by Ouida
“He did not do it,” Letta repeated again and again to all his family. She never said more than that, for she could not have given a reason for her faith. But she never wavered in her faith, and she brought his mother in time round to her belief, though to the older woman it seemed as natural that a youth should use his knife, as that calves should tug at the cows’ udders, or babes should bruise their mothers’ breasts.
“They mean no harm,” she said, “but when the blood’s hot the hand is quick.”
Letta had been a handsome girl, but, after this sorrow, she lost her good looks very early. She grew yellow of skin and hollow of cheek and chest; her hair lost its lustre, and her step its buoyancy.
“’Tis no use crying over spilt milk,” said the old man many a time to her. “The boy won’t come back; he’s as good as dead, or as bad as dead. Take another sweetheart.”
Letta said neither yes nor no; but she did not look at the youths, and she always wore a black kerchief over her head, and pulled it low down upon her brows. Every one else forgot Rizzardo, but she did not.
Women soon grow aged in the work of the fields, and she looked old when she was twenty.
“It was better in the old time,” he added, when they made them work in the streets chained together. One could see them then. They were black as soot, and clad in yellow, and all chained together; but one could see them. What’s the use of shutting a poor boy up in a hole, seeing nothing and no-body? ’Tis vile— ’tis vile.”
Letta did not answer. It was all vague, dull, horrible to her. All she knew was that they had taken Rizzardo for a fault not committed by him, for a death caused by somebody else. Some great power not to be moved, not to be reached, had taken him and put him out of sight. The priest had told her this was justice. It might be so: she could not see any justice in it.
“He said he did not do it,” she constantly repeated.
The old father snorted scornfully. He knew how youngsters lie. He had not the smallest doubt for an instant that Rizzardo was guilty; only it seemed to him merely a young man’s hasty stroke, not a thing to make such a pother about and ruin a boy for life.
“It was a wicked thing to do, but then it was not he who did do it,” said Letta.
The old man spat on the ground in unspeakable scorn.
“He did it, certain sure, he did it; but ’twas not much matter when all’s said.”
Fulvio Nestio had been a poor, weak reed of a creature, or he would not have died of one thrust of a blade. So the sturdy old man thought. When he had been a youngster himself he had had as many disputes and riots as there had been Saints’ days in the calendar. A man enjoyed the right to settle his own quarrels as he chose. Why did the blackguard law come interfering?
Letta had various suitors, for she was quick of hand and strong of muscle, and she was known to be skilful with calves, and chickens, and silkworms. They were all peasants, for there was no one else near for many a square mile; but some of them were well-to-do, and her relatives could not think why she rejected them. It never occurred to any one that it was because she thought still of Rizzardo. She might as well have thought of the skulls and the skeletons in the church crypt.
He had gone out in the dark, like a rush candle blown in a strong draught.
His brothers and sisters never spoke of him. They were ashamed to remember they had a felon belonging to them. It had made a mark on them, as a fire makes a bare black place on a country-side. One by one they drifted away; the maidens married, the youths went across the seas. Letta alone remained with the old people. They took her presence as a right. Had they not given her a home when her father had died, poor, silly soul that he had been, going and nursing other folks and taking the black small-pox?
There is not much gratitude amongst peasant folks; their hearts are apt to harden with much toil, like their hands and feet. Fine feelings are apt to be plucked up as roughly as the jonquils and narcissi are plucked up between the corn.
“You are those old folks’ servant,” said a man who wished to marry her.
“They were good to me when I was little,” she answered; but in herself she thought, “I should have been their daughter if Rizzardo had not chanced on that misfortune.”
Rizzardo and she would have lived here under the walnut trees and cherry trees, whoever else might have gone away. Rizzardo had been attached to the old house, and always a dutiful son.
One day when Letta was plucking beans in the fields in the heat of noon a neighbour called to her across a spinney, hallooing through his joined hands: —
There’s a man here wants to see you. He’s a tramp; he’s dying for sure. He lay in my shed last night, and I found him here this morning.”
“Wants me?” she said in wonder. Then her heart stood still. Was it — could it be, Rizzardo?
“He’s a stranger to these parts, but he wants you,” said the neighbour. “Come along, he’s dying; he can do you no sort of harm.”
“I was not afraid,” said Letta; but her teeth chattered from emotion as she left the lines of beans, and went across the two fields which divided her from the speaker. Together they went through the hawthorn, and brambles, and young larches of the little plantation till they reached some rough grass-land, on which stood a shed beside two stone tanks for washing linen, which were set on the edge of a spring. She saw a miserable creature, wrapped in rags, and lying huddled up on leaves and dry ferns. She made the sign of the Cross. He was not Rizzardo, and it was clear to see that he was dying.
“You’re the woman he should have married?” said the vagabond, raising his head. “You’re Colletta, eh?”
She gave a sign of assent.
“Aye, she’s Letta,” said the neighbour, standing by in curiosity.
“Then,” said the man, in a flickering voice, “I’d like to tell you that your sweetheart did not kill the man Fulvio Nestio; leastways not with his own knife, for I stole his knife in the fair. There ’tis.”
Letta seized the knife and looked at it. On the horn handle there were scratched letters she knew.
“The Holy Mother of us all be praised! ’Tis his own knife,” she cried with trembling lips. Then she turned on the tramp with anguish. “Oh, man! Why did you not speak before? One word — one word—”
“They’d have taken me,” said the fellow sullenly.
“For sure that’s a good reason,” said the neighbour; “a man can’t be expected to put his own head in a trap.”
“Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Oh Mother of Mercy!” cried Letta; and then she covered her face with her apron and screamed aloud piteously, like a shot hare.
The neighbour ran to call the priest, but the presbytery was up in the hills; and before he could get there the vagrant had the death-rattle in his throat, and died without another word or another look.
But the knife was safe in Letta’s bosom; the old horn knife which had cut blackberry branches, and prised open walnuts, and peeled apples, and cut straw to wind round wine flasks, and trimmed river canes to make matting, in the days when she and Rizzardo had been young and happy, frolicking together in the woods and lanes. Poor Rizzardo! he had always said that he had lost his knife at the fair, and no one except herself had ever believed him.
If the people who have got him could be told this thing, they would let him out,” she said to the priest that evening; but the priest was doubtful.
“It would not, I fear, be evidence,” he said sadly.
“Not what?”
“It would not prove anything.”
“How? When it is his own knife, and the man confessed to stealing it?”
The priest sighed.
If it had been known at the time of the trial, when it could have been followed up and seen into, perhaps it might have been found to be evidence. But now — a dead man, no witnesses, merely a tale that the knife was stolen — who would listen? We should easier move those mountains.”
“It is Rizzardo’s knife,” said Letta.
That was sufficie
nt for her. She kept the knife in her bosom, between her rough shift and her brown skin.
It was like what a little bit of Rizzardo might have been to her; almost like a child of his. She did not believe what the priest said. It was testimony to her as clear as the stars. If his knife was stolen at the fair — and it had been stolen — here it was — how could he have stabbed Fulvio Nestio with it?
She said this to herself a thousand times, ten thousand times; and it was not possible for her to understand that this proof, so all-convincing to herself, would be nothing at all in the eyes of the law. Moreover, she could not comprehend how this fact should be made known; she thought perhaps the vicar might tell it from the pulpit, and that so it would become known in that way elsewhere, but she was not sure. She was not stupid, but she was absolutely ignorant; she had always lived under the shadow of the hills, amongst the crisp, wet herbage, like a lark or a hedgehog. All her mind and sight were given to her field work; no one near her ever talked of anything else, and even the priest was a humble, simple countryman, as illiterate as he could be to be in orders at all, and more occupied with his small glebe, and his few rows of vines, than with any other matter.
She had no one to consult or take counsel with; she had only the knife to look at and Rizzardo’s old father to listen to, who said a dozen times a day: “Well, I was always sure he did it, certain sure; but if he hadn’t his knife he couldn’t do it, and here the knife is. Yes, that’s his knife, yes, for sure.”
But farther than that he did not go; only once he said, after Mass, to an old friend as they cracked nuts together, “Can’t somebody tell the lad that the knife has been brought back?”
But no one knew how that could be done; he was in his living grave. To men such as Rizzardo had become, no friends can send messages. The endless silences brood over them.
“Father,” said Letta one Sunday evening as they sat on the bench by the door; she always called him thus. “Father, Would you let me go and see Rizzo, and tell him, and get him out of jail?”
“Eh?” said the old man, astounded.
She repeated her words.
“You don’t know where he is,” said the old man. “Nobody does.”
“His reverence does.”
“And where is it?”
“In the north somewhere.”
“And how could you go to the north? Lord love us, you’re right on mad!”
“I would find out, somehow or another. The Holy Mother herself would lead me, surely,” she added. And the old man crossed himself at the sacred name.
But he cried, “Lord, who’ll do the work here?”
His consent was not won for many a day afterwards. He and his wife were old, and they had grown used to put all their needs upon Letta. He stormed and swore, and his wife sobbed and fretted. Letta was their right hand, their prop, and stay, and comfort. All their own children had gone away, and had left them to do as they could, and scarcely wrote once a year; but she was like the very roof tree of the house. Not a chick was hatched, or a pig helped in labour, or a sick cow cured, or a sheaf of herbs cut, or a pot put on the fire without Letta. But for the first time in her life she found some strength of will. She was very quiet, but she was resolved. They were obliged to let her do as she wished.
She left all in order, and called in a young neighbour to take her place, and with her black kerchief as usual on her head, and a dark shawl wrapped round her, she went down the valley in the dew of the early morning, the old knife in her bosom, and a change of linen in a pack.
A new life had come into her since she had held that old knife in her hand. She had never doubted Rizzardo’s innocence, but now it was proved to her. A dying man would not have crime there only to tell a useless lie. Her acquiescence in fate ceased, and gave place to a strong, if blind, impulse to act, and serve the one so cruelly snatched away from her.
Since she had come to it at ten years old, she had never been out of sight of the twisted chimneys of this farmhouse. But she took courage and let them sink below the horizon. Soon she ceased even to see, when she turned and looked back, the waving topmost boughs of the larches, and the rounded, massive domes of the walnut trees. Yet another mile or two, and all around her had become strange country, with not a landmark on; it for her.
The priest had written out all names and directions necessary for her guidance, and she had brought a little money, all in coppers, all that there had been in the family savings-box which was kept in the well; besides this, she had two pierced silver armlets, and a string of small coral, which had come down to her from her grandmother, long, long before this time. But she did not think much about these things, she was thinking always about Rizzardo, and of how she would show his knife to the gaolers, whoever they were, who kept him chained up, and how then perhaps they would see how guiltless he had been, and set him free.
It was fine, clear, autumn weather, and she walked more than a dozen miles in a day, but when night fell she had to sleep wherever she found a roof to shelter her, and then she felt very lone, and strange, and wretched, and dared not unloose her stays ere she lay down on these rude, unfamiliar beds. It was only the poorest houses which would shelter her, for she looked very poor, and she was silent to all, and no one could tell her errand. She passed through historic cities, over gleaming rivers, under war-worn walls, by gardens sung of by poets, along thronged and noisy highways, through vast silent lands, once battle-fields, now wastes of wild grasses and of reeds and flowers, but she noticed nothing. She only showed the name which the priest had written as her destination, and asked, “How far still?” And for a long while it was always very far away.
She grew footsore, and had pains in all her bones, but she persevered on her errand. Several times she was stopped by the police, but the priest had taken care that her papers were all in order, and she was allowed to proceed.
Many days had gone by, so many that she had been unable to keep a clear account of them, and she would have doubted that she was still in the same country, or the same world, if she had not seen that the sun and stars looked the same as they had done in her valley. She had got very far north, when at last she reached the place of which she had learned the name by heart, orally, from the Vicar.
“It is many, many leagues,” the Vicar had said to her. “It is more than six score miles.”
But measurement conveyed no sense of distance to her.
“I will ask the way,” she said.
“The dialects differ in different districts,” said the priest. “You will not understand the people, nor they you.”
She did not know what he meant, and did not ask him.
She had entered on the great plain of Lombardy, but she did not know its name. The season was early autumn; the vintage had begun. Everywhere the gold and green of sun-lightened foliage was broken by teams of oxen, by troops of peasants, by red-tiled houses and brown granges, by little villages clustered round spires or towers.
The land seemed wonderfully wide to her. Its great width frightened her. Both the land and the sky were so narrow at home in the little green valley. Then the people, the endless streams of people in the towns! She would never have supposed that there had been so many people living at one time.
She had been many days on her journey when, under the shadow of lofty, snow-topped mountains, she entered at length the town of which the Vicar had written the name for her guidance, a small, gloomy, and walled city, set in the full blast of Alpine winds, crowning a hill, and remaining but little altered from the times of Cun Grande and Il Moro. In its centre rose a huge mass of masonry, a square keep, with a round frowning tower at each corner of it. All the loop-holes or windows which were visible from below had been walled up, long lines of bastions stretched beneath it; beneath them in turn were the roofs of houses, the belfries of churches, the trees of gardens.
It was the great Mastia, or fortress, used in modern times for a penitentiary. It looked black, cold, brutal, terribly strong. The sky was pale above i
t, and a fierce wind was blowing. She climbed up the steep stairs cut in the face of the cliffs, by which people on foot could mount by a shorter road than that which served for animals and vehicles. At the summit was a brown, bald, cheerless square; the dead leaves were being driven along it by the rough mountain wind.
The great Mastia filled three sides of the square. There were sentinels in the archways, some cannon stood in the courtyard; from the fourth side the Pennine Alps were visible across a plain.
She stood and looked in terror at the huge, sombre, savage pile. Was it there — there? Could Rizzardo be there, he who had always lived in the air, and the sun, and the greenery?
She went up timidly to a sentinel and murmured a question.
The man did not move, or even look; he did not seem to breathe. A woman passing pulled her by the skirt.
If you speak to them, you will have trouble.”
“I want to go in there,” said Letta.
“Rizzo is in there. I have got his knife. He did not do it. They must let him out. He did not do it.”
The woman understood.
If he be in there you will not do him any good — knife or no knife. Get home, my poor soul.”
The woman, who had a crate of live fowls on her head, went into the outer works of the fortress by a grated door, which opened for and closed on her. Letta stood and gazed at the walls, which were as impenetrable as a masked face.
She did not dare speak again to the sentries. There was a loud iron bell ringing, with slow, ponderous, re-echoing strokes. The sound filled the whole square.
“Is that for the prisoners?” she said, frightened, to an old man who was sweeping up the leaves.
“No; they don’t count them when they die,” said the sweeper. “’Tis the Governor’s wife that is dead.”
“How can one get in there?”
“No one can get in—”
“Not to see any one who is there?”
“You are a poor fool. Get home.”