by Ouida
She met Carmelo Pastorini as she neared the village, and told him what that drunken lout, Pompéo of Sestriano, had done to her. Carmelo listened with all his bright face lit up in a radiance of wrath, and before she could stop him had dashed up the hill path, had overtaken the staggering scoundrel, and had rescued the basket, though the eggs were all smashed in the dispute for them.
But Carmelo thought that he would not tell her that: he had a little money of his own, allowed him by his father — very little — for tobacco and his clothes: he had a franc left, and he strode farther up the hill, and bought a dozen eggs at the first farmhouse that would sell them. ‘It will be only to go without a pipe for a week or two,’ he thought; for he spent one centime a day on his tobacco.
Annunziata was home again in her chamber with the other old women by the time Carmelo reached Santa Rosalia, and she had to get out of bed and speak to him, as he threw a stone at her shutter.
‘I have got back your eggs, ‘Nunziatina,’ he shouted to her. ‘Let me down a bit of string, and you can draw up the basket.’
The old woman, laughing and crying with joy, did as he bade her, and the eggs were drawn slowly upward against the white wall in the silvery moonlight.
‘Thou art a dear good lad,’ she cried, ‘and Viola is a lucky maiden.’
Carmelo laughed, and called back.
‘Do not tell on the poor devil, mother. He was drunk—’
‘Not I,’ said Annunziata. ‘I wouldn’t put a poor toad in the lock‐up for a bag of gold if he took it of me — not I.’
‘Good night,’ said Carmelo, and went away, humming to himself, Nel mezzo del mio petto è una ghirlanda, E ne l’ho scritto il nome di Viola, Quattr’angioli del ciel suonan la banda.
But as not a mouse squeaks in its own hole without all the country‐side chattering about it, this encounter with Pompéo of Sestriano got wind, and all the village was talking of it next day. The story ran here and there like a jack‐o’‐lanthorn in a swamp, and, of course, grew in the telling.
In consequence the carabiniers, at Messer Nellemane’s instigation, visited Pompéo at his forge in Sestriano, and visited Carmelo at his father’s mill, and great fuss and noise were made about it, and the two men and the old woman were summoned to the Municipality.
Around my breast there is a garland, And on it’s writ the name of Viola, And four angels of God make melody!
Every lover of course substitutes the name of his beloved.
The old woman, trembling like a leaf for her very life, for she had never been called up by the police in all her years, made light of it, and said she ‘was sure that ‘Péo had but done it as a joke.’
‘The law does not recognise jokes,’ the law said to her by the august voice of Messer Nellemane, who was examining her.
Pompéo himself declared that he had no remembrance of anything at all; and most likely spoke genuinely, for he had been very much the worse for wine; and when he had awakened on the hillside at morning had not been able, in the least, to recollect how he had come there.
When Carmelo was examined he laughed outright.
‘Péo was drunk,’ he said, ‘and I knocked him down to get Viola’s aunt’s basket away from him, but he heeled over as if he were made of straw and fell on the grass under the vines, and there I left him. I broke none of his bones, you see, and I hoped nobody would know anything.’
‘The Law knows everything,’ said Messer Nellemane, with a frown, ‘and for concealing a theft there is a very heavy penalty, and the interests of public justice require—’
Annunziata, beholding the blanched, scared, stupid face of the sottish smith, felt all her courage and her charity burn in her.
‘Holy Mother! sir, most illustrious, I mean,’ she cried in desperation, ‘there wasn’t a bit of harm of any sort done, and I am certain the poor fool took them from me not knowing; and he wouldn’t hurt a hair of my head if he were sober; and the eggs were all safe and sound, and nobody could go against anyone when the eggs were all got back; and as for me, not a soul would I put in prison if they cut the gown from off my waist; not I.’
‘Woman!’ thundered Messer Nellemane, losing his benignity before these atrocious principles, ‘do you dare to insult the majesty of the Law? Abstract justice is alone fit to govern any human action. You have a duty to society—’
‘Me, sir!’ cried Annunziata, and muttered to herself, ‘Well‐a‐day! one does live to come to something.’
‘Which must be above all personal considerations. Let us examine for a moment to what your astounding, your inexcusable, laxity of principle would lead. You would actually establish the frightfully immoral fact that, if stolen goods were returned intact, the theft would be condoned, effaced, become as though it had not been! You ignore entirely the moral heinousness of the crime. You take the low and debasing view that the only thing of importance in a theft is the pecuniary loss it may inflict! Whether your goods were returned to you safe, or were destroyed, is altogether beyond the question. What moral teachers have you had, woman?’
Annunziata dimly comprehended that her morality was impugned, and her little black eyes blazed with righteous rage.
‘I have been a decent person all my days, sir,’ she said with a resentful fierceness in her voice. ‘I was a good wife while my poor man lived, and since he died, thirty year or more ago, never have I done a thing he’d be ashamed to see.’
Messer Nellemane paid no attention to her whatever, but continued his dissertation, to which Carmelo listened with a merry grin upon his face, Pompéo stupidly with open mouth, and the Chancellor, the Conciliator, and Bindo Terri, with his colleagues, in attitudes expressive of righteous awe and overpowering admiration. Finally, Messer Nellemane, unwillingly felt that no judge would sentence with any severity for an offence non‐proven, and prosecuted against the aggrieved person’s will; yet, reluctant to let them escape altogether, he decided that after this unofficial examination that the Sestriano smith should be summoned to appear at Pomodoro, to be there judged for drunkenness and attempted theft, and that the miller’s son should pay a fine of twenty francs for having taken the law into his own hands in lieu of summoning the police, an offence against the Code.
Carmelo made a wry face. Every farthing could be ill afforded by his father.
‘Those are the dearest eggs that were ever laid, mother!’ he whispered to Annunziata.
The old woman wrung her hands.
‘And that poor soul to go to prison for me! Oh dear, oh dear! And the gentleman won’t hear a word that I say!’
So that bright summer day was clouded over for them all.
‘You will have to be witnesses at the trial of Pompéo,’ said the guard Bindo, with keen relish, to them, as the old woman and Carmelo went down the municipal steps.
‘Nay, I’ll never say a word against him, poor creature. When the wine’s in the wit’s out,’ said Annunziata.
‘I’ll say again what I said in there,’ added Carmelo, ‘and that’s just the truth; he went over at a touch like an owl in noonday. And as for you Bindo, if you had against you all the witnesses that see you in the caffès, would you wear that fine popinjay’s hat and jacket long, I wonder?’
Bindo growled and muttered something about his wish that Carmelo and all his people should be burnt.
‘Sia brucciato!!’ remains a favourite imprecation in the language, having been transmitted no doubt from the day when heretics and Hebrews and all such sinners were sent to the stake.
Carmelo went onward, disregarding the storm he had raised, and singing at the top of his voice the stornello: Io benedico lo fiore d’amore, Rubato avete le perle al mare, Agli alberi le fronde, a me il core.
What did Bindo’s wrath or the punishment of hanging over the drunken head of Pompé of Sestriano matter to him? He was
I bless the flower of Love, It has stolen the pearls from the sea, It has stolen the leaves from the trees, It has stolen the heart from me!
not more selfish
than another, but he would not have been a youth and a lover if he had had room for any other thought long together than that of his approaching nuptials.
The papers of the marriage had been long enough behind the wire cage and the dusty glass of the communal palace, and the time had rolled on until now on the first day of July he would be wedded to Viola, and only forty‐eight hours separated him from that morn. He ran along the village laughing and singing, with a fresh rose stuck behind his ear and a fresh ribbon round his hat, and reached the house with the white and blue Madonna, and went in and sat in the window‐sill, looking down on the girl’s hands as they plaited, whilst Pippo worked and smoked his pipe on the threshold.
‘You were so good to ‘Nunziatina,’ said Viola, raising eyes to his that were wet with tears of pleasure.
‘Che!’ laughed Carmelo, swinging his shapely bare feet against the wall of the window. ‘Won’t she belong as much to me as to you? She shall never want a basket of eggs while I live.’
CHAPTER VII.
MEANTIME Bindo slunk away across the square, fumbling at the revolver with which the commune had lately armed him on pretext of mad dogs, and meditating within himself on his vengeance. Suddenly a bright inspiration occurred to him.
The favourite mission of Bindo was to poison dogs. Messer Gaspardo hated dogs; hey had an unfortunate way of smelling at him which made people laugh and remember the old saying that a dog can smell a rogue, and hurt his dignity in his own sight and that of others. Moreover, courage does not characterise the tyrant always; though Atilla was brave, Messer Nellemane was not. He was afraid of dogs; and he had made it Article I. of Rule I. in his Regulations that a free dog was never to be seen in all the length and breadth of Vezzaja and Ghiralda.
But there will always be dogs loose, all Regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, for there is no population anywhere in which everybody is a poltroon. So, as loose dogs still trotted about the commune, and led their pretty, merry, brisk lives under his very eyes, in impertinent disregard of Article I., Rule I., Messer Nellemane had at once bethought himself of poisoning them. Phosphorus was cheap and deadly, so were rat‐poisons, and when fried with liver as Bindo fried them, and thrown about in the dust of the highway, they stretched many a gallant hound low, and left many a puppy rigid and swollen after an agony more terrible than the hanged malefactor suffers; whilst for those that his poisoned polpetti did not slaughter he wore out the lives of the owners thereof with summonses without end and fines without mercy.
It grew to be the general belief in Vezzaja and Ghiralda that you had better stab a man than keep a dog, and you would pay less for doing it, too.
Carmelo, like most sons of the soil, was fond of his dog, a fine curly white fellow, strong and young like Carmelo himself, who was called Toppa because he scared away robbers. Toppa, by choice, kept close about the mill, and in that little boschetto of poplars which had belonged to the Pastorini longer than men could remember; for he was a good and dutiful dog, and knew that if he went roaming, thieves might break in and steal. Therefore Toppa rarely fell under the head of a contravention, since even Article I., Rule I., could not assert that a man’s dog must not be loose upon his own property.
Nevertheless, on Toppa the evil eye of Bindo had often fallen, for Bindo had been pinned by Toppa more than once in unregenerate days before becoming a functionary of the State; and moreover, Messer Nellemane had said, ‘That dog at the mill looks dangerous; he barks when anyone passes;’ which hint sufficed for the guard now that to natural cruelty was united the thirst of personal animosity. At dawn, whilst the mists of earliest morning were still white on the river and the hills, he walked warily within sight of the little wood by the mill, intent alike on hurting Carmelo and pleasing his patron. Toppa was lying with his head between his paws on the grass on the bank; he kept wide awake all night from his strong principle, and now when the sun had risen, knew that he might slumber and dream in peace without peril to the homestead.
Nevertheless, when he heard a step fall upon the thick dust of the road, Toppa, although he was no longer sentry, performed a sentry’s part and rose, and ran, and looked. He kept within his own boundary, as he had been taught to do, being a very faithful dog, and only looked; a cat may look at a king, says the old saw, but in Vezzaja and Ghiralda a dog must not look at a guard.
Bindo spoke not a word, but he threw something he held in his hand from the road where he stood into the grass beneath the poplars, near the dog.
Toppa was at no time very well fed, no dog is in the country; and he had not eaten since sunset. His nostrils smelled an odour savoury and sweet to them. The thing lay in his own grass, within a foot of him; he drew close to it and smelt it closer; it was a fried slice of liver rolled up in a tempting way. He ate it. Almost in an instant he staggered, strove to vomit, became convulsed, gasped, and gave a strangled, hollow moan, then turned round giddily, as men may when drunk, and fell prone on the dewy grass.
Bindo leapt to him, seized him by the skin of his throat and back, and dragged him into the highway; the dog was quivering, rolling, panting in agony as the poison burned and tore his entrails.
Leaving him there, Bindo slunk away. Toppa lay in the dust, mute in his death throes; his snowy, curly body swelling and writhing, his bright brown eyes protruding, his tongue forced out, his lambs paralyzed; suffering as men deem it too cruel to make murderers suffer. Within a stone’s throw of his master and his friends, he could not raise a cry, he could not move a limb. The burning hellish poison had its way, tearing, consuming, killing him.
Presently the mists began to yield to the lovely light of the fuller day; and in the sunshine on the lonely road Toppa lay dead; foam on his lips, a little blood upon the dust that he had vomited even as he died.
His happy, harmless, honest life was done.
A few moments later Carmelo, who seldom forgot the dog, came out under the poplars to call him for a bit of bread; he called in vain; knowing that Toppa never wandered away, and was ever alert to answer his voice, he stepped across the strip of woodland, meaning to whistle down the road. His eye fell on the dead body in the dust. He threw himself on his knees beside it. One glance told him the truth; one instant he gave to grief, passionate as though he had seen a brother perish.
Then on his feet he leapt; with a great shout to all the saints of heaven for justice, he ran fleet as a deer down the road to see who was in sight; the name of Bindo Terri sprang to his lips, and the figure he saw afar off flying in the dust was Bindo’s.
Swift as the hurricane the young fellow tore in the wake of the guard, who now was spurred with a dire terror, and ran not knowing what he did. With one last bound like that of the hound on to the wolf, Carmelo seized Bindo in his grasp.
‘You have killed my dog!’
‘I? No — no — no!’
‘You have!’ swore Carmelo, with an oath, and shook the slenderer form of the guard in his grip.
Bindo gathered up a desperate courage.
‘I have not killed him, no. He may have picked up poison on the road — it is the law, the law allows it.’
Carmelo’s hand closed on his throat.
Without a word the more, he dragged him to the edge of the wood where some wood was lying for fencing, and with his other hand snatching a stave of oak, swung Bindo Terri backwards and forwards, striking him on the head, the arms, the shoulders, with the wood the while; men were at work in the vineyards beside the road; they screamed, and ran, and caught the arm of the young Pastorini, and, being five to one, wrenched him asunder from the trembling frame of Bindo, being willing enough to see harm wrought on the body of the guard, but afraid of the law if they looked on at the death of one of its myrmidons, and Carmelo, left alone, would have killed in that rude justice which a righteous vengeance is.
The moment that the vine‐dressers freed him, Bindo Terri staggered away, sick, bleeding, bruised, and nearly dead with fright. Carmelo struggled in vain in the hold of five strong men.
&nbs
p; ‘He has killed Toppa!’ he gasped, his eyes bloodshot, his muscles straining, his whole body writhing to be free.
‘Ay, ay! has he done that? — and he merits death himself,’ muttered the eldest of the peasants. ‘But they will have the law on you, and worse for touching him, the vile little villain, that the snakes must have spawned.’
‘My dog! My dog!’ moaned Carmelo, as his passion dissolved into an agony of grief, and his eyes filled with blinding tears, and dully and stupidly he went back to where the dead dog lay, and sat down by him in the dust, and wept.
The men stood around silent and sorrowful, but sorely afraid.
Bindo Terri was a poisoner and a scoundrel, but the arm and the shield of the law were over him, and made him sacred, as religions of old made sacred the snake and the toad.
The law here ordains that you cannot be arrested for anything you do, unless you be taken in the act, even though the deed be clearly proved against you. But there are sins so heinous as to be beyond this mercy, as the crimes in the Latin documents of the Vatican are beyond pardon, human or divine. Carmelo’s was such a crime.
You may lay a sacrilegious finger on the Host with more ease than on the person of a municipal guard. Nay, there is more fuss when one is touched than when the King is shot at: if Passavanti had tried to assassinate a guard instead of a sovereign, he would not have been let off the scaffold so easily as he was. Therefore, when Bindo Terri picked himself up, staggered into the house of the elder guard, Angelo, which was within a rood of the millhouse, an there fell down, groaning aloud that he had been murdered by the devil Carmelo, the elder man flew, as one possessed, down the road to the picket of the carabiniers, and brought them to the spot to avenge a foul and inexcusable assault whose end would be sooner or later death; and clamoured and roared and raved, while Bindo, dying Bindo, raved with him, and forced the gendarmes to go and seize the assassin. Law can stretch at either end when wanted.