He looked at it wistfully.

"Ah, Guilio!" he murmured, "what use were your conquests, what use was your genius, the greatest perchance the world has ever seen? What use? You were struck in the throat like a felled ox, and the land you ruled lies bleeding at every pore!"

In a quarter of an hour he was ushered through other large rooms into one of great architectural beauty, where the Prefect was standing by a writing-table.

Giovacchino Gallo was a short, stout person with a large stomach, a bald head, bright restless eyes, and a high, narrow forehead; his face was florid, like the face of one to whom the pleasures of the table are not alien. His address was courteous but distant, stiff, and a little pompous; he evidently believed in himself as a great person and only unbent to other greater persons, when he unbent so vastly that he crawled.

"What can I do for your Reverence?" he asked, as he seated himself behind the writing-table and pointed to a chair.

The words were polite but the tone was curt; it was officialism crystallised.

Don Silverio explained the purpose of his visit, and urged the prayers of his people.

"I am but the vicar of Ruscino," he said in explanation, "but in this matter I plead for all the natives of the Valdedera. Your Excellency is Governor of this province, in which the Edera takes its rise and has its course. My people, and all those others who are not under my ministry, but whose desires and supplications I represent, venture to look to you for support in their greatest distress, and intercession for them against this calamity."

The face of the Prefect grew colder and sterner, his eyes got an angry sparkle, his plump, rosy hands closed on a malachite paper-knife; he wished the knife were of steel, and the people of the Valdedera had but one head.

"Are you aware, sir," he said impatiently, "that the matter of which you speak has had the ratification of Parliament?"

"But it has not had the ratification of the persons whom it most concerns."

"Do you supposed, then, when a great public work is to be accomplished the promoters are to go hat in hand for permission to every peasant resident on the area?"

"A great public work seems to me a large expression: too large for this case. The railway is not needed. The acetylene works are a private speculation. I venture to recall to your Excellency that these people, whom you would ignore, own the land, or, where they do not own it, have many interests both in the land and the water." "Pardon me, your Excellency, but that is a phrase: it is not a fact. You could not, if you gave them millions, compensate them for the seizure of their river and their lands. These belong to them and to their descendants by natural right. They cannot be deprived of these by Act of Parliament without gross injury and injustice." "There must be suffering for the individual in all benefit of the general!"

"And doubtless, sir, when one is not the individual the suffering appears immaterial!"

"What an insolent priest!" thought Giovacchino Gallo, and struck the paper-knife with anger on the table.

"Take my own parishioners alone," pursued Don Silverio. "Their small earnings depend entirely upon the Edera water; it gives them their food, their bed, their occupation; it gives them health and strength; it irrigates their little holdings, extra murus, on which they and their families depend for grain and maize and rice. If you change their river-bed into dry land they will starve. Are not your own countrymen dearer to you than the members of a foreign syndicate?"

"There will be work for them at the acetylene factory."

"Are they not free men? Are they to be driven like slaves to a work which would be hateful to them? These people are country born and country bred. They labour in the open air, and have done so for generations. Pardon me, your Excellency, but every year the King's Government forces into exile thousands, tens of thousands, of our hard working peasants with their families. The taxation of the land and of all its products lays waste thousands of square miles in this country. The country is being depleted and depopulated, and the best of its manhood is being sent out of it by droves to Brazil, to La Plata, to the Argentines, to anywhere and everywhere, where labour is cheap and climate homicidal. The poor are packed on emigrant ships and sent with less care than crated of fruit receive. They consent to go because they are famished here. Is it well for a country to lose its labouring classes, its frugal, willing, and hard-working manhood? to pack them off across the oceans by contract with other states? The Government has made a contract with a Pacific island for five thousand Italians? Are they free men or are they slaves? Can your Excellency call my people free who are allowed no voice against the seizure of their own river, and to whom you offer an unwholesome and indoor labour as compensation for the ruin of their lives? Now, they are poor indeed, but they are contented; they keep body and soul together, they live on their natal soil, they live as their fathers lived. Is it just, is it right, is it wise to turn these people into disaffection and despair by an act of tyranny and spoilation through which the only gainers will be foreign speculators abroad and at home the gamblers of the Bourses? Sir, I do not believe that the world holds people more patient, more long-suffering, more pacific under dire provocation, or more willing to subsist on the poorest and hardest conditions than Italians are; is it right or just or wise to take advantage of that national resignation to take from half a province the natural aid and the natural beauty with which God Himself has dowered it in the gift of the mountainborn stream? You are powerful, sir, you have the ear of the Government; you will not try to stop this infamous theft of the Edera water whilst there is still time?"

Don Silverio spoke with that eloquence and with that melody of voice which few could bear unmoved; and even the dull ear and the hard heart of the official who heard him were for one brief moment moved as by the pathos of a song sung by some great tenor.

But that moment was very brief. Over the face of Giovacchino Gallo a look passed at once brutal and suspicious. "Curse this priest!" he thought; "he will give us trouble."

He rose, stiff, cold, pompous, with a frigid smile on his red, full, bon viveur's lips.

"If you imagine that I should venture to attack, or even presume to criticise, a matter which the Most Honourable the Minister of Agriculture has in his wisdom approved and ratified, you must have a strange conception of my fitness for my functions. As regards yourself, Reverend Sir, I regret that you appear to forget that the chief duty of your sacred office is to inculcate to your flock unquestioning submission to Governmental decrees."

"Is that your Excellency's last word?"

"It is my first, and my last, word."

Don Silverio bowed low.

"You may regret it, sir," he said simply, and left the writing-table and crossed the room. But as he approached the door the Prefect, still standing, said, "Wait!"

Gallo opened two or three drawers in his table, searched for some papers, looked over them, leaving the priest always standing between him and the door. Don Silverio was erect; his tall frail form had a great majesty in it; his pallid features were stern.

"Return a moment," said Gallo.

"I can hear your Excellency where I am," replied Don Silverio, and did not stir.

"I have here reports from certain of my agents," said Gallo, fingering his various papers, "that there is and has been for some time a subversive movement amongst the sparse population of the Valdedera."

Don Silverio did not speak or stir.

"It is an agrarian agitation," continued Gallo, "limited to its area, with little probability of spreading, but it exists; there are meetings by night, both open-air and secret meetings; the latter take place now in one farmhouse, now in another. The leader of this noxious and unlawful movement is one Adone Alba. He is of your parish."

He lifted his eyelids and flashed a quick, searching glance at the priest.

"He is of my parish," repeated Don Silverio, with no visible emotion.

"You know of this agitation?"

"If I did, sir, I should not say so. But I am not in the confidence of Adone Alba."

"Of course I do not ask you to reveal the secrets of the confessional, but —"

"Neither in the confessional nor out of it have I heard anything whatever from him concerning any such matter as that of which you speak."

"He is a young man?"

"Yes."

"And the owner of the land known as the Terra Vergine?"

"Yes."

"And his land is comprised in that which will be taken by the projected works?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure that he has not sent you here?"

"My parishoners are not in the habit of 'sending' me anywhere. You reverse our respective positions."

"Humility is not one of your ecclesiastical virtues, Most Reverend."

"It may be so."

Gallo thrust his papers back into their drawer and locked it with a sharp click.

"You saw the Syndic of San Beda?"

"I did."

"Much what you say. Official language is always limited and learned by rote."

Gallo would willingly have thrown his bronze inkstand at the insolent ecclesiastic; his temper was naturally choleric, though years of sycophancy and State service had taught him to control it.

"Well, Reverend Sir!" he said, with ill-concealed irritation, "this conversation is, I see, useless. You protect and screen your people. Perhaps I cannot blame you for that, but you will allow me to remind you that it is my duty to see that the order and peace of this district are not in any manner disturbed; and that any parish priest if he fomented dissatisfaction or countenanced agitation in his district, would be much more severely dealt with by me than any civilian would be in the same circumstances. We tolerate and respect the Church so long as she remains strictly within her own sphere, but so long only."

"We are all perfectly well aware of the conditions attached to the placet and the exequatur at all times, and we are all conscious that even the limited privileges of civilians are denied to us!" replied Don Silverio. "I have the honour to wish your Excellency good morning."

He closed the door behind him.

"Damnation!" said Giovacchino Gallo; "that is a strong man! Is Mother Church blind that she lets such an one rust and rot in the miserable parish of Ruscino?"

When Don Silverio rejoined the Vicar of Sant Anselmo the latter asked him anxiously how his errand had sped.

"It was a waste of breath and words," he answered. "I might have known that it would be so with any Government official."

"But you might have put a spoke in Count Corradini's wheel. If you had told Gallo that the other is trafficking —"

"Why should I betray a man who received me in all good faith? And what good would it have accomplished if I had done so?"

And more weary than ever in mind and body he returned to Ruscino.

As he had left the Prefect's presence that eminent person had rung for his secretary.

"Brandone, send me Sarelli."

In a few moments Sarelli had appeared; he was the usher of the Prefecture by appointment; by taste and in addition he was its chief spy. He was a native of the city, and a person of considerable acumen and excellent memory; he never needed to make memoranda — there is nothing so dangerous to an official as written notes. "Sarelli, what are the reports concerning the vicar of Ruscino?"

Sarelli stood respectfully at attention; he had been a non-commissioned officer of artillery; and answered in rapid but clear tones —

"Great ability — great eloquence — disliked by superiors; formerly great preacher in Rome; supposed to be at Ruscino as castigation; learned — benevolent — correct."

"Humph!" said Gallo, disappointed. "Not likely then to cause trouble or disorder? — to necessitate painful measures?"

Sarelli rapidly took his cue.

"Hitherto, your Excellency, uniformly correct; except in one instance —"

"That instance?"

"Your Excellency will have heard of Ulisse Ferrero, a great robber of the lower Abruzzo Citeriore Primo?"

"I have: continue."

"Ulisse Ferrero was outlawed; his band had been killed or captured, every one; he had lost his right arm; he hid for many years in the lower woods of Abruzzo; he came down at night to the farmhouses, the people gave him food and drink, and aided him —"

"Their criminal habit always: continue."

"Sometimes in one district, sometimes in another, he was often in the macchia of the Valdedera. The people of the district, and especially of Ruscino, protected him. They thought him a saint, because once when at the head of his band, which was then very strong, he had come into Ruscino and done them no harm, but only eaten and drunk, and left a handful of silver pieces to pay for what he and his men had taken. So they protected him now, and oftentimes for more than a year he came out of the macchia, and the villagers gave him all they could, and he went up and down Ruscino as if he were a king; and this lasted for several seasons, and, as we learned afterwards, Don Silverio Frascara had cognisance of this fact, but did nothing. When Ulisse Ferrero was at last captured (it is nine years ago come November, and it was not in Ruscino but in the woods above), and brought to trial, many witnesses were summoned, and amongst them this Don Silverio; and the judge said to him, 'You had knowledge that this man came oftentimes into you parish?' and Don Silverio answered, 'I had.' 'You knew that he was an outlaw, in rupture with justice?' 'I did,' he answered. Then the judge struck his fist with anger on his desk. 'And you a priest, a guardian of order, did not denounce him to the authorities?' Then Don Silverio, your Excellency, quite quietly, but with a smile (I was there close to him), had the audacity to answer the judge. 'I am a priest,' he said 'and I study my breviary, but do not find in it any command which authorises me to betray my fellow creatures.' That made a terrible stir in the tribunal, you Excellency. They talked of committing him to gaol for contempt of court and for collusion with the outlaw. But it took place at San Beda, where they are all papalini, as your Excellency knows, and nothing was done, sir."

"That reply is verily like this priest!" thought Giovacchino Gallo. "A man of ability, of intellect, of incorruptible temper, but a man as like as not to encourage and excuse sedition."

Aloud he said, "You may go, Sarelli. Good morning."

"May I be allowed a word, sir?"

"Speak."

"May it not well be, sir, that Don Silverio's organisation or suggestion is underneath this insurrectionary movement of the young men in the Valdedera?"

"It is possible; yes. See to it."

"Your servant, sir."

Sarelli withdrew, elated. He loved tracking, like a bloodhound, for the sheer pleasure of the "cold foot chase." The official views both layman and priest with contempt and aversion; both are equally his prey, both equally his profit: he lives by them and on them, as the galleruca does on the elm-tree, whose foliage it devours, but he despises them because they are not officials, as the galleruca doubtless, if it can think, despises the elm.



XVI

Of course his absence could not be hidden from any in his parish. The mere presence of the rector of an adjacent parish, who had taken his duties, sufficed to reveal it. For so many years he had never stirred out of Ruscino in winter cold or summer heat, that none of his people could satisfactorily account to themselves for his now frequent journeys. The more sagacious supposed that he was trying to get the project for the river undone; but they did not all have so much faith in him. Many had always been vaguely suspicious of him; he was so wholly beyond their comprehension. They asked Adone what he knew, or, if he knew nothing, what he thought. Adone put them aside with an impatient, imperious gesture. "But you knew when he went to Rome?" they persisted. Adone swung himself loose from them with a movement of anger. It hurt him to speak of the master he had renounced, of the friend he had forsaken. His conscience shrank from any distrust of Don Silverio; yet his old faith was no more alive. He was going rapidly down a steep descent, and in that downward rush he lost all his higher instincts; he was becoming insensible to everything except the thirst for action, for vengeance.

To the man who lives in a natural state away from cities it appears only virile and just to defend himself, to avenge himself, with the weapons which nature and art have given him; he feels no satisfaction in creeping and crawling through labyrinths of the law, and he cannot see why he, the wronged, should be forced to spend, and wait, and humbly pray, while the wrongdoer may go, in the end, unchastised. Such a tribunal as St. Louis held under an oak-tree, or the Emperor Akbar in a mango grove, would be intelligible to him; but the procedure, the embarrassments, the sophistries, the whole machinery of modern law are abhorrent to him.

He yearned to be the Tell, the Massaniello, the Andreas Hofer, of his province; but the apathy and supineness and timidity of his neighbors tied his hands. He knew that they were not made of the stuff with which a leader could hope to conquer. All his fiery appeals fell like shooting stars, brilliant but useless; all his vehement excitations did little more than scare the peasants whom he sought to rouse. A few bold spirits like his own seconded his efforts and aided his propaganda; but these were not numerous enough to leaven the inert mass.

His plan was primitive and simple: it was to oppose by continual resistance every attempt which should be made to begin the projected works upon the river; to destroy at night all which should be done in the day, and so harass and intimidate the workmen who should be sent there that they should, in fear and fatigue, give up their labours. They would certainly be foreign workmen; that is, workmen from another province; probably from the Puglie. It was said that three hundred of them were coming that week from the Terra d'Otranto to work above Ruscino. He reckoned that he and those he led would have the advantage of local acquaintance with the land and water, and could easily, having their own homes as base, carry on a guerrilla warfare for any length of time. No doubt, he knew, the authorities would send troops to the support of the labours, but he believed that when the resolve of the district to oppose at all hazards any interference with the Edera should be made clear, the Government would not provoke an insurrection for the sake of favouring a foreign syndicate. So far as he reasoned at all, he reasoned thus.

But he forgot, or rather he did not know, that the lives of its people, whether soldiers or civilians, matter very little to any Government, and that its own vanity, which it calls dignity, and the financial interests of its supporters, matter greatly; where the Executive has been defied there it is inexorable and unscrupulous.

Both up and down the river there was but one feeling of bitter rage against the impending ruin of the water; there was but one piteous cry of helpless desperation. But to weld this, which was mere emotion, into that sterner passion of which resistance and revolt are made, was a task beyond his powers.

"No on will care for us; we are too feeble, we are too small," they urged; they were willing to do anything were they sure it would succeed, but —

"But who can be sure of anything under heaven?" replied Adone. "You are never sure of your crops until the very last day they are reaped and carried; yet you sow."

Yes, they granted that; but sowing grain was a safe, familiar labour; the idea of sowing lead and death alarmed them. Still there were some, most of them those who were dwellers on the river, or owners of land abutting on it, who were of more fiery temper, and these thought as Adone thought, that never had a rural people juster cause for rebellion; and these gathered around him in those meetings by night of which information had reached the Prefecture, for there are spies in every province.

Adone had changed greatly; he had grown thin and almost gaunt; he had lost his beautiful aspect of adolescence; his eyes had no longer their clear and happy light; they were keen and fierce, and looked out defiantly from under his level brows.

He worked on his own land usually, by day, to stave off suspicion; but by night he scoured the country up and down the stream wherever he believed he could find proselytes or arms. He had no settled plan of action; he had no defined project; his only idea was to resist, to resist, to resist. Under a leader he would have been an invaluable auxiliary, but he had not the knowledge whatever of stratagem, or manoeuvre, or any of the manifold complications of guerrilla warfare. His calm and dreamy life had not prepared him to be all at once a man of action: action was alien alike to his temperament and to his habits. All his heart, his blood, his imagination, were on fire; but behind them there was not that genius of conception and command which alone makes the successful chief of a popular cause.

His mother said nothing to disturb or deter him on his course, but in herself she was sorely afraid. She kept her lips shut because she would have thought it unworthy to discourage him, and she could not believe in his success, try how she might to compel her faith to await miracles.

Little Nerina alone gave him that unquestioning, blind belief which is so dear to the soul of man. Nerina was convinced that at his call the whole of the Valdedera would rise full-armed, and that no hostile power on earth would dare to touch the water. To her any miracle seemed possible. Whatever he ordered, she did. She had neither fear nor hesitation. She would slip out of her room unheard, and speed over the dark country on moonless nights on his errands; she would seek for weapons and bring them in and distribute them; she would take his messages to those on whom he could rely, and rouse to his cause the hesitating and half-hearted by repetition of his words. Her whole young life had caught fire at his; and her passionate loyalty accepted without comprehending all he enjoined her or told to her.

The danger which she ran and the concealment of which she was guilty, never disturbed her for an instant. What Adone ordained was her law. Had he not taken pity on her in her misery that day by the river? Was she not to do anything and everything to serve him and save the river? This was her sole creed; but it sufficed to fill her still childish soul. If, with it, there were mingled a more intense and more personal sentiment, she was unconscious of, and he indifferent to, it. He sent her to do his bidding as he would have sent a boy, because he recognised in her that zeal and fervent fidelity to a trust of which he was not sure in others.

Although she was a slender brown thing, like a nightingale, she was strong, elastic, untiring; nothing seemed to fatigue her; she always looked as fresh as the dew, as vigorous as a young cherry-tree. Her big hazel eyes danced under their long lashes, and her pretty mouth was like one of the four-season roses which bloomed on the house wall. She was not thought much to look at in a province where the fine Roman type is blended with the Venetian colouring in the beauty of its women; but she had a charm and a grace of her own; wild and rustic, like that of a spray of grass or a harvest mouse swinging on a stalk of wheat.

She was so lithe, so swift, so agile; so strong without effort, so buoyant and content, that she carried with her the sense of her own perfect health and happiness, as the east wind blowing up the Edera water bore with it the scent of the sea.

But of any physical charm in her Adone saw nothing. A great rage filled his soul, and a black cloud seemed to float between him and all else which was not the wrong done to him and his and the water of Edera. Until he should have lifted off the land and the stream this coming curse which threatened them, life held nothing for him which could tempt or touch him.

He used the girl for his own purposes and did not spare her; but those purposes were only those of his self-imposed mission, and of all which was youthful, alluring, feminine, in her he saw nothing: she was to him no more than a lithe, swift, hardy filly would have been which he should have ridden over the moors and pastures to its death in pursuit of his end. He who had been always so tender of heart had grown cruel; he would have flung corpse upon corpse into the water if by such holocaust he could have reached his purpose. What had drawn him to Nernia had been that flash of ferocity which he had seen in her; that readiness to go to the bitter end in the sweet right of vengeance; instincts which formed so singular a contrast to the childish gaiety and the sunny goodwill of her normal disposition.

He knew that nothing which could have been done to her would have made her reveal any confidence placed in her. That she was often out all the hours of the night on errands to the widely scattered dwellings of the peasants did not prevent her coming at dawn into the cattle stalls to feed and tend the beasts.

And she was so dexterous, so sure, so silent; even the sharp eyes of old Gianna never detected her nocturnal absence, even the shrewd observation of Clelia Alba never detected any trace of fatigue in her or any negligence in her tasks. She was always there when they needed her, did all that she was used to do, was obedient to every word or sign; they did not know that as she carried the water pails, or cut the grass, or swept the bricks, or washed the linen, her heart sung proudly within her a joyous song because she shared a secret — a perilous secret — of which the elder woman knew nothing. Any night a stray shot might strike her as she ran over the moors, or through the heather; any night a false step might pitch her headlong into a ravine or a pool; any night, returning through the shallows of the ford, she might miss her footing and fall into one of the bottomless holes that the river hid in its depths: but the danger of it only endeared her errand the more to her; made her the prouder that she was chosen for it.

"I fear nothing," she said to him truthfully; "I fear only that you should not be content."

And as signal fires run from point to point, or hill to hill, so she ran from one farmhouse to another, bearing the messages which organised those gatherings whereof Giavacchino Gallo had the knowledge. The men she summoned and spoke with were rough peasants, for the most part, rude as the untanned skins they wore at their work, but not one of them ever said a gross word or gave a lewd glance to the child.

She was la bimba to them all; a brave little soul and honest; they respected her as if she were one of their own children, or one of their own sisters, and Nernia coming through the starlight, with an old musket slung at her back, which Adone had taught her to use, and her small, bronzed feet leaping over the ground like a young goat's, was a figure which soon became familiar and welcome to the people. She seemed to them like a harbinger of hope; she had few words, but those words reverberated with courage and energy; she moved the supine, she braced the timid; she brought the wavering firmness and the nervous strength; she said what Adone had taught her to say, but she put into it all her own immense faith in him, all her own innocent and undoubting certainty that his cause was just and would be blessed by heaven.

The Edera water belonged to them. Would they let it be turned away from their lands and given to strangers?

As a little spaniel or beagle threshes a covert, obedient to his master's will and working only to please him, so she scoured the country-side and drove in, by persuasion, or appeal, or threat, all those who would lend ear to her, to the midnight meetings on the moors, or in the homesteads, where Adone harangued them, with eloquence ever varied, on a theme which was never stale, because it appealed at once to the hearts and to the interests of his hearers.

But many of them, though fascinated, remained afraid.

"When all is said, what can we do?" they muttered. "Authority has a long arm."

The people of the district talked under their breath of nothing else than of this resistance which was being preached as a holy war by the youth of Terra Vergine. They were secret and silent, made prudent by many generations which had suffered from harsh measures and brutal reprisals, but the league he proclaimed fascinated and possessed them. Conspiracy has a seduction subtle and irresistible as gambling for those who have once become its servants. It is potent as wine, and colours the brain which it inflames. To these lowly, solitary men, who knew nothing beyond their own fields and coppices and wastelands, its excitement came like a magic philter to change the monotony of their days. They were most of them wholly unlettered; knew not their A B C; had only learned the law of the seasons, and the earth, and the trees which grew, and the beasts which grazed; but they had imagination; they had the blood of ancient races; they were neither dolts not boors, though Adone in his wrath called them so. They were fascinated by the call to rise and save their river. A feeling, more local than patriotism, but more noble than interest, moved them to share in his passionate hatred of the intruders, and to hearken to his appeals to them to arm and rise as one man.

But, on the other hand, long years of servitude and hardship had made them timid as gallant dogs are made so by fasting or the whip. "What are we?" some of them said to him. "We are no more than the earthworms in the soil." For there is a pathetic humility in these descendants of the ancient rulers of the world; it is a humility born of hope deferred, of the sense of every change of masters, of knowledge that the sun rises and sets upon their toil, as it did on that of their fathers, as it will do on that of their children, and will never see it lessened, nor see the fruits thereof given to themselves or to their sons. It is a humility which is never ignoble, but is infinitely, because hopelessly, sad.

The river was their own, surely, yes; but, like so much else that was their own, the State claimed it.

"What can be more yours than the son you beget, the fruit of your loins, the child for whom you have laboured through long years?" said an old man to him once. "Yet the State, as soon as he is of use to you, the State takes him, makes a beast of burden of him, kills his youth and his manhood; sends him without a word to you, to be maimed and slaughtered in Africa, his very place of death unknown to you; his body — the body you begat and which his mother bore in her womb and nourished and cherished — is devoured by the beasts of the desert and the birds of the air. They take all; why shall they not take the river also?"

The glowing faith of Adone was flung, as the sunlit salt spray of the ocean is cast on a cliff of basalt, against the barrier of that weary and prostrate despair which the State dares to tell the poor is their duty and their portion upon earth.

But the younger men listened to him more readily, being less bent and broken by long labour, and poor food, and many years of unanswered prayers. Of these some had served their time in regiments, and aided him to give some knowledge of drill and of the use of weapons to those who agreed with him to dispute by force the claim of strangers to the Edera water.

These gatherings took place on waste lands or bare heaths, or in clearings or hollows in the woods, and the tramp of feet and click of weapons scared the affrighted fox and the astounded badger. They dared not fire lest the sound should betray their whereabouts to some unfriendly ear; but they went through all other military exercises as far as it lay in their power to do so.

The extreme loneliness of the Edera valley was in their favour. Once in half a year, perhaps, half a troop of carabineers might ride through the district, but this was only if there had been any notable assassination or robbery; and of police there was none nearer than the town of San Beda.

It was to arrange these nightly exercises, and summon to or warn off men from them, as might be expedient, that Nernia was usually sent upon her nocturnal errands. One night when she had been bidden by Adone to go to a certain hamlet in the woods to the north, the child, as she was about to slip back the great steel bolts which fastened the house door, saw a light upon the stairs which she had just descended, and turning round, her hand upon the lock, saw Clelia Alba.

"Why are you out of your bed at this hour?" said the elder woman. Her face was stern and dark.

Nernia did not answer; her gay courage forsook her; she trembled.

"Why?" asked Adone's mother.

"I was going out," answered the child. Her voice shook. She was clothed as usual in the daytime, but she had over her head a woollen wrapper. She had not her musket, for she kept it in the hen-house, and was accustomed to take it as she passed that place.

"Going out! At the fourth hour of the night? Is that an answer for a decent maiden?"

Nernia was silent.

"Go back to your room, and I will lock you in it; in the morning you will account to me."

Nernia recovered her self-possession, though she trembled still.

"Pardon me, Madama Clelia," she said humbly, "I must go out."

She did not look ashamed, and her small brown face had a resolute expression.

A great anguish seized and wrung the heart of Clelia Alba. She knew that Adone was not in the house, Did he, the soul of purity and honour, seduce a girl who dwelt under his own roof? — carry on an intrigue with a little beggar, to his own shame and the outrage of his mother? Was this the true cause of his frequent absence, his many nights abroad? Her dark brows contracted, her black eyes blazed.

"Go to your room, wanton!" she said in tones of thunder. "In the morning you will answer to me."

But Nernia, who had before this slipped the bolt aside, and who always kept her grasp upon the great key in the lock, suddenly turned it, pushed the oak door open, and before the elder woman was conscious of what she was doing, had dashed out into the air, and slammed the door behind her. The rush of wind had blown out the lamp in Clelia Alba's hand.

When, after fumbling vainly for some minutes to find the door, and bruising her hands against the wall and oaken chair, she at last found it and thrust it open, the night without was moonless and starless and stormy, and in its unillumined blackness she saw no trace of the little girl. She went out on to the doorstep and listened, but there was no sound. The wind was high; the perfume of the stocks and wallflowers was strong; far away the sound of the river rushing through the sedges was audible in the intense stillness, an owl hooted, a nightjar sent forth its sweet, strange, sighing note. Of Nernia there was no trace. Clelia Alba came within and closed the door, and locked and bolted it.

The old woman Gianna had come downstairs with a lighted rush candle in her hand; she was scared and afraid.

"What is it? What is it, madama?"

Clelia Alba dropped down on the chair by the door.

"It is — it is — that the beggar's spawn you would have me shelter is the leman of my son; and he has dishonoured his house and mine."

Gianna shook her grey head in solemn denial and disbelief.

"Sior'a, Clelia, do not say such words or think such thoughts of your son or of the child. She is as harmless as any flower that blows out there in the garden, and he is a noble youth, though now, by the wickedness of me, distraught and off his head. What makes you revile them so?"

"They are both out this night. Is not that enough?"

Gianna was distressed; from her chamber above she had heard the words which had passed between Adone's mother and Nernia, and knew the girl was gone.

"I would condemn others, but not Adone and the child," she returned. "For sure they do not do right to have secrets from you, but they are not such secrets as you think."

"Enough!" said Clelia Alba sternly. "The morning will show who is right. It suffices for me that the son of Valeria Albo, my son, has forgot his duty to his mother and his respect for himself."

Clelia Alba rose with effort from her chair, relighted her lamp at the old woman's rush candle, and went slowly and heavily up the stairs. She felt stunned and outraged. Her son! — hers! — to lie out of nights with a little nameless vagrant!

Gianna caught hold of her skirt. "Madama — listen. I saw him born that day by the Edera water, and I have seen him every day of his life since till now. He would never do a base thing. Do not you, his mother, disgrace him by thinking of it for an hour. This thing is odd, is ugly, is strange, but wait to judge it —"

Clelia Alba released her skirt from her old servant's grasp.

"You mean well, but you are crazed. Get you gone."

Gianna let go her hold and crept submissively down the stair. She set her rushlight on the floor and sat down in the chair beside the door, and told her beads with shaking fingers. One or other of them, she thought, might come home either soon or late, for she did not believe that any amorous intimacy was the reason that they were both out — God knew where — in this windy, pitch-dark night.

"But he does wrong, he does wrong," she thought. "He sends the child on his errands perhaps, but he should remember a girl is like a peach, you cannot handle it ever so gently but its bloom goes; and he leaves us alone, two old women here, and we might have our throats cut before we should be able to wake old Ettore in the stable."

The night seemed long to her in the lone stone entrance, with the owls hooting round the house, and the winds blowing loud and tearing the tiles from the roof. Above, in her chamber, Adone's mother walked to and fro all night sleepless.



XVII

Gianna before it was dawn went out in the hope that she might meet Adone on his return, and be able to speak to him before he could see his mother. She was also in extreme anxiety for Nerina, of whom she had grown fond. She did not think the little girl would dare return after the words of Clelia Alba. She knew the child was courageous, but timid, like an otter or a swallow.

She went to the edge of the river and waited; he must cross it to come home; but whether he would cross higher up or lower down she could not tell. There was the faint light which preceded the rising of the sun. A great peace, a great freshness, were on the water and the land.

"Oh Lord, what fools we are!" thought the old woman. "The earth makes itself anew for us with every dawn, and our own snarling, and fretting, and mourning cloud it all over for us, and we only see our own silly souls!"

Soon, before the sun was rising, Adone came in sight, passing with firm, accustomed step across the undressed trunks of trees which were here thrown across the river to make a passage lower down the stream than the bridge of Ruscino. He was walking with spirit and ease, his head was erect, his belt was filled with arms, his eyes had sternness and command in them; he came from one of the military drillings in the woods, and had been content with it. Seeing old Gianna waiting there he understood that something must have happened, and his first fears were for his mother.

"Is she ill?" he cried, as he reached the bank of his own land.

"No; she is well in health," answered Gianna, "but she is sorely grieved and deeply angered; she found the girl Nerina going out at the dead of night."

Adone changed colour. He was silent. Gianna came close to him.

"The child and you both out all night, heaven knows where! What but one thing can your mother think?"

"If she thinks but one thing, that thing is false."

"Maybe. I believe so myself, but, Sior' Clelia will not. Why do you send the child out at such hours?"

"What did she say to my mother?"

"Nothing; only that she had to go."

"Faithful little soul!"

"Aye! And it is when little maids are faithful like this that men ruin them. I do not want to speak without respect to you, Adone, for I have eaten your bread and been sheltered by your roof through many a year; but for whatever end you send that child out of nights, you do a bad thing, a cruel thing, a thing unworthy of your stock; and if I know Clelia Alba——and who should know her if not I?— she will never let Nerina enter her house again."

Adone's face grew dark.

"The house is mine. Nerina shall not be turned out of it."

"Perhaps it is yours; but it is your mother's too, and you will scarce turn out your mother for the sake of a little beggar-girl?"

Adone was silent; he saw the dilemma; he knew his mother's nature; he inherited it.

"Go you," he said at last; "go you and tell her that the child went out on my errands, indeed, but I have not seen her; there is no collusion with her, and she is not and never will be dama of mine."

"I will take her no such message, for she would not listen. Go you; say what you choose; perhaps she will credit you, perhaps she will not. Anyhow, you are warned. As for me, I will go and search for Nerina."

"Do you mean she has not returned?"

"Certainly she has not. She will no more dare to return than a kicked dog. You forget she is a young thing, a creature of nothing; she thinks herself no more than a pebble or a twig. Besides, your mother called her a wanton. That is a word not soon washed out. She is humble as a blade of grass, but she will resent that. You have made much trouble with your rebellious work. You have done ill — ill — ill!"

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

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

"It is the least you can do. But you must not forget the cattle. Nerina is not there to see to them."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Maybe she is amongst the hay," thought Gianna, and painfully she climbed the wide rungs of the ladder which led to the hay loft. There, sure enough, was Nerina, sound asleep upon the fodder. She looked very small, very young, very innocent.

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

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

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

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

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

"Praise be to the Madonna that you have come back, reverendissimo!" she cried. "There are sore trouble and disputes under our roof."

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

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

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

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

Don Silverio listened with pain and indignation.

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

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

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

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

"Go up; and send Adone to me."

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

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

Gianna went and came down quickly.

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

"He may have gone to Nerina?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You cannot be serious!"

"If you think so, look at me."

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

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

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

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

The face of Clelia Alba grew chillier and harder still.

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

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

"Why not?" said Clelia Alba, and a cruel smile passed over her face. "It seems to me more decent than lying out in the fields together night after night."

"Silence!" said Don Silverio in that tone which awed the boldest. "Of what avail is your own virtue if it make you thus harsh, thus unbelieving, thus ready to condemn?"

"I claim no more virtue than any clean-living woman should possess; but Valerio Alba would not have brought his leman into my presence, neither shall his son do so."

"In your present mood, words are wasted on you. Go to your chamber, Sior' Clelia, and entreat Heaven to soften your heart. There is sorrow enough in store for you without your creating misery out of suspicion and unbelief. This house will not long be either yours or Adone's."

He left the kitchen and went out into the air; Clelia Alba was too proud, too dogged, in her obstinancy to endeavour to detain him or to ask him what he meant.

"Where is Adone?" he asked of the old labourer Ettore, who was carrying manure in a great skip upon his back.

"He is down by the five apple-trees, sir," answered Ettore.

The five apple-trees were beautiful old trees, gnarled, moss-grown, hoary, but still bearing abundant blossom; they grew in a field which was that year being trenched for young vines, a hard, back-breaking labour; the trenches were being cut obliquely, so as not to disturb the apple-trees or injure some fine fig-trees which grew there. Adone was at work, stripped to his shirt and hidden in the delved earth to his shoulders.

He looked up from the trench and lifted his hat as he saw the priest enter the field; then he resumed his labour.

"Come out of your ditch and hearken to me. I will not weary you with many words."

Adone, moved by long habit of obedience and deference, leapt with his agile feet on to the border of the trench and stood there, silent, sullen, ready to repel reproof with insolence.

"Is it worthy of you to ruin the name of a girl of sixteen by sending her on midnight errands to your fellow-rebels?"

Don Silverio spoke bluntly; he spoke only on suspicion, but his tone was that of a direct charge.

Adone did not doubt for a moment that he was in possession of facts.

"Has the girl played us false?" he said moodily.

"I have not seen the girl," replied Don Silvero. "But it is a base thing to do, to use that child for errands of which she cannot know either the danger or the illegality. You misuse one whose youth and helplessness should have been her greatest protection."

"I had no one else that I could trust."

"Pour little soul! You could trust her, so you abused her trust! No: I do not believe you are her lover. I do not believe you care for her more than for the clod of earth you stand on. But to my thinking that makes what you have done worse; colder, more cruel, more calculating. Had you seduced her, you would at least feel that you owed her something. She has been a mere little runner and slave to you — no more. Surely your knowledge that she depends on you ought to have sufficed to make her sacred?"

Adone looked on the ground. His face was red with the dull flush of shame. He knew that he merited all these words and more.

"I will provide temporarily for her; and you will send her out no more upon these errands," continued Don Silverio. "Perhaps, with time, your mother may soften to her; but I doubt it."

"The house is mine," said Adone sullenly. "She shall not keep Nerina out of it."

"You certainly cannot turn your mother away from her own hearth," replied Don Silverio with contempt. "I tell you I will take the girl to some place in Ruscino where she will be safe for the present time. But I came to say another thing to you as well as this. I have been away three days. I have seen the Prefect, Senatore Gallo. He has informed me that your intentions, your actions, your plans and coadjutors are known to him, and that he is aware that you are conspiring to organise resistance and riot."

A great shock struck Adone as he heard; he felt as if an electric charge had passed through him. He had believed his secret to be as absolutely unknown as the graves of the lucomone under the ivy by the riverside.

"How could he know?" he stammered. "Who is the traitor?"

"That matters little," said Don Silverio. "What matters much is, that all you do and desire to do is written down at the Prefecture."

Adone was sceptical. He laughed harshly.

"If so, sir, why do they not arrest me? That would be easy enough. I do not hide."

"Have you not ofttimes seen a birdcatcher spread his net? Does he seize the first bird which approaches it? He is not so unwise. He waits until all the feathered innocents are in the meshes: then he fills his sack. That is how the Government acts always. It gives its enemies full rope to hang themselves. It is cold of blood, and slow, and sure."

"You say this to scare me, to make me desist."

"I say it because it is the truth; and if you were not a boy, blind with rage and unreason, you would long since have known that such actions as yours, in rousing or trying to rouse the peasants of the Valdedera, must come to the ear of the authorities. Do not mistake. They let you alone as yet, not because they love you or fear you; but because they are too cunning and too wise to touch the pear before it is ripe."

Adone was silent. He was convinced; and many evil thoughts were black within his brain. His first quarrel with a mother he adored had intensified all the desperate ferocity awake in him.

"You are as blind as a mole," said Don Silverio, "but you have not the skill of the mole in constructing its hidden galleries. You scatter your secrets broadcast as you scatter grain over your ploughed field. You think it is enough to choose a moonless night for you and your companions-in-arms to be seen by no living creature! Does the stoat, does the wild cat, make such a mistake as that? If you make war on the State, study the ways of your foe. Realise that it has as many eyes, as many ears, as many feet as the pagan god; that its arm is as long as its craft, that it has behind it unscrupulous force and unlimited gold, and the support of all those who only want to pursue their making of wealth in ease and in peace. Do you imagine you can meet and beat such antagonists with a few rusty muskets, a few beardless boys, a poor little girl like Nerina?"

Don Silverio's voice was curt, imperious, sardonic; his sentences cut like whips; then after a moment of silence his tone changed to an infinite softness and sweetness of pleading and persuasion.

"My son, my dear son! cease to live in this dream of impossible issues. Wake to the brutality of fact, to nakedness of truth. You have to suffer a great wrong; but will you be consoled for it by the knowledge that you have led to the slaughter men whom you have known from your infancy? It can but end in one way — your conflict with the power of the State. You, and those who have listened to you, will be shot down without mercy, or flung into prison, or driven to lead the life of tracked beasts in the woods. There is no other possible end to the rising which you are trying to bring about. If you have no pity for your mother, have pity on your comrades, for the women who bore them, for the women who love them."

Adone quivered with breathless fury as he heard. All the blackness of his soul gathered into a storm of rage, burst forth in shameful doubt and insult. He set his teeth, and his voice hissed through them, losing all its natural music.

"Sir, your clients are men in high places; mine are my miserable brethren. You take the side of the rich and powerful; I take that of the poor and the robbed. Maybe your reverence has deemed it your duty to tell the authorities that which you say they have learned?"

A knife through his breast-bone would have given a kindlier wound to his hearer. Amazement under such an outrage was stronger in Don Silverio than any other feeling for the first moment. Adone — Adone! — his scholar, his beloved, his disciple! — spoke to him thus! Then an overwhelming disgust and scorn swept over him, and was stronger than his pain. He could have stricken the ungrateful youth to the earth. The muscles of his right arm swelled and throbbed; but, with an intense effort, he controlled the impulse to avenge his insulted honour. Without a word, and with one glance of reproach and of disdain, he turned away and went through the morning shadows under the drooping apple boughs.

Adone, with his teeth set hard and his eyes filled with savage fire, sprang down into the trench and resumed his work.

He was impenitent.

"He is mad! He knows not what he says!" thought the man whom he had insulted. But though he strove to excuse the outrage it was like a poisoned blade in his flesh.

Adone could suspect him! Adone could believe him to be an informer!

Was this all the recompense for eighteen years of unwearying affection, patience, and tuition? Though the whole world had witnessed against him, he would have sworn that Adone Alba would have been faithful to him.

"He is mad," he thought. "His first great wrong turns his blood to poison. He will come to me weeping to-morrow."

But he knew that what Adone had said to him, however repented of, however washed away with tears, was one of those injuries which may be forgiven, but can never be forgotten, by any living man. It would yawn like a pit between them for ever.



XVIII

To this apple-tree field there was a high hedge of luxuriant elder and ash, myrtle and field-roses. Behind this hedge old Gianna was waiting for him; the tears were running down her face. She took the skirt of his coat between her hands. "Wait, your reverence, wait! The child is in the cattle stable."

Don Silverio looked down on her a few moments without comprehension. Then he remembered.

"Is she there indeed? Poor little soul! She must not go to the house."

"She does not dream of it, sir. Only she cannot understand why Madonna Clelia's anger is so terrible. What can I do — oh, Lord!"

"Keep her where she is for the present. I am going home. I will speak with some of the women in Ruscino, and find her some temporary shelter."

"She will go to none, sir. She says she must be where she can serve Adone. If she be shut up, she will escape and run into the woods. Three years ago she was a wild thing; she will turn wild again."

"Like enough! But we must do what we can. I am going home. I will come or send to you in a few hours."

Gianna reluctantly let him go. As he crossed the river he looked down on the bright water, here green as emeralds, there brown as peat, eddying round the old stone piers of the bridge, and an infinite sorrow was on him.

As a forest fire sweeps away under its rolling smoke and waves of flame millions of obscure and harmless creatures, so the baneful fires of men's greed and speculations came from afar and laid low these harmless lives with neither thought of them or pity.

Later in the day he sent word to Gianna to bring Nernia to the presbytery. They both came, obedient. The child looked tired and had lost her bright colour; but she had a resolute look on her face.

"My poor little girl," he said gently to her, "Madonna Clelia is angered against you. We will hope her anger will pass ere long. Meanwhile you must not go to the house. You would not make ill-blood between a mother and her son?"

"No," said Nernia.

"I have found a home for awhile for you, with old Alaida Manzi; you know her; she is a good creature. I am very sorry for you, my child; but you did wrong to be absent at night; above all not to go back to your chamber when Clelia Alba bade you to do so."

Nernia's face darkened. "I did no harm."

"I am sure you did not mean to do any; but you disobeyed Madonna Clelia."

Nernia was silent.

"You are a young girl; you must not roam the country at night. It is most perilous. Decent maidens and women are never abroad after moonrise."

Nernia said nothing.

"You will promise me never to go out at night again?"

"I cannot promise that, sir."

"Why?"

"If I be wanted, I shall go."

"If Adone Alba bid you — is that your meaning?"

Nernia was silent.

"Do you think that it is fitting for you to have secrets from me, your confessor?"

Nernia was silent; her rosy mouth was closed firmly. It was very terrible to have to displease and disobey Don Silverio; but she would not speak, not if she should burn in everlasting flames for ever.

"Take her away. Take her to Alaida," he said wearily to Gianna.

"She only obeys Adone, sir," said the old woman. "All I can say counts as naught."

"Adone will send her on no more midnight errands, unless he be brute and fool both. Take her away. Look to her, you and Alaida."

"I will do what I can, sir," said Gianna humbly, and pushed the girl out into the village street before her.

Don Silverio sat down at his deal writing-table and wrote in his fine, clear calligraphy a few lines: "In the name of my holy office I forbid you to risk the life and good name of the maiden Nernia on your unlawful errands."

Then he signed and sealed the sheet, and sent it by his sacristan to Adone.

He received no answer.

The night which followed was one of the most bitter in its meditations that he had ever spent; and he had spent many cruel and sleepless nights ere then.

That Adone could for one fleeting moment have harboured so vile a thought filled him with nausea and amaze. Betray them! He! — who would willingly have given up such years of life as might remain to him could he by such a sacrifice have saved their river and their valley from destruction. There was nothing short of vice or crime which he would not have done to save the Edera water from its fate. But it was utterly impossible to do anything. Even men of eminence had often brought all their forces of wealth and argument against similar enterprises, and had failed in their opposition. What could a few score of peasants, and one poor ecclesiastic, do against all the omnipotence of Parliament, of millionaires, of secretaries of State, of speculators, of promoters, tenacious and forcible and ravenous as the octopus?

In those lonely night hours when the moonbeams shone on his bed and the little white dog nestled itself close to his shoulder, he was tortured also by the sense that it was his duty to arrest Adone and the men of the Valdedera in their mad course, even at the price of such treachery to them as Adone had dared to attribute to him. But if that were his duty it must be the first duty which consciously he had left undone!

If he could only stop them on their headlong folly by betraying them they must rush on to their doom!

He saw no light, no hope, no assistance anywhere. These lads would not be able to save a single branch of the river water, nor a sword-rush on its banks, nor a moorhen in its shallows, nor a cluster of myosotis upon its banks, and they would ruin themselves.

The golden glory of the planet Venus shone between the budding vine-leaves at his casement.

"Are you not tire?" he said to the shining orb. "Are you not tired of watching the endless cruelties and insanities on earth?"



XIX

The people of Ruscino went early to their beds; the light of the oil-wicks of the Presbytery was always the only light in the village half an hour after dark. Nerina went uncomplainingly to hers in the dark stone house within the walls where she had been told that it was her lot to dwell. She did not break her fast; she drank great draughts of water; then, with no word except a brief good-night, she went to the sacking filled with leaves which the old woman Alaida pointed out for her occupancy.

"She is soon reconciled," thought the old crone. "They have trained her well."

Relieved of all anxiety, she herself lay down in the dark and slept. The girl seemed a good, quiet, tame little thing, and said her paternosters as she should do. But Nerina did not sleep. She was stifled in this little close room with its one shuttered window. She who was used to sleeping with the fresh fragrant air of the dark fields blowing over her in her loft, felt the sour, stagnant atmosphere take her like a hand by the throat.

As soon as she heard by the heavy breathing of the aged woman that she was sunk in the congested slumber of old age, the child got up noiselessly — she had not undressed — and stole out of the chamber, taking the door key from the nail on which Alaida had hung it. A short stone stair led down to the entrance. No one else was sleeping in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in another moment ran down the steep and stone street. She laughed as the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the fragrance of Adone's fields.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have done me only good."

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

"It is her right."

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

"Yes."

"How can you be out to-night?"

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

"You are a brave child."

"Is there nothing to do to-night?"

"No, dear."

"Where do you go?"

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

"Who summoned them?"

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

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

"No, my dear, I cannot."

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

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

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

"But if they will not go?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of a sudden she stopped short, in alarm.

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

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

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

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

They were soldiers; yes, they were soldiers; the sounds she had heard had been the crushing of the plants under their feet, the click of their muskets as they moved; they were soldiers! Where had they come from? There were no soldiers at Ruscino.

The only time when she had ever seen soldiers had been when the troopers had captured Baruffo. These were not troopers; they were small men, on foot, linen-clad, moving stealthily, and as if in fear; only the tubes of their muskets glistened in the light of the great planets.

She crouched down lower and lower, trying to enter the ground and hide; she hoped they would go onward, and then she could run — faster than they — and reach the hollow, and warn Adone and his fellows. She had no doubt that they came to surprise the meeting; but she hoped from their pauses and hesitating steps that they were uncertain what way to take.

"If you come to me to lead you — aye! I will lead you! — you will not forget where I lead!" she said to herself, as she hid under the heather; and her courage rose, for she saw a deed to be done. For they were now very near to the place of meeting, and could have taken the rebels like mice in a trap, if they had only known where they were; but she, watching them stand still, and stare, and look up to the stars, and then north, south, east, and west, saw that they did not know, and that it might be possible to lead them away from the spot by artifice, as the quail leads the sportsman away from the place where her nest is hidden.

As the thought took shape in her brain a sixth man, a sergeant who commanded them, touched her with his foot, stooped, clutched her, and pulled her upward. She did not try to escape.

"What beast of night have we here?" he cried. "Spawn of devils, who are you?"

Nerina writhed under the grip of his iron fingers, but she still did not try to escape. He cursed her, swore at her, shook her, crushed her arm black and blue. She was sick with pain, but she was mute.

"Who are you?" he shouted.

"I come down from the mountains to work here in summer."

"Can any of you speak her dialect?" cried the sergeant to his privates: the sergeant was a man of Milan.

One man answered, "I come from Paganica; it is much the same tongue there as in these parts."

"Ask her the way, then."

The soldier obeyed.

"What is the way to the Three Pines? — to the tomb of Asdrubal?"

"The way is long," said Nerina.

"Do you know it?"

"I know it."

"Have you heard tell of it?"

"Yes."

"That men meet at night there?"

"Yes."

"Meet this night there?"

"Yes."

"You know where the tomb of Asdrubal is?"

"Have I not told you?"

The soldier repeated her answer translated to his sergeant; the latter kept his grasp on her.

"Ask her if she will take us there."

The soldier asked her and translated her answer.

"If we give her two gold pieces she will take us there."

"Spawn of hell! I will give her nothing. But if she do not lead us aright I will give her a bullet for her breakfast."

The soldier translated to Nerina: "He will give you two gold pieces if you guide us aright; and you need have no fear; we are honest men and the king's servants."

"I will guide the king's servants."

"You are sure of the way?"

"Is the homing pigeon sure of his?"

"Let us be off," said the sergeant. "A bullet for her if she fail."

He had little pleasure in trusting to this girl of the Abruzzo hills, but he and his men were lost upon these moors, and might grope all night, and miss the meeting, and fail to join his comrades and surprise those who gathered at it. He reckoned upon fear as a sure agent to keep her true, as it kept his conscripts under arms.

"Bid him take his hand off me," said Nerina, "or I do not move."

The private translated to his superior. "She prays of your mercy to leave her free, or she cannot pass through the heather."

The sergeant let her go unwillingly, but pushed her in front of him, and levelled his revolver at her.

"Tell her, if she try to get away, I fire."

"Tell him I know that," said Nerina.

She was not afraid, for a fierce, unholy joy was in her veins; she could have sung, she could have laughed, she could have danced; she held them in her power; they had come to ensnare Adone, and she had got them in her power as if they were so many moles!

They tied her hands behind her; she let them do it; she did not want her hands. Then she began to push her way doggedly, with her head down, to the south. The tomb of Asdrubal was due north; she could see the pole star, and turned her back to it and went due south.

Three miles or more southward there was a large pollino, or swamp as L'Erba Molle, the wet grass; the grass was luxuriant, the flora was varied and beautiful; in appearance it was a field, in reality it was a morass; to all people of the Valdedera it was dreaded and avoided, as quicksand are by the seashore.

She went on as fast as the narrow path, winding in and out between the undergrowth, permitted her to go; the armed soldiers, heavy laden with their knapsacks and their boots, following her clumsily, and with effort, uttering curses on their ill-luck and their sleepless night.

The stars were now larger and brighter; the darkness was lightened, the river was running away from its southern birthplace in the hills which lie like couched lions about the feet of the Gran Sasso. She could hear its distant murmur. "They come to capture you," she said to it, "and I will kill them. They shall choke and go down, down, down — "

Her heart leapt within her; and she went with the loaded revolver pointed at her from behind as though she went to her bridal-bed.

"Where are you taking us, vile little bitch?" the sergeant cried, and the soldier from Paganica translated: "Pretty little brown one, whither do you go?"

"I take you straight," said Nerina, "only you go to clumsily, for men in these parts should not wear leather upon their feet."

The soldiers sighed assent, and would willingly have gone barefoot, and the sergeant swore in tones of thunder because he could not understand what she said.

Before long they came in sight of the Erba Molle; it looked like a fair, peaceful pasture, with thousands of sword rushes golden upon its surface. The light of the stars, which was now brilliant, shone upon its verdure; there were great flocks of water-birds at roost around it, and they rose with shrill cries and great noise of wings, with a roar as though a tide were rising.

Across it stretched a line of wooden piles which served as a rude causeway to those who had the courage and the steadiness to leap from one to another of them. It was not three times in a season that any one dared to do so. Adone did so sometimes; and he had taught Nerina how to make the passage.

"Pass you after me, and set your feet where I set mine," said Nerina to the little soldier of the Abruzzo, and she put down her foot on the first pile, sunk almost invisible under the bright green slime, where thousands of frogs were croaking.

The soldier of the Abruzzo said to his superior, "She says we must set our feet where she sets hers. We are quite near now to the tomb of the barbarian."

Nerina, with the light leap of a kid, bounded from pile to pile. They thought she went on solid ground; on meadow grass. The sergeant and his men crowded on to what they thought was pasture. In the uncertain shadows and scarce dawning light, they did not see the row of submerged timber. They sank like stones in the thick ooze; they were sucked under to their knees, to their waists, to their shoulders, to their mouths; the yielding grasses, the clutching slime, the tangled weed, the bottomless mud, took hold of them; the water-birds shrieked and beat their wings; the hideous clamour of dying men answered them.

Nerina had reached the other side of the morass in safety, and her mocking laughter rang upon their ears.

"I have led you well!" she cried to them. "I have led you well, oh servants of the king! — oh swine! — oh slaves! — oh spies!— oh hunters and butchers of men!"

And she danced on the edge of the field of death, and the light of the great planets shone upon her face.

Had she run onward at once the wood beyond she would have been saved. That instant of triumph and mockery lost her.

The sergeant had put his revolver in his teeth; he knew now that he was a dead man; the slime was up to his chin, under his feet the grass and the mud quaked, yielded, yawned like a grave.

He drew his right arm out of the ooze, seized his revolver, and aimed at the dancing, mocking, triumphant figure beyond the border of golden sword rushes. With a supreme effort he fired; then he sank under the mud and weed.

The child dropped dead on the edge of the morass.

One by one each soldier sank. Not one escaped.

The water-birds came back from their upward flight and settled again on the swamp.

Underneath it all was still, save for the loud croaking of the frogs.



XX

Don Silverio rose with the dawn of day, and entered his church at five of the clock. There were but a few women gathered in the gaunt, dark vastness of the nave. The morning was hot, and the scent of buds and blossoms and fresh-cut grass came in from the fields over the broken walls and into the ancient houses.

When Mass was over, old Alaida crept over the mouldy mosaics timidly to his side, and kneeled down on the stones.

"Most reverend," she whispered, "'twas not my fault. I slept heavily; she must have unlocked the door, for it was undone at dawn; her bed is empty, she has not returned."

"You speak of Nerina?"

"Of Nerina, reverence. I did all I could. It was not my fault. She was like a hawk in a cage."

"I am grieved," he said; and he thought: "Is it Adone?"

He feared so.

"Is she not at the Terra Vergine?" he asked. Alaida shook her head.

"No, reverend sir. I sent my grandchild to ask there. Gianna has not seen her, and says the girl would never dare to go near Clelia Alba."

"I am grieved," said Don Silverio again.

He did not blame the old woman, as who, he thought, blames one who could not tame an eaglet?

He went back to the presbytery and broke his fast on a glass of water, some bread, and some cresses from the river.

He had sent for Gianna. In half an hour she came, distressed and frightened.

"Sir, I know not of her; I should not dare to harbour her, even in the cattle-stall. Madonna Clelia would turn me adrift. When Madonna Clelia has once spoken —"

"Adone is at home?"

"Alas! No, sir. He went out at nightfall; we have not seen him since. He told me he went to a meeting of men at the Three Pines, at what they call the Tomb of the Barbarian."

Don Silverio was silent.

"It is very grave," he said at last.

"Aye, sir, grave indeed," said Gianna. "Would that it were love between them, sir. Love is sweet and wholesome and kind, but there is no such thing in Adone's heart. There it is only, alas! Blackness and fire and hatred, sir; bloodlust against those who mean ill to the river."

"And his mother has lost all influence over him?"

"All, sir. She is no more to him now than a bent stick. Yet, months ago, she gave him her pearls and her bracelets, and he sold them in a distant town to buy weapons."

"Indeed? What madness!"

"How else could the men have been armed, sir?"

"Armed!" he repeated. "And of what use is it to arm? What use is it for two hundred peasants to struggle against the whole forces of the State? They will rot in prison; that is all that they will do."

"Maybe yes, sir. Maybe no," said the old woman, with the obstinacy of ignorance. "Some one must begin. They have no right to take the water away, sir; no more right than to take the breast from the babe."

Then, afraid of having said so much, she dropped her curtsey and went out into the street. But in another moment she came back into the study with a scared, blanched face, in which the wrinkles were scarred deep like furrows in a field.

"Sir — sir!" she gasped, "there are the soldiery amongst us."

Don Silverio rose in haste, put the little dog on his armchair, closed the door of his study, and went down the narrow stone passage which parted his bookroom from the entrance. The lofty doorway showed him the stones of the familiar street, a buttress of his church, a great branch of one of the self-sown ilex-trees, the glitter of the arms and the white leather of the cross belts of a sentinel. The shrill lamentations of the women seemed to rend the sunny air. He shuddered as he heard. Coming up the street farther off were half a troop of carabineers and a score of dragoons; the swords of the latter were drawn, the former had their carbines levelled. The villagers, screaming with terror, were closing their doors and shutters in frantic haste; the door of the presbytery alone remained open. Don Silverio went into the middle of the road and addressed the officer who headed the carabineers.

"May I ask to what my parish owes this visit?"

"We owe no answer to you, reverend sir," said the lieutenant.

The people were sobbing hysterically, catching their children in their arms, calling to the Holy Mother to save them, kneeling down on the sharp stones in the dust. Their priest felt ashamed of them.

"My people," he called to them, "do not be afraid. Do not hide yourselves. Do not kneel to these troopers. You have done no wrong."

"I forbid you to address the crowd," said the officer. "Get you back into your house."

"What is my offence?"

"You will learn in good time," said the commandant. "Get you into your presbytery."

"My place is with my people."

The officer, impatient, struck him on the chest with the pommel of his sword.

Two carabineers thrust him back into the passage.

"No law justifies your conduct," he said coldly, "or authorises you to sever me from my flock."

"The sabre is law here," said the lieutenant in command.

"It is the only law known anywhere in this kingdom," said Don Silverio.

"Arrest him," said the officer. "He is creating disorder."

The carabineers drove him into his study, and a brigadier began to ransack his papers and drawers.

He said nothing; the seizure of his manuscripts and documents was indifferent to him, for there was nothing he had ever written which would not bear the fullest light. But the insolent and arbitrary act moved him to keen anxiety, because it showed that the military men had licence to do their worst, at their will, and his anguish of apprehension was for Adone. He could only hope and pray that Adone had returned, and might be found tranquilly at work in the fields of the Terra Vergine. But his fears were great. Unless more soldiery were patrolling the district in all directions it was little likely, he thought, that these men would conduct themselves thus in Ruscino; he had no doubt that it was a concerted movement, directed by the Prefect, and the General commanding the garrisons of the province, and intended to net in one haul the malcontents of the Valdedera.

From his study there was no view upon the street; he could hear the wailing of women and screaming of children from the now closed houses: that was all.

"What is it your men do to my people?" he said sternly.

The brigadier did not reply; he went on throwing papers into a trunk.

"Where is your warrant for this search? We are not in a state of siege?" asked Don Silverio.

The man, with a significant gesture, drew his sabre up half way out of its sheath; then let it fall again with a clash. He vouchsafed no other answer.

Some women's faces pressed in at the grating of the window which looked on the little garden, scared, blanched, horrified, the white head, and sunburnt features of Gianna foremost.

"Reverendissimo!" they screamed as with one voice. "They are bringing the lads in from the moors."

And Gianna shrieked, "Adone! They have got Adone!"

Don Silverio sprang to his feet.

"Adone! Have you taken Adone Alba?"

"The ringleader! By Bacchus! Yes," cried the brigadier, with a laugh. "He will get thirty years at the galleys. Your flock does you honour, Reverendissimo!"

"Let me go to my flock," said Don Silverio; and some tone in his voice, some gesture of his hand, had an authority in them which compelled the carabineer to let him pass unopposed.

He went down the stone passage to the archway of the open door. A soldier stood sentinel there. The street was crowded with armed men. The air was full of clangour and clamour; above all rose the shrill screams of the women.

"No one passes," said the sentinel, and he levelled the mouth of his musket at Don Silverio's breast.

"I pass," said the priest, and with his bare hand he grasped the barrel of the musket and forced it upward.

"I rule here, in the name of God," he said in a voice which rolled down the street with majestic melody, dominating the screams, the oaths, the hell of evil sound; and he went down the steps of his house, and no man dared lay a hand on him.

He could hear the trampling of horses and the jingling of spears and scabbards; some lancers who had beaten the moors that night were coming up the street. Half a company of soldiers of the line, escorted by carabineers, came in from the country, climbing the steep street, driving before them a rabble of young men, disarmed, wounded, lame, with their hands tied behind them, the remnant of those who had met at the tomb of Asdrubal in the night just passed. They had been surprised, seized, surrounded by a wall of steel; some had answered to their leader's call and had defended themselves, but these had been few; most of them had thrown down their weapons and begged for mercy when the cold steel of the soldiers was at their throats. Adone had fought as though the shade of Asdrubal had passed into him; but his friends had failed him; his enemies had outnumbered him a score to one; he had been overpowered, disarmed, bound, dragged through his native heather backward and upward to Ruscino, reaching the shadow of the walls as the sun rose.

The child lay dead by the stagnant pond, and the men she had led to their death lay choked with the weeds and the slime; but of that he knew naught.

All he knew was that his cause was lost, his life forfeit, his last hope dead.

Only by his stature and his bearing could he be recognised. His features were black from powder and gore; his right arm hung broken by a shot; his clothing had been torn off him to his waist; he was lame; but he alone still bore himself erect as he came on up the village street. The others were huddled together in a fainting, tottering, crazed mob; all were sick and swooning from the long march, beaten when they paused by the buckles of belts and the flat of sabres.

Don Silverio saw that sight in front of his church, in the white, clear light of early morning, and on the air there was a sickly stench of sweat, of powder, of wounds, of dust.

He went straight to the side of Adone.

"My son, my son! I will come with you. They cannot refuse me that."

But the soul of Adone was as a pit in which a thousand devils strove for mastery. There was no light in it, no conscience, no gratitude, no remorse.

"Judas!" he cried aloud; and there was foam on his lips and there was red blood in his eyes. "Judas! You betrayed us!"

Then, as a young bull lowers his horns, he bent his head and bit through and through to the bone the wrist of the soldier who held him; in terror and pain the man shrieked and let go his hold; Adone's arms remained bound behind him, but his limbs, though they dripped blood, were free.

He fronted the church, and that breach in the blocks of the Etruscan wall through which Nerina had taken her path to the river a few hours before. He knew every inch of the descent. Hundreds of times in his boyhood had he run along the ruined wall and leaped in sport over the huge stones, to spring with joyous shouts into the river below.