'Dario,' he said gravely, 'I have some terrible news in this paper. Lillo's son, Cecco, is dead. I have to go and tell the family. The authorities have written to me.'
He stopped suddenly, surprised by the effect which his news had on his hearer.
'Saints protect us, how you look!' he cried. 'One would think you were the lad's father!'
'Is it sure? Is it true?' stammered Fringuello.
'Ay, ay, it is true and sure enough. The authorities write to me,' answered the vicar, with some pride. 'Poor lad! Poor, good, pretty lad! They sent him to the Marenna marshes, and the ague and fever got on him, and he died in the fort a week ago. And only to think that this time last year he was bringing me armfuls of blooming cherry boughs for the altar at Easter-day! And now dead and buried. Good lack! Far away from all his friends, poor lad! The decrees of heaven are inscrutable, but it is of course for the best.'
He crossed himself and went on his way.
Fringuello doffed his cap mechanically, and crossed himself also, and rested against the shaft of his cart with his face leaning on his hands. His hope was struck down into nothingness; the future had no longer a smile. Though he had told himself, and them, that children were fickle and unstable, and that nothing was lesslikely than that the lad would come back in the same mind, he had nevertheless clung to and cherished the idea of such a fate for his little daughter with a tenacity of which he had been unconscious until his air castle was scattered to the winds by the words of the priest. The boy was dead; and never would Lizina go to dwell in peace and plenty at the old farmhouse by the great pine.
'It was too good to be. Patience!' he said to himself, with a groan, as he lifted his head and bade the mule between the shafts move onward. His job had to be done; his load had to be carried; he had no leisure to sit down alone with his regret.
'And it is worse for Lillo than it is for me,' he said to himself, with an unselfish thought for the lad's father.
He looked up at the little window of his own attic which he could see afar off; the lemon-tree was visible, and beside it the little brown head of Lizina as she sat sewing.
'Perhaps she will not care; I hope she will not care,' he thought.
He longed to go and tell her himself lest she should hear it from some gossip, but he couldnot leave his work. Yet, he could not bear the child to learn it first from the careless chattering of neighbouring gossips.
When he had discharged the load he carried, he fastened the mule to a post by the water-side, and said to a fellow-carter, 'Will you watch him a moment whilst I run home?' and on the man's assenting he flew with lightning speed along the road and up the staircase of his house.
Lizina dropped her sewing in amazement as he burst into the room and stood on the threshold with a look which frightened her.
She ran to him quickly.
'Babbo!Babbo!What is the matter?' she cried to him. Then, before he could answer, she said timidly, under her breath, 'Is anything wrong—with Cecco?'
Then Fringuello turned his head away and wept aloud.
He had hoped the child had forgotten. He knew now that she had remembered only too well. All through the year which had gone by since the departure of the youth she had been as happy as a field-mouse undisturbed in the wheat. The grain was not ripe yet for her,but she was sure that it would be, and that her harvest would be plenteous. She had always been sure, quite sure, that Cecco would come back; and now, in an instant, she understood that he was dead.
Lizina said little then or at any time; but the little gay life of her changed, grew dull, seemed to shrink into itself and wither up as a flower will when a worm is at its root. She had been so sure that Cecco would return!
'She is so young; soon it will not matter to her,' her father told himself.
But the months went by and the seasons, and she did not recover her bloom, her mirth, her elasticity; her small face was always grave and pale. She went about her work in the same way, and was docile, and industrious, and uncomplaining, but something was wrong with her. She did not laugh, she did not sing; she seldom even spoke unless she was spoken to first. He tried to persuade himself that there was no change in her, but he knew that he tried to feed himself on falsehood. He might as well have thought his lemon-tree unaltered if he had found it withered up by fire.
Once Lizina said to her father, 'Could one walk there?'
'Where, dear? Where?'
'Where they have put Cecco,' she answered, knowing nothing of distances or measurements or the meaning of travel or change of place.
She had never been farther than across the ferry to the other bank of the river.
Her father threw up his hands in despair.
'Lord! my treasure! why it is miles and miles and miles away! I don't know rightly even where—some place where the sun goes down.'
And her idea of walking thither seemed to him so stupefying, so amazing, so incredible, that he stared at her timorously, afraid that her brain was going wrong. He had never gone anywhere in all his life.
'Oh, my pretty, what should we do, you and I, in a strange place?' moaned Fringuello,weeping with fear at the thought of change and with grief at the worn, fevered face lifted up to his. 'Never have I stirred from here since I was born, nor you. To move to and fro—that is for well-to-do folks, not for us; and when you are so ill, my poor little one, that you can scarcely stand on your feet—if you were to die on the way——'
'I shall not die on the way,' said the child firmly.
'But I know nought of the way,' he cried wildly and piteously. 'Never was I in one of those strings of fire-led waggons, nor was ever any one of my people that ever I heard tell of. How should we ever get there, you and I? I know not even rightly what place it is.'
'I know,' said Lizina; and she took a crumpled scrap of paper out of the breast of her worn and frayed cotton frock. It bore the name of the seashore town where Cecco had died. She had got the priest to write it down for her. 'If we show this all along as we go people will put us right until we reach the place,' she said, with that quiet persistency which was so new in her. 'Ask how one can get there,' she persisted, and wound her armabout his throat, and laid her cheek against his in her old caressing way.
'You are mad, little one—quite mad!' said Fringuello, aghast and affrighted; and he begged the priest to come and see her.
The priest did come, but said sorrowfully to him:
'Were I you, I would take her down to one of the hospitals in the town; she is ill.'
He did so. He had been in the town but a few times in his whole life; she never. It was now wintry weather; the roads were wet, the winds were cold; the child coughed as she walked and shivered in her scanty and too thin clothes. The wise men at the hospital looked at her hastily among a crowd of sick people, and said some unintelligible words, and scrawled something on a piece of paper—a medicine, as it proved—which cost to buy more than a day of a sand carter's wage.
'Has she really any illness?' he asked, with wild, imploring eyes, of the chemist who made up the medicine.
'Oh no—a mere nothing,' said the man in answer; but thought as he spoke: 'The doctors might spare the poor devil's money. Whenthe blood is all water like that there is nothing to be done; the life just goes out like a wind-blown candle.' 'Get her good wine; butcher's meat; plenty of nourishing food,' he added, reflecting that while there is youth there is hope.
The father groaned aloud, as he laid down the coins which were the price of the medicine. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! They might as well have bidden him feed her on powdered pearls and melted gold. They got home that day footsore and wet through; he made a little fire of boughs and vine-branches, and, for the first time ever since it had been planted, he forgot to look at the lemon-tree.
'You are not ill, my Lizinanina?' he said eagerly. 'The chemist told me it was nothing.'
'Oh no, it is nothing,' said the child; and she spoke cheerfully and tried to control the cough which shook her from head to foot.
Tears rolled down her father's cheeks and fell on to the smouldering heather, which he set all right. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! The three vain words rang through his head all night. They might as well have bade himset her on a golden throne and call the stars down from their spheres to circle round her.
'My poor little baby!' he thought; 'never did she have a finger ache, or a winter chill, or an hour's discomfort, or a moment's pain in mind or body until now!'
The child wasted and sickened visibly day by day. Her father looked to see the lemon-tree waste and sicken also; but it flourished still, a green, fresh, happy thing, though growing in a place so poor. A superstitious, silly notion took possession of him, begotten by his nervous terrors for his child, and by the mental weakness which came of physical want. He fancied the lemon-tree hurt the child, and drew nourishment and strength away from her. Perhaps in the night, in some mysterious way—who knew how? He grew stupid and feverish, working so hardly all day on hardly more than a crust, and not sleeping at night through his fears for Lizina. Everything seemed to him cruel, wicked, unintelligible. Why had the State taken away the boy who was so contented and useful where he was born? Why had the strange, confined, wearisome life amongst the marshlands killed him?Why was he himself without even means to get decent food? Why, after working hard all these years, could he have no peace? Must he even lose the one little creature he had? The harshness and injustice of it all disturbed his brain and weighed upon his soul. He sank into a sullen silence; he was in the mood when good men turn bad, and burn, pillage, slay—not because they are wicked or unkind by nature, but because they are mad from misery.
But she was so young, and had been always so strong, he thought; this would pass before long, and she would be herself again—brisk, brown, agile, mirthful, singing at the top of her voice as she ran through the lines of the cherry-trees. He denied himself everything to get her food, and left himself scarce enough to keep the spark of life in him. He sold even his one better suit of clothes and his one pair of boots; but she had no appetite, and perceiving his sacrifice, took it so piteously to heart that it made her worse.
The neighbours were good-natured and brought now an egg, now a fruit, now a loaf for Lizina; but they could not bring herappetite, and were offended and chilled by her lassitude, her apparent ignorance of their good intentions, and her indifference to their gifts.
Some suggested this nostrum, others that; some urged religious pilgrimages, and some herbs, and some charms, and some spoke of a wise woman, who, if you crossed her hand with silver, could relieve you of any evil if she would. But amidst the multitude of counsellors, Lizina only grew thinner and thinner, paler and paler, all her youth seeming slowly to wane and die out of her.
Her little sick heart was set obstinately on what her father had told her was impossible.
None of Cecco's own people thought of going to the place where he died. He was dead, and there was an end to it; even his mother, although she wept for him, did not dream of throwing away good money in a silly and useless journey to the place where he had been put in the ground.
Only the little girl, who had laughed at him and flouted him as they sat on the wall by the river, did think of it constantly, tenaciously, silently. It seemed to her horrible to leave him all alone in some unfamiliar, desolate place,where no step was ever heard of any whom he had ever known. She said nothing of it, for she saw that even her father did not understand; but she brooded over the thought of it constantly, turning to and fro in her mind the little she had ever known or heard of the manner and means by which people transported themselves from place to place. There were many, of course, in the village who could have told her how others travelled, but she was too shy to speak of the matter even to the old man of the ferry, in whose boat, when it was moored to apouladriven in the sand, she had spent many an hour of playtime. She had always been a babbling, communicative, merry child, chattering like a starling or a swift, until now. Now she spoke rarely, and never of the thing of which her heart was full.
One day her father looked from her pinched, wan face to the bright green leaves of the flourishing lemon-tree, and muttered an oath.
'Day and night, for as many years as you are old, I have taken care of that tree, and sheltered it and fed it; and now it alone is fair to see and strong, whilst you—verily, oh verily, Lizina, I could find it in my heart to take a billhook andhew it down for its cruelty in being glad and full of vigour, whilst you pinch and fade, day by day, before my sight!'
Lizina shook her head, and looked at the tree which had been the companion of her fifteen years of life.
'It's a good tree,babbo!' she said gently. 'Think how much it has given us; how many things you bought me with the lemon money! Oh! it is very good; do not ever say a word against it; but—but—if you are in anger with it, there is a thing which you might do. You have always kept the money which it brought for me?'
'Surely, dear. I have always thought it yours,' he answered, wondering where her thoughts were tending.
'Then—then,' said Lizina timidly, 'if it be as mine really, and you see it no more with pleasure in its place there, will you sell it, and with the price of it take me to where Cecco lies?'
Her eyes were intensely wistful; her cheeks grew momentarily red in her eagerness; she put both hands to her chest and tried to stop the cough which began to choke her words. Herfather stared, incredulous that he could hear aright.
'Sell the tree?' he asked stupidly.
Not in his uttermost needs had the idea of selling it come to him. He held it in a superstitious awe.
'Since you say it is mine,' said the child. 'It would sell well. It is strong and beautiful and bears good fruit. You could take me down where the sun sets and the sea is—where Cecco lies in the grass.'
'Good Lord!' said Fringuello, with a moan.
It seemed to him that the sorrow for her lost sweetheart had turned the child's brain.
'Do, father—do!' she urged, her thin brown lips trembling with anxiety and with the sense of her own powerlessness to move unless he would consent.
Her father hid his face in his hands; he felt helpless before her stronger will. She would force him to do what she desired, he knew; and he trembled, for he had neither knowledge nor means to make such a journey as this would be to the marshlands in the west, where Cecco lay.
'And the tree—the tree!' he muttered.
He had seen the tree so long by that little square window, it was part of his life and hers. The thought of its sale terrified him as if he were going to sell some human friend into bondage.
'There is no other way,' said Lizina sadly.
She, too, was loth to sell the tree, but they had nothing else to sell; and the intense selfishness of a fixed idea possessed her to the exclusion of all other feeling.
Then the cough shook her once more from head to foot, and a little froth of blood came to her lips.
Lizina, in the double cruelty of her childhood and of her ill-health, was merciless to her father, and to the tree which had been her companion so long. She was possessed by the egotism of sorrow. She was a little thing, now enfeebled and broken by long nights without sleep and long days without food, and her heart was set on this one idea, which she did not reveal—that she would die down there, and that then they would put her in the same ground with him. This was her idea.
In the night she got up noiselessly, whilst her father was for awhile sunk in the deepsleep which comes after hard manual toil, and came up to the lemon-tree and leaned her cheek against its earthen vase.
'I am sorry to send you away, dearie,' she said to it; 'but there is no other way to go to him.'
She felt as if it must understand and must feel wounded. Then she broke off a little branch—a small one with a few flowers on it.
'That is for him,' she said to it.
And she stood there sleepily with the moonlight pouring in on her and the lemon-tree through the little square hole of the window.
When she got back to her bed she was chilled to the bone, and she stuffed the rough sacking of her coverture between her teeth to stop the coughing, which might wake her father. She had put the little branch of her lemon into the broken pitcher which stood by her at night to slake her thirst.
'Sell it,babbo, quick, quick!' she said in the morning.
She was afraid her strength would not last for the journey, but she did not say so. She tried to seem cheerful. He thought her better.
'Sell it to-day—quick, quick!' she criedfeverishly; and she knew that she was cruel and ungrateful, but she persisted in her cruelty and ingratitude.
Her father, in despair, yielded.
It seemed to him as if he were cutting the throat of a friend. Then he approached the tree to carry it away. He had called in one of his fellow-carters to help to move it, for it was too heavy for one man. With difficulty it was forced through the narrow, low door and down the steep stair, its leaves brushing the walls with a sighing sound, and its earthen jar grinding on the stone of the steps. Lizina watched it go without a sigh, without a tear. Her eyes were dry and shining; her little body was quivering; her face was red and pale in quick, uneven changes.
'It goes where it will be better than with us,' said Fringuello, in a vague apology to it, as he lifted it out of the entrance of the house.
He had sold it to a gardener in a villa near at hand.
'Oh yes, it will be better off,' he said feverishly, in the doubtful yet aggressive tone of one who argues that which he knows is not true. 'With rich people instead of poor; out in afine garden half the year, and in a beautiful airy wooden house all winter. Oh yes, it will be much better off. Now it has grown so big it was choked where it stood in my little place; no light, no air, no sun, nothing which it wanted. It will be much better off where it goes; it will have rich, new earth and every sort of care.'
'It has done well enough with you,' said his comrade carelessly, as he helped to shove the vase on to the hand-cart.
'Yes, yes,' said Fringuello impatiently, 'but it will do better where it goes. It has grown too big for a room. It would starve with me.'
'Well, it is your own business,' said the other man.
'Yes, it is his own business,' said the neighbours, who were standing to see it borne away as if it were some rare spectacle. 'But the tree was always there; and the money you get will go,' they added, in their collective wisdom.
He took up the handles of the little cart and placed the yoke of cord over his shoulders, and began to drag it away. He bent his head down very low so that the people should not see the tears which were running down his cheeks.
When he came back to his home he carried its price in his hands—thirty francs in three paper notes. He held them out to Lizina.
'All is well with it; it is to stand in a beautiful place, close to falling water, half in shade, half in sun, as it likes best. Oh, all is well with it, dear! do not be afraid.' Then his voice failed him, and he sobbed aloud.
The child took the money. She had a little bundle in her hand, and she had put on the only pair of shoes she possessed.
'Clean yourself, father, and come—come quickly,' she said in a little hard, dry, panting voice.
'Oh wait, wait, my angel!' he cried piteously through his sobs.
I cannot wait,' said the child, 'not a minute, not a minute. Clean yourself and come.'
In an hour's time they were in the train. The child did everything—found the railway-station, asked the way, paid their fares, took their seats, pushing her father hither and thither as if he were a blind man. He was dumb with terror and regret; he resisted nothing. Having sold the tree, there seemed to him nothing leftfor him to do. Lizina obeyed him no more—she commanded.
People turned to look after this little sick girl with death written on her face, who spoke and moved with such feverish decision, and dragged after her this thin dumb man, her small lean hand shut with nervous force upon his own. All the way she ate nothing; she only drank thirstily of water whenever the train stopped.
The novelty and strangeness of the transit, the crowd, and haste, and noise, the unfamiliar scenes, the pressure of unknown people, and the stare of unknown eyes—all which was so bewildering and terrible to her father, had no effect upon her. All she thought of was to get to the place of which the name was written on the scrap of paper which she had shown at the ticket-office, and which she continued to show mutely to anyone who spoke to her. It said everything to her; she thought it must say everything to everyone else.
Nothing could alarm her or arrest her attention. Her whole mind was set on her goal.
'Your little lady is very ill!' said more than one in a crowded railway-waggon, where theyjammed one on to another, thick as herrings in a barrel.
'Ay, ay, she is very ill,' he answered stupidly; and they did not know whether he was unfeeling or daft. He was dizzy and sick with the unwonted motion of the train, the choking dust, the giddy landscape which seemed to run past him, earth and sky together; but on Lizina they made no impression, except that she coughed almost incessantly. She seemed to ail nothing and to perceive nothing. He was seized with a panic of dread lest they should be taken in some wrong direction, even out of the world altogether; dreaded fire, accident, death, treachery; felt himself caught up by strong, invisible hands, and whirled away, the powers of heaven or hell alone knew where. His awful fear grew on him every moment greater and greater; and he would have given his soul to be back safe on the sand of the river at his home.
But Lizina neither showed nor felt any fear whatever.
The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passedhours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst, and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there—to be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the lemon-tree.
Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.
It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their destination—a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the salt water on one side of it, and themachiaand marsh on the other.
Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand and in the other her father's wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching, trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did not faint or fall—she went straight onward as though the place was familiar to her.
Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited. She motioned toher father to do the same. He was like a poor steer landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank, but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned, tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first Mass.
In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his shoulder, said to them, 'You are strangers—what would you?'
Lizina rose and answered him: 'Will you open to me? I come to see my Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.'
The sacristan looked at her father.
'Cecco?' he repeated, in a doubtful tone.
'A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,' said Fringuello, hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his head swam. 'He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man, where his grave is made?'
The sacristan paused, standing before theleathern curtain of the church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and some die in the fort and in the town.
'Cecco? Cecco?' he said doubtfully. 'A Tuscan lad? A conscript? Ay, I do recall him now. He got the tertian fever and died in barracks. His reverence wrote about him to his family. Yes, I remember. There were three soldier lads died last year, all in the summer. There are three crosses where they lie. I put them there; his is the one nearest the wall. Yes, you can go in; I have the key.'
He stepped across the road and unlocked the gate. He looked wonderingly on Lizina as he did so. 'Poor little one!' he muttered, in compassion. 'How small, how ill, to come so far!'
Neither she nor her father seemed to hear him. The child pressed through the aperture as soon as the door was drawn ajar, and Fringuello followed her. The burial-groundwas small and crowded, covered with rank grass, and here and there sea-lavender was growing. The sacristan led them to a spot by the western wall where there were three rude crosses made of unbarked sticks nailed across one another. The rank grass was growing amongst the clods of sun-baked yellow clay; the high white wall rose behind the crossed sticks; the sun beat down on the place: there was nothing else.
The sacristan motioned to the cross nearest the wall, and then went back to the church, being in haste, as it was late for matins. Lizina stood by the two poor rude sticks, once branches of the hazel, which were all that marked the grave of Cecco.
Her father, uncovering his head, fell on his knees.
The child's face was illuminated with a strange and holy rapture. She kissed the lemon bough which she held in her hand, and then laid it gently down upon the grass and clay under the wall.
'I have remembered, dear,' she said softly, and knelt on the ground and joined her hands in prayer. Then the weakness of her body overcame the strength of her spirit; she leanedforward lower and lower until her face was bowed over the yellow grass. 'I came to lie with you,' she said under her breath; and then her lips parted more widely with a choking sigh, the blood gushed from her mouth, and in a few minutes she was dead.
They laid her there in the clay and the sand and the tussocks of grass, and her father went back alone to his native place and empty room.
*****
One day on the river-bank a man said to him:
'It is odd, but that lemon-tree which you sold to my master never did well; it died within the week—a fine, strong, fresh young tree. Were there worms at its root, think you, or did the change to the open air kill it?'
Fringuello, who had always had a scared, wild, dazed look on his face since he returned from the sea-coast, looked at the speaker stupidly, not with any wonder, but like one who hears what he has long known but only imperfectly understands.
'It knew Lizina was dead,' he said simply;and then thrust his spade into the sand and dug.
He would never smile nor sing any more, nor any more know any joys of life; but he still worked on from that habit which is the tyrant and saviour of the poor.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
Transcriber's Notes:Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.Simple typographical errors were corrected, sometimes by referencing other editions of these stories.Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected, sometimes by referencing other editions of these stories.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.