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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 ***