here, however, I have no choice.
+I am but the servant of others. I
+must enforce what I know to be
+right.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>“They will kill you.”</p>
+
+<p>“That must be as it will.
+Threatened men usually live long.”</p>
+
+<p>“Not always; and not here.”</p>
+
+<p>Then she resumed her work,
+and the pallid rustling ribands of
+the canes fell beneath her rusty
+blade.</p>
+
+<p>“And whoever slays you,” she
+added as she worked, “will never
+be found. Everyone will make
+common cause with him. Everyone
+will be for him, risk all for him,
+hide him in their beds, swear falsely
+for him by the Madonna’s self. He
+will be beloved of all, and pass safely
+by signs from house to house, from
+village to village, from province to
+province. The law will never get
+hold of his little finger. The hatred
+of the stranger is more binding than
+oaths.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then why do you not share
+it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>She did not know why. She had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span>not asked herself. Certainly she
+ought to be on the side of her
+own people, and not his. Why was
+she not so?</p>
+
+<p>“You are in the right,” she said
+simply; “and you are alone against
+hundreds. I have never been at
+one with my father’s people. My
+mother was a woman of Viterbo.
+I lived with her in Viterbo till she
+died. She had left my father
+because he was wicked and cruel.
+She was good; so good! She
+taught me to see that the ways
+they follow here are evil. They
+are bad men, as my father was. And
+they have no love for the woods.
+You have. And now good-day.
+They had best not see you here.
+They will think we plot some mischief
+against them.”</p>
+
+<p>She bound all the cut canes together
+in one bundle, heaved them
+upward on to her head, and when
+loaded went away along the banks
+of the stream, walking erect and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>swiftly, the great sheaf swaying as
+she moved.</p>
+
+<p>So passed the women of Etruria
+and of Latium before her through
+these woods. The work of husbandry
+is the only work which does
+not change with time, but remains,
+at least in Italy, natural, noble, and
+beautiful in its attitudes and its
+simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her as he might
+have looked at some statue exhumed
+from the soil. She was as sexless as
+a statue to him; he wore the ice
+armour of an absorbing and despairing
+passion, which left him neither
+sight nor sense for any more fugitive
+feelings.</p>
+
+<p>But she had shown a comprehension
+of his position, of his motives,
+of his difficulties, which was welcome
+in the isolation wherein he lived,
+and made him grateful to her, as he
+would have been for the sympathy
+of some other man. He discerned
+the intelligence which shone through
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>the fog of her ignorance, and he
+appraised at its due value the
+courage which kept her in perpetual
+opposition to those with whom she
+lived.</p>
+
+<p>Her warnings did not influence his
+conduct, but he knew that they
+were founded on a just estimate of
+those around him. They weighed,
+however, but little upon him, because
+his philosophy was fatalistic,
+and he had that apathetic indifference
+to danger which comes
+from extreme unhappiness in life.
+When you have lost all except
+actual existence, it seems to matter
+little if sheer existence be taken
+as well.</p>
+
+<p>He had been now eighteen months
+in these woods, seeing no faces but
+those of peasants hostile to him,
+and exchanging no single word with
+anyone of cultured intelligence.
+Muriella was ignorant as any one
+of the sheep, who only knew their
+winter and summer tracks; but she
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>understood with her heart, if not
+with her mind, and he found relief
+in telling her a little of those “old
+forgotten far-off things,” which
+seemed to him so many æons of
+time away, though they belonged in
+truth only to his own life of a year
+or two earlier. It did him good to
+call up that past, these scenes, all
+those who had been with him in his
+daily life; it relieved him of that
+dazed sense of unreality which came
+upon him as on men in the solitude
+of a condemned cell.</p>
+
+<p>Once he spoke of the woman he
+loved: not by name, but as Surrey
+might have spoken of Geraldine,
+with bated breath and unuttered
+prayer; and having thus spoken
+once, he did so again, and yet again,
+tracing her portrait in words, pressing
+the dagger of regret into his
+heart as lovers love to do in every
+age. And Muriella listened, growing
+pale, hanging on his words, till
+in her rude fancy an image shaped
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>itself from his words clothed in starlight,
+crowned with the pale hellebore,
+fugitive, spiritual, unreachable.
+Imagination was dormant in her; it
+caught light at the flame of his
+higher intelligence. She could not
+see clearly by it, but she saw a ray
+before her feet—a soft faint green
+light like that of the glowworm in
+the woodland paths, the ray of awaking
+comprehension, with its companion
+pain.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know why she
+thought of this unknown lady thus.
+Perhaps it was because, when he
+first spoke of her, the hellebore was
+in blossom all over the awakening
+woods.</p>
+
+<p>It did not occur to him that he
+did a cruel thing in interesting thus
+in his fate a poor untutored maiden;
+he scarcely thought of her at all; he
+spoke to her because he read loyalty
+and sympathy in her gaze as in the
+eyes of a dog; and because he was
+weary of the long, dumb, friendless
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span>front in which his mind and memories
+were imprisoned.</p>
+
+<p>“You will go back,” she said to
+him one day when the grief which
+was in him broke down his courage
+and his resignation, and she saw
+great tears rise slowly to his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He gave a gesture of despair.
+“Ah, never.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, you will go back.”</p>
+
+<p>“What should you know, poor
+child?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing,” said Muriella.
+“But I pray for you.”</p>
+
+<p>He bent his head.</p>
+
+<p>“I thank you, dear.”</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a wistful,
+yearning look, which he did not
+interpret because his thoughts were
+elsewhere than with her.</p>
+
+<p>“I will pray always,” she said
+briefly. “I am sure you will go
+back to your own land one day.”</p>
+
+<p>“You say so to console me.
+Those whom I have offended do
+not pardon.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>“May it not be put in their
+hearts to relent?”</p>
+
+<p>“As soon will yonder oaks rise
+and walk.”</p>
+
+<p>Yet, though his reason rejected
+it, her persistent faith entered into
+his heart against his reason, and
+was sweet to him with the sweetness
+of hope.</p>
+
+<p>After all, save death, nothing
+was absolutely hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>He was still young enough to see
+many changes in the world—wars,
+revolutions, dynasties, policies,
+might all alter the face of Europe,
+and with the larger national life,
+his own obscure individual fate. It
+was the wildest and vaguest dream,
+but it trembled on the edge of the
+unknown future, as far away in the
+west and the night, at times, a faint
+spark of light shone, which was the
+beacon above the sea at Palo; not
+a score of times in a year was that
+far-off speck visible, but to know
+that it was there lent a sense of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span>safety and companionship even in
+the darkest murk of storm. So to
+him was precious that sense of hope
+in another soul; he could not share
+its belief, but it saved him from
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>“You will go back to your own
+land,” said Muriella; and the sound
+of the promise was sweet to his ear,
+though spoken by a poor ignorant
+girl who did not even know where
+his own land lay.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">VI.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">IN her, as in most women of
+her nation, religious faith
+was very strong, but vague.
+It was an intense force, blind
+and irrational, which had no more
+doubt of itself than she had that
+her feet were planted on the solid
+earth. But it was shapeless and dim
+as the lineaments of the Scythian
+Diana, which lay so long under the
+waters of the Lake of Nemi. The
+early years of her childhood had
+been happy, for her mother had
+been good, and Viterbo remained
+in her recollection transfigured in
+the golden light of a lost joy. It
+was to her a holy place: her mother
+lay there. Slowly there entered
+into her mind and matured in it
+the idea of going on pilgrimage to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>Viterbo, and there beseeching that
+the saints and archangels should
+grant the stranger his desire.</p>
+
+<p>It was a generous, an unselfish,
+almost an heroic thought, and it
+grew apace with her, as a sweet
+herb grows in a good soil, and the
+very pain it gave her stung her
+into pursuance of it. She had
+never been beyond the limits of
+the Gandolfo Woods since she had
+been brought under their broad
+green shadows one burning July
+day in her tenth year; but she
+knew well where her birthplace lay,
+to the north-east after crossing the
+last boundary of Le Selve.</p>
+
+<p>Pilgrims through many a century
+had come and gone in one continuous
+stream from that little
+walled city of the Popes to the
+greater Urbs on Tiber; but now
+the Popes go no more to Viterbo,
+and the sand chokes its fountains;
+and the course of life flows away
+from it, and leaves it like them dry
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>and silent. This she did not know.
+It was to her the city of her childhood;
+the city of winged angels
+and clustering seraphim, and
+heavenly choirs and miracles and
+benedictions. She had no knowledge
+of its great past; of its fine
+art, of its sacred memories; but she
+loved it because there she had
+known a mother’s love, there had
+made a mother’s grave.</p>
+
+<p>In her solitary musings, during
+her long hours of toil, the resolution
+matured with her. Viterbo
+seemed, in her recollection of the
+long journey from it, immeasurably
+far off, far as the very moon itself.
+But from shepherds and cattle-drivers
+she learned the way to take,
+out of the woods and northward,
+to join the great high-road.</p>
+
+<p>She walked nine miles, over hills
+and across streams, to meet the
+public vehicle as it passed on its
+way to Ronciglione, and thence
+went to Viterbo itself. She had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>only a few coins in her pocket,
+for it was only when she sold a
+little piece of hempen cloth of her
+own making that she got a trifle.
+But she had some black bread
+and two onions in a handkerchief,
+and she was used to meagre food.</p>
+
+<p>After the green shade of the
+forest, the cloud of dust upon the
+roads and the grey desolate streets
+seemed to her very dreary; the
+city she remembered with its dancing
+waters and its glancing spires
+seemed to have vanished. Was
+the Spirit of God here more truly
+than in the aisles of pine and ilex?
+It was twelve years since she had
+been in these stony places, and her
+bare feet, used to the moss and the
+turf, ached as they trod the granite
+of the streets. But the Duomo was
+there, the temple dedicated to St
+Laurence, where she had knelt when
+a little child at her mother’s side,
+whilst the music of the Kyrie
+Eleison poured overhead, in sounds,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>winged like birds, which floated to the
+roof and passed out heavenward.</p>
+
+<p>The great church was silent as
+she pushed aside the leathern curtain
+of a side door. The day was
+almost done; here and there on
+the pavement knelt a lonely figure;
+a sacristan moved noiselessly, lighting
+the lamps in the nave. She
+went to a side chapel, which she
+remembered, whither her mother
+had always gone; and she knelt
+there, a tired, dusty, unnoticeable
+woman, and she prayed with all
+the force of her spirit. It might
+be no good. There might come no
+answer. But she would have done
+what she could.</p>
+
+<p>She prayed as women pray for
+their sick at Loretto and Lourdes.</p>
+
+<p>There was a silver lamp above
+the altar; it swayed slowly to and
+fro. She bowed her head down
+upon the stones, and covered her
+face with her hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Holy ones, take the only thing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>I have,” she murmured. “I am
+poor and of no account, but hearken
+unto me. I give you all I have.
+Grant him his heart’s desire.”</p>
+
+<p>And she loosened from her throat
+a little agate heart. It had been
+her mother’s; it was hung round
+her neck by a plaited tress of gray
+hair. She laid it down under the
+silver lamp upon the altar; it was
+her only treasure. In all the world
+she had nothing else. It looked
+very small, very poor, very valueless,
+as it lay, dark and worn, in
+the light of the lamp. But she
+thought they would not despise it
+or reject it. They would know it
+was all she had.</p>
+
+<p>In a little while the church was
+fully lighted; the service of vespers
+began. She got up from her knees
+and walked away down the side
+aisle, leaving the agate heart and
+the braid of her mother’s hair behind
+her. Her throat ached with
+silent, hidden weeping.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span>She slept that night in a poor
+place in the town that she knew,
+and left the gates at daybreak in
+the public vehicle, packed close
+between other women and screeching
+fowls, and wailing babes, and
+crowded crates of ducklings, on her
+homeward way to the cross-road
+which led to Le Selve.</p>
+
+<p>She felt as if her heart was of lead
+now that her amulet was no longer
+warm against the pulses of it. But
+she did not regret what she had
+done. In a few hours the walls
+and towers of Viterbo had faded
+from the distance, and she saw again
+the dark waters of the little lake
+of Vico, and the chestnuts and oak
+forests of the Ciminian slopes.</p>
+
+<p>She left Ronciglione on foot,
+and on her homeward way met
+a horseman, who, passing her,
+stopped his horse.</p>
+
+<p>“Have you thought of what I
+offered to you last week?” he
+asked.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>“No,” replied Muriella.</p>
+
+<p>“How long will it be before you
+do?”</p>
+
+<p>“As long as the earth is old.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am a bad foe, Muriella.”</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you are a worse lover.”</p>
+
+<p>“I would give you a string of
+pearls and a box of clothes.”</p>
+
+<p>“Keep the pearls for your betrothed
+and the clothes for a
+beggar, and ride away to your
+<i>dama</i> at La Storta.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where have you been?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is naught to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“You look jaded and worn.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am fresh enough to make
+your ears tingle if you molest me.
+Get you gone to your lawful
+allegiance.”</p>
+
+<p>Fausto scowled, and dug his
+heels into the flanks of his good
+grey horse. He was not used to
+be flouted or thwarted.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at herself in the
+brown shallow water of the river’s
+bed, clear as a mirror, and wondered
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>what Faustone saw that made him
+so hot in her pursuit. She did
+not see any good looks in herself;
+she only saw her sun-browned skin,
+her dark, rough hair, her strong
+column-like throat, her brown arms
+and hands, her bare feet wet with
+dew and green with moss; she
+seemed no more to herself than a
+rude bit of wood shaped into
+human likeness, such as they found
+sometimes in the Etruscan tumuli.
+Fausto might find her handsome,
+and rest his wicked hot eyes upon
+her; but she saw nothing in herself.</p>
+
+<p>She reached her home, after a
+long and exhausting walk, and,
+since the under-steward had seen
+her, made no secret of her journey
+to Viterbo. They were all angry
+that she brought them nothing,
+but otherwise the matter had no
+interest for them.</p>
+
+<p>She shut her hope up in her
+soul and waited. In the saints’
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>good time the saints would set
+him free.</p>
+
+<p>“You mope, girl. What is
+amiss?” said her uncles to her.</p>
+
+<p>“Do I not do my quota of
+work?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nay, we do not say you fail
+in that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Then what matter my looks or
+my ways to you?”</p>
+
+<p>She would brook no interference.
+She knew that she was worth much
+more than her keep to them, and
+they knew it too; if the men had
+shirts to their backs, and the
+children had as much bread as
+they could eat, they owed it chiefly
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>“If she likes to be the light-o’-love
+of that stranger ’tis no matter
+to us,” said the women.</p>
+
+<p>“She’d do better to be Fausto’s,”
+replied Alcide. “We’d get a pig
+out of him come winter.”</p>
+
+<p>They would have seen with a
+favourable eye her welcome of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>Roman’s wooings; he was a man
+after their own taste, who bought
+and sold, and trafficked and lied,
+and could fake a colt and outwit
+a dealer with the best of his
+time.</p>
+
+<p>“She may take her <i>damo</i> where
+she likes best. But if she tell
+tales she will be sorry for it,” said
+Alcide to himself, and set himself
+to watch her.</p>
+
+<p>To do so was easy, for they knew
+where her day’s work lay every
+morning when she went out to it;
+it was nearly always the same
+according to season. Once or twice
+he saw her speak with Cyrille.
+But he saw nothing which looked
+to him like amorous intercourse.
+The more sure therefore was he
+that she played informer to the
+foreigner’s command.</p>
+
+<p>“We have reared a cuckoo,” he
+said to his wife; but the woman,
+wiser and shrewder, answered:</p>
+
+<p>“We did not rear her. She came
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>full grown or nearly so; and she
+is not of the temper that makes
+spies.”</p>
+
+<p>Alcide, however, remained of his
+own opinion, and Lucio shared it.
+If a man and a woman, both young
+in years, did not talk of love, what
+could they talk of when they were
+together if not of others? Once
+Lucio got near enough to hear
+what they said, and to see that
+there were some feet of shallow
+water between them as they spoke,
+Muriella cutting reeds, and the
+steward, dismounted, leaning
+against a tree.</p>
+
+<p>“That is a grasshopper warbler,”
+said the latter, as a small bird flew
+up from the pool. “Take care not
+to cut where they have built.”</p>
+
+<p>“I see the nest,” she answered.
+“’Tis like a little basket, and the
+stalks run through it. There are
+many of these birds here.”</p>
+
+<p>“They must mean other than
+they say,” thought the eavesdropper;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>and he continued to listen,
+but all he heard was talk of birds
+and their haunts, and the like
+nonsense, until he saw the rider
+mount and move away.</p>
+
+<p>The part of the wood where the
+pools and marshes were, lay lower
+and more level, spreading onward
+till it reached the Vico lake, and
+poured into it its many trickling
+streams and hidden springs. In
+the swamps wild hogs and buffaloes
+waded, grunted, bathed, and
+bellowed, and over many a square
+league the brown spikes of the
+bulrush and the purple plumes of
+the reeds reigned in undisturbed
+sovereignty. A raised causeway
+of piles and stones ran across it, of
+which the foundations were of date
+remote as the Antonines; and once
+off that path such intimate knowledge
+as the woodlanders possessed
+was necessary before venturing
+amongst the network of <i>padule</i>.
+There was nothing on the surface
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>of it to mark out the solid land
+from the bog.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder your Northman does
+not want us to pay for the reeds!”
+said Lucio, showing himself a little
+later over the as yet unblossomed
+bulrushes.</p>
+
+<p>“No one need pay aught for
+aught,” replied Muriella. “So long
+as they take only in season, and do
+not cut to waste, there is nothing
+grudged.”</p>
+
+<p>Lucio snorted with scorn.</p>
+
+<p>“Whoever cut reeds by rule or
+asked leave to rake in dead wood?
+The marshes are free to us as
+to that bull-calf.”</p>
+
+<p>He pointed to a half-grown buffalo
+turning on its back in a shallow
+of sand and water.</p>
+
+<p>“So you say,” replied Muriella
+calmly. “The lords of the soil
+and the stream do not see it so.”</p>
+
+<p>“You unnatural wench! Do
+you go against your own folks and
+their rights?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>“What rights are denied you?”</p>
+
+<p>“We have the right to take,”
+said Lucio furiously. “Your upstart
+whiteface makes a show of
+charity in giving us what is our
+own.”</p>
+
+<p>“The land is no more our own
+than it is yon bull-calf’s,” said
+Muriella, glancing at the uncouth
+play of the creature in the shallow
+water.</p>
+
+<p>“You insolent jade!” shouted
+Lucio. “I will duck you head
+foremost!”</p>
+
+<p>“Try,” said his niece, where she
+stood between the bundles of reeds;
+and she folded her hands on her
+bosom and waited, the edge of the
+sickle turned outwards.</p>
+
+<p>Muttering many oaths, he let her
+be, and went away, shying a stone
+at the poor calf, which stumbled up
+on its uncertain legs and hobbled
+away, splashing awkwardly through
+the shallows to regain its herd.
+He was not as clever and resolute
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span>a man as his brother; he fretted
+and swore about matters which
+Alcide settled with a lead pellet or
+a stiletto blade.</p>
+
+<p>“Could you not find some occupation
+for that poor girl Muriella?”
+asked Cyrille of the Massaja some
+days later.</p>
+
+<p>“Occupation there is plenty, sir,”
+said Caterina curtly. “But you know
+her folks little if you think we can
+meddle with them and go scot free.”</p>
+
+<p>“But she is not their slave?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; not as one may call a
+slave; but they have housed and
+fed her ever since she was ten, and
+they have the first right to her. No
+one can gainsay that. If she were
+to come here, and have bed and
+board and wage, they would stick
+a knife in her and in me, most
+likely. They would hold she had
+disgraced them. Folks don’t go
+out to service here as they do in
+the cities. And what would they
+do without her? Who ploughs, who
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>sews, who washes, who keeps the
+soul in all their lazy, dirty carcasses
+if not this one poor wench?”</p>
+
+<p>“I know; but it is unjust.”</p>
+
+<p>“Most things are, sir, in this
+world,” replied Caterina; “she was
+brought there when she was too
+small to choose, and now she must
+stay where she was put, like the
+grain in furrow. There is only one
+thing that she might do——”</p>
+
+<p>“What is that?”</p>
+
+<p>“She might take the veil. If
+she did that they would not dare
+to say aught against it, for they
+would know they would burn in fire
+everlasting if they did.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why should she not marry?”</p>
+
+<p>“Nay, sir; she will not marry such
+as alone would marry her. Only
+a <i>ciociaro</i> would take her, and
+’twould be but a change of
+masters.”</p>
+
+<p>“Poor girl!” said Cyrille, with
+regret. He knew what to marry
+a <i>ciociaro</i> implied.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>“You had better not think about
+her, sir,” said Caterina, with significance.
+“Your thoughts can do
+her no good.”</p>
+
+<p>“They shall do her no harm, I
+promise you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Fine words! Fine words!”
+said Caterina, who, though she
+thought him a man above others,
+was doubtful of his regarding a
+good-looking maiden in any other
+manner than as the bee looks at
+the rose.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">VII.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">THE position of a steward
+in Italy, if he be an honest
+man, is necessarily a
+position of continual
+friction in relation to the tenantry,
+and above all to those who, as in
+so many instances, pay in kind and
+pay in labour. Their perpetual
+effort is to cheat, and his to frustrate
+their cheating, for even if he be
+himself a trickster to his lord, it is
+not to his interests that their tricks
+should succeed.</p>
+
+<p>To Cyrille, with his political
+views, his poetic communism, and
+his genuine tenderness of temper,
+it was a daily torment to mark,
+track, and prevent the continual
+petty thefts and crooked intrigues
+of those forest-squatters. More
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>than once he was on the point of
+writing to Adolfo Gandolfo, and
+begging him to tender his resignation
+to the old prince. But many
+reasons restrained him: in the first
+place, gratitude; in the second,
+that natural reluctance of every
+high-spirited man to confess himself
+beaten; besides this, there was
+always a feeling which had entered
+into him of affection for the trees
+and for the animals, and a great
+sense of repose in the dim green
+solitudes which closed in around his
+refuge. If he went away, in impatience
+and thanklessness, what could
+await him? Only the stifling life
+of cities, the sordid struggle of
+intellect with want. Where again
+if he left Le Selve would he see
+the light of morning on the snows
+of Soracte? Where again behold
+the evening’s gold gleam on the
+line of the sea by Ostia? Where
+smell the bourgeonning blossoms of
+the lime? Where stroke the velvet
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>antlers of the deer? Where watch
+the nightingales pluck the small
+white moths off the pale azure discs
+of the succory? Where see the day
+decline in pomp behind the hoary
+boughs of oaks which as saplings
+saw the armies of Theodoric and
+of Constantine pass beneath their
+sapling shadows; the spell of
+Rome held him and the sorcery
+of Nature; of that Nature which
+is eternally young, yet allied with
+the greatest ages of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>The year did not pass without
+the warning of the women to
+him being verified. Once a bullet
+whistled past him as he rode, and
+cut off the oak leaves at his
+shoulder. But the forest growth
+hid the would-be assassin from
+his sight; and another night, when
+he rode over the wooden bridge
+often used by him in returning
+homeward, the planks gave way
+beneath his horse’s tread, and the
+animal and he escaped by a miracle
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>from a bad fall on to jagged rocks
+and into deep water; and when he
+examined it by daylight it seemed
+to him that the timbers had been
+sawn nearly asunder, so as to
+give way under vibration. But of
+the guilty persons there was no
+trace. What affected him more
+was when his dog, a greyhound of
+large size and great beauty, sent to
+him by Gandolfo, was found dead
+one noonday stretched out on the
+terrace, with all the signs of death,
+by a poison which the woodlanders
+extracted from adders which they
+caught and robbed of their venom,
+treating it as they did also the poison
+of the night-shade, and the hemlock,
+and the corn-crowfoot, in a
+manner learned by oral recipes
+handed down from remote Etruscan
+times. It was only the eldest living
+son who received that teaching from
+the head of the family, and in turn
+passed it to his heir, with many
+another dark secret of subterranean
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>waters, and buried passages, and
+rock tombs and hollow ways in
+which a fugitive from justice might
+dwell safely many a year. Muriella
+had no doubt as to who had slain
+the greyhound; for Alcide was so
+good-natured, so industrious, so
+quiet, by comparison with his
+ordinary habit, that she felt sure he
+had done some evil successfully.
+Cyrille offered rewards and made
+investigations as to the dog’s death
+uselessly. Concerning his own
+danger he said nothing; he sent
+workmen to mend the bridge, affecting
+to take for granted that the
+timber had been rotten and old. If
+any were disappointed by his escape,
+they kept their chagrin to themselves
+and bided their time.</p>
+
+<p>Vengeance is like a good Falernian
+or Chianti wine; it only
+mellows with keeping.</p>
+
+<p>After the pleasure of trapping and
+shooting, in and out of season, the
+main and favourite diversion of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span>squatters of Le Selve was smuggling;
+the smuggling of all kinds of
+game netted out of season, of ingeniously-hidden
+wines, carried
+across the woods from the Este
+districts to the very gates of Rome,
+or as far as Nepi and Corneto; of
+charcoal burned by themselves from
+the stolen wood of the violated
+groves around them, and taken in
+sacks under the walls of villages
+and little towns; even of the very
+pips of the pine-cones baked in their
+ovens they made traffic, and carried
+them away and sold them for what
+they could get; they took everything
+across the forest by night, with
+their poor starved cows or buffaloes
+harnessed to the wagons; and it was
+not only the small gains which were
+dear to them but the pleasure in
+the contraband-dealing, and the
+relish of cheating the <i>gabellotti</i> at
+the gates of the capital itself. More
+than one of them had stabbed a
+guard and taken to the hills, where
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span>such a fugitive could no more be
+traced than if he were an adder
+under a pile of stones. The ground
+was honeycombed with subterranean
+places, in the past Etruscan sepulchres,
+now the storehouses of these
+men, their entrances known to them
+alone, and their retreat safe from
+discovery.</p>
+
+<p>“Every man may be betrayed, for
+Christo was,” said Alcide once; “but
+an outlaw is almost always safe
+and welcome.”</p>
+
+<p>It was quite true. There is an
+universal feeling amongst the
+people of fraternal unison against
+the law and the fiscal agents; and
+the little children will carry bread
+and wine to such a fugitive from
+justice and never speak, or tell
+where they have found him. Whatever
+feud there might be between
+the families in other matters, they are
+of one accord, of strict and mutual
+support concerning their enterprises
+in smuggling and in brigandage.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>“This contraband carrying is an
+organised conspiracy,” said Cyrille
+to the under-steward, when he had
+become aware of the practice.</p>
+
+<p>“No doubt,” said Fausto, with a
+gesture of indifference.</p>
+
+<p>“And you have never attempted
+to put it down?”</p>
+
+<p>“No; before me nobody ever
+did. Why should I?”</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think it right?”</p>
+
+<p>Fausto shrugged his shoulders.
+“I do not say whether it is right or it
+is wrong. It has always been done.
+The people would not like it
+meddled with, be sure. They regard
+it as one of their rights.”</p>
+
+<p>“But it is a bad, dangerous, and
+dishonest life.”</p>
+
+<p>“They do not see it so. It
+pleases them.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you connive at it?”</p>
+
+<p>“It hurts nobody,” said Fausto
+sullenly. “There is no thief so big
+as the Revenue.”</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille said no more; but he resolved
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>to make an example of the
+first convoy which he could surprise.
+He saw that Fausto, for some gain
+of his own, or out of personal fear,
+closed his eyes to the practice. He
+determined to lie in waiting himself
+to hear the wagon wheels passing
+over the road on the first moonless
+night after this conversation. He
+understood why he had so often
+heard afar off in the still hours
+after midnight the faint grinding
+of wheels on rutty paths, and the
+far-off voices of swearing men. He
+took up his stand where three woodland
+paths met, on the edge of the
+only road which led across the
+woods of the Gandolfo to Montefiascone
+northwards, and south-westwards
+to Rome. He had reason
+to believe that it was a frequent
+route with the forest thieves.</p>
+
+<p>He was alone, for he trusted no
+one enough to ask their company.
+It was pitch dark; the moving of
+night birds and beasts was audible
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>as they stirred in branch or brake;
+a deep runlet of water fell down
+through the undergrowth, rippling
+and splashing. He had a seven-chambered
+revolver in his belt; he
+hoped not to be forced to use it. It
+was extremely cold, as nights in
+February are even in the south; but
+he had known what it was to pace
+up and down on guard on the terraces
+of Gatschina when snow was
+six feet deep around, and the cold of
+the Patrimony of St Peter had small
+terrors for him. He stood immovable,
+his back against the trunk of an
+ilex tree; his repeating watch told
+him that five quarters had passed
+since he came there. He was not
+sure that the smugglers were out this
+night, though he had reason to believe
+so. It might well be that he
+had come there for nothing; but
+he was resolved to wait until the
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>At last, in the darkness and stillness,
+he heard the distant sound of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>cleft hoofs moving through muddy
+earth, and springless carts groaning
+as the rough wooden spokeless discs
+of the wheels alone can groan on
+their rusty axles. All the soldier in
+him was roused; he had not felt so
+much alive since the day that he
+had passed the frontier of his
+country. They were distant perhaps
+half a mile. By one of these
+three paths fronting him they were
+forced to enter on the high-road;
+there was no other. Nearer and
+nearer came the creaking of the
+carts, the crushing of the soil, the
+low voices of men: he waited until
+he could hear the heavy breathing
+of the cattle, then he flashed a
+lantern on them, and levelled his
+revolver.</p>
+
+<p>“It is I—halt!” he said in a
+clear voice.</p>
+
+<p>They instinctively pulled the
+buffaloes backward, and fell back
+themselves one against another.
+They thought he had guards with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span>him. The cattle paused willingly,
+the gasping of their breath, the
+blowing of their nostrils, sounding
+painfully on the stillness.</p>
+
+<p>“Stir not a step, or you are dead
+men,” he said to them. “You are
+carrying contraband.”</p>
+
+<p>He was by no means certain
+what they had with them, but his
+venture sped home. They had
+crapes over their faces. They had
+charcoal and game in their carts.
+They huddled together in fear, and
+did not speak lest he should recognise
+their voices. There were three
+carts, yoked severally to four
+buffaloes and two cows; the men
+were but three. They had no
+firearms, only their knives. They
+eyed him evilly, but they were
+afraid to strike him. His revolver,
+they knew, would be
+quicker than their steel; and they
+thought that he had armed force
+behind him hidden in the brake.
+They muttered under their breath
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>dreadful curses against him, but
+they did not rebel.</p>
+
+<p>“Take your carts to the Fattoria,”
+he said. “Go on before me. If
+you stir out of the road a bullet will
+find you.”</p>
+
+<p>Sullenly but timidly they pulled
+their cattle across out of the high-road,
+and into the avenue which
+led to the house. He walked
+behind them, his revolver covering
+them, as they knew and felt in
+every nerve of their spines. Cattle
+move slowly on the best of roads,
+and this road was thick with half-frozen
+mud, and crossed by runlets
+of water, and the beasts splashed
+heavily through the slush on their
+leaden-footed way.</p>
+
+<p>But at last the half-mile of distance
+was traversed, and the lamp
+burning before a shrine on the
+balustrade before the house shone
+across the sward like a beacon. To
+his infinite surprise, no one of the
+men had attempted any rebellion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>He fired a shot in the air, and all
+the members of the household
+tumbled up from their slumbers and
+came out, as he had bade them do
+when they should hear the signal,
+with arms and torches. He caused
+the cattle to be stabled, the carts
+with their loads locked up in an outhouse,
+and consigned the prisoners
+to one of the strong-rooms made for
+such use in earlier ages. When he
+saw their faces he recognised in
+one the peasant Alcide. He was
+amazed at the extreme ease of
+his own victory; what to do with
+it was more perplexing.</p>
+
+<p>“Take them bread and water,
+Caterina,” he said to her.</p>
+
+<p>“Not I, sir. Let the rogues
+fast.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you will not, I must.”</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed, with great reluctance.</p>
+
+<p>“Think of yourself, sir,” she
+said when she returned. “Get to
+rest.”</p>
+
+<p>“No, I shall remain up; I do
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>not altogether trust our household.
+There is a great deal of tribal feeling
+in your woods.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is that why you went alone,
+sir?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina groaned aloud. “’Tis
+sheer madness. I wonder they did
+not knife you like a sheep. You
+trust too much to that little steel
+honeycomb of yours.”</p>
+
+<p>“One can only die once,” said
+Cyrille, and thought: “I died when
+I left my love and my country.”</p>
+
+<p>He remained the rest of the night
+awake and armed; seated by the
+kitchen fire, where he could hear the
+slightest movement which might
+take place in any of the long stone
+passages and basement chambers.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound anywhere
+till the cocks crowed at dawn. An
+hour after sunrise he had the men
+whom he had captured brought
+before him. In one he recognised,
+as he expected to do, the peasant
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>Alcide; the other two were neighbours
+of his, young, unintelligent,
+ill-looking boors who had followed
+Alcide’s lead.</p>
+
+<p>The dark-browed, lean, unwashed
+man scowled at him as he had done
+in the death-chamber of the old
+Adamo; his eyes were like jewels
+and scintillated dangerously. He
+had been disarmed when brought
+there, but his fingers fingered
+nervously at his hairy breast seeking
+the poignard which was always
+used to lie within his belt. Cyrille
+cross-questioned him minutely, but
+failed to get any confession out of
+him.</p>
+
+<p>“You took me in the act,” he
+said sullenly. “Make what you
+can of that.”</p>
+
+<p>In his own mind Alcide was
+certain that his niece had betrayed
+him; but he would let no word
+escape him which could be construed
+into confession or facilitate condemnation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span>The theft of the charcoal and
+game, and the intent to run them
+contraband, were evident, and he
+did not deny them; but he did
+not admit either. He left his
+accuser to collect evidence as he
+could.</p>
+
+<p>There was enough of it to justify
+Cyrille in sending him and his companions
+to the nearest guardhouse,
+which was a dozen miles on the
+other side of the woods.</p>
+
+<p>It would have been the wisest
+course to pursue, and Alcide
+would have had a year or more of
+prison; his companions, more excusable,
+as tempted by him, perhaps
+less.</p>
+
+<p>But his present judge was a man
+who held the creeds of Tolstoi;
+who abhorred the eye for an eye
+and tooth for a tooth of modern
+legislation; who had infinite compassion
+for the poor and ignorant,
+and even for the most vicious. He
+took a course which he thought
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>would be just both for his employers
+and to the thief.</p>
+
+<p>“I could send you to take your
+trial,” he said in conclusion, “and
+your trial would undoubtedly end in
+your conviction. I perhaps shall
+do wrong if I spare you. But my
+employers leave me large discretion,
+and I shall exercise it in your favour.
+I confiscate the stolen charcoal; it
+is the property of my masters; and
+the game I shall send to the hospitals
+of Rome; but I will restore to
+you your carts and cattle, and I will
+set you free. All I ask of you is to
+offend no more.”</p>
+
+<p>Alcide’s face did not change;
+he shrugged his shoulders slightly;
+the other two offenders fell on their
+knees and blessed the saints, and
+swore their willingness to lead a
+cleanly life.</p>
+
+<p>“Of what are you thinking,
+Alcide?” said Cyrille, looking at
+the dark savage, sunburnt face of
+Muriella’s uncle, with its glittering
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>eyes and its deep lines of dirt and
+smoke.</p>
+
+<p>“I was thinking that you have
+not learned much since you have
+come here!” replied the man in
+tones of rasping contempt.</p>
+
+<p>“You mean that I am a fool to
+spare you?”</p>
+
+<p>Alcide showed his white even
+teeth flashing in his swarthy face
+with a grin of satirical scorn. He
+did not answer in words.</p>
+
+<p>“I fear that I am,” said Cyrille.
+“But I have given you my word.
+I cannot withdraw it now. If any
+hear of this matter it will not be
+from me. Go. You are free.
+Your knife will be given back to
+you. Treat your cattle decently
+if you know how; and if I take
+you, when engaged in this work, a
+second time, I shall not spare
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>Alcide turned on his heel, and
+went out of the chamber without a
+word of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>“The girl betrayed me to him,”
+he thought. “Thank him? Not
+I! What does he here? Interloper,
+and spy, and meddler. He
+drew me before him last night as
+if I had been an ox. I will be
+quits with him before long.”</p>
+
+<p>“He dealt better with you than
+you deserve, you gallows-bird,” said
+Caterina, as he went across the
+courtyard. Alcide showed his
+white even teeth again like a
+wolf’s, and grinned in her face.</p>
+
+<p>No one had betrayed him.
+Cyrille’s own observations had alone
+furnished him with indices which
+he had followed up to proof. But
+the Italian always believes betrayal
+to be the cause of all disaster, public
+or private, and these men were
+convinced that they had been betrayed;
+their suspicions settled,
+naturally, on Muriella. “She was
+ever an unnatural, ill-feeling wench,”
+said Alcide. “Always caring for
+birds and beasts and reptiles, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>frowning where we laughed. It is
+but of a piece with her to serve
+the stranger and rob us all.”</p>
+
+<p>But he did not let her see his
+suspicions since he had no confirmation
+of them; he, indeed, went
+out of his way to be civil and flatter
+her. “If you can make our poor
+girls like yourself we shall thank
+you,” he said more than once.
+“’Tis those good ways your
+mother taught you; they were
+never in our wild blood.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella weighed his compliments
+at their right worth, and
+distrusted all he said; but she did
+not know how passionately he
+hated her. He was a bad man,
+she knew, but after all he was
+her father’s brother, and had given
+her a home, such as it was. It was
+miserable in many ways, and made
+more so than it need have been by
+filth and want of thrift; but it was
+a home; it saved her from that
+errant and lonely life which brings
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span>down on any woman so much
+contempt and derision, and in a
+rough way they estimated her use
+to them and feared to lose her.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">VIII.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">THE winter passed, and
+no one of the threats
+against the steward had
+been fulfilled. The
+woods with earliest February were
+again filled with the fragrance of
+the hellebore, earliest and sweetest
+herald of the spring.</p>
+
+<p>“They will do nothing now, the
+days are lengthening,” thought
+Muriella, as her nostrils breathed
+that pungent perfume of the pale
+green bells, which she associated in
+fancy with that lady of the north
+whom she vaguely and wistfully
+envied. But though she strove to
+persuade herself of this she felt no
+certainty.</p>
+
+<p>Short days or long, dark nights
+or fine, are all one and the same
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span>to those who hate another, and the
+quietude and comparative industry
+of her relatives filled her with apprehension
+as to what evils such
+unwonted virtues might pertain.</p>
+
+<p>Her uncles were certain she
+was a spy of the steward’s, and said
+nothing before her which they
+would not have had repeated
+from the tree-tops. But the wife
+of Alcide was imprudent, and let
+dark innuendoes fall from her.</p>
+
+<p>“White birds that come from
+the North do not always live to go
+back there,” she said once, and
+once again said, “Le Selve is full
+of trees, but the trees can bear
+three fruits—fire, and steel, and
+lead.”</p>
+
+<p>Muriella knew that they could
+wait patiently for years when they
+meditated a revenge, but that they
+would strike in the end as unerringly
+as the gerfalcon struck the
+wood-pigeon.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the saints were long
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span>in answering; perhaps what she
+had done had been too insignificant,
+yet she could not think so;
+they would be too generous to
+despise, too merciful to reject it.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” she repeated to herself
+again and again that winter-time;
+“I will pray always.”</p>
+
+<p>Weeks and months went by, and
+she had no sign from heaven. Once
+she said to Cyrille:</p>
+
+<p>“Do they not call you home?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” he answered in surprise;
+“what makes you think of things
+which can never be?”</p>
+
+<p>“You will go home,” she repeated.</p>
+
+<p>Yet if her prayer were granted,
+she knew that he would go away
+from these woods for ever; that his
+unknown love, of whom she thought
+as crowned with green hellebore
+and clothed with the stars, would
+stretch her arms out from the mists
+and take him.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the beautiful springtime
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>came and went, with the song of
+nightingales in the laurel shadows,
+and the cuckoos calling from the
+pines, and the marvellous flora of
+the Agro Romano in blossom all
+through the woods.</p>
+
+<p>The long hot summer succeeded,
+with water-lilies, white and gold,
+on all the pools. In these woods
+there is something of a tropical
+heat; their deep shade does not
+bring coolness, for it excludes air;
+it is delightful to the eyes, but to
+the lungs humid and oppressive.
+Oftentimes for weeks not a breath
+stirs the pendant foliage; when
+there is fever and ague on the
+plains around Rome, there is
+danger here in the forest in the
+sultry nights and on the stagnant
+waters. In the higher woods there
+is less danger, but down in the
+marshes where the mosquitoes hum
+in vast clouds, and the swamps dry
+up and crack, and the horse-flies
+swarm in myriads, and the toads
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>and the frogs die of drought, it
+were as much as life were worth
+to sleep there through a summer
+night. There was much sickness
+this year amongst the woodlanders,
+and Cyrille supplied as far as he
+could the place of medical aid.
+The remedies for such fevers were
+simple; and the greatest obstacle
+he encountered was in the bodily
+filth of the people and their fear of
+fresh air. They, who in health
+worked all day long in the air in
+all weathers, falling sick huddled
+together in a foul corner, and shut
+their wooden windows close. But
+though he saved their lives, they
+hated him all the more. The
+report spread amongst them that
+he had poisoned the watersprings
+because he wanted the woods clear
+of the squatters; and this preposterous
+tale found willing and credulous
+believers.</p>
+
+<p>“Truly,” he thought bitterly, “I
+had better let them drop like murrained
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>sheep. For what crime
+does one pay half as dear as for
+the madness of trying to serve one’s
+fellow-men?”</p>
+
+<p>But he continued to do what
+he could, by day and by night,
+in despite of their evil glances
+and their muttered curses, and of
+the fingers thrust out at him in
+exorcism.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in the long course of breathless
+weeks the summer drew to an
+end, and every day the thirsty
+glades looked for rain, and the
+parched pools and dried-up waterways
+hungered for the first storm
+in vain.</p>
+
+<p>It was towards the close of a hot
+day in September. The air was
+heavy and the sky dull. He had
+been out all day on his usual rounds,
+and came in as the sun set to his
+evening meal. He was thirsty
+and tired; he had eaten nothing
+all day. The colourless leaden
+heat made him think of summer
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span>on his native plains, and even the
+distant horizons were veiled by
+the gray malarious vapours rising
+from the soil. The courtyard
+seemed to him unusually still as
+he passed through it. There was
+no one about, not even a stable-lad.</p>
+
+<p>Only a man on a mule, with a
+horn slung at his shoulder, and
+some sacks on his saddle, was riding
+out of one of the gates he entered.
+He saw it was a letter-carrier from
+Ronciglione.</p>
+
+<p>The post was a rare thing in these
+districts; scarcely anyone, in an
+area of a hundred miles square, could
+read, still less write. Once in half
+a year Caterina received news from
+a son who was a trader in Brazil,
+and another son who was a soldier in
+Eritrea, and Fausto had occasional
+correspondence concerning stallions
+or brood mares to be bought or sold,
+or bulls and rams to be had for the
+hiring, but these were very rarely;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>business was done on horseback
+and by word of mouth in these
+districts; and to Cyrille himself no
+single message had ever come since
+he had first entered the shadows of
+Le Selve. Absolute silence had
+fallen between him and his own
+land and his own people; he hoped
+that they believed him dead. The
+Gandolfo had promised him secrecy
+as to his existence and employment,
+and the most that he could hope for
+was that he might be allowed to
+remain in the poor substitute for
+resignation which is to be obtained
+from constant occupation and undisturbed
+work.</p>
+
+<p>His mother had been in her
+grave some years. There was no
+one living, he thought bitterly,
+who loved him well enough to endeavour
+to learn his fate. His
+family, doubtless, and all those who
+had once formed his world, thought
+him dead, and better dead, in some
+nameless foreign grave.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>Therefore his heart stood still
+with surprise and emotion as he
+returned this day from his usual
+rounds, and was met by Caterina,
+who cried to him:</p>
+
+<p>“The post-boy has been here,
+sir; the post from Ronciglione;
+dead beat he was, and glad enough
+of bit and sup; he brought a letter
+for you; ’tis on your table in your
+chamber.”</p>
+
+<p>He ascended the staircase with
+beating pulse, and noticed not that
+the curious good-will of Caterina
+brought her up after him and kept
+her at the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>There was a large square envelope
+lying on the table, stamped
+with the postmarks of his native
+land, and sealed with a cypher
+which he knew.</p>
+
+<p>He tore it open.</p>
+
+<p>All it contained was a photograph
+of a woman’s head and shoulders;
+a likeness of the face which was
+always in his dreams by night and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span>by day. Under the portrait was
+written:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="verse">  “<i>Je seraià Rome en hiver.</i></div>
+<div class="indent11">“<i>Marie.</i>”</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was to him as though heaven
+had opened. His limbs shook
+as with palsy, his breath came
+in deep-drawn sobs; he pressed
+the portrait to his lips and to his
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>He was no more alone. He was
+no more without a future. He did
+not ask or care how she had found
+his refuge or learned his fate, how
+she had traced him, what she knew,
+what they could be or could not be
+to each other; it was enough that
+she remembered; that she was
+faithful; that in a few months she
+would be near him there, where
+the golden rays of the cross sparkled
+in the soft azure of summer eves
+above Rome. It was an ecstasy
+so great, so unlooked for, so overwhelming,
+that it utterly unmanned
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>him; he fell on his knees and
+wept.</p>
+
+<p>Caterina, looking on from the
+entrance, closed the door softly, and
+went down the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>The sultry day was ended; the
+sun had set. Far to the west on
+the Campagna the fever mists were
+drifting in pale haze, like the wraiths
+of the multitudes of dead whose
+dust made up the soil. The Anio,
+shrunken to a runlet in its bed, was
+slow and almost stagnant. The
+distant Tiber was discernible by the
+thread of fog which hung over its
+course. In the woods themselves
+the heat was noiseless and dusky
+and oppressive; the great ilex
+avenues looked black as the sacrificial
+groves of old. Yet never to
+him, not in April radiance or
+autumn glory, had the scene looked
+so fair. Evening closed in, an evening
+hot and heavy, without any
+moon or any breath of air, but he
+sat in a rapture of memory and of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>hope beside one of the large windows,
+of which the embrasure fronted
+the north. The light from his own
+oil lamp within shone on the marbles
+of the balustrade outside, and across
+a few yards of the rough grassland
+beyond it. Farther than that was
+all quite dark, for the heat-mists
+made the light of the stars dim.
+Now and then an owl flew by
+hooting; many had their dwelling
+in the roof; and scores of large
+bats rushed to and fro pursuing
+the invisible insect-life of the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>At any other time it might have
+struck him that the house was unusually
+silent; that there was not
+the noise of women’s chatter, or of
+men’s laughter and altercation, such
+as usually rose up from court and
+stable and outhouse when the day
+was done. All was so still that
+the place might have been a
+monastery, with every cell closed,
+and every friar sleeping.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>But at this moment of supreme
+happiness, happiness which seemed
+almost reunion, with that portrait in
+his hands, and under his eyes, and
+that vague, ineffable promise written
+for the future beneath it, he would
+have scarcely been sensible if the
+volcanic fires which slept under the
+tufa around had burst the soil and
+thundered through the woods.</p>
+
+<p>He was happy. Once more he
+was happy, in despite of exile, of
+poverty, of attainder, of ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Those fair eyes looked at him
+with the gaze he knew so well, and
+those fair lips said to him, “I am
+faithful.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">IX.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap">HOW long he had sat
+there since he had
+entered the chamber
+he did not know; he
+had had no consciousness of the
+old woman having entered the
+room with the lamp, and having
+told him that his dinner awaited
+him in the smaller room beyond.</p>
+
+<p>It was with difficulty that he
+roused himself to a perception of
+her voice, when she stood again at
+his elbow, and called him thrice in
+a low, shrill, startled voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Let me alone, my friend,” he
+said to her; “I am occupied—I
+do not need to dine.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is not that. Hearken!”
+said Caterina, and something in
+her tone awakened him to attention.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>“Sir—sir—there is no one in the
+house.”</p>
+
+<p>He turned and looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>“No one in the house? There
+must be some of the men—some of
+the women. Have they not
+supped?”</p>
+
+<p>“That is it, sir,” she answered.
+“Supper-hour is long past, and
+never yet did they fail to get together
+to fill their bellies. Save
+old Matteo, who is daft, and
+Dreina, who is lame, there is not
+a soul in the place. There must be
+some meaning in it, sir. Never
+did my folks dare to cross the
+threshold without leave.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is strange,” said Cyrille, as
+he comprehended the singularity
+of her intelligence. “They do
+indeed obey you usually like children.
+Where can they all be
+gone?”</p>
+
+<p>“The Lord knows, sir. But I
+am afraid——”</p>
+
+<p>Her ruddy face was blanched.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>“Of what are you afraid?”</p>
+
+<p>“That they have left the house
+because they know there will be an
+attack on it.”</p>
+
+<p>“Is it possible?”</p>
+
+<p>“Possible enough. People who
+are warned and do not wish to take
+either side always go away like this.
+Matteo is daft, but even he knows
+something; he laughs, and draws
+his finger across his throat. Dreina
+is crying, but will not speak though
+I beat her. You had best close
+the windows, sir, and fasten up the
+doors.”</p>
+
+<p>He still scarcely gathered the full
+meaning of her words; his brain
+was still dizzy with the sweetness
+of sudden hope, the rush of reviving
+memories, and he had never
+been alive to the true dangers of
+the life around him, to its enmities,
+its risks, its possibilities. He
+meant so well by the people, that
+he could not consent to believe that
+they meant less well by him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>“You must be mistaken,” he said
+to the old woman. “The household
+must be playing you some
+trick to affright you. Let us go
+and look over the outbuildings.
+The <i>guardiani</i> must at least be
+about the place.”</p>
+
+<p>He put the portrait he had received
+in his breast, and buttoned
+his coat over it; then he took his
+revolver from the table and put it
+in his chest-pocket.</p>
+
+<p>“Do not go out of doors, sir,”
+said Caterina, as she laid her hand
+on his arm. “I do not believe
+there is one of our men within
+call anywhere, and who knows what
+gang of thieves and ruffians may
+not be hid all round already? If
+you knew the things I have seen
+in my youth and my womanhood!
+I fear me you will meet your God
+to-night, for there is no hand but
+your own to defend you!”</p>
+
+<p>This time he believed her; he
+saw that whether she deceived
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span>herself or not, she thought some
+deadly peril awaited himself.</p>
+
+<p>“What will they do?” he asked,
+“and why should they seek to
+kill me?”</p>
+
+<p>She answered almost sullenly:</p>
+
+<p>“I have told you a score of
+times, and so has the girl Muriella,
+that you are hated because you are
+a stranger, a meddler, as folks
+think, a reformer as you call it.
+You would never believe us because
+we were women. Well, this night
+I fear you will find we said truth.
+But let us waste no time in talk.
+Let us fasten up the doors. They
+are strong; they have stood a siege
+before now.”</p>
+
+<p>“I shall look a poor cowardly
+fool if the household return.”</p>
+
+<p>“They will not return, sir, till
+they see the house ablaze.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good heavens! Do you <i>know</i>
+this?”</p>
+
+<p>“I do not know it, for if I
+had heard tell of it, I should have
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>told you, and you could have got
+the carabineers or the soldiery
+here; but I know what an empty
+house like this means, when there
+are forty folks all gone out of it
+at the same time on the same
+errand, and I know that the woodlanders
+of Le Selve are no lambs.”</p>
+
+<p>He was silent a moment; then
+he said:</p>
+
+<p>“I will sell my life dearly,
+Caterina. As for you, slip out
+while you can, and hide in the outhouses
+or the underwood till morning.
+You cannot alter my fate. Do
+not stay to share it.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am no poltroon, sir, and my
+years anyhow cannot be many.
+Come to work.”</p>
+
+<p>She led the way carrying the
+lamp, and held the light up whilst
+he put up the enormous bars and
+turned the gigantic keys of the iron-barred
+doors, and shut and bolted
+the shutters. There was no sound
+without. The imbecile Matteo and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>the lame woman Dreina he drove,
+as a precaution, into a little room
+off the kitchen, which had no communication
+with the outer court, and
+locked them in there. The woman
+would not speak.</p>
+
+<p>He caused Caterina to light as
+many lamps as there were in the
+building, and placed them in various
+corridors and chambers; he looked
+for the guns belonging to the men,
+but they were gone, and those of
+the under-steward likewise.</p>
+
+<p>“Fausto must be in this matter,”
+he said to Caterina.</p>
+
+<p>“He is probably the mainspring
+of it, sir,” she answered. “But no
+one will ever prove it on him. He
+went away yesterday eve to go
+to shoot in the macchia over by
+Ostia; there is no close time there.
+You recollect he asked your leave
+to go and buy cattle; but he told
+several of the men he was going
+shooting. If this plan succeed, he
+will come back and act innocence.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>If it fail, he will take ship to one of
+the Americas. He has feathered
+his nest.”</p>
+
+<p>“He did ask leave—yes,” replied
+Cyrille, still incredulous. “But after
+all, there may be nothing of what
+you think; your lads and lasses may
+only have taken holiday.”</p>
+
+<p>“They have taken holiday, sir,
+indeed,” said Caterina grimly. She
+was angered against him for his
+incredulity. To her the conspiracy
+was clear as crystal.</p>
+
+<p>He was still very doubtful of the
+truth of her suspicions, but he
+thought it well to take such measures
+for protection as he could. He
+made the basement as safe from
+attack as he could with the means
+at his disposal, and no man’s
+strength to aid him, and closed all
+passages which led outward; there
+were some subterranean passages, of
+the existence even of which he had
+possessed no previous knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Caterina showed him an iron
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>door in the side of a well. The door
+was just above the level of the
+water, which glimmered far down
+below; steps in the stonework
+descended to it.</p>
+
+<p>“It goes out to the woods under
+the long avenue, and opens up
+under that great ilex which they
+call Pope Paul’s,” she said. “You
+might get away so if you would.
+The passage is low and narrow, but
+it has been kept clear. You know
+the woods well enough to find your
+way at daybreak to the guardhouse.”</p>
+
+<p>“I could not hide and fly like
+that,” answered Cyrille. “I am
+placed in charge here. I can only
+lay down my charge with my life.”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina nodded in approval, but
+sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“If you will not fly, they will
+have you before the night is passed.
+’Tis a conspiracy of the whole Selve
+folk.”</p>
+
+<p>She knew nothing, but she had
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>many memories, and she was a
+native of the woods.</p>
+
+<p>“Did they not poison your
+dog?” she added.</p>
+
+<p>When he had made all as secure
+as it was possible to make it (and
+he thought, except against explosives
+or petroleum, the doors would
+stand all night), he went up to an
+open loggia at the top of the
+building, with a dark lanthorn, and
+thence looked to all points of the
+compass. On a clear night he
+could see from the light at Palo on
+the west to the Sabine Hills and to
+Soracte on the east. Many a night
+in the full moonlight he had traced
+the profiles of the beautiful mountains
+lying like the silver waves
+of a phosphorescent sea. Now
+they were all hidden under a haze
+of heat and vapour; he could
+scarcely distinguish farther than
+the stone benches and balustrades
+immediately below, and the outlines
+of the nearest trees.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>The stillness was intense. Leaning
+against one of the columns of
+the loggia, invisible to anyone who
+might be below, he waited and
+listened. But the sense of the
+possible peril near was less realised
+by him than the knowledge of
+the happiness which had come
+across steppe and mountain, and
+plain and forest, to bring him its
+blessing.</p>
+
+<p>With all the tide of recovered
+hope coursing like warm wine
+through his veins, he could not
+believe that he was about to be
+besieged like a rat in his hole,
+hunted out like a fox from his
+earth. The man whom Princess
+Marie loved, whom she remembered,
+whom she smiled on in
+banishment, disgrace, and poverty,
+must wear an amulet too potent,
+he thought, to be done to death
+by a tribe of ingrate peasants.
+There could not be such devilish
+derision in fate, that at the very
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span>moment when his barren life blossomed
+like the rose, it was to be
+cut down by a yelling rabble
+against whom he had no sin but to
+have served them in sickness and
+to his own peril.</p>
+
+<p>He leaned against the marble
+pilaster, and let his thoughts drift
+away from the present hour to the
+past, which was so dear; to the
+future, which was still dearer. Come
+what may, be what might, nothing
+save death itself could slay that
+ecstasy which sang like a bird in
+his breast.</p>
+
+<p>The clock tolled at the stables
+more than once the passing hours,
+and the stillness was broken by no
+other sound. It was midnight; he
+thought the old woman had been
+misled by her fears: the men and
+women would no doubt return at
+sunrise from revel at some distant
+town to which they had known it
+would be useless to ask the Massaja
+to grant leave of absence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>Suddenly he heard a sound, distant,
+slight, such a sound as the
+passing of goats or sheep over
+grass produces; scarcely perceptible
+by day, but audible in the deep
+hush of night.</p>
+
+<p>“That is the movement of men,”
+thought Cyrille, with a sick sense
+of certainty. He listened a moment
+longer to make sure that it was not
+a breeze rising which stirred the
+foliage; then, with his impression
+confirmed, he left the loggia, and
+descended the stairway to where
+old Caterina sat in his chamber
+telling her beads.</p>
+
+<p>“There are persons approaching,”
+he said to her; “and they can
+come for no good.”</p>
+
+<p>“They come, thinking you are
+asleep, and that one of the doors
+has been left open for them. How
+many are there?”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot tell. But several.”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>“If help could come—but how
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>should any help come? We are
+cut off from all.”</p>
+
+<p>“Hark! they are crossing the
+grass. In a moment they will be
+at the great doors.”</p>
+
+<p>“They expect Dreina will open
+for them, the wretched baggage!”</p>
+
+<p>For a moment or two there was
+silence, then a crossing of confused
+voices became audible through
+the heavy timber of the closed
+doors.</p>
+
+<p>“Let them think me asleep,”
+murmured Cyrille, and he covered
+the entrance with his revolver.
+He could not tell who were there
+without, nor in what numbers; their
+purpose it was easy to imagine.
+It was also probable that they
+were for the instant nonplussed
+finding no one there ready to
+admit them. But he knew that
+they would not long let this baffle
+them.</p>
+
+<p>“Go and hide somewhere, good
+Caterina,” he murmured to her.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>“It unnerves me to know you are
+here.”</p>
+
+<p>“Do not think of me, sir,” said
+the stout old woman. “I am of no
+use, but I will be of no hindrance.
+It is strange to me that the girl
+Muriella did not hear of this and
+warn us. When did you see her
+last?”</p>
+
+<p>“Three days ago, I think.”</p>
+
+<p>His voice was drowned in the
+sound of iron striking wood as the
+blow of hatchets fell on the oak
+of the great doors. But every inch
+of the wood was studded with great
+nails in front and plated with iron
+behind, and the axes made but little
+progress.</p>
+
+<p>“Try the side doors,” said a
+voice in which he recognised
+Alcide’s. “The strumpet Dreina has
+played us false.”</p>
+
+<p>The feet of a score of men
+trampled on the marble of the
+terrace running round the buildings.
+But the side doors were armoured
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>in the same way, and had been all
+bolted and barred. The assailants
+realised that they would not enter
+by those means; they began to
+swear savagely amongst each other.</p>
+
+<p>They had not crossed the turf
+as yet.</p>
+
+<p>“Poor Caterina!” said Cyrille;
+“would to heaven you were in
+safety.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is not me whom they come
+after. Forgive me, sir; but is there
+much money in the strong-box?”</p>
+
+<p>“Happily not. I sent an express
+with the proceeds of three months’
+sales to Rome last week.”</p>
+
+<p>“That will make them mad.”</p>
+
+<p>“If they get in. I hope to keep
+them out. I shall not open to them—of
+that you may be sure.”</p>
+
+<p>She was a stout-hearted old
+woman; she laughed a little grimly.</p>
+
+<p>In the centre of the great doors,
+as in most old Italian entrances,
+there was a small barred square
+panel, the width of a man’s hand
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>which could be slid back, leaving
+the grating open, and thus a parley
+could be effected without danger.</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille drew back the panel, and
+standing on one side of the grating,
+where none could see or touch him,
+said in a clear voice:</p>
+
+<p>“Why come you here armed?”</p>
+
+<p>“Open, and you will know,”
+answered the voice of Alcide, and
+they cursed him.</p>
+
+<p>“I do not open to threats. Say
+your errand, or depart.”</p>
+
+<p>They cursed him again.</p>
+
+<p>“We shall have your blood,”
+said their spokesman. “We come
+for that. We shall not be balked.
+We will burn you out like a live
+hog smoked from his lair.”</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille closed the panel.</p>
+
+<p>The group without roared with
+fury like wild boars, and threw
+themselves with all their weight
+against the doors.</p>
+
+<p>“You could have shot him
+through the grating,” said Caterina,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>with her face gray and stern.
+“Why did you not? It was
+Alcide who spoke.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know it was,” replied Cyrille.</p>
+
+<p>“Why did you not shoot him?”</p>
+
+<p>He was silent. He could not
+have made her understand the
+reluctance to shed blood which
+had held his hand.</p>
+
+<p>The hideous uproars of a ravenous
+pack was now let loose upon
+the stillness of the summer midnight.
+They fired at the doors.
+The shots recoiled harmlessly.
+They were all armed merely in the
+rude manner of the woods. They
+had expected to be admitted from
+within, and the disappointment
+baffled and drove them mad.</p>
+
+<p>“Burn him out!” cried their
+ringleader. “There is brushwood
+in the sheds.”</p>
+
+<p>By the sound of the trampling
+feet and lessening shouts he could
+tell that they were gone where the
+firewood used by the household
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>was stored in sheds beside the
+stackyard and stables.</p>
+
+<p>“They will try to burn us out,”
+said Cyrille. “But the house is
+like a rock.”</p>
+
+<p>The old woman shrugged her
+shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>“You could have shot the worst
+of them and you did not. He
+will roast you, as he says, like a
+spitted hog.”</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot kill a man in cold
+blood,” he replied, and he pressed the
+portrait in his breast closer to him.</p>
+
+<p>But he knew that they would
+doubtless do what they threatened.</p>
+
+<p>The solid house would resist
+long, but it could not resist all
+night. If they brought wood
+enough and fired it, sooner or
+later those within would perforce
+fall a prey to the smoke and the
+flames.</p>
+
+<p>Rather than perish so, he thought
+he would open and go out, and
+fall fighting. But to do so would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>be to expose the whole place to
+certain pillage; and he was there
+as the representative and trustee
+of the owners.</p>
+
+<p>In a few minutes there was no
+doubt as to the intentions of the
+marauders. They returned dragging
+with them quantities of brushwood
+and faggots, and by the sound
+he could tell that they were piling
+them up before the principal entrance;
+the voice of Alcide was
+loudest in command and objurgation.</p>
+
+<p>“Fire you through the peephole,
+sir,” said Caterina. She was
+gray with horror, but she did
+not cry out, or give any sign of
+cowardice.</p>
+
+<p>“Not yet,” said Cyrille. “These
+wretched people were confided to
+my care. If I have missed the
+way to their souls it is my fault.”</p>
+
+<p>Caterina gave a snort of scorn.</p>
+
+<p>“They will not miss the way
+to your vitals, be sure! Much
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>good will your fine thoughts do
+you when the scoundrels shall haul
+you out through the smoke, and
+hack you to pieces as they would
+hack a wild boar’s limbs off his
+trunk.”</p>
+
+<p>Despite his courage and composure
+a shudder ran through him
+at the horrible words. But he
+did not open the panel and
+fire.</p>
+
+<p>The men without were mad with
+rage because they had not found
+the house opened to them as
+arranged with the absent household.</p>
+
+<p>They had planned an easy
+entrance, unmolested pillage, and
+the slaughter of the foreigner in
+his bed. They could not tell
+why they found him up and
+armed; and all the entrances of
+the house closed.</p>
+
+<p>“’Tis that traitress Muriella,”
+muttered Lucio; “she warned him,
+be sure,” and as he spoke the other
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span>men screamed in chorus with rage
+and hate. Let them find her! let
+them only find her! She should
+rue the day that her mother, the
+cursed woman of Viterbo, bore
+her!</p>
+
+<p>They heaped the dry heather
+and pine branches up in a great pile
+before the doorway; they lighted
+matches and resinous cones, and
+tried to set fire to the pile. They
+had not brought petroleum, because
+of its name and use they were all
+ignorant. The wood failed to catch
+alight; the air was heavy, and there
+was no wind to stir a flame.</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille debated whether it would
+not be best for the place and for the
+woman to give himself up to the
+will of the assailants, on condition
+that she and it should be spared.
+But he knew that he could not
+trust them to fulfil any conditions,
+and the soldier and the noble in
+him loathed the thought of surrender
+to this rabble, and at last
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>he fired through one of the inch-wide
+squares of the grating. His
+shot broke the wrist of the man
+lighting the heather.</p>
+
+<p>They all for a moment fell back
+demoralised; Alcide was safe out
+of reach, for he had expected shots
+from within, and had given his
+comrades the posts of danger.</p>
+
+<p>“I would willingly spare you,”
+said Cyrille, and his voice came
+clearly to them through the little
+aperture. “But you shall not fire
+the house whilst I live; I will
+break the bone of every man’s arm
+used to set light to this wood.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a brief pause. They
+were cunning, vindictive, merciless,
+but they were not brave, and they
+could not be certain that he was alone.
+They drew back from the doorway,
+and took counsel amongst themselves.
+No one of them cared to be
+the second to have his wrist snapped
+in two; the first man who had met
+this fate was howling like a wounded
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>wolf, calling curses down on the head
+of Alcide. It was one thing to enter
+a defenceless and open house, and
+pillage all it contained, and kill a
+stranger in his sleep, and another
+to force entrance under the deadly
+fire of a revolver whose owner was
+masked and protected by iron-plated
+doors.</p>
+
+<p>They had unlit torches with them,
+brought to light their way about
+the cellars and store-rooms when
+they should enter the house.
+Alcide lighted one, and standing
+where Cyrille could not see him,
+hurled its blazing mass on to the
+piled brushwood, and three other
+men did the same. But the torches
+fell short and dropped on the marble
+pavement before the door; as they
+flared there harmlessly their red
+glare glowed on the black figures
+of the woodlanders, which looked
+like the forms of demons as they
+danced and yelled with rage and
+thirst for blood, hidden by the darkness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>of the night, save where the
+fitful glimmer of the torches touched
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Owing to the narrowness of the
+slit through which he fired, Cyrille
+could only aim at those immediately
+before the door or on the grass in
+front of him.</p>
+
+<p>The peasants could, without going
+far, keep out of range, and from
+their station beyond the balustrade
+they flung two other torches; these
+fell full on the piled heather, which
+caught alight, and sent a rolling,
+stifling cloud of smoke up through
+the grating. As they saw the
+success of their effort they lost
+caution, they shouted with rapture,
+and crowded nearer to enjoy the
+sport; the fire ran from heather to
+bramble and branch; the cones
+caught alight with jets of flame;
+the dry faggots cracked and flared,
+the volumes of smoke rolled up to
+the sculptured arms and crown
+about the doorways.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>“Their blood be on their own
+heads,” said Cyrille, and he fired—once,
+twice, thrice. Each time a
+man fell. But Alcide still kept out of
+range. The fire was fierce, and its
+red waves licked hungrily the old
+oak and iron which opposed their
+entrance.</p>
+
+<p>Resistance could be but a question
+of time.</p>
+
+<p>“If I could believe they would
+keep faith with me, I would let
+them torture me to death, to save
+the house and the woman. But
+they do not know what faith
+means. Were I once dead, they
+would sack the place from loggia
+to cellar, and get drunk on wine
+and blood.”</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly there came to his ears
+a sound of galloping horses. The
+sound came from the long avenue
+in front of the house to the north.
+The men did not heed it; they
+were leaping and shouting and
+bellowing with triumph as the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>fire waxed higher and fiercer, and
+the smoke ran up amongst the
+bronze scroll-work of the balconies
+above.</p>
+
+<p>He could now see nothing, for
+the burning wood hid all save itself,
+but he could hear, and the gallop of
+the horses grew nearer, and there
+blent with it the jingling of chains
+and of scabbards, and a shrill yell
+of terror rose from the grassland
+beyond the balustrade.</p>
+
+<p>“The saints be praised!” cried
+Caterina, and she fell on her knees
+and burst into tears. “’Tis the
+carabineers of Ronciglione!”</p>
+
+<p>Cyrille went to a side door which
+the fire had not reached, unfastened
+its bolts and bars, and went out on
+to the grass.</p>
+
+<p>The gendarmes had slid from
+their saddles, had surrounded and
+seized the woodlanders, who made a
+fierce but short resistance. Against
+a horse from which she had dismounted
+there leaned a woman—pale,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>dishevelled, exhausted, staring
+with dilated eyes at the burning
+pile. She was drenched with sweat;
+discoloured with heat and dust; her
+mouth was wide open with parching
+thirst; her bare feet were bleeding.</p>
+
+<p>It was Muriella.</p>
+
+<p>Great tears were falling down her
+cheeks, for she had delivered her
+own kinsmen over to justice, and
+she was ashamed of the guilt of her
+father’s people.</p>
+
+<p>“You brought the guards?” cried
+Cyrille, as he recognised her.</p>
+
+<p>“I overheard—this afternoon—late,”
+she said, her breath deep
+drawn and laboured, like a worn-out
+steer’s; “it would have done no
+good to come here, and I knew
+the men at the picquet were
+absent. I ran to Ronciglione in
+four hours for the soldiery. There
+was no other way. I could trust
+no one.”</p>
+
+<p>Alcide was standing, pinioned
+by a gendarme, his gun having
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>been taken from him; his eyes
+were red with a wicked, furious
+flame. There was little light, except
+such as was shed by the glare
+of the burning wood; but that
+was enough to enable him to see
+who it was who had been his undoing.</p>
+
+<p>With a sudden movement, lithe
+and quick and unexpected as a
+snake’s, he twisted himself from the
+hold of the carabineer who was
+about to manacle him, and with one
+leap like a deer’s he sprang to the
+side of his niece.</p>
+
+<p>“Traitress!” he hissed in her
+ear, as he snatched a knife hidden in
+his waistbelt, and stabbed her full
+in the breast.</p>
+
+<p>They seized him instantly again,
+but he had aimed too well not to
+have slain.</p>
+
+<p>“It does not matter,” she said,
+as she pressed the haft of the knife
+to her bosom. “I was in time—it
+was that which mattered.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>The blood from her pierced lungs
+choked her.</p>
+
+<p>“You will go home,” she murmured
+feebly. “The saints did
+hear!”</p>
+
+<p>A moment later she was dead.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="ph1">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p>
+
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
+
+<p>Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77040 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77040
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77040)