by Ouida
This summer the procession was especially hateful and foolish in Messer Gaspardo’s sight; was more than ever loathsome to him, since Viola Mazzetti did not wear his gown, and his garland, and his shoe‐buckles, but came out in her humble grey skirt and bodice, that were to her loveliness like the dark leaves to the mangolia flower, and had never as much even as a silver pin set in her hair.
Old Pastorini, too, was the capo of the feast, and managed everything, and in the village band Carmelo beat the drum; beat it indeed with more zeal than discretion, so that it could always be heard high above every other instrument at every moment, but was very much praised, and looked very handsome and bright as he did so.
Messer Nellemane found all this too much for him, so he rose early on this day, and went on business to the great city, twelve miles away under the mountains, and let Santa Rosalia have its fooling since he had no power to stop it.
And Santa Rosalia had it; very peacefully and piously at first, and then very good‐naturedly and gaily, mingling the sacred and the profane in an innocent jumble, singing the O Salutaris one moment devoutly as they followed the Host, and the next, humming waltz music merrily as they jumped round in the dance.
Italian merrymaking is no longer pretty; the sense of colour and of harmony is gone out of our people, whose forefathers were models of Leonardo and Raffaelle, and whose own limbs, too, have still so often the mould of the Faun and the Discobolus. Their merrymaking has nothing of the grace and brightness of French fairs, nor even of the picturesqueness and colour of the German feast and frolics; even in Carnival, though there are gaiety and grotesqueness, there are little grace and little good colouring. Yet the people enjoy themselves; enjoy themselves for the most part very harmlessly, and very merrily, when they forget their tax‐papers, their empty stomachs, and their bankrupt shops.
The village enjoyed itself this day of the Feast of God, though its piazza was very dusty, and its band very out of tune, and its food and its drink as thoroughly bad as they could be. But it was Corpus Domini, and everyone was happy; and when the long procession had said its last prayer the trescone began in the square, and every house was hung with crescents of light.
Messer Nellemane, being compelled to return by the last diligence that ran to Santa Rosalia from the town to which he had gone to escape from the ceremonies and festivities, found himself at ten of the night in a still crowded piazza as he descended from his rickety conveyance. The Municipality was black as crepe; that he could ordain; but every other house round the place was twinkling with the flame of lighted oil in little iron sconces; the very same sconces that had been used in the Cinque Cento to celebrate feasts and frays and saints’ days.
The lights were blazing brightly; the music was sounding jocundly, the youths and the maidens were going round and round, laughing and chattering as they jumped. The drum stood on a pavement with the honest dog of the mill guarding it, and Carmelo was dancing with Viola, while old Pippo and the miller, sitting on two rush chairs beside the dog and drum, looked on smiling and beating the time.
A shining sky was over them all; the river glistened in the strong moonlight; the air was heavy with the scent of the lilies and the stocks, the carnations and the roses in the gardens around. Saint Rosalia was in festa, and the two old men, warmed by a little more wine than usual, were saying one to another.
‘They might as well wed at once? They will never be richer, and there is no time like youth.’
Messer Nellemane did not hear the words of the old men, but he saw the young dancers.
He went on sullenly, with his hat drawn down over his brows, pushing his way through the crowd without any of the somewhat pompous politeness of demeanour which marked him usually.
He slammed his door, and went to his bed, and shut his shutters to shut out the shining heavens, the fragrant air, the glittering little lights; but the laughter, and the music, and the joyous blithe‐hearted murmur that rose up from the dancers below the shutters, he could not exclude; and he cursed them.
For the first time his liberi pensieri were distasteful to him and unsatisfactory; for atheism makes a curse a mere rattle of dry peas in a fool’s bladder as it makes a blessing a mere flutter of breath. Messer Nellemane for the first time felt that the old religion had its advantages over agnosticism; it gave you a hell for your rivals and your enemies!
In the next week there came a little party up to the Municipality of Santa Rosalia. They were Pippo and his granddaughter and the two Pastorini, father and son. They were in festal attire; Pippo wore new dark blue hempen clothes, and had his jacket on one shoulder, and his shirt well ruffled up above his trouser‐band; the miller was in his Sunday suit, all grey; Carmelo had a pink shirt and a blue necktie and a jay’s‐wing in the band of his wide‐awake; and Viola had a gown of pale dove‐coloured stuff that she had bought in the town of Pomodoro for her wedding, and had her dead mother’s string of seed‐pearls about her throat; her pale cheek was as red as a rose, and but for her grandfather’s stout hold on her arm she would never have found feet to bear her up the flight of steps.
Bindo Terri, lounging in the entrance, saw the little group, and thrust his tongue into his cheek and spat on the stone. Pastorini the elder, who was the stoutest‐hearted of the quartette, asked for the most worshipful the Syndic.
Bindo whistled.
The Chancellor, who was inside the door, and who was busy eating little black figs and whittling a stick, said the Most Worshipful was at the Bagni for his health, but there was in his stead and equal to himself for all intents and purposes of business the Most Estimable his secretary, Messer Gaspardo Nellemane.
Viola changed from her soft warmth of colour to a great pallor.
The miller said stoutly: ‘Then his Most Estimable the secretary let us see. It is a matter that brooks no delay, eh, son of mine?’
Thereat Demetrio Pastorini laughed, and chuckled, and winked, being a merry man, and the Chancellor bade them go on up the stairs, and on the landing place, at a door to the right, they might enter, he said; then he returned to eating his figs and throwing the skins on the floor of this august place where children were forbidden to play.
They went on up the staircase, and at the door the elder Pastorini rapped with his staff.
‘Enter!’ said the voice of the high functionary of state within, and they entered and stood in the presence of Messer Nellemane.
A single gleam, like the glitter of a steel mirror in moonlight, lit up cruelly and fiercely the eyes of the rejected lover of Viola; he guessed their errand.
A moment more, and the evil light ceased to shine in his regard; he smiled a pleasant and condescending smile of patronage.
‘Ser Fillippo, good‐day — Signora mine, you look as fair as the morning. Signore Pastorini, what can I do for you? But I divine your errand — nay, before as an official I execute your business, let me as a friend wish you all happiness.’
The men were subdued, fascinated, deceived; they thought what a good comrade this tyrant of the community could be; the maiden alone was not blinded; she had seen the first, fell, fierce gleam of her village Faust’s eyes, and it had stabbed her like a knife. The smile that had replaced it was no lovelier to her than would have been the hissing jaws of a swamp‐snake.
Her heart was heavy, but she curtseyed and thanked him.
Messer Nellemane said some more polite words and well‐turned assurances of friendship, and old Pippo thought, ‘He’ll never go against me for the rushes and the water now — after all this.’
Then the Syndic’s secretary proceeded with the Syndic’s work of registration and wore an unruffled brow.
The intended marriage of Pastorini Carmelo, aged twenty‐two, and Mazzetti Viola, aged seventeen, was formally announced in print, and stuck up, for all the commune to see, behind a dirty glass in a dirtier frame with those admirably delicate and spiritual formularies which modern governments deem necessary for the hedging in of the divinity of love.
Then
Viola took off her pearl‐coloured gown and went to make some bread, and Carmelo tucked up his sleeves and went forth to work amongst the sacks till nightfall, and both knew that when the round moon should want and grow a slender horn once more in the summer skies, the day of days would dawn for them.
CHAPTER VI.
SOON after Corpus Domini the Rosa water became too low to turn the great wheel of the Pastorini’s mill. This often happened in Santa Rosalia now that the woods of the convent and of other hills in the stream had been felled, and that farther up in the province, at the making of the new railway, whole forests of sweet chestnut and of pines had been destroyed; needlessly in most instances, only that so fine an occasion for the making of loot could not of course be missed by the army of contractors, landowners, and officials of public works.
‘I never knew the like when I was young; there were always four feet of water even in the Leone month, ‘ said Demetrio Pastorini, scratching his head wofully as he gazed down on the sun‐dried wheels and the shallows that showed all the pebbles and the sand, the water weeds and the little fishes.
‘Lord a‐mercy!’ said Pippo, ‘when we were young, things were let alone as God made them; now they’re always messing and muddling, and thinking as how they could have built the world a deal better.’
‘I suppose it’s that,’ said the miller sorrowfully. ‘Never when I was young was Rosa dry. As fast as wheat was cut in midsummer, ’twas ground by us.’
‘It’s along of the meddling and muddling,’ said Pippo. ‘Why Lord! they do
The month of August is always called in Italy the month of the Lion.
say that beyond Pomodoro on Tagliafico’s ground they are threshing wheat with a kettle on wheels!’
Old Pastorini sighed: he was a better educated man than old Pippo, and he knew that into the quiet, sweet, pastoral lands there were coming the ‘buzzing and muzzing’ of those unsightly machines which are the best friends of socialism, being the gain of the proprietor, and the curse of the peasantry, everywhere throughout Europe.
He had never heard of Virgil and of Theocritus, but it hurt him to have these sylvan pictures spoiled; these pictures which are the same as those they saw and sang; the threshing barns with the piles of golden grain, and the flails flying to merry voices; the young horses trampling the wheat loose from its husk with bounding limbs and tossing manes; the great arched doorways, with the maidens sitting in a circle breaking the maize cone from its withered leaves, and telling old world’s stories, and singing sweet fiorellini all the while; the hanging fields broken up in hill and vale with the dun‐coloured oxen pushing their patient way through labyrinths of vine boughs and clouds of silvery olive leaf; the bright laborious day, with the sun‐rays turning the sickle to a semi‐circlet of silver, as the mice ran, and the crickets shouted, and the larks soared on high; the merry supper when the day was done, with the thrill and thrum of the mandolini, and the glisten of the unhoused fireflies, whose sanctuary had been broken when the bearded barley and the amber corn fell prone; all these things rose to his memory; they had made his youth and manhood glad and full of colour; they were here still for his sons a little while, but when his sons should be all men grown, then those things would have ceased to be, and even their very memory would have perished, most likely, while the smoke of the accursed engines would have sullied the pure blue sky, and the stench of their foul vapours would have poisoned the golden air.
He roused himself, and said wearily to Pippo, ‘There is a tale I have heard somewhere of a man who sold his birthright for gold, and when the gold was in his hands, then it changed to withered leaves and brown moss; I was thinking, eh? That the world is much like that man.’
‘Truly,’ said Pippo, who did not very well understand. ‘But what has the world to do with us? We have done well enough without it.’
The miller shook his head, and turned from the shallow waters.
‘It is all “world” now: that is the worst of it. There is no country, or soon there will be none. Even Rosa water is running away, you see!’
Pippo went home to his daughter, and said : ‘The end of all things is a’coming: Rosa is drying up; I do not see how you can marry if the mill stops. To be sure you could always live in this house, and Carmelo could always be a bracciante.’
Viola’s eyes filled: she did not mind how poor Carmelo and she might be, but she thought it would be such a terrible shame to him to be a bracciante — a day labourer — everybody looks down on these, and nobody is one that can, by any means, avoid it.
Viola never contradicted her father; but she slipped away, and went inside San Giuseppe, which stood in the piazza, and prayed to that Bohemian S. John who is the patron of all running water, to set the Rosa flowing again, and the tears ran down her cheeks as she prayed.
Messer Nellemane met her straight, face to face, as she came out of the church and he out of the caffè: he took off his hat with the sweetest smile.
‘When is the giorno felice?’ he asked.
She murmured some unintelligible words, coloured hotly, and ran towards her own door, her little yellow dog Raggi, who had been in the church with her, scampering in front.
‘A dog loose!’ said Messer Nellemane to his myrmidon Bindo, who was near. Bindo muttered sheepishly that it was ‘such a little one.’
‘Little or large; what is the use of rules if they be not enforced?’ said the uperior, very sternly. ‘A little dog may bite or go mad just as easily as a large one.’
‘And that is true, signore,’ said Bindo. ‘And besides they never pay any tax for this one.’
Messer Nellemane made a note of the fact, and the next day took the tax‐gatherer to account for leniency and inattention.
When in the evening the great man sat on his usual green iron chair in front of the Nuova Italia with his comrades and colleagues, fat Maso and thin Tonino, he saw the young Pastorini, Carmelo, with his two brothers, stop the mill‐house mule before Pippo’s house, and Viola come out to talk to them on the doorstep.
There is the miller’s cart,’ said Messer Nellemane to his colleagues. ‘By the way, I hear, the mill has not worked for a month. The Rosa up there is so dry.’
‘It never used to be dry. It used to be a very deep stream,’ said the Chancellor. ‘I cannot tell the reason of it, unless it be that drying up the Lago di Giglio has scorched this up too.’
Messer Nellemane gave him a glance of scorn: the Lily lake had been a beautiful piece of water which had been drained, as a speculation, by a rich man, and the draining had been called progress and patriotism, though it had destroyed great beauty of scenery, and been the ruin of some three hundred families of freshwater fishermen. All the syndics and their councils had admired the work exceedingly.
‘It is very injurious for the interests of the province,’ continued Messer Gaspardo, ‘to be dependent thus on the caprices of a river. It would be a great thing if a steam‐mill could be established.’
‘Ouf!’ said little Tonino, opening wide his eyes. ‘And what would become of the Pastorini?’
‘The interests of the few must always be subordinate to those of the many,’ answered Messer Nellemane, with his usual excellence of phrase and opinion. ‘It is quite absurd in these practical times for a whole commune to be dependent for its bread on the accident of a river being full of water. We must see what can be done in the matter. Of course,’ he added, ‘it would at the moment be very hard upon the miller and his family; but someone must always suffer for any great work, and the cause of progress is sacred,’
‘Just so,’ said Maso and Tonino in concert, being always convinced, if not en‐ lightened, by the magnificent words of Messer Nellemane.
‘There was some talk of such a mill before the Cavaliere went to the baths,’ said their instructor, though he had never until that moment ever thought of such a thing. ‘And, certainly, if the river continue to run dry like this, something must be done. The miller is not very well off as it is, I believe; and this is
an improvident marriage that he is making for his son.’
‘They won’t have many beans in their pot,’ giggled Maso, who was a vulgar man.
‘Alas! no,’ said Messer Nellemane, who was never vulgar, with an air of regret. ‘It is these hasty and impecunious marriages that bring about the beggary of the nation. They ought to be forbidden by the law. The State forbids suicide; why not also forbid an ill‐judged marriage?’
‘What would the women say?’ chuckled the vulgar Maso.
‘They have no voice in politics,’ said Messer Nellemane, coldly: he was a very literal man, and never saw a joke in anything. The land of Pasquin and of Polichinello has ceased to laugh.
‘What a minister he would make!’ said Maso admiringly to Tonino, when their great man had left them to go and read the ‘Diritto,’ which had come to him by the evening’s post: the little girl of Nando running over with it obsequiously.
‘Ah, he would indeed!’ assented Tonino; but there was no great warmth in the assent: Messer Nellemane always beat him at dominoes, and hurt him both in pride and pocket.
That night, as it chanced, old Annunziata was coming home alone along a path across the fields from one of the farmhouses in the hills. The massaja there had been very good to her, and had given her some eggs; not to eat, for Annunziata would have thought that wild extravagance indeed, except at Pasqua, but to sell for her own profit.
On this path, dark with twilight and the thick canopy of overhanging pines, the old woman was accosted by a drunken fellow — a smith from the forge above at Sestriano — who shook her, jeered at her, and carried away her basket of eggs. The poor old soul went bruised and weeping down towards Santa Rosalia; she mad made a good fight for it with her oaken stick, but she had got blows in return, and had lost her eggs.