by Ouida
Carmelo would not say her nay, but he smiled a little bitterly.
‘You may walk barefoot, my love, from here to Rome; nothing will avail, until the people write their rights in blood upon the soil that should belong to them.’
Viola shuddered.
‘Hush! That would be doing evil that good might come.’
‘It is what we must do,’ he answered gloomily; and they spoke but little more, as they trod the long tedious ways between the stone walls and the cropped trees.
A day or two later she had her way, and her father‐in‐law drove her to the city. Carmelo stayed within the mill.
She had put on her grey gown that she was married in, and had an amber‐coloured handkerchief tied over her raven locks. She looked very pale, but she was a beau‐ tiful woman in all the charm of youth, though careworn, and too grave for her few years.
They started very early — at dawn, indeed — for the sake of Bigio, and the way seemed very long; Viola’s heart beat hurriedly, and with fear and hope alternately, as she saw the great marble dome of the basilica of Santa Maria, famous in history and in art, rise with its golden cross higher and higher, as Mont Blanc looms white across the foliage of the Val d’Aosta.
‘And I will say a word for myself, too, if we get audience,’ said the miller, as they drove under the massive brown gateway through the crowd of chattering people, and the market‐carts waiting for the weighing and taxing of their goods.
Before the city can eat anything, drink any wine, burn any fuel, the country‐folk who bring in what it wants are treated as contraband traders, and made to wait through vexatious hours of heat, or rain, or snow, as it may be, till they are taxed and fined. In this year of grace 1880, the machinery of the State is still so clumsy that it can devise no wiser means to maintain itself than to employ the antiquated dragon of the Octroi, which often obliges the people, and their horses, and mules, and cattle, and fowls, to wait all the long wet night in the highroad, so as to be ready against the opening of the gates. They have pulled down all the fine old towers and walls; but they keep up the barriers of the Gabella.
Viola was awed by the noise, the width, the height, the crowds around her, but she was scarcely sensible of any of the grandeur of the frowning palaces, the foaming foun‐ tains, the spacious bridges, the marble statues; all her soul and mind were absorbed in her errand. A great purpose gives a sense of invisibility.
Pastorini stabled the grey horse near the market place, and then they sought the Prefecture. There it was in the centre of a square, a grand, solemn mighty place, that in olden times had been the abode of mighty men; half fortress, half palace, built in the thirteenth century and faced with variegated marbles, and with one once gorgeous frescoes on its frieze.
The miller and Viola entered the vast courtyard where water was rushing from the open jaws of stone lions: the Italian peasant has nothing in him of the vulgarity of trepidation before greatness and its emblems; the instincts of liberty and art are in him, all stifled though they be, and he stands graceful and unabashed before a monarch.
They asked to see the Prefect: they were told his Excellency was out; what did they want? They were sent here, sent there, a servant saw them, a clerk saw them; they were indolently told to wait.
They sat down in the court; a janissary, splendidly clothed, and with a gilt stick, told them they could not sit there.
Pastorini knew that the Prefect had in his day been a soldier of liberty, that he was very liberal, even ‘red’ in his opinions; that he had all the medals and ribbons of the wars of independence on his breast; that he was a trusted friend and ally of that advanced Ministry which the party of Messer Luca Finti was always trying to dislodge: Pastorini had heard this, and he hoped much from this soldier in power. His own brother had died at San Martino; the miller was simple enough to think this must be a link to all the Liberali.
They went outside and sat on the stone ledge that ran round the pediment of the palace. They sat there one hour, two hours, three hours; then they grew faint; they went into a little by‐street, and took a bit of bread, and a little wine; then they turned back to the Prefecture and sat there again. Troops went by, cartloads of flowers, carriages with fine liveries, a band passed playing, the great sonorous bells of the cathedral boomed over the city, the hours drifted on; still they waited.
So many hours had at last gone by that their patience, even the illimitable inextinguishable Italian patience, had begun to get ruffled. Pastorini had got up and gone so often to the gorgeous guardian of the doors to know if the Prefect had come home, that the functionary at last got angry and — in irâ veritas.
‘His Excellency has never been out at all, simpleton,’ said he. ‘But you do not suppose he or the secretaries are here for the like of you? Mercy alive! If once they began to see the public, they would have the whole province here screaming. He has never been out, I tell you. He has got his guests with him. He will now be coming out soon, because it is the time to drive in the park.’
Pastorini went back to Viola.
‘He is coming out soon,’ he said: ‘they told us a falsehood; we will wait and watch the staircase. We cannot miss him.’
By this time all the long golden drowsy day was drawing near its close. Viola felt feverish and stupid; her head spun with the coming and going of the crowds, the noise of the carriages and carts, and the unwonted closeness of the city air. Her peachlike complexion grew yellow with the heat and fatigue, and her great eyes had a strained reddened look.
Presently there came into the courtyard a handsome equipage, with liveried servants and fine horses; it waited at the foot of the stairs. ‘Now is our time,’ said the miller; and he and his daughter‐in‐law stood up by the entrance.
In a little while there came down a lady very superbly dressed in surah of old gold colour and laces of price, and behind her a good‐looking, smiling man, with long moustaches and a glimpse of ribbon at his buttonhole.
Breaking past the janitor of the gates the girl rushed to the foot of the stairs; her father‐in‐law behind her.
‘Oh, let me beseech of his Excellency to hear me,’ cried Viola, stretching out her arms with a piteous gesture; and his Excellency paused a moment on the lowest step.
‘What is it, Cuccioli?’ he said, glancing interrogatively over his shoulder to a slim young gentleman behind him, who was indeed his private secretary.
Cuccioli murmured that he did not know; he would inquire; and he looked unutterable furies at the porter.
Meanwhile Viola was sobbing so that she could not speak; and Pastorini, with his head uncovered, said beseechingly:
‘Your Excellency, my brother died at San Marino! We are come—’
‘Oh, a pension, a claim?’ said the Prefect, lighting a long cigar. ‘Based on military service? My good friends, you must apply to the Minister of War. We have nothing to do with such things—’
‘But I thought,’ stammered the miller, ‘I thought that as his Excellency fought himself—’
Now, unhappily, there were few periods of which it pleased the Prefect to be reminded so little as this period, far behind him, when he had been a soldier of fortune. He frowned a little impatiently, and moved to get into his carriage; but Viola stood in his way.
‘Oh dear, my lord,’ she pleaded; ‘if you would but hear me: my grandfather is such a good honest soul, and all he has is sold up, and he never owed anyone a penny, and he is going mad; and if the money could be got back—’
‘Cara mia!’ said his Excellency caressingly, because she was a woman, and handsome. ‘Believe me, these matters are not in my department. If I listened to petitioners I should be deluged with them. What is it you want? If it be a pension—’
‘It is not a pension,’ said Pastorini. ‘It is the cruelty of the municipality, your Excellency. They have ruined me; taken my ground; never paid me; and this poor old soul of whom the girl rightly speaks has been treated—’
‘Oh, I cannot hear anything of that s
ort,’ said the Prefect very decidedly. ‘The communes are autonomous. Whilst they are within the law no Prefect has any right to interfere in any way. Your commune, wherever it is, is self‐governed: if you do not think it ruled well, change your Giunta; change your Syndic.’
Which was as though he had said to one who complained of bad weather: ’Change the sun; move about the moon.’
‘But your Excellency—’ began Viola and the miller in one breath.
‘Make them understand this, my dear Cuccioli,’ said the Prefect with a wave of his hand towards the slim youth: then he smiled affably on the upraised face of Viola, and hurried to rejoin his wife in her carriage: the tall high‐stepping horses pranced rapidly from the court to the street, and he was gone.
His Excellency had a rough time of it in those early wars, and he wanted to enjoy himself now. Why else were rewards given to men for public service?
The slim youth turned to Pastorini with the true official expression.
‘It is quite beyond our department. No one can interfere with municipal administration. It is quite impossible. You have your Syndic. You must rely on him. Pray be so good as to remember in future that the Prefect never can have anything to do with any personal grievance.’
‘Who has then?’ said the miller desperately.
‘Well, no one exactly: you see the government of every commune depends on itself. Nothing can be more satisfactory. Each commune has the rule it desires. Good day,’ said the youngster; and he too slipt down the steps, and went his way to saunter in the park, and turn his eyeglass on the ladies.
‘We must go home, Viola,’ said the miller with a groan: he would not reproach her; but in himself he thought if the Virgin could not help them better than this she might as well reveal nothing. The cost of the horse’s stabling and of their own noonday meal was all that this pilgrimage in search of justice had brought to them.
Carmelo said nothing when he heard. He had guessed very well how it would be.
Viola stole down to her grandfather’s in the moonlight, weary and worn out though she was, and made a little supper in a little earthen pot; her tears falling all the while.
‘It is a hundred scudi they have taken from me in all,’ said Pippo to her for the five hundredth time, following the old mode of coinage that he had been used to as a lad, and which indeed country people most naturally use still.
‘I know — I know!’ sobbed Viola.
‘A hundred scudi; it would buy a cow,’ muttered the old man, with his hands set on his knees, and his eyes fixed on the boiling pot. ‘I am sorry to hear you are with child, my dear; there’ll be no bit or sup for it when it grows up; and it will have to sweat, and toil, and hunger, and then at the end they’ll sell the bed from under it. That is what they’ll do.’
Viola could not see the burning charcoal nor the little brown pot, for the thick mist of her tears.
It was true: what use or joy was there in the children coming to the birth to know only pain, and privation, and hard injustice of God and man?
In this lovely land that brims over with flowers like a cup over‐filled, where the sun is as a magician for ever changing with a wand of gold all common things to paradise; where every wind shakes out the fragrance of a world of fruit and flower commingled; where, for so little, the lute sounds and the song arises; here, misery looks more sad than it does in sadder climes, where it is like a home‐born thing, and not an alien tyrant as it seems here.
Then, whilst so lovely is the land, most unlovely does this tyrant make the homes of the poor; the alternate dust and mud of the roads, the greed‐clipped trees, the human filth strewn over the fields as compost and putrefying in the sun, the dark, grimy foul‐smelling houses, the starved and beaten animals panting in the heat or shivering in the cold; these all come in the train of this alien misery, and are more horrible and comfortless here than anywhere else on all the earth. More so because, as you look on it all, you know that it is the greed of the State, and the greed of the landlord and his steward, which, working side by side, and striving to outwit each other, do it all. Get away from the grasp of these, and it is the Italy of our Raffaelle still, and smiles as his child‐Christs smile, with a light on its face that is of heaven.
CHAPTER XXXII.
The months went on and brought the winter round and the spring . , Things went ill at Santa Rosalia. The place was littered with dirt and lumber from the public works so nobly begun in it; the people did not dare say their souls were their own, with the guards striding up and down the roads and lanes, or watching from the winehouse windows; the tramway company had made up its quarrels with the Municipalities; monies had passed quietly from hand to hand; a few schemers had got the richer, and the rails had finally been laid two thirds of the way, and soon would be completed; the diligence man said he would cut his throat come Pasqua, and no one was content except Messer Gaspardo Nellemane who found all the new laws and new inventions working well, from the steam‐mill that poured its black vapours down the once bright Rosa water, to the mendicancy clauses which had cleared the land of some scores of useless old people.
Messer Nellemane, sitting behind his desk, felt that he had in him the soul of a statesman. In his mind’s eye as in a magic mirror, he beheld himself already at Montecitorio, already with his portfolio, demanding a hundred millions for military manœuvres, and increasing the grist tax by an added third.
He was only a clerk, it is true; but what of that? He had studied to perfection the modern science of success, and he knew that he had in himself all the modern requirements for eminence. Already the prefect and the sub‐prefect had murmured to him, ‘You are wasted here, you shall not be forgotten;’ and already Luca Finti had promised him, ‘When we are in office you will be remembered.’
Here in the little room of the communal palace, with his maps around him and his piles of papers before him, Messer Nellemane, though his imagination was slow, was almost deluded into imagining himself a minister already; and his fancy leapt at a bound the stairs he had still to climb.
Besides, Messer Luca Finti, with his father‐in‐law, were bringing into notice a scheme for turning the catacombs of Rome into an underground railway; he had got a syndicate of Jew, American and Scotch bankers to consider the matter, and he could trust to his own party’s power of worrying the Government into a concession. The sale of concessions is as flourishing nowadays in Italy as ever was of yore the sale of indulgences, and Messer Nellemane, in a strictly private manner, had been associated in this great project which promised well, as it was thoroughly adapted to the temper of the hour.
There was a fine flavour of desecration and utilitarianism about it which would be quite certain to take with the Press and the Bourse. All the Liberi Pensieri would be delighted at the use made of the early Christians. To an age which has decided that martyrdom was a kind of hysteria, and faith a sort of meningitis, there would be something peculiarly fascinating in making of SS. Gianetta and Basilla a booking office, and of St. Hippolytus a junc‐ tion. To drive an air shaft and a corkscrew stait straight through the soil that Scipio and Gracchus trod, down into the twilight, where the ashes of S. Agnes and S. Felicita rest, would be an enterprise full of peculiar sweetness and suitability to a generation that submits to the March Decrees, Irish murders, Cook’s parties, the pickelhaube, and wooden nutmegs, and Paul Bert.
Europe, as it is at present constituted, would be seduced in a second at a prospect that would turn the Quattro Santi into a chief station, and make of the Callimachus — last resting place of so many martyrs and early popes — a depôt for the goods‐trains.
Messer Luca Finti knew the motto of his generation was a paraphrase of Voltaire: ‘Souillez, souillez, souillez! Toujours quelqu’un gagnera!’
And when M. Jules Ferry is a Minister, and M. Herold lives in the Louvre, why should not Messer Nellemane be a statesman and Messer Luca Finti date his letters from the Consulta or the Palazzo Braschi?
The deputy had that first and
most useful of talents: he knew how to hit the tastes of his own times, and he foresaw that the Catacomb Metropolitan would be a name to seduce the world and sell a million actions. He had paid Messer Nellemane the great compliment of divulging this grand scheme to him and even employing his command of florid language in the composition of a prospectus. Messer Nellemane had proved himself equal to the task, and was assured he should be entitled to preference shares. He felt that he was already passed many milestones on the high road to public greatness, and when he slept at night dreamed of portfolios and grand cordons.
As for his passion, he had conquered it with that strength of will which was his characteristic. Messer Nellemane was nothing if not moral; when Viola Mazzetti had wedded another, he had said to himself virtuously that it would never do to compromise his career; besides, after all, she was very thin, and her mouth rather large, and she had been only a common, hard‐working girl: so he dismissed her memory and saw her reality pass by him without emotion. But passion departing left hate behind it; the not uncommon ashes of unholy fires.
His love was a short‐lived thing, but his hate smouldered on, unquenchable.
The little square house with the blue and white Madonna was a blot in the landscape to him. True, he had accomplished much against it; the mill smoke drowned it night and day in black vapours and foul smells; the tramway cars would plunge right across its very doorway, and to lay their rails down, the trees of the bank that had shaded it were felled; inside it all was bare and desolate.
Yet the sight of the little old man sitting on the threshold weaving his rush‐work was to the eyes of Messer Nellemane as the vineyard of Naboth to the great king. Old Pippo was not crushed into the earth, his sturdy little spirit was not stamped into the dust; he was very miserable indeed, and his brain was dull and his hand infirm; but still he lived on, and seemed to the irritated pride of the ruler of Vezzaja and Ghiralda to have an insolent jeering pertinacity of existence.