by Ouida
“I will slit their pipes if they are not quiet,” said the thief.
He forgot that his knife had been taken away from him on his entrance there.
Prisca, however, understood the sense of his threat, as she leaned against the wall, and her heavy eyes dilated, and she drew her little sister still closer to her with a maternal gesture of protection. She did not let herself sleep again, and she succeeded in hushing Petronilla into unconsciousness and rest. So the black night wore away.
In the grey, dull light which came with morning from the corridor, the filthy figure of the old woman, huddled in her rags, the stupid, scared face of the youth, the brutalized countenance and stinking clothes of the thief, the dirty floor of the cell, and its bare, grim walls, gained a still more hideous aspect. Neither of the children dared look up: they cowed down one against the other, hiding their eyes; they still believed that in some way or another their mother would arise and come to their aid. One by one the guards took out the three others, and no one of them returned. The door was locked and bolted; the window strongly grated; vague ideas of escape crossed Prisca’s mind, indistinctly stirring under the lethargy of her fear and stupor. But she had consciousness enough left to see that it would be impossible.
“They will forget us, and we shall die,” she thought; it did not seem to matter. If only the gaolers would give her sister something to eat!
Petronilla was always murmuring: “Mother, mother! Where is the bread?” For their mother, going without often herself, had always given them a good hunch of bread on their awaking.
It was late in the forenoon when those who had come for the others came for them.
“Get up!” said the guard, and he pushed them with his foot.
Prisca, trembling, tried to obey, but her body and limbs felt stiff as stakes, and yet empty.
Petronilla continued to cry, “Mother — bread!” as a hungry fledgling in a deserted nest cries for his slain parents, and his lost food, whilst the bird-slaughterers stride on, indifferent, through the grass and the blossoms of spring.
The man pulled them both up from the floor with rude hands.
“Go on, or it will be bad for you,” he said; “there is no use in shamming here.”
Prisca tried to obey, for she had sense enough to know that they would only fare worse the more they resisted. Her feet were numbed, and her sinews seemed frozen, but she managed to lift up Petronilla, and, half dragging and half carrying her, went out of the cell before the guard, who held their hair, to keep close hold on them, and every now and then gave it a rough jerk, as a bad driver tugs at a curb.
They were taken before the police authorities to receive warrant and order for their consignment to prison. The provisional preliminary imprisonment punishes equally with the guilty those innocent who on their trial are set free. The Commissary of police had, without investigation, consigned the other three to gaol on the unattested declaration of the guards, the old woman being sentenced because she could not pay a fine.
When the two children were brought before him, the Commissary looked at them with a vague pity: they were two such miserable atoms to be offenders against the law. But he listened to the deposition of the guards, who declared that they had seen these two little vagrants annoying people on the pavement and in carriages, and had also seen them beg for and obtain money. When asked their names and residence, they had been obstinately mute; they had been taken up at three o’clock in the previous afternoon; they were old and incorrigible offenders, well known to the police for their contumacy: so at least said their accusers.
“They are very young,” said the Commissary, “but if they be contumacious — —”
Then he questioned them.
“Where do you live?”
“In the hut,” said Prisca, feebly.
“Where is your mother?”
“In the hut.”
“Where is this hut?”
Prisca did not answer; she did not know.
“Your names and ages?” he continued.
Prisca did not reply.
“Find the mother,” said the Commissary to the guard; “she is more to blame than they.”
“Where is your mother?” said the guard, and shook Prisca by the shoulders.
“Dead — dead,” said the child.
“But if she be in the hut?”
“She is in the hut.”
“And where is that?”
Prisca made a vague gesture which implied immeasurable distance.
“They are imbecile,” said the Commissary, “or they are feigning idiocy. They are very small, very miserable. Send them out of the city. They come, it is plain to see, from the Campagna.”
There were scores of similar children in the prisons and penitentiaries since the recent laws against vagrancy had been set in motion. He felt unwilling to add these miserable little creatures to the number.
“You may go,” he said to them; “I will not send you before the tribunal this time. But if you be found again in Rome no mercy will be shown you.”
“He lacks zeal,” thought a brigadier standing behind his chair, and he meditated a secret report against his too supine chief.
“Take them away. Put them in the street,” said that gentleman with impatience; he felt sorry for these little, lonely, stupid waifs, and he dared not show it for fear of the argus-eyed officials and underlings around him; he would have given them some small coins, but he dared not encourage mendicancy with all these chartered spies around him.
The children were pushed outside the room, down several passages, and finally thrust through the entrance doorway into the open air. There the guard gave each a shake and a slap.
“Get out of the city, little beasts, and keep out of it,” he said, as his valediction.
Prisca understood that they were free. Petronilla understood nothing, except that she ached all over, and wanted to eat and drink. It was twenty-four hours since they had received the charity of the shepherd on the plains.
Prisca did not know where she was: there were the babble, the bustle, the noise of the streets around her, and she did not know when, or where, these stony ways and long lines of walls would cease. Her little sister was like a log to drag along; the child scarcely moved, scarcely aided herself in any way, and Prisca felt her own limbs quivering under her, and the chills and heats of fever coursing turn by turn through her veins.
They had come in by a gate, by a barrier, they must go out by one: that was all which was clear to her; that the gates and barriers might lead to totally different points of the compass was wholly beyond the grasp of her mind in its actual state.
Now, she had entered by the Porta Pia; but the Questura, from which she had been expelled, was in the Via di Arancio, to the west of the Corso, and it was into an alley out of this street that they were turned adrift, knowing less than a lost dog where to turn or what to do. But haunted by the command which had sunk into her dulled brain to get out of the city at once, or be hauled back to prison, Prisca, trembling in every limb, ventured to stop by an old man selling chestnuts, and to say under her breath, “The gate! Where is the gate?”
“What gate?” he asked.
“The gate!” she repeated.
He pointed upward towards the left.
“The Porta del Popolo is yonder. Is that the one you want? Or is it the Salara?” said the old man, who was patient and kind.
“No,” said Prisca; then, searching in her aching, puzzled brain, she added, “ours is Por’ Pia.”
“That lies the other way. You must go towards the Quirinal,” said the chestnut seller, and patiently pointed out where they should go; and then, neglecting his smoking stove, seeing Prisca’s face so wan and blue and scared, he offered her a handful of his chestnuts. “For nothing, for nothing; take them, little ones,” he said good-naturedly.
But she dared not take them; the terror of another accusation and another arrest was on her. She dragged her sister away from the stall, and went on up th
e street, the child screaming and resisting. He had explained to her the way across the maze of streets to Porta Pia, clearly enough for any one who had known anything of Rome to find the way. But Prisca only gathered a confused sense of some vast wilderness stretching between her and the homeward road.
The distance is not very great from the Corso to the Porta Pia to those who are driving in carriages or walking gaily along on pleasant errands. But she could not disentangle the network of the streets, and she went instead, without knowing what she did, towards the Tiber; taking, by instinct, secluded and silent ways instead of the thoroughfares, where the traffic bewildered her more and more. She was footsore and fever-stricken, and the child hung on her like a leaden weight. Her sole means of making a few pence had been taken from her, and the lady’s gift also. In her dull, aching brain a sense of the injustice done to her seemed to burn her like a fire.
What a quantity of bread that lira would have bought! Why had the guard kept it? Petronilla was crying and moaning with hunger. She herself could not have eaten if all the shops and inns of Rome had been open to her; but Petronilla! — Prisca felt as if she sinned against her mother, sinned against the Madonna, in letting the child want.
She dragged her frozen feet along over the stones in a belief that she was going towards Porta Pia and the open country, but in reality she had turned away from it; she often went over the same ground again and again, in circles, like a child lost in a forest, and she was always farther and farther from her goal. At last she came on a wholly deserted street: one of those marked for demolition. The dwellers in it had been turned out, the houses were shut up; there was even a church which was closed, as it was to be swept away in a few weeks. It had a noble doorway rising above some wide, low steps; the portico and pillars were of travertine marble; the sculptured Ecce Homo above it was of fine fifteenth-century work; a dealer in such things had already bought it for a foreign patron; the door itself was of oak, finely carved in panels which represented the life of St. Jerome, to whom the church was dedicated.
Prisca saw its broad, smooth, easy steps at the moment when Petronilla sank out of her grasp on to the stones, and she herself felt that she could move no more. With one last effort she carried her sister on to the steps, and dragged her upward until they each leaned against the door. The portico sheltered them in a measure from the blasts of a keen wind blowing from the north, which drove down the doomed street clouds of grey dust from portions of it already dismantled.
No one came thither. The workmen were making holiday, for it was the vigil of the Presentation of the Virgin; now and then the wind shook a loose shutter, or dislodged some loosened bricks; nothing else moved. A sleep, which was mere stupor, stole over Prisca; she thought her sister already slept, for the child’s head grew heavier and heavier upon her breast. The hours passed; no one came there; delirious fancies passed across Prisca’s mind. She saw her mother and the Madonna, hand in hand, come through the oleander shrubs beside the hut; but they frowned on her and said, “Hast thou let the child starve?”
Then she cried out aloud, and tried to lift up Petronilla’s head, but she could not; it was heavy as a stone.
Then she ceased to dream, and ceased to feel; her eyelids shut out the day, her breath was feeble and fluttering like a half-frozen bird; her last act was to draw her little sister’s curls about her own throat.
“Mother — mother will know,” she thought; and then she, too, was still, like the child upon her knees.
They remained there all the day, and all the night, locked in each other’s arms.
In the morning some scavengers found them, sitting thus. They had been dead many hours.
They were taken to the mortuary house, and thence, none recognizing them, they were carried to the common ditch in which the poor and nameless lie.
What were they more than the dust of the street, blown about a little while by the winds, and then swept away and forgotten?
Letta
THEY were going home from a fair: one of those autumn fairs to which peasants flock from far and wide. They were driving home some young cattle. They were all a little hot with wine. There were eight of them, of ages varying between sixteen and twenty-two; dwellers on farms which were scattered along a valley, under the shadow of mountain spurs of the lower and central Apennines; all of them were cousins, neighbours, friends, who had known each other from childhood. They had difficulty with their cattle, being strangers to them, and the poor beasts being weary, jaded, thirsty, and footsore, and trying to go back to the country which they knew.
The young men blamed each other for the trouble they had; they grew hot and rough; they used shrill, sharp words and angry oaths; each accused the others. The animals grew wilder, and six of them broke from the men, and galloped away into the twilight, which was brief and dark. Then the curses and the reproaches grew louder and more general; and the youngsters set on each other furiously, the elder accusing the younger, the boys protesting their innocence. In the evening air there was a great up-roar, and the young bulls bellowed to get free, and the cows lowed loudly for the calves left far behind. Then the youths used their sticks on one another, and three of them drew their knives, and no one knew clearly how, or by whom, but one of them was stabbed in three places, and fell dead, and another was struck in the groin, and the sight of the blood sobered the rest.
They all went homewards silent and afraid, every one denying that he had struck the fatal blows. The wounded man they carried with them; the dead one they left under a juniper tree. He was stone dead, he would not get away; his people would come for him with an ox-cart in the morning.
When they reached the first farmstead, several of the cattle were missing, and the night was come. The few souls who were on the farm, turned out in wrath and bewilderment.
“We must find the beasts first, then we will see to the lads,” said the head of the household: an old grey man.
The women carried in the wounded youth, and laid him on the bricks.
“Who did it?” they cried.
A voice from the outside cried to them, “It was Rizzardo.”
No, no, no! Not I!” cried Rizzardo.
“You stabbed the other one, and then this one,” said the unseen speaker.
“I had no knife,” said Rizzardo.
But no one believed him. Beside, that question could wait, as the dead body was waiting under the juniper. What mattered was to pursue and recover the cattle.
Rizzardo went out into the night with the rest to search for the escaped cattle. Even the women went also, leaving the wounded lad with the old granddame and the shrieking babes; she lifted up the boy’s head and gave him a drink of water.
Who did it?” she asked him.
He shook his head feebly. He knew, but he would not say. He was afraid to say.
“Fulvio was struck dead,” he muttered, and his breath was short and thick.
“A nice night’s work,” said the old crone. “But, Holy Mary! was there ever a fair’s end without a letting of blood?”
Six weeks later, Rizzardo, son of Giannone, of the house of Lazzare, was arrested on the charge of having stabbed one of his companions fatally, and another slightly, on their return from the cattle fair of the month of October.
Rizzardo only replied to those who arrested him: —
“I did not do it. No: I did not. I had no knife. I had lost my knife at the fair.”
But that no one believed, because, if he had lost it, he would have bought another at the first cutlery stall. A young man without a knife would be more ridiculous than a dog without a tail.
Even his own father and mother did not believe him when he said he had no knife upon him at the fair. He might as well have said he had no shirt. The knife is like the shirt; even if he have nothing else, a man has that. He said his knife had been stolen in the crowd at the fair; but that seemed a silly tale, for the knife is always worn between the trouser-band and the shirt, and no one can get at it.
“Of course he had stuck it into Fulvio Nestio,” said his father and brothers. “Why not?”
It did not seem much of a sin to his parents and neighbours. Only to the girl Colletta, who was his sweetheart, it seemed terrible, because she was a softer, sillier thing than the women of the valley, having come from a town, where her people had died in an epidemic of small-pox. She had had no one left except her great-uncle, who was Rizzardo’s father. She had learned the rough labour and the hard life of the country side, but she had kept some of her town-bred mother’s fancies and prejudices in her; and one of these made her think that this crime, whoever had done it, was a great one.
“Folks are squeamish and white-livered nowadays,” said her great-uncle, with scorn. “In my young time no one thought more of sticking a man than a pig. It was all one in the day’s work.”
“I did not do it,” said Rizzardo.
The girl believed him, but no one else.
“Say you did it, like a man,” said his father and brothers.
“But I did not do it,” repeated Rizzardo, growing angry.
And then he was taken out of their sight by the gendarmes, and kept in prison many months, and finally put on his trial. He was found guilty of man-slaughter, and sentenced to twenty-one years’ imprisonment, and preceded by two years of solitary confinement: They did not see him again. They were all too poor to go to the distant town where his trial took place; and what good could they have done if they had gone?
“Why would he not say that he did it?” repeated his people.
“He did not do it,” said Letta.
But not even the mother who had borne him thought with her. Of course he had done it. He had not meant to kill Fulvio Nestio; he had only struck out with the knife, as was natural, as a young horse lashes out in its anger, and the blade had gone a little too deep down into the breast-bone; an accident, a misfortune, such as might happen any day to any one.
“He would have done better to look after the cattle,” said his father; for two of the steers had never been found or heard of. They had been drowned, perhaps, or had run riot in the woods, or had been stolen and butchered — who knew?