by Ouida
When will the truth be written of hospitals anywhere? If ever it were written, the faculty would swear it all a lie.
No one hardly ever recovered in this infirmary, certainly none were ever the better for it. All Carmelo’s auburn locks were shaved off, and many ounces of blood were taken from him, and little else was done; he was a prisoner, and really it did not matter. His father, who was not allowed to see him, drew his last franc out of the Cassa di Risparmio to bespeak the doctor’s care for him and the doctor took the fees; secretly, as
he was forbidden by the rules to touch a centime.
‘The dear lad, he has ruined me!’ thought the old man, who was feeble and broken in health since the fit before the Pretura, and who had spent nearly his all over the long account of the notary; ‘dear lad, he has ruined me! Yet he is as innocent as a babe unborn!’
The miller was not a weak man, nor given to such weaknesses, but the hot tears rose in his eyes and fell down his furrowed cheeks as he left the hospital bed. He was not allowed to stay there, nor to send any sister or brother of Carmelo’s to him, and he felt as though his tough heart would break, as he got up behind his good grey horse and jolted over the ruts of the road in the twilight of the November afternoon.
Why had all this ever come upon him? Who put these thieves and tyrants there on those stools of office?
The Government had done, he supposed. To him, the Government meant the King. He cursed the King. How could he tell that the King had no more to do with these things than with the melons and pumpkins that had ripened with the summer sun under his garden wall?
It is the White Cross of Savoy which the ink splashes of Messer Nellemane’s documents stain in the people’s eyes.
How can you expect them to comprehend the contradictions of constitutionalism?
The King caused it all, and set Messer Nellemane on that office throne; so thought Demetrio Pastorini, and so think tens of thousands; but the thought failed to console the old miller as he went along the dusky road that he knew so well; indeed it made his pain the more bitter to him, because he had lost a dearly beloved and only brother in days when they were young, in those wars against the ‘stranieri’ which they were told had given them freedom.
So weary were his thoughts and so preoccupied, and so dim were his eyes with tears, that if the good grey horse had not been acquainted with the way for fifteen years, he might have missed it for aught that his master did to guide him.
‘Hè — o! Ouf!’ cried the old man to the horse in surprise, as his own mill‐house loomed through the grey shadows, and the horse checked his trot without the command.
In the mist of the autumn night that was closing in, he could see the figure of his eldest daughter as she ran out to him; she was sobbing, and the sound of her sobs was borne to him through the cold, quiet, misty air.
‘Oh father,’ she stammered, ‘Oh father!’ and then she came to the side of the cart, and lifted herself up on the side of the wheel and caught his hand: ‘Oh father’ she cried again.
The old man trembled.
‘What is it new of sorrow?’ he said: he spoke almost roughly from very fear.
The girl standing up on the shaft caught his hand:
‘Oh father, do not mind too much — the trees !’
‘The trees!’
He said no more; he got down off the cart and threw the reins of rope to the youngest boy.
‘Lead the horse to the stable,’ he said unsteadily. ‘The trees? what of the trees?’
He strode off in the darkness towards the river, and the girl followed him.
‘Oh father!’ she said again with a great sob.
There was very little light but the gleam of the moon as the clouds swept by; it was enough to show him what had been done in his absence.
Three of the poplars had been felled.
‘Oh father!’ said the girl catching at his hands once more. ‘We did all we could to stop them, but they would not wait . There were six of them with hatchets, and an overseer. They said they had the right by law. Oh father!—’
CHAPTER XVIII.
BEFORE the week was out the trees were all down, and the wood by the mill was a thing of memory alone. Demetrio Pastorini was powerless. He had misunderstood his own rights and the ways of the laws.
When the wood‐cutters and the overseer came on the morrow, he was like one beside himself. He got down his old gun from the shelf, and would have shot the first man that dared approach the boschetto, but his young sons and daughters weeping about him made his nerve and his purpose fail; they got the weapon from him, and besought him for their sakes to be patient.
‘Patient!’ he cried to them. ‘Shall we be patient while we are stripped alive as the live lamb is stripped of her skin, she bleeding at every pore? Patient? you are poltroons! You eat the dust! You are no children of my blood. Let me be!’
But they clung about him notwithstanding, and pleaded that better was it to suffer wrong than to do it, and sweeter in heaven’s sight; and so besought him, in the name of Christ and of their own, that he, being a religious man, and one most affectionate, gave way at last, and dropped into his wooden chair and wept, and bore as best he could the sound of crashing axe, of falling trunk, of wrenching wood, of shivering leaf.
‘Must the King, who has dominion from sea to sea, over all the land and the greatness of it, must he grudge me my little all?’ he cried in his agony, as he heard the blows of the hatchet on the trees.
CHAPTER XIX.
BEFORE the week was out the poplars were all down, as I have said, and the birds that had made their homes in them had flown, shrilly piping in their woe, across the Rosa water.
Messer Nellemane visited the spot often.
The municipal soul loves destruction. Whether it beholds a noble and fair monument of ancient times being changed to dust and rubble by the hammers of masons, or whether it sees a gracious sylvan haunt alter to a desolation of sand and stones beneath the hatchets of wood‐cutters, the municipal soul is equally full of an exceeding joy, of an unspeakable contentment.
Messer Nellemane, who possessed the municipal soul in its entire perfection, was thus happy now; and his happiness was further pointed by the acid pungency of a grudge paid off, a vengeance accomplished.
It was a sad sight to other eyes than his: the mossy bank where Toppa had used to roam stamped down into mud, the brave trees felled, their yellow leaves churned into a paste of earth and water, the branches piled in squares to be sold for firewood, the tall trunks trimmed and set in rows to be disposed of as timber; all the place unsightly, naked, miserable, where all had been so lately freshness, and peace, and forest loveliness.
The white wall of the mill‐house stood bare and ugly, no friendly shadows cast on it from waving boughs. The heart of the miller seemed broken in his breast; he could scarce bear to pass his door; he could not bear to look across the stream.
He never spoke of it to anyone since the trees had gone.
Once his third son, little Dante, said timidly:
‘Is it well, father, that they should sell the wood like that? They have not paid you.’
Then Demetrio Pastorini said to him:
‘If they sold your sister to the brothel would you squabble to share the price? Pay? no, they will never pay. They are thieves. Thieves do not pay for what they take.’
Then the young man was afraid, and did not dare to speak of the wood again.
After a while the timber was carried away, and the boughs also; no one knew where they went; it was understood to go to the City. No one ventured to inquire, since the stern lips of Pastorini were dumb.
If he had spoken he would have learned little: he would have heard that the engineers had valued his possession, and the municipality had contracted to pay for it: that was all he would have been told. He did not know that he was highly honoured, and that they were treating him exactly as the princely owner of Farnesina was treated before him.
This destruction of the b
oschetto, which had been a favourite haunt for feast days with the neighbours, and the dread of the iron way that was to follow it, harassed and saddened all the people in Santa Rosalia, and added to the gloom of a wet and stormy November, which was in turn followed by an unusual and severe winter.
The harvest had been good, and so had been the vintage, and so also proved the olive‐gathering, rain notwithstanding, and as foreign papers innocently wrote, nothing was wanting to the happiness of the country.
But the foreign papers only read the statistics of corn, wine, and oil, and did not try to see any further; indeed, having started with this fixed idea of Italian happiness, would not have believed any explanations proving the contrary. Foreign papers did not understand that, as the local taxes always go up in proportion to the excellence of the harvest and vintage, that excellence is not the unmixed gain which it is supposed to be, and, indeed, is scant profit to anyone.
The more you have, the more I take, say the municipalities to the communities; there can be no more admirable recipe for keeping a populace poor.
CHAPTER XX.
IN Santa Rosalia the winter was hard and, for this country, long. Snow came; not the snow of cold countries, with all the glories of an ice‐clad, frost‐hung world; not snow pure, serene, beautiful, with holly‐berries red against it, and fir‐trees dark, not the snow of lands where snow means Noël, Santa Claus, or Father Christmas; but snow that fell in the night and melted in the day, and left a muddy, slushy, watery, slippery slough of despond in its place: snow that killed the olive, broke the arbutus boughs, withered into death the passion‐ flower, and changed to putrefaction the aloe and the cactus; snow that blurred out all the sunny pastoral loveliness, and made the landscape grey and sear.
In this sort of winter‐time the poor are the first to pine and perish everywhere, but soonest of all in this land of sunshine and south wind.
The impetuous Rosa was as over full of water as it had been low and shallow in the midsummer; it ran out over its banks and flooded the fields, where Science brought in with Liberty had felled the trees and hedges that had been used to serve as dykes.
There was no work in the flooded or in the frozen fields; the contadini wanted no labourers; there was nothing to be done anywhere; there was a score of empty hands ready if ever such a little job needed the doing.
The houses, all built for warm weather, with their open loggie and their ill‐fitting windows, were swept through by the north wind as though they had been canvas tents. There was scant fuel; the old times were gone when they could glean it on all the hillsides, for the best reason, that nearly all the woods were felled. Wine was so dear no poor man could drink it, and bread was frightfully dear, too. The people cowered over their little brown pots of lighted brace, and did not complain. When anyone gave them a coin they were passionately grateful.
Most winters they suffered like this; but this winter the suffering was greater than usual. A few said something about getting work in the Maremma, where all the work is done in winter; but they might as well have spoken of getting work in the moon; they could as well get to the one as the other. They had no idea how to travel there, and nothing to travel with; besides, nine‐tenths of them were women and children, for whom the Maremma had no need and no room.
Of course these people were very thankless and unreasonable. There was a railway twelve miles off, there was going to be gas in Pomodoro, and there was Messer Nellemane in their midst, all three monuments of progress.
But these silly people persisted in feeling that they would prefer cheap wine, cheap bread, and stomachs full of both, even to a railway, gas, or Messer Nellemane.
The winter is never very long in Italy, yet this seemed very long indeed. The mill wheels, after having been immovable from drought, were now useless from ice, and the miller, from a plump, jovial, strong man, had become thin, haggard, and silent, feeling the weight of bitter sorrow and the aching of money‐cares.
In Pippo’s little house the blue Madonna heard no laughter and saw no fire‐gleam.
The old man had grown taciturn and irritable. Misfortune is no sweetener of temper or of bread. He would sit long together, crouched in a corner immovable, and his lips were at such times always moving inaudibly; he was counting up the sums of which they had robbed him; counting them again and again; a hundred times a day, a hundred times a night.
They had but little to live on: no one bought straw plaiting in winter, and, as he could not cut the osiers in the river, the rush‐working of Pippo bought but small profit.
When they could have a dish of oil and beans they were very thankful; when they could not they boiled a little bread in water with a bit of garlic, and tried to believe it was soup.
Now and then they had a drop of bad coffee without milk: that was all: as wine they had mezzo‐vino, that is, the last juices of the already‐squeezed grape‐skins diluted with water, a drink to which vinegar were sweetness.
The Italian poor know as little of the bacon, and potatoes, and tea of the English labourer, as they do of the champagne and mutton of the English mechanic.
In summer time they can do well enough: there is the gracious sun shining on them, and there is always work to be had; but in winter there is terrible suffering, the more terrible, I think, because so quiet: the people die, that is all.
‘Patience,’ they say, to the last; but their patience brings them nothing.
In Santa Rosalia there was great want, and there was nobody to succour it: the nobles of the province were away in the City keeping carnival, and no fattore ever cares for the poor: he gets labour cheap if he requires it, that is his view of the universal misery.
Vezzaja and Ghiralda possessed a charitable society; it was named after that purest of all saints, the Confraternità di San Francisco di Asissi, and it dated back to the thirteenth century.
Originally it had been a very noble society, and had owned broad lands, of which many estates still remained to it. It had been self‐denying, generous, religious, in the highest sense of that word, and gentle and simple had been proud to be its ministers; but of this character there did not now remain to it so much as there did remain of its revenues. The rich were very willing to be on its staff; but the poor were not very willing to apply to it; it had a way of considering a case for three months, and then ordering as relief a few pounds of bread, which, when a whole family was waiting, and starving, and dying, was a little too dilatory to be very efficient.
But the fraternity of St. Francis still had its old palace in Pomodoro; still had its historical archives and its pious repute; still had nobles and gentlemen on its committee; and if it only gave a little bread now and then — well — pauperism, they say, should not be encouraged; and if its funds were never very clearly accounted for, we know these mediæval institutions cannot be worked in the mediæval way nowadays: St. Francis saluted Lady Poverty; but we keep her well outside the door while we ask for her certificate.
Now old ‘Nunziatina had an attack of bronchitis at this time, and though she recovered, which was little short of a miracle, she was by no means so strong again as she had been; and her draughty room under the tiles, scorching in summer, and frozen in winter, shared with three other old women, and without any stove, or any glass in the window, was not an abode to favour convalescence. The vicario of Santa Maria seeing this, bethought him of the Fraternity of St. Francis, and gave her a letter to its committee, urging her age, and honesty, and recent sickness, as fit reasons why she should benefit by this noble charity.
There was a quantity of money locked up in the revenues of this Fraternity, and it had been intended for the poor; but then the present age, the age of Messer Nellemane, knows better than to spend it on the poor.
Those old times were so different to ours: different methods of administration become a necessity in modern days. The Fraternity made a great flourish, and printed long reports, and still charmed the province into subscriptions and donations; but if St. Francis could have been
present when the accounts were made up, his benignant eyes would have blazed with the fury of his offended God.
Annunziata blessed Dom Lelio, and took the letter and the sixty centimes he gave her for the diligence, and betook herself, and her staff, and her broad hat, and her short petticoat into the rickety vehicle with much joy and hopefulness of spirit. If she could get a certain little pension, if it were only a franc a week, she felt that she could praise heaven with a full heart. Her trotting round to all the outlying farm houses and villages with her basket was getting very toilsome to her.
Now, the President of the Fraternity was a certain most noble Count Saverio, who had a high repute as a philanthropist, and whose villa was close by to Pomodoro.
The Count gave his services, which were highly appreciated, nominally for nothing, saying, with much eloquence, that all his life was dedicated to service of God and the poor; and if he did do a good deal at the Bourse, and buy a great many terni at Lotto, that was his own affair, and in no way concerned St. Francis. Besides he did it through agents; and his own name never was heard except in connection with philanthropy.
This very noble and pious gentleman received old ‘Nunziatina, who made him a nice curtesy, and wished him every blessing in her cheery cordial way, which was as pleasant to hear as a bird’s chirping; he was sitting surrounded with ledgers and folios, in the muniment room of the castellated house of this ancient brotherhood; and he spoke so prettily and amiably to her that she felt quite sure of ten francs a month.
He was a long time looking over her papers and reading the priest’s recommendation; and then he smiled, and fussed about, and rang for his clerk, and whispered with him, and scribbled something and slipped it in a drawer, and then, finally looking across his writing‐table at Annunziata, said very pleasantly: