Ouida

“ You, who deem yourself so wholly without hope, may find solace if you choose to take it. You are young, you are free, all the tenderest ties of life can be yours if you choose; if this home be destroyed you may make another where you will. But I am bound here. I must obey; I must submit. I cannot move; I cannot alter or renew my fate; and to me the destruction of the beauty of the Edera valley will be the loss of the only pleasure of my existence. Try and see with my eyes, Adone; it may help you to bear your burden. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a frightful calamity which hangs over us all. But it is our duty to meet it like men."
"Like men!" muttered Adone as he rose to his feet; had not the child from the Abruzzo rocks a better sense of men's duty than this priest so calm and wise?
"Men resist," he said very low.
"Men resist," repeated Don Silverio. "They resist when their resistance serves any purpose, but when it can only serve to crush them uselessly under a mass of iron they are not men if they resist, but madmen."
"Farewell, sir," said Adone. ”

“ A great peace, a great freshness, were on the water and the land.
"Oh Lord, what fools we are!" thought the old woman. "The earth makes itself anew for us with every dawn, and our own snarling, and fretting, and mourning cloud it all over for us, and we only see our own silly souls!"
Soon, before the sun was rising, Adone came in sight, passing with firm, accustomed step across the undressed trunks of trees which were here thrown across the river to make a passage lower down the stream than the bridge of Ruscino. ”

“ A tremor shook his frame from head to foot.
"I knew it was some deviltry," he muttered. "Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! would that I had made the oxen trample them into thousand pieces! They ought never to have left my field alive!"
"Hush, hush!" said the priest sternly. "I cannot have such language in my house. Compose yourself."
Adone raised his head; his eyes were alight as with fire; his face was darkly red.
"What, sir! You tell me the river is to be taken away from us, and you ask me to be calm! It is not in human nature to bear such a wrong in peace. Take away the Edera! ”

“ Don Silverio bade her sadly farewell, and insisted no more. He went through the odorous grasslands, where the primrose and wild hyacinth grew so thickly and the olive branches were already laden with small green berries, and his soul was uneasy, seeing how closed is the mind of the peasant to argument or to persuasion. Often had he seen a poor beetle pushing its ball of dirt up the side of a sandhill only to fall back, and begin again, and again fall; for any truth to endeavour to penetrate the brain of the rustic is as hard as for the beetle to climb the sand. ”

“ The light of the stars, which was now brilliant, shone upon its verdure; there were great flocks of water-birds at roost around it, and they rose with shrill cries and great noise of wings, with a roar as though a tide were rising.
Across it stretched a line of wooden piles which served as a rude causeway to those who had the courage and the steadiness to leap from one to another of them. It was not three times in a season that any one dared to do so. Adone did so sometimes; and he had taught Nerina how to make the passage. ”

“ No one else was sleeping in the house; all was dark, and she had not even a match or a tinder-box; but she felt her way to the outer door, unlocked it, as she had been used to unlock the door at the Terra Vergine, and in another moment ran down the steep and stone street. She laughed as the wind from the river blew against her lips, and brought her the fragrance of Adone's fields.
"I shall be in time!" she thought, as she ran down a short cut which led, in a breakneck descent, over the slope of what had once been the glacis of the fortress, beneath the Rocca to the bridge. ”

“ To all young men of courage and sensibility and enthusiasm the vindication of a clear right seems an act so simple that it is only through long and painful experience that they realize that there is nothing under the sun which is so hard to compass, or which is met by such strong antagonism. To Adone, whose nature was unspoilt by modern influences, and whose world was comprised in the fields and moors around Ruscino, it seemed incredible that such a title as that of his native soil to the water of Edera could be made clear to those in power without instant ratification of it. ”

“ Through those wilds he loved to wander alone; the sweet stillness of a countryside which was uncontaminated by the residence of men stilling the vague unrest of his youth, and the mountains towering in the light lending to the scene the charm of the unknown.
In days of storm or rain he read with Don Silverio or sang in the church; on fine holy-days he roamed far afield in the lonely heatherlands and woodlands which were watered by the Edera. He carried a gun, for defence if need be, for there were boars and wolves in these solitudes; but he never used it upon bird or beast. ”

“ With a loud cry he sprang forward and ran with the fleetness of a colt the hundred yards which were between him and that familiar figure.
"My son! my dear son!" cried Don Silverio, as Adone reached him and fell on his knees on the scorched turf.
"At last!" he murmured, choked with joy and fear. "Oh, where have you been? We are half dead, your people and I. What tidings do you bring? What comfort?"
"Rise up, and remember that you are a man," said Don Silverio; and the youth, gazing upwards keenly into his face, suddenly lost all hope, seeing no ray of hope on that weary countenance. ”

“ The travail of child-bearing, the toil of the fields, the hardship of constant want, the incessant clamour on her ear of unsatisfied hunger, the painful rearing of sons whom the State takes away from her as soon as they are of use, painful ending of life on grudged crusts as a burden to others on a hearth no longer her own. This, stripped of glamour, is the lot nine times out of ten of the female peasant — a creature of burden like the cow she yokes, an animal valued only in her youth and her prime ”

“ Slay thousands, tens of thousands come on; if once the scent of gain be on the wind it brings men in crowds from all parts, as the smell of carrion brings meat-flies. If they think of seizing the Edera it is because men of business will turn it into gold. The Edera gives us our grain, our fruits, our health, our life; but if it will give money to the foreigner, the foreigner will take it as he would take the stars and coin them if he could. The brigand of the hills is caged or shot; the brigand of the banks is allowed to fatten and die in the odour of success. ”

“ Clelia Alba sighed. "My son, hunger is a hard master; it makes the soul faint, the heart hard, the belly ravenous. We have never known it. We cannot judge those who know nothing else."
"Even hunger need not make one vile," he answered.
But he did not disclose all his thoughts to his mother.
He was so intolerant of these poor people of Ruscino because he foresaw the hopelessness of forging their weak tempers into the metal necessary for resistance. As well might he hope to change a sword-rush of the river into a steel sabre for combat. ”

“ The face of Clelia Alba grew chillier and harder still.
"Sir, leave me to judge of my own duties as the mother of Adone, and the keeper of this house. He has told me that he is master here. I do not deny it. He is over age. He can bring her here if he chooses, but I go."
"But you must know the child cannot live here with a young man!"
"Why not?" said Clelia Alba, and a cruel smile passed over her face. "It seems to me more decent than lying out in the fields together night after night."
"Silence!" said Don Silverio in that tone which awed the boldest. ”

“ That faith spoke in her eyes, in her absorbed attention, in the few breathless sentences which escaped her; there was also on her youthful face a set, stern anger akin to his own.
"Could we not slay these men?" she said in a low, firm voice; she came of a mountain race by whom life was esteemed little and revenge honour.
"We must not even say such a thing," said Adone bitterly, in whose ears the rebuke of Don Silverio still rang. "In these days everything is denied us, even speech. If we take our rights we are caged in their prisons." ”

“ She was la bimba to them all; a brave little soul and honest; they respected her as if she were one of their own children, or one of their own sisters, and Nernia coming through the starlight, with an old musket slung at her back, which Adone had taught her to use, and her small, bronzed feet leaping over the ground like a young goat's, was a figure which soon became familiar and welcome to the people. She seemed to them like a harbinger of hope; she had few words, but those words reverberated with courage and energy ”

“ 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. ”

“ In our province we are so aloof from all movement, so remote in our seclusion, so moss-grown in our antiquity, so wedded to the past, to old customs, old habits, old ways of act and thought, that the modern world shocks us as impious, odious, and intolerable."
"Sir," said Don Silverio with his most caustic smile, "if you are here to sing the praises of modernity, allow me to withdraw from the duet. I venture to ask you, as I asked you this morning, one plain question. To whom is Adone Alba, to whom are my people of Ruscino, to appeal against the sequestration?" ”