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The Waters of Edera

^ srp n 1973

THK

WATERS OF EDERA

OUIDA

Author of
The Messarenesr ^^ Under Two Flags ^ Etc,, Etc.

*7I^

THE MUSSON BOOK CO.,
TORONTO.
1900.

..- ■•' !.. ,...r

copyfjioht, 189p.
St Louise de la Ramb.

The Waters of Bdera

iJol

The Waters of Edera

It was a country of wide pastures, of moors
covered with heath, of rock-born streams and
rivulets, of forest and hill and dale, sparsely in-
habited, with the sea to the eastward of it, un-
seen, and the mountains everywhere visible
always, and endlessly changing in aspect.

Herdsmen and shepherds wandered over it, and
along its almost disused roads pedlars and pack
mules passed at times but rarely. Minerals and
marbles were under its turf, but none sought for
them ; pools and lakes slept in it, undisturbed, save
by millions of water fowl and their pursuers. The
ruins of temples and palaces were overgrown by
its wild berries and wild flowers. The buffalo
browsed where emperors had feasted, and the bit-
tern winged its slow flight over the fields of for-
gotten battles.

It was the season when the flocks are brought
through this lonely land, coming from the plains
to the hills. Many of them passed on their

The Waters of Edera

way thus along the course of the Edera water.
The shepherds, clothed in goatskin, with the hair
worn outward, bearded, brown, hirsute men,
looking like savage satyrs, the flocks they drove
before them travel-worn, lame, heart-broken, the
lambs and kids bleating painfully. They cannot
keep up with the pace of the flock, and, when
they fall behind, the shepherds slit their throats,
roast their bodies over an evening fire, or bake
them under its ashes, and eat them; if a town or
village be near, the little corpses are sold in it.
Often a sheep dog or a puppy drops down in the
same way, footsore and worn out ; then the shep-
herds do not tarry but leave the creatures to their
fate, to die slowly of thirst and hunger.

The good shepherd is a false phrase. No one
is more brutal than a shepherd. If he were not so
he could not bear his life for a day.

All that he does is brutal. He stones the flock
where it would tarry against his will. He muti-
lates the males, and drags the females away from
their sucking babes. He shears their fleeces
every spring, unheeding how the raw skin drops
blood. He drives the halting, footsore, crippled
animals on by force over flint and slate and parch-
ing dust. Sometimes he makes them travel
twenty miles a day.

For his pastime he sets the finest of his beasts
to fight. This is the feast day and holiday sport

The Waters of Edcra

of all the shepherds; and they bet on it until all
they have, which is but little, goes on the heads of
the rams; and one will wager his breeches, and
another his skin jacket, and another his comely
wife, and the ram which is beaten, if he have any
life left in him, will be stabbed in the throat by
his owner : for he is considered to have disgraced
the branca.

This Sunday and Saints* day sport was going
on on a piece of grass land in the district known
as the Vale of Edera.

On the turf, cleared of its heaths and ferns,
there was a ring of men, three of them shepherds,
the rest peasants. In the midst of them were the
rams, two chosen beasts pitted against each other
like two pugilists. They advanced slowly at first,
then more quickly, and yet more quickly, till they
met with a crash, their two foreheads, hard as
though carven in stone, coming in collision with a
terrible force; then each, staggered by the en-
counter, drew back dizzy and bruised to recoil and
take breath and gather fresh force, and so charge
one on the other in successive rounds until the
weaker should succumb, and, mangled and sense-
less, should arise no more.

One of the rams was old, and one was young;
some of the shepherds said that the old one was
more wary and more experienced, and would have
the advantage; in strength and height they were

The Waters of Edera

nearly equal, but tlic old one liad been in such
duels before and the young one never. The young
one thought he had but to rush i^, head down-
ward, to con(|uer; the old one knew this was
not enough t(j secure victory. The young one was
blind with ardour and impatience for the fray; the
old one was cool and shrewd and could parry and
wait.

After three rounds the two combatants met in a
final shock; the elder ram butted furiously, the
younger staggered and failed to return the blow,
his frontal b(jne was split, and he fell to the
ground ; the elder struck him f>nce, twice, thrice,
amidst the ui)roarious applause of his backers;
a stream of l)lood poured from his skull, which
was pounded to splinters; a terrible convulsion
shook his body and hi> limbs; he stretched his
tongue out as if he tried to lap water; the men
who had their money on him cursed him with
every curse they knew ; they did not cut his
throat, for they knew he was as good as dead.

" This is a vile thing you have done," said a lit-
tle beggar girl who had Ljen passing, and had
been arrested by the horrible fascination of the
combat, and forced against her will to stand and
watch its 'ssue. The shepherds jeered ; those who
had backed the victor were sponging his w^ounds
beside a runlet of water which was dose at hand ;

The Waters of Edera

those who had lost were flinging stones on the
vanquished. The girl knelt down by the dying
ram to save him from the shower of stones; she
lifted his head gently upward, and tried to pour
water through his jaws from a little wooden cup
which she had on her, and which she had filled at
the river. But he could not swallow ; his beauti-
ful opaline eyes were covered with film, he gasped
painfully, a foam of blood on his lips and a stream
of blood coursing down his face; i. quiver passed
over him again; then his head rested lifeless on
her knees. She touched his she ttered hornb, his
clotted wool, tenderly.

' Why did you set him to fight ^ * she said with
an indignation which choked her voice. *' It was
vile. He was younger than the other and knew
less."

Those wdio had won laughed. Those who had
lost cursed him again; he had disgraced his
branca. They would flay him, and put him in the
cauldron over the wood fire, and would curse him
even whilst they picked his bones for a white-liv-
ered spawn of cowards ; a son of a thrice-damned
ewe.

The girl knew that was what they do.
She laid his battered head gently down upon
the turf, and poured the water out of her cup, her
eyes were blind with tears ; she could not give him

The Waters of Edera

back his young life, his zest in his pastoral pleas-
ures, his joy in cropping the herbage, his rude
loves, his merry gambols, his sound sleep, his
odorous breath.

He had died to amuse and excite the ugly pas-
sions of men, as, as if he had lived longer he
would, in the end, have died to satisfy their ugly
appetites.

She looked at his corpse with compassion, the
tears standing in her eyes ; then she turned away,
and as she went saw that her poor ragged clothes
were splashed here and there with blood, and that
her arms and hands were red with blood : she had
not thought of that before ; she had thought only
of him. The shepherds did not notice her; they
were quarrelling violently in dispute over what
had been lost and won, thrusting their fingers in
each other's faces, and defiling the fair calm of the
day with filthy oaths.

The girl shrank away into the heather with the
silent swiftness of a hare; now that she had lost
the stimulus of indignant pity, she was afraid of
these brutes ; if the whim entered into them they
would be as brutal to her as to their flock.

Out of fear of them she did not descend at once
to the river, but pushed her way through the
sweet-smelling, bee-haunted, cross-leaved heaths;
she could hear the sound of the water on her right

The Waters of Edera

all the time as she went. She knew little of this
country, but she had seen the Edera, and had
crossed it farther up its course on one of its rough
tree-bridges.

When, as well as she could judge, she had got
half a mile away from the scene of the rams' com-
bat, she changed her course and went to the right,
directed by the murmur of the river. It was slow
walking through the heath and gorse which grew
above her head, and were closely woven together,
but in time she reached shelving ground, and
heard the song of the river louder on her ear. The
heath ceased to grow within a few yards of the
stream and was replaced by various water plants
and bv acacia thickets: she slid down the banks
between the stems and alighted on her bare feet
where the sand was soft and the water-dock grew
thick. She looked up and down the water, there
was no one in sight, nothing but the banks rose-
hued with the bloom of the heather, and, beyond
the opposite shore, in the distance, the tender ame-
thystine hues of the mountains. The water was
generally low, leaving the stretcher of sand and of
shingle visible, but it was still deep in many parts.

She stripped herself and went down into it, and
washed the blood which had by this time caked
upon her flesh. It seemed a pity she thought to
sully with that dusky stain this pure, bright, shin-

The Waters of Edera

ing stream ; but she had no other way to rid her-
self of it, and she had in all the world no other
clothes than these poor woollen rags.

Her heart was still sore for the fate of the con-
quered ram; and her eyes filled again with tears
as she washed his blood off her in the gay running
current. But the water was soothing and fresh,
the sun shone on its bright surface ; the comf rey
and fig-wart blew in the breeze, the heather smell
filled the atmosphere.

She was only a child and her spirits rose, and
she capered about in the shallows, and flung the
water over her head, and danced to her own re-
flection in it, and forgot her sorrow. Then she
washed her petticoats as well as she could, having
nothing but water alone, and all the while she was
as naked as a Naiad, and the sun smiled on her
brown, thin, childish body as it smiled on a stem
of plaintain or on the plumage of a coot.

Then when she had washed her skirt she spread
it out on the sand to dry, and sat down beside it
for the heat to bake her limbs after her long bath.
There was no one, and there was noth-
ing, in sight; if any came near she could
hide under the great dock leaves until such
should have passed. It was high noon,
and the skirt of wool and the skirt of hemp
grew hot and steamed under the vertical rays ; she
was soon as dry as the shingles from which the

The Waters of Edera

water had receded for months. She sat with her
hands clasped round her updrawn knees, and her
head grew heavy with the want of slumber, but
she would not sleep, though it was the hour of
sleep. Some one might pass by and steal her
clothes she thought, and how or when would she
ever get others?

When the skirt was quite dried, the blood stains
still showed on it; they were no longer red, but
looked like the marks from the sand. She tied it
on round her waist and her shirt over it, and
wound an old crimson sash round both. Then she
took up her little bundle in which were the wooden
cup and a broken comb, and some pieces of
hempen cloth and a small loaf of maize bread, and
went on along the water, wading and hopping in
it, as the water- wagtails did, jumping from stone
to stone and sinking sometimes up to her knees in
a hole.

She had no idea where she would rest at night,
or where she would get anything to eat ; but that
reflection scarcely weighed on her; she slept well
enough under stacks or in outhouses, and she was
used to hunger. So long as no one meddled with
her she was content. The weather was fine and
the country was quiet. Only she was sorry for
the dead ram. By this time they would have
hung him up by his heels to a tree and have pulled
his skin off his body.

The Waters of Edera

She was sorry ; but she jumped along merrily in
the water, as a kingfisher does, and scarcely even
wondered where its course would lead her.

At a bend in it she came to a spot where a
young man was seated amongst the bulrushes,
watching his fishing net.

"Aie ! " she cried with a shrill cry of alarm like
a bird who sees a fowler. She stopped short in
her progress ; the water at that moment was up to
her knees. With both hands she held up her petti-
coat to save it from another wetting; her little
bundle was balanced on her head, the light shone
in her great brown eyes. The youth turned and
saw her.

She was a very young girl, thirteen at most;
her small flat breasts were still those of a child,
her narrow shoulders and her narrow loins spoke
of scanty food and privation of all kinds, and her
arms and legs were brown from the play of the
sun on their nakedness; they were little else than
skin and bone, nerves and sinew, and looked like
stakes of wood. All the veins and muscles stood
revealed as in anatomy, and her face, which
would have been a child's face, a nymph's face,
with level brows, a pure, straight profile, and
small close ears like shells, was so fleshless and so
sunburnt that she looked almost like a mummy.
Her black eyes had in them the surprise and sad-
ness of those of a weaning calf's; and her hair,

The Waters of Edera

too abundant for so small a head, would, had it
not been so dusty and entangled, have been of a
red golden brown, the hue of a chestnut which
has just burst open its green husk.

*' Who are you? " said the young man, looking
at her in surprise.

" I am Nerina," answered the child.

" Where do you come from ? What is your
country? "

She pointed vaguely to the south-west moun-
tains, where the snow on the upper ranges was
lying with bands of cloud resting on it.

" From the Abruzzi ? "

She was silent. She did not know the moun-
tains of her birthplace by their name.

" Who was your father? " he asked, with some
impatience.

" He was Black Fausto."

" What did he do for a living? "

" He went down with the fair season to the Ro-
man plain."

He understood: the man had no doubt been
a labourer, one of those who descend in bands
from the villages of the Abruzzi heights to
plough, and mow, and sow, and reap, on the lands
of the Castelli Romani ; men who work in droves,
and are fed and stalled in droves, as cattle are,
who work all through the longest and hottest days
in summer, and in the worst storms of winter;

The Waters of Edera

men who are black by the sun, are half naked,
are lean and hai.y and drip with continual sweat,
but who take faithfully back the small wage they
receive to where their women and children dwell
in their mountain-villages.

" He went, you say ? Is he ill. Does he work
no longer? "

" He died last year."

"Of what?"

She gave a hopeless gesture. "Who knows?
He came back with a wolf in his belly, he said, al-
ways gnawing and griping, and he drank water
all day and all night, and his face burned, and his
legs were cold, and all of a sudden his jaw fell,
and he spoke no more to us. There are many of
them who die like that after a hot season down in
the plains."

He understood; hunger and heat, foul air in
their sleeping places, infusoria in the ditch and
rain water, and excessive toil in the extremes of
heat and cold make gaps in the ranks of these
hired bands every year as if a cannon had been
fired into them.

" Who takes care of you now? " he asked v/ith
pity, as for a homeless bitch.

" Nobody. There is nobody. They are all gone
down into the earth."

" But how do you live? "

" I work when I can. I beg when I cannot.

The Waters of Edera

v/ith

gone

nnot.

People let me sleep in the stalls, or the barns, and
give me bread."

" That is a bad life for a girl."

She shrugged her shoulders.

" I did not make it."

*' And where are you going? "

She opened her arms wide and swept the air
with them.

" Anywhere. Along the water, until I find
something to do."

" I cannot do much," she added, after a pause.
" I am little, and no one has taught me. But I
can cut grass and card wool."

" The grass season is short, and the wool sea-
son is far off. Why did you not stay in your vil-
lage?"

She was mute. She did not know why she had
left it, she had come away down the mountain-
side on a wandering instinct, with a vague idea of
finding something better the farther she went : her
father had always come back with silver pieces in
his pocket after his stay down there in those lands
which she had never seen, lying as they did down
far below under the golden haze of what seemed
an immeasurable distance.

" Are you not hungry? " said the fisher.

" I am always hungry," she said, with some as-
tonishment at so simple a question. ** I have been
hungry ever since I can remember. We all were

The Waters of Edera

up there. Sometimes even the grass was too dried
up to eat. Father used to bring home with him a
sack of maize; it was better so long as that
lasted."

" Are you hungry now? "

'* Of course."

" Come to my house with me. We will feed
you. Come. Have no fear. I am Adone Alba,
of the Terra Vergine, and my mother is a kind
woman. She will net grudge you a meal."

The child laughed all over her thin, brown face.

" That will be good," she said, and leapt up out
of the water.

"Poor soul! Poor little soul!" thought the
young man, with a profound sense of pity.

As the child sprang up out of the river, shaking
the water off her as a little terrier does, he saw
that she must have been in great want of food for
a long time; her bones were almost through her
skin. He set his fishing pole more firmly in the
ground, and left the net sunk some half a yard be-
low the surface; then he said to the little girl:
" Come, come and break your fast. It has lasted
long. I fear."

Nerina only understood that she was to be fed ;
that was enough for her. She trotted like a stray
cur, beckoned by a benevolent hand, behind him as
he went, first through some heather and broom,

The Waters of Edera

the

then over some grass, where huge oHve trees
grew, and then through corn and vine lands, to
an old farmhouse, made of timber and stone;
large, long, solid; built to resist robbers in days
when robbers came in armed gangs. There was a
wild garden in front of it, full of cabbage roses,
lavender, myrtle, stocks, and wallflowers. Over
the arched door a four-season rose-tree clambered.

The house, ancient and spacious, wutli its high-
pitched roof of ruddy tiles, impressed Nerina with
a sense of awe, almost of terror. She remained
hesitating on the garden path, where white and
red stocks were blossoming.

** Mother," said Adone, '* Here is a hungry
child. Give her, in your kindness, some broth and
bread."

Clelia Alba came out into the entrance, and saw
the little girl with some displeasure. She was
kind and charitable, but she did not love beggars
and vagabonds, and this half-naked female tatter-
demalion offended her sense of decency and pro-
bity, and her pride of sex. She was herself a
stately and handsome woman.

** The child is famished," said Adone, seeing his
mother's displeasure.

** She shall eat then, but let her eat outside,"
said Clelia Alba, and went back into the kitchen.

Nerina waited by the threshold timid and mute

P^A^

The Waters of Edera

i!>

1 H'

and humble, like a lost dog, her eyes alone ex-
pressed overwhelming emotions: fear and hope,
and one ungovernable appetite, hunger.

Clelia Alba came out in a few minutes with a
bowl of hot broth made of herbs, and a large piece
of maize-flour bread.

" Take them," she said to her son.

Adone took them from her, and gave them to
the child.

" Sit and eat here," he said, pointing to a stone-
settle by the wall under the rose of four seasons.

The hands of Nerina trembled with excitement,
her eyes looked on fire, her lips shook, her breath
came feverishly and fast. The smell of the soup
made her feel beside herself. She said nothing,
but seized the food and began to drink the good
herb-broth with thirsty eagerness though the
steam of it scorched her.

Adone, with an instinct of compassion and deli-
cacy, left her unwatched and went within.

"Where did you find that scarecrow?" asked
his mother.

" Down by the river. She has nobody and
nothing. She comes from the mountains."

" There are poor folks enough in Ruscino with-
out adding to them from without," said Clelia
Alba impatiently. " Mind she does not rob the
fowl-house before she slips away."

The Waters of Edera

" She has honest eyes," said Adone, " I am sure
she will do us no harm."

When he thought that she had been given time
enough to finish her food he went out; the child
was stretched at full length on the stone seat, and
was already sound asleep, lying on her back ; the
empty bowl was on the ground, of the bread there
was no longer a crumb; she was sleeping peace-
fully, profoundly, her thin hands crossed on her
naked brown bosom, on which some rose leaves
had fallen from the rose on the wall above.

He looked at her in silence for a little while,
then returned to his mother.

** She is tired. She sleeps. Let her rest."

" It is unsafe."

" How unsafe, mother? She is only a child."

" She may have men behind her."

" It is not likely."

Adone could not say (for he had no idea him-
self) why he felt sure that this miserable little
waif would not abuse hospitality: "She is a
child," he answered rather stupidly, for children
are often treacherous and wicked, and he knew
nothing of this one except what she had chosen to
tell of herself.

" She may have men behind her," repeated his
mother.

Such men as you are thinking of mother, do

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not come to this valley nowadays. Ulisse Ferrero
was the last of them. Indeed, I think this poor
little creature is all alone in the world. Go and
look at her. You will see how forlorn and small
she is."

She went to the doorway and looked at the
sleeping beggar; her eyes softened as she gazed,
the whole attitude and appearance of the child
were so miserable and so innocent, so helpless,
and yet so tranquil, that her maternal heart was
touched; the waif slept on the stone bench beside
the door of strangers as though she were in some
safe and happy home.

Clelia Alba looked down on her a few mo-
ments, then took the kerchief off her hair, and laid
it gently without awakening the sleeper over the
breast and the face of the child, on which flies
were settling and the sun was shining.

Then she picked up the empty earthenware
bowl, and went indoors again.

" I W'ill go back to the river," said Adone. " I
have left the net there."

His mother nodded assent.

** You will not send this little foreigner away
till I return ? " he asked. Every one was a for-
eigner who had not been born in the vale of
Edera.

*' No ; not till you return."

He went away through the sunshine and

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shadow of the olive-trees. lie knew that his
mother never broke her word. But she thought
as she washed tlie bowl : " A little stray mongrel
bitch like that may bite badly some d^y. She must
go. She is nothing now ; but, by and by she may
bite."

Clelia Alba knew human nature, though she
had never been out of sight of the river Edera.
She took her spinning-wheel and sat down by the
door. There was nothing urgent to do, and she
could from the threshold keep a watch on the lit-
tle igabond, and would be aware if she awoke.
All around was quiet. She could see up and down
the valley, beyond the thin, silvery foliage of the
great olive-trees, and across it to where the ruins
of a great fortress towered in their tragic help-
lessness. The sun shone upon her fields of young
wheat, her slopes of pasture. The cherry-trees
and the pear-trees were in bloom, her trellised
vines running from tree to tree. Ragged-robin,
yellow crowsfoot, purple orchis, filled the grass
intermixed with the blue of borage and the white
and gold of the oxeye. She did not note these
things. Those fancies were for her son. Herself,
she would have preferred that there should be no
flower in the grasses, for before the cow was fed
the flowers had to be picked out of the cut grass
and had served no good end that she could per-
ceive, for she knew of no bees except the wild ones

The Waters of Edera

whose honey no one ever tasted, hidden from
sight in hollow trees as it was.

Nerina slept on in peace and without dreams.
Now and then another rose let fall some petals
on her, or a bee buzzed above her, but her repose
remained undisturbed. The good food filled her,
even in her sleep, with deep contentment, and
the brain, well nourished by the blood, was still.

Clelia Alba felt her heart soften despite herself
for this lonely creature; tliough she was always
suspicious of her, for she had never known any
good thing come down from the high mountains,
but only theft and arson and murder, and men
banded together to solace their poverty with
crime. In her youth the great brigands of the
Upper Abruzzi had been names of terror in Rus-
cino, and in the hamlets lying along the course of
the Edera, and many a time a letter written in
blood had been fastened with a dagger to the door
of church or cottage, intimating the will of
the unseen chief to the subjugated population. Of
late years less had been heard and seen of such
men; but they or their like were still heard and
felt sometimes, up above in lonely forests, or
down where the moorland and macchia met, and
the water of Edera ran deep and lonely. In her
girlhood, a father, a son, and a grandson had
been all killed on a lonely part of the higher val-
ley because they had dared to occupy a farm and a

The Waters of Edera

water-mill after one of these hillmen had laid
down the law that no one was to live on the land
or to set the water-wheel moving.

That had been a good way off, indeed, and for
many a year the valley of Edera had not seen the
masked men, with their belts, crammed with arms
and gold, round their loins; but still, one never
knew, she thought ; unbidden guests were oftener
devils than angels.

And it seemed to her that the child could not
really be asleep all this time in a strange place and
in the open air. At last she got up, went again to
the bench and drew her handkerchief aside, and
looked down on the sleeper; on the thin, narrow
chest, the small, bony hands, the tiny virginal
nipples like wood strawberries.

She saw that the slumber was real, the girl very
young and more than half-starved. *'' Let her for-
get while she can," she thought, and covered her
face again. " It is still early in the day."

The bees hummed on ; a low wind swept over a
full-blown rose and shook its loose leaves to the
ground. The shadow from the ruined tower be-
gan to touch the field which lay nearest the river,
a sign that it was two hours after noon.

The large square fresh-water fishing-net had
sunk under the surface, the canes which framed
it were out of sight; only the great central pole,
which sustained the whole, and was planted in the
ground of the river-bank, remained visible as it
bent and swayed but did not yield or break. Such
nets as this had been washed by the clear green
waters of the pools and torrents of the Edera ever
since the days of Etruscan gods and Latin au-
gurs ; religions had changed, but the river, and the
ways of the men of the river had not altered.

Adone did not touch it, for it was well where it
was ; he seated himself on the bank ready to seize
and hold it if its pole showed any sign of yielding
and giving way and heeling over into the stream.
He sat thus amongst the bulrushes for many an
hour, on many a spring day and summer night.
Although fish were not numerous he never tired
of his vigil, lulled by the sound of the current as
it splashed among the stones and rippled through
the rushes ; a deeper music coming from its higher
reaches where it fell over a ledge of rock and
leapt like a live thing into the air. And, indeed,
what thing could be more living than this fresh,

The Waters of Edera

pure, Uiitroubled water, glad as a child, swift as a
swallow, singing for sport, as a happy boy sings,
as it ran down on its way from the hills ?

To the young man sitting now on its bank
amidst the bulrushes it was as living as himself,
his playmate, friend, and master, all in one. First
of all things which he could remember were the
brightness and the coolness of it as it had laved his
limbs in his childhood on midsummer noons, his
mother's hands holding him safely as he waded
with rosy feet and uncertain steps along its pebbly
bottom! How many mornings, when he had
grown to boyhood and to manhood, had he es-
caped from the rays of the vertical sun into its
acacia-shadowed pools ; how many moonlit, balmy
nights had he bathed in its still reaches, the liquid
silver of its surface breaking up like molten metal
as he dived! How many hours of peace had he
passed, as he was spending this, waiting for the
fish to float into his great net, whilst the air and
the water were alike so still that he could hear the
little voles stealing in and out amongst the reeds,
and the water-thrush pushing the pebbles on its
sands in search for insects, though beast and bird
were both imseen by him ! How many a time
upon the dawn of a holy-day had he washed and
swam in its waters whilst the bells of the old
church in the village above had tolled in the soft-
ness of dusk I

The Waters of Edera

I',

He thought of none of these memories dis-
tinctly, for he was young and contented, and those
who are satisfied with their lot live in their pres-
ent; but they all drifted vaguely through his mind
as he sat by the side of the river, as the memories
of friends dear from infancy drift through our
waking dreams.

He was in every way a son of the Edera, for he
had been born almost in the water itself, for his
mother had been washing linen with other women
at the ford when she had been taken with the
pains of labour two months before her time. Her
companions had had no time or thought to do
more than to stretch her on the wet sand, with
some hempen sheets, which had not yet been
thrown in the water, between her and the ground ;
and the cries of her in her travail had echoed over
the stream and had startled the kingfishers in the
osiers, and the wild ducks in the marshes, and the
tawny owls asleep in the belfry tower of the vil-
lage. But her pains had been brief though sharp,
and her son had first seen the light beside the
water ; a strong and healthy child, none the worse
for his too early advent, and the rough river-
women had dipped him in the shallows, where
their linen and their wooden beaters were, and
had wrapped him up in a soiled woollen shirt, and
had laid him down with his face on his mother's
young breast, opening his shut unconscious mouth

The Waters of Edera

with their rough fingers, and crying in his deaf
ear, " Suck! and grow to be a man! "

CleHa Alba was now a woman of forty-one
years old, and he, her only son, was twenty-four ;
they had named him Adone; the beautiful Greek
Adonais having passed into the number of the
saints of the Latin Church, by a transition so fre-
quent in liagiology that its strangeness is not re-
membered save by a scholar here and there. When
he had been born she had been a young creature of
seventeen, with the wild grace of a forest doe,
with that nobility of beauty, that purity of outline,
and that harmony of structure, which still exist in
those Italians in whom the pure Italiote blood is
undefiled by Jew or Gentile. Now her abundant
hair was white, and her features were bronzed and
lined by open-air work, and her hands of beautiful
shape were hard as horn through working in the
fields. She looked an old woman, and was
thought so by others, and thought herself so : for
youth is soon over in these parts, and there is no
half-way house between youth and age for the
peasant.

Clelia Alba, moreover, had lost her youth
earlier even than others : lost it forever when her
husband at five-and-twenty years of age had been
killed by falling from an olive-tree of which the
branch sustaining him had cracked and broken
under his weight. His neck had been broken in

The Waters of Edera

the fall. She had been dancing and shouting with
her two-year-old child on the grassland not far
off, romping and playing ball with some dropped
chestnuts ; and when their play was over she had
lifted her boy on to her shoulder and run with
him to find his father. Under one of the great,
gnarled, wide-spreading olives she had seen him,
lying asleep as she thought.

" Oh, lazy one, awake ! The sun is only two
hours old !" she had cried merrily, and the child on
her shoulder had cooed and shouted in imitation,
" Wake — wake — wake ! " and she, laughing, had
cast a chestnut she had carried in l.er hand upon
the motionless figure. Then, as the prostrate form
did not stir, a sudden terror had seized her, and
she had set the baby down upon the grass and run
to the olive-tree. Then she had seen that this was
death, for when she had raised him his head had
dropped and seemed to hang like a poppy broken
in a blast of wind, and his eyes had no sight, and
his mouth had no breath.

From that dread hour Clelia Alba had never
laughed again. Her hair grew white, and her
youth went away from her forever.

She lived for the sake of her son, but she and
joy had parted company for ever.

His death had made her sole ruler of the Terra
Vergine; she had both the knowledge and the

The Waters of Edera

strength necessary for culture of the land, and she
taught her boy to value and respect the soil.

*' As you treat the ground ill or well, so will
your ground treat you," she said to him.

She always wore the costume of the province,
which was similar to that of the Abruzzi villages,
and suited her cast of features and her strong and
haughty carriage. On feast-days she wore three
strings of fine pearls round her throat, and brace-
lets of massive gold and of fine workmanship, so
many in number that her arms were stiff with
them; they had been her mother's and grand-
mother's and greatgrandmother's, and had been
in her dower. To sell or pawn them under stress
of need, had such occurred, would never have
seemed to any of her race to be possible. It would
have seemed as sacrilegious as to take the chalice
off the church altar and melt its silver and jewels
in the fire. When she should go to her grave
these ornaments would pass to Adone for his
wife, or for his future wife; none of her family
were living.

" Never talk of death, mother," he said, when-
ever she spoke of these things. " Death is always
listening; and, if he hear his name, he taps the
talker on the shoulder just to show that he is there
and must be reckoned with."

" Not so, my son ! " replied Clelia, with a sigh.

The Waters of Edera

" He has every soul of us written down in his
books from the time we are born ; we all have our
hour to go and none of us can alter it."

*' I do not believe that," said Adone. " We kill
ourselves oftentimes; or we hasten our end as
drunkards do."

"Did your father hasten his end?" said his
mother. *' Did not some one break that olive
branch? It was not the tree itself, though the
Ruscino folks would have it cut down because
they called it a felon."

** Was it not the devil ? " said Adone.

He believed in the devil, of course, as he had
been taught to do, and had he not as a child met
the infernal effigy everywhere — in marble, in
stone, in wood, in colour, in the church and out-
side it; on water-spout and lamp-iron, and even
on the leaves of his primer? But it seemed to him
that the devil had '' troppo hraccia " given him,
was allowed too long a tether, too free a hand ; if
indeed he it wxre that made everything go wrong,
and Adone did not see who else it could be. Here,
in the vale of Edera, all the world believed in
Satan as in holy water, or in daily bread.

Clelia Alba crossed herself hastily, for she was
a pious woman.

" We are talking blasphemy, my son," she said
gravely. " Of course there is the good God who

t
"*

The Waters of Edera

' was

said
who

orders the number of our days for each of us, and
is over us all."

Adone was silent. To him it seemed doubtful.
Did the good God kill the pretty little children as
the butcher in a city killed his lambs? But he
never contradicted or vexed his mother ; he loved
her with a great and tender affection. He was less
ignorant than she was, and saw many things she
could not see ; he was, as it were, on a hilltop and
she down in a valley, but he had a profound re-
spect for her; he obeyed her implicitly, as if he
were still a child, and he thought the world held
no woman equal to her.

When he went back to his house that evening,
with his great net on his shoulder and swinging
in one hand some fresh-water fish, he looked at
the stone bench, which was empty of all except
some fallen rose-leaves, and then anxiously, ques-
tioningly, in the face of his mother.

She answered the regard.

" The girl is gone to Gianna's custody," she
said rather harshly. " Gianna will give her her
supper, and will let her sleep in the loft. With
the morning we will see what we can do for her,
and how she can be sped upon her way."

Adone kissed her hands.

" You are always good," he said simply.

" I am weak," answered his mother, " I am

The Waters of Edera

weak, Adone; when you wish anything I consent
to it against my judgment."

But she was not weak ; or at least only weak in
the way in which all generous natures are so.

On the morrow Nerina was not sped on her
way. The old woman, Gianna, thought well of
her.

"She is as clean as a stone in the water," she
said; "she has foul-smelling rags, but her flesh is
clean. She woke at dawn, and asked for some-
thing to do : She knows nought, but she is willing
and teachable. We can make Iier of use. She has
nowhere to go. She is a stray little puppy. Her
people were miserable, but they seem to have been
pious folks. She has a cross pricked on her shoul-
der. She says her mother did it when she was a
babe to scare the devil off her. I do not know
what to say ; she is a poor, forlorn little wretch ; if
you like to keep her, I for my part will see to her.
I am old : it is well to do a good work before one
dies."

Gianna was an old woman, half house-servant,
half farm-servant, wholly friend ; she had lived at
the Terra Vergine all her life; big, gaunt, and
very strong, she could do the work of a man, al-
though she was over seventy years of age ; burnt
black by the sun, and with a pile of grey hair like
the hank of flax on her distaff, she was feared by
the whole district for her penetrating glance and

The Waters of Edera

her untiring energy. When Gianna was satisfied
the stars had changed their courses, said the peo-
ple, so rare was the event ; therefore, that this
httle wanderer contented her was at once a miracle
and a voucher indisputable.

So the child remained there; but her presence
troubled Adone's mother, though Nerina was
humble as a homeless dog, was noiseless and sel-
dom seen, was obedient, agile, and became useful
in many manners, and learned with equal eager-
ness the farm work taught her by Gianna, and the
doctrine taught her by Don Silverio, for she was
intelligent and willing in every way. Only Clelia
Alba thought, " Perhaps Gianna's good heart mis-
leads her. Gianna is rough ; but she has a heart as
tender at bottom as a ripe melon's flesh."

Anyhow, she took her old servant's word and
allowed the child to remain. She could not bring
herself to turn adrift a female thing to stray about
homeless and hungry, and end in some bottomless
pit. The child might be the devil's spawn. No
one could be sure. But she had eyes which looked
up straight and true, and were as clear as the river
water where it flowed over pebbles in the shade.
When the devil is in a soul he always grins be-
hind the eyes ; he cannot help it ; and so you know
him ; thus, at least, they thought at Ruscino and in
all the vale of Edera; and the devil did not lurk
in the eyes of Nerina.

The Waters of Edera

"Havel done right, reverend sir?" asked
Clelia Alba of the Vicar of Ruscino.

'* Oh, yes — yes — charity is ahvays right," he
answered, imwilHng to discourage her in her be-
nevolence; but in his own mind he thought, " the
child is a child, but she will grow; she is brown,
and starved, and ugly now, but she will grow;
she is a female thing and she will grow, and I
think she will be handsome later on; it would
have been more prudent to have put some money
in her wallet, and have let her pass on her way
down the river. The saints forbid that I should
put aloes into the honey of their hearts; but
this child will grow."

Clelia perceived that he had his doubts as she
had hers. But they said nothing of them to each
other. The issue would lie with Time, whom men
always depict as a mower, but who is also a sower
too. However, for good or ill, she was there;
and he knew that, having once harboured her,
they would never drive her adrift. Clelia was in
every sense a good woman ; a litde hard at times,
narrow of sympathy, too much shut up in her ma-
ternal passion ; but in tlie main merciful and cor-
rect in judgment.

** If the child were not good the river would not
have given her to us," said Adone — and believed
it.

" Good-day, my son," said the voice of the

The Waters of Edera

Vicar, Don Silverio Frascara, behind him, where
Adone worked in the fields. " Where did you find
that scarecrow whom your mother has shown me
just now ? "

" She was in the river, most reverend, dancing
along in it, as merry as a princess."

" But she is a skeleton ! "

" Almost."

** And you know nothing of her? "

" Nothing, sir."

" You are more charitable than wise."

" One cannot let a little female thing starve
whilst one has bread in the hutch. My mother is
a virtuous woman. She will teach the child vir-
tue."

" Let us hope so," said Don Silverio. " But all,
my son, do not take kindly to that lesson."

" What will be, will be. The river brought
her."

He credited the river with a more than human
sagacity. He held it in awe and in reverence as a
deity, as the Greeks of old held their streams. It
would have drowned the child, he thought, if she
had been an evil creature or of evil augury. But
he did not say so, for he did not care to provoke
Don Silverio's fine fleeting ironical smile.

A goatherd who passed some few days later
with his flock on his way to the mountains, recog-
nised the little girl.

The Waters of Edera

'* You are Black Fausto's daughter," he said to
her. "Is he dead? Eh, well, we must all die. May
his soul rest."

To Gianna, who questioned him, he said, " Yes,
he was a good soul. Often have I seen him down
in the Roman plains. He worked himself to
death. These gangs of labourers get poor pay. I
saw him also in the hills where this girl comes
from, ever so high up, you seem to touch the sky.
I summered there two years ago; he had his
womankind in a cabin, and he took all that he got
home to them. Aye, he was a good soul. We can
come away out of the heats, but they have to stay
down in them ; for the reapmg and the sowing are
their chief gain, and they get the fever into their
blood, and the worms into their bellies, and it kills
them mostly before they are forty. You see, at
Ansalda, where he came from it was snow eight
months out of the twelve, so the heats and the
mists killed him : for the air you are born in you
want, and if you don't get it in time you sicken."

" Like enough," said Gianna, who herself had
never been out of sight of the river Edera ever
since she had been a babe in swaddling clothes.
" Tell me, gossip, was the child born in wed-
lock?"

" Eh, eh ! " said the goatherd grinning. " That
I would not take on me to say. But like enough,

The Waters of Edera

like enough; they are always ready to go before
the priest in those high hills."

The little girl glided into her place humbly and
naturally, with no servility but with untiring
willingness and thankfulness. It seemed to her an
amazing favour of heaven to live with these good
people; to have a roof over her head and food
regularly every day. Up there in her home,
amongst the crags of Ansalda, she had never
known what it was not to have a daily hunger
gnawing always in her entrails, and making her
writhe at night on her bed of dry leaves. In her
thirteen years of life she had never once had
enough — no one ever had. A full stomach had
been a thing unknown.

She began to grow, she began to put a little
flesh on her bones ; they had cut her hair short, for
it had not been clean, and it grew again burnished
and bright like copper; colour came into her
cheeks and her lips ; she seei. led to spring upward,
visibly, like a young cane. She worked hard, but
she worked willingly, and she was well nourished
on sound iood, tliough it had little variety and was
entirely ^ egetable ; and every day she went down
and bathed in the river at the same place where
she had sat nude under the dock leaves whilst her
skirt dried in the sun.

To her the Terra Vergine was Paradise itself;

The Waters of Edera

to be fed, to be clothed, to have a mattress to sleep
on, to work amongst the flowers and the grass and
the animals — it was all so beautiful, she thought
sometimes that she must be in heaven.

She spoke little. Since she had been under this
roof she had grown ashamed of the squalor and
starvation and wretchedness of her past existence.
She did not like to think of it even; it had been
no fault of hers, but she felt ashamed that she
ever should have been that little filthy, unkempt
naked thing, grovelling on the clay floor, and
fighting for mouldy crusts with the other chiUl- en
on the rock of Ansalda.

" If I had only known when father was alive,"
she thought, but even if she had known all she
knew now, what could she have done ? There had
been nothing to use, nothing to eat, nothing to
wear, and the rain and the snow and the wind had
come in on them where they had lain huddled to-
gether on their bed of rotten leaves.

Now and then she said something of that rude
childhood of hers to Adone; she was afraid of the
women, but not of him; she trotted after him as
the little white curly dog Signorino trotted after
Don Silverio.

" Do not think of those dnrk days, little one,"
he said to her. " They are gone by. Think of
your parents and pray for their souls ; but let the
rest go; you have all your life to live."

II :i'

The Waters of Edera

" My mother was young when she died," said
the child. " If she had had food she would not
have died. She said so. She kept on gnawing a
bit of rag which was soaked in water ; you cheat
hunger that way, you know, but it does not fill
you."

" Poor soul ! Poor soul ! " said Adone, and he
thought of the great markets he had seen in the
north, the droves of oxen, the piles of fruits, the
long lines of wine carts, the heaps of slaughtered
game, the countless shops with their electric light,
the trains running one after another all the nights
and every night to feed the rich ; and he thought,
as he had thought when a boy, that the devil had
troppo bracciOj if any devil indeed there were be-
side man himself.

Should there be anywhere on the face of the
earth, young women, good women, mothers of
babes who died of sheer hunger like this mother
of Nerina's up yonder in the snows of the
Abruzzi? He thought not; his heart ^olted at
the vision of her, a living skeleton on her heap of
leaves.

" Father brought all he had," continued the
child, " but he could not come back until after har-
vest, and when he came back she had been in the
ground two months and more. They put him in
the same ditch when his turn came; but she was
no longer there, for they take up the bones every

The Waters of Edera

three years and burn them. They say they must,
else the ditch would get too full."

Adone shuddered. He knew that tens of thou-
sands died so, and had died so ever since the days
of Phenicians and Gauls and Goths. But it re-
volted him. The few gorged, the many famished
— strange disproportion! unkind and unfair bal-
ance!

But what remedy was there ?

Adone had read some socialistic and com-
mc •'"'■ literature; but it had not satisfied him;
it h:^v_ emed to him vain, verbose, alluring, but
unreal, no better adapted to cure any real hunger
than the soaked rag of Nerina's mother.

III

The Val d'Edera is situated on the south of the
Marches, on the confines of what is now the terri-
torial division of the Abruzzo-Molese, and so hes
between the Apennines and the Adriatic, fanned
by cool winds in summer from the eternal snow of
the mountain peaks, and invigorated in all sea-
sons by breezes from the Adrian Sea.

Ruscino, placed midway in the valley, is only a
'illage to v/hich no traveller had for many years
come, and of which no geographer ever speaks ; it
is marked on the maps of military topographers,
and is, of course, inscribed on the fiscal rolls, but
is now no more than a village ; though once when
the world was young it was the Etruscan Rusciae,
and then the Latin Ruscinonis ; and then when the
Papacy was mighty, it was the militant principal-
ity of the fortified town of Ruscino. But it was
now only an almost uninhabited village ; a pale, di-
minutive, shrunken relic of its heroic self ; and of
it scarcely any man knows anything except the
f ^ v men who make their dwelling there; sons of
the soil, who spring from its marble dust and re-
turn to it.

The Waters of Edera

It had shrunk to a mere hamlet as far as its
population was counted; it shrank more and more
with every census. There was but a handful of
poor people who, when gathered together in the
great church, looked no more than a few flies on a
slab of marble.

The oldest men and women of the place could
recall the time when it had been still of some im-
portance as a posting place on the mountain route
between the markets of the coast and the western
towns, when its highway had been kept clean and
clear through the woods for public and private
conveyance, and when the clatter of horses' hoofs
and merry notes of horns had roused the echoes of
itr. stones. In that first half of the century, too,
they had lived fairly well, and wine and fowls had
cost next to nothing, and home-made loaves had
been always large enough to give a beggar or a
stray dog a slice. But these times had long been
over ; every one was hungry now and every one a
beggar by way of change, and to make things
equal, as the people said, with dreary mirth and
helpless acquiescence in their lot. Like most
riverain people they lived chiefly by the river,
cutting and selling its canes, its sallows, its osiers,
its sedges, catching its fish, digging its sand ; buc
there were few buyers in this depopulated district.

Don Silverio Frascara, its vicar, had been sent
to Ruscino as a chastisement for his too sceptical

The Waters of Edera

and inquiring mind, his too undisciplined temper.
Nearly twenty years in this solitude had chastened
both; the fire had died out of his soul and the
light out of his eyes. His days were as monoto-
nous as those of the blinded ass set to turn tho
wine-press. All the steel of his spirit rusted, all
the brilliancy of his brain clouded ; his life was like
a fine rapier which is left in a corner of a dusty
attic and forgotten.

In certain rare states of the atmosphere the
gold cross on St. Peter's is visible from some of
the peaks of the Abruzzese Apennines. It looks
like a speck of light far, far away in the silver-
green of the western horizon. When one day he
climbed to such an altitude and saw it thus, his
heart contracted with a sickly pain, for in Rome
he had dreamed many dreams; and in Rome,
until his exile to the Vale of Edera, he had been a
preacher of noted eloquence, of brilliant fascina-
tion, and of daring thought.

There had been long cypress alleys which at
sunset had glowed with rose and gold where he
had in his few leisure hours builded up such vis-
ions for the future as illumined the unknown
years to the eyes of an Ignatius, a Hildebrand, a
Lacordaire, a Bossuet. On the place where those
grand avenues had stretched their green length in
the western light and the seminarist had paced
over the sward there were now long, dreary lines

{

wrm

The Waters of Edera

of brick and stone, the beaten dust of roadways,
the clang and smoke of engines; as the gardens
had passed away so had passed his ambitions and
visions, as the cypresses had been ground to pow-
der in the steam mill so was he crushed and
effaced under an inexorable fate. The Church,
intolerant of individuality, like all despotisms, had
broken his spirit; like all despotisms the tyranny
had been blind. But he was rebellious to doctrine
— she bound him to her stake.

He would have been a great prelate, perhaps
even a great Pope; but he would have been also a
great reformer, so she stamped him down into
nothingness under her iron heel. And for almost
a score of years she had kept him in Ruscino,
where he buried and baptized the old and new
creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any
ordinary country priest able to gabble through the
ritual could have done as well as he. Some few
of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the
Church did indeed think that it was waste of great
powers, but he had the Sacred College against
him, and no one ventured to speak in his favour
at the Vatican. He had no pious women of rank
to plead for him, no millionaires and magnates to
solicit his preferment. He was with time forgot-
ten as utterly as a folio is forgotten on a library
shelf until mildew eats its ink away and spiders
nest between its leaves. He had the forty pounds

The Waters of Edera

a year which the State pays to its parish priests;
and he had nothing else.

He was a tall and natarally stately man, but his
form was bent by that want of good food which
is the chronic malady of many parts of Italy.
There was little to eat in Ruscino, and had there
been more there would have been no one who
knew how to prepare it. Bread, beans, a little oil,
a little lard, herbs which grew wild, goat's milk,
cheese, and at times a few small river fish ; these
were all his sustenance; his feasts and his fasts
were much alike, and the little wine he had he
gave away to the sick and the aged. For this
reason his high stature was bent and his com-
plexion was of the clear, yellow pallor of old mar-
bles; his profile was like the Caesarian outline on a
medallion, and his eyes were deep wells of im-
penetrable thought; his finely cut lips rarely
smiled, they had always upon them an expression
of bitterness as though the apple of life in its eat-
ing had been harsh and hard as a crab.

His presbytery was close to his church, a dreary
place with a few necessaries and many books only
within it, and his only servant was an old man,
lame and stupid, who served also as sacristan.

It was a cure of souls which covered many miles
but counted few persons. Outside the old walls
of Ruscino nearly all the land of the vale of Edera
was untilled, and within them a few poverty-

The Waters of Edera

stricken people dragged out their days uncared for
by any one, only remembered by the collectors of
fiscal dues. " They never forget," said the people.
" As soon as one is born, always and in every sea-
son, until one's bones rattle down into the ditch
of the dead, they remember always."

The grasp of an invisible power took the crust
off their bread, the toll off their oil, off their bed
of sacking, off their plate of fish, and took their
children when they grew to manhood and sent
them into strange lands and over strange seas;
they felt the grip of that hard hand as their fore-
fathers had felt it under the Caesars, under the
Popes, under the feudal lords, under the foreign
kings, so they felt it now under the Casa Sabauda;
the same, always the same; for the manners and
titles of the State may change, but its appetite
never lessens, and its greed never spares. For
twice a thousand years their blood had flowed and
their earnings had been wrung out of them in the
name of the State, and nothing was changed in
that respect; the few lads they begot amongst
them went to Africa, now as under Pompeius or
Scipio ; and their corn sack was taken away from
them under Depretis or Crispi, as under the
Borgia or the Malatesta: and their grape skins
soaked in water were taxed as wine, their salt for
their soup-pot was seized as contraband, unless it
bore the government stamp, and if they dared say

The Waters of Edera

lless it
id say

a word of resistance there were the manacles and
the prison under Vittorio and Umberto as under
Bourbon or Bonaparte ; for there are some things
which are immutable as fate. At long intervals,
during the passing of ages, the poor stir, like
trodden worms, under this inexorable monotony
of their treatment by their rulers ; and then baleful
fires redden the sky, and blood runs in the con-
duits, and the rich man trembles ; but the cannon
are brought up at full gallop and it is soon over ;
there is nothing ever really altered ; the iron heel
only presses the harder on the unhappy worm,
and there is nothing changed.

Here at Ruscino there were tombs of nenfro
which had overhung the river for thirty centuries ;
but those tombs have never seen any other thing
than this, nor ever will until the light and the
warmth of the sun shall be withdrawn for ever,
and the earth shall remain alone with her buried
multitudes.

There was only Don Silverio who thought of
such a thing as this, a scholar all alone amongst
barbarians ; for his heart ached for his barbarians,
though they bore him no love in return for his
pity. They would have liked better a gossiping,
rotund, familiar, ignorant, peasant pries', '^-le of
themselves, chirping formula comfortably over
skeleton corpses.

In default of other interests he interested him-

The Waters of Edera

self in this ancient place, passing from neglect
into oblivion, as his own life was doing. There
were Etruscan sepulchres and Pelasgic caves
which had been centuries earlier rifled of their
objects of value, but still otherwise remained
untouched under the acacia woods by the 'r.
There were columns, and terraces, and founda-
tions of marble which had been there when
the Latin city of Ruscinonis had flourished from
the time of Augustus until its destruction by The-
odoric. And nearest of all these to him were the
Longobardo church and the ancient houses, and
the dismantled fortress, and the ruined walls, of
what had been the fief of the Toralba, the mediae-
val fortified town of Ruscino. It still kept this,
its latest, name, but it kept little else. Thr" a
thousand centuries had rolled over it, eat' t
away as the sea eats away a cliff. War and fire
and time had had their will with it for so long that
dropped acorns and pine-pips had been allowed
leisure to sink between the stones, and sprout, and
bud, and rise, and spread, and were now hoary and
giant trees of which the roots were sunk deep into
its ruins, its graves, its walls.

It had been Etruscan, it had been Latin, it had
been Longobardo, it had been Borgian and Papal ;
through all these changes a fortified city, then a
castellated town, then a walled village; and a vil-
lage it now remained. It would never be more,

The Waters of Edera

before many generations passed it would proliahly
have become still less; a mere tumulus, a mere
honeycomb of tombs, hidden beneath the wild
sage and the clambering clematis, and would thus
escape the shameful death of greater places from
telegraph and telephone poles driven through
their mosaic floors, and from wheels grinding to
powder the dust of their deserted agorae. It was
perishing, surely though slowly, but in peace, with
the grass growing on its temple stairs, and the
woodbine winding round its broken columns.

The trained and stored intellect of Don Silverio
could set each period of its story apart and read
all the indices remaining of eich. Ruscino was
now to all others a mere poverty-stricken place,
brown and gaunt and sorrowful, in the sun, with
only the river beneath it to keep it clean and alive.
But to him it was as a palimpsest of surpassing
value and interest, which, sorely difficult to de-
cipher, held its treasures close from the profane
and the ignorant, but tempted and rewarded the
scholar, like the lettering on a Pompeian nuptial
ring, the cyphers on a funeral urn of Hercu-
laneum. " After all my lot might be worse than
it is," he thought with philosophy. " They might
have sent me to a modern manufacturing town in
Lombardy, or exiled me to a socialistic philanstere
intheTicino!"

Here, at least, he had history and nature, and

The Waters of Edera

he enjoyed thousands of hours undisturbed in
which to read or write, or muse and ponder on this
chronicle of brick and stone, this buried mass of
dead men's labours and of dead men's dust.

Doubtless liis manuscripts would lie unknown,
unread ; no man would care for them ; but the true
scholar cares neither for public or posterity; he
lives for the work he loves ; and if he knows that
he will have few readers in the future — maybe
none — how many read Grotius, or Boethius, or
Chrysostpm, or Jerome?

Here, like a colony of ants, the generations had
crowded one on another, now swept away by the
stamp of a conqueror's heel and now succeeded by
another toiling swarm, building anew each time
out of ruin, undaunted by the certainty of destruc-
tion, taught nothing by the fate of their precur-
sors.

From the profound sense of despair which the
contemplation of the uselessness of human effort
and the waste of human life produces on the
scholar's mind, it was a relief to him to watch the
gladness of its river, the buoyancy of its currents,
the foam of white blossom on its acacia and
syringa thickets, the gold spectres and green lances
of its iris-pseudacorus, the sweep of the winds
through its bulrushes and canebrakes, the glory of
colour in the blue stars of its veronica, the bright
rosy spikes of its epilobium. The river seemed

III

The Waters of Edera

always happy, even when the great rainfall of
autumn churned it into froth and the lightnings
illumined its ink-black pools.

It was on the river that he had first mace
friends with Adone, then a child of six, playing
and splashing in the stream, on a midsummer
noon. Don Silverio also was bathing. Adone, a
little nude figure, as white as alabaster in the hot
light, for he was very fair of skin, sprang suddenly
out of the water on to the turf above where his
breeches and shirt had been left; he was in haste,
for he had heard his mother calling to him from
their fields ; an adder started out of a coil of bind-
weed and wound itself round his ankle as he
stooped for his clothes.

The priest, standing waist-deep in the river a
few yards away, saw it before the child did, and
cried out to him : "Stand still till I come ! Be not
afraid ! " Adone understood, and although trem-
bling with terror and loathing as he realised his
danger, and felt the slimy clasp of the snake, re-
mained motionless as he was bidden to do. In a
second of time the priest had leaped through the
water to his side, seized the adder and killed it.

"Good boy," he said to the child. "If you had
moved your foot the creature would have bitten
you."

Adone's eyes filled with tears.
'Thank you, sir; thank you for mother," he

<<'

The Waters of Edera

said very gently, for he was a shy child, though
courageous.

The priest stroked his curls.

"There is death in the grass very often. We
should not fear death, but neither should we run
risk of it uselessly, especially when we have a
mother whom it would grieve. Come and bathe
at this spot, at this hour to-mor' / and every
day, if you like. I will be here uad look after
you; you are little to be alone."

They were often together from that day on-
wards.

The brutishness and greed of his flock op-
pressed him. He was sent here tc have care of
their souls, but where were their ,>ouls? They
would all have sold them to the foul fiend for a
mess of artichokes fried in oil.

In such a solitude as this he had been glad to
be able to teach and move the young malleable
mind of Adone Alba; the only one of them who
seemed to have any mind at all. Adone also had
a voice as sweet as a nightingale in the syringa
bushes in May; and it pierced the gloom of the
old naked gaunt church as a nightingale's thrills
through the dark hour before dawn.

There was no other music in that choir except
the children's or youth's voices; there was nothing
to make music with except those flexible pipes of
the boyish throats; and Don Silverio loved and

The Waters of Edera

understood choral music; he had studied it in
Rome. Adone never refused to sing for him, and
when the voice of adolescence had replaced that of
childhood, he would still stand no less docilely by
the old marble lectern, and wake the melodies of
early masters from the yellow pages.

The church was as damp as a vault of the dead;
cold even when the dog-star reigned in the heav-
ens. The brasses and bronzes w-ere rusted with
moisture, and the marbles were black with the
spores of mould; rain dripped through the joints
of the roof, and innumerable sparrows made their
nests there; the mosaics of the floor were green
from these droppings, and from those of the rain ;
the sun never entered through any of the win-
dows, which were yellow with age and dust; but
here, with a lantern for their only light, they so-
laced each other with the song of the great choral
masters. Only Adone, although he never said or
showed it, was glad when the huge key groaned
in the lock of the outer door, and he ran out
into the evening starlight, down the steep streets,
across the bridge, and felt the fresh river air
blowing on him, and heard the swirling of the
water amongst the frost-stiffened canes; and saw
far off in the darkened fields the glimmer of a
light — the light of home.

That old home was the dearest thing on earth
to the young man. He had never been away

The Waters of Edera

from it but once, when the conscription called him.
In that time, which had been to him like a night-
mare, the time of his brief exile to the army, brief
because he was the only son of a widow, he had
been sent to a northern city, one of commerce and
noise and crowded, breathless life; he had been
cooped up in it like a panther in a den, like a hawk
in a cage. What he saw of the vices and appetites
of men, the pressure of greed and of gain, the
harsh and stupid tyranny of the few, the slavish
and ignoble submission of the many; the brutish
bullying, the crouching obedience, the deadly
routine, the lewd license of reaction — all filled him
with disdain and with disgust. When he re-
turned to his valley he bathed in the waters of
Edera before he crossed his mother's threshold.

" Make me clean as I was when I left you! "
he cried, and took the water in the hollow of his
hands and kissed it.

But no water flows on the earth from land to
sea which can wholly cleanse the soul as it
cleanses the body.

That brief time under arms he cursed as thou-
sands of youths have cursed it. Its hated stigma
and pollution never wholly passed away. It left
a bitterness on his lips, a soil upon his memories.
But how sweet to him beyond expression, on his
return, were the sound of the rushing river in
the silence of the night, the pure odours of the

The Waters of Edera

lOU-

yma

left
ies.
his
in
the

blossoming beanfields, the clear dark sky with its
radiant stars, the sense of home, the peace of his
own fields !

" Mother, whether life for me shall be long
or short, here its every hour shall be spent ! " he
said, as he sto-'^d on his own ground and looked
through the olive-trees to the river, running
swiftly and strong beneath the moon.

*' Those are good words, my son," said Clelia
Alba, and her hands rested on his bowed head.

He adored both the soil and the water of this
place of his birth; no toil upon either seemed to
him hard or mean. All which seemed to him to
matter much in the life of a man was to be free,
and he was so. In that little kingdom of fertile
soil and running stream no man could bid him
come and go, no law ruled his uprising and his
down lying; he had enough for his own wants
and the wants of those about him, enough
for the needs of the body, and the mind here
had not many needs; at the Terra Vergine
he was his own master, except so far as he
cheerfully deferred to his mother, and all
which he put into the earth he could take out
of it for his own usage, though indeed the fiscal
authorities claimed well nigh one-half, rating his
land at far more than its worth. No doubt scien-
tific agriculture might have made it yield more
than it did ; but he was content to follow the ways

The Waters of Edera

of old ; he farmed as men did when the Sun-god
was the farm slave of Admetus. The hellebore
and the violets grew at will in his furrows; the
clematis and the ivy climbed his fig-trees; the
fritillaria and the daphne grew in his pastures,
and he never disturbed them, or scared the starling
and the magpie which fluttered in the wake of his
wooden plough. The land was good land, and
gave him whatever he wanted ; he grudged noth-
ing off it to bird, or beast, or leaf, or flower, or to
the hungry wayfarer who chanced to pass by his
doors. In remote places the old liberal, frank,
open-handed hospitality of an earlier time is still
in Italy a practice as well as a tradition.

The house was their own, and the earth gave
them their bread, their wine, their vegetables,
their oil, hemp and flax for their linen, and herbs
for their soup; of the olive-oil they had more
than enough for use, and the surplus was sold
once a year in the nearest town, San Beda, and
served to meet the fiscal demands. They had
rarely any ready money, but no peasant in Italy
ever expects, unless by some luck at lotto, to
have money in his pocket.

He worked hard; at some seasons extremely
hard; he hired labour sometimes, but not often,
for to pay for the hiring takes the profit off the
land. But he had been used to such work from
childhood, and it was never irksome to him ; even

The Waters of Edera

though he rose in the dark and rarely went home
to supper till the stars were shining. He had no
near neighbours except the poor folks in Ruscino.
All surrounding him was grass and moor and
wood, called communal property, but in reality
belonging legally to no one; vast, still fragrant
leagues of uninhabited country stretching away
to the blue hills, home of the fox and the hare
and the boar, of the hawk and the woodpecker
and the bittern.

Through those wilds he loved to wander alone ;
the sweet stillness of a countryside which was un-
contaminated by the residence of men stilling the
vague unrest of his youth, and the mountains
towering in the light lending to the scene the
charm of the unknown.

In days of storm or rain he read with Don Sil-
verio or sang in the church ; on fine holy-days he
roamed far afield in the lonely heatherlands and
woodlands which were watered by the Edera.
He carried a gun, for defence if need be, for there
were boars and wolves in these solitudes; but
he never used it upon bird or beast.

Like St. Francis of Assissi both he and Don
Silverio took more pleasure in the life than in the
death of fair w^inged things.

" We are witness, twice in every year, of that
great and inexplicable miracle," the priest said
often, " that passage of small, frail, unguided

The Waters of Edera

creatures, over seas and continents, through tem-
pests and simoons, and with every man's hand
against them, and death waiting to take them
upon every shore, by merciless and treacherous
tricks, and we think nought of it ; we care nought
for it; we spread the nets and the gins — that is
all. We are unworthy of all which makes the
earth beautiful — vilely unworthy ! "

One of the causes of his unpopularity in Rus-
cino was the inexorable persistence with which
he broke their gins, lifted their nets, cleared off
their birdlime, dispersed their watertraps, and
forbade the favourite night poaching by lanterns
in the woods. More than once they threatened
his life, but he only smiled.

" Faccia pure! " he said, " you will cut a knot
which I did not tie, and which I cannot myself
undo."

But they held him in too much awe to dare to
touch him, and they knew that again and again
he went on bread and water himself to give his
wine to the sick, or his strip of meat to their old
people.

Moreover they feared Adone.

" If you touch a hair of Don Silverio's head,
or the hem of his cassock, I will burn Ruscino,"
said Adone to one of those who had threatened
his friend, " and you will all burn with it, for the

The Waters of Edera

river will not help you ; the river will turn to oil
and make the flames rage tenfold."

The people were afraid as they heard him, for
good as he was, and usually gentle, he could be
on provocation both furious and pitiless if he
were crossed.

" For sure 'tis the dead Tor'alba as speak in
him," they said with fright under their breath,
for there was a tale told in the district that Adone
Alba was descended from the old war-lords.

The veterans of the village and the country-
side remembered hearing their fathers say that
the family of the Terra Vergine were descended
from those great marquises who had reigned for
centuries in that Rocca, which was now a grim
ivy-covered ruin on the north of the Edera Wa-
ter. But more than this no one could say, no
one could tell how the warlike race had become
mere tillers of the soil, or how those who had
measured out life and death up and down the
course of the valley had lost their power and pos-
sessions. There were vague traditions of a terri-
ble siege, following on a great battle in the vale;
that was all.

The church in which Don Silverio officiated
every morning and evening for the benefit of a
few old crones, had once been a Latin tem-
ple; it had been built from the Corinthian
pillars, the marble peristyle, the rounded, open
dome, like that of the Pantheon, of a pagan
edifice; and to these had been added a Longo-
bardo belfry and chancel; pigeons and doves
roosted and nested in it, and within it was
cold even in midsummer, and dark always as a
vault. It was dedicated to St. Jerome, and was a
world too wide for the shrunken band of believers
who came to worship in it; there was a high,
dark altar said to have been painted by Ribera,
and nothing else that spoke in any 'way of art
except the capitals of its pillars and the Roman
mosaics of its floor.

The Longobardo bell-tower was of vast height
and strength; within it were various chambers,
and these chambers had served through many ages
as muniment-rooms. There were innumerable
documents of many different epochs, almost all in
Latin, a few in Greek. Don Silverio, who was a

The Waters of Edera

> a

fine classic as well as a learned archseoiogist, spent
all his lonely and cold winter evenings in the study
of these early chronicles, his oil lamp burning pale
and low, his little white dog lying on his knees.

These manuscripts gave him great trouble, and
were in many parts almost unintelligible, in oth-
ers almost effaced by damp, in others again
gnawed by rats and mice. But he was interested
in his labours and in his subject, and after several
years of work on them, he was able to make out a
consecutive history of the Vald'edera, and he was
satisfied that the peasant of the Terra Vergine had
been directly descended from the feudal-lords
of Ruscino. That pittance of land by the water-
side under the shadow of the ruined citadel was
all which remained of ^he great fief to the youth
in whose veins ran the blood of men who had
given princes, and popes, and cardinals, and cap-
tains of condottieri, and patrons of art, and con-
querors of revolted provinces, to the Italy of old
from the beginning of the thirteenth century to
the end of the sixteenth. For three hundred years
the Tor'alba had been lords there, owning all
their eyes could reach from mountain to sea ; then
after long siege the walled town and their adja-
cent stronghold had fallen into the hands of he-
reditary foes whose forces had been united against
them. Fire and steel had done their worst, and
only a month-old child had escaped from the burn-

The Waters of Edera

ing Rocca, being saved in a boat laden with reeds
at anchor in the river, and hidden by a faithful
vassal. The child had grown to manhood and
had lived to old age, leading a peasant's life on the
banks of the Edera ; the name had been mutilated
in common usage amongst those who spoke only
the dialect of the province, and for three more cen-
turies father and son had succeeded each other,
working for their daily bread where their ances-
tors had defied Borgia and Delia Rovere, and
Feltrio, and Malatesta; the gaunt dark shade of
the dismantled citadel lying athwart their field
between them and the setting sun.

Should he tell Adone this or not?

Would the knowledge of his ancestry put a
thorn in the boy's contented heart? Would it act
as a spur to higher things, or be merely as the use-
less sting of a nettle ?

Who could say?

Don Silverio remembered the gorgeous dreams
of his own youth; and what had been their issue?

At fifty years old he was buried in a deserted
village, never hearing from year's end to year's
end, one word of friendship or phrase of culture.

Would it be well or would it be wronr to •^-
turb that tranquil acquiescence in ^ 'itviole des-
tiny? He could not decide. He .d not tak
upon himself so much responsibilit>. " T doubt

The Waters of Edera

Qes-

tak

)ubt

do nothing " has been the axiom of many wise
men. The remembrance of the maxim closed his
Hps. He had himself been in early manhood pas-
sionately ambitious; he was only a priest, but of
priests are made the Gregorio, the Bonifazio, the
Leone, of the Papal throne; to the dreams of a
seminarist nothing is impossible. But Adone
had no such dreams; he was as satisfied with his
lot as any young steer which wants nothing more
than the fair fresh fields of its birth.

But one day as he was sitting with the boy, then
fifteen years old, on the south bank of the Edera,
the spirit moved him and he spake. It was the
day of San Benedetto, when the swallows come.
The grass was full of pink lychnis and yellow but-
tercups. A strong east wind was blowing from
the sea. A number of martins, true to the pro-
verb, were circling gaily above the stream. The
water, reflecting the brilliant hues of the heavens,
was hurrying on its seaward way, swollen by re-
cent rains and hastened by a strong wind blowing
from the eastern mountains.

The lands of the Terra Vergine lay entirely on
the south-east bank of the river, and covered many
acres, of which some was moorland still. Almost
opposite to it was the one-arched stone bridge,
attributed to Theodoric, and on the northern bank
was the ruined Rocca towering above the trees

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which had grown up around it ; whilst hidden by
it and by the remains of the fortifications was that
which was now the mere village of Ruscino.

"Listen, Adone!" he said in his deep, melo-
dious voice, grave and sweei as a mass of Pales-
trina. " Listen, and I will tell you the tale of
yonder donjon and villag^e, and of the valley of
the Edera so far as I have been able to make it
out for myself."

According to the writers whose manuscripts
he had discovered the town of Ruscino, like Cre-
mona, had existed before the siege of Troy, that
is, six hundred vears before the foundation of
Rome. Of this there was no proof except tradi-
tion, but the ruins of the walls and the tombs by
the riverside and in the fields proved that it had
been an Etruscan city, and of some considerable
extent and dignity, in those remote ages.

" The foundations of the Pocca," he continued,
" were probably part of a great stronghold raised
by the Gauls, who undoubtedly conquered the
whole of this valley at the time when they settled
themselves in what is now the Marches, and
founded Senegallia. It was visited by Asdrubal,
and burned by Alaric; then occupied by the Greek
free lances of Justinian ; in the time of the Prank-
ish victories, in common with greater places, it
was forced to swear allegiaiTce to the first papal
Adrian. After that it had been counted as ore of

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the fiefs comprised in the possessions of the Penta-
poHs; and later on, when the Saracens ravaged
the shores of the Adriatic, they had come up
the Vald'edera and pillaged and burned again.
Gregory the Ninth gave the valley to the family
of its first feudal lords, the Tor'alba in recompense
for military service, and they, out of the remains
of the Gallic, Etruscan, and Roman towns rebuilt
Ruscino and raised the Rocca or the ruins of the
castle of the Gauls. There, though at feud many a
time with their foes, the Delia Rovere, the Mala-
testa, and the Dukes of Urbino, they held their
own successfully, favoured usually by Rome, and
for three centuries grew in force and in posses-
sions. Rut they lost the favour of Rome by their
haughtiness and independence ; and under pretext
that they merited punishment, Cesare Borgia
brought troops of mercenaries against them, and
after a fierce conflict in the valley (the ter*-ible
battle of which the villagers preserved the mem-
ory) the town was besieged, and sacked.

" After this battle, which must have taken
place on yonder moor, to the north-west, for the
assailants had crossed the Apennines, the Tor'-
alba and the remnant of men remaining to them
retreated within the walls of Ruscino.

" The whole place and the citadel were burn-
ing, set on fire by order of Borgia. The
church alone was spared, and the dead men were

■•><

The Waters of Edera

as thick as stones on the walls, and in the streets,
and in the nave of the church, and on the steps of
the houses. This river was choked with corpses,
and dark with blood. The black smoke towered
to the sky in billows like a sea. The mercenaries
swarmed over the bastions and violated the
women, and cut off their breasts and threw their
bodies down into the stream and their children
after them. The Lady of Tor'alba, valiant as
Caterina Sforza, was the first slain. The whole
place was given up to flame and carnage, and
the great captains were as helpless as dead oxen.
They were all slain amongst their troopers and
their vassals, and their bodies were burnt when
the fortress was fired.

" Only one little child escaped the massacre, a
month-old babe, son of the Marquis of Tor'alba,
who was hidden by a faithful servant amongst
the reeds of the Edera in a basket. This servant
was the only male who escaped slaughter.

" The river rushes were more merciful than
man, they kept the little new-born lordling safe
until his faithful vassal, under cover of the night,
when the assailants were drunk and stupid with
license gratified, could take him to a poor woman
to be suckled in a cottage farther down the river.
How he grew up I know not, but certain it is that
thirty years later one Federigo Tor'alba was liv-
ing where you live, and the glebe of the Terra

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Vergine was his own, and your house and land
have never changed hands or title since; only
your own name has been truncated, as often hap-
pens in the speech of the people. How this land
called the Terra Vergine was first obtained I can-
not say ; the vassal may have saved some gold or
jewels which belonged to his masters, and have
purchased these acres, or the land may have been
taken up and put gradually into cultivation w^ith-
out any legal right to it; of this there is no ex-
planation, no record. But from that time the
mighty lordship of Tor'alba has been extinct, and
scarcely exists now even in local tradition; al-
though their effigies are on their tombs, and the
story of their reign can be deciphered by any one
who can read a sixteenth-century manuscript, as
you might do yourself, my son, had you been dili-
gent."

Adone was silent. He had listened with atten-
tion, as he did to everything which was said or
read to him by Don Silverio. But he was not
astonished, because he had often heard, though
vaguely, the legend of his descent.

" Of what use is it? " he said, as he sat, moving
the bright water with his bare slim feet. " Noth-
ing will bring it all back."

" It should serve some great end," said Don
Silverio, not knowing very well what he meant or
to what he desired to rnove the young man's mind.

The Waters of Edera

" Nobility of blood should make the hands
cleaner, the heart lighter, the aims finer."

Adone "had shmgged his shoulders.

" We are all equal ! " he answered.

" We are not all equal," the priest said curtly.
" There is no equality in nature. Are there even
two pebbles alike in the bed of the river ? "

Don Silverio, for the first time in his life, could
have willingly let escape him some unholy word.
It incensed him that he could not arouse in the
boy any of that interest and excitement which
had moved his own feelings so strongly as he had
spent his spare evenings poring over the crabbed
characters, and the dust-weighted vellum of the
charred and mutilated archives discovered by him
in a secret closet in the bell-tower of his church.
With infinite toil, patience, and ability he had de-
ciphered the Latin of rolls, registers, letters,
chronicles, so damaged by water, fire, and the
teeth of rats and mice, that it required all an
archaeologist's ingenuity and devotion to make
out any sense from them. Summer days and
winter nights had found him poring over the
enigma of these documents, and now, when he
had conquered and revealed their secret, he, who
was most concerned in it, was no more stirred by
curiosity or pride than if he had been one of the
big tawny owls who had watched him at his la-
bours in the dusk of the belfry.

The Waters of Edera

i la-

Don Silverio was a learned man and a holy
man, and should have despised such vanities, but
an historic past had great seduction for him; a
militant race fascinated him against his con-
science, and aristocracy allured him despite all his
better judgment : it seemed to him that if he had
learned that he had come from a knightly gens
such as this of the Tor'alba, he would have been
more strongly moved to self-glorification than
would have become a servant of the Church. He
himself had no knowledge even of his own
near parentage; he had been a forsaken child,
left one dark autumn night in the iron cra-
dle at the gates of a foundling hospital in
Reggio Calabrese. His names had been bestowed
on him by the chaplain of the institution; and
his education had been given him by an old noble-
man of the town, attracted by his appearance and
intelligence as a child. He was now fifty years
of age; and he had never known anything of kith
and kin, or of the mingled sweetness and impor-
tunity of any human tie.

Adone sat silent, looking up at the fortress of
his forefathers. He was more moved than his
words showed.

" If we were lords of the land and the town
and the people, we were also lords of the river,"
was what he was thinking; and that thought
moved him to strong pride and pleasure, for he

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loved the river with a great love, only equalled by
that which he felt for his mother.

"They were lords of the river?" he asked
aloud.

** Undoubtedly," answered the priest. " It was
one of the highways of the province from east to
west and vice versa in that time ; the signoria of
this Rocca took toll, kept the fords and bridges
and ferries; none could pass up and down
under Ruscino without being seen by the sentinels
on the ramparts here. The Edera was different
then; more navigable, perhaps less beautiful.
Rivers change like nations. There have been
landslips which have altered its course and made
its torrents. In some parts it is shallower, in
others deeper. The woods which enclosed its
course then have been largely felled, though not
wholly. Sand has been dug from it incessantly,
and rocks have fallen across it. As you know, no
boats or barges which draw any depth of water
can ascend or descend it now without being
. towed by horses ; and in some parts, as here, it is
too uncertain in its depth, too devious in its
course, too precipitous in its fall for even small
boats to adventure themselves upon it : its shoals
of lilies can blossom unmolested where its surface
is level. Yes ; undoubtedly, the lords of Ruscino
were also lords of the Edera, from its mouth to
its source; and their river formed at once their

The Waters of Edera

strongest defence and their weakest point. It
was difficult sufficiently to guard so many miles of
water; above all because, as I say, its course was
so much clearer, and its depth so much greater,
that a flotilla of rafts or cutters could ascend it
from its mouth as far as this town in the Middle
Ages; in fact, more than once, corsairs from the
Levant and from Morocco did so ascend it, and
though they were driven back by the culverins of
the citadel, they every time carried ofif to slavery
some of the youths and maidens of the plain."

Adone gazed across the river to the moss-
grown walls which had once been fortifications
still visible on the side of the hill, and to the
frowning donjon, the blackeneu towers, the
ruined bastions, of w^hat had been once the Rocca,
with the amber light and rosy clouds of the un-
seen sun behind them.

" Teach me Latin, your reverence," was all he
said.

" I have always offered to do so," said Don Sil-
verio.

Adone was again silent, swinging his slender
brown feet in the water, and looking always up-
ward at the evening sky beyond the great round
shape of the dismantled fortress.

Adone learned some Latin with much difficulty,
studying hard in his evening leisure in the win-
ters, and with time he could decipher for himself,

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with assistance from Don Silverio, the annals of
the Tor'alba; and he saw that it was as certain as
anything grown over with the Hchens and cob-
webs of time can be that he himself was the last of
the race.

" Your father used to say something of the
sort," his mother said ; " but he had only heard
it piecemeal from old people, and never heard
enough to put the pieces together as you have
done. * What does it matter either? ' he used to
say; and he said those great lords had been cut-
throats on the land and robbers on the river. For
your father's father had worn the red shirt in his
youth, as I have told you often, and thought but
little of lords and princes."

But Adone was different; the past allured him
with the fascination which it has for poets and
scholars; he was neither of these, except in a
vague, unconscious way; but his imagination was
strong and fertile once aroused ; the past, as sug-
gested to him by the vicar, by degrees became to
him a living thing and nearer than the present, as
it is to scholars who are also poets. He was
neither scholar nor poet; but he loved to muse
upon that far-off time when his forefathers had
been lords of the land and of the water.

He did not want the grandeur, he did not envy
the power which they had possessed; but he

The Waters of Edera

wished that, Hke them, he could own the Edera
from its rise in the hills to its fall into the sea.

" Oh, dear river! " he said to it tenderly. " I
love you. I love you as the dragon-flies do, as
the wagtails do, as the water voles do; I am you
and you are me. When I lean over you and
smile, you smile back to me. You are beautiful
in the night and the morning, when you mirror
the moon and play with the sunbeams, when you
are angry under the wind, and when you are at
peace in the heat of the noon. You have been
purple with the blood of my people, and now you
are green and fresh as the leaves of the young
vine. You have been black with powder and
battle, now you are fair with the hue of the sky
and the blue of the myosotis. You are the same
river as you were a thousand years ago, and yet
you only come down to-day from the high hills,
young and strong, and ever renewing. What is
the life of man beside yours? "

That was the ode which he sang in the dialect
of the province, and the stream washed his feet
as he sang; and with his breath on his long reed
flute — the same flute as youths have made and
used here ever since the days of Apollo Cythar-
nedes — he copied the singing of the river, which
piped as it ran, like birds at dawn.

But this was only at such times as daybreak or
early night when he was alone.

The Waters of Edera

There were but a few people within the ruined
walls of Ruscino ; most of the houses were tenant-
less and tottering to their fall. A few old bent
men and weather-beaten women and naked chil-
dren climbed its steep lanes and slept under its red-
brown roofs, bawled to each other from its deep
arched doorways to tell of death or birth, and
gathered dandelion leaves upon its ramparts to
cure their shrunken and swollen bladders. He
knew them every one, he was familiar with and
kind to them; but he was aloof from them by
temperament and thought, and he showed them
his soul no more than the night birds in the
towers showed their tawny breasts and eyes of
topaz to the hungry and ragged fowls which
scratched amongst the dust and refuse on the
stones in the glare of day.

" // bel Adonef " sighed matrons and the maid-
ens of the scattered farms and the old gloomy cas-
tellated granges which here and there, leagues
distant from one another, broke the green and
silent monotony of the vast historic country
whose great woods sloped from hill to plain. But
to these, too, he was indifferent, though they had
the stern and solid beauty of the Latium women
on their broad low brows, their stately busts, their
ox-like eyes, their shapely feet and limbs; and
often, joined to that, the red-gold hair and the
fair skin of the Adriatic type. As they bound

The Waters of Edera

the sheaves, and bore the water-jars, and went
in groups through the seeding grass to chapel,
or fountain, or shrine, they had the free, irank
grace of an earher time; just such as these
had carried the votive doves to the altars of
Venus and chaunted by the waters of the Edera
the worship of Isis and her son. But to Adone
they had no charm. What did he desire or dream
of? Himself he could not have said. Perhaps
they were too warm ; it was certain that they left
him cold.

Sometimes he leaned over the river and looked
longingly into its depths.

" Show me the woman I shall love," he said to
the water, but it hastened on, glad, tumultuous,
unheeding; and he only saw the reilection of the
white jonquils or the golden sword rush on its
banks.

■.A

Fruits ripen quickly in these provinces, and
children become women in a summer hour; but
with Nerina, through want and suffering and
hunger, physical growth had been slow, and she
remained long a child in many things and many
ways. Only in her skill and strength for work
was she older than her actual age.

She could hoe, and reap, and sow : she could
row and steer the boat amongst the shallows as
well as any man ; she could milk the cow, and put
the steers in the waggon; she could cord, hemp,
and weave, and spin either ; she could carry heavy
weights balanced on her head ; she was strong and
healthy and never ill, and with it all she was
happy. Her large bright eyes were full of con-
tentment, and her rosy mouth often smiled out of
the mere gladness of living. Her senses were
still asleep and her young soul wanted nothing
more than life gave her.

" You can earn your bread anywhere now, little
one," said Clelia Alba to her one day, when she
had been there three years.

The girl shrank as under a blow; her brown

The Waters of Edera

and rosy face grew colourless. " Do you wish me
to go away? " she said hunihly.

" No, no," said Clelia, although that was what
she did desire. " No, not while I live. But
should I die, you could not stay here with my
son."

"Why?" said Nerina. She did not under-
stand why.

Clelia hesitated.

" You ought to feel that yourself," she said
harshly. " Young men and young maids do not
dwell together, unless "

" Unless what? " asked Nerina.

" You are a simpleton indeed, or you are
shamming," thought Adone's mother; but aloud
she only said : '' It is not in our usage."

*" But you will not die," said Nerina anxiously.
"Why should you think of dying, madonna?
You are certainly old, but you are not so very,
very old."

Clelia smiled.

" You do not flatter, child. So much the better.
Run away and drive in those fowls. They are
making havoc in the beanfield."

She could not feel otherwise than tenderly to-
wards this young creature, always so obedient,
so tractable, so contented, so grateful; but she
would willingly have placed her elsewhere could
she have done so with a clear conscience.

The Waters of Edera

" My son will never do ill by any creature un-
der his roof," she thought. " But still youth is
youth; and the girl grows."

" We must dower her and mate her; eh, your
reverence?" she said to Don Silverio when he
passed by later in that day.

"Willingly," he answered. "But to whom?
To the owls or the cats at Ruscino? "

In himself he thought, " She is as straight and
as slight as a chestnut wand, but she is as si'rong.
When you shall try to bend her where she shall
not want to go you will not succeed."

For he knew the character of Nerina in the
confessional better than Clelia Alba judged of it
in her house.

" It was not wise to bring her here," he added
aloud. " But having committed that error it
would be unfair to charge the child with the pain-
ful payment of it. You are a just woman, my
good friend; you must see that."

Clelia saw it clearly, for she never tried to trick
her conscience.

" Your reverence mistakes me," she answered.
" I would not give her to any but a good man
and a good home."

" They are not common," said Don Silverio.
" Nor are they as easy to find as flies in sum-

mer

What was the marriage of the poor for the

The Waters of Edera

5':

woman? What did it bring? \\'hat did it mean?
The travail of child-bearing, the toil of the fields,
the hardship of constant want, the incessant
clamour on her ear of unsatisfied himger, the
painful rearing of sons whom the State takes
away from her as soon as the}^ are of use, pain-
ful ending of life on grudged crusts as a burden
to others on a hearth o.o longer her own. This
stripped of glamour is tlie lot nine times out of
ten of the female peasant — a creature of burden
like the :ow she yokes, an animal valued only in
her youth and her prime; in old age or in sickness
like the stricken and barren goat, who has nought
but its skin and its bones.

Poor little Nerina !

As he went home he saw her cutting fodder for
a calf; she was kneeling in a haze of rose colour
made by the many blossoms of the orchis maculata
which grew there. The morning light sparkled
in the wet grass. She got up as she saw him cross
the field, dropped her curtsey low with a smile,
then resumed her work, the dew, the sun, the
sweet fresh scents shed on her like a benison.

" Poor little soul," thought Don Silverio.
" Poor little soul ! Plas Adone no eyes ? "

Adone had eyes, but they saw other things than
a little maiden in the meadou'-grass.

To her he was a deity; s^ c believed in him and
worshipped him with the strongest faith as a little

The Waters of Edera

sister might have done. She would have fought
for him hke a httle mastiff; she would have suf-
fered in his service with rapture and pride; she
was as vigilant for his interests as if she were
fidelity incarnated. She watched over all that be-
longed to him, and the people of Ruscino feared
her more than they feared Pierino the watch-dog.
Woe-betided the hapless wight who made free
with the ripe olives, or the ripe grapes, with the
fig or the peach or the cherry which grew on
Adone's lands; it seemed to such marauders that
she had a thousand eyes and lightning in her feet.

One day, when she had dealt such vigorous
blows with a blackthorn stick on the back of a
lad who had tried to enter the fowl-house, that he
fell down and shrieked for pardon, Adone re-
proved her. " Remember they are very poor,
Nerina," he said to her. " So were your own
folks, you say."

" I know they are poor," replied Nerina. She
held to her opinions. " But when they ask, you
always give. Therefore it is vile to rob you.
Besides," she added, " if you go on and let them
steal they do not thank you; and they will steal
and steal and steal till you will have nothing left."

Whatever she saw, whatever she heard, she
told Adone; and he gave ear to her because she
was not a chatterer, but was usually of few words.
All her intelligence was spent in the defence and

The Waters of Edera

in the culture of the Terra Vergine; she did not
know her alphabet, and did not wish to do so; but
she had the quickest of ears, the keenest of eyes,
the brightest of brains.

One morning she came running to him where
he was cutting barley.

"Adone! Adone!" she cried breathlessly,
" there were strange men by the river to-day."

" Indeed," said Adone astonished, although
strangers were never seen there. Ruscino was
near no highroad, and the river had long ceased
to be navigable.

" They asked me questions, but I put my hands
to my ears and shook my head; they thought I
was deaf."

" What sort of men were they? " he asked with
more attention, for there were still those who
lived by violence up in the forests which overhung
the valley of the Edera.

" How do I know ? They were clothed in long
woollen bed-gowns, and they had boots on their
feet, and on their heads hats shaped like kitchen-
pans."

Adone smiled. He saw men from a town, or
country fellows who aped such men, with a con-
tempt which was born at once of that artistic
sense of fitness which was in him. and of his ad-
herence to the customs and habits of his province.
The city-bred and city-clothed man looked to him

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a grotesque and helpless creature, much sillier
than an ape.

'' That sounds like citizens or townsfolk. What
did they say? "

" I could not understand ; but they spoke of
the water, I think, for they pointed to it and said
a great deal which I did not understand, and
seemed to measure the banks, and took your punt
and threw a chain into the water in places."

"Took castings? Used my punt? That is
odd ! I have never seen a stranger in my life by
the Edera. Were they anglers?"

" No."

" Or sportsmen? "

" They had no guns."

" How many were they? "

" Three. They went a- ay up the river talk-
ing."

" Did they cross the bridge? "

" No. They were not shepherds, or labourers,
or priests," said Nerina. In these classes of men
her own acquaintance was confined.

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

" What are painters? " said Nerina.

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

The Waters of Edera

" No; they did not do that."

"It is strange.''

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

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

He would have asked Don Silverio if he had
heard or seen anything of any strangers, but the

v.;

The Waters of Edera

priest was away that day at one of the lonely
moorland cabins comprised in his parish of Rus-
cino, where an old man, who had been a great sin-
ner in his past, was at his last gasp, and his sons
and grandsons and great-grandchildren all left
him to meet his end as he might.

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

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

" They would not wait ! They would not wait
— hell take them ! " said the old man, with a
groan, his bony hands fighting the air.

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

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

The Waters of Edera

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

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

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

The day had been only beginning when Don
Silverio had reached the cabin, but he resolved to
await there the return of the family; its hours
were many and long and cruel in the midsummer
heat, in this foetid place where more than a score of
men, women, and children of all ages slept and
swarmed through every season, and where the
floors of beaten earth were paven with filth three
millimetres thick. The people were absent, but
their ordure, their urine, their lice, their saliva
were left there after them, and the stench of all
was concentrated on this bed where the old man
wrestled with death.

Don Silverio stayed on in the sultry and pesti-
lent steam which rose up from the floor. Gnats
and flies of all kinds buzzed in the heavy air, or

The Waters of Edera

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

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

When the great heat had passed he set the door
wide open; the sun was setting; a flood of light
inundated the plain from the near mountains on
the west, where the Leonessa towered, to those
shadowy green clouds which far away in the east
were the marshes before the sea. Through the
ruddy glory of the evening the family returned,
dark figures against the gold; brown women,
half-nude men, footsore children, their steps drag-
ging reluctantly homeward.

The Waters of Edera

•89

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

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

" Your father is dead," said Don Silverio.

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

" We could not let the good grain spoil," said
the eldest man, with some shame in his voice.

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

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

Don Silverio went on his way over the moors
homeward, for he had no mv^ans except his own
limbs whereby to go to his scattered parishioners.
When he reached the village and climbed its
steep stones night had long fallen and he was

The Waters of Edera

sorely tired. lie entered by a door which was
never locked, and found an oil wick burning on
his table, which was set out with the brown
crockery used for his frugal supper of cheese and
lettuces and bread. His old servant was abed. His
little dog alone was on the watch, to welcome him.
It was a poor plain place with whitewashed walls
and a few necessary articles of use; but it was
clean and sweet, its brick floors were sanded, and
the night air blew in from its open casement with
the freshness from the river in it. Its quiet was
seldom disturbed except by the tolling of the bell
for church services; it was welcome to him after
the toil and heat and stench of the past day.

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

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

When Don Silverio reached home that evening
the little news-sheet was lying on his table beside
the rude brown crockery set out for his supper,

The Waters of Edera

with cheese, lettuces, and bread. He scarcely
touched the food, he was saddened and sickened
by the day he had passed, although there had been
nothing new in it, nothing of which he had not
been witness a hundred times in the cabins of his
parishioners. The little paper caught his eye, he
took it and opened it. It was but a meagre thing,
tardy of news, costing only two centimes, but it
was the only publication which brought him any
news of the outer world from which he was as
much separated as though he had been on a de-
serted isle in mid-ocean.

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

'" The project to divert the course of the Edera
river ivill he brought before the Chamber shortly:
the Minister of Agriculture is considered to fa-
vour the project."

He held the sheet nearer to the light and
read the paragraph again, and yet again. The
words were clear and indisputable in their

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The Waters of Edera

meaning, they could not be misconstrued. There
was but one river Edera in the whole province, in
the whole country ; there could be no doubt as to
what river was meant ; yet it seemed to him utterly
impossible that any such project could be con-
ceived by any creature. Divert the course of the
Edera? He felt stupefied. He read the words
over and over again ; then he read them aloud in
the stillness of the night, and his voice sounded
strong in his own ears.

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

" But it is impossible, it is impossible ! " he said
so loudly that his little dog awoke and climbed on
his knee uneasily and in alarm. " What could
the people do ? What could the village do or the
land or the fisher folk ? Are we to have drought
added to hunger? Can they respect nothing? The
river belongs to the valley; to seize it, to appraise

The Waters of Edcra

it, to appropriate it, to make away with it,
Vvould be as monstrous as to steal his mother's
milk from a yearling babe ! "

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

In the morning he awoke from a short per-
turbed sleep with that heavy sense of a vaguely
remembered calamity which stirs in the awaken-
ing brain like a worm in the unclosing flower.

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

Adone alone had intelligence, but he shrank
from taking these tidings to the youth, as he
would have shrunk from doing him a physical
hurt. The news might be false or premature;
many projects were discussed, many schemes

The Waters of Edera

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

His duties over for the forenoon, he went up the
three hundred stairs of his bell-tower, to the
wooden platform, between the machicolations.
It was a dizzy height, and both stairs and
roof were in ruins, but he went cautiously,
and was familiar with the danger. The owls
which bred there were so used to him that they did
not stir in their siesta as he passed them. He
stood aloft in the glare of noonday and looked
down on the winding stream as it passed under
the ruined walls of Ruscino, and growing, as it
flowed, clearer and clearer, and wilder and wilder,
as it rushed over stones and boulders, foaming and
shouting, rushed through the heather on its way
towards the Marches. Under Ruscino it had its
brown mountain colour vStill, but as it ran it grew
green as emeralds, blue as sapphires, silver and
white and grey like a dove's wings; it was un-
sullied and translucent ; the white clouds were re-
flected on it. It went through a country lonely,
almost deserted, only at great distances from one
another was there a group of homesteads, a cluster

The Waters of Edera

of stacks, a conical cabin in some places where the
woods gave place to pasture; here and there were
the ruins of a temple, of a fortress, of some great
marble or granite tomb; but there was no living
creature in sight except a troop of buffaloes
splashing in a pool.

Don Silverio looked down on its course until
his dazzled eyes lost it from sight in the glory of
light through which it sped, and his heart sank,
and he would fain have been a woman to have
wept aloud. For he saw that its beauty and its
solitude were such as would likely enough tempt
the spoilers. He saw that it lay fair and defence-
less as a maiden on her bed.

He dwelt out of the world now, b' he had
once dwelt in it; and the world does not greatly
change, it only grows more rapacious. He knew
that in this age there is only one law to gain,
only one duty, to prosper; that nature is of no
account, nor beauty either, nor repose, nor ancient
rights, nor any of the simple claims of normal jus-
tice. He knew that if in the course of the river
there would be gold for capitalists, for engineers,
lor contractors, for promoters, for speculators,
for attorneys, for deputies, for ministers, that
then the waters of the Edera were in all prob-
ability doomed.

He descended the rotten stairs slowly, with a
weight as of lead at his heart. He did not any

wm^

The Waters of Edera

longer doubt the truth of what he had read. Who
or what shall withstand the curse of its time?

" They have forgotten us so long," he thought,
with bitterness in his soul. " We have been left
^to bury our dead as we would, and to see the
children starve as they might; they ren'.ember us
now because we possess something which they
can snatch from us."

He did not doubt any more. He could only
wait: wait and see in what form and in what
time the evil would come to them. Meantime,
he said to himself, he would not speak of it to
Adone, and he burned the news-sheet. Adminis-
trations alter frequently and unexpectedly, and
the money-changers, who are fostered by them,
sometimes fall with them, and their projects re-
main in the embryo of a mere prospectus. There
was that chance.

He knew that in the age he lived in, all things
were only estimated by their value to commerce
or to speculation; that there was neither space
nor patience amongst men for what was, in their
reckoning, useless; that the conqueror was now
but a trader in disguise; that civilisation was but
the shibboleth of traffic ; that because trade follows
the flag, therefore to carry the flag afar, thou-
sands of young soldiers of every nationality are
slaughtered annually in poisonous climes and ob-
scure warfare, because such is the siiprema lex

The Waters of Edera

and will of the trader. If the waters of Edera
would serve to grind any grist for the mills of
modern trade they would be taken into bondage
with many other gifts of nature as fair and as free
as they were. All creation groaned and travailed
in pain that the great cancer of the cities should
spread.

" It is not only ours," he remembered with a
pang; on its way to and from the Vald'edera the
river passed partially through two other com-
munes, and water belongs to the district in which
it runs. True, the country of each of these was
like that of this valley, depopulated and wild ; but,
hovsever great a solitude any land may be, it is still
locally and administratively annexed to and owned
by the town which it is municipality. Ruscino
and its valley were dependent on San Beda ; these
two other communes were respectively under a
little town of the Abruzzi and under a seaport of
the Adriatic.

The interest of the valley of the Edera in its
eponymous stream was the largest share; but it
was not more than a sliare in this gift of nature.
If it came to any question of conflicting inter-
ests. Ruscino and the valley might very likely be
powerless, and could only, in any event, be repre-
sented by and through San Beda; a strongly ec-
clesiastical and papal little place, and therefore,
without influence with the ruling powers, and

The Waters of Edera

consequently viewed with an evil eye by the Pre-
fecture.

He pondered anxiously on the matter for some
days, then, arduous as the journey was, he re-
solved to go to San Beda and inquire.

The small mountain city was many miles away
upon a promontory of marble rocks, and its many
spires and towers were visible only in afternoon
light from the valley of the Edera. It was as old
as Ruscino, a dull, dark, very ancient place with
monasteries and convents like huge fortresses and
old palaces still fortified and grim as death
amongst them. A Cistercian monastery, which
had been chiefly builded by the second Giulio,
crowned a prominent cliff, which dominated the
town, and commanded a view of the whole of the
valley of the Edera, and, on the western horizon,
of the Leonessa and her tributary mountains and
hills.

He had not been there for five years ; he went
on foot, for there was no other means of transit,
and if there had been he would not have wasted
money on it; the way was long and irksome; for
the latter half, entirely up a steep mountain road.
He started in the early morning as soon as mass
had been celebrated, and it was four in the after-
noon before he had passed the gates of the town.
He rested in the Certosa, of which the superior
was known to him, and made his first inquiries
amongst the monks ; they had heard nothing. So

The Waters of Edera

far as he could learn when he went into the streets
no one in the place had heard anything of the pro-
ject to alter the course of the river. He made
the return journey by night so as to reach his
church by daybreak, and was there in his place
by the high altar when the bell tolled at six
o'clock, and the three or four old people, who
never missed an office, wxre kneeling on the
stones.

He had walked over forty miles and had eaten
nothing except some bread and a piece of dried
fish. But he always welcomed physical fatigue;
it served to send to sleep the restless intellect, the
gnawing regrets, the bitter sense of wasted pow-
ers and of useless knowledge which were his daily
company.

He had begged his friends, the friars, to obtain
an interview with the Syndic of San Beda, and
interrogate him on the subject. Until he should
learn something positive he could not bring him-
self to speak of the matter to Adone : but the fact
of his unusual absence had too much astonished
his little community for the journey not to have
been the talk of Ruscino. Surprised and disturbed
like others, Adone was waiting for him in the
sacristy after the first mass.

" You have been away a whole day and night
and never told me, reverendissimo ! " he cried in
reproach and amazement.

I have yet to learn that you are my keeper,"

HiiCA )

100

The Waters of Edera

said Don Silverio with a cold and caustic intona-
tion.

Adone coloured to the roots of his curling hair.

"That is unkind, sir!" he said humbly; '* I
only meant that — that "

" I know, I know ! " said the priest impatiently,
but with contrition. ** You meant only friend-
ship and g-ood-will ; but there are times when the
best intentions irk one. I went to see the Prior of
the Certosa, an old friend; I had business in San
Beda."

Adone was silent, afraid that he had shown an
unseemly curiosity; he saw that Don Silverio
was irritated and not at ease, and he hesitated
what words to choose.

His friend relented, and blamed himself for
being hurried by disquietude into harshness.

" Come and have a cup of coffee with me,
my son," he said in his old, kind tones. '* I am
going home to break my fast."

But Adone was hurt and humiliated, and made
excuse of field work, which pressed by reason of
the weather, and so he did not name to his friend
and councillor the visit of the three men to the
river.

Don Silverio went home and boiled his coffee;
he always did this himself; it was the only luxury
he ever allowed himself, and he did not indulge
even in this very often. But for once the draught

The Waters of Edera

lOI

had neitlicr fragrance nor balm for him. He was
overtired, weary in mind as in body, and g-rcatly
dejected ; even though nothing was known at San
Beda he felt convinced that what he had read was
the truth.

He knew but little of afifairs of speculation, but
he knew that it was only in reason t(^ suppose that
such projects would be kept concealed, as long as
might be expedient, from those who would be
known to be hostile to them, in order to minimize
the force of opposition.

On the morning of the fourth day which fol-
lowed on the priest's visit to San Beda, about ten
in the forenoon, Adone, with his two oxen, Or-
lando and Rinaldo were near the ri^-er on that
part of his land which was still natural moorland,
and on which heather, and linq-, and broom, and
wild roses, and bracken grew together. He had
come to cut a waggon load of furze, and had
been at work there since eight o'clock, when
he had come out of the great porch of the
church after attending mass, for it was the
twentieth of June, the name-day of Don Silverio.

Scarcely had that day dawned when Adone had
risen and had gone across the river to the presby-
tery, bearing with him a dozen eggs, two flasks
of his best wine, and a bunch of late-flowering
roses. They were his annual offerings on this
day; he felt some trepidation as he climbed the
steep, stony, uneven street lest they should be re-
jected, for he was conscious that three evenings
before he had offended Don Silverio, and had
left the presbytery too abruptly. But his fears
were allayed as soon as he entered the house;

102

The Waters of Eder a

103

the vicar was already up and dressed, and was
about to go to the church. At the young man's
first contrite words Don Silverio stopped him
with a kind smile.

" I was impatient and to blame," he said as he
took the roses. " You heap coals of fire on my
head, my son, with your welcome gifts."

Then together they had gone to the quaint old
church of which the one great bell was tolling.

Mass over, Adone had gone hoiri j, broken his
fast, taken off his velvet jacko*-. his long "carlet
waistcoat, and his siiver-studded belt, aud put the
oxen to the pole of the waggon.

" Shall I come? " cried Nerma.

" No," he answered. *' Go and finish ciitting
the oats in the triangular field."

Always obedient, she went, her sickle swinging
to her girdle. She was sorry, but she never mur-
mured.

Adone had been at work amongst the furze two
hours when old Pierino, who always accompanied
the oxen, got up, growled, and then barked.

"What is it, old friend?" asked Adone, and
left off his work and listened. He heard voices
by the waterside and steps on the loose shingle
of its shrunken summer bed. He went out of the
wild growth round him and looked. There were
four men standing .-nd talking by the water.
They were doubtless the same persons as Nerina

I04

The Waters of Edera

had seen, for they were evidently men from a city
and strangers. Disquietude and offence took
alarm in him at once.

He conquered that shyness which was natural
to him, and which was due to the sensitiveness
of his temperament and the solitude in which he
had been reared.

" Excuse me, sirs," he said, as he advanced to
them with his head uncovered; "what is it you
want with my river?"

"' Your river ! " repeated the head of the group,
and he smiled. " How is it more yours than your
fellows?"

Adone advanced nearer.

" The whole course of the v/ater belonged to
my ancestors," he answered, " and this portion at
least is mine now ; you stand on my ground, I
ask you what is your errand? "

He spoke with courtesy, but in a tone of
authority which seemed to the intruders imper-
ious and irritating. But they controlled their an-
noyance; they did not wish to offend this haughty
young peasant.

** To be owner of the water it is necessary to
own both banks of it," the stranger replied po-
litely, but with some impatience. " The opposite
bank is communal property. Do not fear, how-
ever, whatever your rights may be they will be
carefully examined and considered."

** By whom? They concern only myself."

The Waters of Edera

105

'" None of our rights concern only ourselves.
What are those which you claim in especial on the
Edera water? "

Adone was silent for a few moments; he was
astonished and embarrassed; he had never
reflected on the legal side of his claim to the river;
he had grown up in love and union with it; such
affections, born with us at birth, are not analysed
until they are assailed.

" You are strangers," he replied. " By what
right do you question me? I was born here.
What is your errand? "

" You must be Adone Alba? " said this person,
as if spokesman for the others.
1 am.

"And you own the land known as the Terra
Vergine? "
" I do."

"You will hear from us in due course, then.
Meantime "

" Meantime you trespass on my ground. Leave
it, sirs."

The four strangers drew away a few paces and
conferred together in a low tone, consulting a
sheaf of papers. Their council over, he who ap-
peared the most conspicuous in authority turned
again to the young man, who was watching them
with a vague apprehension which he could not ex-
plain to himself.

io6

The Waters of Edera

" There is no question of trespass ; the riverside
is free to all," said the stranger, with some con-
tempt. " Courtesy would become you better, Ser
Adone."

Adone coloured. He knew that courtesy was
at all times wise and useful and an obligation
amongst men; but his anger was stronger than
his prudence and his vague alarm was yet
stronger still.

** Say your errand with the water," he replied
imperiously. " Then I can judge of it. No one,
sirs, comes hither against my will."

** You will hear from us in due time," answered
the intruder. " And believe me, young man, you
may lose much, you cannot gain anything by rude-
ness and opposition."

" Opposition to what? "

The stranger turned his back upon him, rolled
up his papers, spoke again with his companions,
and lifted from a large stone on which he had
placed it a case of surveyor's instruments. Adone
went close up to him. "Opposition to what?
What is it you are doing here? "

" We are not your servants," said the gentle-
man with impatience. " Do not attempt any
brawling I advise you; it will tell against you
and cannot serve you in any way."

" The soil and the water are mine, and you
meddle with them," said Adone. " If you were

The Waters of Edera

107

honest men you would not be ashamed of what
you do, and would declare your errand. Brawling
is not in my habit ; but either speak clearly, or get
you gone, or I will drive my oxen over you. The
land and the waters are mine."

The chief of the group gave a disdainful, in-
credulous gesture, but the others pulled him by
the sleeve and argued with him in low tones and
a strange tongue, which Adone thought was
German. The leader of the group was a small
man with a keen, mobile face and piercing eyes;
he did not yield easily to the persuasions of his
companions; he was disposed to be combative;
he was offended by what seemed to him the in-
sults of a mere peasant.

Adone went back to his oxen, who were stand-
ing dozing with drooped heads; he gathered up
the reins of rope and mounted the waggon, rais-
ing the drooped heads of the beasts. He held his
goad in his hand ; the golden gorze was piled be-
hind him; he was in full sunlight, his hair was
lifted by the breeze from his forehead; his face
was flushed and set and stern. They saw that he
would keep his word and drive down on to them,
and make his oxen knock them down and the
wheels grind their bodies into pulp. They had
no arms of any kind, they felt they had no choice
but to submit : and did so, with sore reluctance.

'* He looks like a young god," said one of them

()

io8

The Waters of Edera

with an angry laugh. "Mortals cannot fight
against the gods."

With discomfiture they retreated before him
and went along the grassy path northward, as
Nerina had seen them do on the day of their first
arrival.

So far Adone had conquered.

But no joy or pride of a victor was with him.
He stood and watched them pass away with a
heavy sense of impending ill upon him ; the river
was flowing joyously, unconscious of its doom,
but on him, though he knew nothing and con-
ceived nothing of the form which the approaching
evil would take, a great weight of anxiety de-
scended.

He got down from the waggon when he had
seen them disappear, and continued his uninter-
rupted work amongst the furze ; and he remained
on the same spot long after the waggon was filled,
lest in his absence the intruders should return.
Only when the sun set did he turn the heads of
the oxen homeward.

He said nothing to the women, but when he
had stalled and fed his cattle he changed his
leathern breeches and put a clean shirt on his
back, and went down the twilit fields and across
the water to Ruscino; he told his mother that he
would sup with Don Silverio.

When Adone entered the book-room his friend

The Waters of Edera

109

was seated at a deal table laden with volumes and
manuscripts, but he was neither writing or read-
ing, nor had he lighted his lamp. The moonlight
shone through the vine climbing up and covering
the narrow window. He looked up and saw by
Adone's countenance that something was wrong.

" What are they coming for, sir, to the river? "
said the young man as he uncovered his head on
the threshold of the chamber. Don Silverio hesi-
tated to reply; in the moonlight his features
looked like a mask of a dead man, it was so white
and its lines so deep.

" Why do they come to the river, these
strangers? " repeated Adone. " They would not
say. They were on my land. I threatened to
drive my cattle over them. Then they went. But
can you guess, sir, why they come ? "

Don Silverio still hesitated. Adone repeated
his question with more insistence; he came up to
the table and leaned his hands upon it, and looked
down on the face of his friend.

"Why do they come?" he repeated a fourth
time. " They must have some reason. Surely
you know ? "

" Listen, Adone, and control yourself," said
Don Silverio.

" I saw something in a journal a few days
ago which made me go to San Beda. But
there they knew nothing at all of what the news-

The Waters of Edera

paper had stated. What I said startled and
alarmed them. I begged the Prior to acquaint
me if he heard of any scheme affecting us. To-
day only, he has sent a young monk over with a
letter to me, for it was only yesterday that he
heard that there is a project in Rome to turn the
river out of its course, and use it for hydraulic
power; to what purpose he does not know. The
townsfolk of San Beda are in entire sympathy
with this district and against the scheme, which
will only benefit a foreign syndicate. That is all I
know, for it is all he knows ; he took his informa-
tion direct from the syndic. Count Corradini.
My boy, my dear boy, ^.ontrol yourself ! "

Adone had dropped down on a chair, and lean-
ing his elbow on the table hid his face upon his
hands. A tremor shook his frame from head to
foot.

" I knew it was some devilry," he muttered.
" Oh, Lord ! oh, Lord ! would that I had made
the oxen trample them into a thousand pieces!
They ought never to have left my field alive ! "

" Hush, hush ! " said the priest sternly. " I
cannot have such language in my house. Com-
pose yourself."

Adone raised his head ; his eyes were alight as
with fire; his face was darkly red.

** What, sir ! You tell me the river is to be
taken away from us, and you ask me to be calm !

The Waters of Edera

II I

It is not in human nature to bear such a wrong in
peace. Take away the Edera ! Take away the
water ! They had better cut our throats. What !
a poor wretch who steals a few grapes off a vine,
a few eggs from a hen roost, is called a thief and
hounded to the galleys, and such robbery as this
is to be borne in silence because the thieves wear
broadcloth ! It cannot be. It cannot be ; I swear
it shall never be whilst I have life. The river is
mine. We reigned here a thousand years and
more; you have told me so. It is written there
on the parchments. I will hold my own."

Don Silverio was silent; he was silent from
remorse. He had told Adone what, without him
Adone would have lived and died never know-
ing or dreaming. He had thought only to stimu-
late the youth to gentle conduct, honourable
pride, perhaps to some higher use of his abilities :
no more than this.

He had never seen the young man thus violent
and vehement ; he had always found him tranquil
to excess, difficult to rouse, slow to anger, indeed
almost incapable of it ; partaking of the nature of
the calm and docile cattle with whom so much of
his time was passed. But under the spur of an
intolerable menace the warrior's blood which
slumbered in Adone leapt to action; all at once
the fierce temper of the lords of Ruscino displayed
its fire and its metal; it was not the peasant of

112

The Waters of Edera

the Terra V'ergine who was before him now, but
the heir of the siegneury of the Rocca.

** It is not only what I told him of his race," he
thought. " If he had known nothing, none the
less would the blood in his veins have stirred and
the past have moved him."

Aloud he said :

" My son, I feel for you from the depths of my
soul. I feel with you also. For if these foreign-
ers take the river-water from us what will become
of my poor, desolate people, only too wretched al-
ready as they are? You would not be alone in
your desperation, Adone. But do not let us take
alarm too quickly. This measure is in gestation ;
but it may never come to birth. Many such pro-
jects are discussed which from one cause or an-
other are not carried out; this one must pass
through many preliminary phases before it be-
comes fact. There must be surely many vested
rights which cannot with impunity be invaded.
Take courage. Have patience."

He paused, for he saw that for the first time
since they had known each other, Adone was not
listening to him.

Adone was staring up at the moon which hung,
golden and full, in the dark blue sky, seeming
framed in the leaves and coils of the vine.

" The river is mine," he muttered. " The river

The Waters of Edera

time
not

and I are as brothers. They shall kill me before
they touch the water."

*' He will go mad or commit some great
crime," thought his friend, looking at him. " We
must move every lever and strain every nerve, to
frustrate this scheme, to prevent this spoliation.
But if the thieves see money in it who shall stay
their hands ? "

He rose and laid his hands on Adone's should-
ers.

" To-night you are ir no fitting state for calm
consideration of this possible calamity. Go home,
my son. Go to your room. Say nothing to your
mother. Pray and sleep. In the forenoon come
to me and we will speak of the measures which it
may be possible to take to have this matter exam-
ined and opposed. We are very poor; but still
we are not altogether helpless. Only, there must
be no violence. You wrong yourself and you
weaken a good cause by such wild threats. Good
night, my son. Go home."

The long habit of obedience to his superior, and
the instinctive docility of his temper compelled
Adone to submit; he drew a long, deep breath
and the blood faded from his face.

Without a word he turned from the table and
went out of the presbytery into the night and the
white glory of the moonshine.

VII

Don Silverio drew to him liis unfinished letter
to the Prior ; the young monk who would take it
back in the morning- to San Beda was already
asleep in a little chamber above. But he could not
write, he was too perturbed and too anxious. Al-
though he had spoken so calmly he was full of
carking care; both for the threatened evil itself
and its effect upon his parishioners and especially
upon Adone. He knew that in this age it is more
difficult to check the devouring monster of com-
mercial covetousness than it ever w^as to stay the
Bull of Crete; and that for a poor and friendless
community to oppose a strong and wealthy band
of speculators is indeed for the wooden lance to
shiver to atoms on the brazen shield.

He left his writing table and extinguished his
lamp. Bidding the little dog lie still upon his
chair, he went through the house to a door
which opened from it into the bell tower of his
church and which allowed him to go from the
house to the church without passing out into the
street. He climbed the belfry stairs once more,
lighting himself at intervals by striking a wooden

114

The Waters of Edera

IIS

his
his
oor
his
the
the
lore,
oden

inatcli ; for througli the narrow loopholes in the
walls the moonheams did not penetrate. He knew
the way so well that he could have gone up and
down those rotting stairs even in total darkness,
and he safely reached the platform of the hell
tower, though one halting step might have sent
him in that darkness head foremost to his death.

He stood there and gazed downwards on the
moonlit landscape far helow, over the roofs and
the walls of the village towards the open fields and
the river, with beyond that the wooded country
and the cultured land known as the Terra Ver-
gine, and beyond those again the moors, the
marshes, and the mountains. The moonlight
shone with intense clearness on the waters of the
Edera and on the stone causeway of the old one-
arched bridge. On the bridge there was a figure
moving slowly; he knew it to be that of Adone.
Adone was going home.

He was relieved from the pressure of one im-
mediate anxiety, but his apprehensions for the
future were great, both for the young man and
for the people of Ruscino and its surrounding
country. To take away their river was to deprive
them of the little which they had to make life
tolerable and to supply the means of existence.
Like all riverain people, they depended chiefly on
the water, on its fish, its osiers, its sedges, its sal-
lows, its flags, its sand; and its various branches

ii6

The Waters of Edera

and its winter overflow nourished the fields which
they owned around it, and the only corn-mill of
the district worked by a huge wheel in its water.
If the river were turned out of its course above
Ruscino the whole of this part of the vale would
be made desolate.

Life was already hard for the human creatures
in these fair scenes on which he looked; without
the river their lot would be famine, would be
death.

" Forbid it, oh, Lord ! forbid this monstrous
wrong," he said, as he stood with bared head un-
der the starry skies.

When the people of a remote place are smitten
by a public power the blow falls on them as unin-
telligible in its meaning, as invisible in its agency,
as a thunderbolt is to the cattle whom it slays in
their stalls. Even Don Silverio, with his classic
culture and his archaeological learning, had little
comprehension of the means and methods by
which these enterprises were combined and car-
ried out; the world of commerce and speculation
is as aloof from the scholar and the recluse as the
rings of Satum or the sun of Aldebaran. Its
mechanism, its intentions, its combinations, its
manners of action, its ways of expenditure, its
intrigues with banks and governments: all these
to men who dwell in rural solitudes, aloof from
the babble of crowds, are utterly unknown; the

The Waters of Edera

117

from
the

very language of the Bourses has no more mean-
ing to thf^m than the jar of wheeN or roar of
steam.

He stood and looked with a sinking heart on
the quiet, moonlit country, and the winding
course of the water where it flowed, now silvery
in the light, now hlack in the gloom, passing
rapidly through the heather and the willows un-
der the gigantic masses of the Etruscan walls. It
seemed to him to the full as terrible as to Adone ;
but .t did not seem to him so utterly impossible,
because he knew more of the ways of men and of
their unhesitating and immeasurable cruelty
whenever their greed was excited. If the fury of
speculation saw desirable prey in the rape of the
Edera chen the Edera was doomed like the daugh-
ter of iEdipus or the daughter of Jephtha.

Adone had gone across the bridge, but he had
remained by the waterside.

" Pray and Sleep ! " Don Silverio had said in
his last words. But to Adone it seemed that
neither prayer nor sleep would ever come to him
again so long as this impending evil hung over
him and the water of the Edera.

He spjnt the first part of the summer night
wandering aimlessly up and down his own bank,
blind to the beauty of the moonlight, deaf to the
songs of the nightingales, his mind filled with one
thought. An hour after midnight he went home

C-
(^

ii8

The Waters of Edera

and let himself into the silent house by a small
door which opened at the back, and which he
used on such rare occasions as he stayed out late.
He struck a match and went up to his room, and
threw himself, dressed, upon his bed. 11 is mother
was listening for his return, but she did not call
to him. She knew he was a man now, and must
be left to his own will.

" What ails Adone that he is not home? " had
asked old Gianna. Clelia Alba had been herself
perturbed by his absence at that hour, but she had
answered :

*' What he likes to tell, he tells. Prying ques-
tions make false tongues. I have never ques-
tioned him since he was breeched."

" There are not many women like you," had
said Gianna, partly in admiration, half in im-
patience.

" Adone is a boy for you and me," had replied
his mother. " But for himself and for all oth-
ers he is a man. We must remember it."

Gianna had muttered mumbled, rebellious
W'Ords; he did not seem other than a child to her;
she had been one of those present at his birth on
the shining sands of the Edera.

He could not sleep. He could only listen to the
distant murmur of the river. With dawn the
women a\voke. Nerina came running down the
steep stone stair and went to let out and feed her
charges, the fowls. Gianna went to the w'ell in

The Waters of Edera

119

the court with her bronze pitcher and pail. Clelia
Alba cut great slices of bread at the kitchen table
and hooked the cauldron of maize flour to the
chain above the fire on the kitchen hearth. He
could not wait for their greetings, their ques-
tions, the notice which his changed mien would
surely attract. For the first time in all his
twenty-four years of life he went out of the house
without a word to his mother, and took his way
to the river again ; for the first time he was neg-
lectful of his cattle and forgetful of the land.

Nerina came in from the fowl-house with
alarm on her face.

" Madama Cklia!" she said timidly, " Adone
has gone away without feeding and watering the
oxen. May I do it? "

'* Can you manage them, little one? "
Oh, yes; they love me."
Go then; but take care."

" She is a good child ! " said Gianna. " The
beasts woti't hurt her. They know their friends."

Clelia Alba, to whom her own and her son's
dignity was dear, said nothing of her own dis-
pleasure and surprise at Adone's absence. But
she was only the more distressed by it. Never
since he had been old enough to work at all had
he been missing in the hours of labour.

" I only pray," she thought, " that no woman
may have hold of him."

Adone hardly knew what he did ; he was like a

((

V,...

w.-

f 1

mmmmmmmmm

I 20

The Waters of Edera

man who has had a blow on the temple ; his sight
was troubled; his blood seemed to burn in his
brain. He wandered from habit through the
fields and down to the river, to the spot where
from his infancy he had been used to bathe. He
took off his clothes and waded into the water,
which was cold as snow after the night. The
shock of the cold and the sense of the running
current laving his limbs, restored him in a measure
to himself. He swam down the stream in the
shadow of the early morning. The air was full
of the scent of dog-roses and flowering thyme ; he
turned on his back and floated ; between him and
the sky a hawk passed ; the bell of the church was
tolling for the diurnal mass. He ran along in the
sun as it grew warm, to dry his skin by move-
ment, as his wont was. He was still stupefied by
the fear which had fallen upon him ; but the water
had cooled and braced him.

He had forgotten his mother, the cattle, the
labours awaiting him; his whole mind was
absorbed in this new horror sprung up in his
path, none knew from where, or by whom
begotten. The happy, unconscious stream ran
singing at his feet as the nightingale sang in the
acacia thickets, its brown mountain water grow-
ing green and limpid as it passed over submerged
grass and silver sand.

How could any thieves conspire to take it from
the country in which it was born? How could

The Waters of Edera

121

any dare to catch it and imprison it and put it to
vile uses? It was a living thing, a free thing, a
precious thing, more precious than jewel or gold.
Both jewels and gold the law protected. Could it
not protect the Edera?

" Something must be done," he said to himself.
"But what?"

He had not the faintest knowledge of what
could or should be done ; he regretted that he had
not written his mark with the horns and the hoofs
of his oxen on the foreign invaders; they might
never again fall into his power.

He had never felt before such ferocious or cruel
instincts as arose in him now. Don Silverio
seemed to him tame and lukewarm before this
monstrous conspiracy of strangers. He knew
that a priest must not give way to anger; yet it
seemed to him that even a priest should be roused
to fury here ; there was a wrath which was holy.

When he was clothed he stood and looked
down at the gliding stream.

A feeble, cracked voice called to him from the
opposite bank.

" Adone, my lad, what is this tale ? "

The speaker was an old man of eighty odd
years, a native of Ruscino, one Patrizio Cambi,
who was not yet too fee])le to cut the rushes and
osiers, and maintained a widowed daughter and
her young children by that means.

"What tale?" said Adone, unwilling to be

w,.-

122

The Waters of Edera

roused from his own dark thoughts. " What
tale, Trizio? "

"' That they are going to meddle with the
river," answered the old man. " They can't do it,
can they? "

'* What have you heard? "

" That they are going to meddle with the

river

In what way ? '*

" The Lord knows, or the devil. There was a
waggon w^ith four horses came as near as it could
get to us in the woods yonder by Ruffo's, and the
driver told Ruffo that the gentry he drove had
come by road from that town by the sea — I
forget its name — in order to see the river, this
river, our river, and that he had brought another
posse of gentry two weeks or more on the same
errand, and that they were a-measuring and
a-plumbing it, and that they were going to get
possession of it somehow or other, but Ruffo
could not hear anything more than that; and I
supposed that you knew, because this part of it is
yours if it be any man's ; this part of it that runs
through the Terra Vergine."

** Yes, it is mine," answered Adone very
slowly. '' It is mine here, and it was once ours
from source to sea."

" Aye, it is ours! " said old Trizio Cambi mis-
taking him. He was a man once tall, but now
nearly bent double ; he had a harsh wrinkled face.

The Waters of Edera

123

brown as a hazel nut, and he was nearly a skele-
ton ; but he had eyes which were still fine and still
had some fire in them. In his youth he had been
a Garibaldino.

*' It is ours," repeated Trizio. " At least if
anything belongs to poor folks. What say you,
Adone?"

'* Much belongs to the poor, but others take it
from them," said Adone. " You have seen a
hawk take a sparrow, Trizio. The poor count
no more than the sparrows."

" But the water is the gift of God," said the
old man.

Adone did not answer.

"What can we do?" said Trizio, wiping the
dew off his sickle. "Who knows aught of us?
WliO cares? If the rich folks want the river they
will take it, curse them ! "

Adone did not answer. He knew that it was
so, all over the earth.

" We shall know no more than birds tangled in
a net," said Trizio. " They will come and work
their will."

Adone rose up out of the grass. " I will go
and see Ruffo," he said. He was glad to do some-
thing.

" Ruffo knows no more than that," said Trizio
angrily, " The driver of the horses knew no
more."

Adone paid him no heed., but began to push his

*wwte|

(]

warn

HHi

124

The Waters of Edera

way through the thick network of the interlaced
heather. He thought that perhaps Ruffo, a man
who made wooden shoes and hoops for casks and
shaped chestnut poles for vines, might tell him
more than had been told to old Trizio ; might at
least be able to suggest from what quarter and in
what shape this calamity was rising to burst over
their valley as a hailstorm broods above, then
breaks on helpless fields and defenceless gardens,
beating down without warning the birds and the
blossoms of spring.

When he had been in Lombard^ he had seen
once a great steam-engine at work, stripping a
moorland of its natural growth and turning it
into ploughed land. He remembered how the
huge machine with its stench of oil and fire had
forced its way through the furze and ferns and
wild roses and myrtle, and torn them up and
flung them on one side, and scattered and
trampled all the insect life and all the bird life and
all the hares and field mice and stoats and hedge-
hogs who made their home there. " A fine sight,"
a man had said to him ; and he had answered, " a
cursed wickedness." Was this what they would
do to the vale of Edera? If they took the river
they could not spare the land. He felt scared,
bruised, terrified, like one of these poor moorland
hares. He remembered a poor stoat who, startled
out of its sleep, had turned and bitten one of the

The Waters of Edera

125

iron wheels of the machine, and the wheel had
gone over it and crushed it into a mass of blood
and fur. He was as furious and as helpless as the
stoat had been.

When he had walked the four miles which sepa-
rated the Terra Vergine from the chestnut woods
where the maker of wooden shoes lived, he heard
nothing else from Ruffo than this: that gentle-
men had come from Teramo to study the Edera
water; they were going to turn it aside and use
it ; more than that the man who had driven them
had not heard and could not explain.

*' There were four horses, and he had nothing
to give them but water and grass," said the
cooper. " The gentry brought wine and food for
themselves. They came the day before yesterday
and slept here. They went away this morning.
They paid me well, oh, very well. I did what I
could for them. It is five-and-twenty miles if one
off Teramo, aye, nearer thirty. They followed
the old posting road ; but you know where it enters
the woods it is all overgrown and gone to rack
and ruin from want of use. In my grandfather's
time it was a fine well-kept highway, with post-
houses every ten miles, though a rare place for
robbery, but nowadays nobody wants it at all, for
nobody comes or goes. It will soon be blocked, so
the driver says: it will soon be quite choked up
what with brambles, and rocks, and fallen trees,

126

The Waters of Edera

and what not. He was black with rage, for he was
obhged to go back as he had come, and he said he
had been cheated into the job."

Adone hstened wearily to the garrulous Ruffo,
who emphasised each phrase with a blow of his
little hammer on a shoe. He had wasted all his
morning hours and learned nothing. He felt like
a man who is lost in a strange and deserted
country at night ; he could find no clue, could see
no light. Perhaps if he went to the seaport town
which was the Prefecture, he might hear some-
thing ?

But he had never left the valley of the Edera
except for that brief time which he had passed
under arms in the north. He felt that he had no
means, no acquaintance, no knowledge, whereby
he could penetrate the mystery of this scheme.
He did not even know the status of the promoters,
or the scope of their speculation. The city
was a port on the Adriatic with considerable
trade to the Dalmatian and Greek coasts, but he
scarcely knew its name. If he went there what
could he do or learn? Would the stones speak,
or the waves tell that which he thirsted to know?
What use was the martial blood in his veins ? He
could not strike an invisible foe.

" Don't go to meet trouble half way," said the
man Ruffo, meaning well. "I may have mistaken
the driver. They cannot take hold of a river, how

The Waters of Edera

127

should they? Water sHps tlirough your fingers.
Where it was set running in the beginning of the
world, there it will go on running till the crack of
doom. Let them look; let them praLe; they can't
take it."

But Adone's reason would not allow him to be
so consoled.

He understood a little of what hydraulic science
can compass; he knew what canalisation meant,
and its assistance to traffic and trade ; he had seen
the waterworks on the Po, on the Adige, on the
Mincio ; he had heard how the Velino had been en-
slaved for the steel foundry of Tcrni, how the
Nerino fed the ironworks of Narni ; he had seen
the Adda captive at Lodi, and the lakes held in
bond at Mantua ; he had read of the water drawn
from Monte Amiata, and not very many miles off
him in the Abruzzo was the hapless Fuscino,
which had been emptied and dried up by rich
meddlers of Rome.

He knew also enough of the past to know how
water had been forced to serve the will and the
wants of the Roman Consulate and the Roman
Empire, of how the marble aqueducts had cast
the shadow of their arches over the land, and
how the provinces had been tunnelled and
bridged and canalised and irrigated during two
thousand years by those whose bones were dust
under the Latin soil. Lie could not wholly

*<i»#S

128

The Waters of Edera

cheat himself as these unlettered men could do;
he knew that if the commerce which had succeeded
the Caesars as ruler of the world coveted the
waters of Edera, the river was lost to the home of
its birth and to him.

" How shall I tell my mother? " he asked him-
self as he walked back through the fragrant and
solitary country. He felt ashamed at his own
helplessness and ignorance. If courage could
have availed anything he would not have been
wanting; but all that was needed here was a
worldly and technical knowledge, of which he pos-
sessed no more than did the trout in the stream.

As he neared his home, pushing his way labor-
iously through the interlaced bracken which had
never been cut for a score of years, he saw ap-
proaching him the tall, slender form of Don Sil-
verio, moving slowly, for the heather was breast
high, his little dog barking at a startled wood-
pigeon.

" They are anxious about you at your house,"
Don Silverio said with some sternness. " Is it
well to cause your mother this disquietude? "

*' No, it is not well," replied Adone. " But how
can I see her and not tell her, and how can I tell
her this thing? "

" Women to bear trouble are braver than men,"
said the priest. " They have more patience in
pain than we. I have said something to her; but

The Waters of Edera

129

we need not yet despair. We know nothing of
any certainty. Sometimes such schemes are aban-
doned at the last moment because too costly or
too unremunerative. Sometimes they drag on for
half a lifetime; and at the end nothing comes of
them."

'* You have told my mother? "

'' I told her what troubles you, and made you
leave your work undone. The little girl was feed-
ing the cattle."

Adone coloured. He was conscious of the im-
plied rebuke.

'* Sir," he said in a low tone, " if this accursed
thing comes to pass what will become of us?
What I said in my haste last night I say in cold
reason to-day."

"Then you are WTong, and you will turn a
calamity into a curse. Men often do so."

" It is more than a calamity."

" Perhaps. Would not some other grief be yet
worse? If you were stricken with blindness? "

*' No ; I should still hear the river running."

Don Silverio looked at him. He saw by the
set, sleepless, reckless look on his face that the
young man was in no mood to be reached by any
argument, or to be susceptible to either rebuke or
consolation. The time might come when he
would be so; but that time was far off, he feared.
The evenness, the simplicity, the loneliness of

130

The Waters of Edera

Adone's existence, made it open to impressions,
and absorbed by tliem, as busy and cbangeful lives
never are; it was like tbe heather plants around
them, it would not bear transplanting; its birth-
place would be its tomb.

" Let us go back to your mother," he said.
'' Why should you shun her? What you feel she
feels also. Why leave her alone?"

** I will go home," said Adone.

** Yes, come home. You must see that there is
nothing to be done or to be learned as yet. When
they know anything fresh at San Beda they will
let me know. The Prior is a man of good faith."

Adone turned on him almost savagely ; his eyes
were full of sullen anger.

" And I am to bear my days like this ? Know-
ing nothing, hearing nothing, doing nothing to
protect the water that is as dear to me as a
brother, and the land which is my own? What
will the land be without the river? You forget,
sir, you forget ! "

** No, I do not forget," said Don Silverio with-
out offence. " But I ask you to hear reason.
What can you possibly do? Think you no man
has been wronged before you? Think you that
you alone here will suffer? The village will be
ruined. Do you feel for yourself alone? "

Adone seemed scarcely to hear. He was like a

The Waters of Edera

I3«

ith-

.son.

Iman

that

11 be

Ike a

man in a fever who sees one set of images and
cannot see anything else.

" Sir," he said suddenly, " why will you not go
to Rome?"

" To Rome? " echoed the priest in amazement.

" There alone can the truth of this thing be
learned," said Adone. ** It is to Rome that the
promoters of this scheme must carry it; there to
be permitted or forbidden as the Government
chooses. All these things are brought about by
bribes, by intrigues, by union. Without authority
from high office they cannot be done. We here
do not even know who are buying or selling
us "

" No, we do not," said Don Silverio ; and he
thought, " When the cart-horse is bouglit by the
knacker what m.atter to him the name of his
purchaser or his price? "

" Sir," said Adone, with passionate entreaty.
" Do go to Rome. There alone can the truth be
learnt. You, a learned man, can find means to
meet learned people. I would go, I would have
gone yesternight, but when I should get there I
know no more than a stray dog where to go or
from whom to inquire. They would see I am a
country fellow. They would slmt the doors in my
face. But you carry respect with you. No one
would dare to flout you. You could find ways

I"
'♦..., .

132

The V/aters of Edera

and means to know who moves this scheme, how
far it is advanced, what chance there is of our de-
feating it. Go, 1 beseech yon, go ! "

" My son, you amaze me," said Don Silverio.
"I? In Rome? I have not stirred out of this dis-
trict for eighteen years. I am nothing. I have
no voice. I have no weight. I am a poor rural
vicar buried here for punishment."

He stopped abruptly, for no complaint of the
injustice from which he suffered had ever in those
eighteen years escaped him.

*' Go, go," said Adone. " You carry respect
with you. You are learned and will know how
to find those in power and how to speak to them.
Go, go ! Have pity on all of us, your poor help-
less menaced people."

Don Silverio w^as silent.

Was it now his duty to go into the haunts of
men, as it had been his duty to remain shut up in
the walls of Ruscino ? The idea appalled him.

Accomplished and self-possessed though he
was, his fine mind and his fine manners had not
served wholly to protect him from that rust and
nervousness which come from the disuse of soci-
ety and the absence of intercourse with equals.

It seemed to him impossible that he could again
enter cities, recall usages, seek out acquaintances,
move in the stir of streets, and wait in ante-
chambers.

The Waters of Edera

That was the life of the world; he had done
with it, forsworn it utterly, both by order of his
superiors and by willing self-sacrifice. Yet he
knew that Adone was right. It was only from
men of the world and imongst them, it was only
in the great cities that it was possible to follow
up the clue of such speculations as now threatened
the vale of Edera.

The young man he knew could not do what
was needed, and certainly would get no hearing,
a peasant of the Abruzzi border who looked like
a agure of Giorgione's, and would probably be
arrested as an anarchist if he were to endeavour
to enter any great house or public office. But to
go to Rome himself! To revisit the desecrated
ci*:y! This seemed to him a pilgrimage impos-
sible except for the holiest purpose. He felt as if
the very stones of Trastevere wl ild rise up and
laugh at him, a country priest with the moss and
the mould of a score of years passed in rural ob-
scurity upon him. Aloreover, .0 revisit Rome
would be to tear open wounds long healed. There
his studious youth had been passed, and there his
ambitious dreams had been dreamed.

"' I cannot go to Rome," he said abruptly. "Do
not ask me, I cannot go to Rome."

" Then I will go," said Adone, " aiid if in no
other way I will force myself into the king's
palace and make him hear."

( ]

134

The Waters of Edera

" And his guards Vvlli seize you, and his judges
will chain you up in a solitary cell for life! Do
not say such mad things. What could the king
reply even if he listened, which he would not do?
He would say that these things were for ministers
and prefects and surveyors, and engineers to
judge of not for him or you. Be reasona*ble,
Adone; do not speak or act like a fool. This is
the first grief you have known in your life, and
you are distraught by it. That is natural enough,
my poor boy. But you exaggerate the danger.
It must be far off as yet. It is a mere project."

** And I am to remain here, tilling the land in
silence and inaction until one day without notice
I shall see a crowd of labourers at work upon the
river, and shall see appraisers measuring my
fields! You know that is how things are done.
You know the poor are always left in the dark
until all is ripe for their robbery. Look you, sir,
if you go to Rome I will wait in such patience as
I can for whatever you may learn. But if you do
not go, I go, and if I can do no better I will take
the king by the throat."

" I have a mind to take you by the throat my-
self," said Don Silverio, with an irritation which
he found it hard to control. '* Well, I will think
over what you wish, and if I find it possible, if
I think it justified, if I can afford the means, if I
can obtain the permission for such a journey, I

The Waters of Edera

135

will go to Rome ; for your sake, for your mother's
sake. I will let you know my decision later.
Let us walk homeward. The sun is low. At
your house the three women must be anxious."

Adone accompanied him in silence through the
heather, of which the blossoming expanse was
reddening in the light of the late afternoon until
the land looked a ruby ocean. They did not
speak again until they reached the confines of the
Terra Vergine.

Then Don Silverio took the path which went
through the pasture to the bridge, and Adone
turned towards his own dwelling.

'' Spare your mother. Speak gently," said the
elder man; the younger man made a sign of as-
sent and of obedience.

" He will go to Rome," said Adone to himself,
and almost he regretted that he had urged the
journey, for in his own veins the fever .. unrest
Hnd the sting of fierce passions were throbbing,
?nd he panted and pined for action. He was the
[/.eir of the lords of the river.

VIII

Like the cooper Ruffo, Clelia Alba had re-
ceived tlie tidings with increduHty, though aghast
at the 1j A iggestion.

" It is i:. ossible," she said. She had seen the
water there ever since she had been a babe in
swaddhng clothes.

" It is not possible," she said, *' that any man
could be profane enough to alter the bed which
heaven had given it."

But she was sorely grieved to see the effect
such a fear had upon Adone.

" I was afraid it was a woman," she thought ;
" but this thing, could it be true, would be worse
than any harlot or adulteress. If they took away
the river the land would perish. It lives by the
river."

" The river is our own as far as we touch it,"
she said aloud to her son ; '' but it was the earth's
before it was ours. To sever water from the land
it lives in were worse than to snatch a child from
its j"nother's womb."

Adone did not tell her that water was no more
sacred than land to the modern constructor. She

136

The Waters of Edera

137

would learn that all too soon if the conspiracy
against the Edera succeeded. But he tried to
learn from her what legal rights they possessed to
the stream: what had his father thought?
He knew well that his old hereditary claim to the
Lordship of Ruscino. however capable of proof,
would be set aside as fantastic and untenable ; but
their claim to the water throi^gh the holding of
Terra Vergine could surely not be set aside.

" Your father never said aught about the water
that I can remember," she answered. " I think
he would no more have thought it needful to say
it was his than to say that you were his son. It
is certain we are writ down in the district as own-
ers of the ground; we pay taxes for it; and the
title of the water must be as one with that."

" So say I ; at least over what runs through
our fields we alone have any title, and for that title
I will fight to the death," said Adone. " River
rights go with the land through which the river
passed."

** But, my son," she said with true wisdom,
" your father would never have allowed any
danger to the water to make him faithless to the
land. If you let this threat, this dread, turn you
away from your work, if you let your fears make
you neglect your fields and your olives, and your
cattle and your vines, you will do more harm to
yourself than the worst enemy can do you. To

V* ;■

warn

138

The Waters of Edera

leave a farm to itself is to call down the vengeance
of heaven. A week's abandonment undoes the
work of years. I and Gianna and the child do
what we can, but we are women, and Nerina is
young."

" I will do what 1 can, mother," replied Adone
humbly. " But of what use is it to dress and
manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera be in its
sap and at its root? What use is it to till these
lands if they be doomed to perish from thirst? "

" Do your best," said his mother, " then the
fault will not lie with you, whatever happen."

The counsel was sound; but to Adone all
savou: and hope were gone out of his labour.
When he saw the green gliding water shine
through the olive branches and beyond the foliage
of the walnut-trees his arms fell nerveless to his
side, his throat swelled with sobs, which he
checked as they rose, but which were only the
more bitter for that — all the joy and the peace of
his day's work were gone.

It was but a small space of it to one whose an-
cestors had reigned over the stream from its rise
in the oak woods to its fall into the sea: but he
thought that no one could dispute or diminish or
disregard his exclusive possession of the Edera
water where it ran through his fields. They could
not touch that even if they seized it lower down
where it ran through other communes. Were

The Waters of Edera

139

they to take it aboi'^ his land, above the bridge
of Ruscino, its bed here would be dried up and
his homestead and the village both be ruined.
The clear, intangible right which he meant to dc
fend at any cost, in any manner, was his right to
have the river run untouched through his fields.
The documents which proved the rights of the
great extinct Seigneury might be useless, but the
limited, shrunken right of the present ownership
was as unassailable as his mother's riglit to the
three strings of pearls; or so he believed.

The rights of the Lords of Ruscino might be
but shadows of far-off things, things of tradition,
of history, of romance, but the rights of the peas-
ant proprietors of the Terra Vergine must, he
thought, be respected if there were any justice
upon earth, for they were plainly writ down in the
municipal registers of San Beda. To rouse others
to defend their equal rights in the same way from
the source of the Edera to its union with the Adri-
atic seemed to him the first effort to be made. He
was innocent enough to believe that it would suf-
fice to prove that its loss would be their ruin to
obtain redress at once.

Whilst Don Silverio was still hesitating as to
what seemed to him this momentous and painful
journey to Rome his mind was made up by a
second letter received from the Superior of the
Certosa at San Beda, the friend to whom he had

140

The Waters of Edera

confided the task of inquiring as to the project for
the Edera.

The letter was long, and in Latin. They were
two classics, who liked thus to refresh themselves
and each other with epistles such as St. Augustine
or Tertullian might have penned. The letter was
of elegant scholarship, but its contents were un-
welcome. It said that the Most Honourable the
Syndic of San Beda had enjoyed a conference with
the Prefect of the province, and it had therein
transpired that the project for the works upon the
river Edera had been long well known to the
Prefect, and that such project was approved by
the existing Government, and therefore by all the
Government officials, as was but natural. It was
not admitted that the Commune of San Beda had
any local interest or local right sufficiently strong
to oppose the project, as such a claim would
amount to a monopoly, and no monopoly
could exist in a district through which a running
river partially passed, and barely one-fifth of the
course of this stream lay through that district
known as the valley of the Edera. The entire
Circondario except the valley, was believed to be
in favour of the project, which the Prefect in-
formed the Syndic could not be otherwise than
most favourable to the general interests of the
country at large.

Therefore, most honoured and revered

The Waters of Edera

141

friend," wrote the Superior of the Cistercians, his
most esteemed worship does not see his way to
himself suggest opposition to this course in our
Town Council or in our Provincial Council, and
the Most Worshipful the Assessors do not either
see theirs; it being, as you know, an equivocal
and onerous thing for either council to express or
suggest in their assembly views antagonistic to
those of the Prefecture, so that I fear, most hon-
oured and reverend friend, it will not be in my
power farther to press this matter, and I fear also
that your parish of Ruscino being isolated and
sparsely populated, and its chief area unculti-
vated, will be possessed of but one small voice in
this matter, the interests of the greater number
being always in such a case preferred."

Don Silverio read the letter twice, its stately
and correct Latinity not serving to disguise the
mean and harsh fact of its truly modern logic.
" Because we are few and poor and weak we have
no rights ! " he said bitterly. " Because the water
comes from others and goes to others it is not
ours whilst in our land! "

He did not blame his friend at San Beda.

Ecclesiastics existed only on sufferance, and
any day the Certosa might be closed if its inmates
offended the ruling powers. But the letter, never-
theless, lay like a stone on his heart. All the
harshness, the narrowness, the disregard of the

142

The Waters of Edera

interests of the weak ; the rude, rough, tyrannical
pressing onward of the strong to their own selfish
aims, all the characteristics of the modern world
seemed to find voice in it and jeer at him.

It was not for the first time in his life that he
had pressed against the iron gates of interest and
formula and oppression, and only bruised his
breast and torn his hands,

He had a little sum of money put by in case
of illness and for his burial; that was the only
fund on which he could draw to take him to
Rome and keep him when there, and it was so
small that it wouid soon be exhausted. He passed
the best part of the night doubting which way
his duty pointed. He fasted, prayed, and com-
muned with his soul, and at length it seemed to
him as if a voice from without said to him,
" Take up your staff and go." For the journey
appalled him, and where his inclination pointed he
had taught himself to see error. He shrank
inexpressibly from going into the noise and glare
and crowd of men; he clung to his solitude as a
timid criminal to its lair; and therefore he felt
persuaded that he ought to leave Ruscino on his
errand, because it was so acutely painful to him.

Whilst he was gone Adone at least would do
nothing rash; would of course await the issue of
his investigations. Time brings council, and time
he hoped would in this instance befriend him. He

The Waters of Edera

143

had already obtained the necessary permission to
leave his parish ; he then asked for a young friend
from San Beda to take his place in the village;
left his little dog to the care of Nerina; took
his small hoard in a leathern bag strapped to
his loins, and went on his way at dayl^reak
along the south-west portion of the valley,
to cover on foot the long distance which lay
between him and the nearest place at which a
public vehicle went twice a week to a railway sta-
tion whence he could take the train to Terni and
so to Rome.

Adone acccompanied him the first half of the
way, but they said little to one another; their
hearts were full. Adone could not forget the
rebuke given to him, and Don Silverio was too
wise a man to lean heavily on a sore and aching
wound, or repeat counsels already given and re-
jected.

At the third milestone he stopped and begged,
in a tone which was a command, the young man
to return home.

" Do not leave your land for me," he said.
*' Every hour is of gold at this season. Go back,
my son ! I pray that I may bring you peace."

" Give me your blessing," said Ador:^: ?-ieekly,
and he knelt down in the dust of the roadside.
His friend gave it; then their hands met in silent
farewell.

144

The Waters of Edera

The sun had risen, and the cold clear air was
yielding to its rays. The young man reluctantly
turned back, and left the priest to go onward
alone, a tall, dark figure in the morning light ; the
river running between acacia thickets and rushes
on his right. Before long he would be fon tu
leave the course of the stream, and ascend a rugged
and precipitous road which mounted southward
and westward through oak woods into the moun-
tains between the Leonessa and Gran Sasso, until
it reached a shrunken, desolate village, with
fine Etruscan and Roman remains left to per-
ish, and a miserable hostelry with the miserable
diligences starting from it on alternate days, the
only remains of its former posting activity. There
he arrived late in the evening and broke hi st
on a basin of bean soup, then rested on a ucx.cn,
for he could not bring himself to enter the filthy
bed which was alone to be obtained, and spent the
following morning examining the ancient ruins,
for the conveyance did not start until four o'clock
in the afternoon. When that hour came he made
one of the travellers ; all country folks, who were
packed close as pigeons in a crate in the ram-
shackle, noisy, broken-down vehicle, which lum-
bered on its way behind its lean and suffering
horses through woods and hills and along moun-
tain passes of a grandeur and a beauty on which
the eyes of educated travellers rarely looked.

The Waters of Edera 145

The journey by this conveyance occupied seven
hours, and he was obljcrcd to wait five more at
that village station which was the nearest point
at which he could meet the train which went
from Tcrni to Rome. Only parliamentary trains
stop at such obscure places ; and this one'seemed
to him slower even than the diligence had been.
It was crammed with country lads going to the
conscription levy in the capital : some of them
drunk, some of them noisy and quarrelsome, some
in tears, some silent and sullen, all of them sad
company. The dusty, stinking, sun-scorched
waggons open one to another, with the stench of
hot unwashed flesh, and the riouds of dust driven
through the unglazed windows seemed to Don
Silverio a hell of man's own making, and in re-
membrance his empty quiet room, with its vine-
hung window, at Ruscinu seemed by comparison
a lost heaven.

To think that there were thousands of men
who travelled thus every day of every year in
every country, many of them from no obligation
whatever, but from choice !

" What lunatics, Avhat raving idiots we should
look to Plato or to Socrates, could they see us ! "
he thought. Was what is called progress any-
thing else except increased insanity in human life?

He leaned back in his corner and bore the dust
in his eyes and his throat as best he might, and

146

The Waters of Edera

spoke a few kind words to the boys nearest to
him, and felt as if every bone in his body was
broken as the wooden and iron cage shook him
from side to side. The train stopped finally in
that area of bricks and mortar and vulgarity and
confusion where once stood the Baths of Diocle-
tian. It was late in the night when he heard the
name of Rome.

No scholar can hear that name without emo-
tion. On him it smote with a keen personal pain,
awakening innumerable memories, calling from
their graves innumerable dreams.

He hsd left it a youth, filled with all the aspira-
tions, the fire, the courage, the faith of a lofty
and spiritual temper. He returned to it a man
aged before his time, worn, weary, crushed, sr>ir-
itless, with no future except death.

He descended from the waggon with the crowd
of jaded conscripts and mingled with that com-
mon and cosmopolitan crowd which now defiles
the city of the Caesars. The fatigue of his body
and the cramped pain of his aching spine added to
the moral and the mental suffering which was
upon him as he moved a stranger and alone along
the new% unfamiliar streets where alone here and
there some giant ruin, some stately arch, some
marble form of god or prophet, recalled to him
the Urbs that he had known.

But he remembered the mission on which he

The Waters of Edera

came; and he rebuked his self-indulgence
mourning for his own broken late.

" I am a faithless servant and a feeble friend,"
he thought in self-reproach. " Let me not
weaken my poor remnant of strength in egotism
and repining. I come hither for Adone and the
Edera. Let me think of my errand only ; not of
myself, nor even of this desecrated city."

-..■■■ ■-%

■■i

It was now the season to plough the reapen
fields, and he had always taken pleasure in his
straight furrows — as straight as t agh meas-
ured by a rule on the level lands ; and of the skill
with which on the hilly ground Orlando and Ri-
naldo moved so skilfully, turning in so small a
space, answering to every inflection of his voice,
taking such care not to break a twig of the fruit
trees, or bend a shoot of the vines, or ^jaze a stem
of the olives.

" Good hearts, dear hearts, faithful friends and
trusty servants ! " he murmured to the oxen. He
leaned his bare arms on the great fawn-col-
oured flanks of Orlando, and his forehead on his
arms, which grew wet with hidden tears.

The cattle stood motionless, breathing loudly
through their distended nostrils, the yokes on
their shoulders crinking, their hidt^ twitching
under the torment of the flies. Nerina, who had
been washing linen in the Edera, approached
through the olives; she hesitated a few minutes,
then put the lineti down off her head on to the
grass, gathered some plumes of featherfew and

148

The Waters of Edera

149

ferns, and brushed the flies off the necks of the
oxen. Adone started, looked up in displeasure at
being thus surprised, then, seeing the intruder
was only the little girl, he sat down on the side of
the plow, and made believe to break his noon-day
bread.

" You have no wine," said the child,"shall I
run to the house for a flask ? "

*' No, my dear, no. If I am athirst there is
water — as yet there is water ! " he murmured
bitterly, for the menace of this impending horror
• gan to grow on him with the fixity and obses-
sion of a mania.

Nerina continued to fan the cattle and drive off
the flies from their necks. She looked at him
wistfully from behind the figures of the stately
animals. She was afraid of the sorrow which
was in the air. No one had told her what the evil
was which hung over the Terra Vergine; and she
never asked questions. The two elder women
never took her into their confidence on any sub-
ject, and she had no communication with the few
people in Ruscino. She had seen that something
was wrong, but she could not guess what:
something which made Madonna Clelia's brows
dark, and Gianna's temper bad, and Adone himself
weary and ill at ease.

Seeing him sitting there not eating, throwing
his bread to some wild pigeons which followed the

ISO

The Waters of Edera

plough, she plucked up courage to speak ; he was
always kind to her, though he noticed her little.

"What is it that ails you all?" she asked.
" Tell me, Adone, I am not a foolish thing to
babble."

He did not answer. What use were words:
It was deeds which were wanted.

" Adone, tell me," she said entreatingly.
" What is this that seems to lie like a stone on you
all? Tell me why Don Silverio has gone av/ay.
I will never tell again."

There was a pathetic entreaty in the words
which touched and roused him; there was in it
the sympathy which would not criticise or doubt,
and which is to the sore heart as balm and soothes
it by its very lack of reason.

He told her; told her the little that he knew,
the much that he feared ; he spent all the force of
his emotion in the narrative.

The child leaned against the great form of the
ox, and listened, not interrupting by a word or
cry.

She did not rebuke him as Don Silverio had
done, or reproach him as did his mother ; she only
listened with a world of comprehension in her
eyes more eloquent than speech, not attempting
to arrest the fury of imprecation or the prophecies
of vengeance which poured from his lips. Hers
was that undoubting, undivided, implicit faith
which is so dear to the wounded pride and im-

The Waters of Edera

151

potent strength of a man in trouble who is con-
scious that what he longs to do would not be ap-
proved by law or sanctioned by religion. That
faith spoke in her eyes, in her absorbed attention,
in the few breathless sentences which escaped her ;
there was also on her youthful face a set, stern
anger akin to his own.

" Could we not slay these men? " she said in a
low, firm voice; she came of a mountain race
by whom life was esteemed little and revenge
honour.

" We must not even say such a thing," said
Adone bitterly, in whose ears the rebuke of Don
Silverio still rang. '' In these days everything is
denied us, even speech. If we take our rights we
are caged in their prisons."

" But what will you do, then? "

'* For the moment I wait to learn more. These
things are done in the dark, or at least in no light
that we can see. To kill these men as you wish,
little one, would do nothing. Others of their kind
would fill their places. The seekers of gold are
like ants. Slay thousands, tens of thousands
come on ; if once the scent of gain be on the wind
it brings men in crowds from all parts as the
smell of carrion brings meat-flies. If they think
of seizing the Edera it is because men of business
will turn it into gold. The Edera gives us our
grain, our fruits, our health, our life, but if it will
give money to the foreigner the foreigner will

152

The Waters of Edera

take it as he would take the stars and coin them
if he could. The brigand of the hills is caged or
shot; the brigand of the banks is allowed to fatten
and die in the odour of success. There are two
measures."

Nerina failed to understand, but her mind was
busy with what seemed to her this monstrous in-
justice.

" But why do they let them do it? They take
ai^d chain the men who rob a traveller or a house."

Adone cast his last atom of bread to the birds.

" There are two measures," he answered.
" Kill one, you go to the galleys for life. Kill
half a million, you are a hero in history, and you
get in your own generation titles, and money, and
applause."

" Barufifo was a good man and my father's
friend," Nerina said, following her own
thoughts. " Baruffo was in the oak woods al-
ways, high above us, but he often brought us wine
and game at night, and sometimes money too.
Baruffo was a good man. He was so kind.
Twice my father aided him to escape. But one
night they seized him ; there was a whole troop of
carabineers against him, they took him in a trap,
they could never have got him else, and I saw him
brought down the mountain road and I ran and
kissed him before they could stop me; and he
never came back — they kept him."

The Waters of Edera

'53

" No doubt they kept him," said Adone bit-
terely. ** Baruffo was a peasant outlawed; if he
had been a banker, or a minister, or a railway
contractor, he might have gone on thieving all
his life, and met only praise. They keep poor
Baruffo safe in their accursed prisons, but they
will take care never to keep, or take even for a
day, law-breakers whose sins are far blacker than
his, and whose victims are multitudes."

" If Baruffo were here he would help you," said
Nerina. " He was such a fine strong man and
had no fear."

Adone rose and put his hands on the handles of
the plough.

" Take up your linen, little one," he said to the
girl, " and go home, or my mother will be angry
with you for wasting time."

Nerina came close to him and her brown dog-
like eyes looked up like a dog's into his face.

" Tell me what you do, Adone," she said be-
seechingly, " I will tell no one. I was very little
when Baruffo came and went to and fro in our
hut ; but I had sense ; I never spoke. Only when
the guards had him I kissed him because then it
did not matter what they knew; there was no
hope."

" Yes, I will tell you," said Adone. " Maybe
I shall end like Baruffo."

Then he called on Orlando and Rinaldo by

IS4

The Waters of Edera

their narres, and they lowered their heads and
strained at their collars, and with a mighty
wrench of their loins and shoulders they forced
the share through the heavy earth.

Nerina stood still and looked after him as he
passed along under the vine-hung trees.

" Baruffo may have done some wrong," she
thought, " but Adone, he has done none, he is as
good as if he were a saint of God, and if he should
be obliged to do evil it will be no fault of his, but
because other men are wicked."

Then she put the load of linen on her head, and
went along the grassy path homeward, and she
saw the rosy gladioli and the golden tansy by
which she passed through tears. Yet she was
glad because Adone had trusted her; and be-
cause she now knew as much as the elder women
in his house who had put no confidence in her.

and

:hty

•ced

i he

she

5 as

)uld

but

and
she
by
wa.s
be-
nen

" I SHALL not write," Don Silverio had said to
Adone. " As soon as I i<no\v anything for cer-
tain I shall return. Of that you may be sure."

For he knew that letters took a week or more
to find their slow way to Ruscino, and he had
hoped to return in less than that time ; having no
experience of " what hell it is in waiting to abide,"
and of the endless doublings and goings to earth
of that fox-like thing, a modern speculation; he
innocently believed that he would only have to
ask a question to have it answered.

Day after day Adone mounted to the bell-tower
roof and gazed over the country in vain. Day
after day the little dog escaped from the custody
of Nerina, trotted over the bridge, pattered up
the street, and ran whining into his master's
study. Every night the people of Ruscino hung
up a lantern on a loophole of the belfry, and
another on the parapet of the bridge, that
their pastor might not miss his way if he were
coming on foot beside the river ; and every night
Adone himself watched on the river bank or by
the town wall, sleepless, longing for, yet dreading
that which he should hear. But more than a

155

iS6

The Waters of Edera

week passed, and the priest did not return. THe
anxiety of Adone consumed him hke fire. He
strove to dull his anxiety by incessant work, but
it was too acute to be soothed by physical fatigue.
He counted the days and the hours, and he could
not sleep. The women watched him in fear and
silence; they dared ask nothing, lest they should
wound him. Only Nerina whispered to him once
or twice in the fields, " Where is he gone? When
will he come back? "

" God knows ! " he answered. Every evening
that he saw the sun set beyond the purple line of
the mountains which were heaped in their masses
of marble and snow between him and the
Patrimonium Petrus, he felt as if he could never
bear another night. He could hear the clear,
fresh sound of the running river, and it seemed
to him like the voice of some friend crying aloud
to him in peril. Whilst these summer days and
nights sped away what was being done to save
it? He felt like a coward who stands by and
sees a comrade murdered. In his solitude and ap-
prehension he began to lose all self-control ; he
imagined impossible things; he began to see in
his waking dreams, as in a nightmare, the dead
body of Don Silverio lying with a knife in its
breast in some cut-throat alley of Rome. For
two weeks passed and there was no sign of his re-
turn and no message from him.

The Waters of Edera

The poor people of Ruscmo also were
troubled. Their vicar had never left them before.
They did not love him ; he was too unlike them ;
but they honoured him, they believed in him; he
was always there in their sickness and sorrow;
they leaned on his greater strength in all their
penury and need ; and he was poor like them, and
stripped himself still barer for their sakes.

Through the young friar who had replaced him
they had heard something of the calamity which
threatened to befall them through the Edera. It
was all dark to them; they could understand
nothing. Why others should want their river and
why they should lose it, or in what manner a
stream could be turned from its natural course —
all these things were to them incomprehensible.
In the beginning of the world it had been set run-
ning there. Who would be impious enough to
meddle with it?

Whoever tried to do so would be smitten with
the vengeance of Heaven. Of that they were
sure. Nevertheless to hear the mention of such a
thing tormented them; and when they opened
their doors at dawn they looked out in terror lest
the water should have been taken away in the
night.

Their stupidity irritated Adone so greatly that
he ceased altogether to speak to them of the im-
pending calamity. " They are stocks and stones.

158

The Waters of Edera

They have not the sense of sheep nor the courage
of goats," he said, with the old scorn which his
forefatliers had felt for their rustic vassals stir-
ring in him.

" I believe that they would dig sand and carry
wood for the engineers and the craftsmen who
would build the dykes ! " he said to his mother.

Clelia Alba sighed. " My son, hunger is a hard
master; it makes the soul faint, the heart hard,
the belly ravenous. We have never known it. We
cannot judge those who know nothing else."

" Even hunger need not make one vile," he an-
swered.

But he did not disclose all his thoughts to his
mother.

He was so intolerant of these poor people of
Ruscino because he foresaw the hopelessness of
forging their weak tempers into the metal neces-
sary for resistance. As well might he hope to
change a sword-rush of the river into a steel sabre
for combat. Masaniello, Rienzi, Garibaldi, had
roused the peasantry and led them against their
foes; but the people they dealt with must, he
thought, have been made of different stuff than
these timorous villagers, who could not even be
made to comprehend the magnitude of th* wr ;:j
which w^as plotted against them.

" Tell them," he said to old Triz *' tell thei,-
their wells will run dry; their fish wi. ro^ on the

The Waters of Edera

159

dry bed of what was once the river; their canes,
their reeds and rushes, their osiers, will all fail
them; when they shall go out into their fields
nothing which they sow or plant will grow be-
cause the land will be cracked and parched ; there
will be no longer the runlets and rivulets to water
the soil ; birds will die of thirst, and thousands of
little river creatures will be putrid carcasses in the
sun; for the Edera, which is life and joy and
health to this part of the country, will be carried
far away, imprisoned in brick walls, drawn under
ground, forced to labour like a slave, put to vile
uses, soiled and degraded. Cannot you tell them
this, and make them see? "

The old man shook his white head. " They
would never believe. It is too hard for them.
Where the river runs, there it will always be. So
they think."

" They are dolts, they are mules, they are
swine ! " said Adone. " Nay, may the poor beasts
forgive me! The beasts cannot help themselves,
but men can if they choose."

" Humph ! " said Trizio doubtfully. " My lad,
you have not seen men shot down by the hundred.
I have — long ago, long ago."

" There is no chance of their being shot," said
Adone, with contempt, almost with regret. " All
that is wanted of them are common sense, union,
protestation, comprehension of their rights."

i6o

The Waters of Edera

" Aye, you all begin with that," said the old
Garibaldino. " But, my lad, you do not end there,
for it is just those things which are your right
which those above you will never hear of; and
then up come the cannon tl' under ing, and when
the smoke clears away there are your dead — and
that is all you get."

The voice of the old soldier was thin and
cracked and feeble, but it had a sound in it which
chilled the hot blood of his hearer.

This was no revolutionary question, no social-
istic theory, no new or alarming demand; it was
only a claim old as the hills, only a resolve to keep
what the formation of the earth had given to this
province.

As well blame a father for claiming his own
child as blame him and his neij.:hbours for claim-
ing their own river.

They were tranquil and docile, people, poor and
patient, paying what they were told to pay, letting
the fiscal wolf gnaw and glut as it chose unop-
posed, not loving their rulers indeed, but never
moving or speaking against them, accepting the
snarl, the worry, the theft, the greed, the malice of
the State without questioning.

Were they to stand by and see their river
ruined, and do nothing, as the helpless fishermen
of Fuscina liave accepted the ruin of their lake?

To all young men of court ge and sensibility

The Waters of Edera

lOi

and enthusiasm the vindication of a clear right
seems an act so simple that it is only through long
and painful experience that they realise that there
is nothing under the sun which is so hard to com-
pass, or which is met by such strong antagonism.
To Adone, whose nature was unspoilt by mod-
ern influences, and whose world was comprised in
the fields and moors around Ruscino, it seemed
incredible that such a title as that of his native
soil to the water of Edera could be m.ade clear to
those in power without instant ratification ot it.

'' Whether you do aught or naught it comes to
the same thing," said the old Garibaldino who was
wiser. '' We did much; we spent our blood like
water, and what good has it been? For one devil
we drove out before our muskets, a thousand
worse devils have enterea since."

" It is different," said Adone, impatient. "' All
we have to do is to keep out the stranger. You
had to drive him out. No politics or doctrines
come into our cause ; all we mean, all we want, is
to be left alone, to remain as we are. That is all.
It is simple and just."

" A3^e, it is simple; aye, it is just," said the old
man; but he sucked his pipe-stem grimly; he had
never seen these arguments prosper; and in his
own youth he had cherished such mistakes, him-
self, to his own hindrance.

Had he not sung in those glorious days of hope
and faith,

l62

The Waters of Edera

" Fratelli d'ltalia!
L'ltalia s'6 desta! "

In the night which followed on the fourteenth
day of the Vicar's absence, Adone, unable to either
rest or to labour, went into the cattle stalls and fed
and watered all the animals, then he crossed the
river and went along its north bank by the same
path which he had followed with DonSilverio two
weeks earlier. He had passed to and fro that path
often since his friend's departure, for by it the
priest must return ; there was no other way to and
from the west.

Rain had fallen in the night and the river was
buoyant, and the grass sparkled, the mountains
were of sapphire blue, and above the shallows
clouds of flies and gnats were fluttering, water-
lilies were blossoming where the water was still,
and in the marshes buffaloes pushed their dark
forms amongst the nymphoea and the nuphur.

He had no longer any eyes to see these things ;
he only strained his sight to catch the first glimpse
of a tired traveller. The landscape here was level
for many miles of moor and pasture and a
human form approaching could be seen from a
great distance. It was such a dawn as he had
used to love beyond all other blessings of nature;
but now the buffaloes in the pools and swamps
were not more blind to its charm than he.

The sun rose behind him out of the unseen
Adrian waves, and a rosy light spread itself over

The Waters of Edera

163

the earth ; and at that moment he saw afar off a
dark form moving slowly. With a loud cry he
sprang forward and ran with the fleetness of a colt
the hundred yards which were between him and
that familiar figure.

" My son ! my dear son ! " cried Don Silverio,
as Adone reached him and fell on his knees on
the scorched turf.

" At last ! " he murmured, choked with joy and
fear. " Oh, where have you been ? We are half
dead, your people and I. What tidings do you
bring? What comfort ? "

" Rise up, and remember that you are a man,"
said Don Silverio; and the youth, gazing upwards
keenly into his face, suddenly lost all hope, seeing
no hope on that weary countenance.

" You cannot save us ? " he cried, with a
scream like a wounded hare's.

" I cannot, my dear son," answered Don Sil-
verio.

Adone dropped backward as if a bullet had
struck him; his head smote the dry ground; he
had lost consciousness, his face was livid.

Don Silverio raised him and dragged him into
the shade of a bay-tree and dashed water on him
from the river. In a few minutes he was roused
and again conscious, but on his features there was
a dazed, stunned look.

" You cannot save u'^? " he repeated.

164

The Waters of Edera

" Neither you nor I have millions," said Don
Silverio with bitterness. " It is with no other
weapon that men can fight successfully now."

Adone had risen to his feet; he was pale as a
corpse, only the blood was set in his forehead.

"Is it true, then?" he muttered. "Do they
mean to come here ? "

" Yes."

"Who are they? Jews?"

"Jews and Gentiles. There is no difference
between those races now; they have a common
Credo — greed; they adore one Jehovah — gold.
My boy, I am very tired, and you are ill. Let us
get home as quickly as we can."

" I am not ill. It was nothing. It has passed.
Tell me the worst."

" The worst, in a word, is that a foreign com-
pany, already established for several years in this
country, has obtained faculty to turn this water
out of its course and use it as the motive power of
an electric railway and of an acetylene manufac-
tory."

" And this cannot be undone? "

" I fear not ; they are rich and powerful. What
are we ? Let me get home. There you shall hear
all, and judge."

Adone asked and said no more. He turned and
went backward. His steps were slow and un-
steady, his head was hung down. The dry, hot

The Waters of Edera

165

air was like fire around them; the sun, though
still low, darted fierce rays upon them like spears
thrown with a sure aim. He had not known how
much and how strongly he had hoped until now
that he heard that there was no hope left.

Don Silverio, though he did not speak of him-
self, was faint with fatigue; the return journey
had tried him more cruelly than the first, since
on his way to Rome he had been sustained by the
hope to find the project abandoned, or at the least
uncertain. He had spent all his scanty earnings,
so hardly and tediously collected through a score
of years, and he had brought back to his poor
people and to the youth he loved, nothing except
the confirmation of their worst fears. It was
with diflficulty that he could drag his aching feet
over the burnt grass back to his parish.

When they reached the bridge they were on
the village side of the stream. Adone, with an
effort, raised himself from the trance into which
he had fallen.

** Forgive me, sir ; you are overtired, you must
rest. I will come to you later."

** No, no," said Don Silverio quickly, for he
thought the youth in no state to be alone. " I
will wash and take a cup of coffee, then I will tell
you all. Wait in my book-room."

They went together to his house. There was
no one in the street or on the walls except some

i66

The Waters of Edera

children gathering dandelion leaves in the ditch.
They reached the priest's house unobserved ; only
the little dog, who was making his diurnal search
there, rushed out of the entrance in a frenzy of
rapture.

" Poor little man ! Dear Signorino ! " mur-
mured Don Silverio, and he took the little crea-
ture in his arms. Then he opened the door of his
study. " Wait there," he said to Adone. " I will
soon come downstairs. I will only Wc'.sh ofif the
dust of this journey."

Adone obeyed.

The room was dusky, cool, silent; he sat down
in it and waited; he could hear the loud, uneven
beating of his own heart in the stillness.

As he felt now, so he thought must feel men
who have heard their own death-sentence, and
are thrust alone into a cell.

If Don Silverio could do nothing, to whom
could he turn ?

Could he induce the people to rise? It would
be their ruin as well as his, this rape of the river.
Would they bear it as they bore taxation, neglect,
conscription, hunger ?

It was not half an hour, although it seemed to
him half a day, which passed before Don Silverio
came down the stone stair, his little dog running
and leaping about him. He seated himself before
Adone, by the shuttered window through which,

The Waters of Edera

167

by chinks and holes in the wood, there came rays

of light and tendrils of vine.

Then detail by detail, with lucidity and brevity,
he narrated all he had heard and done in Rome,
and which it was exceeding hard to bring home to
the comprehension of a mind wholly ignorant of
such things.

" When I reached Rome," he explained, " I
was for some days in despair. The deputy of
San Beda was not at the Chamber. He was in
Sicily. Another deputy, a friend of the Prior at
San Beda, to whom I had a letter, was very ill
with typhoid fever. I knew not where to turn. I
could not knock at the doors of strangers without
credentials. Then I remembered thac one with
whom I had been friends, great friends, when we
were both seminarists, had become a great man
at the Vaticatio. It was scarcely possible that he,
in his great elevation, would recollect one unseen
for a quart^^r of a century. But I took courage
and sent in my name. Imagine my surprise and
emotion when I was admitted at once to his pres-
ence, and was received by him with the uttermost
kindness. He assisted me in every way. He
could not of course move ostensibly in a matter
of the government, himself, but he gave me letters
to those who could obtain me the information and
the interviews which I desired. He was good-
ness itself, and through him I was even received

i68

The Waters of Edera

by his Holiness. But from all those political and
financial people whom I saw I learned but the
same thing. The matter is far advanced, is be-
yond any alteration. The company is formed.
The concurrence of parliament is not to be,
but has long been, given. The ministry favours
the project. They all repeated to me the same
formula : public works are to the public interest.
They babbled commonplaces. They spoke of
great advantages to the province. I pleaded as
forcibly as I could in the interests of this valley,
and I opposed fact to formula. But my facts
were not those which they wanted; and they told
me, politely but unmistakably, that a churchman
should not seek to interfere with civil matters.
The promoters are masters of the position. They
are all of accord : the foreigi bankers, the Italian
bankers; the foreign engineers, the Italian en-
gineers; the Technical ofnce, the President of
Council, the dicastro of Hygiene, of Agriculture,
of Public Works, all of them. Our poor little
valley seems to them a desirable pre}'; they have
seized it, they will keep it- They w-ere all cour-
teous enough. They are polite and even unwill-
ing to cause what they call unnecessary friction,
But they will not give an inch. Their talons are
in our flesh as an eagle's in a lamb's. One thinks
fondly that what a man possesses is his own, be it
land, house, stream — what not ! But we mistake.

The Waters of Edera

169

There is a thing stronger, higher, more powerful
than any poor title of property acquired by herit-
age, by purchase, or by labour. It is what they
call expropriation. You think the Edera cannot
be touched: it can be expropriated. You think
the Terra Vergine cannot be touched: it can be
expropriated. Against expropriation no rights
can stand. It is the concentration and crystallisa-
tion of theft lesritimatised bv Government — that is
by Force. A vagrant may not take a sheaf of
your wheat, a fowl from your hen-house : if he do
so, the law protects you and punishes him. A
syndicate of rich men, of powerful men, may take
the whole of your land, and the State will compel
you to accept any arbitrary price which it may
choose to put upon your loss. According as you
are rich or poor yourself, so great or so small will
be the amount awarded to you. All the sub-
prefects, all the syndics, all the officials in this
province, will be richly rewarded; the people de-
frauded of the soil will get what may be given
them by an enforced valuation. I have conversed
with all kinds and conditions of men; and I have
heard only one statement in the mouths of all ; the
matter is beyond all alteration. There is money
in it ; the men whose trade is money will not let it
go. My son, my dearest son, be calm, be prudent.
Violence can only injure yourself, and it can save
nothing."

170

The Waters of Edera

He had for the moment spoken as he had been
speaking for the last two weeks to men of educa-
tion and of the workh

He was recalled to the fact that his present
auditor did not reason, did not comprehend, only
felt, and was drunk with his own force of feeling.
The look on Adone's face appalled him.

The youth seemed almost to have no intel-
hgence left, almost as if all which had been
said to him had reached neither his ear nor
his brain.

Don Silverio had been in the world of men, and
unconsciously he had adopted their phraseology
and their manner. To Adone, who had expected
some miracle, some rescue almost archangelic,
some promise of immediate and divine interposi-
tion, these calm and rational statements conveyed
scarcely any sense, so terrible was the destruction
of his hopes. All the trust and candour and
sweetness of his nature turned to gall.

He listened, a sullen, savage darkness stealing
over his countenance.

*' And our rights? Theirs? — mine?" he said
as Don Silverio paused.

" For all rights taken away they vi^ill give legal
compensation."

" You dare repeat that, sir ? "

Don Silverio controlled his indignation with
difficulty.

The Waters of Edera

171

I dare do whatever I deem right to do. You
should know that by this time."

" You think this right ? "

" I think it right to repeat exactly what has
been said to me. I do not of necessity approve
because I repeat."

" You know no compensation is possible ! "

" Morally, none. I speak of but what law al-
lows."

"The law of pirates, of cut-throats!"

" The law of the State, alas ! "

Adone laughed. His hearer had heard such
laughter as that in madhouses.

" The State kills a soldier, and gives his fam-
ily a hundred francs! That is the compensation
of the State. If they emptied their treasuries,
could they give the soldier back his life? If they
emptied their treasuries, could they give us back
what they will take from us? "

*' My dear son, do not doubt my sympathy. All
my heart is with you. But what can be done?
Can a poor village, a poor commune, struggle
with any chance of success against a rich com-
pany and a government? Can a stalk of wheat
resist the sickle? Can an ear of wheat resist the
threshing-flail ? I have told you the story of Don
Quixote della Mancha. Would you fight the
empty air like him? "

Adone did not reply.

1/2

The Waters of Edera

His beautiful face grew moody, dark, fierce ; in
his eyes flamed passions which had no voice upon
his lips; his white teeth ground against one
another.

" Believe me, Adone," said his friend, " we are
in evil days when men babble of liberty, and are
so intent on the mere empty sound of their lips
that they perceive not the fetters on their wrists
and feet. There was never any time when there
was so little freedom and so little justice as in
ours. Two gigantic dominions now rule the hu-
man race; they are the armies and the money-
makers. Science serves them turn by turn, and
receives from each its wage. The historian
Mommsen has w'ritten that we are probably in-
ferior both in intelligence and in humanity, in
prosperity and in civilization, at the close of this
century to what the human race was under
Severus Antoninus; and it is true."

Adone did not seem to hear. What were these
abstract reasonings to him? All he cared for were
his river and his fields.

" I sought for an old friend of mine in Rome,"
said Don Silverio, endeavouring to gain his atten-
tion and divert his thoughts, "one Pamfilio Scoria.
He was a learned scholar; he had possessed a small
competence and a house of his own, small too, but
of admirable architecture, a Quattro-centisto
house. I could not find this house in Rome. After

The Waters of Edera

173

long search I learned that it had been pulled
down to make a new street. Pamfilio Scoria had
in vain tried to preserve his rights. The city had
turned him out and taken his property, paying
what it chose. His grief was so great to see it
destroyed, and to be turned adrift with his book
and manuscripts, that he fell ill and died not long
afterwards. On the site of the house there is a
drinking-place kept by Germans; a street railway
runs before it. This kind of theft, of pillage,
takes place every week. It is masked as public
utility. We are not alone sufferers from such a
crime."

Adone was still silent.

His thoughts were not such as he could utter
aloud in the priest's presence ; and he heard noth-
ing that was said; he heard only little Nerina's
voice saying : " Could we not kill these men ? "
That flutelike whisper seemed to him to sigh with
the very voice of the river itself.

Don Silverio rose, his patience, great as it was,
exhausted.

" My son, as you do not give ear to me, it is
useless for me to speak. I must go to my office.
The Prior from San Beda desires to return this
evening. I have done all I can. I have told you
the facts as they stand. Take courage. Be peace-
able for vour mother's snVe nnd restrain yourself
for ycnir own. It is a frightful calamity which

174

The Waters of Edera

hangs over us all. But it is our duty to meet it
like men."

" Like men ! " muttered Adone as he rose to his
feet; had not the child from the Abruzzi rocks a
better sense of man's duty than this priest so
calm and wise?

** Men resist," he said very low.

** Men resist," repeated Don Silverio. '* They
resist when their resistm^^e serves any purpose,
but when it can only serve to crush them uselessly
under a mass of iron they are not men if they re-
sist, but madmen."

" Farewell, sir," said Adone.

And with an obeisance he went out of the
chamber.

" Poor boy ! Poor, passionate, dear youth ! "
thought Don Silverio as the door closed. " He
thinks me cold and without emotion; how little
he knows ! He cannot suffer as I suffer for him
and for my poor wretched people. What will
they do when they shall know? They will mourn
like starved sheep bleating in a field of stones,
and I, their sliepherd, shall not have a blade of
grass wherewith to comfort them! "

Adone's sight was trncbled as soon as he
passed out of the dusky room into the blaze of
noonday sunshine. His eyes seemed filled with
blood. His brain was dizzy. That which had been
his sheet-anchor in all doubts and contrition, his
faith in and his reverence for Don Silverio availed
him nothing now. A blind sympathy with his
most violent instincts was the only thing which
could now content or console him.

He was in that state to which all counsels of
moderation appear but so much treason and un-
kindness. As he went out of the priest's house
in that dazzling light, a hand caught his sleeve
and that y-ung flutelike voice of which he had
though I murmured to him —

"Adone! what tidings? What has he told
you? "

Nerina, having run across the bridge and up
the street after the little dog, had seen him and
Don Silverio enter, and had waited for Adone to
come out of the house. Adone i ished her away.

" Let me be! " he said im])atiently. " It is all
bad— bad — bad. Bad as ill-blood. Bad as crime."

175

■■l

176

The Waters of Edera

She clung to his arm nevertheless.

" Come into the church and tell me. No one
cares as I do."

" Poor little soul ! "

He let her draw him into the great porch of the
church and thence into ^-he church itself; it was
dark as it always was, cold as an autumn evening,
damp even in the canicular heat.

" No one will hear ; tell me ! " said the child.

He told her.

" And what are you to do ? " she asked, her
eyes dilated with horror.

"' According to him," said Adone bitterly, " I
am to be meek and helpless as the heifer which
goes to the slaughter. Men must not resist what
the law permits."

Nerina was mute. To dispute what Don Sil-
verio said was like blasphemy to her, she hon-
oured him with all her soul, but she loved
Adone.

She loved the Edera water too; that fair green
rippling water on whose bank she had sat naked
under the dock leaves tlie day the two rams
had fought. That which was threatened was an
unholy, wicked, cruel robbery. Was it indeed
necessary to yield to it in submission?

She remembered a saying of Baruffo's : " If a
man stand up to me I leave him some co:ns in
his pocket, some life in his body; but if he crouch

The Waters of Edera

^77

o one

of the
it was
ening,

child.

d, her

ly. " I

which
t what

)n Sil-

e hon-
loved

• green

naked

rams

vvas an
indeed

"If a

D"ns in
crouch

and cringe I stick him in the throat. He is a
craven."

The doctrine of Baruffo seemed to her the
more sound. It warmed the blood of the little
Abruzzi-born maiden to recall it. In the high
mountains and forests the meeker virtues are not
greatly honoured.

She stood by Adone's side, knitting her brows
under her auburn curling locks, clinching her
hands.

" Is there one who does this evil most of all? "
she said at length. " One we could reach ? "

" You are a brave child, Nerina! " said Adone,
and his words made her proud. " I fear there is
a crowd. Such men are like locusts ; they come in
swarms. But the first man who touches the
water "

" Shall sup of it and drown."

The little girl added the words with a fierce joy
in her great bright eyes.

" Hush ! " said Adone, " and get you home-
ward, and tell my mother that Don Silverio has
returned, and that I will come back to my work
in a little while. Tell her he says there is no
hope."

Nerina obeyed him instantly, her bare feet fly-
ing over the stones of the street. He was left
alone in the sombre church with the great winged
angels of stone y.bove his head.

178

The Waters of Edera

He was grateful for its gloom. He shrank
from the light of the morning. Every drop of
blood in his body, and in liis brain, and in his
limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire — a fire which
all the waters of the Edera would never quench.

How could they be accused of rebellion or
wrong-doing because they wanted to keep the
water running in the channel which it had made
for itself in the very beginning of the world?

The Edera was ancient as its neighlyurs, the
Fiumicino which heard the voice of Caesar; or the
Marechia which was bridged by Augustus; ancient
as the fountain of Arethusa, as the lake of Diana
Nemorensis. What sacrilege could be more hein-
ous than to chase it from its chosen course? No
Lucumon of Etruria or Esarch of Ravenna or
Pope of Rome had ever dared to touch it. The
revolutionists ! they, who on^) sought to preserve
it? The revolutionists were those who with alien
hands and vampire's greed would seek to disturb
its peace.

XII

All that day the people of Ruscino crowded
round the Presbytery.

" What of the Edera water, sir ? " they asked
him a hundred times in the shriH cries of the
women, in the rude behow of the men, in the
high-pitched, dissonant clamour of angry speak-
ers. And all the day his patience and kindness
were abused and liis nerves racked and strained
in the effort to persuade them that the river which
ran beneath their walls was no more theirs than
the stars which shone above it.

It was hopeless to bring home to their intelli-
gence either the invalidity of their claim, or the
peril which would lie in their opposition.

" 'Twas there in the beginning of time," they
said, " There it must be for our children's chil-
dren."

He talked nonsense, they thought ; who should
be able to stop a river which was for ever run-
ning? The Edera water was carried in the womb
of the Leonessa; Leonessa gave it fresh birth
every day.

Yes ! thought Don Silverio as he walked by the

179

i8o

The Waters of Edera

river after sunset and watched its bright, impetu-
ous current dash under the stones and shingle
whilst two kingfishers flashed along its surface.
Yes, truly Nature would pour it forth every day
from her unfailing breast so long as man did not
do it outrage. But how long would that be?
A year, two years, three years, at most; then its
place would know it no more, and its song would
be silent. The water-pipet would make its nest
no more in its sedges, and the blue porphyrion
would woo his mate no more on its bosom. As
one of the rich men in Rome had said to him with
a cynical smile, " The river will be there always,
only it will be dry ! "

In the gloaming he went and spoke to Adone's
mother. She was at her spinning-wheel, but her
hands moved mechanically; her face was dark
and her eyelids swollen.

" My friend," he said, as he sat down on the
bench beneath the rose-tree, " I have brought you
ill-tidings."

" It is true then, sir? "

" Alas ! "

" I do not believe it. God will not let it be."

" Would that I could think so."

** 'Tis you, sir, who should think so, and not I."

" Madame Clelia," he said, with some impa-
tience, " it is no use to dream dreams. Try and

The Waters of Edera

i8i

persuade your son to accept the inevitable. My
words seem harsh. They are not so. But I dare
not let you cherish your illusions like this; blind
yourself to fact, you expect some supernatural in-
tercession. They will take your river; they will
take your lands. Your house will be yours no
more. If you do not go peaceably they will have
you turned out, as if you were a debtor. This
may take some time for it will be done with all
due legal forms, but it will be done. They will
pay you and your son some value by appraisement,
but they will take your land and your house and
all that is yours and his ; I have seen the plans in
Rome. Can you think that I should invent this
to torture you? There will be a process, a sen-
tence, an award; the money the law allots to you
will be strictly paid to you ; but you will be driven
away from the Terra Vergine. Realise this.
Try and keep your reason and save your son from
madness. Surely, where there is great love be-
tween two people, and bonds of memory and mu-
tual duty, and strong faith, there a home may be
made anywhere, even over seas?"

Clelia Alba snapped with violence the thread
she span. ** They have talked you ( ver, sir," she
said curtly. *' When you went away you were
with us."

" With you! " he echoed. ** In heart, in pity,

l82

The Waters of Edera

in sympathy, yes; never could I be otherwise.
But were I to see you struck with Hghtning,
should I save you by telling you that lightning
did not kill? I did not know that the enterprise
was as mature as I found it to be when I saw the
promoters of it in Rome. But I know now that
it has been long in incubation ; you must remem-
ber that every bend and runlet of the water are
marked on the ordnance maps; every strcarn,
however small, is known to the technical office,
and the engineers civil and military. I abhor the
project. It is to me a desecration, an infamy, a
robbery; it will ruin the Vald'edera from every
point of view; but we can do nothing; this is
what I implore you to realise. We are as help-
less as one of your fowls when you cut its throat.
Violence can only hurry your son into the grip of
the law. His rights are morally as plain as yon-
der snow on those mountains; but, because they
will buy his rights at what will be publicly esti-
mated at a fair price, the law will not allow him
to consider himself injured. My dear friend, you
area woman of sense and foresight; try to see this
thing as it is."

" I will hear what Adone says, sir," replied
Clelia Alba doggedly. " If he bids me burn the
house, I shall burn it."

Don Silverio was heart-sick and impatient.
What use was it to argue with such minds as

The Waters of Edera

183

these? As well might he waste his words on the
trunks of the olives, on the oxen in their stalls.

They were wronged.

That the wrong done them was masked under
specious pretences and was protected Ijv all the
plate armour of law and government, made the
outrage little the worse to them. The brigand
from the hills who used to harry their cattle and
pillage their strong-box looked to them a hero, a
saint, a Christ, compared to these modern thieves
who were environed with all the defences and
impunity which the law and the State could give.
When an earth-shock makes the soil under your
feet quiver, and gape, and mutter, you feel that
unnatural forces are being hurled against you, you
feel that you are the mere sport and jest of an
unjust deity. This was what they felt now.

" Nay," said Clelia Alba, " if the earth opened,
and took us, it would be kinder; it would bury us
at least under our own roof tree."

What use was it to speak to such people as
these of the right of expropriation granted by par
liament, of the authority of a dicastcro, and of a
prefecture, of the sophistries and arguments of
lawyers, of the adjudication of values, of the
appraisement of claims? They were wronoed-
and they came of a race and of a soil in which the
only fitting redresser of wrong was revenge.

"Mother," cried Adone, "my father would

184

The Waters of Edera

not have given up his land as meekly as a sheep
yields up her life."

"No," said Clelia Alba; "whether he came
from those war-lords of old I know not, but he
would have fought as they fought."

XIII

The autumn and winter passed without more
being heard in the Vald'edera of the new invasion.
The peasantry generally believed that such silence
was favoura1)le to their wishes ; but Dun Silverio
knew that it was otherwise. The promoters of
the work did not concern themselves with the local
population, they dealt with greater folks; with
those who administered the various communes,
and who controlled the valuation of the land
through which the course of the Edera ran;
chiefly those well-born persons who constituted
the provincial council. A great deal of money
would change hands, but it was intended, by all
through whose fingers those heavy sums would
pass, that as little of the money as possible should
find its way to the owners of the soil. A public
work is like a fat hog; between the slaughterers,
the salesmen, the middlemen, and the consumers,
little falls to the original holder of the hog. The
peasants of the Vald'edera were astonished that
none came to treat with them; but they did not
understand that they dwelt under a paternal gov-
ernment, and the first care of a paternal govern-

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The Waters of Edera

ment is to do everything for its children which
is likely to promise any profit itself.

The men of business whom Don Silverio had
seen in Rome did not trouble themselves with the
rustic proprietors of either water or land; they
treated with the great officials of the department,
with the deputies, the prefects, and sub-prefects,
the syndics and assessors; so a perfect silence on
the question reigned from the rise of the river to
its mouth, and many of the men said over their
wood-fires that they had been scared for nothing.
The younger men, however, and those who were
under Adone's influence, were more wary; they
guessed that the matter was being matured with-
out them; that when the hog should be bacon,
should be cut up and cured, and eaten, the small-
est and rustiest flitch would then be divided
amoi'gst them. Agents, such agents as were
ministerial instruments of these magnates in elec-
tion time, went amongst the scattered people and
spoke to them of the great public utility of the
contemplated works, and made them dispirited
and doubtful of the value of their holdings, and
uncertain of the legality of their tenures. But
these agents were cautious and chary of promises,
for they knew that in this district the temper of
men was proud and hot and revengeful ; and they
knew also that when these rural owners should
be brought into the courts to receive their price,

The Waters of Edera

187

they would be dealt with just as the great men
chose. One by one, so that each should be unsup-
ported by his neighbours, the men of the valley
were summoned, now to this town, now to the
other, and were deftly argued with, and told that
what was projected would be their salvation, and
assured that the delegates who would be sent in
their name by their provincial council to the capi-
tal would defend all their dearest interests.

The rich man, the man of business, the man of
cities may receive in such transactions compensa-
tion, which is greatly to their advantage, because
traffic is their trade, because to buy and sell, and
turn and re-turn, and roll the ball of gold so that
it grows bigger every hour, is their custom and in-
terest. But the poor man, the rustic, the man
with the one ewe lamb, loses always, whether he
assents to the sale or has it forced upon him.
These people of the valley might have a little
ready money given them on valuation, but it
would be money clipped and cropped by the
avarice of intermediates until little of it would
remain and they would be driven out to begin life
anew ; away from their old rooftree and the fruits
of long years of labour.

From far and near men came to Ruscino to take
counsel of its vicar; his wisdom being esteemed
and his intelligence known in the valley beyond
the confines of his parish ; and what advice could

i88

The Waters of Edera

he give them ? He could but tell them that it was
useless to kick against the pricks. He knew so
well the cold, curt, inflexible official answer; the
empty, vapouring regrets, false, simpering, Phari-
saical ; the parrot-phrases of public interests, public
considerations, public welfare ; the smile, the sneer,
the self-complacent shrug of those whose bribe is
safely pocketed and who know that only the peo-
ple whom they profess to serve will suffer. To
him as to them it seemed a monstrous thing to
take away the water from its natural channel and
force the men who lived on it and by it to alter all
their ways of life and see their birthplace changed
into a desert in order that aliens might make
money. But he could not counsel them to resist ;
no resistance was possible. It was like any other
tyranny of the State; like the fiscal brutality
which sold up a poor man's hayrick or clothing
because he could not pay the poll-tax. If the poor
man resisted, if he fired his old fowling-piece, or
used his knife on the minions of the State, what
use was such resistance? He went to rot in pri-
son.

His calling, his conscience, his good sense, his
obedience to law, all alike compelled him to urge
on them patience, submission, and inaction before
the provocation of a great wrong. He dared not
even let them see one tithe of the sympathy he

The Waters of Edera

189

felt, lest if he did so they should draw from it an
incentive to illegal action.

The part which he was obliged to take in thus
persuading the people to be tranquil under in-
justice estranged him farther and farther from
Adone Alba, who found it a cowardice and a
treachery, although he dared not say so in words.
Had he retained the coolness of reason the youth
would have known and acknowledged that in the
position of Don Silverio no other course would
have been possible or decent. But reason had
long left him, and inaction and impulse alone re-
mained. He would not allow that a wrong might
be condemned, and yet endured. To him all en-
durance had in it the manners of condonation.

He ceased to have any faith in his ^ nd and
teacher; and gradually grew more and more
alienated from him ; their intimate affection, their
frequent intercourse, their long walks and even-
ing meetings were over ; and even as his spiritual
director the vicar had no longer power over him.
Most of his actions and intentions were concealed ;
except in the younger men of the district who saw
as he saw he had now no confidence in any one.
The impending loss of the land and the water
turned all the sweetness of his nature to gall. He
thought that never in the history of the world had
any wrong so black been done. He, himself,

190

The Waters of Edera

flung broadcast the fires of burning incitation
without heeding or caring whither the flames
might reach. Riots had been successful before
this; why noc now? He was young enough and
innocent enough to beheve in the divine right of a
just cause. If that were denied, what remained
to the weak?

If he could, he would have set the valley in
flames from one end to the other rather than have
allowed the foreigners to seize it. Had not his
forefathers perished in fire on yonder hill rather
than cede to the Borgia?

Evening after evening he looked at the sun set-
ting behind the Rocca and felt the black rage in
him gnaw at his heart like a vulture.

They would offer him money for this dear
earth, for this fair, beloved stream! — the mere
thought choked him as a man who loved his wife
would be choked at the thought of her dishonoured
sale.

Some were half persuaded that it would be a
fine thing to get some crisp banknotes in exchange
for waste ground which yielded little, or a cabin
which was falling to pieces, or a strip of woodland
which gave them fuel, but not much more. But
the majority were angry, irreconcilable, furious to
lose the water, full of their wrongs. These were
glad to find in Adone Alba a spokesman and a
leader; they were tow which caught fire at his

The Waters of Edera

191

torch. They comprehended Httle, but they knew
that they were wronged; and they agreed with
him that the labourers who should come from over
the border to meddle with them should be made
to rue it bitterly.

The Italian goes over seas, indeed; huddled
under the hatches of emigrant ships; miserable,
starved, confined; unable to move, scarce able to
breathe, like the unhappy beasts carried with him.
But he never goes willingly; he never wrenches
himself from the soil without torn nerves and ach-
ing heart ; if he live and make a little money in exile
he comes back to the shadow of the village church,
to the sound of the village bell, which he knew
in his boyhood, to walk in the lanes where he
threw his wooden quoit as a lad, and to play domi-
noes under the green bough of the winehouse
where as a child he used to watch his elders and
envy them.

Most of these people dwelling on the Edera
water had not been five miles away from che river
in all their lives. The moorland birds and beasts
were farther afield than they. They had no in-
terest in what was beyond their own freehold;
they did not even know or care whither the water
went, or whence it came. Where it was, they
owned it. That was enough for them.

" Sir, what is it Adone does? " said Clelia Alba,
one dusky and stormy eve after vespers. " At

192

The Waters of Edera

nightfall out he goes; and never a word to me,
only * Your blessing, mother,' he says, as if he
might lose his life where he goes. I thought at
first it was some love matter, for he is young ; but
it cannot be that, for he is too serious, and he goes
fully armed, with his father's pistols in his belt
and his own long dagger in his stocking. True,
they go so to a love tryst, if it be a dangerous
one; if the woman be wedded; only I think it is
not that, for men in love are different. I think
that he broods over some act."

" Neither you nor I can do aught. He is of
age to judge for himself," said Don Silverloj
** but, like you, I do not think a woman is the
cause of his absence."

" Can you not speak to him, sir? "

" I have spoken. It is useless. He is moved
by a motive stronger than any argument we can
use. In a word, good Clelia, this coming seizure
of the water is suffering so great to him that he
loses his reason. He is trying to make the men
of the commune see as he sees. He wants to
rouse them to arm them. He might as well set
the calves in your stalls to butt the mountain
granite."

" Maybe, sir," said Clelia Alba, unwillingly ;
but her eyes gleamed, and her stern, proud face
grew harder. " But he has the right to do it if he
can. If they touch the water they are thieves,

The Waters of Edera

193

worse than those who came clown from the hills
in the years of my girlhood."

" You would encourage him in insurrection,
then?"

** Nay, I would not do that ; but neither would
I blame him. Every man has a right to defend
his own. Neither his father nor mine, sir, were
cowards."

" This is no question of cowardice. It is a
question of common sense. A few country lads
cannot oppose a government. With what
weapons can they do so? Courage I honour;
without it all active virtues are supine; but it is
not courage to attempt the impossible, to lead the
ignorant to death — or worse."

" Of that my son must judge, sir," said Adone's
mother, inflexible to argument. " I shall not set
myself against him. He is master now. If he
bids me fire the place I shall do it. For four-and-
twenty years he has obeyed me like a little child ;
never a murmur, never a frown. Now he is his
own master, and master of the land. I shall do
as he tells me. It is his turn now, and he is no
fool, sir, Adone."

" He is no fool ; no. But he is beside himself.
He is incapable of judgment. His blood is on
fire and fires his brain."

" I think not, sir. He is quiet. He speaks
little "

194

The Waters of Edera

" Because he meditates what will not bear
speech. Were he violent I should be less alarmed.
He shuns me — ivt — his oldest friend."

" Because no doubt, sir, he feels you are against
him."

" Against him ! How can I, being what I am,
be otherwise? Could you expect me to foment
insurrection, and what less than that can opposi-
tion such as he intends become? "

" You speak as you feel bound to speak, sir,
no doubt."

" But think of the end ? Must not every action
be weighed and considered and judgment passed
on it by what will be its issue ? No rising of our
poor people can effect anything except their own
destruction. It is only a demagogue who would
urge them on to it. Adone is not a demagogue.
He is a generous youth frantic from sorrow, but
helpless. Can you not see that?"

" I do not see that he is helpless," said his
mother with obstinacy. " The thing they are
about to do us is unjust. I would load a gun my-
self against them, and if money be what is wanted
I would give Adone my pearls. He asks me for
nothing, but when he does I will strip myself to
my shift to aid him."

" It is a terrible madness ! " cried Don Silverio.
" What can your fowling-piece or your necklace
do against all the force these speculators and con-

The Waters of Edera

195

tractors will employ? It is a great, a heinous,
wrong which will be done to you ; that no one can
feel more strongly than I. But there are wrongs
to which we must submit when we are weak ; and,
my good Clelia, against this wc p<H^r folks in
the Vale of Edera are as weak as the teal in the
marshes against the swivel guns of the sports-
men's punts."

But he argued in vain ; logic and persuasion are
alike useless when opposed to the rock of ignor-
ance and obstinacy. She held him in deep rever-
ence; she brought her conscience to his judgment;
she thought him beyond ordinary humanity; but
when he endeavoured to persuade her that her son
was wrong he failed.

" Sir, you know that this crime against the river
will ruin us," she said doggedly. " Why then
should you try to tie our hands ? I do not know
what Adone does; his mind is hid from me, but
if, as you say, he wants a rising of our people, it
is natural and just."

When the mind of the peasant — man or
woman — be made up in its stubljornness. all learn-
ing, wisdom, experience, even fact speaks in vain ;
it opposes to all proofs the passive resistance of a
dogged incredulity ; to reason with it is as useless
as to quarry stone with a razor.

Many and many a time had he given up in ex-
haustion, and nausea his endeavours to convince

196

The Waters of Edera

c:
<

the rural mind of some simple fact, some clear
cause, some elementary principle. He knew that
Clclia Alba would never believe in tiie exile which
would be her certain fate until the armed and
liveried creatures of the State should drive her
from her home by order of the State. He had
seen in Rome that there was no possible chance
of opposing this enterprise against the Edera
water. It had been decided on by men of money
who had the ear of ministers, the precedence in
ante-chambers, the means of success in political
departments and in commercial centres. A few
scattered provincial owners of land and labourers
on land might as well try to oppose these men as
the meek steinbok in the mountain solitudes to
escape the expanding bullet of a prince's rifle.
Yet he also saw how impossible it was to expect
a young man like Adone, with his lineage, his
temperament, his courage, and his mingling of
ignorance and knowledge, to accept the inevitable
without combat. As well might he be bidden to
accept dishonour.

The remorse in his soul was keen, inasmuch as
without him Adone would never have known of
his descant from the lords of Ruscino, and never,
probably, have acquired that " little" learning
which a poet of the north has said is a dangerous
thing.

Better," thought Don Silverio, with torment-

The Waters of Edera

197

; clear
\v that
which
:cl and
ve her
le had
chance
Edera
money
mce in
oHtical
A few
Dourers
men as
ides to
s rifle,
expect
ge, his
Hng of
ivitable
Iden to

inch as
own of
I never,
earning
igerous

Drment-

ing self-reproach, " lictter have left him to his
plough, to his scythe, to his reaping-hook; better
have left him in ignorance of the meaning of art
and of study; better have left him a mere peasant
to beget peasants like himself. Then he would
have suffered less, and might possibly have taken
peaceably such compensation as the law would
have allowed him for the loss to his land, and
have gone away to the West, as so many go,
leaving the soil they were born on to [> iss out of
culture."

Would Adone ever have done tl it? No: hz
would not; he was wedded to the soil like the
heaths that grew out of it. He might be violently
dragged away, but he would never live elsewhere;
his heart had struck its roots too deeply into the
earth which nurtured him.

" Why did you tell him of all the great men
that lived? " Clelia Alba had often said to him.
" Why did you fill his soul with that hunger which
no bread that is baked can content? We, who
work to live, have no time to do aught except
work, and sleep awhile to get strength for more
work; and so on, always the same, until age ties
knots in our sinews, and makes our blood thin
and slow. What use is it to open gates to him
which he must never pass, to make his mind a
tangled skein that can never be undone? When
you work hard you want i. rest in your resting

198

The Waters of Edera

hours, not ti dream. Dreaming is no rest. He
is always dreaming, and now he dreams of blood
and fire."

His heart was with them, and by all the obli-
gations of his calling was forced to be against
them. He was of a militant temper; he would
gladly have led them into action as did the mar-
tial priests of old ; but his sense, his duty, his con-
science, all forbade him to even show them such
encouragement as would lie in sympathy. Had
he been rich he would have taken their cause into
the tribunals and contested this measure inch by
inch, however hopelessly. But who would plead
for a poor parish, for a penniless priest? What
payment could he offer, he who could scarcely
find the coins to fill his salt-box or to mend his
surplice?

A great anxiety consumed him. He saw no
way out of this calamity. The people were
wronged, grossly wronged, but how could they
right that wrong? Bloodshed would not alter it,
or even cure it. What was theirs, and the earth's,
was to be taken from them; and how were they
to be persuaded that to defend their own would
be a crime ?

" There is nothing, then, out for the people to
lie down and let the artillery roll over them ! "
said Adone once, with bitter emphasis.

" And the drivers and the gunners are their

The Waters of Edera

199

own brothers, sons, nephews, who will not check
their gallop an instant for that fact ; for the worst
thing about force is that it makes its human in-
struments mere machines like the guns which they
manoeuvre," thought Don Silverio, as he an-
swered aloud : ** No ; I fear there will be nothing
else for them to do under any tyranny, until all
the nations of the earth shall cease to send their
children to be made the janissaries of the State.
No alteration of existing dominions will be pos-
sible so long as the Armies exist."

Adone was silent; convinced against his will,
and therefore convinced without effect or ad-
hesion.

He dared not tell his friend of the passionate
propaganda which he had begun up and down the
course of the Edera, striving to make these stocks
and stones stir, striving to make the blind see, the
deaf hear, the infirm rise and leap.

" Let us go and make music," said the priest at
last. " That will not harm any one, and will do
our own souls good. It is long since I heard your
voice."

" It will be longer," thought Adonc, as he an-
swered: " Excuse me, sir; I cannot think of any
other thing than this great evil which hangs over
us. There is not one of our country people who
does not curse the scheme. They are frightened
and stupid, but they are angry and miserable.

2O0

The Waters of Edera

Those who are their spokesmen, or who ought to
be, do not say what they wish, do not care what
they wish, do not ask what they wish. They are
the sons of the soil, but they count for nothing.
If they met to try and do anything for themselves,
guards — soldiery — would come from a distance,
they say, and break up the meetings, and carry
those who should speak away to some prison.
The Government approves the theft of the water ;
that is to be enough."

" Yet public meeting has been a right of the
people on the Latin soil ever since the Caesars."

** What matter right, what matter wrong? No
one heeds either."

*' What can be done then ? "

" We must help ourselves."

He spoke sullenly and under his breath. He
did not dare to say more clearly what was in his
thoughts.

" By brute force? " said Don Silverio. " That
were madness. What would be the number of
the able-bodied men of all three communes? Let
us say two thousand; that is over the mark.
What w^eapons would they have? Old muskets,
old fowling-pieces, and not many of those; their
scythes, their axes, their sticks. A single bat-
talion would cut them down as you mow grass.
You have not seen rioters dispersed by trained
troops. I have. I have seen even twenty cara-

The Waters of Edera

20 1

bineers gallop down a street full of armed citizens,
the carabineers shooting right and left without
selection; and the street, before they had ridden
two hundred yards, was empty except for a few
fallen bodies which the horses trampled. You
can never hope to succeed in these days with a
mere jacquerie. You might as well set your
wheat-sheaves up to oppose a field battery."

** Garibaldi," muttered Adone, " he had naught
but raw levies ! "

" Garibaldi was an instinctive military genius,
like Aguto, like Ferruccio, like Gian delle Bande
Neri, like all the great Condottieri. But he
would probably have rotted in the Spielberg, or
been shot in some fortress of the Quadrilateral, if
he had not been supported by that proclamation of
Genoa and campaign of Lombardy, which were
Louis Napoleon's supreme error in French pol-
icy."

Adone was silent, stung by that sense of dis-
comfiture and mortification which comes upon
those who feel their own inability to carry on an
argument. To him Garibaldi was superhuman,
fabulous, far away in the mists of an heroic past,
as Ulysses to Greek youths.

" You, sir, may preach patience," he said sull-
enly. "It is no doubt your duty to preach it.
But I cannot be patient. My heart would choke
in my throat."

202

The Waters of Edera

c
f

{(

((

Don Silverio looked him straight in the face.

" What is it you intend to do? "

" I shall do what I may, what I can."
I tell you that you can do nothing, my son.
How know you that, reverend? You are a
priest, not a man."

A faint red colour came over Don Silverio's
colourless face.

" One may be both," he said simply. " You
are distraught, my son, by a great calamity. Try
and see yourself as others see you, and do not lead
the poor and ignorant into peril. Will the Edera
waters be freer because your neighbours and you
are at the galleys? The men of gold who have
the men of steel behind them will be always
stronger than you."

" God is over us all," said Adone.

Don Silverio was silent. He could not refute
that expression of faith, but in his soul he could
not share it; and Adone had said it, less in faith,
than in obstinacy. He meant to rouse the coun-
try if he could, let come what might of the rising.

Who could tell the issue? A spark from a
poor man's hearth had set a city in flames before
now.

"How can you think me indifferent?" said
Don Silverio. " Had I no feeling for you should
I not feel for myself? Almost certainly my life
will be doomed to end here. Think you that I

The Waters of Edera

203

shall see with callousness the ruin of this fair
landscape, which has been my chief consolation
through so many dreary years ? You, who deem
yourself so wholly without hope, may find solace
if you choose to take it. You are young, you are
free, all the tenderest ties of life can be yours if
you choose; if this home be destroyed you may
make another where you will. But I am bound
here. I must obey; I must submit. I cannot
move ; I cannot alter or renew my fate ; and to me
the destruction of the beauty of the Edera valley
will be the loss of the only pleasure of my exist-
ence. Try and see with my eyes, Adone; it may
help you to bear your burden."

But he might as well have spoken to the water
itself, or to the boulders of its rocks, or to the
winds which swept its surface.

" It is not yours," said Adone, almost brutally.
" You were not born here. You cannot know !
Live elsewhere? My mother and I? Sooner a
thousand times would we drown in Edera ! "

The water was golden under the reflections of
the sun as he spoke; the great net was swaying
in it, clear of the sword rush and iris; a king-
fisher like a jewel was threading its shallows, blue
as the veronica ; there was the fresh smell of the
heather and the wild roses on the air. " You do
not know what it is to love a thing! — how
should you? — you, a priest! " said Adone.

204

The Waters of Edera

Don Silverio did not reply. He went on down
the course of the stream.

'I*,

One morning in early April Adone received a
private invitation to attend in five days' time at
the Muncipality of San Beda to hear of something
which concerned him. It was brought by the lit-
tle old postman who went the rounds of the dis-
trict once a week on his donkey ; the five days had
already expired before the summons was de-
livered. Adone's ruddy cheeks grew pale as he
glanced over it ; he thrust it into the soil and drove
his spade through it. The old man, waiting in
hopes to get a draught of wine, looked at him in
dismay.

" Is that a way to treat their Honours' com-
mands ? " he said aghast.

Adone did not answer or raise his head; he
went on with his digging; he was turning and
trenching the soil to plant potatoes; he flung
spadefuls of earth over the buried summons.

"What's amiss with you, lad?" said the old
fellow, who had known him from his infancy.

*' Leave me," said Adone, with impatience.
" Go to the house if you want to drink, and to bait
your beast."

" Thank ye," said the old man. *' But you will
go, won't you, Adone? It fares ill with those
who do not go."

The Waters of Edera

205

" Who told you to say that? "

" Nobody ; but I have Hved a many years, and
I have carried those printed papers a many years,
and I know that those who do not go when they
are called rue it. Their Honours don't let you
flout them."

" Their Honours be damned ! " said Adone.
" Go to the house."

The little old man, sorely frightened, dropped
his head, and pulling his donkey by its bridle went
away along the grass path under the vines.

Adone went on delving, but nis strong hands
shook with rage and emotion as they grasped the
handle of the spade. He knew as well as if he
had been told by a hundred people that he was
called to treat of the sale of the Terra Vergine.
He forced himself to go on with his forenoon's
labour, but the dear familiar earth swam and spun
before his sight.

" What? " he muttered to it, " 1 who love you
am not your owner ? I who was born on you am
not your lawful heir? 1 who have laboured on
you ever since I was old enough to use a tool at
all am now in my manhood to give you up to
strangers? I will make you run red with blood
first!"

It wanted then two hours of noon. When
twelve strokes sounded from across the river,
tolled slowly by the old bronze bell of the church

2o6

The Waters of Edera

tower, he went for the noonday meal and rest to
the house.

The old man was no longer there, but Clelia
Alba said to him :

" Dario says they summon you to San Beda,
and that you will not go ? "

" He said right."

" But, my son," cried his mother, " go you
must! These orders are not to be shirked.
Those who give them have the law behind them.
You know that."

" They have the villainy of the law behind
them ; the only portion of the law the people are
ever suffered to see."

" But how can you know what it is about if you
do not go ? "

" There is only one thing which it can be. One
ching that I will not hear."

" You mean for the river — for the land? "

"What else?"

Her face grew as stern as his own. " If that
be so ... Still you should go, my son;
you should go to hold your own."

" I will hold my own," said Adone; and in his
thoughts he added, " but not by words."

" What is the day of the month for which they
call you? " asked his mother.

" The date is passed by three days. That is a
little jest which authority often plays upon the
people."

The Waters of Edera

207

They went within. The meal was eaten in
silence ; the nut-brown eyes of Nerina looked wist-
fully in their faces, but she asked nothing; she
guessed enough.

Adone said nothing to Don Silverio of the sum-
mons, for he knew that the i)riest would counsel
strongly his attendance in person at San Beda,
even although the date was already passed.

But Don Silverio had heard of it from the post-
man, who confided to him the fears he felt that
Adone would neglect the summons, and so get
into trouble. He saw at once the error which
would be committed if any sentence should be
allowed to go by default through absence of the
person cited to appear. By such absence the ab-
sentee discredits himself; whatsoever may be the
justice of his cause, it is prejudiced at the outset.
But how to persuade of this truth a man so blind
with pain and rage and so dogged in self-will as
Adone had become, Don Silverio did not see. He
shrank from renewing useless struggles and dis-
putes which led to no issue. He felt that Adone
and he would only drift farther and farther apart
with every word they spoke.

The young man saw this thing through a red
mist of hatred and headstrong fury; it was im-
possible for his elder to admit that such views
were wise or pardonable, or due to anything more
than the heated visions evoked by a great wrong.

That evening at sunset he saw the little girl

2o8

The Waters of Edera

Nerina at the river. She had led two cows to the
water, and they and she were standing knee deep
in the stream. The western light shone on their
soft, mottled, dun hides and on her ruddy brown
hair and bright young face. The bearded bul-
rushes were round them; the light played on the
broad leaves of the docks, and the red spikes of
great beds of willow-herb ; the water reflected the
glowing sky, and close to its surface numbers of
newly-come swallows whirled and dipped and
darted, chasing gnats, whilst near at hand on a
spray a little woodlark sang.

The scene was fair, peaceful, full of placid and
tender loveliness.

" And all this is to be changed and ruined in
order that some sons of the mammon of unright-
eousness may set up their mills to grind their
gold," he thought to himself as he passed over the
stepping-stones which at this shallow place could
be crossed dryfoot.

" Where is Adone? " he called to the child.

" He is gone down the river in the punt, most
Reverend."

"And his mother?"

" Is at the house, sir."

Don Silverio went through the pastures under
the great olives. When he reached the path lead-
ing to the house he saw Clelia Alba seated before
the doorway spinning. The rose-tree displayed

The Waters of Edera

209

its first crimson buds above her head; under the
eaves the swallows were busy.

Clelia Alba rose and dropjied a low courtesy to
him, then resumed her work at the wheel.

" You have heard, sir? " she said in a low tone.
" They summon him to San Beda."

" Old Dario told me; but Adone will not go? "

" No, sir; he will never go."

** He is in error."

" I do not know, sir. He is best judge of
that."

** I fear he is in no state of mind to judge
calmly of anything. His absence will go against
him. Instead of an amicable settlement the ques-
tion will go to the tril)unals, and if he be unrepre-
sented there, he will be condemned in contuma-
cium.''

"Amicable settlement?" repeated his mother,
her fine face animated and stern, and her deep,
dark eyes flashing. " Can you, sir, dare you, sir,
name such a thing? What they would do is rob-
bery, vile robbery, a thousand times worse than
aught the men of night ever did when they came
down from the hills to harass our homesteads."

" I do not say otherwise; but the law is with
those who harass you now. We cannot alter the
times, good Clelia, we must take them as they are.
Your son should go to San Beda and urge his
rifjhts, not with violence but with firmness and

210

The Waters of Edera

C
f

lucidity; he should also provide himself with an
advocate, or he will he driven out of his home hy
sheer force, and with some miserahle sum as com-
pensation."

Clelia Alha's hrown skin grew ashen grey, and
its heavy lines deepened.

** You mean . . . that is possible? "

** It is more than possible. It is certain. These
things always end so. My poor dear friend! do
you not understand, even yet, that nothing can
save your homestead ? "

Clelia Alba leaned her elbows on her knees and
bowed her face upon her hands. She felt as
women of her race had felt on some fair morn
when they had seen the skies redden with baleful
fires, and the glitter of steel corslets shine under
the foliage, and had heard the ripe corn crackle
under the horses' hoofs, and had heard the shriek-
ing children scream, " The lances are coming,
mother ! Mother ! save us ! "

Those women had had no power to save home-
stead or child; they had seen the pikes twist in
the curling locks, and the daggers thrust in the
white young throats, and the flames soar to
heaven, burning rooftree and clearing stackyard,
and they had possessed no power to stay the steel
or quench the torch. She was like them.

She lifted her face up to the light.

" He will kill them."

The Waters of Edera

211

" He may kill one mnn — two men — he will have
blood on his hands. What will that serve? I
have told yor again and again. Thir. t'ling is in-
evitable — frightful, but inevitable, like war. In
war do not millions of innocent and helpless
creatures suffer through no fault of their own,
no cause of their own, on account of some king's
caprice or statesman's blunder? You are just
such victims here. Nothing will preserve to you
the Terra Vergine. My dear old friend, have

- »»

courar

" I cannot believe it, sir ; I cannot credit it.
The land is ours; this little bit of the good and
solid earth is ours; God will not let us be robbed
of it."

" My friend ! no miracles are wrought now. I
have told you again and again and again you must
lose this place."

" I will not believe it ! "

'* Alas ! I pray that you may not be forced to
believe ; but I know that I pray in vain. Tell me,
you are certain that Adone will not answer that
summons?"

" I am certain."

" He is mad."

" No, sir, he is not mad. No more than I, his
mother. We have faith in heaven."

Don Silverio was silent. It was not for him
to tell them that such faith was a feeble staff.

)

212

The Waters of Edera

" I must not tarry, he said, and rose. " The
night is near at hand. Tell your son what I have
said. My dear friend, I would almost as soon
stab you in the throat as say these things to you ;
but as you value your boy's sanity and safety
make him realise this fact, which you and he deny :
the law will take your home from you, as it will
take the river from the province."

" No, sir ! " said Clelia Alba fiercely. " No, no,
no ! There is a God above us ! "

Don Silverio bade her sadly farewell, and in-
sisted no more. He went through the odorous
grasslands where the primrose and wild hyacinth
grew so thickly and the olive branches were al-
ready laden with purpling berries, and his soul
was uneasy, seeing how closed is the mind of the
peasant to argument or to persuasion. Often had
he seen a poor beetle pushing its ball of dirt up
the side of a sandhill only to fall back and begin
again and again fall; for truth to endeavour to
penetrate the brain of the rustic is as hard as for
the beetle to climb the sand. He was disinclined
to seek the discomfiture of another useless argu-
ment, but neither could he be content in his con-
science to let this matter wholly alone.

Long and dreary as the journey was to San
Beda, he undertook it again, saying nothing to
any one of his purpose. He hoped to be able be-
fore the syndic to put Adone's contumacy in a
pardonable light, and perhaps to plead his cause

The Waters of Edera

213

better than the boy could plead it for himself. To
Don Silverio he always seemed a boy still, and
therefore excusable in all his violences and ex-
travagances.

The day was fine and cool, and walkinp- was
easier and less exhausting than it had been at the
season of his first visit ; moreover, his journey to
Rome had braced his nerves and sinews to exer-
tion, and restored to him the energy and self-
possession which the long, tedious, monotonous
years of solitude in Ruscino had weakened.
There was a buoyant wind coming from the sea
with rain in its track, and a deep blue sky with
grand clouds drifting past the ultramarine hues of
the Abruzzi range. The bare brown rocks grew
dark as bronze, and the forest-clothed hills were
almost black in the shadows as the clustered
towers and roofs of the little city came in sight.
He went, fatigued as he was, straight to the old
episcopal palace, which was now used as the
municipality, without even shaking the dust off
his feet.

" Say that I come for the affair of Adone
Alba," he said to the first persons he saw in the
ante-room on the first floor. In the little ecclesi-
astical town his calling commanded respect.
They begged him to sit down and rest, and in a
few minutes returned to say that the most illustri-
ous the Count Corradini would receive him at
once in his private room; it was a day of general

214

The Waters of Edera

council, but the council would not meet for an
hour. The syndic was a tall, spare, frail man
with a patrician's face and an affable manner.
He expressed himself in courteous terms as flat-
tered by the visit of the Vicar of Ruscino, and
inquired if in any way he could be of the slightest
service.

" Of the very greatest, your Excellency," said
Don Silverio. *' I have ventured to come hither
on behalf of a young parishioner of mine, Adone
Alba, who, having received the summons of your
Excellency only yesterday, may, I trust, be ex-
cused for not having obeyed it on the date named.
He is unable to come to-day. May I offer my-
self for his substitute as amicus curiae? "

" Certainly, certainly," said Corradini, relieved
to meet an educated man instead of the boor he
had expected. *' If the summons were delayed
by any fault of my officials, the delay must be in-
quired into. Meanwhile, most reverend, have
you instructions to conclude the affair ? "

" As yet, I venture to remind your Excellency,
we do not even know what is the affair of which
you speak."

" Oh no ; quite true. The matter is the sale of
the land known under the title of the Terra
Vergine."

" Thank Heaven I am here, and not Adone,"
thought Don Silverio.

The Waters of Edera

213

Aloud he answered, " What sale ? The pro-
prietor has heard of none."

" He must have heard. It can be no news to
you that the works about to be made upon the
river Edera will necessitate the purchase of the
land known as the Terra Vergine."

Here the syndic put on gold spectacles, drew
towards him a black portfolio filled by plans and
papers, and began to move them about, mut-
tering, as he searched, little scraps of phrases out
of each of them. At last he turned over the
sheets which concerned the land of the Alba.

" Terra Vergine — Commune of Ruscino —
owners Alba from 1620 — family of good report
— regular taxpayers — sixty hectares — land pro-
ductive; value — just so — humph, humph,
humph ! "

Then he laid down the documents and looked
at Don Silverio from over his spectacles.

" I conclude, most reverend, that you come
empowered by this young man to treat with us ? "

" I venture, sir," replied Don Silverio respect-
fully, " to remind you again that it is impossible
I should be so empowered, since x\done Alba was
ignorant of the reason for which he was sum-
moned here."

Corradini shuffled his documents nervously
with some irritation.

2l6

The Waters of Edera

"■.V

" This conference, then, is mere waste of time?
I hold council to-day "

" Pardon me, your Excellency," said Don
Silverio blandly. '' It will not be waste of time
if you will allow me to lay before you certain
facts, and, first, to ask you one question: Who
is, or are, the buyer or buyers of this land? "

The question was evidently unwelcome to the
syndic; it was direct, which every Italian con-
siders ill-bred, and it was awkward to answer.
He was troubled for personal reasons, and the
calm and searching gaze of the priest's dark eyes
embarrassed him. After all, he thought, it would
have been better to deal with the boor himself.

"Why do you ask that?" he said irritably.
" You are aware that the National Society for the
Improvement of Land and the foreign company
of the Teramo-Tronto Electric Railway combine
in these projected works? "

** To which of these two societies, then, is
Adone Alba, or am I, as his locum tenens, to
address ourselves? "

" To neither. This commune deals with you."

"Why?"

Count Corradini took off his glasses, put them
on again,, shifted the papers and plans in his im-
posing portfolio.

" May I ask again — why? " said Don Silverio
in the gentlest tones of his beautiful voice.

The Waters of Edera

217

(C\

'Because, because," answered the syndic irri-
tably, " because the whole affair is in treaty be-
tween our delegates and the companies. Public
societies do not deal with private individuals di-
rectly, but by proxy."

" Pardon my ignorance," said Don Silverio,
" but why does the commune desire to substitute
itself for the owner ? "

'* It is usual."

"Ah! It is usual."

Corradini did not like the repetition of his
phrase, which would not perhaps bear very close
examination. He looked at his watch.

" Excuse me, Reverend Father, but time
presses."

" Allow me to crave of your bounty a little
more time, nevertheless. I am not habituated to
busines'^, but I believe, if I understand your wor-
shipful self aright, the commune contemplates
purchasing from the individuals with [x^wer and
intent to sell to the companies."

What an unmannerly ecclesiastic, thought Cor-
radini; for indeed, put thus bluntly and crudely,"
what the commune, as represented by himself, was
doing did not look as entirely correct as could be
desired.

" I was in Rome, most illustrious," said Don
Silverio, " in connection with this matter some
months ago."

2l8

The Waters of Edera

((

"In Rome?"

To hear this was unpleasant to the syndic; it
had never occurred to him that his rural, illiterate,
and sparsely populated district would have con-
tained any person educated enough to think of in-
quiring in Rome about this local matter.

" To Rome ! Why did you go to Rome ? "

" To acquire information concerning this
scheme."

" You are an owner of land? "

** No sir. I am a poor, very poor, priest."
It cannot concern you, then."
It concerns my people. Nothing which con-
cerns them is alien to me."

** Humph, humph ! Most proper, most praise-
worthy. But we have no time for generalities.
You came to treat of the Terra Vergine? "

" I'ardon me, sir; I came to hear why you sum-
moned Adone Alba, one of my flock."

"Could he not have come himself? It had
been but his duty."

'* He could not, sir; and, to say truth, he would
not. He does not intend to sell his land."

" What ! "

Corradini half rose from his chair, leaning both
hands on the table, and staring through his glasses
across the mass of portfolios and papers at the
priest.

" He will have no choice allowed him," he said

The Waters of Edera

219

with great anger. " To the interests of the State
all minor interests must bend. What! a mere
peasant stand in the way of a great enterprise? "
"You intend expropriation then?"
The voice of Don Silverio was very calm and
sweet, but his countenance was stern.

Corradini was irritated beyond measure. He
did not desire to play that great card so early in
the game.

" I do not say that," he muttered. " There
must be parliamentary sanction for any forced
sale. I spoke in general terms. Private interest
must cede to public."

" There is parliamentary sanction already given
to the project for the Valley of Edera," said Don
Silverio, " expropriation included."

Count Corradini threw himself back in his
chair with an action expressive at once of wrath
and of impotence. He had an irritating sense
that this priest was master of the position, and
knew much more than he said. In reality Don
Silverio knew very little, but he had skill and tact
enough to give a contrary impression to his audi-
tor. He followed up his advantage.

" Expropriation is to be permitted to enforce
sales on recalcitrant landowners," he continued.
" But that measure, even though conceded in
theory, will take time to translate into practice. I
fear, sir, that if it be ever put into execution we

220

The Waters of Edera

shall have trouble in your commune. Your coun-
cil has been over hasty in allying itself with these
speculators. You and they have not taken into
account the immense injury which will be done to
the valley and to my own village or town, call it
as you will, of Ruscino. The people are quiet,
patient, meek, but they will not be so if they are
robbed of the water of the Edera. It is the
source of all the little — the very little — good
which comes to them. So it is with Adone Alba.
He has been God-fearing, law-abiding, a good son,
excellent in all relations; but he will not recog-
nize as law the seizure of his land. Sir, you are
the elected chief of this district; all these people
look to you for support in their emergency.
What are these foreign speculators to you that
you should side with them? You say this com-
mune will purchase from its peasant proprietors
in the interests of these foreigners. Was it to
do this that they elected you? Why should the
interests of the foreigners be upheld by you to
the injury of those of your own people? Speak-
ing for my own parish, I can affirm to you that,
simple souls as they are, poor in the extreme, and
resigned to poverty, you will have trouble with
them all if you take it on you to enforce the
usurpation of the Edera water."

Count Corradini, still leaning back in his large
leathern chair, listened as if he were hypnotised;

The Waters of Edera

221

he was astounded, offended, enraged, but he was
fascinated by the low, rich, harmonious modula-
tions of the voice which addressed him, and by
the sense of mastery which the priest conveyed
without by a single word asserting it.

" You would threaten me with public dis-
order?" he said feebly, and with consciousness
of feebleness.

" No, sir; I would adjure you, in God's name,
not to provoke it."

" It does not rest with me."

He raised himself in his chair; his slender,
aristocratic hands played nervously with the
strings of the portfolio, his eyelids flickered, and
his eyes avoided those of his visitor.

" I have no voice in this matter. You mis-
take."

" Surely your Excellency speaks with the voice
of all your electors ? "

" Of my administrative council, then ? But
they are all in favour of the project; so is his Ex-
cellency the Prefect, so is the Deputy, so is the
Government. Can I take upon myself in my own
slender personality to oppose these ? "

" Yes, sir, because you are the mouthpiece of
those who cannot speak for themselves."

" Euh ! Euh ! That may be true in a sense.
But you mistake; my authority is most limited.
I have but two votes in Council. I am as wholly

222

The Waters of Edera

">«<!..

convinced as you can be that some will suffer for
the general good. The individual is crushed by
the crowd in these days. We are in a period of
immense and febrile development; of wholly un-
foreseen expansion; we are surrounded by mira-
cles of science; we are witnesses of an in-
crease of intelligence which will lead to results
whereof no living man can dream ; civilisation in
its vast and ineffable benevolence sometimes
wounds, even as the light and heat of the blessed
sun—"

" Pardon me, sir," said Don Silverio, " at any
other moment it would be my dearest privilege
to listen to your eloquence. But time passes. I
came here on a practical errand. I desire to take
back some definite answer to Adone and Clelia
Alba. Am I to understand from you that the
municipality, on behalf of these foreign com-
panies, desires to purchase his land, and even in-
sists upon its right to do so ? "

The syndic accustomed to seek shelter from all
plain speaking in the cover of flowery periods
such as these in which he had been arrested, was
driven from his usual refuge. He could not re-
sume the noble and enlightened discourse which
had been thus recklessly cut in two. He tied the
strings of the portfolio into a bow, and undid
them, and tied them again.

" I have received you, sir, ex officio/' he re-

The Waters of Edera

223

plied after a long silence. *' You address me as if
I possessed some special individual power. I have
none. I am but the mouthpiece, the representa-
tive of my administrative council. You, a learned
ecclesiastic, cannot want to be taught what are
the functions of a syndic."

" I am to understand then that I must address
myself on behalf of my people to the Prefect? "

Corradini was silent. The last thing he desired
was for this importunate priest to see the Pre-
fect.

" I must go into council at once," he said, again
looking at his watch. " Could you return? Are
you remaining here? "

** Some hours, sir."

" Will you dine with me at my house at three?
You will give me much pleasure, and the Countess
Corradini will be charmed."

" I am grateful for so much offered honour, but
I have promised to make my noonday meal with
an old friend, the superior of the Cistercians."

*' An excellent, a holy person," said Corradini,
with a bend of his head. " Be at my house, rev-
erend sir, at five of the clock. I shall then have
spoken with the assessors of your errand, and it
will be dealt with probably in council."

Don Silverio made a low^ bow, and left him
free to go to his awaiting councillors, who were
already gathered round a long table covered by

224

The Waters of Edera

green cloth, in a vaulted and stately chamber, with
frescoes losing their colour on its walls, and sto-
ries from Greek mythology carved on its oaken
doors and stone cornices.

" Pray excuse me, gentlemen," said the courtly
mayor to his assessors, taking his seat on an old
walnut-wood throne at the head of the table. " I
have been detained by this matter of the Val d'
Edera. I fear the people of that valley will show
an ungrateful and refractory temper. How hard
it is to persuade the ignorant where their true
interests lie ! But let us to business."

** It will be a hard matter," said the Prior to
Don Silverio as they walked together in the little
burial-ground of the monastery between its lines
of rose-trees and its lines of crosses, after the
frugal noonday meal had been eaten in the refec-
tory. *' It will be a hard matter. You will fail,
I fear. The municipalities here smell money.
That is enough to make them welcome the inva-
sion. What can you do against the force of
gold?"

*' Would it avail anvihing to see the Prefect? "

" Nothing. He ib cousin to the Minister of

Agriculture, whose brother is chairman of the Te-

ramo-Tronto Company. We are governed solely

by what the French call tripotage."

" What character does this syndic bear? "

" A good one. lie is blameless in his domestic

The Waters of Edera

2±S

', with
id sto-
oakcn

:ourtly
an old
e. "I
Val d'
1 show
V hard
ir true

rior to
le httle
[S lines
ter the
t refec-
ill fail,
money.
e inva-
)rce of

ifect?"
ister of
the Te-
1 solely

.omestic

relations, an indulgent landlord, a gentleman, re-
spectful of religion, assiduous in his duties; but
he is in debt; hi^ lar^;e estates produce little; he
has no other means. 1 would not take upon me
to say that he would be above a bribe."

At five of the clock, as the Syndic had told him
to do, Don Silverio presented himself at the Pa-
lazzo Corradini. He was shown with much def-
erence by an old liveried servant into a fine apart-
ment with marble busts in niches in the walls
and antique bookcases of oak, and door-hangings
of Tuscan tapestry. The air of the place was cold,
and had the scent of a tomb. It was barely illu-
mined by two bronze lamps in which unshaded oil
wicks burned. Corradini joined him there in five
minutes' time, and welcomed him to the house
with grace and warmth of courtesy.

" What does he want of me? " thought Don
Silverio, who had not been often met in life by
such sweet phrases. " Does he want me to be
blind?"

*' Dear and reverend sir," said the mayor, plac-
ing himself with his back to the brass lamps, " tell
me fully about this youth whom you protect, who
will not sell the Terra Vergine. He^e we can
speak at our ease; yonder at the municipality,
there may be always some eavesdropper."

" Most worshipful, what I said is matter well
known to the whole countryside; all the valley

226

The Waters of Edera

can bear witness to its truth," replied Don Sil-
verio, and he proceeded to set forth all that he
knew of Adone and Clelia Alba, and of their great
love for their lands ; he only did not mention what
he believed to be Adone's descent, because he
feared that it might sound fantastical, or pre-
sumptuous. Nearly three hundred years of peas-
ant ownership and residence were surely titles
enough for consideration.

" If land owned thus, and tilled thus by one
family, can be taken away from that family by
Act of Parliament to please the greedy schemes
of strangers, why preserve the eighth command-
ment in the Decalogue? It becomes absurd.
There cannot be a more absolute ownership than
this of the Alba to the farm they live on and cul-
tivate. So long as there is any distinction at all
between meitm et timm, how can its violent seizure
be by any possibility defended? "

*' There need be no violent seizure," said Cor-
radini. " The young man will be offered a good
price ; even, since you are interested in him, a high
price."

" But he will take no price — no price if he were
paid millions; they would not compensate him
for his loss."

He must be a very singular young man."
His character is singular, no doubt, in an age
in which money is esteemed the sole goal of ex-

The Waters of Edera

227

istence, and discontent constitutes philosophy.
Adone Alba wants nothing but what he has; he
only asks to be left alone."

" It is difficult to be left alone in a world full of
other people! If your hero want a Thebaid he
can go and buy one in La Plata or the Argentine
with the price we shall give for his land."

" We? " repeated Don Silverio with significant
emphasis.

Corradini reddened a litde. " I use the word
because I am greatly interested in the success of
this ei-!terprise, being convinced of its general util-
ity to die province. Being cognisant as I am of
the ne^'ghbourhood, I hoped I could prevent some
friction."

" The shares are, I believe, already on the mar-
ket?"

It was a harmless remark, yet it was a disa-
greeable one to the Syndic of San Be a.

** What would be the selling price of the Terra
Vergine," he said abruptly? "It is \alued at
twelve thousand francs."

" It is useless to discuss its price," replied Don
Silverio, " and the question is much wider than
the limits of the Terra Vergine. In one word,
is the whole of the Val d' Edera to be ruined be-
cnnse a Minister has a relation who desires to
c.wate an unnecessary railway? "

** Ruined is a large word. These constructions

228

The Waters of Edera

appear to all, except primitive and ignorant peo-
ple, to be improvements, acquisitions, benefits. In
our province we are so aloof from all movement,
so remote in our seclusion, so moss-grown in our
antiquity, so wedded to the past, to old customs,
old habits, old ways of act and thought, that the
modern world shocks us as impious, odious, and
intolerable."

" Sir," said Don Silverio with his most caustic
smile, ** if you are here to sing the praises of
modernity, allow me to withdraw from the duet.
I venture to ask you, as I asked you this morning,
one plain question. To whom is Adone Alba, to
whom are my people of Ruscino, to appeal against
this sequestration? "

** To no one. The Prefect approves ; the Min-
ister approves; the local deputies approve; I and
my municipal and provincial councils approve;
Parliament has approved and authorised. Who
remain opposed? A few small landowners and
a mob of poor persons living in your village of
Ruscino and in similar places."

" Who can create grave disorders and will do
so."

" Disorders, even insurrections, do not greatly
alarm authority nowadays; they are easily re-
pressed since the invention of quick-firing guns.
The army is always on the side of order."

The Waters of Edera

229

Don Silverio rose.

" Most honourable Corradini ! your views and
mine are so far asunder that no amount of dis-
cussion can assimilate them. Allow me to salute
you."

" Wait one instant, reverence," said the syndic.
" May I ask how it is that an ecclesiastic of your
appearance and your intellect can have been buried
so long in such an owls' nest as Ruscino? "

" Sir," replied Don Silverio very coldly, " ask
my superiors; I am but one of the least of the
servants of the Church."

" You might be one of her greatest servants, if
influence — "

" I abhor the word influence. It means a bribe
too subtle to be punished, too gilded to alarm."

" Nay, sometimes it is but a w^ord in season, a
pressure in the right place."

" It means that which cannot serve the ooor
man vithout degrading him."

« But — but — if as a reward for duty, advance-
ment came to you? "

"■ T fail to understand."

" Let me speak frankly. With your superiority
to them you must easily rule the embryo rioters of
the Val d'Edera. If, to your efforts it should be
owing that the population remain quiet, and that
this Adone Alba and others in a similar position,

230

The Waters of Edera

^S^fr-

come to me in an orderly manner and a pliant
spirit, I will engage that this service to us on
your part shall nut be forgotten."

He paused; but Don Silverio did not reply.

''It is lamentable and unjust," continued the
mayor, " that one of your evident mental pow-
ers and capacity for higher place should be wast-
ing youi rnrs and wasting your mind in a
miserable f- ;de like Ruscino. If you will aid
us to a pacific cession of the Val d' Edera I will
take upon myself to promise that your translation
to a higher office shall be favoured by the Gov-
ernment "

Pie paused again, for he did not see upon Don
Silverio's countenance that flattered and rejoiced
expression which he expected; there was even
upon it a look of scorn. He regretted that he had
said so much.

" I thank your Excellency for so benevolent an
interest in my poor personality," said Don Sil-
verio. " But with the King's government I have
nothing to do. I am content in the place whereto
I have been called, and have no disposition to as-
sist the speculations of foreign companies. I have
the honour to bid your Excellency good evening."

He bowed low, and backed out of the apart-
ment this time. Count Corradini did not en-
deavour to detain him.

When he got out into the air the strong moun-

The Waters of Edera 231

tain wind was blowing roughly down the steep
and narrow street. He felt it with pleasure smite
his cheeks and brows.

" Truly only from nature can we find strength
and health," he murmured. " In the houses of
men there are but fever and corruption, and un-
cleanliness."

XIV

I..

To neglect no possible chance, he resolved to
see the Prefect, if the Prefect consented to
see him. This great official dwelt in a seaport
city, whence he ruled the province, for such a
period at least as his star should be in the ascend-
ant, that is, whilst his political group should be
in power. It v;as scarcely likely that a govern-
ment ofh rial -^^'ould be accessible to any arguments
which a poor coun;ry priest could bring forward
against a government project. Still, he resolved
to make the effort, for at the Prefect's name ap-
prehension, keen and quaking, had leapt into
Count Corradini's faded eyes.

From San Beda to the seaport city there
stretched some forty miles of distance; the first
part a descent down the spurs of the Apennines
the latter half through level sandy country, with
pine woods here and there. The first half he
covered on foot, the second by the parliamentary
train, which drew its long black line, snake-like
and slow, through the dunes and the stagnant
waters. He had but a few francs in his waist-
band, and could ill afford to expend those.

When he reached his destination it was even-

232

The Waters of Edera

233

ingf; too late for him to present himself at the Pre-
fecture with any chance of admittance. The Prior
at San Beda had given him a letter to the vicar
of the church of Sant Anselmo in the city, and
by this gentleman he was warmly received and
willingly lodged for the night.

" A government project — a project approved
by ministers and deputies? " said his host on hear-
ing what was the errand on which he came there.
" As well, my brother, might you assail the Gran
Sasse d'ltalia ! There must be money in it, much
money, for our Conscript Fathers."

" I suppose so," said Don Silverio, " but I can-
not see where it is to come from."

" From the pockets of the taxpayers, my
friend ! " replied the incumbent of Sant Anselmo,
with a smile as of a man who knows the world
he lives in. " The country is honeycombed by
enterprises undertaken solely to this end — to pass
the money which rusts in the pockets of fools
into those of wise men who know how to make
it run about and multiply. In what other scope
are all our betterments, our hygiene, our useless
railway lines, our monstrous new streets, all our
modernisation, put in the cauldron and kept boil-
ing like a witch's supper ? "

" I know, I know," said Don Silverio wearily.
" The whole land is overrun by aifaristi, like red
ants."

234

The Waters of Edrra

v«

"Do not slander the ants!" replied his host;
" I would not offend the name of any honest,
hard-working, little insect by giving it to the men
through whom this country is eaten up by selfish
avarice and unscrupulous speculation! But tell
me, what do you hope for from our revered Pre-
fect?"

" I hope nothing, but I wish to leave no stone
unturned. Tell me of him."

" Of his Excellency, Giovacchino Gallo, senator
and deputy and what not? There is much to tell,
though there is nothing which could not be also
told of many another gentleman in high place. It
is the usual story ; the supple spine, the sharp eye,
the greased foot. He was a young lawyer, useful
to deputies. He married a lovely woman whom
a prince had admired beyond him. He asked no
questions ; her dower was large. To do him jus-
tice, he has always behaved very well to her. He
entered Parliament early, and there was useful
also, to existing institutions. He was instrumen-
tal in carrying many railway and canal bills
through the chamber. He has been always suc-
cessful in his undertakings, and he knows that
nothing succeeds like success. I am told that he
and his wife are pcrsone gratissimc at the Quiri-
nale, and that her jewels are extremely fine. When
he was named Senator two years ago the Press,

The Waters of Edera

235

especially the Press of the Right, sahited his nom-
ination as strengthenin.£^ the Senate by the acces-
sion to it of a person of impeccable virtue, of en-
lightened intellect, and of a character cast in an-
tique moulds of noble simplicity and Spartan cour-
age. You think, my brother, that this favourite of
fortune is likely to favour your plea for your par-
ishioners? "

" Dear and revered brother," replied Don Sil-
verio, " I came hither with no such illusions. If
I had done, your biography of this functionary
would have dispelled them."

Nevertheless, although without hope, at two
o'clock of that day he went to the audience which
was granted him at the intervention of the bishop
of the city, obtained by means of the vicar of Sant
Anselmo.

The Prefecture was situated in a palace of six-
teenth century architecture, a noble and stately
place of immense size, greatly injured by tele-
graph and telephone wires stretching all round it,
the post-office and the tax offices being situated on
the ground floor, and the great Central Court
daubed over with fresh paint and whitewash.
Some little soldiers in dingy uniforms, ill-cut and
ill-fitting, stood about gates and doors. On the
first floor were the apartments occupied by his
Excellency. Don Silverio w^as kept waiting for

236

The Waters of Edera

some time in a vestibule of fine proportions
painted by Diotisalvi, with a colossal marble
group in its centre of the death of Caesar.

He looked at it wistfully.

" Ah, Giulio ! " 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 writ-
ing-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 cour-
teous 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.

The Waters of Edera

237

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 Val d'Edera. Your Excellency is Governor
of this part of the 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 great
distress, and intercession for them against this ca-
lamity."

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 Val d'Edera 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 per-
sons whom it most concerns."

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

" A great public work seems to me a large ex-
pression; too large for this case. The railway is
not needed. The acetylene works are a private

238

The Waters cf Edera

speculation. I venture to recall to your Excel-
lency that these peoiilo, whom you would ignore,
own the land, or, where they do not own it, have
many interests both in the land and the water."

'* Their interests are considered and will h^
compensated," said the Prefect. " I do not admit
that any of them can claim more."

" 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 seiz-
ure 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 Par-
liament without gross injury and injustice."

" There must be suffering for the individual i
all benefit of the general ! "

" And doubtless, sir, when one is not the indi-
vidual the suffering appears immaterial ! "

" What an insolent priest ! " thought Giovac-
chino Gallo, and struck the paper-knife with an-
ger on the table.

" Take my own parishioners alone," pursued
Don Silverio. " Their small earnings depend en-
tirely upon the Edera water; it gives them their
food, their bed, their occupation; it gives them
health and strength; it irrigates their little hold-
ings, extra miiros, on which they and their fami-
lies depend for grain and maize and rice. If you

The Waters of Edera

239

imi-

change their river-bed into dry land they will
starve. Are not your own countrymen dc^arer to
you than the members of a foreis:n syndicate? "

** There will be work for tlicm 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 fan m lies. The taxa-
tion of the land and of all its products lay 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
crates of fruit receive. They consent to go be-
cause 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?

2^0

The Waters of Edera

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 in-
door 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 spoliation 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 prov-
ocation, 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 nat-
ural air and the natural beauty with which God
himself has dow^ered it in the gift of the moun-
tain-born stream? You are powerful, sir, you
have the ear of the Government, will you 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

The Waters of Edera

241

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 upon his red, full bon viveur's lips.

"If you imagine that I should venture to at-
tack, 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 stand-
ing, said, "Wait!"

Gallo opened two or three drawers in his table
searched for some papers, looked over them, leav-
ing the priest always standing between him and
the door. Don Silverio was erect; his tall, frail

9.4^

The Waters of Edera

t V

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," re-
plied Don Silverio, and did not stir."

" I have here reports from certain of my
agents," said Gallo, fingering his various ppners,
" that there is and has been for some time sub-
versive movement amongst the sparse popula-
tion of the Val d'Edera."

Don Silverio did not speak or stir.

" It is an agrarian agitation," continued Gallo,
"limited in its area, with little probabil ty of
spreading, but it exists; there are meeting s by
night, both open-air and secret meetings; the lat>
ter take place now in one farmhouse, now in an-
other. The leader of this noxious and unlawful
movement is one Adone Alba. He is of your par-
ish."

He lifted his eyelids and flashed a quick, search-
ing 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 se-
crets of the confessional, but "

** Neither in the confessional or out of it have

The Waters of Edera

243

re-

I heard anything whatever from him concerning
any such matter as that of which you speak."

" He is a young man? "

" Yes."

" And 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 parishioners are not in the habit of ' send-
ing ' me anywhere. You reverse our respective
positions."

" Humility is not one of your ecclesiastical vir-
tues, Most Reverend."

" It may be so."

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

" You saw the Syndic of San Beda? "

" I did."
What did he say to you? "
Much what you say. Official language is al-
ways limited and learned by rote."

Galba would willingly have thrown his bronze
inkstand at the insolent ecclesiastic; his temper
was naturally choleric, though years of syco-
phancy and state service had taught him to con-
trol it.

((

244

The Waters of Edera

■'»

** Well, Reverend Sir ! " he said, with ill-con-
cealed irritation, '' this conversation is I see use-
less. You protect and screen your people. Per-
haps 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 se-
verely 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 con-
ditions attached to the placet and the exequator
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 stroncr 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 waste of breath and of words," he an-

The Waters of Edera

245

swered. " I might have known that it would be
so with any Government official."

" But vou 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 emi-
nent person had rung for his secretary.
" Brandone, send me Sarelli."
In a few moments Sarelli 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 danger-
ous 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 ; sup-
posed to be at Ruscino as castigation ; learned-
benevolent — correct.

i^ji

246

The Waters of Edera

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

Sarelli rapidly took his cue.

" Hitherto, your Excellency, uniformly correct ;
CTxept in one instance "

"That instance?"

" Was five years ago, in the matter of the ma-
landrino, Ferrero. Your Excellency will have
heard of Ferrero Ulisse, a great robber of the
lower Abruzzi? "

'' I have : continue."

*' Ferrero Ulisse 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 the Abruzzi ; he came down at night to
the farmhoiT^es, the people gave him food and
drink, and aideci him "

" Their criminal habit always : continue."

" Sometimes in one district, sometimes in an-
other, he was often in the macchia of the Val
d'Edera. The people of the district, and espe-
cially 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

The Waters of Edera

247

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 Frascaro had cognisance
of this fact, but did nothing. When Ferrero
Ulisse 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 often-
times into your parish?' and Don Silverio an-
swered, * I had.' * You knew that he was an out-
law, in rupture with justice?' *I did,' he an-
swered. Then the judge struck his fist with an-
ger on his desk. * And you a priest, a guardian
of order, did not denounce him to the authori-
ties ? ' Then Don Silverio, your Excellency, quite
quietly, but with a smile (for 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 I do not find in it any command which au-
thorises me to betray my fellow-creatures.' That
made a terrible stir in the tribunal, your Excel-
lency. 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

248

The Waters of Edera

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 ahility, of intel-
lect, of incorruptible temper, but a man as like as
not to encourage and excuse sedition."

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

mornmg.

May I be allowed a word, sir? "
Speak."

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

" 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 lay-
man 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.

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. INIany had always been vaguely suspicious
of him, he was so wholly beyond their compre-
hension. 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 t.3 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

249

250

The Waters of Edera

higher instincts; he was becoming insensible to
everything except the thirst for action, for ven-
geance.

To the man who lives in a natural state away
from cities it appears only virile and just to de-
fend himself, to avenge himself, with the weapons
which nature and art have given him ; he feels no
satisfaction in creeping and crawling through the
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 Ak-
bar 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 neighbours tied
his hands. He knew that they were not made of
the stuff with which a leader could hope to con-
quer. 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.

The Waters of Edera

251

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 in-
timidate the workmen who should be c^ent there
so that they should, in fear and fatigue, give up
their labours. They would certainly l)e foreign
workmen; that is, workmen from another prov-
ince; probably from Apulia. It was said that
three hundred of them were coming that week to
begin the works 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 guerilla warfare for any length of time.
No doubt, he knev/, the autiiorities would send
troops to the support of the foreign labourers, 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 rea-
soned at all, he reasoned thus.

But he forgot, or rather he did not know, that
the lives of its people, whether soldiers or civil-
ians, matter very little to any Government, and
that its own vanity, which it calls dignity, and the
financial interests of its supporters, matter greatly;

252

The Waters of Edera

where the Executive has been defied there it is in-
exorable 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 one 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 that 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 jr^te' cause
for rebellion; and these gathered ar him in

those meetings by night of which infc itior had
reached the Prefecture, for there are spies in ^very
province.

Adone had changed greatly ; he had grown thin

The Waters of Edera

^S^

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 be-
lieved he could find proselytes or arms. He had
no settled plan of action ; he had no defined pro-
ject ; his only idea was to resist, to resist, to Fesist.
Under a leader he would have been an invaluable
auxiliary, but he had not knowledge enough of
men, or of the way to handle them, to direct a
revolt; and he had no knowledge whatever of
stratagem, or manoeuvre, or any of the manifold
complications of guerilla warfare. His calm and
dreamy life had not prepared him to be all at once
a man of action : action was akin alike to his tem-
perament and to his habits. All his heart, his
l)]oo(l, 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.

254

The Waters of Edera

Little Nerina alone gave him that unquestion-
ing, unhesitating, blind belief which is so dear to
the soul of man. Nerina was convinced that at
his call the whole of the Val d'Edern would rise
full-armed, and that no hostile power on earth
would dare to touch the water, To her any mira-
cle seemed possible. Whatever he ordered, she
did. She had neither fear or 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 passio late loyalty
accepted without comprehending all he enjoined
on her or told to her.

The danger which she ran and the ''oncealment
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 was mingled a
more intense and more personal sentiment, she
was unconscious of, and he indifcerei^t to, it. He
sent her to do his bidding as he would ha\ e sent

The Waters of Edera

25s

a boy, because he recognized in her th-it leal 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 cher-
ry-tree. Her big hazel eyes danced under their
long lashes, and her pretty mouth was I'ke 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 swingir.g on a stalk of
wheat.

She was so lithe, so swift, so agile; so strong
without eflfort, 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

256

The Waters of Edera

curse which threatened them, Hfe 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 noth-
ing: 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 pur-
pose. What had drawn him to Nerina 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 con-
fidence he 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 pre-
vent 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 nrcturnal absence, even the shrewd observa-
tion of Clelia Alba never detected any trace of

The Waters of Edera

257

nothing

and (lid
ly those
lich was
w noth-
;, swift,
lid have
:s death
always
; would
vater if
liis pur-
ad been
in her;
le sweet
med so
and the

ve been
ny con-
:ten out
: widely
lot pre-
stalls to

> silent;
letected
ibserva-
racc 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 car-
ried 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. x-\ny 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 5^ou should not be content."

And as signal fires run from point to point, or
hill to hill, so she ran from one farm house to an-
other bearing the messages which organized 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

2s8

The Waters of Edera

and honest ; they respected her as if she were one
of their own children, or one of their own sisters,
and Nerina coming through the starHght, 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 harbin-
ger 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.

The Waters of Edera 259

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 the Terra Vergine. They were secret
u 'd silent, made prudent by many generations
which had suffered from harsh measures and bru-
tal reprisals, but the league he proclaimed fasci-
nated and possessed them. Conspiracy has a se-
duction subtle and irresistible as gambling for
those who have once become its servants. It is
potent as wine, and colours the brain which it in-
flames. To these lowly, solitary men, who knew
nothing beyond their own fields and coppices and
waste-lands, its excitement came like a magic phil-
ter to change the monotony of their days. They
were most of them wholly unlettered; knew not
their ABC; had only learned the law of the sea-
sons, and the earth, and the trees which grew, and
the beasts which grazed; but they had imagina-
tion; they had the blood of ancient races; they
were neither dolts nor 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

26o

The Waters of Edera

hatred of the intruders, and to hearken to his ap-
peals 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 being but a change of masters, of the
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 them-
selves 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

The Waters of Edera

261

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 pros-
trate despair w^hich the State dares to tell the
poor is their duty and their portion upon e-arth.

But the younger men listened to him more
readily, being less bent and broken by long labour,
and poor food, and many years of unar wered
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 wea-
pons 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,

262

The Waters of Edera

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 chan the town of San Beda.

It was to arrange these nightly exercises, and
summon to or warn ofif men from them, as might
be expedient, that Nerina 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 v^^hich 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.

Nerina did not answer; her gny courage for-
sook 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 day-
time, but she had over her head a woollen wrap-
per. 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 ? "

Nerina was silent.

((

The Waters of Edera

263

? »

for-

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

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

" Pardon me, Madama Clelia," she said hum-
bly, " 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 Nerina, who had before this slipped the
bolts aside, and who had 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

264

The Waters of Edera

'It;!'

to find the door, and bruising her hands against
the wall and an oaken chair, she at last found it
and thrust it open, the night without was moonless
and starless and stormy, and in its unillumincd
blackness she saw no trace of the little girl. She
went out on to the doorstep and listened, but there
was no sound. The wdnd 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 night jar sent forth its sweet, strange,
sighing note. Of Nerina there was no trace. Cle-
lia Alba came w^ithin 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 flow^er that blows out there
in the garden, and he is a noble youth, though

The Waters of Edera

265

was

now, by the wickedness of men, distraught and
off his head. What makes you revile them so? "
" They are both cut 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 Nerina, 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 Valerio Alba, my son, has for-
got his duty to his mother and his respect for
himself."

Clelia Alba rose with effort from her chair, re-
lighted 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. " Madania —
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 tliinking
of it for an hour. This thing is odd, is ugly, is
strange, but wait to judge it "

266

The Waters of Edcia

Clelia Alba released lier skirt from her old ser-
vant'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 by 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 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 sleep-
less.

XVI

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 pre-
ceded 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 davm, and our own snarling, and
fretting, and mourning clouds 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

267

The Waters of Edera

down the stream than the bridge of Ruscino. He
was walkingf 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."

A done 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

The Waters of Edera

269

no. He
ad was
^es had
e from
is, and
Gianna
g must
for his

le bank

jianna,
igered ;
le dead

Gianna

heaven
1 your

ling is

' Clelia
at such

aithfu!

Hke this that men ruin them. I do not want to
speak v/ithout 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 viruel thing, a thing unworthy of your stock;
and if I know Clelia Alba — and */ho 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 ht--; there is no collusion with her,
and she if 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 returr .a? "

" Certainly she has not. She will no more dare
to return than a kicked dog. You forget she is a

svr-jr^ z:,¥:-^::'^.-7iB-v}vri-

270

The Waters of Edera

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 foot-
bridge; but midway across it she turned and
oalled 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 to-
wards 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

The Waters of Edera

271

suffer; possibly 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 Nerma, sound asleep upon the

2/2

The Waters of Edera

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 w^ent back to the house and busied her-
self 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 Corra-
dini and Senatore Gallo. When -e reached Rus-
cino 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,

r, very

,y that
bench

row
wn the
>leeper,

ed her-

i voices

above ;

rds she

Silverio
Corra-
id Rus-
woods
Silverio
entered
ist with
he day
Y to the
mis:ht
that he
lone of
fecture.
id if he
or you,

The Waters of Edera

273

my poor Httle man," he added to his dog Signo-
rino, who was ninninq- J2:1eef illy 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 indigna-
tion.

" 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 un-
just and untrue things? "

274

The Waters of Edera

** 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
A done convinced his mother of the girl's inno-
cence? "

" 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.
Aladama told me so. If he do 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
tue 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 Wafers of Edera

275

2 they
m see;
of the
t when

? Has
i inno-

ley are
IV ago.
jp, but

OSS the
vithout

ds, sir.
le land

back to

me."
e great
d herbs
leaves

The land vrould 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 en-
gines, 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 I " 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 fea-
tures, at her heavy eyelids drooping over eyes of
implacable wrath, at her firm mouth and jaw,

ij6

The Waters of Edera

cold as if cut in marble. She was not a woman to
trifle or to waver ; perhaps she was one who hav-
ing received offence would never forgive.

" But it is monstrous ! " he exclaimed ; " you
cannot turn adrift a little friendless girl — you can-
not 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.
1 am not too old to labour for myself."

" My good woman — my dear friend — it is in-
credible! 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 benevo-
lence?"

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."

nan to
hav-

The Waters of Edera

277

((

you
)U can-
band's

whom
» I go.

: is in-
cannot
t what
sible —
ite girl
)enevo-

harder

ties as
house,
do not
sr here

/e here

I cruel
to me
)gether

" Silence ! " said Don Silverio in that tone
which awed the boldest. " Of what avail is your
own virtue if it makes you thus harsh, thus un-
believing, 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 en-
treat Heaven to soften your heart. There is sor-
row 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
obstinacy to endeavour to detain him or to ask
him what he meant.

" Where is Adone? " he asked of the old man
Ettore, who Vv'as carrying manure in a great skip
upon his back.

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

The five apple-trees were beautiful old trees,
gnarled, moss-grown, hoary, but still bearing
abundant blossoms; 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

278

The Waters of Edera

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 bor-
der 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 Silverio.
" But it is a base thing to do, to use that child for
errands of which she cannot know either the dan-
ger 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."

" Poor little soul ! You could trust her, so you
abused her trust ! No : I do not believe you are

The Waters of Edera

279

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, w'ith 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

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280

The Waterr of Edera

felt as if an electric charge had passed through
him. He had believed his secret to be as abso-
lutely 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 de-
sire 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 govern-
ment 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 Val d'Edera, 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.'

The Waters of Edera

281

Adone was silent. He was not convinced ; and
many evil thoughts were black within his brain.
His first quarrel with a mother he adored had in-
tensified all the desperate ferocity awake in him.

" You are as blind as a mole," said Don Sil-
verio, " 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, sar-
donic; his sentences cut like whips; then after a
moment ot silence his tone changed to an infinite
softness and sweetness of pleading and persua-
sion.

" My son, my dear son ! cease to live in this
dream of impossible issues. Wake to the brutality
of fact, to the nakedness of truth. You have to

282

The Waters of Edera

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 con-
flict with the power of the State. You and those
who have listened to you will be shot down with-
out 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 place; 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. Amaze-
ment under such an outrage was stronger in Don
Silverio than any other feeling for the first mo-
ment. Adone — Adone ! — his scholar, his beloved,

The Waters of Edera

283

his disciple ! — spoke to him thus ! Then an over-
whelming 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;
then, with an intense effort, he controlled the im-
pulse to avenge. Without a word, and with one
glance of reproach and of disdain, he turned away
and went through the morning shadows under
the drooping and laden 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,

284

The Waters of Edera

however repented of, however washed away with
tears, was one of those injuries which may be
forgiven, but can never be forgotten, by any Uving
man. It would yawn like a pit between them for
ever.

XVII

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 mo-
ments without comprehension. Then he remem-
bered.

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

" She does not dream of it. Sir. Only she can-
not 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."

285

286

The Waters of Edera

" 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 Nerina 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. Mean-
while you must not go to the house. You would
not make ill-blood between a mother and her
son?"

" No," said Nerina.

" I have found a home for awhile for you, with
old Alaida Manzi; you know her; she is a good

The Waters of Edera

287

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 do so."

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

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

Nerina 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 moon-
rise."

Nerina 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 mean-
ing?"

Nerina was silent.

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

Nerina 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.

288

The Waters of Edera

" 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 hum-
bly, 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 caligraphy a few lines :
" In the name of my holy office I forbid you to
risk the life and good name of the maiden Nerina
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 sac-
rifice have saved their river and their valley from

' he said

the old

It."

nidnight

1. Take
»

la hum-
;^e street

ng-table

w Hnes :

you to

Nerina

nd sent

le most
spent ;
nights

loment
m with
! — who
of Hfe
a sac-
y from

The Waters of Edera

289

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
of 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 mil-
lionaires, of secretaries of State, of speculators, of
promoters, tenacious and forcible and ravenous as
the octopus?

In those lonely night hours when the moon-
beams 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 Vald'edera 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 his 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 any-
where. 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,

290

The Waters of Edera

nor a cluster of myosotis upon its banks, and they
would ruin themselves.

The round golden moon shone between the
budding vine-leaves at his casement.

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

XVIII

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 villaj^ half an hour
after dark. Nerina went uncomplaii ^ngly to hers
in the dark stone house within Ihe walls wliere
she had been told that it was her jot to dwell.
She did not break her fast; sl^e 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 shut-
tered window. She who was used to sleep 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.

291

292

The Waters of Edera

As soon as she heard by the heavy breathing of
the aged woman that she was sunk in the con-
gested slumber of old age the child got up nois-
lessly — she had not undressed — and stole out of
the chamber, takjng 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 sleep-
ing 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 stony
street. She laughed as the wind from the river
blew against her lips, and brought her the fra-
grance of Adone's autumn fields.

" I shall be in time ! " she thought, as she ran
down a short cut which led, in a breakneck de-
scent, 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 mal-
contents 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 north-
east on the Marecchia water, should have been
buried in the Vald'edera at all ; but the place and
the name were well known in the district to hun-

The Waters of Edera

293

dreds 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 Per-
seus.

Adone had summoned them to be there by mid-
night, 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, and was more distressed
than pleased to see her there ; he had not thought
of her.

In the moonlight and the silvery olive foliage
her little sunburnt face and figure took a softer
and more feminine grace. But Adone had no
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 crtiel to Anita.

But through that intense egotism which sees

294

The Waters of Edera

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 him 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."

" \Vhat ! 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 ? "

The Waters of Edera

295

kvn end,
instant
he had
ve.

) you, I
1 vague
:ed him

na ; and
so. "I
lumbly.
>ing my
1 harm

you out

il come

hard."

bal."

" 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 him 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, when will anything be
done?"

" Whenever the 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 moon-
light. There was fierce mountain blood in her

296

The Waters of Edera

veins ; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like
the juice of grapes warmed in an August noon.

He laughed also, 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 think-
ing 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 Puglia, leased by contract, mar-
shalled under overseers, different in nothing from
slaves who groan under the white man's lash in
Africa.

As he went on along the path which led through
his own fields to the moors, 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.

" No, no," he said sternlv. ** Get vou 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 Waters of Edera

297

iter like
loon.
)od will

hem in
:hem in
the day
ith the

eir own
3 think-
ould be
3re the
uarter ;
of the
t, mar-
g from
lash in

li rough

lark as

by his

nmand

)ack to

basely

dience.

not to

The child, ever obedient, vanished through the
olive boughs. Adone went onward northward to
his tryst.

But she did not go over the bridge. 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 love of movement,
the love of air and sky and freedom were stronger
than all. 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 so often borne the
summons. Now that she had escaped from Alai-
da's 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 Sil-
verio himself had stood in her path with the cross
raised.

She doubled like a hare, and came out on to the
path which Adone had taken, and within a few
yards of him, ready to hide herself in the furze
and broom if he turned his head. But he did not
do so ; he went straight onward.

She knew the way to the tomb of Asdrubal,
even in the darkness, as well as he did. It was a

298

The Waters of Edera

grassy hollow surrounded by dense trees, some
five miles or more from the Terra Vergine, on the
north bank of the river. The flat, grassy solitude
was clear enough and large enough to permit the
assemblage of several scores of men; it was the
spot generally chosen for these armed meetings.

Adone went on, unconscious that he was fol-
lowed; he went at a swing 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 Adone 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 here 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 the hills ; there was
little light, for there were as yet few stars visible,
but that was no 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 v.^hich was blowing bore her up

The Waters of Edera

299

!s, some
J, on the
solitude
rmit the
was the
tings.
vas fol-
1 swift;
as steel,
his feet,
half a
s ang-er
t. She
he path
)ture of
Vlaida's
rible to
" are to
ys been
ine she

■ of its

ire was
visible,
er way

1 which
ne, the
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, 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. And she went on
gaily, running where there was open ground,
pushing hard where the heather grew, going al-
ways in the same path as Adone had done. All
of a sudden she stopped short, in alarm. The
night was still ; the rushing of the river was loud
upon it, the 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 lit-
tle rivulets unheard by day, of timid creatures tak-
ing 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 with them. Were they men of Ruscino
going to their tryst with Adone? She did not

300

The Waters of Edera

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, breath-
ing, creeping, moving under the heather.

Suddenly she felt some presence close to her in
the dark; she held her breath; she shrank noise-
lessly 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 heather
had been recently cut. The men debouched on to
it from the undergrowth ; there was a faint liglit
from the stars on that strip of rough grass; she
saw that they w^ere 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
aw^ay there, in the hollow bed 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 Rus-
cino.

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

few men

le armed

stopped

her did ;

, breath-

:o her in
k noise-
ley were
her, but

heather
x\ on to
nt Hglit
iss; she

f ice at
r those
: stone-

Jrs ; the
: of the
niskets
re had
:t Rus-

oldiers
aruffo.
I men,
s if in

The Waters of Edera 301

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 uncer-
tain 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 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 fin-

302

The Waters of Eden

gers, 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

((

m summer

Can any of you speak the dialect? " cried the
sergeant to his privates.

One man answered, ** I come from Monte
Corno; 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.

The Waters of Edera

303

e cursed

ler arm

but she

Drk here

ried the

Monte
•e as in

-to the

lal is?"

ated to
er.

" Ask her if she will take us there."
The soldier asked her and translated her an-
swer.

" 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 1 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," said Nerina.

" 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 Abruzzi hills, but he and his men were lost
upon these moors, and might grope all night, and
miss the meeting, and fail to 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
orays of your mercy to leave her free, as she can-
not pass through the heather.'

3^4

The Waters of Edera

(.)

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 be-
gan 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 known as L'Erba Molle,
the wet grass; the grass was Inxuiiant, the flora
was varied and beautiful ; in appearance it was a
field, in reality it was a morass ; to all people of the
Vald'edera it was dreaded and avoided, as quick-
sands are by the seashore.

She went on as fast as the narrow path, winding
in and out between the undergrowth, permitted
her to go; with the armed soldiers, heavy laden
with their knapsacks and their boots, following

The Waters of Edera

)ut pushed
evolver at

>»

y joy was
ould have
d them in
done, and
y were so

let them
;n she be-
ead down

was due
4rned her

re was a
ba Molle,
the flora
it was a
pie of the
as quick-

, winding
permitted
vy laden
iollowing

her clumsily, and with effort, mutteri.ig curses on
tlicir ill-kick and tlieir sleepless ni^dit

The strrs were now laro-er and lighter; the
darkness was lightened, the river was running
avvay from its southern birthplace in the hills
which he like crouched lions aix)ut the feet of the
Leonessa. 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 "

And her heart leapt within her; and she went
with che loaded revolver pointed at her from be-
hind as though she went to her bridal-bed.

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

" I take you straight," said Nerina, ''only you
go too clumsily, for men in these parts should not
wear leather upon their feet."
_ And the soldiers sighed assent, and would will-
ingly have gone barefoot, and the sergeant swore
in tones of thunder because he could not under-
stand what she said.

Before long they came in sight of the Erba
Molle; the wet grass, which looked like a fair
peaceful pasture, with thousands of sword rushes
golden upon its surface. The dawn was faint, and

3o6

The Waters of Edera

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.

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

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

The swamp was of a brilliant emerald hue from
the ooze and stagnant waters under the grass, but
in aspect it seemed a smooth meadow, with only
the ripple of the grasses like that of a green lake
to disturb its surface ; it had killed many who had
trusted to it.

The soldier of the Abruzzi 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

locks of
)se with
1 a roar

where I
r of the
the first
it green

IS which
had the
one to
n a sea-
i did so
how to

ue from
•ass, but
ith only
een lake
vho had

lUperior,
she sets
b of the

3ounded

on solid

and his

The Waters of Edera 307

men crowded on to what they thought was pas-
ture. In the uncertain shadows and scarce dawn-
ing light, they did not see the row of submerged
piles. 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 clamor 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 rosy light of the sunrise shone on her
face.

Had she run onward into 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, yiekled, yawned like a grave.

He drew his right arm out of the ooze, seized
his revolver, and aimed at the dancing, mocking,

3o8

The Waters of Edera

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 mo-
rass.

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.

,ii 1

i golden
le fired;

the mo-
escaped,
upward

XIX

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

When mass w^as 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

309

3IO

The Waters of Edera

fl,

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 midnight ; 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; blood-lust
against those who mean ill to the river."

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

((

5ays the
Jba."
n.

vho, he
ime an

oke his
d some

our she

dare to
adonna
adonna

:ht ; we
vent to
at they

Would
5 sweet
such
, alas!
od-lust

e over

The Waters of Edera 3 1 1

" 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 peas-
ants 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 courtesy 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 sol-
diery 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 door-
way showed him the stones of the familiar street,
a buttress of his church, a great branch of one of

312

The Waters of Edera

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 re-
mained 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 ^ieu^enant.

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. We 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 com-
mandant. " Get you into your presbytery."

The Waters of Edera

313

arms and
L sentinel,
leemed to
he heard.
If a troop
le swords
lad their
ing with
utters in
alone re-
e middle
3 headed

'Ves this

ir," said

:atching
le Holy
le sharp
imed of

not be
't kneel

aid the

e com-

" 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 pas-
sage.

" 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 draw-
ers.

He said nothing ; the seizure of his manuscripts
and documents w^ere indifferent to him, for there
was nothing he had ever written which would not
bear the fullest light. But the insolent and arbi-
trary 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 ap-
prehension 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 direc-
tions it was little likely, he thought, that these
men would conduct themselves thus in Ruscino:

314

The Waters of Edera

he had no doubt that it was a concerted move-
ment, directed by the Prefect and the general com-
manding the garrisons of the province, and in-
tended to net in one haul the malcontents of the
Vald'edera.

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 to the lieutenant.

The young man did not reply ; he went on throw-
ing papers into a trunk.

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

The officer, 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 an-
swer.

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.

ill'

•ted move-
neral com-
e, and in-
nts of the

upon the
omen and
;d houses :

pie ? " he

)n throw-

=h? We
Silverio.
drew his
let it fall
ther an-

grating
garden,
ad, and

^ith one
om the

ive got

The Waters of Edera 3 1 r

" 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, Rev-
erendissimo ! "

"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 young man 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 a hideous clangour and clamour;
above all rose the shrill screams of the women.

" No one passes," said the sentinel, and he lev-
elled 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.

Where was Adone ?

He could hear the trampling of horses and the
jingling of spears and scabbards; the half squad-
ron who had beaten the moors that night were

3i6

The Waters of Edera

t5,

coming up the street. Half a battalion of soldiers
of the line, escorted by carabineers, came in from
the country, climbing the steep street, driving be-
fore 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 dov n their weapons and
begged for mercy when the cold steel of the sol-
diers 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 Rus-
cino, 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;

The Waters of Edera

317

of soldiers
ne in from
Jriving be-

disarmed,
hind them,
le tomb of
y had been
I of steel;
H and had
)een few ;
apons and
)f the sol-
fought as
Lssed into
s enemies

had been
I through
1 to Rus-
s the sun

ond, and
•ked with
he knew

t, his life

lid he be
1 powder
' 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 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 re-
morse.

" 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 were bound behind him, but his
limbs, though they dripped blood, were free.

He fronted the church, and that breach in the

318

The Waters of Edera

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 from block to block of the
Cyclopean huge stones, to spring with joyous
shouts into the river below.

As the soldier with a scream of agony let go his
hold, he broke away like a young lion released
from the den. Before they could seize him he
had sprung over the wall and was tearing down
the slope; the soldiers in swift pursuit behind him
stumbled, rolled down the slippery grass, fell over
the blocks of granite. He, sure of foot, knowing
the way from childhood, ran down it safely,
though blood poured from his wounds and blinded
his sight, and a sickness like the swooning of death
dulled his brain. Beyond him and behind him was
the river. He dashed into it like a hunted beast
swimming to sanctuary; he ran along in it with
its brightness and coolness rippling against his
parched throat. He stooped and kissed it for the
last time.

" Take me — save me — comrade — brother —
friend ! " he cried aloud to it w^ith his last breath
of life.

Then the sky grew dark, and only the sound of
the water was heard in his ears. By the bridge

The Waters of Edera

3^9

its depth was great, and the current was strong
under the shade of the ruined keep. It swept liis
body onward to the sea.

From the cornfields under the olive-trees his
mother saw him spring to that last embrace.

It was the beginning of winter when Don Sil-
verio Frascara, having been put upon his trial and
no evidence of any sort having been adduced
against him, was declared innocent and set free,
no compensation or apology being offered to him.

" Were it only military law it had been easy
enough to find him guilty," said Senator Giovac-
chino Gallo to the Syndic of San Beda, and the
Count Corradini warmly agreed with his Excel-
lency that for the sake of law, order, and public
peace it would be well could the military tribunals
be always substituted for the civil; but alas! the
monarchy was not yet absolute !

He had been detained many weeks and months
at the city by the sea, where the trial of the young
men of the Vald'edera had been held with all the
prolonged, tedious, and cruel delays common to
the national laws. Great efforts had been made
to implicate him in the criminal charges; but it
had been found impossible to verify such suspi-
cions; every witness by others, and every action
of his own, proved the wisdom, the purity, and
the excellence in counsel and example of his whole

320

The Waters of Edera

321

I Don Sil-
s trial and
I adduced
1 set free,
^d to him.
been easy
•r Giovac-
L, and the
lis Excel-
nd public
tribunals
alas! the

d months
le young
h all the
nmon to
en made
s; but it
h suspi-
y action
ity, and
is whole

life at Ruscino. The unhappy youths who had
been taken with arms in their hands were con-
demned for overt rebellion and conspiracy against
authority, and were sentenced, some to four, some
to seven, some to ten, and, a few who were con-
sidered the ringleaders, to twenty-five years of
cellular confinement. But against Don Silverio
it was found impossible even to make out the sem-
blance of an accusation, the testimony even of
those hostile to him being irresistibly in his fa-
vour in all ways. He had done his utmost to de-
fv^nd the poor boys and men who had been misled
b) Adone to their ow^n undoing, and he had de-
iended also the natives and the character of the
dead with an eloquence which moved to tears the
public who heard him, and touched even the hearts
of stone of president and advocates; and he had
done this at his own imminent isk; for men of
law can never be brou.^-ht to understand that com-

prehension is not collusion, as that pity is not fel-
lowship. But all his efforts fniled to save the
young men from the utmost rigour of the law.
It even declared that the most severe example was
necessary to rheck once for all by its terrors the
tendency of the common people to resist the State
and its public works and decrees. Useful and pa-
triotic enterprises must not be impedcv or wrecked
because ignorance was opposed to progress : thus
said the Public Prosecutor in a-i impassioned ora-

322

The Waters of Edera

tion which gained for him eventually emolument
and preferment. The rustics were sent in a body
to the penitentiaries; and Don Silverio was per-
mitted to go home.

Cold northern winds blew from the upper Apen-
nines and piled the snows upon the marble and
granite of the Abruzzi as he descended from the
hills and crossed the valley of the Edera towards
Ruscino. It seemed to him as though a century had
passed since he had left it. In the icy wind which
blew from the snows of the hills below the Leo-
nessa he shivered, for he had only one poor, thiu
coat to cover him. His strength, naturally great,
had given way under the mental and physical suf-
ferings of the last six months, although no word
of lament had ever escaped him. Like all gener-
ous natures he rebuked himself for the sins of
others. Incessantly he asked himself — might he
not have saved Adone ?

As he came to the turn in the road which
brought him within sight of the river, he sat down
on a stone and covered his eyes with his hand. He
dreaded what his eyes should see. The sacristan
had come to meet him bringing the little dog,
grown thin, and sad, and old with sorrow.

"I did all I could for him, but he would not be
consoled," murmured the old man.

From this point he had reached the course of
the Edera and the lands of the Terra Vergine

The Waters of Edera

323

molument

in a body

was per-

per Apen-
arble and

from the
a towards
mtitryhad
ind which

the Leo-
poor, thii.
illy great,
^sical suf-
i no word
all gener-
e sins of
might he

id which
sat down
land. He
sacristan
tie dog,

IV.

d not be

:ourse of
Vergine

were visible, he knew. With an effort, like one
who forces his will to look on a dead face, he un-
covered his eyes and looked downward. The
olive-trees were still standing; where the house
had stood was a black, charred, roofless shell.

" Reverend," said the old man belov; his breath,
" when she knew Adone was drowned she set fire
to the house, and so perished. They say she had
promised her son."

" I know ! " said Don Silverio.

The wind from the north swept across the val-
ley and drove the water of the Edera in yellow
foam and black eddies through the dead sedges.
Above Ruscino the acacia thickets were down, the
water was choked with timber and iron and stone,
the heather vv^as trampled and hacked, the sand
and gravel were piled in heaps, the naked soil
yawned in places like fresh-dug graves ; along the
southern bank were laid the metals of a li^^ ; rail-
way; on the lines of it were some empty trucks
filled with bricks; the wooden huts of the work-
iv^.a covered a dreary, dusty space ; the vater was
s',:li flowing, but on all the scene were the soil, the
disorder, the destruction, the vulgar meanness and
disfigurement which accompany modern labour
and affront like a coarse bruise on the gracious
face of Nature.

*' There have been three hundred men from the
Pi'.glia at work," said the sacristan. " They have

324

The Waters of Edera

stopped awhile now on account of the frost, but
as soon as the weather opens "

" Enough, enough! " murmured Don Silverio;
and he rose, and holding the little dog in his
arms, went on down the uncouth familiar road.

"His body has never been found?" he asked
under his breath.

The dM man shook his head.

*' Naj , ■ what Edera loves it keeps. He
dropped w; e lie knew it was deepest."

As he returned up the village street there was
not a soul to give him greeting except old Gianna,
who kneeled weeping at his feet. The people
peered out of their doorways and casements, but
they said not a word of welcome. The memory
of Adone was an idolatry with them, and Adone
had said that he had betrayed them. One woman
threw a stone at Signorino. Don Silverio covered
the little dog, and received the blow on his own
arm.

'" For twenty years I have had no thought but to
serve these, my people!" he thought; but he
neither rebuked nor reproached them.

The women as he passed them hissed at him:
" Judas ! Judas ! "

One man alone said : ** Nay, 'tis a shame. Have
you forgot what he did in the cholera ? 'Tis long
ago, but still—

>»

The Waters of Edera

325

But the women said, " He betrayed the poor
lads. He brought the soldiers. He sold the water."

Then, under that outrage, his manhood and his
dignity revived.

He drew his tall form erect, and passed through
them, aruil gave them his blessing as he passed.

Then he went within his church and remained
there alone.

" He is gone to pray for the soul of Adone,"
said the sacristan.

When he came out of the church and entered
his house, the street was empty ; the people were
afraid of what they had done and of their own
ingratitude. He crossed the threshold of the pres-
bytery. The sere vine veiled his study casement ;
in the silence he could hear the sound of the Edera
water; he sat down at his familiar table, and
leaned his arms on it, his head on his arms. His
eyes were wet, and his heart was sick ; his courage
was broken.

" How shall I bear my life here? " he thought.
All which had made it of value and lightened its
solitude was gone. Even his people had turned
against him; suspicious, thankless, hostile.

The old sacristan, standing doubtful and timid
at the entrance of the chamber, drew near and
reverently touched his arm.

** Sir — here is a letter — it came three days ago."

326

The Waters of Edera

Don Silverio stretched out his hand over the
Httle dog's head and took it.

He changed Loloiir as he saw its seal and super-
scription.

Rome had at last remembered him and awak-
ened to his value.

At the last Consistory he had been nominated
to the Cardinalate.

THE END.

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lominated