Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “You say this to scare me, to make me desist.”

  “I say it because it is the truth; and if you were not a boy, blind with rage and unreason, you would long since have known that such actions as yours, in rousing or trying to rouse the peasants of the Valdedera, must come to the ear of the authorities. Do not mistake. They let you alone as yet, not because they love you or fear you; but because they are too cunning and too wise to touch the pear before it is ripe.”

  Adone was silent. He was convinced; and many evil thoughts were black within his brain. His first quarrel with a mother he adored had intensified all the desperate ferocity awake in him.

  “You are as blind as a mole,” said Don Silverio, “but you have not the skill of the mole in constructing its hidden galleries. You scatter your secrets broadcast as you scatter grain over your ploughed field. You think it is enough to choose a moonless night for you and your companions-in-arms to be seen by no living creature! Does the stoat, does the wild cat, make such a mistake as that? If you make war on the State, study the ways of your foe. Realise that it has as many eyes, as many ears, as many feet as the pagan god; that its arm is as long as its craft, that it has behind it unscrupulous force and unlimited gold, and the support of all those who only want to pursue their making of wealth in ease and in peace. Do you imagine you can meet and beat such antagonists with a few rusty muskets, a few beardless boys, a poor little girl like Nerina?”

  Don Silverio’s voice was curt, imperious, sardonic; his sentences cut like whips; then after a moment of silence his tone changed to an infinite softness and sweetness of pleading and persuasion.

  “My son, my dear son! cease to live in this dream of impossible issues. Wake to the brutality of fact, to nakedness of truth. You have to suffer a great wrong; but will you be consoled for it by the knowledge that you have led to the slaughter men whom you have known from your infancy? It can but end in one way — your conflict with the power of the State. You, and those who have listened to you, will be shot down without mercy, or flung into prison, or driven to lead the life of tracked beasts in the woods. There is no other possible end to the rising which you are trying to bring about. If you have no pity for your mother, have pity on your comrades, for the women who bore them, for the women who love them.”

  Adone quivered with breathless fury as he heard. All the blackness of his soul gathered into a storm of rage, burst forth in shameful doubt and insult. He set his teeth, and his voice hissed through them, losing all its natural music.

  “Sir, your clients are men in high places; mine are my miserable brethren. You take the side of the rich and powerful; I take that of the poor and the robbed. Maybe your reverence has deemed it your duty to tell the authorities that which you say they have learned?”

  A knife through his breast-bone would have given a kindlier wound to his hearer. Amazement under such an outrage was stronger in Don Silverio than any other feeling for the first moment. Adone — Adone! — his scholar, his beloved, his disciple! — spoke to him thus! Then an overwhelming disgust and scorn swept over him, and was stronger than his pain. He could have stricken the ungrateful youth to the earth. The muscles of his right arm swelled and throbbed; but, with an intense effort, he controlled the impulse to avenge his insulted honour. Without a word, and with one glance of reproach and of disdain, he turned away and went through the morning shadows under the drooping apple boughs.

  Adone, with his teeth set hard and his eyes filled with savage fire, sprang down into the trench and resumed his work.

  He was impenitent.

  “He is mad! He knows not what he says!” thought the man whom he had insulted. But though he strove to excuse the outrage it was like a poisoned blade in his flesh.

  Adone could suspect him! Adone could believe him to be an informer!

  Was this all the recompense for eighteen years of unwearying affection, patience, and tuition? Though the whole world had witnessed against him, he would have sworn that Adone Alba would have been faithful to him.

  “He is mad,” he thought. “His first great wrong turns his blood to poison. He will come to me weeping to-morrow.”

  But he knew that what Adone had said to him, however repented of, however washed away with tears, was one of those injuries which may be forgiven, but can never be forgotten, by any living man. It would yawn like a pit between them for ever.

  XVIII

  To this apple-tree field there was a high hedge of luxuriant elder and ash, myrtle and field-roses. Behind this hedge old Gianna was waiting for him; the tears were running down her face. She took the skirt of his coat between her hands. “Wait, your reverence, wait! The child is in the cattle stable.”

  Don Silverio looked down on her a few moments without comprehension. Then he remembered.

  “Is she there indeed? Poor little soul! She must not go to the house.”

  “She does not dream of it, sir. Only she cannot understand why Madonna Clelia’s anger is so terrible. What can I do — oh, Lord!”

  “Keep her where she is for the present. I am going home. I will speak with some of the women in Ruscino, and find her some temporary shelter.”

  “She will go to none, sir. She says she must be where she can serve Adone. If she be shut up, she will escape and run into the woods. Three years ago she was a wild thing; she will turn wild again.”

  “Like enough! But we must do what we can. I am going home. I will come or send to you in a few hours.”

  Gianna reluctantly let him go. As he crossed the river he looked down on the bright water, here green as emeralds, there brown as peat, eddying round the old stone piers of the bridge, and an infinite sorrow was on him.

  As a forest fire sweeps away under its rolling smoke and waves of flame millions of obscure and harmless creatures, so the baneful fires of men’s greed and speculations came from afar and laid low these harmless lives with neither thought of them or pity.

  Later in the day he sent word to Gianna to bring Nernia to the presbytery. They both came, obedient. The child looked tired and had lost her bright colour; but she had a resolute look on her face.

  “My poor little girl,” he said gently to her, “Madonna Clelia is angered against you. We will hope her anger will pass ere long. Meanwhile you must not go to the house. You would not make ill-blood between a mother and her son?”

  “No,” said Nernia.

  “I have found a home for awhile for you, with old Alaida Manzi; you know her; she is a good creature. I am very sorry for you, my child; but you did wrong to be absent at night; above all not to go back to your chamber when Clelia Alba bade you to do so.”

  Nernia’s face darkened. “I did no harm.”

  “I am sure you did not mean to do any; but you disobeyed Madonna Clelia.”

  Nernia was silent.

  “You are a young girl; you must not roam the country at night. It is most perilous. Decent maidens and women are never abroad after moonrise.”

  Nernia said nothing.

  “You will promise me never to go out at night again?”

  “I cannot promise that, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “If I be wanted, I shall go.”

  “If Adone Alba bid you — is that your meaning?”

  Nernia was silent.

  “Do you think that it is fitting for you to have secrets from me, your confessor?”

  Nernia was silent; her rosy mouth was closed firmly. It was very terrible to have to displease and disobey Don Silverio; but she would not speak, not if she should burn in everlasting flames for ever.

  “Take her away. Take her to Alaida,” he said wearily to Gianna.

  “She only obeys Adone, sir,” said the old woman. “All I can say counts as naught.”

  “Adone will send her on no more midnight errands, unless he be brute and fool both. Take her away. Look to her, you and Alaida.”

  “I will do what I can, sir,” said Gianna humbly, and pushed the girl out into the village street before her.

>   Don Silverio sat down at his deal writing-table and wrote in his fine, clear calligraphy a few lines: “In the name of my holy office I forbid you to risk the life and good name of the maiden Nernia on your unlawful errands.”

  Then he signed and sealed the sheet, and sent it by his sacristan to Adone.

  He received no answer.

  The night which followed was one of the most bitter in its meditations that he had ever spent; and he had spent many cruel and sleepless nights ere then.

  That Adone could for one fleeting moment have harboured so vile a thought filled him with nausea and amaze. Betray them! He! — who would willingly have given up such years of life as might remain to him could he by such a sacrifice have saved their river and their valley from destruction. There was nothing short of vice or crime which he would not have done to save the Edera water from its fate. But it was utterly impossible to do anything. Even men of eminence had often brought all their forces of wealth and argument against similar enterprises, and had failed in their opposition. What could a few score of peasants, and one poor ecclesiastic, do against all the omnipotence of Parliament, of millionaires, of secretaries of State, of speculators, of promoters, tenacious and forcible and ravenous as the octopus?

  In those lonely night hours when the moonbeams shone on his bed and the little white dog nestled itself close to his shoulder, he was tortured also by the sense that it was his duty to arrest Adone and the men of the Valdedera in their mad course, even at the price of such treachery to them as Adone had dared to attribute to him. But if that were his duty it must be the first duty which consciously he had left undone!

  If he could only stop them on their headlong folly by betraying them they must rush on to their doom!

  He saw no light, no hope, no assistance anywhere. These lads would not be able to save a single branch of the river water, nor a sword-rush on its banks, nor a moorhen in its shallows, nor a cluster of myosotis upon its banks, and they would ruin themselves.

  The golden glory of the planet Venus shone between the budding vine-leaves at his casement.

  “Are you not tire?” he said to the shining orb. “Are you not tired of watching the endless cruelties and insanities on earth?”

  XIX

  The people of Ruscino went early to their beds; the light of the oil-wicks of the Presbytery was always the only light in the village half an hour after dark. Nerina went uncomplainingly to hers in the dark stone house within the walls where she had been told that it was her lot to dwell. She did not break her fast; she drank great draughts of water; then, with no word except a brief good-night, she went to the sacking filled with leaves which the old woman Alaida pointed out for her occupancy.

  “She is soon reconciled,” thought the old crone. “They have trained her well.”

  Relieved of all anxiety, she herself lay down in the dark and slept. The girl seemed a good, quiet, tame little thing, and said her paternosters as she should do. But Nerina did not sleep. She was stifled in this little close room with its one shuttered window. She who was used to sleeping with the fresh fragrant air of the dark fields blowing over her in her loft, felt the sour, stagnant atmosphere take her like a hand by the throat.

  As soon as she heard by the heavy breathing of the aged woman that she was sunk in the congested slumber of old age, the child got up noiselessly — she had not undressed — and stole out of the chamber, taking the door key from the nail on which Alaida had hung it. A short stone stair led down to the entrance. No one else was sleeping in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in another moment ran down the steep and stone street. She laughed as the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the fragrance of Adone’s fields.

  “I shall be in time!” she thought, as she ran down a short cut which led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge.

  The usual spot for the assembly of the malcontents was a grassy hollow surrounded on all sides with woods, and called the tomb of Asdrubal, from a mound of masonry which bore that name, although it was utterly improbable that Asdrubal, who had been slain a hundred miles to the northeast on the Marecchia water, should have been buried in the Valdedera at all. But the place and the name were well known in the district to hundreds of peasants, who knew no more who or what Asdrubal had been than they knew the names of the stars which form the constellation of Perseus.

  Adone had summoned his friends to be there by nightfall, and he was passing from the confines of his own lands on to those of the open moors when the child saw him. He was dressed in his working clothes, but he was fully armed: his gun on his shoulder, his great pistols in his sash, his dagger in his stocking. They were ancient arms; but they had served in matters of life and death, and would so serve again. On the three-edged blade of the sixteenth-century poignard was a blood-stain more than a century old which nothing would efface.

  “Nerina!” he cried as the girl stopped him, and was more distressed than pleased to see her there; he had not thought of her.

  In the moonlight, under the silvery olive foliage her little sunburnt face and figure took a softer and more feminine grace. But Adone had not sight for it. For him she was but a sturdy little pony, who would trot till she dropped.

  He was cruel as those who are possessed by one intense and absorbing purpose always are: he was cruel to Nerina as Garibaldi, in the days of Ravenna, was cruel to Anita.

  But through that intense egotism which sees in all the world only its own cause, its own end, its own misery, there touched him for one instant an unselfish pity for the child of whom he had made so mercilessly his servant and his slave.

  “Poor little girl! I have been hard to you, I have been cruel and unfair,” he said, as a vague sense of her infinite devotion to his cause moved him as a man may be moved by a dog’s fidelity.

  “You have been good to me,” said Nerina; and from the bottom of her heart she thought so. “I came to see if you wanted me,” she added humbly.

  “No, no. They think ill of you for going my errands. Poor child, I have done you harm enough. I will not do you more.”

  “You have done me only good.”

  “What! When my mother has turned you out of the house!”

  “It is her right.”

  “Let it be so for a moment. You shall come back. You are with old Alaida?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be out to-night?”

  “She sleeps heavily, and the lock is not hard.”

  “You are a brave child.”

  “Is there nothing to do to-night?”

  “No, dear.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “To meet the men at the tomb of Asdrubal.”

  “Who summoned them?”

  “I myself. You must be sad and sorry, child, and it is my fault.”

  She checked a sob in her throat. “I am not far away, and old Alaida is kind. Let me go on some errand to-night?”

  “No, my dear, I cannot.”

  He recalled the words of the message which he had received from Don Silverio that day. He knew the justice of this message, he knew that it only forbade what all humanity, hospitality, manhood, and compassion forbade to him. One terrible passion had warped his nature, closed his heart, and invaded his reason to the exclusion of all other thoughts or instincts; but he was not yet so lost to shame as, now that he knew what he had done, to send out a female creature into peril to do his bidding.

  “Tell me, then, tell me,” pleaded Nerina, “when will anything be done?”

  “Whenever the foreign labourers come to work on the water we shall drive them away.”

  “But if they will not go?”

  “Child, the river is deep; we know its ways and its soundings; they do not.”

  Her great bright eyes flashed fire: an unholy joy
laughed in them.

  “We will baptize them over again!” she said; and all her face laughed and sparkled in the moonlight. There was fierce mountain blood in her veins; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like the juice of grapes warmed in an August noon.

  He laughed slow, savagely. “Their blood will be on their own heads!”

  He meant to drive them out, swamp them in the stream, choke them in the sand, hunt them in the heather; make every man of them rue the day that ever they came thither to meddle with the Edera water.

  “Curse them! Their blood will be on their own heads!” he said between his teeth. He was thinking of the strange men who it was said would be at work on the land and the water before the moon, young now, should be in her last quarter; men hired by the hundreds, day-labourers of the Romagna and the Puglie, leased by contract, marshalled under overseers, different in nothing from slaves who groan under the white man’s lash in Africa.

  “Let me come with you to-night,” she pleaded again. “I will hide in the bushes. The men shall not see me.”

  “No, no,” he said sternly. “Get you back to your rest at Ruscino. I did wrong, I did basely to use your ignorance and abuse your obedience. Get you gone, and listen to your priest, not to me.”

  The child, ever obedient, vanished through the olive boughs. Adone went onward northward to his tryst: his soul was dark as night; it enraged him to have been forced by his conscience and his honour to obey the command of Don Silverio.

  But she did not go over the bridge to Ruscino. She waited a little while then followed on his track. Gianna was right. She was a wild bird. She had been caught and tamed for a time, but she was always wild. The life which they had given her had been precious and sweet to her, and she had learned willingly all its ways; but at the bottom of her heart the love of liberty, the love of movement, the love of air and sky and freedom were stronger than all else. She was of an adventurous temper also, and brave like all Abruzzese, and she longed to see one of those moonlit midnight meetings of armed men to which she had escaped from Alaida’s keeping, she could not have forced herself to go back out of this clear, cool, radiant night into the little, close, dark sleeping-chamber. No, not if Don Silverio himself had stood in her path with the cross raised. She was like a year-old lioness who smells blood.