by Ouida
“How shall I tell my mother?” he asked himself as he walked back through the fragrant and solitary country. He felt ashamed at his own helplessness and ignorance. If courage could have availed anything he would not have been wanting; but all that was needed here was a worldly and technical knowledge, of which he possessed no more than did the trout in the stream.
As he neared his home, pushing his way laboriously through the interlaced bracken and heaths which had never been cut for a score of years, he saw approaching him the tall, slender form of Don Silverio, moving slowly, for the heather was breast high, his little dog barking at a startled wood-pigeon.
“They are anxious about you at your house,” Don Silverio said with some sternness. “Is it well to cause your mother this disquietude?”
“No, it is not well,” replied Adone. “But how can I see her and not tell her, and how can I tell her this thing?”
“Women to bear trouble are braver than men,” said the priest. “They have more patience in pain than we. I have said something to her; but we need not yet despair. We know nothing of any certainty. Sometimes such schemes are abandoned at the last moment because too costly or too unremunerative. Sometimes they drag on for half a lifetime; and at the end nothing comes of them.”
“You have told my mother?”
“I told her what troubles you, and made you leave your work undone. The little girl was feeding the cattle.”
Adone coloured. He was conscious of the implied rebuke.
“Sir,” he said in a low tone, “if this accursed thing comes to pass what will become of us? What I said in my haste last night I say in cold reason to-day.”
“Then you are wrong, and you will turn a calamity into a curse. Men often do so.”
“It is more than a calamity.”
“Perhaps. Would not some other grief be yet worse? If you were stricken with blindness?”
“No; I should still hear the river running.”
Don Silverio looked at him. He saw by the set, sleepless, reckless look on his face that the young man was in no mood to be reached by any argument, or to be susceptible to either rebuke or consolation. The time might come when he would be so; but that time was far off he feared. The evenness, the simplicity, the loneliness of Adone’s existence, made it open to impressions, and absorbed by them, as busy and changeful lives never are; it was like the heather plants around them, it would not bear transplanting; its birthplace would be its tomb.
“Let us go back to your mother,” he said. “Why should you shun her? What you feel she feels also. Why leave her alone?”
“I will go home,” said Adone.
“Yes, come home. You must see that there is nothing to be done or to be learned as yet. When they know anything fresh at San Beda they will let me know. The Prior is a man of good faith.”
Adone turned on him almost savagely; his eyes were full of sullen anger.
“And I am to bear my days like this? Knowing nothing, hearing nothing, doing nothing to protect the water that is as dear to me as a brother, and the land which is my own? What will the land be without the river? You forget, sir, you forget!”
“No, I do not forget,” said Don Silverio without offence. “But I ask you to hear reason. What can you possibly do? Think you no man has been wronged before you? Think you that you alone here will suffer? The village will be ruined. Do you feel for yourself alone?”
Adone seemed scarcely to hear. He was like a man in a fever who sees one set of images and cannot see anything else.
“Sir,” he said suddenly, “why will you not go to Rome?”
“To Rome?” echoed the priest in amazement.
“There alone can the truth of this thing be learned,” said Adone. “It is to Rome that the promoters of this scheme must carry it; there to be permitted or forbidden as the Government chooses. All these things are brought about by bribes, by intrigues, by union. Without authority from high office they cannot be done. We here do not even know who are buying or selling us—”
“No, we do not,” said Don Silverio; and he thought, “When the cart-horse is bought by the knacker what matter to him the name of his purchaser or his price?”
“Sir,” said Adone, with passionate entreaty. “Do go to Rome. There alone can the truth be learnt. You, a learned man, can find means to meet learned people. I would go, I would have gone yesternight, but, when I should get there, I know no more than a stray dog where to go or from whom to inquire. They would see I am a country fellow. They would shut the doors in my face. But you carry respect with you. No one would dare to flout you. You could find ways and means to know who moves this scheme, how far it is advanced, what chance there is of our defeating it. Go, I beseech you, go!”
“My son, you amaze me,” said Don Silverio. “I? In Rome? I have not stirred out of this district for eighteen years. I am nothing. I have no voice. I have no weight. I am a poor rural vicar buried here for punishment.”
He stopped abruptly, for no complaint of the injustice from which he suffered had ever in those eighteen years escaped him.
“Go, go,” said Adone. “You carry respect with you. You are learned and will know how to find those in power and how to speak to them. Go, go! Have pity on all of us, your poor, helpless, menaced people.”
Don Silverio was silent.
Was it now his duty to go into the haunts of men, as it had been his duty to remain shut up in the walls of Ruscino? The idea appalled him.
Accomplished and self-possessed though he was, his fine mind and his fine manners had not served wholly to protect him from that rust and nervousness which come from the disuse of society and the absence of intercourse with equals.
It seemed to him impossible that he could again enter cities, recall usages, seek out acquaintances, move in the stir of streets, and wait in antechambers.
That was the life of the world; he had done with it, forsworn it utterly, both by order of his superiors and by willing self-sacrifice. Yet he knew that Adone was right. It was only from men of the world and amongst them, it was only in the great cities, that it was possible to follow up the clue of such speculations as now threatened the vale of Edera.
The young man he knew could not do what was needed, and certainly would get no hearing — a peasant of the Abruzzo border, who looked like a figure of Giorgione’s, and would probably be arrested as an anarchist if he were to endeavour to enter any great house or public office. But to go to Rome himself! To revisit the desecrated city! This seemed to him a pilgrimage impossible except for the holiest purpose. He felt as if the very stones of Trastevere would rise up and laugh at him, a country priest with the moss and the mould of a score of years passed in rural obscurity upon him. Moreover, to revisit Rome would be to tear open wounds long healed. There his studious youth had been passed, and there his ambitious dreams had been dreamed.
“I cannot go to Rome,” he said abruptly. “Do not ask me, I cannot go to Rome.”
“Then I will go,” said Adone; “and if in no other way, I will force myself into the king’s palace and make him hear.”
“And his guards will seize you, and his judges will chain you up in a solitary cell for life! Do not say such mad things. What could the king reply, even if he listened, which he would not do? He would say that these things were for ministers and prefects and surveyors and engineers to judge of, not for him or you. Be reasonable, Adone; do not speak or act like a fool. This is the first grief you have known in your life, and you are distraught by it. That is natural enough, my poor boy. But you exaggerate the danger. It must be far off as yet. It is a mere project.”
“And I am to remain here, tilling the land in silence and inaction until, one day without notice, I shall see a crowd of labourers at work upon the river, and shall see appraisers measuring my fields! You know that is how things are done. You know the poor are always left in the dark until all is ripe for their robbery. Look you, sir, if you go to Rome I will wait in such patience as I can for whatever you may learn
. But if you do not go, I go, and if I can do no better I will take the king by the throat.”
“I have a mind to take you by the throat myself,” said Don Silverio, with an irritation which he found it hard to control. “Well, I will think over what you wish, and if I find it possible, if I think it justified, if I can afford the means, if I can obtain the permission, for such a journey, I will go to Rome; for your sake, for your mother’s sake. I will let you know my decision later. Let us walk homeward. The sun is low. At your house the three women must be anxious.”
Adone accompanied him in silence through the heather, of which the blossoming expanse was reddening in the light of the late afternoon until the land looked a ruby ocean. They did not speak again until they reached the confines of the Terra Vergine.
Then Don Silverio took the path which went through the pasture to the bridge, and Adone turned towards his own dwelling.
“Spare your mother. Speak gently,” said the elder man; the younger man made a sign of assent and of obedience.
“He will go to Rome,” said Adone to himself, and almost he regretted that he had urged the journey, for in his own veins the fever of unrest and the sting of fierce passions were throbbing, and he panted and pined for action. He was the heir of the lords of the river.
VIII
Like the cooper Ruffo, Clelia Alba had received the tidings with incredulity, though aghast at the mere suggestion.
“It is impossible,” she said. She had seen the water there ever since she had been a babe in swaddling clothes.
“It is not possible,” she said, “that any man could be profane enough to alter the bed which heaven had given it.”
But she was sorely grieved to see the effect such a fear had upon Adone.
“I was afraid it was a woman,” she thought; “but this thing, could it be true, would be worse than any harlot or adulteress. If they took away the river the land would perish. It lives by the river.”
“The river is our own as far as we touch it,” she said aloud to her son; “but it was the earth’s before it was ours. To sever water from the land it lives in were worse than to snatch a child from its mother’s womb.”
Adone did not tell her that water was no more sacred than land to the modern contractor. She would learn that all to soon if the conspiracy against the Edera succeeded. But he tried to learn from her what legal rights they possessed to the stream: what had his father thought? He knew well that his old hereditary claim to the Lordship of Ruscino, however capable of proof, would be set aside as fantastic and untenable; but their claim to the water through the holding of Terra Vergine could surely not be set aside.
“Your father never said aught about the water that I can remember,” she answered. “I think he would no more have thought it needful to say it was his than to say that you were his son. It is certain we are writ down in the district as owners of the ground; we pay taxes for it; and the title of the water must be as one with that.”
“So say I; at least over what runs through our fields we, alone, have any title, and for that title I will fight to the death,” said Adone. “River rights go with the land through which the river passes.”
“But, my son,” she said with true wisdom, “your father would never have allowed any danger to the water to make him faithless to the land. If you let this threat, this dread, turn you away from your work; if you let your fears make you neglect your field and your olives, and your cattle and your vines, you will do more harm to yourself than the worst enemy can do you. To leave a farm to itself is to call down the vengeance of heaven. A week’s abandonment undoes the work of years. I and Gianna and the child do what we can, but we are women, and Nerina is young.”
“No doubt you speak wisely, mother,” replied Adone humbly. “But of what use is it to dress and manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera be in its sap and at its root? What use is it to till these lands if they be doomed to perish from thirst?”
“Do your best,” said his mother, “then the fault will not lie with you, whatever happen.”
The counsel was sound; but to Adone all savour and hope were gone out of his labour. When he saw the green gliding water shine through the olive branches, and beyond the foliage of the walnut-trees, his arms fell nerveless to his side, his throat swelled with sobs, which he checked as they rose, but which were only the more bitter for that — all the joy and the peace of his day’s work were gone.
It was but a small space of it to one whose ancestors had reigned over the stream from its rise in the oak woods to its fall into the sea; but he thought that no one could dispute or diminish or disregard his exclusive possession of the Edera water where it ran through his fields. They could not touch that, even if they seized it lower down, where it ran through other communes. Were they to take it above his land, above the bridge of Ruscino, its bed here would be dried up, and his homestead and the village both be ruined. The clear, intangible right which he meant to defend at any cost, in any manner, was his right to have the river run untouched through his fields. The documents which proved the rights of the great extinct Seigneury might be useless, but the limited, shrunken right of the peasant ownership was as unassailable as his mother’s right to the three strings of pearls; or so he believed.
The rights of the Lords of Ruscino might be but shadows of far-off things, things of tradition, of history, of romance, but the rights of the peasant proprietors of the Terra Vergine must, he thought, be respected if there were any justice upon earth, for they were plainly writ down in the municipal registers of San Beda. To rouse others to defend their equal rights in the same way, from the source of the Edera to its union with the Adriatic, seemed to him the first effort to be made. He was innocent enough to believe that it would suffice to prove that its loss would be their ruin to obtain redress at once.
Whilst Don Silverio was still hesitating as to what seemed to him this momentous and painful journey to Rome his mind was made up by a second letter received from the Superior of the Certosa at San Beda, the friend to whom he had confided the task of inquiring as to the project for the Edera.
This letter was long, and in Latin. They were two classics, who liked thus to refresh themselves and each other with epistles such as St. Augustine or Tertullian might have penned. The letter was of elegant scholarship, but its contents were unwelcome. It said that the Most Honourable the Syndic of San Beda had enjoyed a conference with the Prefect of the province, and it had therein transpired that the project for the works upon the river Edera had been long well known to the Prefect, and that such project was approved by the existing Government, and therefore by all the Government officials, as was but natural. It was not admitted that the Commune of San Beda had any local interest or local right sufficiently strong to oppose the project, as such a claim would amount to a monopoly, and no monopoly could exist in a district through which a running river partially passed, and barely one-fifth of the course of this stream lay through that district known as the valley of the Edera. The entire Circondario, except the valley, was believed to be in favour of the project, which the Prefect informed the Syndic could not be otherwise than most favourable to the general interests of the country at large.
“Therefore, most honoured and revered friend,” wrote the Superior of the Cistercians, “his most esteemed worship does not see his way to himself suggest opposition to this course in our Town Council, or in our Provincial Council, and the Most Worshipful the Assessors do not either see theirs; it being, as you know, an equivocal and onerous thing for either council to express or suggest in their assembly views antagonistic to those of the Prefecture, so that I fear, most honoured and reverend friend, it will not be in my power farther to press this matter, and I fear also that your parish of Ruscino, being isolated and sparsely populated, and its chief area uncultivated, will be possessed of but one small voice in this matter, the interests of the greater number being always in such a case preferred.”
Don Silverio read the letter twice, its stately and
correct Latinity not serving to disguise the mean and harsh fact of its truly modern logic. “Because we are few and poor and weak we have no rights!” he said bitterly. “Because the water comes from others, and goes to others, it is not ours whilst in our land!”
He did not blame his friend at San Beda.
Ecclesiastics existed only on sufferance, and any day the Certosa might be closed if its inmates offended the ruling powers. But the letter, nevertheless, lay like a stone on his heart. All the harshness, the narrowness, the disregard of the interests of the weak, the rude, rough, tyrannical pressing onward of the strong to their own selfish aims, all the characteristics of the modern world seemed to find voice in it and jeer at him.
It was not for the first time in his life that he had pressed against the iron gates of interest and formula and oppression, and only bruised his breast and torn his hands.
He had a little sum of money put by in case of illness and for his burial; that was the only fund on which he could draw to take him to Rome and keep him when there, and it was so small that it would be soon exhausted. He passed the best part of the night doubting which way his duty pointed. He fasted, prayed, and communed with his soul, and at length it seemed to him as if a voice from without said to him, “Take up your staff, and go.” For the journey appalled him, and where his inclination pointed he had taught himself to see error. He shrank inexpressibly from going into the noise and glare and crowd of men; he clung to his solitude as a timid animal to its lair; and therefore he felt persuaded that he ought to leave Ruscino on his errand, because it was so acutely painful to him.