Few were the dead who were taken there;meagre and miserable were the lot and the pittance of its poor Vicar, and weather-beaten and worn by toil were the score of peasants who made up its congregation, coming thence from the scattered huts and farmhouses of the hillside.
It was seven miles off from the chestnut wood where he dwelt, and twice seven from the four roads; a lonely and not over-safe tramp across the hills and the water-courses and the brushwood.
But it was not the distance which troubled him, nor any possible danger. He knew his way through all that country, and the full round moon was by now showing her broad disc over the edge of the farther mountains on the south-east. But the thought of what he would have to do at the end of his pilgrimage made him sick with fear not altogether unmanly.
He knew that what he would do would be sacrilege and punishable by law, but it was not of that he thought: his mind was filled with those terrors of the nether world, of the unknown, of the unseen, which a lonely life and a latent imagination made at once so indistinct and so powerful to him.
'Had she but asked me anything else! 'he thought piteously. 'Anything!—to cut off my right hand or to take the life of any man!'
But she had set him this task; inexorably as women of old set their lovers to search for the Grail or beard the Saracen in his mosque, and he knew that he must do what she willed or never again feel those warm red lips breathe on his own.
He tightened the canvas belt round his loins, and went home to his cabin to fetch a pickaxe and a spade, and, bidding his dog stay to guard the empty hut, he set out to walk across the vast steep breadth of woodland darkness which separated him from the church and churchyard which were his goal.
A labourer on those hills all his life, and accustomed also to the more perilous and murderous thickets of Maremma, where escaped galley-slaves hid amongst the boxwood and the bearberry, and lived in caves and hollow trees, no physical alarm moved him as he strode on across the uneven ground with the familiar scents and sounds of a woodland night around him on every side.
The moon had now risen so high that thevalleys were bathed in her light, and the sky was radiant with a brilliancy which seemed but a more ethereal day.
He had no eyes for its beauty. His whole soul was consumed by the horror of his errand. He only looked up at the pointers and the pole-star which he knew, so as to guide himself by them up the steep slopes to the church, for he had left the cart-tracks and mule-paths and struck perforce through the gorse and undergrowth westward, gradually ascending as he went.
'Poor mother! poor mother!' he kept saying to himself. It seemed horrible to him to go and molest her out in her last sleep and take those things which were buried with her. Would she know? Would she awake? Would she rise and strike him?
Then he thought of a dead woman whom he had found once in the 'macchia' in Maremma, lying unburied under some myrtle bushes; he remembered how hideous she had looked, how the ants and worms had eaten her, how the wild boars had gnawed her flesh, how the jaws had grinned and the empty eyeballs had stared, and how a black toad had sat on her breast.
Would his mother look like that?
No; for she was safe under ground, under sacred ground, shut up secure from wind and weather in that deal shell which he had himself made and hammered down; and she was in her clothes, all neat and proper, and the holy oil had been upon her.
No, she had been put in her grave like a Christian, witch though they said that she was. She could not look like the woman in Maremma, who had been a vagrant and a gipsy.
Yet he was afraid—horribly afraid.
It was a soft and luminous night; there was the faintest of south winds now and then wandering amongst the tops of the pines, and fanning their aromatic odours out of them. The sound of little threads of water trickling through the sand and moss, and falling downward through the heather, was the only sound, save when a night bird called through the dark, or a night beetle whirred on its way.
The summit of the hillside was sere and arid, and its bold stony expanse had seldom a living thing on it by daylight. By night, when the priest and sacristan of St. Fulvo were sleeping, there was not a single sign of any life, except the blowing of the pine-tops in the breeze.
He had never been there except by broad day; his knees shook under him as he looked up at the tall straight black tower, with the moonlit clouds shining through the bars of its open belfry. If he had not heard the voice ofSantina crying to him, 'No coward shall win me,' he would have turned and fled.
He was alone as utterly as though all the world were dead.
It was still barely midnight when he saw the bell-tower on high looming darker than the dark clouds about it, and the pine-trees and the presbytery and the walls of the burial-ground gathered round it black and gaunt, their shapes all fused together in one heap of gloom.
The guardians of the place, old men who went early to their beds, were sleeping somewhere under those black roofs against the tower. Below, the hills and valleys were all wrapped in the silence of the country night.
On some far road a tired team of charcoal-bearing mules might be treading woefully to the swing of their heavy bells, or some belated string of wine-carts might be creeping carefully through the darkness, the men half-drunk and their beasts half-asleep.
But there was no sound or sign of them in the vast brooding stillness which covered like great soft wings the peaceful hills overlapping one another, and the serenity of the mountains bathed in the rays of the moon.
There was no sound anywhere: not even the bleat of a sheep from the flocks, nor the bark of a dog from the homesteads.
Caris crossed himself, and mounted the steep path which led to the church-gate.
The last time he had come thither he had climbed up with the weight of his mother's coffin on his shoulders; the ascent being too steep for a mule to mount and he too poor to pay for assistance.
The walls of the graveyard were high, and the only access to it was through a wooden iron-studded door, which had on one side of it a little hollowed stone for holy water, and above it a cross of iron and an iron crown. To force the door was impossible; to climb the wall was difficult, but he was agile as a wild cat, and accustomed to crawl up the stems of the pines to gather their cones, and the smooth trunks of the poplars in the valleys to lop their crowns.
He paused a moment, feeling the cold dews run like rain off his forehead, and wished that his dog was with him, a childish wish, for the dog could not have climbed: then he kicked off his boots, set his toe-nails in the first crevice inthe brick surface, and began to mount with his hands and feet with prehensile agility.
In a few moments he was above on the broad parapet which edged the wall, and could look down into the burial-place below. But he did not dare to look; he shut his eyes convulsively and began to descend, holding by such slight aids as the uneven surface and the projecting lichens afforded him. He dropped at last roughly but safely on the coarse grass within the enclosure.
All was black and still; the graveyard was shut in on three sides by its walls, and at the fourth side by the tower of the church.
The moon had passed behind a cloud and he could see nothing.
He stood ankle-deep in the grass; and as he stirred he stumbled over the uneven broken ground, made irregular by so many nameless graves. He felt in his breeches pockets for his pipe and matches, and drew one of the latter out and struck it on a stone.
But the little flame was too feeble to show him even whereabouts he was, and he could not in the darkness tell one grave from another.
Stooping and stretching out his hands, he could feel the rank grass and the hillocks all round him; there were a few head-stones, but only a few; of such dead as were buried in the graveyard of St. Fulvo, scarce one mourner in a century could afford a memorial stone or even a wooden cross.
He stood still and helpless, not having foreseen the difficulty of the darkness.
He could feel the stirring of wings in the air around him. His sense told him that they were but owls and bats, of which the old tower was full; but he shivered as he heard them go by; who could be sure what devilish thing they might not be?
The horror of the place grew on him.
Still, harmless, sacred though it was, it filled him with a terror which fastened upon him, making his eyeballs start, and his flesh creep, and his limbs shake beneath him.
Yet he gripped his pickaxe closer and tighter, and held his ground, and waited for the moon to shine from the clouds.
Santina should see he was no white-livered boy. He would get her what she asked, and then she would be his—his—his; and thewoods would hide their loves and the cold moss grow warm with their embrace.
Stung into courage and impatience by her memory, he struck violently upon one of the stones his whole handful of brimstone matches; they flared alight with a blue, sharp flash, and he saw there at his feet his mother's grave.
He could not doubt that it was hers; it was a mound of clay on which no grass had had time to grow, and there were the cross-sticks he had set up on it as a memorial, with a bit of an old blue kerchief which had been hers tied to them.
It was just as he had left them there four months before, when the summer had been green and the brooks dry and the days long and light. She was there under his feet where he and the priest had laid her, the two crossed chestnut sticks the only memorial she would ever have, poor soul!
She was there, lying out in all wind and weather alone—horribly, eternally alone; the rain raining on her and the sun shining on her, and she knowing nought, poor, dead woman!
Then the wickedness of what he came to do smote him all of a sudden so strongly that hestaggered as under a blow, and a shower of hot tears gushed from his eyes, and he wept bitterly.
'Oh, mother, poor mother!' he cried aloud.
She had been a hard mother to him, and had had ways which he had feared and disliked, and a cruel tongue and a bad name on the hillside, but she had been his mother, and when she had lain dying she had been sorrowful to think that she would leave him alone.
She had been his mother, and he came to rifle her grave.
What a crime! What a foul, black crime, such as men and women would scarce speak of with bated breath by their hearths in the full blaze of day! What a crime! He abhorred himself for doing it, as he would have abhorred a poisoner or a parricide seeing them pass to the gallows.
'Oh, mother, mother, forgive me! She will have it so!' he sobbed with a piteous prayer.
He thought that, being dead, his mother would understand and forgive, as she would never have understood or forgiven when living.
Then he struck his spade down into theheavy clay on which no bird-sown seed of blade or blossom had yet had any time to spring.
He dug and dug and dug, till the sweat rolled off his limbs and his shoulders ached and his arms quivered.
He threw spadefuls of clay one after another out on the ground around, his eyes growing used to the darkness, and his hands gripping the spade handle harder and harder in desperation. The very horror of his action nerved him to feverish force.
'Oh, Santina, Santina, you give my soul to hell fires everlasting!' he cried aloud once, as he jammed the iron spade down deeper and deeper into the ground, tearing the stiff soil asunder and crushing the stones.
The moon came forth from the clouds, and the burial-ground grew white with her light where the shadows of the wall did not fall. He looked up once; then he saw black crosses, black skulls and cross-bones, rank grass, crumbling headstones, nameless mounds all round him, and beyond them the tower of the church.
But his mother's coffin he did not find. In vain he dug, and searched, and frantically tossed aside the earth in such haste tohave ended and finished with his horrible task.
His mother's coffin he could not find.
Under the rays of the moon the desecrated ground lay, all broken up and heaped and tossed together, as though an earthquake had riven the soil. But the deal shell which he had made with his own hands and borne thither on his own shoulders, he could not find.
'She will never believe! she will never believe!' he thought.
Santina would never believe that he had come there if he met her at dawn with empty hands. He could hear in fancy her shrill, cruel, hissing shriek of mockery and derision; and he felt that if he did so hear it in reality it would drive him mad.
He dug, and dug, and dug, more furiously, more blindly, going unconsciously farther and farther away from where the two crossed chestnut sticks had been; they had been uprooted and buried long before under the first heap of clay which he had thrown out from the grave.
He had forgotten that they alone were his landmarks and guides; in the darkness whichhad been followed by the uncertain, misleading light of the moon, he had gone far from them.
His work had become almost a frenzy with him; his nerves were strung to an uncontrollable pitch of excitation, fear, and horror, and obstinacy, and a furious resolve to obtain what he sought, with a terrible dread of what he should see when he should reach it, had together, in their conflict of opposing passions, driven him beside himself.
He dug on and on, without any consciousness of how far he had gone from his goal, and no sense left but the fury of determination to possess himself of what he knew was there in the earth beneath him.
He stood up to his knees in the yawning clay, with the heavy clods of it flung up on either side of him, and the moon hanging up on high in the central heavens, her light often obscured by drifting cloud wrack, and at other times shining cold and white into his face, as though by its searching rays to read his soul.
How long he had been there he knew not; time was a blank to him; his supernatural terrors were lost in the anguish of dread lest he should be unable to do Santina's will.
He felt as though he strove with the fiend himself.
Who but some hideous power of evil could have moved the corpse and baffled and beaten him thus? Perhaps truly the charms had been things born of the devil, and the devil had taken them both to himself, and the body of his mother with them. He dug on and on frantically, deriving relief from the fever within him through that violent exertion which strained every vein and muscle in his body, till he felt as though beaten with iron rods.
He did not see, in the confusion of his mind and the gloom of the night, that he had come close under the graveyard wall, and was digging almost at its base. He believed himself still to be on the spot where he had buried his mother; and he had deepened the pit about him until he was sunk up to his loins. He never remembered the danger of the priest or the sacristan waking and rising and seeing him at his occult labour.
He never remembered that the bell would toll for matins whilst the stars would be still in their places, and the hills and the valleys still dark. All sense had left him except one set,insane resolve to obtain that by which the beauty of a woman was alone to be won.
Of crime he had grown reckless, of emotion he had none left; he was only frantically, furiously determined to find that which he had come to seek. Standing in the damp, clogging soil, with the sense of moving creatures about him which his labours had disturbed in the bowels of the earth, he dug and dug and dug until his actions had no purpose or direction in them, only hurling clod upon clod in breathless, aimless, senseless monotony and haste.
At last his spade struck on some substance other than the heavy soil and the slimy worms; he thrilled through all his frame with triumph and with terror.
At last! At last! He never doubted that it was the coffin he sought; he did not know that his mother's grave lay actually yards away from him. Oh, were there only light, he thought; it was so dark, for the moon had now passed down behind the wall of the graveyard, and there would be only henceforth growing ever darker and darker that dense gloom which precedes the dawn. He dared not go on digging; he was afraid that the iron of hisspade should stave in the soft wood of the coffin, and cut and maim the body within it. He stooped and pushed the clay aside with his hands, trying to feel what the tool had struck.
What met his touch was not wood, but metal—rounded, smooth, polished; though clogged and crusted with the clay-bed in which it lay. He pushed the earth farther and farther away, and the object he had reached seemed to lie far down, under the soil, and to be held down by it.
He was himself hemmed in by the broken clods, and stood in the hole he had dug, half imprisoned by it. But he could move enough to strike a few remaining matches on the iron of the spade, and let their light fall on what he had unearthed.
Then it seemed to him that a miracle had been wrought.
Before him lay a silver image of the Child Christ. His knees shook, his whole frame trembled, his lips gasped for breath; the flame of the matches died out; he was left in the dark with the image.
'It is the Gesu! It is the Gesu!' he muttered, sure that his dead mother, or thesaints, or both, had wrought this miracle to show him the evil of his ways.
In truth, the statue had lain there many centuries, buried against the wall by pious hands in times when the torch of war had been carried flaming over all the wasted villages and ravaged fields in the plain below.
But no such explanation dawned on the mind of Caris.
To him it was a miracle wrought by the saints or by the dead. In the dark he could feel its round shoulders, its small hands folded as in prayer, its smooth cheek and brow, its little breast; and he touched them reverently, trembling in every nerve.
He had heard of holy images shown thus to reward belief or to confound disbelief.
His faith was vague, dull, foolish, but it was deep-rooted in him. He was a miserable sinner; and the dead and the saints turned him thus backward on his road to hell; so he thought, standing waist-deep in the rugged clay and clutching his spade to keep himself from falling in a swoon.
To Caris miracles were as possible as daily bread.
He knew little of them, but he believed in them with his whole soul. It seemed wonderful that the heavenly powers should create one for such a poor and humble creature as himself; but it did not seem in any way wonderful that such a thing should be.
The Divine Child was there in the earth, keeping away all evil things by its presence, and he could not doubt that the saints who were with Mary, or perchance his own mother's purified spirit, had called the image there to save him from the fiend.
He sank on his knees on the clay, and said over breathlessly all the Aves he could think of in his awe. They were few, but he repeated them over and over again, hoping thus to find grace and mercy for his sin for having broken into these sacred precincts and disturbed the dead in their rest.
But what of Santina? Would she believe him when he told her of this wondrous thing?
If he went to her with his hands empty, would she ever credit that he had courage to come upon this quest? He could hear, as it were, at his ear, her mocking, cruel, incredulous laughter.
She had said, 'Bring me the magic toys.' What would the tale of a miracle matter to her? She wanted treasure and knowledge. She would care nothing for the souls of the dead or the works of the saints—nothing.
He knew that her heart was set on getting things which she knew were evil, but believed were powerful for good and ill, for fate and future.
Suddenly a thought which froze his veins with its terror arose in him, and fascinated him with its wickedness and his daring. What if he took the holy image to her in proof that he had tried to do her will, and had been turned from his errand by powers more than mortal?
Since she had believed in the occult powers of his mother's divining tools, surely she would still more readily believe in the direct and visible interposition of the dead?
If he bore the Gesu to her in his arms, she could not then doubt that he had passed the hours of this night in the graveyard of St. Fulvo.
She could not, before its sacred testimony, be angry, or scornful, or incredulous, or unkind.
But could he dare to touch the holy thing? Would the image consent to be so taken? Would not its limbs rebel, its lips open, its body blister and blast the mortal hands which would thus dare to desecrate it?
A new fear, worse, more unspeakable than any which had moved him before, now took possession of him as he knelt there on the bottom of the pit which he had dug, gazing through the blackness of the darkness to the spot where he knew the silver body of the Christ Child lay.
The thing was holy in his eyes, and he meant to use it for unholy purposes. He felt that his hands would wither at the wrist if they took up that silver Gesu from its bed of earth.
His heart beat loudly against his ribs, his head swam.
It was still dark, though dawn in the east had risen.
He crawled out of the pit of clay with difficulty, holding the silver image to his bosom with one arm, and stood erect, and gazed around him.
If saints or friends were there beside him, they made no sign; they neither prevented nor avenged the sacrilege.
The sweet, sharp smell of the wet blowing grasses was in his nostrils, and the damp clinging sods were about his feet, dragging at the soles of his boots, that was all.
He began to think of the way in which he could, thus burdened, climb the wall.
The silver Christ was heavy in his hold, and he needed to have both hands free to ascend the height above him.
He knew it was an image and not a living god; yet none the less was it in his sight holy, heaven-sent, miraculous, potent for the service of the saints, and to take it up and bear it away seemed to him like stealing the very Hostia itself.
True, he would bring it back and give it to the vicar, and let it, according to the reverend man's choice, be returned to its grave or laid on the altar of the church for the worship ofthe people, and the continued working of miracles.
Yes, he said to himself, assuredly he would bring it back. He would only bear it in his arms most reverently to Santina, that she might see and believe, and become his; and then he would return hither with it and tell the priest the wondrous story.
Yet he shook as with palsy at the thought of carrying the blessed image as though it were a mere living human babe.
It seemed to him as if no man could do such a deed and live. The anointed hands of a priest might touch it, but not his—his so hard and rough and scarred with work, never having held aught better than his pipe of clay and his tool of wood or of iron, and the horn haft of his pocket-knife.
Nor was even his motive for taking it pure. He wanted through it to justify himself in the sight of a woman, and to find favour with her, and to gratify a strong and furious passion. His reasons were earthly, gross, selfish; they could not redeem, or consecrate, or excuse his act. That he knew.
All was still, dusky, solitary; the church waswrapt in gloom, the daybreak did not reach it; only above the inland hills the white light spread where he could not see; behind the high wall of the graveyard, beyond the ranges of the inland hills, the gray soft light of daybreak had arisen.
He thought he heard voices all around him, and amongst them that of his mother warning him to leave untouched the sacred Child, and get up on his feet and flee. But above these he heard the laughter of Santina mocking him as an empty-handed, white-livered fool, who came with foolish tales of visions to hide his quaking soul.
Better that his arms should shrivel, that his sight should be blinded, that his body should be shrunken and stricken with the judgment of heaven, than that he should live to hear her red lips laugh and call him a feckless coward.
With all the life which was in him shrinking and sickening in deadly fear, he stooped down, groped in the dark until he found the image, grasped its metal breast and limbs, and dragged it upward from the encircling earth.
It was of the size of a human child of a year old.
He plucked it roughly upward, for his terrormade him rude and fierce, and held it in his arms, whilst he wondered in his great awe and horror that no judgment of affronted heaven followed on his desperate act.
All was still well with him; he saw, he heard, he breathed, he lived; the cool night air was blowing about him, the clouds were letting fall a faint fine mist-like rain.
He undid the belt about his loins—a mere piece of webbing with a buckle—strapped it around the body of the Gesu, and taking the ends thereof between his firm, strong teeth, sought in the dark for the place whence he had descended, and found it.
He climbed the wall with slow, laborious, and painful effort, the dead weight of the silver figure encumbering him as he mounted with cat-like skill, cutting his hands and bruising his skin against the rough, undressed stones.
He dropped carefully down on the earth beneath, and began the descent of the hill.
'When I can bring the little Christ back, I can get the tools,' he thought. It seemed a small matter.
He was forced to leave behind him his spade and pickaxe.
When at last he reached the top of the coping, he saw that it was dawn. His heart leaped in his breast. Down in the chestnut coppice Santina would be awaiting him; and she would believe—surely, certainly she would believe—when she should see this holy Gesu brought out from the tomb.
He was in good time. It was barely day. He unslung the little Christ and took it again in his arms, as carefully as a woman would take a new-born child. The polished limbs grew warm in his hands; its small face leaned against his breast; he lost his awe of it; he ceased to fear what it might do to him; he felt a kind of love for it.
'Oh, Gesu, dear Gesu, smile on us!' he said to it; and although it was still too dark to see more than its outline faintly, he thought he saw the mouth move in answer.
Holding it to him, he started homeward downthe stony slope. He was thankful to be out of that ghostly place of tombs; he was thankful to have escaped from that scene of terror whole in limb, and uncursed if unpardoned; the tension of his nerves in the past hours had given place to an unreasoning and overstrung gladness. But for his reverence for the burden he carried, he could have laughed aloud.
Only once now and then, as he went, his conscience smote him. His poor mother!—he had forgotten her; he had displaced the mark set above her grave; no one would ever now be sure where she was buried. Did it hurt her, what he had done? Would she be jealous in her grave of the woman for whom he did it? Was it cruel to have come away without smoothing the rugged earth above her bed and saying an Ave for her?
But these thoughts, this remorse, were fleeting; his whole mind was filled with the heat of passion and its expectation. Fatigued and overworked and sleepless as he was, he almost ran down the paths of the hills in his haste, and tore his skin and his clothes as he pushed his way through the brushwood and furze, guarding only the Gesu from hurt as he went.
The day had now fully dawned, and the sun had risen; its rosy flush was warm over all the land and sky; the woodlarks and the linnets were singing under the bushes; the wild doves were dabbling in the rivulets of water; the hawks were circling high in the light.
On the wooded hillside all was peaceful with the loveliness of the unworn day; the air was full of the smell of heather and wet mosses and resinous pine-cones; rain was falling above where the church was, but in these lower woods there was a burst of sunrise warmth and light. None of these things, however, did he note. He went on and on, downward and downward, holding the silver image close against his breast, scarcely feeling the boughs which grazed his cheeks or the flints which wounded his naked feet.
When he came within sight of the place where he had left Santina the night before, he strained his eyes to catch a glimpse of her through the tangle of leaves and twigs and fronds. And true enough to her tryst she was there, waiting impatiently, fretting, wishing the time away, blaming her own folly in setting all her hopes of freedom and the future on afoolish, cowardly churl—for so she called him in her angry thought, as she crouched down under the chestnut scrub and saw the daylight widen and brighten.
She ran a great risk in hiding there; if any of her people or their carters saw her, their suspicions would be aroused and their questions endless. She would say that she came for mushrooms; but they would not believe her. She was too well known for a late riser and a lazy wench.
Still, she had imperilled everything to keep her word with him, and she waited for him seated on the moss, half covered with leaves, except at such times as her impatient temper made her cast prudence to the winds and rise and look out of the thicket upward to the hills.
She had made herself look her best; a yellow kerchief was tied over her head, her hair shone like a blackbird's wing, her whole face and form were full of vivid, rich, and eager animal beauty. To get away—oh, only to get away! She looked up at the wild doves sailing over the tops of the tall pines and envied them their flight.
Caris saw that eager, longing look upon hercountenance before he reached her, and he thought it was caused by love for him.
He held the Gesu to his bosom with both hands and coursed like lightning down the steep slope which still divided him from her; he was unconscious of how jaded, soiled, and uncomely he looked after his long night's work and all his ghostly fears; his feet were scratched and bleeding, his shirt soaked in sweat, his flesh bespattered with the clay, his hair wet and matted with moisture; he had no remembrance of that, he had no suspicion that even in that moment of agitation, when she believed her errand done, her will accomplished, she was saying in her heart as she watched him draw nigh: 'He has got them, he has got them; but, Holy Mary! what a clown!—he has all the mud of fifty graves upon him!'
He rushed downward to her, and held the silver image out at arm's-length, and sobbed and laughed and cried aloud, indifferent who might hear, his voice trembling with awe and ecstasy.
'It is the Gesu Himself, the Gesu—and I have brought Him to you because now you will believe—and my mother must be well withthem in heaven or they never had wrought such a miracle for me—and such a night as I have passed, dear God! such things as I have seen and heard—but the Child smiles—the Child is pleased—and now you will believe in me, though I could not find the magic things—and I said to myself when she sees the Gesu she will believe—and she will be mine—mine—mine! The Lord forgive me, that has been all my thought, though heaven wrought such a miracle for me!'
The words poured out of his mouth one over another like the rush of water let loose through a narrow channel. He was blind with his own excess of emotion, his own breathless desire; he did not see the changes which swept over the face of Santina in a tumult of wrath, wonder, fury, eagerness, suspicion, cupidity, as one after another each emotion went coursing through her soul and shining in her eyes, making her beauty distorted and terrible.
Her first impulse was fury at his failure to bring her what she wanted; the second was to comprehend in a flash of instantaneous insight the money value of that to which he only attached a spiritual merit.
She snatched the image from him, and in the morning light she saw the silver of it glisten through the earth which still in parts clung to it. It might be better, surer, more quick aid to her than the uncertain divining tools whereof she was ignorant of the full employ. Her rapid mind swept over in a second all the uses to which it might be put, and comprehended the superstitious adoration of it which moved Caris and made him control his passion for herself, as he stood gazing at it in her arms, his own hands clasped in prayer, and his whole frame trembling with the portentous sense of the mercy of heaven which had been made manifest to him.
She in a second divined that it had been part of some buried treasure which he had by accident disinterred, but she was too keen and wise to let him see that she did so; it was her part to humour and to confirm him in his self-deception.
She calmed the angry, gibing words which rose to her lips, she held back the exultant covetousness which flashed in her eyes and betrayed itself in the clutching grasp of her fingers; she gazed on the Gesu with a worshiphalf real, half affected, for it was also a holy image to her, if its sanctity were to her outweighed and outshone by its monetary worth in precious metal.
'Tell me how you found this?' she asked, under her breath, as one almost speechless with awe before such a manifestation from on high.
She was really in genuine fear. He had been into precincts which none could enter without offending immortal and unseen powers. He had done it at her bidding. Who could be sure that the offending spirits would not avenge his sacrilege on her?
But through her fears she kept her hold upon the image, whilst she asked the question.
Tremblingly he told her how he had passed the awful hours of the night and failed to find his mother's tomb, but in its stead found this.
'And I brought it that you should know that I had been there,' he said in conclusion, 'that you might know I had been where you willed, and am no coward; and we will take it back together and give it to the holy man up yonder—and now—and now—and now——'
His hands touched her, his breath was upon her, his timid yet violent passion blazed in hiseyes and quivered all over his frame: he had dared all things for his reward, and he claimed it. But, quick as lightning, and merciless as dishonest, she put the holy image between her and him. The sacred silver froze his burning lips.
His arms fell to his side as though they were paralyzed.
'Not while the Gesu is with us,' she murmured in rebuke. 'Let us not be unworthy—you say yourself a miracle was wrought.'
'But——'
He stood before her, checked, daunted, breathing heavily, like a horse thrown back on its haunches in full flight.
'Hush!' she said, with a scared look. 'There are people near; I hear them. We will take the Gesu back to the church, but that cannot be till dusk. I will keep Him safe with me. Go, you dear, and clean your skin and your clothes, lest any seeing you should suspect what you have done.'
'I will not go,' he muttered; 'you promised——'
'I promised, oh fool!' she said, with quick passion, 'and my word I will keep, but notwhile the Gesu is with us. I love you for all you have braved. I love you for all you have done. I will be yours and no other's. See! I swear it on the Holy Child's head!'
And she kissed the silver brow of the babe.
He was convinced, yet irresolute and impatient.
'Let us go back with it now, then,' he muttered. 'I did but bring him to show you in witness of what I had done.'
'No,' she said, with that imperious command in her voice and her gaze which made the resolve in him melt like wax beneath a flame. 'You cannot be seen with me in such a state as you are. I will carry the Christ back to the church if so be that He rests uneasily in common arms like ours, and then—well, I will pass by your cabin as I come down. Dost complain of that, my ingrate?'
A flood of warmth and joy and full belief swept like flame through the whole being of Caris. Her eyes were suffused, her cheek blushed, her lips smiled; he believed himself beloved; he thought himself on the threshold of ecstasy; the minutes seemed like hours untilhe should regain his hut and watch from its door for her coming.
'You will go now?' he asked eagerly.
'At once,' she answered, holding the Gesu to her as a woman would hold a sucking child.
Caris closed his eyes, dazed with her beauty and the wild, sweet thought of how she would hold to her breast some child of his on some fair unborn morrow.
'Then go,' he muttered. 'The sooner we part, the sooner we shall meet. Oh, my angel!'
She gave him a smile over her shoulder, and she pushed her way upward through the chestnut boughs, carrying the Gesu folded to her bosom.
Watching her thus depart, a sudden and new terror struck him.
'Wait,' he called to her. 'Will the priest be angered that I disturbed the graves, think you?'
'Nay, nay, not when he sees that you give him the image,' she called backward in answer.
Then she disappeared in the green haze of foliage, and Caris struck onward in the opposite direction, to take the way which led to his cabinon Genistrello. Her words had awakened him to a consciousness of his bruised, befouled, and tattered state.
He wished to avoid meeting anyone who might question him as to his condition.
He got as quickly as he could by solitary paths to his home, and was met with rapture by his dog. He entered the house, and drank thirstily; he could not eat; he washed in the tank at the back of the hut, and clothed himself in the best that he had: what he wore on holy and on festal days.
Then he set his house-door wide open to the gay morning light which, green and gleeful, poured through the trunks of the chestnuts and pines; and he sat down on his threshold with the dog at his feet, and waited.
It would be a whole working-day lost, but what of that? A lover may well lose a day's pay for love's crown of joy.
Hour after hour passed by, and his eyes strained and ached with looking into the green light of the woods. But Santina came not.
The forenoon, and noontide and afternoon went by; and still no living thing came up to his solitary house. The whole day wore away,and he saw no one, heard nothing, had no visitant except the black stoat which flitted across the path, and the grey thrushes which flew by on their autumn flights towards lower ground.
The long, fragrant, empty day crept slowly by, and at last ended. She had not come.
He was still fasting. He drank thirstily, but he could not eat, though he fed the dog.
He was in a state of nervous excitation almost delirious. The trees and the hills and the sky seemed to whirl around him. He dared not leave the hut, lest she should come thither in his absence. He stared till he was sightless along the green path which led down to the four roads. Now and then, stupidly, uselessly, he shouted aloud; and the mountains echoed his solitary voice.
The dog knew that something was wrong with his master, and was pained and afraid.
The evening fell. The night wore away. He put a little lamp in his doorway, thinking she might come, through shyness, after dark; but no one came. Of her there was no sign, or from her any word.
When the day came he was still dressed andsleepless, seated before his door; the flame of the little lamp burnt on, garish and yellow in the sunshine.
The sun mounted to the zenith; it was again noon. He went indoors, and took a great knife which he was accustomed to carry with him to Maremma. He put it in his belt inside his breeches, so that it was invisible.
Then he called the dog to him, kissed him on the forehead, gave him bread, and motioned to him to guard the house; then he took his way once more down the hillside to Massaio's house.
If she had fooled him yet again, she would not live to do it thrice. His throat was dry as sand; his eyes were bloodshot; his look was strange.
The dog howled and moaned as he passed out of sight.
He went onward under the boughs tinged with their autumnal fires, until he came to the place where the house and sheds and walls of the wood merchant's homestead stood. He walked straight in through the open gates, and then stood still.
He saw that there was some unusual stir andtrouble in the place: no one was at work, the children were gaping and gabbling, the housewife was standing doing nothing, her hands at her sides; Massaio himself was seated drumming absently on the table.
'Where is Santina?' asked Caris.
They all spoke in answer, 'Santina is a jade'—Massaio's voice louder and rougher than the rest.
'She has gone out of the town and away, none knows where; and she has left a letter behind her saying that none need try to follow, for she is gone to a fine new world, where she will want none of us about her; and my brother says it is all my fault, giving her liberty out on the hills. And the marvel is where she got the money, for we and they kept her so close—not a stiver—not a penny—and it seems she took the train that goes over the mountains ever so far, and paid a power of gold at the station wicket.'
The voice of Caris crossed his in a loud, bitter cry. 'She sold the Gesu! As God lives—she sold the Gesu!'
Then the blood rushed from his nostrils and his mouth, and he fell face downwards.
A few days later he was arrested for having violated and robbed the tombs in the burial-grounds of St. Fulvo. The pickaxe and the spade had been found with his name burned on the wood of them; he was sentenced to three years at the galleys for sacrilege and theft.
When the three years were ended he was an old, gray, bowed man, though only twenty-nine years of age; he returned to his cabin, and the dog, who had been cared for by the charcoal-burners, knew him from afar off, and flew down the hill-path to meet him.
'The wench who ruined you,' said the charcoal-burners around their fire that night, 'they do say she is a fine singer and a rich madam somewhere in foreign parts. She sold the Gesu—ay, she sold the Gesu to a silversmith down in the town. That gave her the money to start with, and the rest her face and her voice have done for her.'
'Who has the Gesu?' asked Caris, hiding his eyes on the head of the dog.
'Oh, the Gesu, they say, was put in the smelting-pot,' said the charcoal-burner.
Caris felt for the knife which was inside his belt. It had been given back to him with his clothes when he had been set free at the end of his sentence.
'One could find her,' he thought, with a thrill of savage longing. Then he looked down at the dog and across at the green aisles of the pines and chestnuts.
'Let the jade be,' said the forest-man to him. 'You are home again, and 'twas not you who bartered the Christ.'
Caris fondled the haft of the great knife under his waistband.
'She stole the Gesu and sold Him,' he said, in a hushed voice. 'One day I will find her, and I will strike her: once for myself and twice for Him.'
It was a small lemon-tree, not more than forty inches high, growing in its red earthen vase as all lemons are obliged to be grown further north than Rome. There were many thousands and tens of thousands of other such trees in the land; but this one, although so little, was a source of joy and pride to its owner. He had grown it himself from a slender slip cast away on a heap of rubbish, and he had saved his pence up with effort and self-denial to purchase, second-hand, the big pot of ruddy clay in which it grew, now that it had reached its first fruit-bearing prime. It had borne as its first crop seven big, fragrant lemons, hanging from its boughs amidst leaves which were as fresh and green as a meadow in May. He had watched its first buds creep out of the slender twigs,and swell and swell gradually into sharp-pointed little cones, which in their turn became pale yellow fruit, 'fit for a princess,' as he said, patting their primrose-coloured rind. They seemed so many separate miracles to him, coming as by some magic out of the little starry white flowers on the glossy twigs.
He was a poor, ignorant man, by name Dario Baldassino, known as Fringuello (or the Chaffinch) to his neighbourhood and fellow workmen. He lived on the south side of the ferry of Royezano, and dug and carted the river-sand; a rude labour and a thankless, taking the sinew and spirit out of a man, and putting little in return into his pocket. The nave or ferry is a place to please an artist. All the land around on this south side is orchard—great pear-trees and cherry-trees linked together by low-growing vines, and in the spring months making a sea of blossom stretching to the river's edge. The watermills, which were there centuries ago, stand yellow and old, and cluster like beavers' dams upon the water. The noise of the weir is loud, but the song of the nightingale can be heard above it. Looking along westward down the widening, curving stream,above the fruit-trees planted thick as woods, there arise, two miles off, the domes and spires of the city of Florence, backed by the hills, which here take an Alpine look upon them when the sun sets beyond the rounded summits of the more distant Carrara range; and the spurs of the Apennines grow deeply blue with that intense transparent colour which is never seen in northern lands. To the north also lie the mountains, and on the east; and late into May the snow lingers where the day breaks above Vallombrosa and Casentino. All the vale is orchard, broken now and then by some great stone-pine, some walnut or chestnut tree, some church spire with its statue of its saint, some low, red-brown roofs, some grey old granary with open-timbered lofts. It is a serene and sylvan scene—at sunset and at sunrise grand—and the distant city rises on its throne of verdure, seeming transfigured as Dante, exiled, may have seen it in his dreams.
Of all this beauty outspread before his sight Fringuello saw little; his eyes were always set on the sand and shingle into which he drove his heart-shaped spade—all which is the pageant of the painter, the paradise of the poet, but isnothing to the toiler of the soil. The sweat of his fatigue drops down before his eyes, and shuts out from him the scenes amidst which he dwells. For him the weir has no song, the orchard no poem, the mountains no counsel, and the vales no charm. He does but see the cart-rucks in the sand, the house-fly in the sunlight, the coins hard-earned in his horny palm, the straw which covers the coveted wine-flask, or the glass which holds the hot and acid flavours of less natural drinks. Now and then Giotto looks up from his sheepfold, and Robert Burns from his furrow, but it is only once in a century. This poor labourer, Fringuello, lived in two little rooms in a poor house which looked on the weir and the water-mills. He had never been able to have a house of his own, and even the small charge of the rooms was more than he could easily pay, miserable though they were. His employment was intermittent, and in winter, when the river was spread wide over its bed, covering the sand and shingle, it ceased entirely. Some odd jobs he got elsewhere, but nothing certain. He had no knowledge of any other work than the digging and carrying which had been his lot. But he was always merry, with the mirth which hadgained him his nickname, and in his light-hearted poverty had done what the poorest always do—he had married at twenty a girl as poor as himself. She was called Lizina, the familiar corruption of Luisa, and was the daughter of a cobbler of the adjacent village of Ripoli.
It was an imprudent union and a foolish one, but it was happier than many which fulfil every condition of prudence and thrift. Lizina was a blithe, buoyant, active, and laborious creature, and whilst she lived he never had a hole in his hempen shirt, or went without a tablespoonful of oil to his beans and bread. They were as merry and happy as if they had really been a pair of chaffinches in a nest in one of the pear-trees. But of joy the gods are envious, whether it go to roost in garret or palace, and in a few brief years Lizina died of fever and left him all alone with one little girl, as like herself as the bud is like the flower.
For months he never sang as he worked, and his ruddy face was pale, and he had long fits of weeping when he lay on his lonely bed, and stared up at the starry skies which were visible through the square, unshuttered window. Lizina was in the ground, in a nameless grave, withtwo crossed sticks set above it, and the river rolled over the weir, and the wide wheel turned, and the orchards blossomed, and the people laughed on the yellow sand, and no one cared that a little merry, glad, tender, harmless life was done for and over, stamped down into the clay like a crushed butterfly, a broken branch, a rotten fruit, or a dead grasshopper. Nobody cared; and after a time he, too, ceased to care, and began to hum and whistle and carol once more as he worked, and laughed once more at his comrades' jokes as they dug up the heavy sand. In the lives of the poor there is little leisure for sorrow, and toil passes over them like an iron roller over the inequalities of a road, forcing them down into dull indifference, as the roller forces into level nothingness alike the jagged flint and the sprouting grass.
Meanwhile, Lizina, as she was called after her mother, grew up apace like the little lemon-tree which had been planted at her birth, a lovely child like a Correggio cherub, thriving on her dry bed and herb-soup as the lemon plant thrived on the dry earth and uncongenial atmosphere of the attic under the roofs.
Fringuello did his best by both of them, making up to them by tenderness and gentleness what he was forced to refuse to both of material comfort. Both the child and the tree went hungry often, suffered from cold and frost in the sharp, short winters, and languished in the scorching days, when foul odours rose from the naked bed of the shrunken river, and white clouds of little moths hovered over the cracked sand, and the leaves of the orchards grew yellow and wrinkled, and curled up, and dropped in the heat before their time.
All that he could not help; he could not help it more than he could help the shrinking of the river in drought, and the coming of blight to the orchards. Though it went to his soul like a knife-thrust when he saw the child pale and thin, and the lemon-tree sickly and shrunk, he could do nothing. But he murmured always, 'Patience, courage,' as he coaxed the child to eat a morsel of crust, and consoled the tree with a spray of spring-water, and he got them both safely through several burning summers and icy winters, and when they were both sixteen years old the tree was strong and buxom, with glossy foliage and fine fruit, and the child was healthyand handsome, with shining eyes and laughing mouth.
He had worked as hard as any mule for them both, and though a young man in years, he looked an old man from excess of toil, though his heart was light and his smile was like sunshine.
When he got up in the dark to go to his work, and drew his leathern belt about his lean ribs, he always looked at the pale light of dawn as it touched the green leaves of the tree and the closed eyes of the child, and then he muttered an Ave, content and thankful at heart. Many would have thought the hardness of his lot excuse enough for suicide; he never knew what it was not to feel tired, he never knew what it was to have a coin in his pocket for pleasure. His bones ached, and the gnawing of rheumatism was in his nerves, from the many hours spent knee-deep in water or damp sand, and always at the pit of his stomach was that other still worse gnawing of perpetual insufficiency of food. But he was content and grateful to his fate, as the birds are, though they hunger and thirst, and every man's hand is against them.
The child and the tree were indissolublyunited in his mind and memory. They had grown up together, and seemed part and parcel of each other. Imagination scarcely exists in the brains of the poor; they do not know what it is. The perpetual grind of daily want leaves no space for or possibility of impersonal fancy in it; but, in a vague kind of superstitious way, he associated the well-being of the one with the welfare of the other. If the tree sickened and drooped for a day, he always looked nervously at Lizina to see if she ailed anything also. If the little girl coughed or grew hot with fever, he always watched anxiously the leaves of the lemon. It was a talisman and fetish to him; and when he came up from the river at evening when his work was done, he looked upward always to see the green boughs of the tree at the square little window of his garret under the deep eaves, and above an archway of old brown-red brick.
If it had been missing at the window, he would have told himself that Lizina was dead. There was no likelihood that it would ever be missing there. Lemon-trees live long, and this one would, he knew, most likely outlive himself if he kept it from worm and fly, and rot andmildew. Nevertheless, he always glanced upward to make sure that it was there when he toiled up the strip of road which led to his home when his work in the sand was done. Lizina herself did not wait at the window. She always came jumping and dancing down the path, her auburn curls flying, and her big brown eyes sparkling; barefooted, ill-clad, scarcely fed, but happy and healthy, singing at the top of her voice as her father had always done in his youth.
When they reached their fifteenth birthday, neither she nor the lemon-tree had ever ailed anything worse than a passing chill from a frosty week, or a transient sickness from a sultry drought.
The lemon-tree had given her the few little gifts she had ever received. The pence brought in by its fruit were always laid out for her: cake at Christmas, sugar-egg at Easter, a white ribbon for her first Communion, a pair of shoes to wear on high feasts and holy days—these little joys, few and far between, had all come to her from the copper pieces gained by the pale, wrinkled, fragrant fruit sold at five centimes each in the village or the town. 'Soldi dellaLizinanina,' said her father whenever he put any so gained in his trousers pocket.
Well as he loved his pipe, and thankful as he was when he could get a drink of watered wine, he never touched a halfpenny of the lemon money to buy a pinch of tobacco or a glass ofmezzo-vino. It was all saved up carefully for his little girl's small wants. Sometimes in hard seasons it had even to go in bread for her, but of that bread he would never himself take a mouthful. Moreover, the pence were few, for the lemons were not many.
Lizina remained quite a child, though she grew fast, and her little round breasts swelled up high and firm where the rough hempen shift cut across them. Young as she was, the eyes of an admirer had fallen upon her, and young Cecco, the son of Lillo, thecontadinowhere the big pine stood (a pine three hundred years old if one), had said to her father and to her that when he had served out his time in the army he should say something serious about it; but Fringuello had answered him ungraciously that he could never give her bridal clothes or bridal linen, so that she would needs die a maid, and his own people had told him roughly that whenhe should have served his time he would be in a different mind. But Cecco, nevertheless, thought nothing would please him ever so well as this ragged, pretty child with her blowing cloud of short, crisp bright curls, and he said to her one evening as she sat on the wall by the ferry, 'If you will be patient, my Lizinanina, I will be true;' and Lizina, too young to be serious, but amused and triumphant, laughed gaily and saucily, and replied to him: 'I will make no promises, Cecco. You will come back with a shorn pate and soft hands and tender soles to your feet.'
For the soldier seems but a poor creature to the children of the soil, and is, indeed, of but little use when the barracks vomit him out of their jaws and send him back to his home, a poor, indifferent trooper, but also a spoiled peasant; having learned to write indeed, but having forgotten how to handle a spade, drive a plough, or prune a grape-vine, and to whose feet, once hard and firm as leather, the once familiar earth with its stones and thorns and sticks seems rough and sharp and painful, after having marched in ill-fitting boots for three years along smooth roads and paven streets.
To the city lad and lass the conscript may seem somebody very fine; but to the country ones he seems but a mere popinjay, only useful to waste powder. Lizina, although only a river labourer's daughter, was country born and bred, and had the prejudices and preferences of the country, and had run about under the orchard boughs and down the vineyards of the countryside till she thought as a peasant and spoke as one.
Cecco was mortified, but he shared her views of the life to which he was about to go. He was useful now to tame a steer, to milk a heifer, to fell a tree, to mow a meadow, to reap a field, to get up in the dark and drive the colt into the city with a load of straw and bring back a load of manure. But in the barracks he would be nothing—worse than nothing; a poor numb-skull, strapped up in stiff clothes with a pack on his back, and a musket, which he must fire at nothing, on his shoulder.
'Wait for me, Lizina,' he said sadly. 'The time will soon pass, and I will come back and marry you, despite them all.'
'Pooh! I shall have married a man with a mint of money by the time they let you comeback,' said the unkind child, saucily tossing the curls out of her eyes; but through her long lashes her glance rested a moment softly on the ruddy face of Cecco, which had looked down on her so often through the boughs and twigs of the cherry or pear trees of his father's farm, as he threw down fruit into her outstretched and eager little hands where she stood in the grass of the orchard.
She said nothing more tender then, being coy and wayward and hard to please, as became her incipient womanhood; but before she went to bed that night she came close to her father's side and put her hand on his.
'Cecco says he will come back and marry me,babbo,' she said, with a child's directness. Her father stroked her curls.
'That is a joke, dear; his people would never let him marry a little penniless chit like you.'
Lizina shook her head sagely with a little proud smile.
'He will not mind his people. He will do it—if I wish—when he comes back.'
Her father looked at her in amazement; in his eyes she was a little child still.
'Why, baby, you speak like a woman!' he said stupidly. 'I am glad this lad goes away, as he puts such nonsense into your head.'
'But if we both wish, you would not mind,babbo?' she asked, persistent and serious.
'The angels save us! She speaks like a grown woman!' cried her father. 'My poor little dear,' he thought sadly, 'you will never be able to wed anyone. We are poor! so poor! I can never give you even a set of shifts. Who could go to a house so naked—in rags, as one may say? My poor little angel, you must live a maid or go to a husband as beggared as I.'
He wished to say all this, but the words choked him in his throat. It seemed so cruel to set before the child the harsh, mean demands of life, the merciless rules and habits of that narrow world of theirs, which was bounded by the river and the sand on one side, and the cornfields and orchards on the other.
'Let be, let be,' he said to himself. 'She is but a child, and the youth is going away for years; if it please her to think of this thing, it can hurt no one. He will forget, and she will forget.'
So he patted her pretty brown cheek, and drew her closer and kissed her.
'You are but a baby, my treasure,' he said softly. 'Put these grave thoughts out of your head. Many moons will wax and wane before Cecco will be free again to come to his old home. The future can take care of itself. I will say neither yea nor nay. We will see what the years will bring forth.'
'But you would not mind?' she murmured coaxingly.
The tears started to his eyes.
'Ah! God knows, dear, how sweet it would be to me!'
He thought of his little girl safe and happy for her lifetime in that pleasant and plentiful household under the red-brown roofs where the big pine grew amongst the pear and cherry trees. The vision of it was beautiful and impossible. It hurt him to look on it, as the sun dazzles the eyes at noon.
'But put it out of your head—out of your head, little one!' he said. 'Even if the boy should keep of the same mind, never would Lillo consent.'
'Cecco will keep in the same mind,' saidLizina, with the serene undoubting certainty of childhood, and she broke off a little twig of the lemon-tree, with a bud upon it and three leaves, and gave it to Cecco that evening in the dusk as they sat again upon the river-wall. It was all she had to give, except her little waking heart.
The next day he went away along the dusty high-road in his father's cart to begin his new life. He sobbed as if his heart would break, and fastened in his shirt was the lemon shoot.
'To break off a bud! Oh, Lizina!' cried her father, in reproof and reproach. 'A bud means a fruit, and a fruit means a halfpenny, perhaps a penny.'
'It is only one,' said the child; 'and I have nothing else.'
Lizina did not speak of him, nor did she seem to fret in any way. Her blithe voice rang in clear carol over the green river water, as she sat on the wall whilst her father worked below, and she ate her dry bread with healthy and happy appetite.
'She is only a baby. She has forgotten the boy already,' thought her father, half disappointed, half relieved, whilst he broke up theearth about the roots of the lemon-tree, and counted the little pointed fruits coming out on it, green as malachite, and promising a fair crop.
No letters could arrive to stimulate her memory, for Cecco could scarcely scrawl his name, and Lizina could not read her A B C. Absence to the poor is a complete rupture, an absolute blank, over which the intelligence can throw no bridge.
Fringuello worked early and late, worked like a willing mule, and lost no chance of doing anything, however hard, which could bring in a centime; and he was so tired when night fell that he could do little except swallow his bread-soup and fling himself down on his bed of dry leaves thrust into an old sack. So that as long as Lizina's voice was heard in song, and her little bare feet ran busily to and fro, he noticed nothing else, and was content, believing all was well with her.
The winter which followed on Cecco's departure to his military service was of unusual rigour for the vale of Arno; the waters were stormy and dark, and the fields were frozen and brown, and snow lay on the long lines of the mountains from their summit to their base.But the lemon-tree flourished before its narrow window, and Lizina was well and gay in the cold little brick-floored, plaster-walled, unceiled garret; and her father asked nothing more of Fate, and went out to his work in the bitter coldness and darkness of the morning dawns with an empty stomach but a warm heart, leaving her sleeping, easily and dreamlessly, curled up like a little dormouse in her corner of the room.
The winter passed and the spring came, making all the orchard lands once more become seas of white flowers, and setting the chaffinches and linnets and nightingales to work at their nests amongst the lovely labyrinth of bursting blossom; and one sunlit afternoon, towards the close of April, the village priest, coming along the road by the river, saw Fringuello, who was backing his sand-cart into the bed of the now shallow stream, and beckoned to him. The priest had an open letter in his hand, and his plump, smooth olive face was sad.