Delphi collected works o.., p.456
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 456
The autumn nights were long and cold; in the infirmary they were allowed no charcoal and no light, but the fiery utterances of the Internationalist lit up and warmed the darkness. Carmelo who knew naught that occurred outside the hedges of Santa Rosalia, listened as in his childish days he had listened to the priest’s wonder‐stories of S. Ursula or SS. Cosmo and Damian, to the recital of the movement going secretly onward in Italy; of the insurrections of San Lupo, of Gallo, of Calatabiano; of the ‘Circoli Barsanti,’ and the section of the ‘Figli di Lavoro;’ of the memorable words of Garibaldi in 1873, that were there a society of devils to combat despotism, he would join it; of the Internationalist federa‐ tion of Rimini which decrees ‘the earth to who cultivates it, the machine to who uses it, the house to who builds it;’ of the programme of Piacenza, ‘everyone has right to what is necessary, no one has right to what is superfluous;’ of the declaration of the fraternity of Montenero, Antignani, Ardenza, and San Jacopo that ‘the State is the negation of liberty; authority creates nothing and corrupts everything; change of government is useless; if a man have a thorn in his foot, it is of no use for him to change his boots, he must pluck out the thorn;’ and, with these, of many a burning and bitter paragraph from the Plebe of Milan, from the Petroleo of Ferrara, from the Proletario of Turin, and the unhesitating dictate of the Campana, that ‘all authority, human and divine, shall perish and disappear, from God downward to the last agent of police.’
The innocent soul of Carmelo revolted from these arguments which tore down his Christ from his crucifix, and dashed his stoup of holy water to the ground; yet the wrong that festered in him made his mind open to all these dreams of freedom and of justice, all these promises of a millennium upon earth.
If such minds as Rousseau’s, Fourier’s, Proudhon’s Bakounine’s do not see the falsehood that is mingled with this truth, how shall Carmelo see it, or the like of Carmelo?
The Italian is as I say, not by nature a revolutionary, but when he is one he goes beyond all others, because, perhaps, he has more than all others to suffer in the contrast between his dead hopes and his present misery. No one seems to remember that the Italian Socialists have rejected Marx and decreed Mazzini a reactionist, whilst they subscribe blindly and without change to all the terrible creed of Bakounine.
No one seems to remember this, or heed it; yet Bakounine’s is a creed of nothing less than universal destruction. The disciples of it grow every day in numbers throughout Italy, but since the arrests of 1874, they call themselves by a harmless name and so no one is afraid.
No one is afraid; and the State continues to give them justification by leaving in every commune the breed of Messer Nellemane and of Bindo Terri.
‘It is a question of hunger,’ the Marquis Pepeli said once of the revolts of Budria and Molinella.
Perhaps partly: not altogether. But who makes the hunger? who keeps the
stomachs empty, the hearths cold, the box of the commune full by fines?
The Municipalities.
Here is the thorn that must be pulled from the foot of Italy if the canker and fester of it are not to spread through the whole body.
Carmelo, of course, could not understand a hundredth part of what the German unfolded to him, but the vague meaning that he gleaned dazzled and awed him, and the poison of injustice already given him to drink had left him thirsty for this other poison of revenge.
Carmelo was a brave lad, a lad honest, clean‐living, and harmless in thought and deed; he was dealt with as if he were a criminal, and the bitter sense of his wrongs made it precious to him to hear of sovereign rights that he shared with all mankind.
He had been dimly conscious of a right to live in his own way so long as he did no harm to his fellows; he had been by nature independent and of fearless spirit; but of late the petty tyrannies enfolding the lives of the poor had been to him like a choking chain, and he had begun to tremble. He saw men impoverished, and hunted down to beggary, or death, by this thing which they called Law, and which he knew only to be extortion; and he had lost hope and manliness; and in the stead of these there had come on him a moody and morbid resentment, chilled with dread.
He was as ready for the tempting of his teacher, as clay is made moist for the hand and the wheel of the potter.
One night, when the moon was shining in through the grated hole that served as casement, the German mechanic died.
Carmelo was too feeble to rise; he sat up in his bed and saw the ghastly agony, and heard the death‐rattle, of this man, who seemed to him his only friend. He strove to call for help, but his tongue clave to his mouth, and when at length he could find his trembling voice he shouted in vain; no one heard.
The horror of that hour aged him by many years.
He dragged his weak limbs out of bed and strove to hold the man in his convulsions, but death was stronger than he, and flung him backward rudely on his own mattress.
With the moonlight on his ghastly face the German struggled with his doom, choking and vomiting blood. Once only, with consciousness in his eyes, he stared upward in the eyes of Carmelo.
‘The people — the people — suffer,’ he muttered through his clenching teeth.
Then he gave a bitter cry and died.
Carmelo was alone through all the long chill night with the body of the dead man beside him.
CHAPTER XXII.
AFTER HER FRUITLESS journey to Pomodoro, Annunziata could not get about at all, on account of snow that fell, and of a thaw that left the roads mere torrents of slush.
She had but little blood in her veins, and but little bread in her cupboard; she and the three other old souls huddled themselves together over a single scaldino of charcoal that they clubbed their pence to get, and spent most of their time in bed, in hope of so keeping their slow circulation frown absolute stagnation. They were four miserable little pallet‐beds, one in each corner, and the spiders and beetles and mice ran over them, and the old women were too feeble to chase them away.
Dom Lelio did all he could and Viola went daily, and denied herself that she might keep her great‐aunt from starving, but when all was done that could be by these two, Annunziata had but little of all that old age needs. Dom Lelio had but a franc a‐day, and in Pippo’s house want was a ghost that had no rest and gave none.
‘They cannot call her a beggar now,’ said Viola bitterly, as she stood beside the hard bed in which the old woman was stretched, with her legs useless from rheumatism.
The heart of the girl was sick with hope deferred, and that vague fear of something yet worse to come which a long succession of undeserved misfortunes will leave on the brightest nature .
It was now the end of February and the weather, as it often does here, grew colder by far than it had been when the days were short. The village was a sorry scene, the ill‐made roads were little better than bogs, and the angry river went swirling and rushing, yellow and muddy with all the clay that it washed down from its treeless banks.
‘One would say the Rosa were mad to think the boschetto is gone,’ thought the eldest girl Dina Pastorini, as the north wind, without that screen of trees, beat with all its might against the millhouse.
Her father had changed as greatly as Pippo.
He was never irritable, because he was a sweet‐tempered and just man, who could not bear to farther afflict his children.
But all the honest mirth and cheery content were gone out of him; he who had been so loquacious and mirthful now never smiled and seldom spoke; his brow was always dark and his eyes were always dull. Missing that glad and pleasant shade, so green through three of the seasons, that had been before his eyes ever since he had opened them at birth, seemed to him to have made him half‐blind.
Besides, he was always saying in his thoughts: ‘How shall we tell Carmelo? how will he bear it when he sees?’ Carmelo, who beyond them all had loved the bright boschetto, and had passed so many a holiday hour sitting on the mossy edge of it with his square net floating on the stream below, and white Toppa sleeping by his side or hunting lizards in the flower‐filled grass.
The father dared not think of it. He had suffered greatly himself, but he feared that his son would suffer yet more.
As for such solace as might have come to a man struggling with many burdens from the help of money, none was given to him. The municipality had offered a certain sum of money indeed for the riverside wood, but they had not paid it. In Rome they were five years paying for the Farnesina gardens, destroying them, as it were, on credit; in Santa Rosalia they would probably be twice as long paying the miller.
If he wanted to make them pay he would have to go to law with them, and that no one of the class that the Pastorini belonged to would ever dare to do, knowing the remedy to be worse than the disease. The Giunta was supposed to deal with these matters, but in reality it only met to give adhesion to what Cavaliere Durellazzo said, and what he said was what he had been prompted to say by his right hand and chief counsellor, Messer Nellemane.
Now, as everyone will understand without saying, they could scarcely be expected to find money for Demetrio Pastorini, since they were obliged to pay beforehand all those gentlemen who had opposed the tramway.
So the miller’s empty pockets were not the heavier by a coin at the present for the expropriation of his wood, and he suffered in a time of peace and, as the foreign newspapers had it, of prosperity, precisely what he would have suffered had an invading army encamped in Vezzaja and Ghiralda and burned it right and left on leaving it.
‘Ah, my girl,’ he said once to Viola, of whom he had grown fond in their mutual trials, ‘I almost would sooner our dear lad stayed on in prison than that he should come come to see what he will see.’
Viola sighed heavily, and did not say that she felt otherwise, only in her young heart there was that hope which is in youth like the golden gorse, always in bloom, even in bad weather and on barren soil.
She thought always: ‘When Carmelo comes home things will change; all will be well.’
It was now the close of February; she was counting the weeks, the days, the hours till Carmelo’s release.
She could not read much, but she had one of those little calendars which are the oracles of the poor, and she could make out their signs and the days of the months, and in this she had marked each cruel week as it crawled by and left her lover shut in prison walls.
There were only two months more now to divide them, and though Carmelo truly would return to trouble and pain, she could not, like his father, wish him absent.
Yet so many sorrows fell upon them, that the bit of charcoal with which she marked evil days in her calendar had made almost every page a smudge of black.
Early in the year her grandfather had received a long and formal printed paper, calling on him to remove the nuisance of the water before his door. Pippo had crammed the thing on to the top of the live cinders in the brascie bowl, and there had let it smoulder into ashes.
A few days later Pierino Zaffi had been seen about the place, examining the little spring and measuring it, and in the name of the commune had entered the house and traced the offending water to its source amongst the frozen orto ground. He had said nothing and had gone.
In a week’s time there had come another document, and that Viola took to Cecco to read, her grandfather being absent at the time.
This one ordered Filippo Mazzetti forthwith to execute works that would direct his spring underground; to cover it was forbidden, because no means by which it could be covered would fail to obstruct the public path.
He was ordered to commence this work within thirty days; if delayed, the offender would be fined for every day’s delay.
The spectacles rose on Cecco’s nose, and the hair upon his head as he read, and his face grew aghast with horror.
‘After all that money that I paid for Pippo,’ he gasped; ‘after that bit of paper which set him free of all!’
He who was disposed to revere and obey the law was paralysed with terror.
Was this its justice ? this the way it kept its troth with men?
Cecco gave up faith in humanity, and almost abandoned faith in heaven.
Viola was crying bitterly.
‘What does it mean?’ gasped Cecco wildly. ‘What does it mean? Can your grandfather pay masons and plumbers for six months like a duke?’
‘It means ruin!’ sobbed the girl. ‘He has nothing in the world; how can he put the water under the earth? And Carmelo coming home in a month!’
Of this new calamity they were compelled to tell Pippo. He heard quite quietly, but there was a savage wild light in his eye.
He stretched his hand out and took the paper and folded it up once, twice, thrice; then the held it in the palm of his hand and spat on it; then he lighted a lucifer match and set fire to it.
It blazed a moment, then curled up, and became a little heap of black ash on the stones of the floor.
He stayed Viola and Cecco with a gesture as they would have spoken.
‘Never a word,’ he said, ‘never a word. If they send me a hundred such, so will I treat them all. They cannot get blood out of a post. Let them do their worst—’
‘But’ — his friend began.
‘Not a word,’ said Pippo, and he spat on the ashes.
Then he went on with his work.
Half an hour later he looked up from his weaving, and his eyes were shining savagely from under his white hair.
‘Girl,’ he said to his granddaughter, ‘I call to mind a night before you were born. There came news of a great battle; they called it San Martino. They told us to light
Solferino is so called by the Italians.
up; so did we all. In your little window I set the oil flaming. They said we were free — God have mercy on us for being fools!’
Then he went on plaiting his osiers.
The girl wept.
CHAPTER XXIII.
A LITTLE WHILE after that, there came a hue and cry of mad dogs in Santa Rosalia. These cries are very common. They bring in plenty of dog skins for the guards to sell.
If any dog be hunted by boys, be thirsty for water he cannot find, or be gaunt or faint from hunger and ill‐treatment, straightway is he declared arrabiato, and up on the walls there appear placards that every dog seen about will be killed. Then Bindo, with his poisoned polpetti and his pistol, is busy and happy all over the land.
A woman was bitten the other day by one of these mad dogs, and was recovered by the bone of a saint being laid by her pillow, but present municipalities are not desirous to bring out the virtues of saints, and they do like to sell the skins of dogs; so they scream at every possible wag of a tail or sign of a growl, and fly to poison and to pistols.
Such a panic seized the municipality of Vezzaja and Ghiralda in this month of February, when Pippo was being summoned again and again for little Raggi and putting the summons in the fire.
If you tunnel a mountain and stifle a score of men you are a public benefactor; if you keep a factory, in which no one lives over thirty years of age from the notions dust or noxious gas inhaled in the work, no one finds human life at all too precious for you to use up as you like in your own interests; but if ever a dog snap at somebody — ah! then of what sanctity is human life! what horror is anything that menaces it!
Messer Nellemane, in the absence of Cavaliere Durellazzo, who was at his candle‐warehouses, took fright now, nothing loth to do so, and had placards stuck up, announcing that the guards were authorised to destroy every dog they saw loose.
The dullest imagination can conjecture the ‘lovely time’ that Bindo and Angelo had in the commune, and no one dared to check their slaughtering hand, remembering the fate that had befallen Carmelo.
Viola, terrified, kept little Raggi in the house, and shut her up in the house, and kept her out of danger all she could, and at night would start up and feel for the little floss silk curls of the dog as it lay at the foot of her bed, waking from a dream that Raggi had been seized and killed.
‘I said the dog should never be kept in for those devils,’ growled her grandfather: but the girl pleaded to him that her trouble for Raggi’s own sake.
The old man let her do as she would; he was growing apathetic, yet desperate; though he had burned the Giunta’s order about his brook, the memory of it and the dread of what they might do to him haunted him night and day. And he was so very poor; he did not so much mind depriving himself of wine and tobacco, but it hurt him terribly to see Viola’s clothes mended till they were but patchwork, and her feet going bare.
Viola had always been the neatest and cleanest as well as the comeliest maiden in the province. Clean she was still, but neat you cannot be when you are so very poor that even to buy a few pins, a little thread, a bit of tape, is quite beyond your means.
This is the poverty that the world does not understand, and, not apprehending, does not pity; famine it understands, the famine that desolates Cashmere and Bombay, but not the poverty which can just put enough in the body to keep life alive uncomplainingly, but has not a coin beyond for any need or pleasure of life.
It was a great sorrow, too, to Viola not to be able to be decently dressed for mass as she had used to be; but she did not think so much of that as she did of her inability to give her grandfather a scrap or two of meat in his broth and her equal powerlessness to defend Raggi.
At Christmas she had sold her little string of seed pearls to a richer maiden, the big butcher’s daughter, and the money they had fetched had long since gone in charcoal and bread for themselves and soup for Annunziata. Money runs away so fast when it has no companions in your drawer.
