by Ouida
He climbed the steep stone stairs, ninety-three from the basement to attic, dark, slippery, foul-smelling, full of dust and mud and cobwebs; he hugged the little purse in his breast, he smiled to himself radiantly as he climbed up the steps one by one with tired, aching feet.
He opened the wooden door by its latch and gently entered the room, for Nonna might be asleep, and it would harm her to startle her, even to tell her such good tidings.
Through the unglazed hole in the wall which served as a window, the moon-rays were shining, coming over the Torrigianni trees; they shone on the wretched bed of leaves and sacking, the old woman lying on her back. Her face looked very peaceful; lean, yellow, and wrinkled though it was.
“She is asleep,” he thought; it would be wrong to awaken her even to hear of the gift from Mamma Rosa. Noiselessly, he ran across the brick floor, and sat down on his own bit of sacking, and began to think. Now he had all this money, it would be easy to move his Nonna out of the city and carry her up, up, up, along the green and gracious ascent of the hills, and never stop until she could be set down under the peach boughs and the walnut leaves, where the little brimming brooks were running amidst the grass.
He opened the pretty shining bag again, and poured the gold coins out upon the sacking. The moon-rays shone also upon them. He counted them. There were twenty. What they were worth he did not know, but a great deal, he felt sure. With them Nonna would be able to buy their farm, and they could live happily there, both of them for ever, seeing the blossoms and the fruits come and go.
He longed to wake her, but he dared not; one of the women had told him never to disturb her when she slept. How glad she would be when she did awake and heard that they could both go home! There was a carter who lived in the house; he would take them, making a bed of hay in the cart for Nonna; that would be easy to do, when once they could give him a shining gold piece for his trouble. And once there, all the rest would follow of itself. When once she could see the green again, and see the buds on the fruit trees, she would begin to move her limbs and get back her strength, and they would pay to have a Mass said every day in the church up above amongst the olives, a Mass of thanksgiving to the Madonna and Mamma Rosa.
He had only eaten a bit of black bread all the day, and his brain was a little dim, and his thoughts were confused. He had been walking about on the stones ever since morning. His head ached and his feet ached, and his brow and lips were hot and dry, but he was so happy! The moon looked at him over the trees and seemed to smile; he lay down with his arms outstretched, so that they embraced the motionless body of his only friend, and his hands, clasping the little purse, rested upon the rags which covered her.
“She will be so glad when she wakes,” he thought; “when she wakes and hears we can go home.”
Then he, too, fell asleep, and dreamed of angels, and fountains of gold, and little red-throated birds singing amongst flowering fruit-trees, and grassy paths beneath the vines, and brown rippling rivulets, and Mamma Rosa standing, smiling with the sun about her feet, and saying, “Our Lady sent me.”
Then his sleep became too profound for dreams, and he breathed deeply, unconsciously, whilst the moon passed upward, and its light ceased to shine upon his face and that of his Nonna.
The trampling of feet on the brick floor aroused him; a rude hand clutched his shoulder, and another hand seized the gold. “Here is the little thief,” said a brutal voice, “and here is the lady’s purse.”
“The little heartless wretch!” said a voice as rude. “Look! He is safe here, he thinks, because the old woman is dead!”
The Fig Tree
“MOTHER,” said a countryman to his wife, “I am going to gather those figs; they will be over-ripe if they hang any longer.”
“So they will,” said his wife, who had that excellent thing in woman, a readily consenting tongue.
He took a big skep, and a light ladder, and went out of the house, and across the courtyard, strewn with straw, for the wheat had been thrashed a little while before, peopled by poultry, pigeons, and pigs rummaging amongst the straw, and surrounded on three sides by walls covered with vines.
“Won’t you let one of the boys do it, Giovacchino?” the woman called out after him. “You’re a heavy weight, and — —”
“I’m not so heavy yet that I can’t climb a tree!” said her husband rather testily as he crossed the sunny court, and went out by an old gateway from which the gate had long departed.
Cesira, his wife, went on with her cooking, which was primitive. It was eight o’clock in the morning. There was no clock or watch in the house; they always guessed the hour by the sun’s place in the heavens. The sun had mounted a good deal higher in the sky, and her pot boiled and her bread was browning: but her man had not returned. A little later her second son Oneiro came in from work; he was hungry; then her elder son, Alessio; then her three girls, who had been up in the woods above cutting fuel. They were all hungry, and eager for their bean-broth.
“We must wait for father,” said Cesira.
“He is a long time gathering those figs.”
“I will go and call him,” said Oneiro, a youth of twenty, fair, stalwart, ruddy, an ideal for a young David.
“Aye, do,” said Cesira. “He may have gone on up higher to the peach trees.”
Oneiro went, whilst the others cast themselves sulkily on chairs and an old bench; they were hot, tired, and sniffed with open nostrils, impatiently, the smell from the boiling pot.
Oneiro had been absent but a few minutes when they heard a terrible scream, succeeded by others still louder and still more ghastly. They all rushed out of the house and the court, and up a grassy slope whence the sounds came. They were met midway by the youth; his face was blanched, his fair hair stood on end, his teeth chattered. He could not speak an intelligible word; he could only scream, scream, scream.
“Father!” cried the others, and, pushing past him, they ran up the slope under the vines to where the great fig tree stood. Cesira was the first to reach it. Under the tree her husband was lying like a log; a rotten branch snapped in twain lying beside him told its tale. His neck was broken. When they lifted him up his head hung loosely, and wobbled from side to side, like the head of a dead fowl. He was a heavy man, and he had mounted imprudently from his ladder on to a bough which had been unable to bear his weight.
That day the soup in the pot boiled itself away to waste. No one ate in that house.
Poor Giovacchino was dead, at forty-five years old; a good man, and a good worker, whose forefathers had lived on that same spot for three centuries. An imprudent step, a branch eaten away inside by larvæ, had ended in a second his useful and harmless life.
The frightful suddenness of the death had stunned and cowed them all, and their mother was like a woman deprived of reason, screaming, and falling from one fit into another. Grief is very violent in these parts; happily it is usually shortlived.
There were but few neighbours on that sparsely populated hillside, but the few people there were, flocked in like sheep from far and wide, attracted by that seduction which lies for the most ignorant in a tragedy. They screamed, they stared, they told tales of similar accidents, and of traditions of how the dead had been brought back to life. The parish doctor came, and examined the fractured bones, and said the man was stone dead; the vicar of the parish came and performed the usual rites; there was nothing more to be done than to order the coffin of the carpenter, and apprise the gravedigger.
With nightfall all these visitors went away; the family was left in solitude to its dolor. Cesira was lying in a stupor produced by some laudanum which the doctor had forced on her. The girls were taking it by turns to watch by her and the corpse, sitting outside the door, for they were afraid of that stiff, shapeless figure covered by a sheet.
They were sturdy, fair-haired, boisterous, merry maidens. But now their mirth was stilled; with that terrible body stretched upstairs motionless, the broken neck lying on the best pillow, and a sprig of
basil placed in each nostril, all gaiety had fled for the time from that household.
Oneiro and Alessio sat in the kitchen, and for the first time broke their fast by some maize bread and some watered wine, a petroleum lamp flaring between them on the bare table of mulberry wood.
Oneiro was a fine, strong youth, of good character and untiring in the fields; he scarcely knew his letters, and could not write his name; but he worked on the farm from dawn till dark, as untiring and strong as one of his own oxen. Alessio was of another type. He had learned every thing that he had been able to acquire from priest and schoolmaster, but he was of little use on the farm; as a child he had cried to see the pigs and the chickens killed; he would not beat the bullocks or overwork them; any books he could get hold of he read; he was silent, docile: his people thought him stupid. As the elder son he was doomed to go to the army; he dreaded it unspeakably. He had an oval, pensive face, with great soft brown eyes and a straight profile; he resembled the St. Sebastians of old masters.
They were both heart-sick and woeful, for their father had been a good father to them from their infancy. They were still stunned by the suddenness of the calamity and by the sense of responsibility, too weighty for their years, which it laid upon them.
“Will they let us remain?” said Oneiro; would the steward who managed the estates, which belonged to a great nobleman far away, not consider them too young to be left on the farm?
Alessio knitted his level brows. “Surely, surely,” he murmured. “We have been here centuries.”
“But they may think us too young, and mother too weak.”
“You must marry. I shall be away in the barracks.”
Oneiro was silent; he had not thought of that.
“Marry; that will age you,” said Alessio, unconscious of the satire lying in his words.
“We must ask Messer Rocco,” said Oneiro. Messer Eocco was the steward. Under his sincere sorrow a vague warmth of pleasure glowed. There was a girl a few miles off, fresh as a rose; he had walked with her on Sundays and feast-days, and her parents had been civil and smiling. She had been reared on a farm, and knew its duties and hardships.
“Take Erinna,” said Alessio, with a smile. He knew his brother’s inclination.
Then he rose hastily, leaving half his bread uneaten, half his draught un-drunken.
“What beasts we are to speak of anything but him!” he said; and the tears rolled down his smooth olive cheeks.
“Ay! and ’tis only twelve hours ago,” said Oneiro. “One would say it was twelve years; it does seem so far away.”
Their father had always been there; a rock of strength, a harbour of refuge, a sure and trusty friend; the two youths felt like two lost sheep without him.
Old Boh, the dog, came and rubbed his head against their knees, first one, then the other, in sympathy.
Alessio gave him the unfinished bread. “Boh knows,” he said.
“Oh, to be sure he knows,” said Oneiro. “He crept on his belly under the bed, and lay a-moaning there, till I turned him out when the doctor came. Father was fond of Boh; he would always have him sleep in on winter nights.”
A sob choked the lad’s voice, thinking of those long nights when father had told them tales over the fire.
Then he put out the light, and he and his brother climbed up the dark stair and sent the girls to bed and kept the vigil themselves. Oneiro slumbered at his post; but Alessio remained wide awake, staring out at the starry skies, or what was visible of them through the old ogive window of his father’s room.
As he leaned against the window he could see the fine mass of foliage standing on the grassy bank, its light-green, glossy leaves shining in the strong moonlight, He knew the custom of his country-side, to fell as a criminal any tree which has caused the death of man, woman or child. But he had thought a good deal and read a little, had read everything he could get; and he despised such superstitions.
If it had not been for the conscription, he would have felt tempted to put his few clothes and hooks in a sack, and go to some distant land, Tunis or Tiröl, Brazil or Argentina. But, if a lad be absent when it is his time to serve, he cannot again enter his country; and he loved his country, or at least his country-side, which was all of it that he knew. He thought that, rather than leave it, he would live on as a labourer under his brother all his days.
He turned and looked at his brother, wishing to speak to him of the matter; but Oneiro was so sound asleep, with his head leaning back against the back of the old carved chair on which he sat, that the elder lad had not the heart to awaken him. He returned to the window and watched the stars which shone above the doomed fig tree.
With the morning, poor Giovacchino was put in his coffin of pinewood, and borne on the shoulders of his sons and neighbours up the steep hill-side to the church, which was three miles distant amongst woods. The torches which the mourners carried flared garish and hot in the cool grey early daylight.
He was left in the mortuary chapel, which was but a small stone hovel like a dog kennel. The burial was to be in the evening; the vicar was away for the day.
They went down the hill-side sadly, but their friends chattered and smoked and made sport with one another. Oneiro even seemed to have ceased to mourn; he was thinking if he could get the steward’s consent he would marry Erinna; without it he could not do so. Marry Erinna, and be his own master, and do as he chose. The project smiled at him from the near future. Certainly he was sorry for his poor father; but a young man must think for himself. Oneiro intended to be very good to every one, and to keep his mother and sisters with him; Alessio in two or three years’ time, when his service should be over, might come and live in the old homestead, though he would never be of much use on the land.
It was comforting to think that he would be the ruler there whilst his brother should be away with some regiment. The bees hummed, the sun shone; he tried to feel miserable, but he could not.
Alessio did; he went dully down the hill-path, his hands in his pockets, his head bent; his own position remained what it had been previously, or rather it was less pleasant, because his father had always been indulgent and liberal to him, and had never been harsh to him for his useless love of reading and dreaming; not even when he had found him lying full length on the turf, with some volume open under his eyes, and his plough prone on the unturned earth, and the oxen blinking and swaying their tails to drive away the flies, in the still sultry weather.
These thoughts ran through his mind as he went down the hill, through the myrtle and bearberry and cistus shrubs. He was very sorry, yes; and his eyes often filled with tears, but he had in his pocket a “Leopardi” which he had bought for a halfpenny at a street bookstall because several of its pages had been wanting. He could not understand all the poems, but some of them had sunk deeply into his mind.
The neighbours went home with them, and drank and ate their fill, feasting plentifully, whilst the girls waited on them; and the widow remained upstairs, still stupid from grief and the after effects of the doctor’s opiate. When the men were gone, reeling a little on their homeward way, Oneiro, who was also heated and excited from drinking with them, went into the wood-house and came back with two axes. He kept one, and held out the other to Alessio.
“We will go and kill the assassin,” he said. “It has lived too long.”
Alessio did not take the hatchet.
“You mean the tree?” he asked.
“Of course I mean the tree,” said Oneiro. “Those men reproved me because it is still standing.”
“What matter what they say?” said Alessio with contempt. “They are fools.”
“No more fools than you,” returned Oneiro roughly. “They thought we lacked respect to father letting it stand there still. Riccardo, he said, said Riccardo: ‘It has tasted blood; ’tis wicked in you to let it stand. A tree is like a bull: when once it has killed a man it goes on killing; it must have blood.’ That is what Riccardo said, and he is a shrewd, wise man.”
> “He is a blind ass,” said Alessio. “How can you repeat me such trash, Oneiro? A tree knows naught of malice, or of murder. A tree is a good creature, and knows how to blossom and bear; how to use the soil and the rain; to drive in its roots and put out its leaves; but it knows no more than that; how should it? Father was proud of that tree; he would bid you leave it alone if he were alive now.”
“If he were alive now, the tree would not have killed him,” said Oneiro doggedly.
“The tree did not kill him. He killed himself. He was a heavy man — God rest his soul — and he went on a rotten branch and it gave way under him. That was all. Heavy as he was, he would have broken his neck if he had fallen off a chair, like enough.”
“ ’Twas the tree drew him on to it, and it betrayed him, and killed him,” said Oneiro, with dogged, vinous obstinacy.
Oneiro had been greatly impressed by the reproofs of the old man Riccardo, and the wine in his head made him insensible to argument.
“It betrayed him, and it killed him, and it shall be cut down as if ‘twere a dead bramble for the burning,” he said, with the obstinate repetition of the half-drunken man. He had not taken much, but he was unused to wine, and what he had taken buzzed in his brain as if the bees from the hill-side had got into it.
Alessio looked at him with rising contempt.
“The wine’s in you,” he said curtly, and he took the axe out of his brother’s hand, and pushed him on to a bench.
“Sleep it off,” he said as contemptuously.