by Ouida
The carabiniers, with their sabres and their white belts flashing in the sun, strode straightaway, therefore, to the mill upon the Rosa and laid hands on the youth, who sat on the bench of his house under the trees with the dead dog at this feet, and his father and brothers and neighbours gathered around him in sad sympathy.
‘But to‐morrow is his marriage‐day!’ stammered the old father, half mad himself with rage and sorrow.
The carabiniers laughed a little grimly and pulled Carmelo up roughly by his arms, and marched from the door, pushing him with them. In their hearts they sympathised with both the Pastorini, but it was not their place to say so.
‘I did what I had a right to do,’ muttered the lad firmly. ‘He killed my dog: I beat him, the poisoner, the devil; I would have beaten him till he could not have stood: I had the right.’
‘You had no right even to complain. Your dog was the offender; he was on the public road,’ shrieked the elder rural guard Angelo, and shook off the miller and thrust Carmelo on between the gendarmes.
‘I will go with you without force,’ said the youth haughtily. ‘I have no fear; I was in the right.’
And he walked steadily, only turning and pausing once to say to his father, who followed him:
‘Do not come; stay and bury Toppa. Bury him just there by the porch. He will know we pass in and out, and he will not feel alone. And tell Viola not to mind; it will go well with me; no judge will keep me for a moment when he hears how it all came about.’
The carabiniers behind his back looked at one another and raised their eyebrows satirically. They knew well how the Law would deal with this brave young fellow.
They took him through the village to the lock‐up of the place.
Early though it was, everyone was astir, and all had heard that Bindo Terri had been thrashed by the younger Pastorini; some had heard that Bindo was dead outright; not a soul regretted his fate if it were so; but not a soul either dared to say what they felt or stretch the hand of friendship to the prisoner.
Only old Gigi Canterelli stepped bravely out of his shop and cried to him, ‘My lad, if you want a little money or a good word, remember I am here, and send for me.’
But no one else said a syllable.
Carmelo was thankful that as the way to the prison led through the centre of the piazza they did not pass the house of Pippo; he trusted that Viola would know nothing until his sister could reach her and soften the blow to her by tender modes of narration, as women know how to do one with another.
But sad mischance would have it that in the centre of the square he met old Pippo carrying three rush chairs on his back, which he let fall in the extremity of his amaze.
God’s mercy, lad, what hast been doing?’ he called to his son‐in‐law of the morrow; and he began to tremble wofully. Carmelo trembled too, for the sorrow that he caused.
‘Grandfather,’ he said tenderly; it was the first time he used the name; ‘do not be alarmed. Bindo Terri killed Toppa, and I have avenged him; that is all. The good judge will judge me innocent.’
‘O Lord, O Lord!’ groaned Pippo, all in a palsy of fear and sorrow; ‘what matters of being innocent? If you touch a hair of the head of those slave‐driving, venomous, viperous jackanapes it is all over with you, all over with you! And to‐morrow your wedding‐day, and my girl at home stitching the veil; O Lord, O Lord!’
The carabiniers hurried Carmelo onwards. ‘A pestilent, seditious, foul‐mouthed old tongue that fellow has,’ said they to one another; and they thrust the young Pastorini with scant mercy into the place of detention; a square bare cell with a brick floor, damp and dirty, and a barred door and a little grated casement high up in the wall.
‘But take me to the judge!’ cried Carmelo; ‘take me somewhere to be heard!’
‘All in good time,’ said the carabiniers, and banged the door to on him, and drew the bolts outside it.
Meanwhile, Viola, sitting in the doorway with the little brook running babbling over the stones in front of her, was stitching some orange‐blossoms she had picked off a tree on to the veil she would wear on the morrow; she was singing in a soft low voice one of the love‐songs of the country: Al piè d’un faggio in sull’erba fiorita Aspetto, aspetto, che giù cada il sole; Perche quando sarà l’aria imbrunita Appunto allor vedrò spuntar il sole, Levarsi quel bel sol che m’ha ferita, Che mi ha ferita e che guarir mi vuole. E questo sol, ch’io dico, è il mio bel damo, Che sempre io gli riprico io t’amo, io t’amo, E questo sole è il giovanettin bello Chi a Ferragosto mi darà l’annello.
She was happy. The fear of her powerful tempter and enemy had passed away from her, and the future smiled at her with the eyes of love and faith. A life of labour, of poverty, of fatigue awaited her, but also a life of sunshine, of affection, of peace; to the first she was well used, the second seemed to her heaven.
At foot of hill, amidst the flow’ring grass, I wait, I wait, until the sun shall set; Because, when all the air is dusk and dark, Scarce will the drooping sun the night have met, Than will arise that sun which wounded me, Which wounded me, and now my cure will bring; And this fair sun, I tell thee, is my love, To whom, in echo, ‘Love, O Love!’ I sing. And this fair sun is that most beauteous youth Who, August dawn’d, will bring to me the ring!
Ferragosto is literally — first of August.
CHAPTER VIII.
THERE was no court open that day at the Pretura, and the Pretura was seven miles away in another commune, Vezzaja and Ghiralda not being blessed with one, and for criminal matters and large debts being bound to betake themselves to the larger township of Pomodore‐Carciofi, though small civil causes were tried before the Conciliator in Santa Rosalia itself.
So the long hours rolled on, and Carmelo remained in the dirty cramped little den behind the barred door. His father and brothers and poor sad old Pippo came to visit him, and the Pastorini paid for him to be kept apart from any other malefactors, and Gigi Canterelli sent him a smoking dish to break his fast with, and a flask of wine. But Carmelo could scarce touch either, and had hardly a word to speak except over and over again he said,
‘Is Toppa buried? — Viola is not angry that I avenged him?’
No other ideas save these seemed to be in his brain; he was dull, and yet fierce; quite changed from the gentle and grave, yet blithe and simple, lad that he had always been.
‘God forbid I should say that you did wrong; who would not have struck a blow for the poor dog?’ said his father weeping. ‘But oh, the pity of it, to see one of my honest sons in these thieves’ den!’
For the Pastorini youths had never had a stain or slur upon their name, and for many a generation the men at the mill had been law‐abiding, God‐fearing, and most dutiful sons of the soil.
‘I did right!’ said Carmelo doggedly, and his brothers all echoed, ‘Yes, you did right. But alas! — alas!—’
Meanwhile Messer Nellemane stood by the bedside of Bindo, who had taken to his bed at once, and groaned, and shivered, and vowed all his bones were broken, and the complaisant apothecary rolled him up in wadding soaked in almond oil, and pretended he might die; Messer Nellemane, tenderly regretful and benevolently compassionate, bent over the sufferer and said in benignant tones:
‘My poor, poor fellow! This is all your reward for a too zealous love of duty, and of course you never touched the dog at all; is it not so?’
Bindo opened wide his eyes, and almost grinned in his employer’s face; then, recollecting himself, gasped as though his breath were failing him.
‘Not I, Signore; he was stiff and stark, poor beast, when I came upon the road.’
‘Precisely, ‘ said Messer Nellemane. ‘That will be put in evidence. The Pastorini have long borne you a grudge, you say, and took this excuse to pay it off on you. A shocking case. A most brutal assault.’
He shook his head as he spoke, above the bed of the victim, and the pliant apothecary shook his.
‘Contusion of the vertebra,’ he murmured, ‘and sympathetic
action may supervene in the heart and lungs, and then—’
‘Hush! he has youth on his side,’ said Messer Nellemane tenderly, and stroked the curly head of the guard as he might have stroked a child or a puppy, had he not happened to hate both pups and children.
When he left the sick chamber, taking the parish doctor with him, the invalid sat up in bed and shouted to the old woman who waited on him.
‘Give me my pipe and a beaker of that Vin Santo, and fry me some tripe and artichokes, and hand me the Book of Fate.’
The Book of Fate was the teller of dreams and foreteller of lucky numbers for the public lottery, and with this favourite literature, and his tobacco, and his wine, the murderer of Toppa passed a brave and merry day, even though he was supposed to be upon his death‐bed, and was wrapped up in oil, and had begged to see the priest, and had all the sycophants of the place (which, to do Santa Rosalia justice, were not many), coming perpetually about his door, and asking whether he was out of danger.
At home Viola was passing the bright hours weeping and kneeling before her little clay figure of the Mother of the Poor.
Old ‘Nunziatina was seated beside her, rocking herself to and fro on her elm staff.
‘My candle was no good!’ she moaned, ‘and yet I spent all I had!’
CHAPTER IX.
THE long bright day and the short luminous night passed, and melted into dawn once more, and Carmelo saw the sunrise of his marriage morn glow on him from the iron bars of a prison cell. At eight of the morning the carabiniers put him in a little vehicle, and took him away to Pomodoro‐Carciofi; making him sit between them, and looking very droll themselves in the little swinging springless cart, with their sabres sticking out on each side, and their cocked hats as stiff as Napoleon’s upon the Vendôme column.
Pomodoro‐Carciofi was a twin township, as Buda‐Pest is a twin city; it was very small, very dusty, very ugly; there were a good many dyers in it, and the smell of the dye was in its atmosphere; it had a noble campanile and some fine frescoes of Luini’s, but nobody ever came to look at them; it had also had an altar‐piece of the Memmi’s, but one fine day somebody had sold that, and it being everybody’s, and so nobody’s, business to punish the thief, it went unpunished, and a large oleograph was stuck up by the municipality in place of the Memmi, and the townsfolk liked it better because it had more colour in it.
The court of law was in a dull, grim, stone house that looked upon a blind wall at the back of the church that rejoiced in the oleograph; and ugly square room, which had been newly whitewashed, was the audience and judgment chamber; and here all criminal cases of the rural commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda were tried and decided by the young attorney who administered the law to some ten thousand persons in all matters, from a fifty‐franc debt to murder, arson, and theft, and who had for his salary about as much as one gives one’s groom, and not half what one gives one’s coachman.
The country is divided into districts; each district has its own Pretore, who unites in his one ill‐paid person the onerous duties of county‐court, civil, and criminal judge. In England the first of these offices is deemed worth as many hundreds a year as it gets pounds here. That, notwithstanding such treatment, the Preture‐ship is sometimes filled by very excellent and upright men, is a credit to the legal fraternity of Italy; it is no thanks to the administration. A man has the peace, the purse, the virtue, the liberty, almost the life, of a whole community in his hands, and he is paid less than a groom or gardener! — as a jewel in a toad’s head is a just man in this office.
The country Pretore can be harassed by the King’s Proctor, and his verdicts can be protested against in the city courts, but for the main part, and certainly over all the poor classes of his districts, he is unresisted and his decrees are inviolable. Aristides in so onerous a position could scarcely mete out perfect justice. I have known, as I say, admirable and excellent persons in this post, and I respect them deeply; but they are rare exceptions, naturally, and in the lonely country places the Pretore exercises a power that is practically irresistible, and that would be a perilous temptation to a Solon.
A crowd had got about the law court this day, for the rumour had run like wildfire that the miller’s son at Santa Rosalia had murdered the rural guard. His father and brothers, and Gigi Canterelli had come over to see if they could aid, or speak for, him, and they had brought poor old half‐frantic Pippo with them; beside these there were the apothecary and Bindo’s friends, and also the Public Minister, as the little lawyer is called who prosecutes for the Municipality, and there were also the Chancellors and the Conciliators of both borough and village.
Messer Nellemane stayed at home; he was never seen in person to appear against any member of the commune, in great cases or small. He always said this with a deprecating smile, that it did not become one who served them in the capacity he filled, to sway the balance of justice either way.
Nevertheless, he was very good friends with the Pretore of Pomodoro and Carciofi; a young advocate, fussy and bustling, and of as shrewd a nose for promotion as ever a dog of the south for truffles; a young advocate who hated Pomodoro and all belonging to it, and its musty court, and its simple population, and the scanty forty pounds a year it gave him, but who, nevertheless took them all as stepping stones. In the future he, too, meant to be a statesman.
This day the young man, who was a little, sallow, sharp‐eyed creature, by no means imposing, even though he donned a black robe and black cap, just as those that Portia wore, took a violent aversion at first sight to Carmelo as the accused, between the carabiniers, was marched in front of the Pretore’s desk.
This day should have been the youth’s nuptial day, and his heart was aching, and his blood burning, and his face was very pale; nevertheless he walked erect, and with a firm step trod the steps of the Pretura between the carabiniers with their clanking swords.
Carmelo was the true peasant of his country; with shapely limbs and throat, like a young gladiator’s, and a handsome face, with the features regular, and the blue eyes large, and the skin delicate, though of a healthy, sun‐tanned hue.
This bold and picturesque‐looking lad, who faced him with hardihood and even haughtiness, displeased the young judge, who was himself a city‐bred, saturnine, and dissipated weakling. He felt at once assured that this miller’s son was a dangerous and violent character, and he listened with willing ear to all the invectives against the accused made by the lawyer, who prosecuted on the behalf of the municipality.
The Pastorini had never known that they ought to bring a lawyer, and old Pippo, in an agony, pulled Gigi Canterelli’s coat, and whispered:
‘There’s a notary against him — there’s a man of law against him. O Lord! O Lord! he’s no more chance than a lamb when it’s hung up by the heels, head downward!’
‘Eh!’ muttered Gigi with a sigh, ‘in our old times one young fellow fought it out with another, when there was any bone to pick, and no one meddled; it was the best man won; now, Lord save us! if but two cats set up their backs and spit, there’s law about it.’
‘Order there! Silence!’ cried the usher; and the case for the prosecution went on glibly till, listening to it, the brains of the Pastorini, father and son, reeled and almost gave way.
Carmelo began to say to himself in amaze, ‘Am I indeed this villain double‐dyed?’
For the advocate of the commune, instructed sub rosâ by Messer Nellemane, was a very eloquent‐tongued man indeed, who, having little to do, and very small means indeed, had always his oratory ready bottled and almost bursting, like ginger‐beer upon a summer’s day.
When he had done his plea for the prosecution, and had resumed his seat, there was no one to answer or refute him.
Carmelo and his friends knew too late the terrible blunder they had committed in their ignorance of having no other man of law there to reply him.
The examination of the accused began.
Carmelo, answering as to his age and name, and parentage, a
dded then in a firm voice,
‘Bindo Terri poisoned my dog; I beat him; yes, if I had killed him I should have done no wrong; he is a beast; he is a devil; he tortures brutes and men—’
‘Silence!’ said the Judge. ‘You can vilify no one. You are only to answer my questions, one by one, as I put them to you.’
‘But he is right! He is right!’ shrieked old Pippo, pressing forward to the bar, behind which he and the rest of the public were hemmed it. ‘He is right! He is right! By the word of Christ our Saviour! Bindo Terri wanted to stop my brook running; wanted to make me pay for the good God’s own clear spring water—’
‘Take that fool out of court,’ said the Pretore, and old man was carried out struggling and screaming for justice.
Then the cross‐examination of Carmelo began again in such an endless intricacy of questions that the boy’s head whirled. Wiser and more worldly‐trained intelligences than his have been confused, and blurred, and bewildered out of their own sense of memory and certitude of fact by the brow‐beating of such an interrogation.
Did he see Bindo Terri poison his dog? No: he did not see it; but the guard poisoned all the dogs he could get at; that anyone knew; the guard poisoned Toppa, certainly, certainly. So he kept on saying, again and again, almost stupidly; and the tears welled into his eyes, and began to fall down his cheeks, thinking of the dead dog, and of the maiden sitting weeping at home on the day that should have been her marriage morn.
The Pretore and, after him, the lawyer for the prosecution tormented him over and over again to much the same purport. All Carmelo could say was, ‘he poisoned the dog; he poisoned the dog.’
That was all he could say.
He had no proofs.
His father begged to speak for him, but was told it was not permitted. Gigi Canterelli, with the moisture in his eyes, begged, too, to testify to his excellent nature and great amiability; and the Vicar of Santa Rosalia entreated to be heard as to the youth’s good and kindly character, his docility and his honesty, as one who had known him from his infancy upward.