Don Silverio drew to him his unfinished letter to the Prior; the young monk who would take it back in the morning to San Beda was already asleep in a little chamber above. But he could not write, he was too perturbed and too anxious. Although he had spoken so calmly he was full of carking care; both for the threatened evil in itself, and for its effects upon his parishioners; and especially upon Adone. He knew that in this age it is more difficult to check the devouring monster of commercial covetousness than it ever was to stay the Bull of Crete; and that for a poor and friendless community to oppose a strong and wealthy band of speculators is indeed for the wooden lance to shiver to atoms on the brazen shield.
He left his writing table and extinguished his lamp. Bidding the little dog lie still upon his chair, he went through the house to a door which opened from it into the bell tower of his church and which allowed him to go from the house to the church without passing out into the street. He climbed the belfry stairs once more, lighting himself at intervals by striking a wooden match; for through the narrow loopholes in the walls the moonbeams did not penetrate. He knew the way so well that he could have gone up and down those rotting stairs even in total darkness, and he safely reached the platform of the bell tower, though one halting step might have sent him in that darkness head foremost to his death.
He stood there, and gazed downwards on the moonlit landscape far below, over the roofs and the walls of the village towards the open fields and the river, with beyond that the wooded country and the cultured land known as the Terra Vergine, and beyond those again the moors, the marshes, and the mountains. The moonlight shone with intense clearness on the waters of the Edera and on the stone causeway of the old one-arched bridge. On the bridge there was a figure moving slowly; he knew it to be that of Adone. Adone was going home.
He was relieved from the pressure of one immediate anxiety, but his apprehensions for the future were great, both for the young man and for the people of Ruscino and its surrounding country. To take away their river was to deprive them of the little which they had to make life tolerable and to supply the means of existence. Its winter overflow nourished the fields which they owned around it, and the only cornmill of the district worked by a huge wheel in its water. If the river were turned out of its course above Ruscino the whole of this part of the vale would be made desolate.
Life was already hard for the human creatures in these fair scenes on which he looked; without the river their lot would be intolerable.
"Forbid it, O Lord! Forbid this monstrous wrong," he said, as he stood with bared head under the starry skies.
When the people of a remote place are smitten by a public power the blow falls on them as unintelligible in its meaning, as invisible in its agency, as a thunderbolt is to the cattle whom it slays in their stalls. Even Don Silverio, with his classic culture and his archæological learning, had little comprehension of the means and methods by which these enterprises were combined and carried out; the world of commerce and speculation is as aloof from the scholar and the recluse as the rings of Saturn or the sun of Aldebaran. Its mechanism, its intentions, its combinations, its manners of action, its ways of expenditure, its intrigues with banks and governments: all these, to men who dwell in rural solitudes, aloof from the babble of crowds, are utterly unknown; the very language of the Bourses has no more meaning to them than the jar of wheels or roar of steam.
He stood and looked with a sinking heart on the quiet, moonlit country, and the winding course of the water where it flowed, now silvery in the light, now black in the gloom, passing rapidly through the heather and the sallows under the gigantic masses of the Etruscan walls. It seemed to him to the full as terrible as to Adone; but it did not seem to him so utterly impossible, because he knew more of the ways of men and of their unhesitating and immeasurable cruelty whenever their greed was excited. If the fury of speculation saw desirable prey in the rape of the Edera then the Edera was doomed, like the daughter of Ædipus or the daughter of Jephtha.
Adone had gone across the bridge, but he had remained by the waterside.
"Pray and sleep!" Don Silverio had said in his last words. But to Adone it seemed that neither prayer nor sleep would ever come to him again so long as this impending evil hung over him and the water of Edera.
He spent the first part of that summer night wandering aimlessly up and down his own bank, blind to the beauty of the moonlight, deaf to the songs of the nightingales, his mind filled with one thought. An hour after midnight he went home and let himself into the silent house by a small door which opened at the back, and which he used on such rare occasions as he stayed out late. He struck a match and went up to his room, and threw himself, dressed, upon his bed. His mother was listening for his return, but she did not call to him. She knew he was a man now, and must be left to his own will.
"What ails Adone that he is not home?" had asked old Gianna. Clelia Alba had been herself perturbed by his absence at that hour, but she had answered:—
"What he likes to tell, he tells. Prying questions make false tongues. I have never questioned him since he was breeched."
"There are not many women like you," had said Gianna, partly in admiration, half in impatience.
"Adone is a boy for you and me," had replied his mother. "But for himself and for all others he is a man. We must remember it."
Gianna had muttered mumbled, rebellious words; he did not seem other than a child to her; she had been one of those present at this birth on the shining sands of the Edera.
He could not sleep. He could only listen to the distant murmur of the river. With dawn the women awoke. Nerina came running down the steep stone stair and went to let out and feed her charges, the fowls. Gianna went to the well in the court with her bronze pitcher and pail. Clelia Alba cut great slices of bread at the kitchen table; and hooked the cauldron of maize flour to the chain above the fire on the kitchen hearth. He could not wait for their greetings, their questions, the notice which his changed mien would surely attract. For the first time in all his twenty-four years of life he went out of the house without a word to his mother, and took his way to the river again; for the first time he was neglectful of his cattle and forgetful of the land.
Nerina came in from the fowl-house with alarm on her face.
"Madama Clelia!" she said timidly, "Adone has gone away without feeding and watering the oxen. May I do it?"
"Can you manage them, little one?"
"Oh, yes; they love me."
"Go then; but take care."
"She is a good child!" said Gianna. "The beasts won't hurt her. They know their friends."
Clelia Alba, to whom her own and her son's dignity was dear, said nothing of her own displeasure and surprise at Adone's absence. But she was only the more distressed by it. Never, since he had been old enough to work at all, had he been missing in the hours of labour.
"I only pray," she thought, "that no woman may have hold of him."
Adone hardly knew what he did; he was like a man who has had a blow on the temple; his sight was troubled; his blood seemed to burn in his brain. He wandered from habit through the field and down to the river, to the spot where from his infancy he had been used to bathe. He took off his clothes and waded into the water, which was cold as snow after the night. The shock of the cold, and the sense of the running current laving his limbs, restored him in a measure to himself. He swam down the stream in the shadow of the early morning. The air was full of the scent of dog-roses and flowering thyme; he turned on his back and floated; between him and the sky a hawk passed; the bell of the church was tolling for the diurnal mass. He ran along in the sun, as it grew warm, to dry his skin by movement, as his wont was. He was still stupefied by the fear which had fallen upon him; but the water had cooled and braced him.
He had forgotten his mother, the cattle, the labours awaiting him; his whole mind was absorbed in this new horror sprung up in his path, none knew from where, or by whom begotten. The happy, unconscious stream ran singing at his feet as the nightingale sang in the acacia thickets, its brown mountain water growing green and limpid as it passed over submerged grass and silver sand.
How could any thieves conspire to take it from the country in which it was born? How could any dare to catch it, and imprison it, and put it to vile uses? It was a living thing, a free thing, a precious thing, more precious than jewel or gold. Both jewels and gold the law protected. Could it not protect the Edera?
"Something must be done," he said to himself. "But what?"
He had not the faintest knowledge of what could or should be done; he regretted that he had not written his mark with the horns and the hoofs of his oxen on the foreign invaders; they might never again fall into his power.
He had never felt before such ferocious or cruel instincts as arose in him now. Don Silverio seemed to him tame and lukewarm before this monstrous conspiracy of strangers. He knew that a priest must not give way to anger; yet it seemed to him that even a priest should be roused to fury here; there was a wrath which was holy.
When he was clothed he stood and looked down again at the gliding stream.
A feeble, cracked voice called to him from the opposite bank.
"Adone, my lad, what is this tale?"
The speaker was an old man of eighty odd years, a native of Ruscino, one Patrizio Cambi, who was not yet too feeble to cut the rushes and osiers, and maintained a widowed daughter and her young children by that means.
"What tale?" said Adone, unwilling to be roused from his own dark thoughts. "What tale, Trizio?"
"That they are going to meddle with the river," answered the old man. "They can't do it, can they?"
"What have you heard?"
"That they are going to meddle with the river."
"In what way?"
"The Lord knows, or the devil. There was a waggon with four horses came as near as it could get to us in the woods yonder by Ruffo's, and the driver told Ruffo that the gentry he drove had come by road from that town by the sea— I forget its name— in order to see the river, this river, our river; and that he had brought another posse of gentry two weeks or more on the same errand, and that they were a-measuring and a-plumbing it, and that they were going to get possession of its somehow or other, but Ruffo could not hear anything more than that; and I supposed that you knew, because this part of it is yours if it be any man's; this part of it that runs through the Terra Vergine."
"Yes, it is mine," answered Adone very slowly. "It is mine here, and it was once ours from source to sea."
"Aye, it is ours!" said old Trizio Cambi mistaking him. He was a man once tall, but now bent nearly double; he had a harsh, wrinkled face, brown as a hazel nut, and he was nearly a skeleton; but he had eyes which were still fine and still had some fire in them. In his youth he had been a Garibaldino.
"It is ours," repeated Trizio. "At least if anything belongs to poor folks. What say you, Adone?"
"Much belongs to the poor, but others take it from them," said Adone. "You have seen a hawk take a sparrow, Trizio. The poor count no more than the sparrows."
"But the water is the gift of God," said the old man.
Adone did not answer.
"What can we do?" said Trizio, wiping the dew off his sickle. "Who knows aught of us? Who cares? If the rich folks want the river they will take it, curse them!"
Adone did not answer. He knew that it was so, all over the earth.
"We shall know no more than birds tangled in a net," said Trizio. "They will come and work their will."
Adone rose up out of the grass. "I will go and see Ruffo," he said. He was glad to do something.
"Ruffo knows no more than that," said Trizio angrily. "The driver of the horses knew no more."
Adone paid him no need, but began to push his way through the thick network of the interlaced heather. He thought that perhaps Ruffo, a man who made wooden shoes, and hoops for casks, and shaped chestnut poles for vines, might tell him more than had been told to old Trizio; might at least be able to suggest from what quarter and in what shape this calamity was rising, to burst over their valley as a hailstorm broods above, then breaks, on helpless fields and defenceless gardens, beating down without warning the birds and the blossoms of spring.
When he had been in Lombardy he had seen once a great steam-engine at work, stripping a moorland of its natural growth and turning it into ploughed land. He remembered how the huge machine with its stench of oil and fire had forced its way through the furze and ferns and wild roses and myrtle, and torn them up, and flung them on one side, and scattered and trampled all the insect life, and all the bird life, and all the hares, and field mice, and stoats, and hedgehogs, who made their home there. "A fine sight," a man had said to him; and he had answered, "A cursed wickedness." Was this what they would do to the vale of Edera? If they took the river they could not spare the land. He felt scared, bruised, terrified, like one of these poor moorland hares. He remembered a poor stoat which, startled out of its sleep, had turned and bitten one of the iron wheels of the machine, and the wheel had gone over it and crushed it into a mass of blood and fur. He was as furious and as helpless as the stoat had been.
But when he had walked the four miles which separated the Terra Vergine from the chestnut woods where the maker of wooden shoes lived, he heard nothing else from Ruffo than this: that gentlemen had come from Teramo to study the Edera water; they were going to turn it aside and use it; more than that the man who had driven them had not heard and could not explain.
"There were four horses, and he had nothing to give them but water and grass," said the cooper. "The gentry brought wine and food for themselves. They came the day before yesterday and slept here. They went away this morning. They paid me well, oh, very well. I did what I could for them. It is five-and-thirty miles if one off Teramo, aye, nearer forty. They followed the old posting road; but you know where it enters the woods it is all overgrown, and gone to rack and ruin, from want of use. In my grandfather's time it was a fine, well-kept highway, with posthouses every ten miles, though a rare place for robbery; but nowadays nobody wants it at all, for nobody comes or goes. It will soon be blocked, so the driver says; it will soon be quite choked up what with brambles, and rocks, and fallen trees, and what not. He was black with rage, for he was obliged to go back as he had come, and he said he had been cheated into the job."
Adone listened wearily to the garrulous Ruffo, who emphasised each phrase with a blow of his little hammer on a shoe. He had wasted all his morning hours, and learned nothing. He felt like a man who is lost in a strange and deserted country at night; he could find no clue, could see no light. Perhaps if he went to the seaport town, which was the Prefecture, he might hear something?
But he had never left the valley of the Edera except for that brief time which he had passed under arms in the north. He felt that he had no means, no acquaintance, no knowledge, whereby he could penetrate the mystery of this scheme. He did not even know the status of the promoters, or the scope of their speculation. The Prefecture was placed in a port on the Adriatic which had considerable trade to the Dalmatian and Greek coasts, but he scarcely knew its name. If he went there what could he do or learn? Would the stones speak, or the waves tell that which he thirsted to know? What use was the martial blood in his veins? He could not strike an invisible foe.
"Don't go to meet trouble half way," said the man Ruffo, meaning well. "I may have mistaken the driver. They cannot take hold of a river, how should they? Water slips through your fingers. Where it was set running in the beginning of the world, there it will go on running till the crack of doom. Let them look; let them prate; they can't take it."
But Adone's reason would not allow him to be so consoled.
He understood a little of what hydraulic science can compass; he knew what canalisation meant, and its assistance to traffic and trade; he had seen the waterworks on the Po, on the Adige, on the Mincio; he had heard how the Velino had been enslaved for the steel foundry of Terni, how the Nerino fed the ironworks of Narni; he had seen the Adda captive at Lodi, and the lakes held in bond at Mantua; he had read of the water drawn from Monte Amiata; and not very many miles off him, in the Abruzzo, was that hapless Fuscino, which had been emptied and dried up by rich meddlers of Rome.
He knew also enough of the past to know how water had been forced to serve the will and the wants of the Roman Consulate and the Roman empire, of how the marble aqueducts had cast the shadow of their arches over the land, and how the provinces had been tunnelled and bridged and canalised and irrigated, during two thousand years, by those whose bones were dust under the Latin soil. He could not wholly cheat himself, as these unlettered men could do; he knew that if the commerce which has succeeded the Caesars as ruler of the world coveted the waters of Edera, the river was lost to the home of its birth and to him.
"How shall I tell my mother?" he asked himself as he walked back through the fragrant and solitary country. He felt ashamed at his own helplessness and ignorance. If courage could have availed anything he would not have been wanting; but all that was needed here was a worldly and technical knowledge, of which he possessed no more than did the trout in the stream.
As he neared his home, pushing his way laboriously through the interlaced bracken and heaths which had never been cut for a score of years, he saw approaching him the tall, slender form of Don Silverio, moving slowly, for the heather was breast high, his little dog barking at a startled wood-pigeon.
"They are anxious about you at your house," Don Silverio said with some sternness. "Is it well to cause your mother this disquietude?"
"No, it is not well," replied Adone. "But how can I see her and not tell her, and how can I tell her this thing?"
"Women to bear trouble are braver than men," said the priest. "They have more patience in pain than we. I have said something to her; but we need not yet despair. We know nothing of any certainty. Sometimes such schemes are abandoned at the last moment because too costly or too unremunerative. Sometimes they drag on for half a lifetime; and at the end nothing comes of them."
"You have told my mother?"
"I told her what troubles you, and made you leave your work undone. The little girl was feeding the cattle."
Adone coloured. He was conscious of the implied rebuke.
"Sir," he said in a low tone, "if this accursed thing comes to pass what will become of us? What I said in my haste last night I say in cold reason to-day."
"Then you are wrong, and you will turn a calamity into a curse. Men often do so."
"It is more than a calamity."
"Perhaps. Would not some other grief be yet worse? If you were stricken with blindness?"
"No; I should still hear the river running."
Don Silverio looked at him. He saw by the set, sleepless, reckless look on his face that the young man was in no mood to be reached by any argument, or to be susceptible to either rebuke or consolation. The time might come when he would be so; but that time was far off he feared. The evenness, the simplicity, the loneliness of Adone's existence, made it open to impressions, and absorbed by them, as busy and changeful lives never are; it was like the heather plants around them, it would not bear transplanting; its birthplace would be its tomb.
"Let us go back to your mother," he said. "Why should you shun her? What you feel she feels also. Why leave her alone?"
"I will go home," said Adone.
"Yes, come home. You must see that there is nothing to be done or to be learned as yet. When they know anything fresh at San Beda they will let me know. The Prior is a man of good faith."
Adone turned on him almost savagely; his eyes were full of sullen anger.
"And I am to bear my days like this? Knowing nothing, hearing nothing, doing nothing to protect the water that is as dear to me as a brother, and the land which is my own? What will the land be without the river? You forget, sir, you forget!"
"No, I do not forget," said Don Silverio without offence. "But I ask you to hear reason. What can you possibly do? Think you no man has been wronged before you? Think you that you alone here will suffer? The village will be ruined. Do you feel for yourself alone?"
Adone seemed scarcely to hear. He was like a man in a fever who sees one set of images and cannot see anything else.
"Sir," he said suddenly, "why will you not go to Rome?"
"To Rome?" echoed the priest in amazement.
"There alone can the truth of this thing be learned," said Adone. "It is to Rome that the promoters of this scheme must carry it; there to be permitted or forbidden as the Government chooses. All these things are brought about by bribes, by intrigues, by union. Without authority from high office they cannot be done. We here do not even know who are buying or selling us—"
"No, we do not," said Don Silverio; and he thought, "When the cart-horse is bought by the knacker what matter to him the name of his purchaser or his price?"
"Sir," said Adone, with passionate entreaty. "Do go to Rome. There alone can the truth be learnt. You, a learned man, can find means to meet learned people. I would go, I would have gone yesternight, but, when I should get there, I know no more than a stray dog where to go or from whom to inquire. They would see I am a country fellow. They would shut the doors in my face. But you carry respect with you. No one would dare to flout you. You could find ways and means to know who moves this scheme, how far it is advanced, what chance there is of our defeating it. Go, I beseech you, go!"
"My son, you amaze me," said Don Silverio. "I? In Rome? I have not stirred out of this district for eighteen years. I am nothing. I have no voice. I have no weight. I am a poor rural vicar buried here for punishment."
He stopped abruptly, for no complaint of the injustice from which he suffered had ever in those eighteen years escaped him.
"Go, go," said Adone. "You carry respect with you. You are learned and will know how to find those in power and how to speak to them. Go, go! Have pity on all of us, your poor, helpless, menaced people."
Don Silverio was silent.
Was it now his duty to go into the haunts of men, as it had been his duty to remain shut up in the walls of Ruscino? The idea appalled him.
Accomplished and self-possessed though he was, his fine mind and his fine manners had not served wholly to protect him from that rust and nervousness which come from the disuse of society and the absence of intercourse with equals.
It seemed to him impossible that he could again enter cities, recall usages, seek out acquaintances, move in the stir of streets, and wait in antechambers.
That was the life of the world; he had done with it, forsworn it utterly, both by order of his superiors and by willing self-sacrifice. Yet he knew that Adone was right. It was only from men of the world and amongst them, it was only in the great cities, that it was possible to follow up the clue of such speculations as now threatened the vale of Edera.
The young man he knew could not do what was needed, and certainly would get no hearing—a peasant of the Abruzzo border, who looked like a figure of Giorgione's, and would probably be arrested as an anarchist if he were to endeavour to enter any great house or public office. But to go to Rome himself! To revisit the desecrated city! This seemed to him a pilgrimage impossible except for the holiest purpose. He felt as if the very stones of Trastevere would rise up and laugh at him, a country priest with the moss and the mould of a score of years passed in rural obscurity upon him. Moreover, to revisit Rome would be to tear open wounds long healed. There his studious youth had been passed, and there his ambitious dreams had been dreamed.
"I cannot go to Rome," he said abruptly. "Do not ask me, I cannot go to Rome."
"Then I will go," said Adone; "and if in no other way, I will force myself into the king's palace and make him hear."
"And his guards will seize you, and his judges will chain you up in a solitary cell for life! Do not say such mad things. What could the king reply, even if he listened, which he would not do? He would say that these things were for ministers and prefects and surveyors and engineers to judge of, not for him or you. Be reasonable, Adone; do not speak or act like a fool. This is the first grief you have known in your life, and you are distraught by it. That is natural enough, my poor boy. But you exaggerate the danger. It must be far off as yet. It is a mere project."
"And I am to remain here, tilling the land in silence and inaction until, one day without notice, I shall see a crowd of labourers at work upon the river, and shall see appraisers measuring my fields! You know that is how things are done. You know the poor are always left in the dark until all is ripe for their robbery. Look you, sir, if you go to Rome I will wait in such patience as I can for whatever you may learn. But if you do not go, I go, and if I can do no better I will take the king by the throat."
"I have a mind to take you by the throat myself," said Don Silverio, with an irritation which he found it hard to control. "Well, I will think over what you wish, and if I find it possible, if I think it justified, if I can afford the means, if I can obtain the permission, for such a journey, I will go to Rome; for your sake, for your mother's sake. I will let you know my decision later. Let us walk homeward. The sun is low. At your house the three women must be anxious."
Adone accompanied him in silence through the heather, of which the blossoming expanse was reddening in the light of the late afternoon until the land looked a ruby ocean. They did not speak again until they reached the confines of the Terra Vergine.
Then Don Silverio took the path which went through the pasture to the bridge, and Adone turned towards his own dwelling.
"Spare your mother. Speak gently," said the elder man; the younger man made a sign of assent and of obedience.
"He will go to Rome," said Adone to himself, and almost he regretted that he had urged the journey, for in his own veins the fever of unrest and the sting of fierce passions were throbbing, and he panted and pined for action. He was the heir of the lords of the river.
Like the cooper Ruffo, Clelia Alba had received the tidings with incredulity, though aghast at the mere suggestion.
"It is impossible," she said. She had seen the water there ever since she had been a babe in swaddling clothes.
"It is not possible," she said, "that any man could be profane enough to alter the bed which heaven had given it."
But she was sorely grieved to see the effect such a fear had upon Adone.
"I was afraid it was a woman," she thought; "but this thing, could it be true, would be worse than any harlot or adulteress. If they took away the river the land would perish. It lives by the river."
"The river is our own as far as we touch it," she said aloud to her son; "but it was the earth's before it was ours. To sever water from the land it lives in were worse than to snatch a child from its mother's womb."
Adone did not tell her that water was no more sacred than land to the modern contractor. She would learn that all to soon if the conspiracy against the Edera succeeded. But he tried to learn from her what legal rights they possessed to the stream: what had his father thought? He knew well that his old hereditary claim to the Lordship of Ruscino, however capable of proof, would be set aside as fantastic and untenable; but their claim to the water through the holding of Terra Vergine could surely not be set aside.
"Your father never said aught about the water that I can remember," she answered. "I think he would no more have thought it needful to say it was his than to say that you were his son. It is certain we are writ down in the district as owners of the ground; we pay taxes for it; and the title of the water must be as one with that."
"So say I; at least over what runs through our fields we, alone, have any title, and for that title I will fight to the death," said Adone. "River rights go with the land through which the river passes."
"But, my son," she said with true wisdom, "your father would never have allowed any danger to the water to make him faithless to the land. If you let this threat, this dread, turn you away from your work; if you let your fears make you neglect your field and your olives, and your cattle and your vines, you will do more harm to yourself than the worst enemy can do you. To leave a farm to itself is to call down the vengeance of heaven. A week's abandonment undoes the work of years. I and Gianna and the child do what we can, but we are women, and Nerina is young."
"No doubt you speak wisely, mother," replied Adone humbly. "But of what use is it to dress and manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera be in its sap and at its root? What use is it to till these lands if they be doomed to perish from thirst?"
"Do your best," said his mother, "then the fault will not lie with you, whatever happen."
The counsel was sound; but to Adone all savour and hope were gone out of his labour. When he saw the green gliding water shine through the olive branches, and beyond the foliage of the walnut-trees, his arms fell nerveless to his side, his throat swelled with sobs, which he checked as they rose, but which were only the more bitter for that—all the joy and the peace of his day's work were gone.
It was but a small space of it to one whose ancestors had reigned over the stream from its rise in the oak woods to its fall into the sea; but he thought that no one could dispute or diminish or disregard his exclusive possession of the Edera water where it ran through his fields. They could not touch that, even if they seized it lower down, where it ran through other communes. Were they to take it above his land, above the bridge of Ruscino, its bed here would be dried up, and his homestead and the village both be ruined. The clear, intangible right which he meant to defend at any cost, in any manner, was his right to have the river run untouched through his fields. The documents which proved the rights of the great extinct Seigneury might be useless, but the limited, shrunken right of the peasant ownership was as unassailable as his mother's right to the three strings of pearls; or so he believed.
The rights of the Lords of Ruscino might be but shadows of far-off things, things of tradition, of history, of romance, but the rights of the peasant proprietors of the Terra Vergine must, he thought, be respected if there were any justice upon earth, for they were plainly writ down in the municipal registers of San Beda. To rouse others to defend their equal rights in the same way, from the source of the Edera to its union with the Adriatic, seemed to him the first effort to be made. He was innocent enough to believe that it would suffice to prove that its loss would be their ruin to obtain redress at once.
Whilst Don Silverio was still hesitating as to what seemed to him this momentous and painful journey to Rome his mind was made up by a second letter received from the Superior of the Certosa at San Beda, the friend to whom he had confided the task of inquiring as to the project for the Edera.
This letter was long, and in Latin. They were two classics, who liked thus to refresh themselves and each other with epistles such as St. Augustine or Tertullian might have penned. The letter was of elegant scholarship, but its contents were unwelcome. It said that the Most Honourable the Syndic of San Beda had enjoyed a conference with the Prefect of the province, and it had therein transpired that the project for the works upon the river Edera had been long well known to the Prefect, and that such project was approved by the existing Government, and therefore by all the Government officials, as was but natural. It was not admitted that the Commune of San Beda had any local interest or local right sufficiently strong to oppose the project, as such a claim would amount to a monopoly, and no monopoly could exist in a district through which a running river partially passed, and barely one-fifth of the course of this stream lay through that district known as the valley of the Edera. The entire Circondario, except the valley, was believed to be in favour of the project, which the Prefect informed the Syndic could not be otherwise than most favourable to the general interests of the country at large.
"Therefore, most honoured and revered friend," wrote the Superior of the Cistercians, "his most esteemed worship does not see his way to himself suggest opposition to this course in our Town Council, or in our Provincial Council, and the Most Worshipful the Assessors do not either see theirs; it being, as you know, an equivocal and onerous thing for either council to express or suggest in their assembly views antagonistic to those of the Prefecture, so that I fear, most honoured and reverend friend, it will not be in my power farther to press this matter, and I fear also that your parish of Ruscino, being isolated and sparsely populated, and its chief area uncultivated, will be possessed of but one small voice in this matter, the interests of the greater number being always in such a case preferred."
Don Silverio read the letter twice, its stately and correct Latinity not serving to disguise the mean and harsh fact of its truly modern logic. "Because we are few and poor and weak we have no rights!" he said bitterly. "Because the water comes from others, and goes to others, it is not ours whilst in our land!"
He did not blame his friend at San Beda.
Ecclesiastics existed only on sufferance, and any day the Certosa might be closed if its inmates offended the ruling powers. But the letter, nevertheless, lay like a stone on his heart. All the harshness, the narrowness, the disregard of the interests of the weak, the rude, rough, tyrannical pressing onward of the strong to their own selfish aims, all the characteristics of the modern world seemed to find voice in it and jeer at him.
It was not for the first time in his life that he had pressed against the iron gates of interest and formula and oppression, and only bruised his breast and torn his hands.
He had a little sum of money put by in case of illness and for his burial; that was the only fund on which he could draw to take him to Rome and keep him when there, and it was so small that it would be soon exhausted. He passed the best part of the night doubting which way his duty pointed. He fasted, prayed, and communed with his soul, and at length it seemed to him as if a voice from without said to him, "Take up your staff, and go." For the journey appalled him, and where his inclination pointed he had taught himself to see error. He shrank inexpressibly from going into the noise and glare and crowd of men; he clung to his solitude as a timid animal to its lair; and therefore he felt persuaded that he ought to leave Ruscino on his errand, because it was so acutely painful to him.
Whilst he should be gone Adone at least would do nothing rash; would of course await the issue of his investigations. Time brings council, and time, he hoped, would in this instance befriend him. He had already obtained the necessary permission to leave his parish; he then asked for a young friend from San Beda to take his place in the village; left his little dog to the care of Nerina; took his small hoard in a leathern bag strapped to his loins, and went on his way at daybreak along the southwest portion of the valley, to cover on foot the long distance which lay between him and the nearest place at which a public vehicle went twice a week to a railway station; whence he could take the train to Terni and so to Rome.
Adone accompanied him the first half of the way, but they said little to one another; their hearts were full. Adone could not forget the rebuke given to him, and Don Silverio was too wise a man to lean heavily on a sore and aching wound, or repeat counsels already given and rejected.
At the third milestone he stopped and begged, in a tone which was a command, the young man to return home.
"Do not leave your land for me," he said. "Every hour is of gold at this season. Go back, my son! I pray that I may bring you peace."
"Give me your blessing," said Adone meekly, and he knelt down in the dust of the roadside. His friend gave it; then their hands met in silent farewell.
The sun had risen, and the cold clear air was yielding to its rays. The young man reluctantly turned back, and left the priest to go onward alone, a tall, dark figure in the morning light; the river running between acacia thickets and rushes on his right. Before long he was forced to leave the course of the stream, and ascend a rugged and precipitous road which mounted southward and westward through oak woods into the mountains between the Leonessa and Gran Sasso, until it reached a shrunken, desolate village, with fine Etruscan and Roman remains left to perish, and a miserable hostelry, with the miserable diligences starting from it on alternate days, the only remains of its former posting activity. There he arrived late in the evening, and broke his fast on a basin of bean soup, then rested on a bench, for he could not bring himself to enter the filthy bed which was alone to be obtained, and spent the following morning examining the ancient ruins, for the conveyance did not start until four o'clock in the afternoon. When that hour came he made one of the travellers, all country folks, who were packed close as pigeons in a crate in the ramshackle, noisy, broken-down vehicle, which lumbered on its way behind its lean and suffering horses, through woods and hills and along mountain passes of a grandeur and a beauty on which the eyes of educated travellers rarely looked.
The journey by this conveyance occupied seven hours, and he was obliged to wait five more at that village station which was the nearest point at which he could meet the train which went from Terni to Rome. Only parliamentary trains stop at such obscure places; and this one seemed to him slower even than the diligence had been. It was crammed with country lads going to the conscription levy in the capital: some of them drunk, some of them noisy and quarrelsome, some in tears, some silent and sullen, all of them sad company. The dusty, stinking, sun-scorched waggons, open one to another, with the stench of hot unwashed flesh, and the clouds of dust driven through the unglazed windows, seemed to Don Silverio a hell of man's own making, and in remembrance his empty quiet room, with its vine-hung window, at Ruscino, seemed by comparison a lost heaven.
To think that there were thousands of men who travelled thus, every day of every year, in every country, many of them from no obligation whatever, but from choice!
"What lunatics, what raving idiots we should look to Plato or to Socrates, could they see us!" he thought. Was what is called progress anything else except increased insanity in human life?
He leaned back in his corner, and bore the dust in his eyes and his throat as best he might, and spoke a few kind words to the boys nearest to him, and felt as if every bone in his body was broken as the wooden and iron cage shook him from side to side. The train stopped finally in that area of bricks and mortar and vulgarity and confusion where once stood the Baths of Diocletian. It was late in the night when he heard the name of Rome.
No scholar can hear that name without emotion. On him it smote with a keen personal pain, awakening innumerable memories, calling from their graves innumerable dreams.
He had left it a youth, filled with all the aspirations, the fire, the courage, the faith, of a lofty and spiritual temper. He returned to it a man aged before his time, worn, weary, crushed, spiritless, with no future except death.
He descended from the waggon with the crowd of jaded conscripts and mingled with that common and cosmopolitan crowd which now defiles the city of the Caesars. The fatigue of his body, and the cramped pain of his aching spine, added to the moral and the mental suffering which was upon him as he moved a stranger and alone along the new, unfamiliar streets where, alone here and there, some giant ruin, some stately arch, some marble form of god or prophet, recalled to him the Urbs that he had known.
But he remembered the mission on which he came; and he rebuked his self-indulgence in mourning for his own broken fate.
"I am a faithless servant and a feeble friend," he thought in self-reproach. "Let me not weaken my poor remnant of strength in egotism and repining. I come hither for Adone and the Edera. Let me think of my errand only; not of myself, nor even of this desecrated city."