Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

Carmelo looked up and his mouth and eyelids quivered. He rose, caught the child in his arms, and hurried out by the open door, and there, on the old oak seat above the stone that covered the body of the dog, he bent his face over the golden head of his little sister and wept bitterly.

  Within doors Demetrio Pastorini struck the wooden table heavily with his clenched fist.

  He had all his life been a most peaceful man, and a more harmless, jovial, kindly, easy in temper, and patient from sense of duty and love of quiet; but now all his blood stirred darkly within him.

  ‘We are mules and bats, blind and dumb, and knowing not when we are smitten,’ he said, with a deep rage in his thickened voice. ‘We are more foolish than the beasts that perish, since we live and submit to our tormentors.’

  They were all silent.

  It was a sad home‐coming.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  THE Italians are patient to a great degree. There is here as much hunger as there is in Ireland, and there are proprietors as indifferent as the absentees, but here there is no agrarian crime, no revolt against masters or landlords, no effort to shirk just payments or even unjust ones.

  ‘Our people do not understand their rights,’ said a prefect to me. I thought: ‘When they do — well, — there will not be many prefects.’

  This is the fact: they do not understand; they let their sons go to the conscription, their bread money to the municipal extortioners, their last tool in fine to the tax‐gatherer, their last shirt in pawn to the Monte di Pieta, and then shut themselves up and die of hunger secretly, or throw themselves in the river without a word of complaint to anyone. They do not understand their rights, and they are not at all envious of the pretty happy people driving by with prancing horses. The cursing envy of Irish or French poor is not in the Italian; if he can sit in the sun and cut a slice of melon in summer, a slice of sausage in winter, he is content, and ready to laugh and be merry with you.

  Foreigners judge the Italians by Menotti’s restless emigrants and Mazzini’s mystic disciples, but in real truth these make up but a small portion of the nation; to the great bulk of it revolt is alien, and a good‐humoured and docile obedience most natural.

  Now, no doubt it would have been far better had Carmelo gone elsewhere to seek a living. But to the higher sort of Italian poor it never occurs to leave their home. The same love that bound Dante to the cerchio antico binds the Italian cotter or workman to his native village. When they are taken perforce away as by conscription they hunger ceaselessly till they see their hill‐side farm or cottage in the plains. Emigration does not attract them; even a change to a near city or a neighbouring province appals them as a kind of expatriation.

  ‘I want to go to my native country’ (paese nativo), said one of the men in my employ. ‘It is such a long‐time since I was there.’

  By his native country he meant an olive‐ clad hill that rose in sight about two miles off; he had not been there since Pasqua, and he spoke on S. Giovanni’s day!

  The paese nativo is what they love, and to this sentiment their rulers owe their incredible and illimitable patience which forbears from revolution. Leave them in their paese nativo, and you may do almost any oppression or extortion to them that you will.

  Therefore neither to him or his did it ever occur that Carmelo would do well to leave Santa Rosalia. Besides he was the elder son, and had always been promised that the mill should pass to him, after an old rule of the family that ignored all the primogeniture‐abolition of ‘48.

  The eldest Pastorini had always had the mill, and the others had always lived there if they liked, and worked at other trades; and Demetrio Pastorini was strongly conser‐ vative, as indeed every rural Italian is in mind and blood, abhorring change, and never understanding it, or being willing to allow for it in any way.

  Therefore, as I say, there was no thought that Carmelo would do well to put some breadth of strange land between himself and his foes; but although things were going so ill at the mill‐house, his marriage was never doubted or spoken of as a matter that would brook delay.

  ‘They have suffered enough,’ said Pastorini, ‘and nothing will chase away the gloom that has gathered upon him like the face of the woman he loves always by him by day or by night.’

  ‘My son,’ he said therefore to Carmelo that night. ‘You are come home to us in evil times. The trees are down, and never a soldo will I see for them. That is certain. The steam mill of Rossi’s is taking all our custom away; some go because it gets done quick, and more go because they think to please the Syndic, and the gentlemen, that set it up there. I am not at all sure, my lad, that the place will bring us bread a year more. And I owe money, that I will not deny to you. I owe money, but I have not heart to stand in the way of the only joy you can grasp. You shall wed the girl tomorrow.’

  So the very morning after his return, all formalities having been gone through well‐nigh twelve months before, they went quietly and with no mirth up to the church of San Giuseppe, and were wedded before the altar by Dom Lelio.

  There were few dry eyes there amongst their friends: she had thought of little Raggi, and had put an almond sprig in her bosom off the tree that grew by the little grave, and the two old men stood beside her, careworn, and with a vague and ghastly dread weighing on their souls.

  Would these two, whose lives were made one, find anything in the future except toil and pain? Would their children be begotten for anything beyond hunger and care? Would they be allowed to see their years go by in such peace as sweetens labour? Would not their hearts be harrowed and their cupboards bare?

  There would be enough if they were let alone, but not enough for tax and fine, for torment and extortion.

  Carmelo said very little. He felt scarce any joy. The dull, sullen shame of his captivity was still on him. The bitter rage of his wrongs suffocated almost all gentler thoughts, all tenderer emotions. He loved the maiden who had been so true to him; but the days of dalliance seemed gone for ever from him: he said to himself, ‘Have I a right to procreate innocent creatures to be as wretched as I have been, and to bear the burdens that our people bear?’

  For he had learned to think, in the long watches of those nights, in hospital and in prison; and all that the communist had taught him was for ever fermenting in his mind.

  The marriage service was said and over very early in the morning, for they wished to make no fuss, and draw no eyes upon them, save the kindly ones of a few old neighbours who had known them both from their birth. The child Isola had gathered a great bunch of the wild narcissus, which filled the church with its fragrance; that was their only rejoicing. Viola wore the grey gown she had laid aside in the past summer; and the good vicar blessed them with a quiver in his voice, and they went as quietly and sadly home again; the stick of old Pippo keeping tune and time on the stones with Annunziata’s crutch.

  Then every one went to his work again, and there was no attempt at any kind of festivity: it would have been unfitting, and Carmelo would have had no heart for such a thing.

  He and Viola went home and with the old man to the little square house to break bread with him ere she departed for ever. They had offered to live with him there a few months before taking up their abode at the mill; but Pippo had refused the offer, sweet as it was to him, for he said to himself: ‘They will distrain all I have: the girl will be best away from that.’

  He had a little meal for them, and they sat at it silently: no one had appetite to eat. It was like a funeral rather than a bridal feast. None of the broad jokes common at such times were heard, and no levity could lift its head under such sorrow.

  It wrung the heart of Viola to leave the old man all alone to do his chores, and make his bread and bed; but Pippo, harshly at the last, said that he would have it so, and so best liked it: and she submitted.

  The mill was but a half‐a‐mile off down the river: she promised herself that she would run in to him a dozen times a day to do all that was needed. With the miller’s three girls there
would be little for her to do in her father‐in‐law’s house, and Carmelo was fond of Pippo.

  Pippo filled a glass with wine and lifted it solemnly upward.

  ‘My girl,’ he said gravely; ‘be as good a wife as you have been a good child to me, and you will be as a vein of gold to those you go to dwell with. You have had sore trouble here. May it never find you where you go now. Demetrio, drink with me: health and long life to your son and your son’s sons when you and I be underneath the sod.’

  Then with twilight, the young people went away to the mill‐house, where there were now no nightingales safe in leafy trees to sing through the hours of their nuptial night; and old Pippo was left alone in his little, dull, and quiet place, where there was not sound but of the Rosa water breaking on the sand beneath the willows.

  He looked through his back door at little Raggi’s grave.

  ‘My wee dog,’ he said to it. ‘I shall soon be like you now. Let the thieves come and seize; they cannot get blood out of a post; and it does not matter for me, since you and the girl are gone.’

  Then he sat him down by the cold hearth, with his hands on his knees, and his head on his breast, and never stirred till midnight came.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  WITH the return of mild weather Annunziata had lost her rheumatic pains, and had been able to get off her bed and put on her huge leather boots, that had once belonged to a cattle dealer, and begin to go about again, up and down the near hills, and to and fro the roads.

  The poor soul had always been certain in her own mind that her basket of eggs had been at the bottom of Carmelo’s troubles, and she never could forgive herself for having complained about them, especially as when the case was brought on at Pomo‐ doro, where it had been sent by Messer Nellemane, she had been forced to attend as an accuser, and had cried so much that the Pretore had abused her, and had felt a great deal more remorse than Pompéo of Sestriano did when they ordered him six weeks’ imprisonment.

  ‘And know another time, you, that it is a breach of the law to conceal a theft, and that such concealment on the part of the person robbed makes such person liable to heavy penalties,’ had thundered the young judge at Annunziata, who had cried again as if her heart would break, but, being an obstinate old woman, would insist on answering that she could not for the life of her see why anybody should mind her being robbed if she did not.

  ‘That shows how lamentably, how culpably, ignorant you are of the first rudiments of morality and public duty,’ said the Pretore, who was as like Messer Nellemane in his ideas and his expressions of them, as a green bunch of grapes is like a ripened one. He was exactly like him, without his mellowed suavity, and exquisite patience with foolish people, which were gifts of time and nature that Messer Nellemane had carefully cultivated with a view to the future, when he should be a Minister, and hold the heart of the State in his hands.

  Annunziata had still gone on crying, having seen the smith of Sestriano led off by carabiniers.

  ‘And he will murder me when he comes out,’ she had cried, ‘and small blame will it be to him, the poor thing, for he was drunk as drunk could be, or never would he have touched the eggs!’

  ‘If he murder you, he will go to the galleys,’ had said the guards as they took her away.

  ‘And what good will that be to me when I am dead?’ had said ‘Nunziatina. ‘And he is a good man enough when the drink is not in him; that I have always told you.’

  On the whole, the ungovernable resolution to have her own way, and the answers that she had thus made to those in authority over her, had produced an impression against her in the minds of all the officials, who had agreed that she was an insolent and cantankerous old woman.

  ‘If there were but a Vagrant Act, I would consign her to the lock‐up at once,’ had said the Pretore to Messer Nellemane, who said in his turn:

  ‘I think the Cavaliere Durellazzo will bring something of the kind; we are over‐run with beggars; but, of course, unless this larger commune do the same, it will scarcely be effective.’

  ‘I will speak to our Syndic,’ had answered the Pretore.

  The Syndic of Pomodoro was the elder brother of that excellent Count Saverio who was the president of the charitable Confraternità di San Francesco di Asissi.

  ‘Are there many mendicants about?’ the Syndic had asked his brother, after having been spoken to by the Pretore.

  Count Saverio had thrown up his hands, implying that they were many as the sands of the sea.

  ‘They are a great anxiety to us,’ he had added, ‘for they are always applying to us, and you know our rules do not permit us to relieve beggars. If there were any law by which one could deal with them—’

  ‘There ought to be one,’ had said the Syndic of Pomodoro. ‘ I will speak to Durellazzo.’

  So in the council chamber of the Giunta in the Palazzo Communale, Messer Nellemane had known very well that it was the marriage day of Viola, but was at the same time enjoying such a victory of reason over prejudice that he had no time to indulge in any of the sentiments of a passion disappointed and outrivalled.

  By his representations to the Cav. Durellazzo, and the Cav. Durellazzo’s representations to the Giunta, he had succeeded in having adopted for Vezzaja and Ghiralda, as he and the Pretore had desired, the laws of the cities against vagrancy and mendicancy.

  There had been a strong prejudice against this course in the Giunta; for Italians, until their humanity is effaced by Impiega‐ tism, do not incline to severity; climate and custom alike making them lenient.

  But Cav. Durellazzo read a report prepared by his secretary, and endorsed by himself, that presented quite appalling evidence of the persons who lived by beggary or alms of some sort. The order of which Messer Nellemane is the type, is never greater or happier than when preparing a report of this kind, which, dealing with the exact science of statistics, deals a death‐blow to those unproductive and erratic classes which every bureaucracy abhors.

  The report concluded with a short moral essay on the beauties of providence and industry, and the patriotism and public spirit that were required in all members of the public to enable them to extinguish their individual sentiments and private pity, and look on the question from the higher standing‐ point of general interest and the good of all humanity.

  It was a very warm day in March; the council chamber was small, and, as children say, stuffy; the Giunta was half asleep, and all that was awake of it was longing for a flask of wine; the voice of the Cavaliere Durellazzo was sonorous, but provocative of somnolence; the Giunta assented to the new law with the pliancy of men whose bodies are moist, and whose throats are dry; it was embodied in an appendix of thirty‐five new regulations and sent to the Prefect to be approved.

  This is a mere form, like sending a death warrant to a sovereign.

  The Prefect approved of course, naturally; first of all, it was not his interest to quarrel with the commune; secondly, he assented to these new rules without even thinking what the long documents forwarded to him meant. He was in a hurry to get to the city races, and he also was warm.

  The prefect’s secretary sent them to the Home Minister, but he was in all the fiery heat of conflict on Montecitorio, and had much to do to keep his own place, and had no time to give to the affairs of a remote municipality hidden away under corn and vines. He assented too: it is always the strongest possible point with ministers and prefects that the country communes are autonomous. When somebody remarked to him that they were ill governed, he said it was their own fault: if they chose to elect asses, they must; it was no business of anybody’s. So the law against vagrants was incorporated into the code of Vezzaja and Ghiralda, and was pasted up upon the walls in large letters, which, as nine‐tenths of the popula‐ tion could not read, was not to any great purpose.

  There, alas! were a great many old folks too old to do anything, who lived with their families, and who, to avoid being a burden to them, went about to all the villas and got pence here, bread there,
a cup of mezzo‐vino, or an old bundle of scraps, as it might chance. If you had called these people beggars, they would have been amazed. They were all well known, never asked for what was not offered to them, and had been hard‐working man and women until their sight or their limbs had failed them.

  These old folks the new rules stunned and slew like a pole‐axe.

  They did no harm; not a mite of harm; and as the State provided no poor‐house for them, they could not see that there was any such very great guilt in taking from their richer neighbours a little aid that the richer were never harmed by, and gave willingly.

  But, in these days, Christian Europe decides that not only the poor man lying by the wayside, but also the Samaritan who helps him, are sinners against political economy, and its law forbids what its religion orders: people must settle the contradiction as they deem best; they generally are content to settle it by buttoning up their pockets and passing by on the other side. This was the consequence of the new rules for the suppression of mendicancy in Vezzaja and Ghiralda.

  Now the suppression of mendicancy is a very good thing; but, as you never can suppress poverty, it would be better to provide a substitute for him before you shelve the Samaritan.

  I know a very good man last winter who gave away soup‐tickets to all who asked him; and he could not understand how anybody wanted anything more. Now a bowl of soup is a very good thing; but I never knew anybody who could live on it, and I have known a good many who felt ashamed to present the ticket and take the soup there in public. Why are you expected to have no sensitive nerves and no pride because you are starving? I cannot see why you should be myself; but it is a fact that such things are not permitted to you.

  Messer Nellemane went a step farther than my good man: he thought people should not have soup at all unless they bought it.

  His rules were framed on this principle, which he considered to be a sound and healthy one; and as they were also adopted for the larger commune of Pomodoro‐Carciofi, he thought they would sweep the land as clean as a steam reaper‐and‐binder sweeps a corn field, leaving gleaners empty‐handed.