The Waters of Edera Part 17

Yes! thought Don Silverio, as he walked by the river after sunset, and watched its bright, impetuous current dash over the stones and s.h.i.+ngle whilst two kingfishers flashed along its surface. Yes, truly Nature would pour it forth every day from her unfailing breast so long as man did not do it outrage. But how long would that be? A year, two years, three years, at most; then its place would know it no more, and its song would be silent. The water-pipet would make its nest no more in its sedges, and the blue porphyrion would woo his mate no more on its bosom. As one of the rich men in Rome had said to him with a cynical smile, "The river will be there always, only it will be dry!"

In the gloaming he went and spoke to Adone's mother. She was at her spinning-wheel, but her hands moved mechanically; her face was dark and her eyelids swollen.

"My friend," he said, as he sat down on the bench beneath the rose-tree, "I have brought you ill-tidings."

"It is true then, sir?"

"Alas!"

"I do not believe it. G.o.d will not let it be."

"Would that I could think so."

"'Tis you, sir, who should think so, and not I."

"My good Clelia," he said, with some impatience, "it is no use to dream dreams. Try and persuade your son to accept the inevitable. My words seem harsh. They are not so. But I dare not let you cherish your illusions like this; blind yourself to fact, you expect some supernatural intercession. They will take your river; they will take your lands. Your house will be yours no more. If you do not go peaceably they will have you turned out, as if you were a debtor.

This may take some time, for it will be done with all due legal forms, but it will be done. They will pay you and your son some value by apprais.e.m.e.nt, but they will take your land and your house and all that is yours and his; I have seen the plans in Rome. Can you think that I should invent this to torture you? There will be a process, a sentence, an award; the money the law allots to you will be strictly paid to you; but you will be driven away form the Terra Vergine.

Realise this. Try and keep your reason and save your son from madness. Surely, where there is great love between two people, and bonds of memory and mutual duty, and strong faith, there a home may be made anywhere, even over seas?"

Clelia Alba snapped with violence the thread she span. "They have talked you over, sir," she said curtly. "When you went away you were with us."

"With you!" he echoed. "In heart, in pity, in sympathy, yes; never could I be otherwise. But were I to see you struck with lightning, should I save you by telling you that lightning did not kill? I did not know that the enterprise was as mature as I found it to be when I saw the promoters of it in Rome. But I know now that it has been long in incubation; you must remember that every bend and ordnance maps; every stream, however small, is known to the technical office, and the engineers civil and military. I abhor the project. It is to me a desecration, an infamy, a robbery; it will ruin the Valdedera from every point of view; but we can do nothing; this is what I implore you to realise. We are as helpless as one of your fowls when you cut its throat. Violence can only hurry your son into the grip of the law. His rights are morally as plain as yonder snow on those mountains; but because they will buy his rights at what will be publicly estimated as a fair price, the law will not allow him to consider himself injured. My dear friend, you are a woman of sense and foresight; try to see this thing as it is."

"I will hear what Adone says, sir," replied Clelia Alba doggedly. "If he bids me burn the house, I shall burn it."

Don Silverio was heart-sick and impatient. What use was it to argue with such minds as these? As well might he waste his words on the trunks of the olives, on the oxen in their stalls.

They were wronged.

That the wrong done them was masked under specious pretences, and was protected by all the plate armour of law and government, made the outrage little the worse to them. The brigand from the hills who used to harry their cattle and pillage their strong-box looked to them a hero, a saint, a Christ, compared to these modern thieves who were environed with all the defences and impunity which the law and the State could give. When an earth-shock makes the soil under your feet quiver, and gape, and mutter, you feel that unnatural forces are being hurled against you, you feel that you are the mere sport and jest of an unjust deity. This was what they felt now.

"Nay," said Clelia Alba, "if the earth opened, and took us, it would be kinder; it would bury us at least under our own rooftree."

What use was it to speak to such people as these of the right of expropriation granted by parliament, of the authority of a _dicastero_, and of a prefecture, of the sophistries and arguments of lawyers, of the adjudication of values, of the apprais.e.m.e.nt of claims? They were wronged: and they came of a race and of a soil in which the only fitting redresser of wrong was revenge.

"Mother," cried Adone, "my father would not have given up his land as meekly as a sheep yields up her life."

"No," said Clelia Alba; "whether he came from those war-lords of old I know not, but he would have fought as they fought."

XIII

The autumn and winter pa.s.sed without more being heard in the Valdedera of the new invasion. The peasantry generally believed that such silence was favourable to their wishes; but Don Silverio knew that it was otherwise. The promoters of the work did not concern themselves with the local population, they dealt with greater folks; with those who administered the various communes, and who controlled the valuation of the land through which the course of the Edera ran; chiefly those well-born persons who const.i.tuted the provincial council. A great deal of money would change hands, but it was intended, by all through whose fingers those heavy sums would pa.s.s, that as little of the money as possible should find its way to the owners of the soil. A public work is like a fat hog; between the slaughterers, the salesmen, the middlemen, and the consumers, little falls to the original holder of the hog. The peasants of the Valdedera were astonished that no one came to treat with them; but they did not understand that they dwelt under a paternal government, and the first care of a paternal government is to do everything for its children which is likely to promise any profit to itself.

The men of business whom Don Silverio had seen in Rome did not trouble themselves with the rustic proprietors of either water or land; they treated with the great officials of the department, with the deputies, the prefects, and sub-prefects, the syndics and a.s.sessors; so a perfect silence on the question reigned from the rise of the river to its mouth, and many of the men said over their wood-fires that they had been scared for nothing. The younger men, however, and those who were under Adone's influence, were more wary; they guessed that the matter was being matured without them; that when the hog should be eaten, the smallest and rustiest flitch would then be divided amongst them. Agents, such agents as were ministerial instruments of these magnates in election time, went amongst the scattered people and spoke to them of the great public utility of the contemplated works, and made them dispirited and doubtful of the value of their holdings, and uncertain of the legality of their tenures. But these agents were cautious and chary of promises, for they knew that in this district the temper of men was proud and hot and revengeful; and they knew also that when these rural owners should be brought into the courts to receive their price they would be dealt with just as the great men chose. One by one, so that each should be unsupported by his neighbours, the men of the valley were summoned, now to this town, now to the other, and were deftly argued with, and told that what was projected would be their salvation, and a.s.sured that the delegates who would be sent in their name by their provincial council to the capital would defend all their dearest interests.

The rich man, the man of business, the man of cities, may receive in such transactions compensation, which is greatly to their advantage, because traffic is their trade, because to buy and sell, and turn and return, and roll the ball of gold so that it grows bigger every hour, is their custom and interest. But the poor man, the rustic, the man with the one ewe lamb, loses always, whether he a.s.sents to the sale or has it forced upon him. These people of the valley might have a little ready money given them on valuation, but it would be money clipped and cropped by the avarice of intermediates until little of it would remain, and they would be driven out to begin life anew; away from their old rooftree and the fruits of long years of labour.

From far and near men came to Ruscino to take counsel of its vicar; his wisdom being esteemed and his intelligence known in the valley beyond the confines of his parish: and what advice could he give them? He could but tell them that it was useless to kick against the p.r.i.c.ks. He knew so well the cold, curt, inflexible official answer; the empty, vapouring regrets, false, simpering, pharisaical; the parrot-phrases of public interests, public considerations, public welfare; the smile, the sneer, the self-complacent shrug of those who know that only the people whom they profess to serve will suffer. To him, as to them, it seemed a monstrous thing to take away the water from its natural channel and force the men who lived on it and by it to alter all their ways of life and see their birthplace changed into a desert in order that aliens might make money. But he could not counsel them to resist; no resistance was possible. It was like any other tyranny of the State: like the fiscal brutality which sold up a poor man's hayrick or clothing because he could not pay the poll-tax.

If the poor man resisted, if he fired his old fowling-piece, or used his knife on the minions of the State, what use was such resistance?

He went to rot in prison.

His calling, his conscience, his good sense, his obedience to law, all alike compelled him to urge on them patience, submission, and inaction before the provocation of a great wrong. He dared not even let them see one t.i.the of the sympathy he felt, lest if he did so they should draw from it an incentive to illegal action.

The part which he was obliged to take in thus persuading the people to be tranquil under injustice estranged him farther and farther from Adone Alba, who found it a cowardice and a treachery, although he dared not say so in words. Had he retained the coolness of reason the youth would have known and acknowledged that in the position of Don Silverio no other course would have been possible or decent. But reason had long left him, and inaction and impulse alone remained. He would not allow that a wrong might be condemned, and yet endured. To him all endurance had in it the meanness of condonation.

He ceased to have any faith in his friend and teacher; and gradually grew more and more alienated from him; their intimate affection, their frequent intercourse, their long walks and evening meeting were over; and even as his spiritual director the vicar had no longer power over him. Most of his actions and intentions were concealed; except in the younger men of the district, who saw as he saw, he had now no confidence in any one. The impending loss of the land and the water turned all the sweetness of his nature to gall. He thought that never in the history of the world had any wrong so black been done.

He, himself, flung broadcast the fires of burning incitation without heeding or caring whither the flames might reach. Riots had been successful before this: why not now? He was young enough and innocent enough to believe in the divine right of a just cause. If that were denied, what remained to the weak?

If he could, he would have set the valley in flames from one end to the other rather than have allowed the foreigners to seize it. Had not his forefather perished in fire on yonder hill rather than cede to the Borgia?

Evening after evening he looked at the sun setting behind the Rocca and felt the black rage in him gnaw at his heart like a vulture.

They would offer him money for this dear earth, for this fair, beloved stream! -- the mere thought choked him as a man who loved his wife would be choked at the though of her dishonoured sale.

Some were half persuaded that it would be a fine thing to get some crisp banknotes in exchange for waste ground which yielded little, or a cabin which was falling to pieces, or a strip of woodland which gave them fuel, but not much more. But the majority were angry, irreconcilable, furious to lose the water, full of their wrongs.

These were glad to find Adone Alba a spokesman and a leader: they were tow which caught fire at his torch. They comprehended little, but they knew that they were wronged; and they agreed with him that the labourers who should come from over the border to meddle with them should be made to rue it bitterly.

The Italian goes over seas, indeed; huddled under the hatches of emigrant s.h.i.+ps; miserable, starved, confined; unable to move, scarce able to breathe, like the unhappy beasts carried with him. But he never goes willingly; he never wrenches himself from the soil without torn nerves and aching heart; if he live and make a little money in exile he comes back to the shadow of the village church, to the sound of the village bell which he knew in his boyhood, to walk in the lanes where he threw his wooden quoit as a lad, and to play dominoes under the green bough of the winehouse where as a child he used to watch his elders and envy them.

Most of these people dwelling on the Edera water had not been five miles away from the river in all their lives. The moorland birds and beasts went farther afield than they. They had no interest in what was beyond their own freehold; they did not even know or care whither the water went, or whence it came. Where it was, they owned it. That was enough for them.

"Sir, what is it Adone does?" said Clelia Alba, one dusky and stormy eve after vespers. "At nightfall out he goes; and never a word to me, only 'Your blessing, mother,' he says, as if he might lose his life where he goes. I thought at first it was some love matter, for he is young; but it cannot be that, for he is too serious, and he goes fully armed, with his father's pistols in his belt and his own long dagger in his stocking. True, they go so to a love tryst, if it be a dangerous one; if the woman be wedded; only I think it is not that, for men in love are different. I think that he broods over some act."

"Neither you nor I can do aught. He is of age to judge for himself,"

said Don Silverio; "but, like you, I do not think a woman is the cause of his absence."

"Can you not speak to him, sir?"

"I have spoken. It is useless. He is moved by a motive stronger than any argument we can use. In a word, good Clelia, this coming seizure of the water is suffering so great to him that he loses his reason.

He is trying to make the men of the commune see as he sees. He wants to rouse them, to arm them. He might as well set the calves in your stalls to b.u.t.t the mountain granite."

"Maybe, sir," said Clelia Alba, unwillingly; but her eye gleamed, and her stern, proud face grew harder. "But he has the right to do it if he can. If they touch the water they are thieves, worse than those who came down from the hills in the years of my girlhood."

"You would encourage him in insurrection, then?"

"Nay, I would not do that; but neither would I blame him. Every man has a right to defend his own. Neither his father nor mine, sir, were cowards."

"This is no question of cowardice. It is a question of common sense.

A few country lads cannot oppose a government. With what weapons can they do so? Courage I honour; without it all active virtues are supine; but it is not courage to attempt the impossible, to lead the ignorant to death -- or worse."

"Of that my son must judge, sir," said Adone's mother, inflexible to argument. "I shall not set myself against him. He is master now. If he bid me fire the place I shall do it. For four-and-twenty years he obeyed me like a little child; never a murmur, never a frown. Now he is his own master, and master of the land. I shall do as he tells me.

It is his turn now, and he is no fool, sir, Adone."

"He is no fool; no. But he is beside himself. He is incapable of judgment. His blood is on fire and fires his brain."