The winter which followed on Cecco’s departure to his military service was of unusual rigour for the vale of Arno; the waters were stormy and dark, and the fields were frozen and brown, and snow lay on the long lines of the mountains from their summit to their base. But the lemon-tree flourished before its narrow window, and Lizina was well and gay in the cold little brick-floored, plaster-walled, unceiled garret; and her father asked nothing more of Fate, and went out to his work in the bitter coldness and darkness of the morning dawns with an empty stomach but a warm heart, leaving her sleeping, easily and dreamlessly, curled up like a little dormouse in her corner of the room.
The winter passed and the spring came, making all the orchard lands once more become seas of white flowers, and setting the chaffinches and linnets and nightingales to work at their nests amongst the lovely labyrinth of bursting blossom; and one sunlit afternoon, towards the close of April, the village priest, coming along the road by the river, saw Fringuello, who was backing his sand-cart into the bed of the now shallow stream, and beckoned to him. The priest had an open letter in his hand, and his plump, smooth olive face was sad.
“Dario,” he said gravely, “I have some terrible news in this paper. Lillo’s son, Cecco, is dead. I have to go and tell the family. The authorities have written to me.”
He stopped suddenly, surprised by the effect which his news had on his hearer.
“Saints protect us, how you look!” he cried. “One would think you were the lad’s father!”
“Is it sure? Is it true?” stammered Fringuello.
“Ay, ay, it is true and sure enough. The authorities write to me,” answered the vicar, with some pride. “Poor lad! Poor, good, pretty lad! They sent him to the Marenna marshes, and the ague and fever got on him, and he died in the fort a week ago. And only to think that this time last year he was bringing me armfuls of blooming cherry boughs for the altar at Easter-day! And now dead and buried. Good lack! Far away from all his friends, poor lad! The decrees of heaven are inscrutable, but it is of course for the best.”
He crossed himself and went on his way.
Fringuello doffed his cap mechanically, and crossed himself also, and rested against the shaft of his cart with his face leaning on his hands. His hope was struck down into nothingness; the future had no longer a smile. Though he had told himself, and them, that children were fickle and unstable, and that nothing was less likely than that the lad would come back in the same mind, he had nevertheless clung to and cherished the idea of such a fate for his little daughter with a tenacity of which he had been unconscious until his air castle was scattered to the winds by the words of the priest. The boy was dead; and never would Lizina go to dwell in peace and plenty at the old farmhouse by the great pine.
“It was too good to be. Patience!” he said to himself, with a groan, as he lifted his head and bade the mule between the shafts move onward. His job had to be done; his load had to be carried; he had no leisure to sit down alone with his regret.
“And it is worse for Lillo than it is for me,” he said to himself, with an unselfish thought for the lad’s father.
He looked up at the little window of his own attic which he could see afar off; the lemon-tree was visible, and beside it the little brown head of Lizina as she sat sewing.
“Perhaps she will not care; I hope she will not care,” he thought.
He longed to go and tell her himself lest she should hear it from some gossip, but he could not leave his work. Yet, he could not bear the child to learn it first from the careless chattering of neighbouring gossips.
When he had discharged the load he carried, he fastened the mule to a post by the water-side, and said to a fellow-carter, “Will you watch him a moment whilst I run home?” and on the man’s assenting he flew with lightning speed along the road and up the staircase of his house.
Lizina dropped her sewing in amazement as he burst into the room and stood on the threshold with a look which frightened her.
She ran to him quickly.
“Babbo! Babbo! What is the matter?” she cried to him. Then, before he could answer, she said timidly, under her breath, “Is anything wrong—with Cecco?”
Then Fringuello turned his head away and wept aloud.
He had hoped the child had forgotten. He knew now that she had remembered only too well. All through the year which had gone by since the departure of the youth she had been as happy as a field-mouse undisturbed in the wheat. The grain was not ripe yet for her, but she was sure that it would be, and that her harvest would be plenteous. She had always been sure, quite sure, that Cecco would come back; and now, in an instant, she understood that he was dead.
Lizina said little then or at any time; but the little gay life of her changed, grew dull, seemed to shrink into itself and wither up as a flower will when a worm is at its root. She had been so sure that Cecco would return!
“She is so young; soon it will not matter to her,” her father told himself.
But the months went by and the seasons, and she did not recover her bloom, her mirth, her elasticity; her small face was always grave and pale. She went about her work in the same way, and was docile, and industrious, and uncomplaining, but something was wrong with her. She did not laugh, she did not sing; she seldom even spoke unless she was spoken to first. He tried to persuade himself that there was no change in her, but he knew that he tried to feed himself on falsehood. He might as well have thought his lemon-tree unaltered if he had found it withered up by fire.
II
Once Lizina said to her father, “Could one walk there?”
“Where, dear? Where?”
“Where they have put Cecco,” she answered, knowing nothing of distances or measurements or the meaning of travel or change of place.
She had never been farther than across the ferry to the other bank of the river.
Her father threw up his hands in despair.
“Lord! my treasure! why it is miles and miles and miles away! I don’t know rightly even where—some place where the sun goes down.”
And her idea of walking thither seemed to him so stupefying, so amazing, so incredible, that he stared at her timorously, afraid that her brain was going wrong. He had never gone anywhere in all his life.
“Oh, my pretty, what should we do, you and I, in a strange place?” moaned Fringuello, weeping with fear at the thought of change and with grief at the worn, fevered face lifted up to his. “Never have I stirred from here since I was born, nor you. To move to and fro—that is for well-to-do folks, not for us; and when you are so ill, my poor little one, that you can scarcely stand on your feet—if you were to die on the way——”
“I shall not die on the way,” said the child firmly.
“But I know nought of the way,” he cried wildly and piteously. “Never was I in one of those strings of fire-led waggons, nor was ever any one of my people that ever I heard tell of. How should we ever get there, you and I? I know not even rightly what place it is.”
“I know,” said Lizina; and she took a crumpled scrap of paper out of the breast of her worn and frayed cotton frock. It bore the name of the seashore town where Cecco had died. She had got the priest to write it down for her. “If we show this all along as we go people will put us right until we reach the place,” she said, with that quiet persistency which was so new in her. “Ask how one can get there,” she persisted, and wound her arm about his throat, and laid her cheek against his in her old caressing way.
“You are mad, little one—quite mad!” said Fringuello, aghast and affrighted; and he begged the priest to come and see her.
The priest did come, but said sorrowfully to him:
“Were I you, I would take her down to one of the hospitals in the town; she is ill.”
He did so. He had been in the town but a few times in his whole life; she never. It was now wintry weather; the roads were wet, the winds were cold; the child coughed as she walked and shivered in her scanty and too thin clothes. The wise men at the h
ospital looked at her hastily among a crowd of sick people, and said some unintelligible words, and scrawled something on a piece of paper—a medicine, as it proved—which cost to buy more than a day of a sand carter’s wage.
“Has she really any illness?” he asked, with wild, imploring eyes, of the chemist who made up the medicine.
“Oh no—a mere nothing,” said the man in answer; but thought as he spoke: “The doctors might spare the poor devil’s money. When the blood is all water like that there is nothing to be done; the life just goes out like a wind-blown candle.” “Get her good wine; butcher’s meat; plenty of nourishing food,” he added, reflecting that while there is youth there is hope.
The father groaned aloud, as he laid down the coins which were the price of the medicine. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! They might as well have bidden him feed her on powdered pearls and melted gold. They got home that day footsore and wet through; he made a little fire of boughs and vine-branches, and, for the first time ever since it had been planted, he forgot to look at the lemon-tree.
“You are not ill, my Lizinanina?” he said eagerly. “The chemist told me it was nothing.”
“Oh no, it is nothing,” said the child; and she spoke cheerfully and tried to control the cough which shook her from head to foot.
Tears rolled down her father’s cheeks and fell on to the smouldering heather, which he set all right. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! The three vain words rang through his head all night. They might as well have bade him set her on a golden throne and call the stars down from their spheres to circle round her.
“My poor little baby!” he thought; “never did she have a finger ache, or a winter chill, or an hour’s discomfort, or a moment’s pain in mind or body until now!”
The child wasted and sickened visibly day by day. Her father looked to see the lemon-tree waste and sicken also; but it flourished still, a green, fresh, happy thing, though growing in a place so poor. A superstitious, silly notion took possession of him, begotten by his nervous terrors for his child, and by the mental weakness which came of physical want. He fancied the lemon-tree hurt the child, and drew nourishment and strength away from her. Perhaps in the night, in some mysterious way—who knew how? He grew stupid and feverish, working so hardly all day on hardly more than a crust, and not sleeping at night through his fears for Lizina. Everything seemed to him cruel, wicked, unintelligible. Why had the State taken away the boy who was so contented and useful where he was born? Why had the strange, confined, wearisome life amongst the marshlands killed him? Why was he himself without even means to get decent food? Why, after working hard all these years, could he have no peace? Must he even lose the one little creature he had? The harshness and injustice of it all disturbed his brain and weighed upon his soul. He sank into a sullen silence; he was in the mood when good men turn bad, and burn, pillage, slay—not because they are wicked or unkind by nature, but because they are mad from misery.
But she was so young, and had been always so strong, he thought; this would pass before long, and she would be herself again—brisk, brown, agile, mirthful, singing at the top of her voice as she ran through the lines of the cherry-trees. He denied himself everything to get her food, and left himself scarce enough to keep the spark of life in him. He sold even his one better suit of clothes and his one pair of boots; but she had no appetite, and perceiving his sacrifice, took it so piteously to heart that it made her worse.
The neighbours were good-natured and brought now an egg, now a fruit, now a loaf for Lizina; but they could not bring her appetite, and were offended and chilled by her lassitude, her apparent ignorance of their good intentions, and her indifference to their gifts.
Some suggested this nostrum, others that; some urged religious pilgrimages, and some herbs, and some charms, and some spoke of a wise woman, who, if you crossed her hand with silver, could relieve you of any evil if she would. But amidst the multitude of counsellors, Lizina only grew thinner and thinner, paler and paler, all her youth seeming slowly to wane and die out of her.
Her little sick heart was set obstinately on what her father had told her was impossible.
None of Cecco’s own people thought of going to the place where he died. He was dead, and there was an end to it; even his mother, although she wept for him, did not dream of throwing away good money in a silly and useless journey to the place where he had been put in the ground.
Only the little girl, who had laughed at him and flouted him as they sat on the wall by the river, did think of it constantly, tenaciously, silently. It seemed to her horrible to leave him all alone in some unfamiliar, desolate place, where no step was ever heard of any whom he had ever known. She said nothing of it, for she saw that even her father did not understand; but she brooded over the thought of it constantly, turning to and fro in her mind the little she had ever known or heard of the manner and means by which people transported themselves from place to place. There were many, of course, in the village who could have told her how others travelled, but she was too shy to speak of the matter even to the old man of the ferry, in whose boat, when it was moored to a poula driven in the sand, she had spent many an hour of playtime. She had always been a babbling, communicative, merry child, chattering like a starling or a swift, until now. Now she spoke rarely, and never of the thing of which her heart was full.
One day her father looked from her pinched, wan face to the bright green leaves of the flourishing lemon-tree, and muttered an oath.
“Day and night, for as many years as you are old, I have taken care of that tree, and sheltered it and fed it; and now it alone is fair to see and strong, whilst you—verily, oh verily, Lizina, I could find it in my heart to take a billhook and hew it down for its cruelty in being glad and full of vigour, whilst you pinch and fade, day by day, before my sight!”
Lizina shook her head, and looked at the tree which had been the companion of her fifteen years of life.
“It’s a good tree, babbo!” she said gently. “Think how much it has given us; how many things you bought me with the lemon money! Oh! it is very good; do not ever say a word against it; but—but—if you are in anger with it, there is a thing which you might do. You have always kept the money which it brought for me?”
“Surely, dear. I have always thought it yours,” he answered, wondering where her thoughts were tending.
“Then—then,” said Lizina timidly, “if it be as mine really, and you see it no more with pleasure in its place there, will you sell it, and with the price of it take me to where Cecco lies?”
Her eyes were intensely wistful; her cheeks grew momentarily red in her eagerness; she put both hands to her chest and tried to stop the cough which began to choke her words. Her father stared, incredulous that he could hear aright.
“Sell the tree?” he asked stupidly.
Not in his uttermost needs had the idea of selling it come to him. He held it in a superstitious awe.
“Since you say it is mine,” said the child. “It would sell well. It is strong and beautiful and bears good fruit. You could take me down where the sun sets and the sea is—where Cecco lies in the grass.”
“Good Lord!” said Fringuello, with a moan.
It seemed to him that the sorrow for her lost sweetheart had turned the child’s brain.
“Do, father—do!” she urged, her thin brown lips trembling with anxiety and with the sense of her own powerlessness to move unless he would consent.
Her father hid his face in his hands; he felt helpless before her stronger will. She would force him to do what she desired, he knew; and he trembled, for he had neither knowledge nor means to make such a journey as this would be to the marshlands in the west, where Cecco lay.
“And the tree—the tree!” he muttered.
He had seen the tree so long by that little square window, it was part of his life and hers. The thought of its sale terrified him as if he were going to sell some human friend into bondage.
“There is no other way,” said Lizina sadly.
She, too, was loth to sell the tree, but they had nothing else to sell; and the intense selfishness of a fixed idea possessed her to the exclusion of all other feeling.
Then the cough shook her once more from head to foot, and a little froth of blood came to her lips.
Lizina, in the double cruelty of her childhood and of her ill-health, was merciless to her father, and to the tree which had been her companion so long. She was possessed by the egotism of sorrow. She was a little thing, now enfeebled and broken by long nights without sleep and long days without food, and her heart was set on this one idea, which she did not reveal—that she would die down there, and that then they would put her in the same ground with him. This was her idea.
In the night she got up noiselessly, whilst her father was for awhile sunk in the deep sleep which comes after hard manual toil, and came up to the lemon-tree and leaned her cheek against its earthen vase.
“I am sorry to send you away, dearie,” she said to it; “but there is no other way to go to him.”
She felt as if it must understand and must feel wounded. Then she broke off a little branch—a small one with a few flowers on it.
“That is for him,” she said to it.
And she stood there sleepily with the moonlight pouring in on her and the lemon-tree through the little square hole of the window.
When she got back to her bed she was chilled to the bone, and she stuffed the rough sacking of her coverture between her teeth to stop the coughing, which might wake her father. She had put the little branch of her lemon into the broken pitcher which stood by her at night to slake her thirst.
“Sell it, babbo, quick, quick!” she said in the morning.
She was afraid her strength would not last for the journey, but she did not say so. She tried to seem cheerful. He thought her better.
“Sell it today—quick, quick!” she cried feverishly; and she knew that she was cruel and ungrateful, but she persisted in her cruelty and ingratitude.
The Third Macabre Megapack Page 19