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LA STREGA 
 
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 Cnir Calfs of ILotolw Hitors 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 anD ©tj)cr Stories 
 
 BY 
 
 OUIDA 
 
 LONDON 
 SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY 
 
 LIMITED 
 1899 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 La Strega i 
 
 An Anarchist 55 
 
 RUFFO AND Ruff 89 
 
 El Bkug 131 
 
 ToTO 183 
 
 TONIA 211 
 
 mOOliiSi} 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 «A/ 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 La Strega, the Witch : she had been called 
 so these many years, this old and feeble woman 
 who was gathering simples in a meadow by the 
 side of a stream. She had names, her baptismal 
 name, her family name, and the name of her 
 dead husband ; dead so long ago in the days 
 of the Fifty-Eight. But no one ever called 
 her any of these. She was only La Strega. 
 Even her church-name of Pia was never heard. 
 People dreaded her, shunned her, despised her ; 
 but they sought her always after dark, when 
 they might not be seen by others. They had 
 faith in her magical and sinister powers. She 
 had charms for disease, for accidents, for warts, 
 for tumours, for snake-bites, for many other 
 things ; but what she was most famous for in 
 the neighbourhood were her imprecations and 
 her love-charms. 
 
 When she cursed any one under a full moon 
 
 3 B 2 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 it made the blood of the boldest run cold to 
 hear her, and when she gave a lover a bean, or 
 a berry, which she had charmed, he was sure 
 to find favour in the sight of one who had been 
 adamant to his prayers. 
 
 So all the hillside folks believed, and she was 
 horrible to them ; but she was honoured by 
 them, as such supernatural powers are always 
 loathed, yet revered, in lonely places where 
 superstition is rooted in the soil like the 
 mandrake. 
 
 Within a stone's-throw of her a girl was lying 
 by the edge of the stream, face downwards, 
 among the blue bugle and ragged-robin, an 
 empty water-barrel and a copper scoop beside 
 
 her. 
 
 She was lying face downward, resting on her 
 elbows, her hands twisted in her rich auburn 
 hair. " To get him back ! To get him back, 
 I would give my soul to hell ! " she muttered, 
 as she twisted like a snake which has been 
 struck a brutal blow across the spine. 
 
 She was the laughing-stock of the country-side, 
 a few scattered farms lying hidden among 
 woods on a hillside in the Garfagnana. She was 
 the beauty of the district ; she was proud, wilful, 
 
 4 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 dominant, amorous, and she had been forsaken 
 for another woman. 
 
 rublicly forsaken ! All the world, her little 
 world of half a hundred souls who came together 
 from their scattered homesteads at the small 
 church on holy-days and feast-days, knew it, for 
 every one had known that Avellino Conti was 
 her damo in the fullest, sweetest meaning of that 
 word. 
 
 She did not see the old woman gathering 
 simples near ; but the old woman saw her, and 
 heard her also. Her despair was so visible, her 
 anguish so absorbed her, that Pia, who never 
 spoke to a human creature by daylight, ventured 
 to draw near. 
 
 "What is the matter, my handsome wench? " 
 she ventured to ask. 
 
 The girl looked up, her face convulsed with 
 grief and passion. She recognized the Strega. 
 A shudder of disgust and fear ran through her ; 
 it was as if the Evil One she had invoked had 
 lost not a moment in replying to her. But her 
 desperation was stronger in her than her terror. 
 
 •' Give him back to me, and take my soul ! " 
 she muttered. 
 
 She clutched her hair savagely with both 
 
 5 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 hands ; she bit furiously at the stems of the 
 grasses with her white, even teeth ; her eyes 
 were dry and blazed with lurid pain. No one 
 was willing to be seen speaking with the evil 
 woman by daylight. Whoever sought her 
 counsels went to her, but after nightfall. But 
 Fedalma was in that delirium of distress and 
 passion which makes the mind it ravages dull 
 and insensible of all except itself She stared 
 through blinding tears at the Strega. 
 
 " Give me back my love, and take my soul ! " 
 she repeated. 
 
 " Come to my house to-night, and we will 
 see," said Pia. "Tell no one aught. Bring 
 four white pieces with you. Come an hour 
 after moonrise." 
 
 The girl was the daughter of a charcoal- 
 burner, known in the country as Febo Nero 
 (Black Phoebus) ; she had lived all her life in the 
 chestnut woods, under the great trees, amongst 
 the grass and the ling and the broom, seeing 
 only the sheep and the goats and their keepers 
 who came up to the hills of the Garfagnana in 
 summer. Avellino came with them, a fair, lithe, 
 bold youth, with a garment of goat-skins, and 
 a long wand in his hand, and bare feet, and a 
 
 6 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 wallet, and an accordion slung at his back, and 
 a bit of meadow-sweet behind his ear. Their 
 love-tale had been told there, under the big 
 trees in the hot balmy weather, with the bees 
 buzzing in the stillness and the flocks asleep. 
 Neither of them heeded the green, calm, silent 
 nature round them, or the blue sky of day, or 
 the stars throbbing in the dark. All the book 
 of nature, like all other books, was naught to 
 them ; they only read each other's eyes, they 
 only knew the instincts and appetites of their 
 young and ardent lives, and followed them as 
 the flocks followed theirs. But they were happy 
 though unreasoning, and but semi-conscious of 
 happiness, also, as the flocks were. All that 
 summer was so good — ah, heavens ! so good ! 
 She tore up the strong dog's-foot grasses in 
 handfuls as she thought of it. 
 
 Then, with All Saints' Day, Avellino, with 
 the sheep and the goats, had gone av/ay from 
 the woods down to the plains, as shepherds 
 always do when the first bite of winter nips the 
 still green leaves. And he had not said to her, 
 " Come with me " ; he had only said, " Fiorianno 
 le rose ! " and laughed, meaning that their loves 
 would flower again like the wild roses in the 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 thickets. The charcoal-burner said to his girl, 
 *' Summer love means no marriage ; " but he did 
 not distress himself. The wench was a strong, 
 fine, helpful girl ; he was better pleased that 
 she should stay in his hut and help carry the 
 logs to the burning. The winter was like the 
 ice-hell of Dante to Fedalma, but she had been 
 sustained by the hope and the promise of spring. 
 " A Pasqu^ fiorianno le rose," she said to her- 
 self, and held her fast-beating, passionate heart 
 in such patience as she could, working hard at 
 the charcoal, because thus she tired herself and 
 got a dull, heavy sleep, in which her throbbing 
 pulses were for a while still. 
 
 With Easter the chestnuts and the early roses 
 also did blossom, and the flocks came up the 
 steep, winding paths into the higher woods, 
 and Avellino came with them. But in passing 
 he saw the white-faced girl Mercede, who sat 
 spinning at the lattice of the old farmhouse 
 by the weir, and had seen how white her throat 
 was where the coral circled it. For this, there- 
 fore, Fedalma writhed like a bruised snake 
 where she lay on the earth, and bit the tough 
 stems of the dog-grass. 
 
 The old woman said nothing more, but went 
 
 8 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 on plucking herbs when she found any which 
 were edible, and the girl shook herself with a 
 dreary yet passionate gesture, and began to 
 fill her water-barrel at the stream under the 
 flags. When it was full she raised it on to 
 her head and strode through the grass with 
 bare, wet feet, heedless of asp or adder. 
 
 Once Pia smiled to herself as she bent ov'cr 
 the herbs she was uprooting. Those silly 
 wenches, breaking their hearts over mannerless 
 rogues who are not worth the yellow bread 
 they break, and who care more for a penn'orth 
 of drink than for all the girls in creation ! She 
 knew that AveUino was a ruddy, well-built, 
 blue-eyed lad, strong as a young steer, and 
 as rough. There was no marriage-ring in his 
 pocket ; in his veins there was nothing but 
 riot and licence. What could that young fool 
 hope for ? When the sheep have cropped the 
 sweetness off a patch of pasture they move on 
 elsewhere, do they not? It is nature, thought 
 Pia, who had once, long before, dwelt in towns 
 and seen other suns than this which rose so 
 late and set so early beyond these hills. She 
 was content ; she had caught a simpleton. 
 
 She had no magic except her cunning and 
 
 9 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 her superior intelligence, but these sufficed to 
 bring such credulous fools to supply her larder, 
 and of all fools she liked best the amorous 
 ones, 
 
 " I might have said five white pieces," she 
 thought regretfully ; " the girl would have 
 procured them somehow or other." 
 
 Five pieces make a lira. 
 
 With moonrise that white night Fedalma 
 kept her tryst. The moon was in its third 
 quarter and rose late, and she left the house 
 stealthily by one of its unglazed windows, for 
 fear her father should awake and ask what she 
 was about, stirring at that hour ; and ran with 
 beating heart and nervous terror across the 
 two miles of wild country which separated her 
 hut from that of the witch. 
 
 " Here are the white pieces," she said, when 
 the old woman opened to her. 
 
 Pia took them with a ravenous movement 
 in her wrinkled, bony hand. 
 
 "What shall I do? What shall I do?" 
 asked the girl, with feverish impatience. 
 
 They stood face to face on the floor of beaten 
 mud ; the elder small and frail and bent, the 
 younger tall and straight and full of colour, 
 
 10 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 health, and force ; but the strong was the 
 suppliant and the weak was the disposer of 
 fate. 
 
 A tallow wick burned in a little flat tin pan 
 of oil and shed a fitful light on the dark brows, 
 the tempestuous eyes, the parted, panting lips 
 of the girl as she muttered, " What shall I do ? 
 What shall I do?" 
 
 She was ready to do anything, to give herself 
 away to any unnameable horror, as she had 
 given her white pieces into that hungry hand. 
 She was horribly afraid ; a nameless terror 
 clutched at' her heart and made it stand still ; 
 she believed that the place she stood in, the 
 air she breathed here, the fingers which clutched 
 her coins, were all bewitched, bedevilled, un- 
 speakable in their powers of evil. But passion 
 was stronger in her than fear. 
 
 " Tut, tut, young one ; not so fast ! " said Pi^, 
 with the ghost of a smile on her face. " What 
 you would have me do will take time " 
 
 " Time 1 " 
 
 Time ! She had thought that some familiar, 
 some imp, or some angel, would dart down that 
 moonbeam which fell across the floor, and take 
 his orders and herself straightway to where the 
 
 II 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 faithless lover slept on his bed of leaves amidst 
 his flock. Time ! Was not love a lightning, 
 like that white fire in storm which came none 
 knew whence, and lit up all the woods, and 
 blinded some, and perhaps slew some, and left 
 others alone — none knew why, except that it 
 was the wish and the whim of that messenger 
 of heaven ? 
 
 "Time? Why time?" she repeated. "He 
 only lived by my breath such a little while 
 ago ! " 
 
 " You young fool ! " thought wise Pia ; but, 
 aloud, she said, in a whisper, " Child, he has 
 been bewitched. That is easy to see. You are 
 fine and fair as a peach-bough in blossom, but 
 to him now you seem as a mere rank thistle- 
 head, for the lad is bewitched." 
 
 " By Mercede ? " 
 
 " By no other." 
 
 " If I killed her ? " 
 
 " That would be of no use. The spell v/ould 
 remain. These ills lie deeper than young things 
 like you can dream. Tell me all — of you, of 
 him, of her. Nay, have no fear. What is un- 
 seen about us shall not hurt you. They are 
 under my yoke." 
 
 12 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 Fedalma shuddered ; her eyes glanced, like a 
 nervous, hunted animal's, here and there around 
 her, from the cobweb-hung walls to the smoke- 
 begrimed roof of the hut, from the barred wooden 
 door to the hole in the roof through which the 
 moonlight shone down and glistened on the 
 white hair of the Strega as it strayed from under 
 her coif. What demons might not be listening? 
 What surety had she that the old one could keep 
 them harmless and invisible? There was a 
 faggot of knotted and crooked sticks in one 
 corner ; to her excited fancy they were imps 
 who grinned at her and waited 
 
 "Speak, or get you gone," said Pia, with 
 authority ; for she knew nothing, not even the 
 name of the faithless lover, and she needed to 
 know to act with any skill. 
 
 " This, then — oh, this ! " said Fedalma in des- 
 peration. " Listen ! My heart is within me as 
 a charred coal, though my breast is all flame 
 and a thousand snakes tear at my flesh. He 
 lived but through me. We were as two cherries 
 on one stalk. Brook-water was as wine when 
 we drank it from each other's lips. The sheep 
 alone knew. They were kind. Not one of them 
 bleated when we met in their fold in the dark, 
 
 13 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 soft nights. A few months ago it was still the 
 same with us. Oh, the blessed hours, the hot 
 smell of the flock, the scent of the mint and the 
 thyme — I shall have them in my nostrils for ever, 
 when I am wretched and old like you ! And 
 now, and now it is no more — it is like the cut 
 grass ; all is over ; he has no eyes but for her ; 
 it is for her that the door of the fold opens." 
 
 She screamed aloud, again and again, with 
 her torture, as though she were a lamb of the 
 fold brought to slaughter. Then she broke 
 down into a tempest of sobs. 
 
 " Be quiet, and tell me more," said the Strega, 
 It was many moments before Fedalma even 
 heard her ; many more before she was calm 
 enough to answer. When she could be brought 
 to speak with any degree of composure, the old 
 woman extracted from her all her brief history, 
 with the skill of a superior intelligence turning 
 a poorer one inside-out for its pleasure. She 
 learned, too, which was what most mattered to 
 her, that the girl was very poor, and could not 
 anyhow be made to yield much profit. Still, 
 one never knows ; love-sick mortals are like 
 those cripples who will rob, or steal, or do any- 
 thing under the sun to get money enough to 
 
 14 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 hang up a garland or place a candle before 
 their patron saint, who can make, if he will, the 
 lame walk and the blind see. Passion ? What 
 was it but the most violent of all fevers ? Pi^ 
 had not forgotten. She, too, long, long before, 
 had known what it was to have the heart turn 
 to a cold cinder in a breast still full of flame. 
 She heard in silence, her small, keen eyes under 
 their wrinkled lids gleaming shrewdly in the 
 fitful light from the saucer of oil. 
 
 "You have it badly, the eternal evil," she 
 muttered, with a touch of pity. " Well, well j 
 what I can do I will." 
 
 " What can you do ? " 
 
 " 'Tis not for the like of you to know. Those 
 who serve me treat ill the rash and the curious, 
 as serves such irreverent fools aright. Wear 
 this between your breasts. Turn it every night 
 once, twice, thrice, and say, * Powers, help me ! 
 Powers, ^help me I Powers, help me ! ' as you 
 turn it. Come again in a week and bring four 
 pieces, some onions, and a pullet whose neck 
 has been wrung, not cut." 
 
 She took out of a packet worn under her 
 skirt a black bean, and muttered over it, and 
 spat on it, and gave it to Fedalma, whose young, 
 
 15 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 strong hand shook like a leaf in a wind as she 
 took it. 
 
 " I have no money," she said woefully. " The 
 onions I can get, and the pullet I will try and 
 get ; but the money " 
 
 " Without the money do not come back," 
 said the elder woman, sharply. " If you come 
 back without it, there is one who will leave 
 the mark of his talons upon you ; ay, and upon 
 your face, too — your handsome face that is like 
 a Pentecost rose." 
 
 The girl shuddered, and cowered like a beaten 
 animal. 
 
 " I will do what I can, mother," she said 
 humbly. " Is there hope ? Will there be 
 hope.?" 
 
 "Ay, like enough, if you don't anger the 
 ones unseen. Get you gone. Your father may 
 miss you, and will be down in another hour." 
 
 Fedalma undid the barred door, trembling, 
 and, once beyond its threshold, fled like a 
 hunted hare over the turf, bearing in her breast, 
 between her skin and her stays, the magical 
 black bean, which seemed to her to lacerate 
 her flesh with a thousand thorns. A thing of 
 sorcery, a gift of the Strega — a devil, for aught 
 
 i6 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 she knew, shut up in that shape ! What would 
 her poor dead mother have said, who had been 
 such a pious soul ? What would the Madonna 
 do to her for taking part with the wicked 
 thus ? 
 
 But she kept the bean in her bosom never- 
 theless, and went on through the woods as fast 
 as the darkness and roughness of their paths 
 permitted to her. She had committed more 
 than a sin ; but she was ready to do worse still, 
 only to get him back, the thankless, worthless, 
 fickle, cruel knave ! 
 
 The old woman Pia, left alone in her hut, 
 barred her door again, put the white pieces in 
 a bag which she kept under a stone on the 
 hearth, ate a sorry meal of endive and hard 
 crusts which bruised and pricked her toothless 
 gums, blew out the little light, and stretched 
 herself on her bed of dried leaves and heather. 
 
 " Poor wench ! " she thought ; " she has a look 
 of my Isola." 
 
 It was many years since her daughter Isola 
 had been upon the earth, many, many years, 
 but she lived in memory to Pia ; in that 
 shrivelled, hard old heart, closed to all except 
 the love of gain and the cunning of her trade, 
 
 17 c 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 there was one small place still open to a tenderer 
 thought. For sake of the girl's likeness to the 
 long-buried Isola, she said to herself that she 
 would try and help this poor forsaken fool. 
 She would rob her, because that was habit and 
 wisdom, but she would help her if possible — 
 not with her black arts, of which the Strega 
 knew better than any one else the worthlessness, 
 but with such skill as age and experience can 
 give. 
 
 " But save me, saints in glory ! " she thought, 
 when she lay on the heather and stared up at 
 the stars throbbing beyond the square hole in 
 the roof. " 'Twere easier to pull down those 
 twinklers from the sky than to turn back a 
 man's fancy when it has had its course and fled 
 away. A passion spent is dead as a rotting 
 rat." 
 
 There are many things you can mould in 
 this world, but not a man's amorous fancy. She 
 knew Avellino by look and repute : a fine fellow 
 to the sight, but nothing more ; ruddy, and 
 with bold, bright, insolent eyes, which challenged 
 women to resist him if they dare : a youth who 
 spoiled a girl's life as indifferently as he wrung 
 a bird's neck or threw down on the wayside a 
 
 i8 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 Iamb too young to walk, too puny to be worth 
 the trouble of carrying. 
 
 One day in the same week the flock of Avel- 
 lino was resting at noon, when the Strega came 
 near, timidly, lamely, with an old hoe in her 
 hand and an old creel on her back. 
 
 "May I pick up a little dung?" she said 
 humbly. 
 
 Avellino was ill-pleased, but he was afraid to 
 refuse her — she was the Strega. She began to 
 rake up the damp, black droppings of the sheep. 
 He did not prevent her. She could call down 
 blindness on him or murrain on the sheep, he 
 thought. It was never well to cross such people. 
 She raked up a few of the black balls, then 
 stopped to breathe. 
 
 "'Tis ill to be old, young man," she said. 
 " You'll know that one day, if you live, comely 
 and strong as you be now," 
 
 Avellino laughed. 
 
 " 'Tis far off me," he said carelessly ; then 
 wondered in affright, could she, maybe, smite 
 him into old age with a curse ? " Take a snack 
 of cheese, mother," he said, with a tremor in his 
 voice, as he cut off a slice of the ricotto, made 
 from the curds of the milk of his ewes. She 
 
 19 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 took it with humble thanks, and sat down on 
 the roots of a tree and pulled a crust from her 
 pocket. 
 
 " 'Tis a heart as good as your handsome face 
 that you have, my lad," she said, with fervent 
 blessinsjs. 
 
 Avellino watched her witli apprehension. 
 She looked very old and poor and feeble ; but 
 people said she had such strength for evil that, 
 the paler and frailer and more crooked she grew, 
 the stronger and the wickeder grew her powers 
 for mischief. He was horribly frightened, and 
 the colour left his cheeks ; but he was fascinated ; 
 if he pleased her, propitiated her, might she not 
 have good in her gifts as well, or, at least, only 
 evil for others ? Her renown was great on this 
 hillside, though the hatred and terror of her were 
 still greater. He gazed at her agape. Such a 
 little, thin, pale, withered creature — was it pos- 
 sible that she had troops of devils and imps 
 under her orders? He would have driven his 
 flocks away, but he had three ewes in labour 
 and no one with him. 
 
 "You make many a young heart ache for 
 you, you rogue," said Pia, munching the edge 
 of the cheese. 
 
 20 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 Avellino smiled : the smile of the conquering 
 booby, his vanity, for a moment, being superior 
 to his fear. 
 
 " They're mostly fools," he said, with un- 
 gallant scorn, as he kicked a wether in the 
 groin, 
 
 " That is a hard word, boy." 
 
 "Tis a true word. Say, all fools, and 'twill 
 be truer." 
 
 He grinned, pleased with his own wit and 
 his own courage in exchanging speech with the 
 Strega. 
 
 " Poor fools, indeed," thought Pia, " to let the 
 fresh dews of their dawn be drunk up by the 
 fierce sun of his coarse wooing I " 
 
 But, aloud, she flattered him deftly and turned 
 him inside-out, as was her habit. There was 
 little to find or to note, only a handsome lout's 
 triumphal conceit and unkind contempt for 
 what he had won and done with, and the 
 obstinate bent of a new fancy growing on the 
 ashes of those burned-out and cold. Mercedc, 
 she learned, was as yet obdurate, had not yet 
 come to the sheep-fold at nightfall, as that im- 
 passioned simpleton, Fedalma, had done to her 
 cost. Mercede was w^ise, coy, willing and no 
 
 21 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 willing, aiming at the nuptial ring and the priestly 
 blessing, things which for the errant shepherd 
 had no savour. 
 
 " If I wed her, you know, I shall leave her," 
 he said candidly ; " leave her when the chestnut- 
 leaves fall, as sure as Noyember will come round. 
 There are others down in the vales, on the plains, 
 in the towns." 
 
 And he grinned again and bit a spike of 
 grass, proud of his victories as a conquering 
 male pigeon when it struts to and fro with ruff 
 erect and breast swollen with triumph. 
 
 " Mercede has brothers," said Pia, significantly. 
 " They'd follow you. Men are beaten or stabbed 
 on the plains as easily as on the hills." 
 
 "A fig for their sticks and stilettos!" said 
 Avellino, stoutly. " I'm a match for all three." 
 "In strength, ay, ay," said Pi4. "But no 
 one's a match for a shot fired from behind a tree 
 on a dark night. Mercede is like to cost you 
 dear, my crowing cockerel," 
 
 Avellino was ill-pleased ; he was used to 
 
 courtships short and fierce and sweet and soon 
 
 over ; the woman paid for the pleasure of it ; 
 
 that was how things should be, in his opinion. 
 
 "You could lay a spell on them, mother?" 
 
 22 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 he said, after a time, in a tentative, frightened 
 murmur. 
 
 " I can da many things," replied the Strega, 
 darkly. 
 
 " You could make their knives bend like steel 
 and their sticks like touchwood," said Avellino, 
 recalling histories he had heard of her incanta- 
 tions. " 'Twould be a good deed, for what call 
 have they to come between their sister and 
 me } " 
 
 Pia nodded gravely. 
 
 " They will come between." After a pause, 
 she added, " They are three to one." 
 
 " The foul fiend take them ! " said Avellino, 
 and then was aghast at what he had said, for 
 might she not resent and revenge the mention 
 of her master ? 
 
 " He will take you, more like," said Pia, with 
 sombre emphasis. 
 
 Avellino felt his veins grow as cold as though 
 he were swimming in a winter flood to save his 
 drowning flock. 
 
 " Speak him fair for me, speak him fair, 
 mother," he said, with terror; "you see him 
 every sixth night, they say." His teeth chattered 
 as he spoke ; he put his hand in the pocket of 
 
 23 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 his goat-skin breeches ; he had a few coppers 
 there only ; he held them out shyly. 
 
 Pia clutched them ; habit was strong in her, 
 and her ways could not change. 
 
 " 'Tis nothing," she said, as she counted them. 
 " Get a crown." 
 
 " A crown ! " he repeated, with a gasp. 
 
 " Ay, a crown." 
 
 " I will make you pay through your nose, 
 you cur!" she thought. "And I will drive you 
 to the church-altar, but not with Mercede." 
 
 Avellino was dumb with conflicting emotions, 
 his dread of the devil and his sense of his own 
 impotency struggling with his poverty. He 
 was very poor ; he had scarcely anything he 
 could call his own except an old lute and his 
 pipe. The flock was not his, and the wage he 
 had as shepherd was very small. 
 
 " A crown ! a crown ! " he muttered — the 
 broad silver pieces of an earlier and more solid 
 time still circulate in remote places. 
 
 " No less. Do as you like, my pretty lad," 
 said Pia, " and the Powers of Darkness will 
 strengthen the hands of Mercede's brothers." 
 
 " I will try, mother ; I will try," muttered 
 Avellino. The brothers of Mercede were a very 
 
 24 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 real and fleshly peril, but the ghostly terrors of 
 the Unseen were more horrible to him, for of 
 what use against the latter would be his stout 
 sinews and his slim knife? 
 
 Pia took up her creel with the sheep's drop- 
 pings. 
 
 " When shall I see you again, mother ? " he 
 said timidly. "If you would like another little 
 snack of cheese " 
 
 " I will be at the ford where you water your 
 sheep the day after to-morrow, at sunset," said 
 Pia ; and the cheese went into her pocket with 
 the bronze pieces. He would bring the silver 
 crown, she was sure of that. Pia was pleased 
 with her machinations as she went home over 
 the heather-clad slopes. She thought she held 
 her fish at the end of her line. She meant to 
 play on his fears and his foibles until she should 
 detach him from his new passion and drag him 
 back to his earlier fealty. She meant to make 
 him atone to Fedalma, whom she had not 
 named because she took more devious and 
 secretive paths to reach her goal, and did not 
 show what was in her brain, lying close-hid 
 there like a hare in the heather. Meantime 
 there v/as no reason why she should not wring 
 
 25 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 what she could out of this heartless handsome 
 
 lad. 
 
 The next night Fedalma appeared. She was 
 trembling, and her gown was rent in several 
 places, and her arms were scratched and bruised 
 and bleeding. 
 
 "Twas a thorn brake I fell into," she said 
 hurriedly. But that was not the truth. She had 
 been to a hen-roost miles off and had stolen a 
 plump pullet from its perch and wrung its neck. 
 But in getting back over the fence she had been 
 attacked by a watch-dog belonging to the place, 
 and had hurt herself on the rough wood of the 
 fence as well. But of this she said nothing, and 
 Pia asked no questions, but took the fowl, with 
 the white pieces and the roots, as the saints in 
 the churches take votive offerings, in silence. 
 
 " You have nothing to tell me ? " said the girl 
 in breathless anxiety. 
 
 " It works, it works," said the Strega vaguely. 
 
 " You have seen him ? " 
 
 "No. Why should I see him, you foolish 
 thing .'' 'Tis not with mortal ways that the 
 Unseen Powers move and conquer." 
 
 Fedalma shuddered. 
 
 " The stars are in your favour," continued 
 
 26 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 Pia. " I looked in the well at dead of night 
 twenty-four hours ago. Your star shone clear ; 
 his and hers were obscured." 
 
 " But were they togetJier f " screamed the girl. 
 In her ignorant, rustic soul something of the 
 imperious passion of Francesca da Rimini stirred. 
 Together even in torture. What joy ! 
 
 "They were apart," said the old woman. 
 
 A wave of ecstasy swept over Fedalma's 
 stormy heart, and her face burned and lightened 
 with rapture. She dropped down on the mud 
 floor of the hut and kissed the Strega's feet, 
 bound in rags and cased in dust. 
 
 "What shall I render you?" she cried, with 
 sobs of delight. 
 
 Pia was touched, and bade her get up. 
 
 " The lad cannot be worth all that," she said, 
 not unkindly. "You are giving a vat of good 
 wine for a pail of muddy water. Think twice. 
 This youth has tired of you. Have pride " 
 
 Fedalma shook her head. Reason said no- 
 thing to her. No argument could touch her. 
 She was blind and deaf to everything except 
 her passion. 
 
 " I shall be proud when he wears my 
 clematis-flower behind his ear once more ! " she 
 
 27 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 cried. " I shall be proud when on his lute he 
 sings again to his sheep in my name ! I shall 
 be proud when once again he says, ' Dove of my 
 soul, life of my life ! ' to me — to me, and Mercede 
 sits alone, counting the days that are dead ! I 
 shall be proud then — then only. Oh, mother ! 
 you are old, so old ; but are you so old indeed 
 that you have wholly forgotten your youth .? " 
 
 " You are mad, poor wench," said Pia ; but 
 though her words were harsh, her voice was not 
 so. Ah, yes ! The divine delirium ! She re- 
 membered it. Its fires burned on the horizon of 
 her memory across the black, dim waste of fifty 
 years and more. And this girl was like Isola, 
 Isola who had died from a stab between the 
 shoulder-blades given her by her lover, a soldier 
 from the Basilicata, one feast-day, when he was 
 hot with wine. 
 
 "Men are all alike," she muttered. "They 
 are not worth a thought. If only we knew that 
 whilst it was time ! Get up, child ; get up. I 
 tell you that the stars favour you. He will be 
 yours again, but it will take time. It will take 
 time, and " 
 
 Fedalma did not rise ; she crouched upon 
 the floor; her eyes shone and flashed in the 
 
 28 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 dark ; the wick in the oil had flickered and gone 
 out slowly. 
 
 "You will be true to me, mother?" she 
 muttered. " You will be true, for pity's sake ? " 
 
 " I will do all I can," said Pia, and she was 
 sincere. " I have others beside you to think of. 
 There is Black Maria, who is afraid of her de- 
 livery ; and there is Giano's Leonilda, whose lame 
 child must be charmed straighter ; and there is 
 the sick cow of Annibale to be cured ; but I will 
 do more for you than for any. Does the amulet 
 I gave you turn of itself sometimes ? " 
 
 " I don't know," answered the girl in a 
 frightened voice. " Yes, I think so. Is that a 
 good sign ? " 
 
 " Surely. As it turns, so will your lad turn to 
 you in his dreams, and from dreaming to doing 
 'tis but a step. Go away now, child, and come 
 back in three days. Bring what you can. I will 
 pray the Powers to be content." 
 
 " I have nothing. Father has nothing. I had 
 to steal the pullet " 
 
 " Well, well ; bring what you can." 
 
 That was as much generosity in the ways of 
 her life as the avarice of her habits could reach. 
 She let the girl go without exacting from her 
 
 29 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 any especial fee, the girl who had Isola's eyes 
 and Isola's cheeks like apricots. 
 
 She pulled Fedalma up off the floor and 
 shoved her to the door ; she herself was so little 
 and so fleshless and so aged, but she had a 
 strength of steel in her wrists. She had heard 
 a tap at the wooden shutter of the aperture which 
 served as a window. She expected Annibale to 
 come to her about his cow, and she never chose 
 that two of her clients should meet. She had 
 the charm for the cow ready : a little bit of wood 
 with some signs burned on it, with a red-hot 
 skewer, and some powdered mandrake root tied 
 to it, wrapped in a small bag. Annibale was to 
 pay well for this. 
 
 " I will make him go to church with her," she 
 thought when she was alone, and the man Anni- 
 bale had gone away carrying his charm with 
 reverence and fear, and warned to tie it round 
 the cow's neck when the moon first showed her- 
 self, and as he did so to say, " Guai, guai, guai, 
 a chi me fa patai ! " a rough rhyme which he 
 went saying to himself, for fear he should 
 forget it, all the four miles over the hills which 
 parted his homestead from the Strega's hut; 
 it was to be tied on with hemp ; tied on with 
 
 30 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 anything else but hemp the spell would be 
 broken. 
 
 " I will make him go to church with her," 
 thought Pia again, as she looked at the pullet. 
 It was a fat, fine bird ; its poor head hung down 
 by its broken neck ; it was scarcely cold. She 
 did not dream of eating it ; she had never eaten 
 such a thing in her life. She could get a couple 
 of lire or a lira and a half for it from the wife of 
 a forest-guard who was marrying a daughter that 
 week and would be making feast. Something 
 more perhaps even that woman would give, for 
 she had come to the Strega not long before to 
 get a charm, and was afraid her husband should 
 know it, since he held that all doings with the 
 devil or the devil's agents should take whoever 
 played with such hell-fire straight down into the 
 fire itself. She would make the shepherd lad 
 atone to Fedalma ; the girl was worth a score 
 such as he. Fedalma would be wretched, per- 
 haps ; she would have a hard life and a faithless 
 spouse ; she would bear children unpitied, more 
 untended than the ewes ; she would tramp along 
 the roads autumn and spring, to and fro, from 
 hill to plain and plain to hill, with the flocks; 
 she would have to pasture them and water them 
 
 31 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 and fold them, for Avellino would surely put all 
 his toil on her shoulders. She would be miser- 
 able ; but, then, she would have had her own 
 way and wish, and won her own man, and what 
 can a woman hope for more ? 
 
 So she was true to her word for Fedalma's 
 sake, and went at sunset two days later to the 
 ford. The ford was where a mountain-stream 
 coming down through the woods became in 
 summer-time, at a level place, quiet enough and 
 shallow enough for sheep to drink there without 
 danger from the impetuosity of the water. In 
 autumn and winter and early spring it was in 
 flood and drowned man or beast at its plea- 
 sure ; but now, when midsummer v/as past, it 
 was shallow, and the flock drank fearlessly. 
 
 Pia followed the course of the stream through 
 the myrtles and oleanders which fringed it, and 
 saw the place where, broad and shallow and 
 interspersed with dry patches of sand and stone, 
 the stream was quiet. The flock was there, 
 slaking its thirst, and the shepherd was sitting, 
 swinging his legs, above his sheep on a fallen 
 tree. The light was warm on the water and 
 the hills were deep in colour as the old woman 
 took the crown from Avellino, whose fingers 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 released it unwillingly and whose eyes gleamed 
 with suspicion and curiosity and a dim, angry 
 sense that he was being duped. He, like 
 Fedalma, had stolen the offering to the Unseen 
 Powers ; he had stolen it out of his employer's 
 canvas bag, of which he knew the hiding-place ; 
 a fine, broad, sparkling silver scudo, which had 
 been for years secreted with other pieces of the 
 good old Ducal times. And having run the 
 risk and done the sin for her, he had taken one 
 for himself also. 
 
 " What will you do for it, mother ? " he 
 muttered. 
 
 "You want a spell laid on your Mercede's 
 brothers ? " 
 
 "Ay, any you like that will make them blind 
 or keep them harmless ! " 
 
 Pii nodded. 
 
 " They shall be limp as linen in the water,'' 
 she said mysteriously. " They shall be sightless 
 as the pups born yesterday, as the worm that 
 tunnels the earth. Never fear, lad ; they shall 
 kiss you on both cheeks if you wish." 
 
 " No, no,'* said the youth, uneasily. " If they 
 let me alone 'twill be enough. Shut their eyes ; 
 that is best." 
 
 33 D 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 He was afraid of those three men. 
 " Of Mercede you are sure ? " 
 " Whew ! " said Avellino, tossing his head 
 back saucily and snapping his fingers in the air. 
 "What is it you see in her so fine? That 
 wench of Febo's that you've broken the heart 
 of is twice as good to look at as such a little 
 flimsy thing." 
 
 Avellino's smile broadened. He had few 
 words at command, but his face was very 
 eloquent. He snapped his fingers in the air 
 again. 
 
 " She's the stone of an eaten peach," he said, 
 with much contempt. 
 
 " You beast ! " thought Pia ; and if she had 
 really possessed the powers she assumed, she 
 would have had him flung into the deep pool 
 which the stream made amongst the rocks below 
 — a pool deep as a grave even in summer heats. 
 '• Say, rather, she's the young peach-tree 
 itself. She'd bear fine fruit if the sun reached 
 her." 
 
 Avellino scowled and lit his pipe. 
 " I didn't give you the crown to talk of that 
 fool." 
 
 •' Take your crown," said Pia, " and deal with 
 
 34 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 Mercede's brothers on a dark night, unhelpcd, 
 as best you may." 
 
 She threw the crown down between them. 
 It cut her to the heart to risk its loss ; but she 
 knew the craven temper of the lad — there was 
 not much fear of losing it. 
 
 He was instantly alarmed, remembered that 
 she was not the feeble crone she looked, sat 
 sheepish on the tree-stump for a moment, doubt- 
 ing, fearing, hesitating, longing to pick up the 
 silver piece, fearing his foes and the devil. Then 
 he said entreatingly — 
 
 •* I did but jest. Nay, I know 'tis bad to 
 joke with wise women like you. Take the 
 crown and keep it, good mother. I meant no 
 affront. Take it, take it ; and keep them off 
 me, the men and the devils both." 
 
 He picked up the scudo and tendered it to 
 her timidly. 
 
 She took it with an air of condescension and 
 reluctance. 
 
 " 'Tis not me you offend," she said sternly. 
 '"Tis all those around you in the air, who can 
 cleave your tongue in twain, make your eyes 
 balls of blood, palsy your limbs, and cause 
 your teeth to fall out, if they choose." 
 
 35 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 His ruddy skin grew white. He believed her. 
 He fancied his sight was failing him ; he felt his 
 teeth with his hand. 
 
 "Respect that of which you cannot judge," 
 said Pia, sternly. "Be humble as you are daft." 
 
 He hung his head, abashed, like a chidden 
 child. This little, grey, shrivelled woman was 
 invested with all the majesty of the unutterable 
 and inconceivable terrors which were associated 
 with her. 
 
 What a small thing was a bit of the root of 
 the meadow-coltsfoot, and yet it could kill a 
 sheep in three minutes ; he knew it, for he had 
 seen it do so. This dreadful little old creature 
 was, amongst men and women, what the colts- 
 foot was amongst other grasses. He was helpless 
 before her as the sheep under the poison. If 
 she left him his life and took his good looks, 
 what would life be to him } — he who was as vain 
 of his curly locks and his ruddy cheeks and his 
 lusty limbs as was of hers any village beauty 
 who stuck gold pins in her hair and carnations 
 in her bodice as he passed under her window 
 or by her threshold as he went through hamlet 
 and township in April and November. Often 
 and often when he was watering the flock did 
 
 36 . 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 he lean down and look, like Narcissus, at his 
 own image in the water between the flags. His 
 beauty was the May-fly with v/hich he won 
 his fish. 
 
 " Don't disfigure me, don't deform me ! " he 
 muttered in terror. " I will get you more of 
 those pieces if you will only make them leave 
 mc alone ! " 
 
 " It is not alone silver pieces that they will 
 have." 
 
 " What, then ? " 
 
 His voice and his face were scared. If she 
 wanted gold, he could not get it. There was 
 no gold in the canvas bag, nor anywhere in 
 the province that he knew. He had heard of 
 gold, but he had never seen it. 
 
 "They will have obedience," said Pia. 
 Obedience ! 
 
 The priests talked of obedience, but who gave 
 it them ? Were the unclean spirits stronger 
 than the saints ? Yes, no doubt ; the coltsfoot 
 was stronger than the meadow grasses, stronger, 
 a vast deal stronger, than the dews which came 
 down from heaven. Then he remembered hor- 
 rible stories told, as lads and lasses sat stripping 
 the maize and shelling the walnuts round the 
 
 37 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 brazier on farmhouse hearths, of gruesome 
 errands ordered by the evil ones, of midnight 
 rides behind witches, of commands to cut out 
 living hearts from cradled children or tear fangs 
 from venomous wood-snakes. What use was 
 it having stolen the crown if he got no more in 
 return than this, and became the slave of the 
 Strega ? He struggled to say this, to free him- 
 self, to laugh at the old crone, and tell her to 
 go to her master, the devil ; but the words died 
 in his throat, his tongue clave to the roof of 
 his mouth. Fear paralyzed him. 
 
 " I can spend no more time with you," said 
 Pia, sternly. " Look to yourself, and don't blame 
 me when you He gasping in a thicket with 
 the blood gurgling out of you where Mercede's 
 brothers shall have let daylight into your belly." 
 
 Then she turned her back on him and went, 
 as it seemed to him, with incredible swiftness 
 through the bushes that grew by the line of the 
 water. 
 
 "Stop, mother, stop!" he said with a gasp, 
 squeezing his throat with his hand to push his 
 voice out of it. 
 
 But Pia would not stop. She knew how to 
 deal with male creatures. 
 
 38 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 Of course, he could have overtaken her with a 
 stride or two ; of course, he could have clutched 
 and killed her, if he had wished, in a moment — 
 that is, he could have done so if she had been 
 an ordinary woman, and if the virus of terror 
 had not been corroding his veins. As it was, he 
 stood motionless, as if rooted to the soil. She 
 knew that he would come and implore her aid 
 that night or the next. She did not even look 
 back, but hurried on, her black shawl over her 
 head, the gnats stinging her naked feet. She 
 was sure that she held the rogue fast. She 
 would drive him through his terrors to marry 
 Fedalma. The broken vase should be mended ; 
 if in the future it would only hold thistle-seeds 
 and thorns, she could not help that. Who 
 breaks pays. It is a fair saying, but seldom 
 a true one. She meant to make it true in this 
 instance. 
 
 She took his crown as she took the girl's 
 pullet, but she was loyal in her double-faced, 
 secretive way to them both. When Fedalma 
 came on the next evening to her, she said 
 mysteriously — 
 
 " All goes well. The Unseen favour you." 
 
 The girl quivered with rapture. 
 
 39 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 "They will make Mercede unlovely and un- 
 desirable in his sight. More I do not know 
 yet," said Pia. " That is much, eh ? " 
 
 "Ay, indeed!" 
 
 Fedalma laughed and sobbed in the hysteria 
 of a passionate hope. 
 
 "The bean turned of itself three times last 
 night," she murmured under her breath. 
 
 " Surely," said Pia, with the calmness of one 
 to whom such miracles in nature are familiar. 
 
 " I am so frightened when it moves," said the 
 girl, still laughing and weeping ; " I can hardly 
 hold myself from plucking it off me. I feel 
 such terror of it ; it pricks sometimes, and one 
 knows 'tis alive — more than alive." 
 
 "Surely," said Pia, nodding her head with 
 significance. "Mind you don't ever anger 
 it. 'Twould burn your reed roof over your 
 head." 
 
 Fedalma shuddered. It requires some courage 
 to keep what you firmly believe to be the devil 
 between your skin and your shift. 
 
 "But they do meet still?" she said, with 
 jealousy and misgiving. " I am sure 'twas they 
 I saw down by the cane-brake by Silvio's mill. 
 I was far off, but I am sure." 
 
 40 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 " You mistake," said Pia. " The spirits who 
 are against you make you see those false visions. 
 Beh'eve naught that you see or hear ; only 
 believe what I tell you." 
 
 Fedalma was only too willing to doubt the 
 evidence of her own senses in such a matter. 
 She went humbly and happily away, borne up 
 by the wings of faith and of hope, leaving four 
 more white pieces and some fresh onions with 
 the Strega ; how she had got them Pia did 
 not ask. 
 
 She was on her bed for the night, for she was 
 tired and footsore from the long walk to the 
 ford, when she heard a scratch at the door. 
 
 •' Who's there ? " she asked. 
 
 " Avellino," said the young shepherd's voice. 
 
 Pia got up ; she never undressed from one 
 year's end to the other. She only undid her 
 black shawl and hung it on a nail for the night. 
 After satisfying herself that it was really Avel- 
 lino, she let him enter, and eagerly eyed what 
 he had brought. He had brought a lamb. It 
 had died of disease and cost him nothing. He 
 had cut its throat and skinned it. 
 
 Pia smelt it and guessed its end. 
 
 "'Tis carrion," she said, with a shrewd smile. 
 
 41 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 " Thank you for naught. I have a mind to 
 send your flock the foot-rot." 
 
 "She is a witch indeed!" thought her 
 visitor. Who else could have known the 
 creature's end when he had cut its throat and 
 skinned it } 
 
 He swore that it had been sucking its dam 
 when he had killed it. 
 
 "You are a fool to lie to me," said Pia. 
 Nevertheless she took the poor little carcase 
 and hung it up beside her black shawl. 
 
 " What do you come here for ? " she said 
 sternly. " I have done with you. You were 
 down by Silvio's mill last eve with your new 
 wench. Do you think nobody has eyes ? " 
 
 "We were in the canes where they're so 
 thick and tall," stammered the youth, sorely 
 disquieted. 
 
 "They may be thick and tall. They are 
 not so thick and not so tall that steel and shot 
 would not pierce them." 
 
 Avellino trembled like a leaf. 
 
 •* How d' you know, mother ? " 
 
 " There is naught I do not know," said Pia, 
 darkly. " What is proof against shot and steel 
 cannot hold against me — or against those I 
 
 42 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 serve," she added in a tone which chilled his 
 blood to ice. 
 
 He left her presence more certain than ever 
 that she could dispose of him here and hereafter 
 as she chose. He had been for an instant sorely 
 moved to strangle her and put her body under 
 her own hearthstone, but he had not courage. 
 That small wizen face of hers, looking smaller 
 than ever and more than ever wizen with the 
 wisps of her white hair uncovered, was so 
 plainly the face of one not human and not 
 mortal. She had told him he must obey or 
 perish of murrain with his whole flock. And 
 obey in what ? In nothing less than in marriage 
 with the girl he had forsaken. All the good 
 cheese, and the silver crown, and the dead lamb, 
 thrown away only to hear such an order from 
 the foul fiends as this ! He groaned aloud as 
 he went through the heather. He knew that 
 sooner or later he would have to do what the 
 Powers of Evil told him. 
 
 The magic which Pia did exercise was the 
 potency of suggestion ; she knew nothing of 
 the meaning of her gift, but she had an almost 
 illimitable power over these uninstructed minds, 
 so dim, so timorous, so credulous. She steered 
 
 43 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 them as the fisherman of the lagoon steers his 
 rowing-boat, netting what he will. Her life 
 had been for more years than she could count 
 lonely and miserable ; but two things in it were 
 dear to her : the pot full of bronze and white 
 money, of which nobody divined the existence, 
 and her arbitrary exercise of her power over 
 others. He was a fool ; and Pia, who was a 
 clever if unlettered woman, had no pity for 
 fools. He was a selfish brute, too ; and she 
 had suffered from just such a fair-faced rascal 
 in her own early years — years which across the 
 gulf of half a century could still stretch out 
 their sting and touch her with sharp pains. 
 
 Three weeks passed, and turn by turn she 
 saw her young people, and terrified the one and 
 consoled the other, and moulded and shaped 
 their thoughts to her liking, and got, now from 
 the one, now from the other, such offerings as 
 by sacrifice or theft they could bring to her : 
 poor presents, indeed, but to her precious. The 
 girl grew more impatient as she grew more 
 sanguine ; the youth became more docile as 
 he became more cowed. 
 
 The fruit was growing ripe for the plucking, 
 she thought ; she must not, she knew, dawdle 
 
 44 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 on too long ; their passions were lighted tow ; 
 they must be fanned or put out without waver- 
 ing, or the flames might run amuck through 
 fresh fields over which she would have no 
 control. 
 
 So one night when the girl came to her hut 
 she said to her : 
 
 " Child, you v/ish for a bed of thorns because 
 you think it a bed of roses. Well, you shall 
 have it and lie on it. Your fellow will marry 
 you. When once he is wed then you will keep 
 him, if you are not a fool ; but I fear you are a 
 fool." 
 
 Fedalma smiled, the defiant, radiant sunrise- 
 smile of assured happiness. 
 
 " Oh, mother ! dear mother ! " she cried in 
 ecstasy, "what can I give you for all you give 
 me ? I was a fool ; yes. I Vv'as afraid of the 
 bean in my breast." 
 
 For Pia had brought Avellino to this point ; 
 by threats, by coaxings, by insinuation, by the 
 dominant force of superior intelligence, she had 
 kneaded his foolish and fearsome brains until 
 she had made them ductile to take the shape 
 she wished. He had consented to all she sug- 
 gested ; he went meek, if sullen, on the road 
 
 45 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 along which she drove him. He submitted to 
 what she ordered, and the priest was spoken 
 with ; the one who was nearest, who said Mass 
 once a month at a little grey church amongst 
 the pine woods. The religious marriage is still 
 often the only one that peasants in remote 
 places think needful : the law counts for little 
 with them. The matter was kept hushed and 
 quiet. Pi^ wished it to be so ; she was afraid if 
 the light of day was let in on her work it might 
 be undone ; she worked best in the dark, as the 
 bats do. She wanted no one to know her share 
 in the lovers' reconciliation. Mercede might 
 move ; her brothers might also ; silence and 
 secrecy were safest. 
 
 And one night, in her little hut, she brought 
 about their meeting, and pushed the reluctant 
 faithless swain into the arms of the woman who 
 loved him with such unmerited persistence and 
 passion. 
 
 " What can I render you, oh, you wondrous 
 one ? " cried Fedalma to her, when the young 
 shepherd, sorely discomfited and scarcely con- 
 cealing his discomfiture, had kissed her and 
 promised the church, and gone out into the 
 night air, which was blowing hot and sullen 
 
 46 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 under a sirocco wind. " What shall I render 
 you ? How shall I labour for you ? Nothing 
 in all my life long that I can do will I refuse." 
 
 She meant every word she said ; her cheeks 
 were once more like Pentecost roses, her great 
 eyes shone with rapture and pride ; he was hers 
 once more ; she would get him and keep him 
 from pale Mercede and from every other female 
 thing born of woman ; he was responseless 
 as a cold bar of black iron, it was true, but 
 within her was the flame which would make 
 the iron, however stubborn, grow red-hot and 
 bend. 
 
 *' He'll ill-treat you," muttered Pia, wishing 
 her work undone. 
 
 Fedalma laughed with vain, rapturous incre- 
 dulity. 
 
 " Nay, nay, not he," she said proudly. " My 
 arm is strong and my heart is hot ; I shall hold 
 him so close he shall never see that another 
 woman is living. I may die on the stony road 
 in childbirth, like one of his ewes, and maybe I 
 shall ; but I'll never cease to bless you, mother, 
 for what you've done for me." 
 
 " Well, well," said Pi^, touched more than she 
 chose to show ; " you're a crazy wench, my poor 
 
 47 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 girl, but you've a grateful soul. That's more 
 than be said of most." 
 
 The thing was done. 
 
 The false wooer was dragged back and tied 
 to his destiny with charmed ropes which he did 
 not dare to break. Fedalma drank the waters 
 of Paradise. 
 
 She had nothing of her own with which to 
 show her gratitude. She stole a pair of duck- 
 lings at sore risk, and brought them to the 
 Strega, and she walked ten miles to a chapel 
 famous for its miracles, and prayed to the 
 Madonna to pardon her if she had done wrong 
 in stealing the birds, and still more wrong in 
 using black arts. 
 
 " Do not be angry with me or with the old 
 one," she said passionately to the Holy Mary 
 in whom she believed. "If the saints would 
 only hear a little quicker we should not turn to 
 the devil." 
 
 And then she prayed to have mercy shown to 
 Pia, and prayed that the aged soul might be 
 cleansed and accepted before death ; " for if she 
 have helped us with unholy ways, yet she has 
 done a holy thing," she said as she lay prostrate 
 before the shrine, not knowing very clearly what 
 
 48 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 she meant, but striving with all the might of her 
 gratitude to have the witch who had aided her 
 assoiled and pardoned ; for happiness did not 
 make her, as it makes many wiser than she, 
 selfish in her joy. The priests would have told 
 her that she committed an inexcusable sin in 
 praying for the soul of a sorceress, for the soul 
 of a daughter and wife of the fiend ; that even 
 to breathe such a name in a consecrated place 
 was heresy, blasphemy, damnation eternal. 
 
 But she did pray, though she prayed in trem- 
 bling ; for had she not still the enchanted bean 
 in her bosom ? 
 
 " She has done so much for me, something I 
 must risk for her," she thought, as she kissed the 
 waxen foot of the Madonna ; it was the same 
 thought as when she had stolen the ducks. The 
 very ignorant know not what they feel nor why 
 they act ; they are incapable alike of analysis 
 or synthesis ; but sometimes their spontaneous 
 and almost unconscious acts are beautiful. 
 
 With her heart beating high in her breast, she 
 went down from the mountain sanctuary to 
 which she had climbed as the day drew near 
 its close. She had to walk ten miles and more 
 back to her father's cabin in the woods, but the 
 
 49 E 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 descent was easy. The autumnal weather was 
 radiant, and the whole hillside and the woods 
 below were bathed in golden light. She was so 
 happy, so fearless, she could have kissed the 
 bewitched bean in her bosom ! 
 
 She sang aloud in her gladness of spirit one 
 of the amorous invocations of the province. 
 Her clear loud notes rang through the solitude ; 
 a whitethroat in a pine-tree answered her as she 
 passed. 
 
 She was so happy ! Her idol might be sullen 
 for awhile, resentful, reluctant ; but he would be 
 hers. Surely she would know, as she had said 
 to Pia, how to heat and to bend the iron. He 
 had loved her so ardently only a few months 
 before, it would be strange indeed if she could 
 not fan that flame into fury once more. 
 
 " He will be mine — mine— mine ! " she sang, 
 as if it were the burden of a ballad, as she went, 
 erect and glorious in the pride of her strength 
 and her triumph, over the fallen fir-needles which 
 strewed the path. 
 
 When she entered into the lower woods, the 
 woods of chestnut and beech, it was evening ; 
 the little brown owls were flying through the 
 trees. Up above, where the sanctuary stood, 
 
 50 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 the mountains had still the light of the sun, but 
 here on the lower hills it was already almost 
 dark. In the gloom before her father's hut there 
 was a little group of men. She approached 
 them, unsuspecting, scarcely noting them, full 
 of her own emotions, singing still. 
 
 They broke away from each other at sight of 
 her, and stood apart like persons afraid. Her 
 father, Febo Nero, alone ran towards her, 
 gesticulating wildly without a word. Her heart 
 stood still with a prescience of ill. 
 " What is it ? " she asked. 
 Febo clutched her arm. 
 
 " Did you lie when you said you were to wed 
 with your danio ? Come, say ! " 
 
 " I am to wed with him," she answered. " Who 
 dares say not ? " 
 
 Febo broke into a rude, harsh laugh : he was 
 an unkind man. 
 
 "You double fool ! " he said savagely. " Was 
 it not enough to let him fool you once ? He's 
 gone, and Mercede of Cecco too ; and the sheep 
 left unguarded and unfed, and his master here 
 crazy with rage. And he's gone to the sea-coast, 
 they say, and he'll sail for Brazil straight away. 
 Mercede took her dower out of the pitcher under 
 
 51 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 the walnut-tree ; she knew where 'twas kept, and 
 'tis gone with her. Ay, you fool — you double 
 and triple fool ! I've a mind to stone you till 
 you're dead, as one stones a toad." 
 
 She swept him aside with a gesture superb 
 in its authority, and went to where the employer 
 of Avellino stood, an old, shrewd, weather-beaten 
 man. 
 
 " Is it true ? " she said in her throat. 
 " Ay, for certain 'tis true," he answered ; " and 
 my flock left alone, unwatered, unfed, unwatched 
 — a miracle they're not stolen. Lord, lass, how 
 you look ! You're better without the scoundrel. 
 Let him go to the Americas, and be damned ! " 
 
 But she did not pause to hear his rough con- 
 solation ; she put her head down, as a cow, 
 enraged and bereaved, lowers hers to attack, 
 and tore along the path of the wood in the 
 gloaming, and soon was lost to sight. 
 
 The men looked at one another, unkindly 
 diverted, yet vaguely afraid. Febo cursed her 
 with savage heartiness. Swift as the wind, 
 lightning-footed as Nemesis, she rushed through 
 the familiar glades, breaking bracken and bramble 
 in her headlong flight. She never paused, but 
 flew over the rough stones, the long grass, the 
 
 52 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 rivulets, the wild sage and thyme, until she 
 reached the place where the Strega dwelt. It 
 was now quite dark. 
 
 She flung herself against the door. Its wooden 
 bar was fastened within, but the wood was old 
 and yielded to her violent impetus. She entered. 
 Pia was on her knees beside the cold hearth 
 counting the money which she kept in a hole 
 under the stones. As she rose, startled at the 
 crash of the door forced open, Fedalma threw 
 herself upon her, clutched the old, wrinkled 
 throat, and crushed it between her hands. 
 
 " You deceived me, you spawn of hell ! " she 
 screamed, as the old woman writhed in her grasp. 
 
 In vain did the Strega struggle to get herself 
 free ; the fingers of Fedalma were more cruel 
 than a tiger's fangs. 
 
 " You deceived me ! " she hissed again and 
 
 *ti"- 
 
 agam. 
 
 "No— no — no!" said the old woman, as, in 
 one supreme effort, she wrenched herself free for 
 a moment from that strangling grasp. 
 
 " You deceived me ! " cried the girl. Her 
 face was black with passion, her lips were drawn 
 back from her clenched teeth : she was mad 
 with agony and rage. She held the throat of 
 
 53 
 
LA STREGA 
 
 the Strega with her left hand alone, and with 
 her right hand plucked from her bosom the 
 black bean. 
 
 " Eat your devil and die ! " she cried, with a 
 hideous laugh, as she forced the jaws of Pia 
 open, and thrust the bean into her tonsils, down, 
 down, deep down, till it choked the gullet ; and, 
 with her left hand, she meanwhile squeezed harder 
 and harder the muscles of the quivering throat. 
 
 In another moment the witch could no longer 
 struggle, and in a few seconds more her face 
 grew livid, then purple, then livid again ; she 
 ceased to gasp ; she ceased to breathe ; her feet 
 kicked the air convulsively for an instant ; then 
 she was dead. 
 
 With all her might Fedalma raised the body 
 high above her head, shook it as though it were 
 an empty sack, and dashed it on the stones. It 
 fell heavily and never moved. She had her 
 vengeance. 
 
 54 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 " How it grows ! " said the young man, looking 
 with pride and affection up at a tree he had 
 planted. It was a plum-tree, of the kind which 
 gives the golden luscious plums which in Eng- 
 land are called Magnum Bonum, in France and 
 in Italy, Reine Claude and Claudia. He had 
 planted it against a south-east wall, and it had 
 thriven well, liking its position and rewarding 
 the care he took of it. He knew little of fruit 
 or plants, but an old gardener had told him 
 what to do with this tree, and it had flourished 
 with him. 
 
 He had been twelve years old when he had 
 set it in the earth, and he was now twenty. His 
 daily occupation was to mend the roads of his 
 commune, but he worked in his little bit of 
 garden after sunset, and before the day's duties 
 began. 
 
 His name was Paolino Sizzo ; he maintained 
 his mother and sister ; his father was dead. His 
 
 57 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 little grey house, with its red-brown roof, stood 
 amongst the fields and hills of a rural commune 
 called Marignolle, which lies to the right of the 
 Certosa of Val d'Ema. He was spared military 
 service because he was the only son of his 
 mother. The lives of all of them were hard, 
 but they did not think so, for they knew no 
 other. When they had oil enough to eat with 
 their beans and a big round loaf in the cup- 
 board, they were content. The mother spun 
 and made their clothes. 
 
 The little daughter Ernesta went to and fro 
 to the village school, and did not do much else 
 than play and laugh, and eat as much bread as 
 she could get ; but she was a merry girl, and 
 made sunshine in the house, and she showed all 
 her pretty teeth, as white as a young dog's, in 
 glee, when there was anything extra to eat on 
 Sundays. 
 
 "You spoil the child," grumbled the mother, 
 when Paolino brought a little gift of sweetstufF 
 or fruit for his sister ; but while she said it she 
 was pleased and grateful that her son was so 
 good to his sister instead of spending his spare 
 pence in gambling or on drink. 
 
 She herself was a bent, worn woman ; grey- 
 
 58 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 haired before her time, for she was not yet forty ; 
 but she went out to work most days ; hard work 
 — washing, cutting corn, turning hay, gathering 
 tomatoes, shelling beans in the hot sun ; and 
 this kind of labour ages soon when it is not 
 sustained by good food. 
 
 When they were all out, the door of the little 
 house was locked, and it was left to itself. 
 There was nothing to steal except a few copper 
 vessels. Only when the plums were ripening 
 Paolino said to his mother, " Stay and see that 
 nobody takes them, mother ; " and then the 
 widow would rest, sitting on a wooden bench 
 by the door and spinning, for both he and she 
 knew that, if they were not watched, the nimble 
 hands of Ernesta would play havoc with the 
 fruit ; not speaking of the village children who 
 would pass by, and the big rats who would run 
 down from the roof. 
 
 The work of Paolino was one which took him 
 out in all weathers, and his tools were heavy 
 and large ; and the constant rooting up of the 
 roadside grass was a tiresome labour, ever renew- 
 ing itself, never really done. But he liked his 
 work, He could rest, when the hour of rest 
 came, under the hedges of hazel and dog-rose, 
 
 59 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 and he knew everybody who passed by, whether 
 gentle-folks or poor folks, and at the cottages 
 he would have a chat and a draught of watered 
 wine, and at the villa gates he would sometimes 
 get a franc if it were Easter time or Christmas. 
 Of course, he was only an underling at his age, 
 but he hoped to be the head man on those roads 
 in due time, as his father had been. He had 
 no other or higher aim in life. He was quite 
 content 
 
 After all it was a life of some interest to any 
 one like Paolino, who took interest in all that 
 passed around him. His sphere indeed was 
 limited by the mile-stones, and measured not 
 quite three kilometres ; but he knew every living 
 creature, human, equine, feline, or canine, that 
 passed over his roads, and knew all about them. 
 
 When he went home to his supper he had all 
 sorts of news ; the marquis had bought a beau- 
 tiful young horse, bay with black points ; the 
 priest's little dog had been washed and clipped ; 
 the miller had had his pocket picked in the 
 town ; a tramp had been found getting over 
 the gates of one villa, the children at another 
 were ill with fever ; the crockery cart, as it 
 made its rounds, had lost a wheel and several 
 
 60 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 bits of earthenware had tumbled into the ditch 
 and been broken ; the knife-grinder had said 
 that there had been a great fire at a factory in 
 the city ; the baker's little donkey had fallen 
 and cut its knees ; the foreign lady who owned 
 the large greyhounds had passed him and 
 spoken kindly to him ; the steward had gone 
 by on his cob and had nodded and called out, 
 ''La Madre? Coin' V sta?" And all these 
 pieces of local intelligence interested his mother 
 and Ernesta, as the telegrams in the morning 
 papers interest ourselves. Every day there was, 
 of course, some one or something different to 
 the previous day, if it were only that the vicar 
 had on new buckled shoes, or that the little 
 ducklings of a neighbour were thriving finely, or 
 that the Franciscan friar had a cou^h. 
 
 Whenever she heard that the priest or the 
 miller, or the steward or the friar, had inquired 
 for her, his mother was a proud and happy 
 woman. Paolino did not tell her that they 
 seldom stopped to hear the answer. " Of 
 course," he thought, "it is only just done out 
 of politeness ; they don't really care." 
 
 The vicar did care, perhaps ; he who lived on 
 the crest of the hill at the church with the tall 
 
 6i 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 white tower. He was a good man, fond of long 
 walks, in which he was always followed by his 
 little white fox-dog ; and he knew the mother, 
 Rosina, well, for she was always in her place 
 at mass and vespers, and the only sins she had 
 to confess, after much searching of her heart, 
 were that she had envied her neighbour's good 
 luck with her chickens, or had been gluttonous 
 in eating too much ricotto, a rude sort of imita- 
 tion of cream cheese made with sour milk, and 
 highly in favour with country people. 
 
 This was in the summer ; and in the winter 
 there were the tales to tell of flood in the city, 
 or perhaps even snow ; of how the pedlar had 
 been blown down coming from the hills ; of the 
 water-mill wheels being frozen ; or of how the 
 priest's little dog had grown his thick furry coat 
 again in readiness for the cold. 
 
 Paolino himself, having a feeling for these 
 things, noted also when the violets came and 
 the primroses showed first ; when the hawthorn 
 in the hedges blossomed : when the nightingale 
 first sang ; but these matters did not interest 
 his women, and so he very rarely indeed spoke 
 of them. But without saying anything to any 
 one, he noticed the earliest swallow, the passing 
 
 62 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 of the sea-birds down the green river water, the 
 flowering of the bryony, the dogrose, and the 
 foxglove in the hedges which fringed his roads ; 
 and he would in all probability have gone on 
 doing this for many years of the twentieth 
 century had not the Municipal Office of Florence 
 come to a new and, for him, disastrous decision. 
 It decided that it had too many rural road- 
 menders in its employment, and decided to 
 dismiss one-fifth of the men in its pay. 
 
 It was one day in mid-winter that this resolve 
 of his superiors was made known to Paolino. He 
 had gone into the city, as usual on a Saturday, 
 for his weekly wage, and, when he had received 
 it, was told in the curtest manner possible that 
 his services would be required no longer. 
 
 He could not understand. He could not be- 
 lieve. Indeed, he was so stupid and tiresome 
 in his manner, and his incredulity, that the 
 official who made the communication grew 
 impatient, and shouted to him that there were 
 gendarmes both inside and out of the Communal 
 Palace for refractory persons. 
 
 " But what have I done .'' Tell me where my 
 fault is? " asked the poor lad, holding his week's 
 wage in his outstretched palm. 
 
 63 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 " You have done nothing," said the official, 
 contemptuously. "You have no fault that I 
 know of, but you are struck off the rolls ; you 
 are not wanted any longer." 
 
 The cruel fact was some minutes before it 
 could insert itself into the boy's brain, in which 
 a thousand hammers seemed beating, and a 
 thousand bells ringing. 
 
 " But we shall starve ! " he cried, as soon as 
 he did comprehend. " Mother and Nesta have 
 nobody to look to, only me ! " 
 
 " With that we have nothing to do," said the 
 official, and added, " there is always work to be 
 found by those who are really willing to do it." 
 
 " But give me a reason ! Give me a reason ! " 
 screamed Paolino, his blood getting hot, and 
 sparks dancing before his eyes. 
 
 " The reason is clear," said the official, loftily. 
 " The Municipality does not want you. You 
 are dismissed." 
 
 Then as Paolino in his youthful ignorance 
 and desperation most unwisely lifted up his 
 voice and poured forth shrill curses on the 
 Syndic and the Council, as a lost dog throws 
 up its head and howls to the empty air, the 
 clerks, whom power made potentates, lost all 
 
 64 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 patience with him, summoned the guards, and 
 bade them take the fellow out into the square. 
 He was creating a disturbance. He was led 
 roughly into the courtyard and into the sun- 
 shine. 
 
 " Go home, you fool," said one of the guards, 
 " and thank your lucky stars you are not locked 
 up. If there's anything against you another 
 time it will go hard with you." 
 
 "But they will starve! They will starve!" 
 screamed the boy, getting a crowd around 
 him, who were ready to take sides with him, 
 though they had no idea what his wrongs 
 might be. 
 
 " What is the matter ? " cried the citizens. 
 "The matter!" shouted Paolino. "They 
 send me away when I have no fault, and my 
 father on those roads till his death before me, 
 
 and " 
 
 His words were cut short by the guards lift- 
 ing him off his feet and pitching him head fore- 
 most past an iron door which another guard 
 held open at that moment, as a sinister-looking 
 vehicle lumbered out of the Communal court- 
 yard. The door was banged upon him ; he was 
 in a prison van, in company with seven other 
 
 6s F 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 young men who were being moved from the 
 Tribunal to the Murate. 
 
 " A lesson does no harm to these youngsters 
 in these revolutionary times," thought the Com- 
 missary of Police, to whom he was brought 
 after some hours' detention ; he considered the 
 guards had been too zealous, but he did not say 
 so. He merely cautioned the prisoner to be 
 careful to abstain in future from causing any 
 disturbance in the public streets, and then set 
 him free. 
 
 Paolino's head was hung down, his face was 
 red and sullen, the tears coursed down his 
 cheeks. 
 
 " We shall starve. We shall starve," he re- 
 peated. " Why am I sent away ? I am not in 
 fault." 
 
 " Oh, into that I cannot enter," said the Com- 
 missary. The Municipality paid you weekly ? " 
 
 " Yes, and father before me." 
 
 " Then it is fully within its rights to dismiss 
 you without notice. If you complain you will 
 be more stringently punished." 
 
 They pushed him out of the Commissary's 
 presence, hustled and jostled till he was as 
 bewildered as a sheep being driven to the 
 
 66 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 shambles. He found himself again in the open 
 air and at liberty to go home. 
 
 " Oh, Lord, how shall I tell them ? " he said 
 with a groan ; and then for the first time he per- 
 ceived that he had lost the week's wages. As 
 they had cuffed and banged him about, to get 
 him, despite his struggles, into the van, the 
 flimsy paper money had slipped out of his hand 
 and gone — who knows where ? 
 
 Paolino dropped on a stone under an old 
 church, hid his face in his hands, and sobbed 
 bitterly. When he had come down into the city 
 it had been ten o'clock ; it was now four in the 
 afternoon ; he had eaten nothing, but he felt 
 no hunger. He was bruised and aching in 
 many parts of his body from the rough usage 
 he had received. 
 
 He got up with pain, and took his way across 
 the town towards his home. 
 
 It chanced to be a Corso day in Carnival, 
 and he met the gay holiday-making stream of 
 human beings, and the grand carriage horses 
 with their flowers and streamers to their ears. 
 A bouquet struck him on the cheek as he went. 
 
 He bore the pleasure-seeking crowds no ill- 
 will, for he had no ill-will in him, but the 
 
 67 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 contrast of their festival and his sorrow hurt him. 
 He walked as quickly as his bruised limbs 
 would take him to get out of the gates and into 
 the green country roads where he was never to 
 work any more. 
 
 " I must have done something and they won't 
 tell me what," he thought, racking his brain to 
 think what his offence could possibly have been. 
 
 It was quite dark when he reached the little 
 house in the hilly lane where his home was. 
 His mother was standing at the door with a 
 lighted oil wick in an old brass lamp in her 
 hand. 
 
 " Oh, the dear Mother of us all be praised ! " 
 she cried, in joyous agitation. " Dear lad, I did 
 think as how you had been run over by the 
 carnival folks, or something worse. Where have 
 you been all the livelong day .-' " 
 
 Paolino did not answer her, but walked slowly 
 past her into the cottage and threw himself 
 heavily on a rush-bottomed chair. 
 
 " I've lost it," he said stupidly, showing her 
 his empty hands. 
 
 •' Lost your wages ? Oh, Lord, save us ! " 
 
 " Lost your wages, you ass ? " echoed the girl 
 Nesta, 
 
 68 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 " I've been in prison," said Paolino, heavily, 
 as if he had not heard them. " We shall starve. 
 They don't want me on the roads any more. 
 They've done with me." 
 
 There was nothing heard for a few moments, 
 but the shrill outcries of the woman and girl. 
 
 " Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy ! " sobbed 
 the mother. 
 
 " He's been in prison ; he's done something ; 
 they wouldn't have sent him away otherwise ! " 
 said the little sister. 
 
 Paolino did not hear what either of them said. 
 
 " Father worked on these roads forty years," 
 he muttered, " and I've been on them ever since 
 I was breeched ; and I'm not to go on them any 
 more, and they won't say what I've done, and 
 they put me in prison for asking." 
 
 " But the week's wage — the week's wage ! " 
 cried the mother. " Did you say you lost it ? " 
 
 He nodded assent. 
 
 " He's drunk it away ! " said the little sister. 
 "Look at him. He's dead drunk. Can't you 
 see, mother ? He's drunk it all away." 
 
 " Oh, Nesta, for shame ! " said the mother ; 
 but the thought was her own. These disordered 
 clothes, these unwilling words, this improbable 
 
 69 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 tale, this heavy, sullen, reddened face, were they 
 not all due to drink ? Rosina Sizzo would 
 sooner have believed the church tower was 
 walking across the hills than believe that her 
 son could be dismissed from his labour on the 
 roads which had been his father's before him. 
 
 Yes, it was drink. Her little daughter had 
 said out the thought which she had herself no 
 courage to put into words ; she was so ashamed. 
 She threw her gown over her head and leaned 
 against the wall of the room, sobbing aloud. 
 Nesta went up to her brother and shook him 
 with both hands. 
 
 *' Aren't you ashamed, you bibber ? If you'd 
 come to take me to the Corso as you promised, 
 you wouldn't have got in this state, and lost 
 your money through swilling wine in the town." 
 
 Paolino slowly raised his head and looked at 
 her. 
 
 " Is that what you think, little girl > You're 
 wrong. I've been good to you from your cradle, 
 Nesta. You might have said something kinder. 
 The trouble there is on me is more for you and 
 the mother than it is for myself." 
 
 Then he rose, and pushing her aside, drank 
 thirstily from a can of water and went up the 
 
 ;o 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 rickety wooden stair to his bed. His mother 
 cast the gown from her head and ran after him. 
 
 "Come and tell me all, my boy! Mother 
 forgives ; and the child is but a saucy ignorant 
 minx." 
 
 But Paolino would not answer or open to her. 
 
 "Tis drink, mother!" said Nesta, with her 
 red lips curled in all the scorn of superior 
 wisdom. " 'Tis drink. You'll see in the morn- 
 ing." 
 
 But in the morning all the school children 
 told Ernesta that they had heard their parents 
 say overnight that her brother was one of some 
 score of road-menders who had been dismissed 
 through no fault of their own by the Commune. 
 
 In the morning also, when the girl was off to 
 school, Paolino told his mother all which had 
 taken place. The night's rest of sleep due to 
 intense fatigue had calmed and sobered him. 
 
 " I must get some other work," he said, and 
 went up to the tall white tower on the crest of 
 the hill and spoke with the vicar. 
 
 " But I shall never be any good now that I'm 
 sent off the roads," he said, with the great tears 
 in his eyes. 
 
 The roads were to him like his ship to a 
 
 71 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 sailor, his flag to a soldier. He could not be- 
 lieve that he was never again to keep them clean 
 and watch the people go to and fro on them, 
 and eat his noon-tide lump of bread under their 
 flowering hedges, amongst their dock leaves and 
 cuckoo-pint. Why had he been dismissed and 
 others retained ? 
 
 The vicar explained to him that it was a 
 mere question of economy, and that the matter 
 was regulated by seniority; but his little lupetto 
 dog would have understood him better than his 
 parishioner. 
 
 The good man also tried to influence the few 
 influential people whom he knew, and himself 
 petitioned the Municipality in favour of the 
 young man ; but he merely received the usual 
 polite negative formalities in return, and nothing 
 was altered. Paolino had been dismissed ; for 
 the authorities he was dead and buried. 
 
 He tried with all his might to get other work, 
 but it was difficult to do so. A dismissal, even 
 caused by no fault, but entirely based on the 
 beautiful exactitude and unrelenting necessity 
 of political economy, always is a black mark 
 against a person's name, however zealously he 
 or she may do their best to efface it. 
 
 7? 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 PaoHno could not understand why Felice 
 Bandone, an old schoolfellow, remained on the 
 roads and he was turned off them. That was 
 the only view of the question that he could be 
 made to see. The injustice of it burdened him, 
 hurt him, ate into him like a corrosive acid. 
 
 He did whatever work came to hand ; field- 
 work, errands, driving a cart, carrying corn to 
 the mill, hedging and ditching, or whatever it 
 might be, but he did it with no pleasure in the 
 labour. He took home his day's pay faithfully, 
 but he had no joy in doing so ; he did not forget 
 Nesta's words on the evening of his return. He 
 had always been a light-hearted, mirthful, con- 
 tented lad, now he was dull, slow, ill at ease. 
 He had been in a prison van, in a prison cell, 
 and it seemed to him as if the taint of them was 
 always on him, on his lips, on his hands, on his 
 soul ; and that others saw it. 
 
 " It is not the prison which taints us, it is the 
 crime for which we go there," said the priest ; 
 "you were really innocent of any offence, there- 
 fore you come out unsoiled, clean as a white 
 pigeon." 
 
 But it was of no use to philosophize ; no 
 reasoning could reach the mind of Paolino ; it 
 
 7Z 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 was too simple, too unlearned, too obstinate. 
 Wrong had been done him ; that was all he 
 knew. 
 
 " Troubles," as some one has said, " are gre- 
 garious ; they never come alone." To add to 
 his, Rosina fell ill. It was no definite malady, 
 it was the giving way of the system under long 
 toil and too poor nourishment. In the medical 
 vocabulary this is called " marasma " ; the poor 
 call it a " breaking up." To Rosina, for her son 
 to be sent off the roads was as great a blow as it 
 was to him. It had been the patent of nobility 
 of the Sizzo to be Communal road-menders one 
 after another — father and son for generation 
 after generation. They had always thought it a 
 fine thing to serve the Commune ; they had 
 always taken a special pride in their work, which 
 was a public work, and in the highways, with 
 their hedges, and shrines, and leafy corners, and 
 grey walls, on which they worked from dawn to 
 dusk. When her son lost his place on the road 
 it was like the seeds of some mortal disease sown 
 in her. She grew weaker and weaker, though 
 she managed to keep the little house in order, 
 and put the soup over the fire, and sew and spin 
 a little. She grew more unwell every day ; and 
 
 74 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 Paolino, so slow of comprehension in some 
 things, was quick to sec these signs of debility 
 and decay. He did his utmost for her and for 
 his thankless little sister ; but that all was very 
 small, for the gains of a man at odd jobs, which 
 was all he could get now, are never cither con- 
 siderable or certain. As cantoiiiere the weekly 
 pay was sure and good, and the sense of being 
 a public servant was a cause of pride and of 
 respect from others. Every one is civil to a 
 cantonicre, with his municipal badge — even 
 though he be clearing up mud or rooting up 
 nettles. 
 
 Now he was nothing ; a poor fellow, asking to 
 be hired by those nearly as poor as himself. 
 And he had lost all his pleasant acquaintances. 
 He no longer saw the ladies and their dogs, the 
 gentry and their horses, the drivers and shepherds 
 and men in their little carts going to and fro 
 the town. They might have been all dead for 
 what he saw of them, working as he did in remote 
 fields, or barns, or workshops, or mill-houses, 
 and seeing nothing of who went by between the 
 familiar hedgerows. 
 
 He got home late in the evening, and ate 
 his frugal meal silently, and went to his bed of 
 
 75 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 sacking under the roof, seeing very well that 
 his sister had never forgiven him or altered her 
 opinion as to the cause of their woes. 
 
 She was only fourteen, but she was shrewd, 
 sharp, and selfish. He had tended to make her 
 so by his indulgence, and the poisoned thorn 
 which rankled in her soul was the knowledge 
 that while a cantoniere s sister might have 
 married fairly well, the sister of a day labourer 
 seeking odd jobs might pine in vain for a suitor. 
 
 " Don't you see, Nesta, how ill mother looks ? " 
 he said to her one day. 
 
 "Who made her so? " said the girl, rudely. 
 
 " It is not my fault," said the poor lad, humbly. 
 
 " Not yours } " said Nesta, shrugging her 
 shoulders. " You make the vicar believe so ; but 
 I'm not such a fool as he. They don't put 
 people in prison for nothing." 
 
 " I will turn you out of the house if you dare 
 say such things to me ! " cried Paolino, white 
 with rage and pain. 
 
 " They will put you in prison again if you do," 
 said Nesta. " If I never marry, it will be your 
 fault." 
 
 '* Marry ! You are a chit of a child." 
 
 ** Nanna's Lena marries come Pentecost, and 
 
 76 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 she is only a year older than I am," replied 
 Nesta, with her face on fire with her wrongs. 
 "And where shall I get a dower? Will you 
 give me anything to buy my necklace with, or 
 even to buy my clothes ? " 
 
 She returned so perpetually to this theme, and 
 rung the changes on it so persistently, that she 
 ended in making her brother feel really guilty 
 towards her ; and she was so tall of her age, so 
 precocious, and conceited, that she did really 
 appear like a marriageable maiden to him. 
 
 " I have spoilt her chances," he said sadly, 
 to his mother. " But, indeed, it was no fault of 
 mine. Do — do — believe that, mother." 
 
 " I never doubted it for a moment, my dear," 
 said Rosina, and she thought sincerely that she 
 never had. 
 
 " Why should Felice be kept on and I sent 
 off?" said Paolino, brooding on the greatest 
 wrong of all. 
 
 His mother shook her head and groaned. 
 
 " Why, my dear lad, Felice's brother's brother- 
 in-law, by a first marriage, is gardener to the 
 syndic's daughter's husband's cousin. He could 
 get a word spoken for him in high quarters; 
 everything goes by favour and by having the 
 
 77 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 right word said at the right minute to the right 
 person. We haven't anybody to speak for us, 
 except the vicar up yonder, and the clergy's 
 word does more harm than good nowadays." 
 
 For Rosina, though illiterate and simple, was 
 intelligent, and knew a little of how the world 
 wagged beyond those hawthorn and hazel hedges 
 which bounded the only sphere she had ever 
 known. 
 
 " Nothing would matter," she said, with a heavy 
 sigh, " if I were only as strong as I used to be. 
 I am like a log on you now." 
 
 " No, mother ; no, no," said Paolino, with a 
 sob in his throat. His heart was full ; he wanted 
 to say so much, but he did not know how to put 
 his feelings into words. His mother could speak 
 well, but he had never been able to do so. He 
 had only been able to keep his roads in good 
 order, and that they would not let him do any 
 longer. 
 
 Rosina at last grew so weak that they called 
 in the parish doctor, who said little but ordered 
 medicines and good food, strong broth and wines. 
 
 He might as well have ordered the stars down 
 from the skies. 
 
 Paolino sold his father's silver watch to get 
 
 73 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 the medicine, but that was not of much use with- 
 out nourishment, and they could not buy it. 
 And if they could have bought it they would 
 not have known how to cook it. 
 
 " You will be well again, mother, when the 
 warm weather comes," said Paolino. 
 
 " Let us hope so, dear," said Rosina. But in 
 her own mind she thought, " When the heat does 
 come it will finish me." 
 
 And she lay awake tormented by anxiety for 
 her children. Paolino had lost his sheet-anchor, 
 and would drift nobody could say how or where, 
 and Nesta was a young creature who without 
 control would in all likelihood go very far wrong. 
 
 " Oh, let me live ! Let me live ! " prayed the 
 poor mother. 
 
 But those prayers were not heard. There are 
 so many similar. 
 
 And one night in the hot, windless, summer 
 which she had dreaded, she died, so quietly that 
 the girl Nesta, sleeping on the same mattress, 
 was not awakened from her sound child-like 
 slumber, and, waking at sunrise, found herself 
 beside a corpse. Her shrieks brought Paolino 
 indoors, reaching his ears as he mounted the hill 
 path behind the house to go to a day's work in 
 
 79 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 the pine woods. He had found no v/ork for 
 four days. 
 
 His grief was less violent than Nesta's, but it 
 was intense. It froze him into sullenness and 
 silence, as his dismissal from the Commune had 
 done. She was dead, and it was his fault. 
 
 The priest came, and the doctor to certify the 
 death ; he sat stolidly by the bed and did not 
 speak to them. 
 
 At last, frightened by his look and his silence, 
 the vicar touched his arm. 
 
 " Shall the parish bury her, dear boy ? " he 
 asked gently. " You know, to-morrow, at latest." 
 
 Paolino sprang to his feet. 
 
 " No," he said, with a furious oath. " No. 
 She always said, ' When I die, bury me decently. 
 Don't let the parish touch me. I have been a 
 decent woman.' No, the parish shall not touch 
 her." 
 
 " Have you the means ? " said the priest. 
 " Something I can contribute, but little ; you 
 know I am very poor." 
 
 Paolino looked wildly around the room. 
 There were only a few pence in the house. 
 
 " I will find the means," he said hoarsely. 
 
 " It will waste the money, Paolino," said 
 
 80 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 Nesta, between her sobs. " The parish would 
 do what was right." 
 
 He cast a glance at her of scorn and loathing ; 
 then, with one long look at the figure on the 
 bed, he left the chamber. 
 
 " I hope he will do nothing rash," said the 
 priest, uneasily. 
 
 " He will go and get drunk," said Nesta, 
 lighting a little oil wick under a print of the 
 Madonna. 
 
 " Hush ! " said the priest, severely, pointing to 
 the bed. 
 
 Paolino went up first to the loft where he 
 slept, took his Sunday clothes, and rolled them 
 up in a bundle. Then he went downstairs, set 
 the ladder against the wall where his plum tree 
 grew, and began to gather the plums. These 
 were the largest number which the tree had yet 
 borne. He had kept them carefully from rot and 
 caterpillar and his sister's eager fingers. He had 
 always said to himself, " They shall be for 
 mother. They shall get her good food as far 
 as they can." 
 
 He had intended to gather them on the 
 following Sunday and take them and sell them 
 in the town, and bring her back meat and wine. 
 
 8i G 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 And now he meant to sell them to help to bury 
 her. To keep her from the pauper funeral she 
 had dreaded. 
 
 They would not bringvery much, but perhaps, 
 he thought, with what his clothes would fetch, it 
 would suffice. 
 
 When gathered they filled a goodly basket — 
 beautiful, golden, cleanly fruit, free from bruise 
 or blemish. 
 
 The women who came to lay out the dead 
 saw him on the ladder, and cried out — 
 
 " What ! At work, and your mother scarce 
 cold on her bed ? Fie ! For shame of you, 
 Paolino ! " 
 
 But he heeded them not, and gathered every 
 plum off the tree. 
 
 Then he took up the basket and the bundle 
 and walked towards the town gate, from which 
 he was distant about two miles. 
 
 He walked quickly over the dust of the hot 
 summer day. It was early still, and he passed 
 people he knew going towards the town, but he 
 took no notice of them. At the gate there 
 was a great press and a great struggle, the 
 string of carts, live cattle and poultry, loads 
 of wood and straw, numbers of country people 
 
 82 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 with eggs and butter, vegetables, homespun 
 linen. 
 
 Here he was made to wait a long time. When 
 his plums were at last weighed and the duty on 
 them paid, the sun was much higher in the 
 heavens. 
 
 At last he was allowed to pass and go down 
 the long ancient street leading to the centre of 
 the town, where the greatest traffic was found. 
 The thought struck him that if he could sell 
 them, not in the market, but to passers-by or at 
 the doors of houses, he would make more money 
 by them, for market prices are always low. His 
 plums were fine, and would take the eye and the 
 fancy of ladies and children. So as he drew 
 near the end of the street he began to ciy, 
 " Plums ! Fine plums ! Who will buy plums 
 to-day ? " 
 
 He was a good-looking lad, like the young 
 men of Signorelli at Orvieto, and his eyes were 
 so brimful of sadness, of a grief which could not 
 weep and would not speak, that women, as they 
 passed, turned and looked at him, and two of 
 them bought a vine leaf laden with plums from 
 his basket. Seeing that, others came out of 
 their shop doors and bought also, so that before 
 
 83 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 he had got quite to the end of the street his 
 basket was nearly empty, and the buyers had 
 not beaten down the price, but had nearly all 
 paid liberally. 
 
 He had a whole handful of copper money, and 
 one young girl, a milliner, passing by with a 
 band-box, had taken some plums and slipped a 
 franc in his hand, because his sad wistful eyes 
 were like those of a man she loved, who was in 
 Africa. 
 
 With not more than a pound of fruit left in 
 his basket, he went on to the bridge, raising his 
 harmless cry to attract the attention of passing 
 citizens. If he got a good price for his clothes, 
 he thought he would be able to pay for the coffin 
 at once, and they would wait, with the priest's 
 aid, for the fees and the ground. 
 
 With his eyes he saw the people moving 
 around him, and the sun shining on the pave- 
 ment, and the water gliding under the bridge ; 
 but with his brain he only saw the pale dead 
 face of his mother, and with his ear he only 
 heard her voice. 
 
 Mechanically, he continued to cry aloud, 
 " Plums ! Fine plums ! Who will buy ? " 
 
 Hearing that cry, two Communal Guards, 
 
 84 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 coming over the bridge, turned and looked at 
 him and spoke to one another. A little child 
 had just stopped her father before the plum 
 basket, which Paolino had lowered on to the 
 stones that she might be able to see into it, when 
 the guards stopped in front of him. 
 
 " You have licence to sell in the streets ? " 
 said one of them. Paolino looked up, not com- 
 prehending the question, and his face grew dark 
 and hard as he saw by their garb who they 
 were. They repeated the question angrily. 
 
 " The fruit is my own. I grew it," he 
 answered, and bent down to sort for the child a 
 dozen plums. With a stroke of his sword one 
 of the guards turned the basket over and sent 
 the remaining fruit rolling in the dust. 
 
 " You are selling in the streets without licence. 
 You must come with us," they said to him ; and 
 without more preface put their hands on his 
 collar, one on each side of him. 
 
 The little child screamed, the passers-by 
 stopped, the traffic was suspended. 
 
 " What has the lad done } " asked a foreigner. 
 
 " That is no business of yours," said the 
 guards. 
 
 A brigadier, hastening up, explained. 
 
 85 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 " He is disturbing the public and hawking fruit 
 without a licence, therefore he must come before 
 the Commissary. We have his name down ; he 
 is dangerous ; he was in trouble, and disorderly, 
 a few months ago." 
 
 Paolino stood between his captors, breathing 
 hard, like a young bull tied to a stake, 
 
 " Let me go ; let me go," he muttered. " It is 
 for her burial. She died in the night. Let me 
 
 go ! " 
 
 There was a murmur of sympathy from the 
 people who had gathered round. 
 
 " Let him go," said several voices. " Some 
 one is dead. Let him go." 
 
 "Yes, she is dead!" he cried, turning to his 
 unknown friends. *' They took me up before for 
 no fault, and it killed her. I did no harm then ; 
 I do not do any now. Tell them to let me go, or 
 she will be buried like a pauper, and it was the 
 one thing she feared — the one thing she prayed 
 against. Tell them to let me go ! " 
 
 A tiger may let go, a crocodile or a python may 
 let go their prey, but not a Communal guard. 
 His captors heard the ominous murmur of pro- 
 test in the momentarily increasing throng. Two 
 drew their revolvers and pointed them at his 
 
 86 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 head ; the third, with a rapid, unforeseen move- 
 ment, tied his hands behind him. 
 
 " He is an anarchist," said the crowd, and fell 
 back a little, their sympathies chilled, their 
 personal terrors awakened. 
 
 " Let me go ; let me go ! " screamed Paolino. 
 " I am doing no wrong. The fruit is my own. 
 I planted the tree. Help me ! Help me ! 
 Good people, help me ! She died last night ! 
 I must go and bury her. My mother ! My 
 mother ! Oh, Lord ! " 
 
 But the fickle support of the populace had 
 already abandoned him and left him to his fate. 
 
 The guards gagged him and drove him 
 between them over the bridge. The last plums, 
 which had rolled against the footway, were 
 picked up and eaten by ragged boys. 
 
 When he was taken before the Commissary 
 that official recognized him. 
 
 " Again, so soon ! " he said severely. " You 
 must be a confirmed law-breaker." 
 
 When he did not return to his home, his little 
 sister said — 
 
 " There ! did I not tell you ? He is lying 
 drunk in some ditch." 
 
 The poor dead woman was buried by the parish. 
 
 ^7 
 
AN ANARCHIST 
 
 The money for the plums found on him had been 
 confiscated by the authorities. When Paolino's 
 trial came on he appeared imbecile. He was 
 sentenced to three days' imprisonment for having 
 hawked fruit in the streets without a licence ; 
 but he was condemned to seven months' im- 
 prisonment for disorderly conduct, and resistance 
 to the police, though he had made none. 
 
 This is how anarchists are begotten and 
 multiplied by law. 
 
 88 
 
RUFFO AND 
 RUFF 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 RUFFO was only twelve years of age, but he 
 remembered so many, many things, which had 
 no likeness to anything in his present existence, 
 that he thought he must be very old indeed. 
 He never spoke of these unforgotten things to 
 any one except Rufif, when they were together 
 at night in the straw of some stable or the 
 lumber of some loft. Ruff was always deeply 
 interested, having a past of his own of which he 
 could not speak, but which was always making 
 a faithful and tender heart ache wistfully. 
 
 What Rufifo remembered were blue seas, sweet- 
 smelling hills, big golden fruits, a hut among the 
 tamarisks, a woman who set him astride on her 
 neck and shoulders and ran with him into the 
 salt and sparkling foam, laughing and singing, 
 and lifting her face to his kisses. Who was she .-' 
 What were they ? When had it all been ? 
 
 Sometimes on dirty stalls, in the ugly English 
 streets with gas-jets glaring over them, he saw 
 
 91 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 the round yellow fruits which he had played 
 with amongst the flowers — poor oranges in exile, 
 so wrinkled, so dusty, so closely crammed in 
 crates or baskets, with the gas instead of the 
 sun shining on them. When he saw them he 
 always remembered more of the country of his 
 birth, and cried himself to sleep, with Ruff's 
 paws clasped round his neck. 
 
 He had been born in a village near Reggio, 
 in Calabria, and his name was Ruffo Anillino. 
 So much was on the municipal paper given 
 with him, which changed hands as he changed 
 masters. 
 
 He had been very little when his father had 
 been drowned in a hurricane, and his mother had 
 a year later died of cholera, and those relatives 
 who remained sold him to a foreign trader who 
 dealt in children, and who took him away in a ship. 
 
 That he did not recollect clearly, for he had 
 been sold many times since then, and had been 
 miserable always, and beaten and hungry, and 
 dragged through various countries and into 
 many cities and towns, so that his mind was 
 a dull, confused grey mass, in which only his 
 earliest memories were clear and sweet. 
 
 He was very small for his age, for he had 
 
 92 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 never had enough to eat ; very pale and thin, with 
 big dark eyes, which had the same patient, tired 
 sadness in them as had Ruff's, the Toby-dog. 
 
 They both belonged to a Punch and Judy 
 show — a poor show — which was ahvays moving 
 from place to place, and was never invited to 
 exhibit in houses at children's parties, but found 
 its public at country fairs and in common streets, 
 by wharf-sides and on village greens. 
 
 It was, perhaps, not worse for him than if he 
 had been sold to the sulphur mines, as so many 
 thousands of children are sold in Sicily ; but he 
 was sold, as utterly as they are, and was as help- 
 less as any poor pony in the coal-pits, or any 
 hapless ass turning a merry-go-round at a school 
 feast, or beaten by excursionists in Epping 
 Forest, or on Hampstead Heath. He did not 
 even dream of trying to end his servitude ; he 
 had not the faintest notion of where to go or 
 what to seek ; he knew nothing of any kind : 
 his only art was to make Punch play when his 
 owners were too drunk to do so, or, when they 
 took the show themselves, to grind the barrel- 
 organ and blow on the Pandean pipes. 
 
 But with these people his unhappy little lot 
 was less wretched than it had been before. 
 
 93 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 When they drank they beat hhn, but when 
 they were sober they were not unkind. He 
 liked the wandering life better than the organ- 
 grinding in London and other big towns ; and 
 then there was Rufif, his comrade, his consoler, 
 his fellow-sufferer, and fellow-slave. 
 
 Ruff was a little silver-grey Skye terrier. He 
 had been a happy and handsome little dog once, 
 who had slept on ladies' laps and on carriage 
 cushions, played on green lawns and eaten sugar, 
 worn silver bells and known pet names ; but the 
 young girl who had loved him had died in her 
 eighteenth year. Her parents, with true human 
 selfishness, gave him away, because the sight of 
 him increased their pain. Naturally, he escaped 
 from the big strange London house to which he 
 was taken, and tried to find his old home and 
 was lost in the maze of the stony streets of 
 Belgravia and clawed up by the Punch man, 
 whose Toby had died three days before. He 
 was shaved and faked that he might not be 
 known, kept on a chain, thrashed, and dressed, 
 and forced to play. His heart and his spirit 
 were broken, but he did not die. Dogs, like 
 men, often call on death in vain. 
 
 One day a little pale, dark-eyed, shivering lad 
 
 94 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 was brought by his owners to share his misery, and 
 from that day Ruffo and Ruff consoled each other. 
 
 When they were beaten they crept away and 
 kissed each other, and the pain seemed less. 
 When their stomachs were empty and their 
 bodies cold, they clung to each other in the 
 straw, and sobbed themselves to sleep. When 
 there was any sun, and there had been any 
 food, and in the rests between the exhibitions 
 the puppets lay in their box, and the man and 
 his wife were at the alehouse, Ruffo and Ruff 
 strayed away by themselves unnoticed on some 
 gorse-covered common, down some lonely lane, 
 through some cowslip meadows, or over some 
 tracks of heather. Often stones were thrown 
 at them, sometimes they were kicked through 
 a hedge, often they were told that these fields 
 and commons " weren't for the likes of them ; " 
 but at other times some good-natured woman 
 gave them a drink of milk, some cottage girl a 
 bit of bread, or an old labourer, resting his 
 rheumatism in the sun, shared with them his 
 rusty bacon and crusty loaf 
 
 " Why, yee and yer cur ain't nought but skin 
 and bone," said an old gaffer once. " Play 
 actin' is ye ? Ay, that's a bad trade." 
 
 95 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 "Would they take us on one of the farms, 
 do you think, sir? " asked Ruffo in his plaintive 
 broken English. 
 
 " Navv, they oodn't, child," said the old man, 
 pleased to be called " sir." " Ye'd not be a scrap 
 o' use, and farmers doan't cotton to furriners." 
 
 " Are we furriners ? " asked Ruffo, vaguely 
 understanding the disqualification. 
 
 "Ees, yeebe — leastways, dawg I dawn't know; 
 but there's no doubt ye've some tarnation lingo 
 o' yer own, my lad ; ye speak so mighty 
 queer." 
 
 " Do I, sir ? " asked Ruffo, sorrowfully ; he 
 could not see in what his speech differed from 
 that of the natives. "Ruff is English," he 
 added, in the hope that his companion would 
 find more favour than himself. 
 
 But the labourer shook his head. 
 
 " Dawgs they hev a bad time o't nowadays. 
 He's a play-actin' dawg is yourn ; he aren't a 
 ratter ; nobody 'd take him nowhere." 
 
 "What is a ratter. Ruff?" asked Ruffo, as 
 they went away under the shade of hawthorn 
 trees. Ruff did not know. Before this miserable 
 time of " play-actin'," he had been always with 
 his dear young mistress, driving behind her 
 
 96 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 ponies, trotting in her shadow, leaping to catch 
 her tennis-ball, running to pick up her glove, 
 sleeping on her pretty white bed. 
 
 His soft dark eyes, so like Rufifo's own, looked 
 up woefully ; they said as plainly as words 
 could have done, " Oh, if I could tell you about 
 her ! Oh, why did she die, and leave me ? " 
 
 He trotted on slowly and sadly by Ruffo's 
 side, thinking wistfully and wearily, as dogs do 
 think so often, of a life which they have loved 
 and lost. He wondered, as Ruffo wondered, 
 where had it all been ? When had it all been ? 
 What had he done that he should be so cruelly 
 punished ? Where was his dear Lady Helen ? 
 He remembered lying on her bed during her 
 illness, and being frightened because at the last 
 she was so cold and silent ; and being carried 
 away by force from her side, and locked up in 
 a distant room by the housekeeper; and after 
 that he had never seen her again, and he had 
 been sent away from the home where he had 
 been so happy with her, though he did not 
 think he had done anything wrong to deserve 
 such punishment ; he had heard them say she 
 was dead. What did " dead " mean ? 
 
 Ruff's little mind worried over all these 
 
 97 H 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 questions, and memories, and sorrows, as he went 
 down the green cart-track under the hawthorns, 
 even as Ruffo's mind wandered back to the 
 shining silver sands, and the blue water, and 
 the green boughs with their fruit of gold, and 
 the smiling face of the young mother, rosy 
 and warm with the sun. Neither of them could 
 clearly understand what they had lost, or why 
 they had lost it, but their hearts ached none 
 the less for that. 
 
 Then, after an hour or two of freedom and 
 peace, they returned to their bondage ; to the 
 whip, and the drudgery, and the toil of the per- 
 formances in the lanes and streets of the small 
 boroughs, where the show was most welcome. 
 
 But these brief hours of peace and liberty 
 kept them alive ; kept them from sinking under 
 the privations and punishments which were their 
 daily lot, for though they both tried to do 
 their best, Todd and his wife were never con- 
 tented, and were almost always more or less in 
 drink. 
 
 Whenever the receipts were meagre, both 
 Ruffo and Ruff were beaten, though it was no 
 fault of theirs if the audience was a scanty one 
 or the neighbourhood very poor. 
 
 98 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 More than once Todd had been fined for 
 cruelty to them ; but that did no good either 
 to the boy or the dog. He paid the money, 
 but they paid in added pain. 
 
 " Pray, sir, don't summon him," said Ruffo 
 one day to a benevolent person, indignant to see 
 the wheals and cuts on the child's skin. "He 
 only gives it us worse the more he has to pay." 
 
 "But he should have a month in gaol 1" said 
 the philanthropist, 
 
 "And when he came out, sir, he'd kill us 
 both, sir." 
 
 " But I would put you in an industrial school, 
 where he could not get at you." 
 
 " And Ruff, please ? " 
 
 " Oh, the dog ! The dog would be taken by 
 the police." 
 
 " Then I'll stay with Todd," said Ruffo, and, 
 to the gentleman's indignant surprise, he took 
 to his heels as fast as he could run, followed 
 closely by Ruff, and darted into a dark alley 
 and was lost to sight. 
 
 To Ruffo's relief, Todd left that little town 
 the same afternoon, having taken fright at 
 questions that had been asked of him there 
 concerning his right to the child. 
 
 99 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 " I bought him. Didn't I buy him, the little 
 dirty wretch ? " he said to his wife. " Gave 
 three good yellow-boys for him, and that's 
 two more than he's wuth — lazy forrin scum 
 as he be." 
 
 Mrs. Todd demurred. To her Ruffo was very 
 useful ; she made him cook and sweep, and 
 fetch and carry, and buy drink for her unknown 
 to her husband, and even wash her clothes in 
 running water ; and he was such a httle fool 
 she could make him do anything if she gave 
 the dog a good meal. 
 
 " He'd rayther the dawg ate than eat hisself," 
 she said to her friends. " He must be a dratted, 
 half-witted little simpleton. Never seed a lad 
 in all my days as 'ud rayther a dawg ate than 
 eat hisself." 
 
 But however foolish he might be, he was 
 well worth the three pounds he had cost to 
 his owners. 
 
 If he could only get back to the sun and 
 the sea and the oranges, and take Ruff there ! 
 Alas ! he did not know it, but he had little 
 brothers and cousins yonder, where the oranges 
 grew, as ill off as himself and, perhaps, worse 
 off; little fair-haired slaves of the sulphur, little 
 
 100 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 Carusi, half-naked, half-blind, toiling up and 
 down all day long with the blistering mineral 
 on their backs, sold into bondage as he had 
 been, and seeing no hope or likelihood of deliver- 
 ance from one year's end to the other. Poor 
 little Carusi ! They only saw the sun through 
 their smarting, reddened eyes ; the lizards 
 played on the grass, but they toiled from dawn 
 to dark ; the oranges grew ripe in the warm 
 sea wind, but no drop of the juice of the fruit 
 moistened their parched cracked lips ; poor 
 slaves of the great grinding wheel of Com- 
 merce, born where all Nature is glad, except 
 themselves, and the weary, footsore mules 
 who toil with them. 
 
 But Ruffo knew nothing of their fate ; he 
 only knew his own troubles and Ruff's, as they 
 trudged along the dust and the slush of English 
 roads, in company with Punch and Judy. 
 Ruffo pushed a hand-cart on which the show, 
 taken to pieces, was packed ; and when Todd 
 was not with them, or was in a good humour, 
 he made Ruff a bed on the cart to save 
 his tired feet, for Ruff got soon foot-sore, 
 having all his previous life been used to 
 running on garden lawns and in grassy lanes, 
 
 lOI 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 and to being driven about lying on carriage 
 cushions. 
 
 The hand-cart was heavy, and the roads were 
 usually bad from either drought or rain, and 
 the child's strength was exceedingly small. 
 One day he and the cart reached a little town 
 on the western border of Hampshire, seven 
 miles from the sea ; it was ancient and cheerful 
 and quiet, with its streets touching fields and 
 woods, and its scanty population neighbourly 
 and kind. Todd had relations there, and 
 stayed longer than it was his usual habit to 
 remain in one place, and Rufifo and Ruff had 
 time to grow popular there. Their owners 
 were jealous, and apprehensive of interference ; 
 but even they saw that it was in their interests 
 to let the boy and the dog become friends with 
 those inclined to befriend them. Mrs. Todd 
 contented herself with emptying Ruffo's pockets 
 whenever she could, and giving Ruff nothing 
 at all to eat, alleging that he got so much from 
 other folks that he grew fat and lazy. 
 
 " I'll teach you to go a-whining to folks as 
 if ye weren't fed," said Mrs. Todd, so that the 
 more fortunate he was in getting something to 
 eat from the public pity the more unfortunate 
 
 102 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 was he in incurring her wrath and feeh'ng it 
 likewise on his poor little bones. 
 
 The Todds had a good many old friends in 
 and around this place, and Rufifo and Ruff 
 obtained more leisure than usual because the 
 performances were less frequent than in larger 
 and less hospitable neighbourhoods. Punch and 
 Judy remained undisturbed in their box, and 
 the boy and the dog could escape into the 
 pleasant country round about the little borough. 
 One morning early they had got out thus into 
 the country whilst their owners were sleeping 
 the heavy sleep of the drunkard. The air 
 was sweet and fresh, for it was midsummer ; 
 birds sang ; cattle standing in shallow reaches 
 of reedy water looked so contented and peace- 
 ful that Ruffo wished he were one of them. 
 It was an old-fashioned bit of rural England, 
 with thatched houses hidden in orchards, and 
 a tall spire rising amidst tall elms, and sandy 
 roads, narrow and grass-grown running up and 
 down under overhanging hawthorns and high 
 banks fragrant with flowers. Ruffo felt the 
 peace of it all sink into his little tired soul. 
 
 Ruff rambled a little here and there, eating 
 a blade or two of dog grass, paddling his often 
 
 103 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 cracked and sore little feet in the rivulets of 
 water, remembering just such lanes as this, 
 or just such mornings as this, when he had 
 been Lady Helen's pet, with his silver bell 
 on his blue ribbon. When had that been ? 
 Why could he never find that place? Why, 
 in all his wanderings, could he never see it 
 again ? W^hat makes dogs sufifer so much and 
 so long is the great constancy of their affections 
 and tenacity of their memories, coupled to 
 that cruel bondage, and the impossibility of 
 following their instincts, in which nine out of 
 ten of them spend their unpitied lives. 
 
 Ruffo was thinking how glad he would be 
 if they both could get taken on one of these 
 farms which looked so pleasant to him, and 
 of whose bereaved cow-mothers in their stalls, 
 and poor calf-children sent to slaughter, and 
 hardly-worked carthorses, and starved sheep, 
 dogs, and chickens choked with crammed 
 gullets, and poisoned blackbirds and mavises 
 in the orchards he knew nothing : the green 
 fields looked so fresh and cool and quiet, the 
 sheep so white and fat, the great stacks of 
 corn so promising of plenty. 
 
 In the midst of his reverie a thing of steel, 
 
 104 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 half-beast, half-bird, all made of metal, whizzed 
 down the grassy lane and knocked him over, 
 grazed him, maimed him, and vanished, a shrill, 
 unkind laugh whistling through the air. 
 
 Ruff, roused from his reverie, dashed after 
 the offender with an angry volley of barks ; 
 but the bicycle was already out of sight in 
 the green haze of the leafy distance. 
 
 Ruff ran back to his fallen friend and covered 
 him with kisses, whining eloquently. 
 
 " It doesn't hurt much," said Ruffo to console 
 him, though showers of sparks seemed to fill 
 the air, and a buzzing like a swarm of bees 
 was in his ears ; he felt himself anxiously all 
 over. If anything in him were broken, what 
 would his master say to him ? They would 
 drive him away, or send him to a hospital, he 
 thought, and then what would happen ? He 
 would never see Ruff: Ruff would be taken 
 away with the show to who could tell what 
 villages or towns and unknown places. 
 
 "I think I'm quite whole, Ruff; he didn't 
 break me," he said, after stretching and pinch- 
 ing each of his limbs, as he had seen men do 
 when they had a fall or an accident ; he ached 
 all over, but he had no bones fractured or 
 
 105 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 sprained. " How glad I am it wasn't you, 
 Ruff! — it would have killed you, the wicked 
 byke ! " he murmured to the dog, who whined 
 again, but now, with pleasure, leaping up into 
 his arms. 
 
 A large shadow loomed across the sunlit turf 
 of the lane. 
 
 "What be you a-doin' here? Tramps, I 
 reckon," said a big, burly man who came 
 through a break in the hedge ; he was one 
 of the policemen of the town, but he had his 
 house and his family under the hawthorn trees 
 in this lane. 
 
 Ruffo knew what " tramp " meant ; he hurried 
 to pull off his little shabby hat, and answer. 
 
 "Oh no, sir, we are not tramps," he said, 
 in very frightened tones. " Ruff is dog Toby, 
 and I'm the pipes." 
 
 " What rot's that ? " bawled the man. 
 
 " Please, sir, it's truth," said Ruffo, piteously. 
 " If you ask for Mr. Todd at the " 
 
 "Ye're Todd's brat, are you?" said the giant, 
 standing over them in grim contempt. " Todd's 
 a blaggard, and ye' re a little rip ; been stealin' 
 eggs, I'll be bound. Let me catch ye at it ! " 
 
 Ruffo's small brown thin face grew red. At 
 
 1 06 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 times, when there was a safe occasion Todd 
 made him get Inside fowl-houses and bring 
 him out eggs, or even a pkimp pullet. He 
 did not like doing It — he never did it on his 
 own account — but it was always with Todd a 
 question of prompt obedience or the stick ; 
 and Todd, who was shrewd, had come to 
 perceive that It hurt Rufifo more to see Ruff 
 beaten than It did to be beaten himself. 
 
 " Let me catch ye at it!" said the big man, 
 savagely ; and to confirm his threat he took 
 Ruffo's ragged jacket In his hand, lifted him up 
 by It, and shook him. 
 
 Ruffo screamed, for he already felt sore and 
 aching all over from his fall. Ruff flew at the 
 constable's legs. 
 
 " Down, Ruff— oh dear, Ruff, don't ! — pray, 
 pray, pray don't ! " he cried in terror ; for it was 
 not the first time that Ruff had taken his part 
 and suffered cruelly for it. 
 
 " Get out, you vermin ! " said the man, and 
 gave a kick which would have brained or 
 crippled the little dog if he had not dodged It 
 and got between Ruffo's ankles, growling and 
 waiting for attack. 
 
 Rufifo fell on his knees. 
 
 107 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 " Kill me, sir ! I don't mind. Do kill me, if 
 you like ; but pray, pray don't hurt Ruff. He 
 doesn't mean to be rude. He only wants to 
 take care of me." 
 
 " Ye're a pretty pair ! " said the man ; but he 
 took his hand off Ruffo's jacket. " Todd '11 
 hear my mind about ye." 
 
 Ruffo shivered ; but he was silent, pressing 
 his knees convulsively upon Ruff's sides to keep 
 him quiet. 
 
 "Ye'll be in gaol afore new moon, and yer 
 little beast '11 get his dose of arsenic," said the 
 man. " Hi, be off with ye both, or I won't 
 answer to keep my hands off of ye." 
 
 Ruffo stumbled stupidly on to his feet, caught 
 Ruff in his arms, and took to flight as fast as 
 his aching limbs would let him go over the 
 grassy wheel-tracks of the steep country lane. 
 
 He clasped Ruff to his chest closer and closer 
 as he stumbled on his way, hugging him so 
 tightly that the little dog was half stifled. But 
 they were both safe for the present hour. 
 
 The big burly man looked after them with 
 unfriendly eyes. 
 
 " Long's muzzHn' regulation '11 soon be coming 
 round to us," he said to himself, *' and then 
 
 io8 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 we'll pay 'em out — the dirty little furrin brat 
 and his durned cur : there ought to be one law 
 all over the country for vagabones and dawgs." 
 
 Rufifo and Ruff reached the pothouse where 
 Todd and his wife, and Punch and his wife, 
 were housed on the outskirts of the little rural 
 town, and got back to the loft in which they 
 slept before the absence of either had been 
 noticed by their owners. In an hour's time they 
 went out with the show and with Mrs. Todd 
 alone, for her husband was still sleeping off his 
 drink ; Ruff imprisoned in his usual costume, 
 and Ruffo staggering under the weight of the 
 theatre. 
 
 It was a fine evening, with a south wind after 
 rain ; many people were out in their cottage 
 gardens or strolling along the roads and streets. 
 It was known that it was one of their last 
 appearances in that town, and they had con- 
 siderable success. Ruffo's back and limbs 
 ached terribly ; but he tried not to think about 
 them, and played on the pipes with as much 
 spirit as though he had been a little fairy 
 making music in the glades of Arcady. Ever 
 and again he looked up at Ruff above him on 
 the platform of the show, and smiled at him ; 
 
 109 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 and Ruff looked down and wagged his tail 
 where it peeped out from under the little red 
 coat in which he was dressed, so sadly to his 
 own discomfort. 
 
 When the performance was ended Ruff 
 walked about amongst the people holding a 
 little tray strapped to his right paw. It was 
 the part of all his compulsory duties which he 
 hated the most. To stand, or walk erect, is 
 always very painful to any dog, and strains 
 their muscles cruelly, and Ruff was wounded in 
 his pride as well ; he could not endure to beg, 
 he who had been Lady Helen's darling, and 
 had the blue blood of Scotland in his veins. 
 Ruffo also could never bear to see him in that 
 cap and coat, begging, to the laughing, jeering, 
 unkind idlers, and as soon as he dared he 
 slipped in through the throng, and unstrapped 
 the tray from the little dog's paw, and went 
 round himself, to spare his friend, and the tray 
 was soon heavy with pence, and there were even 
 a few sixpences and threepenny-bits amongst 
 them that evening. 
 
 Ruffo's face always touched the well-springs 
 of pity in the hearts of some of the mothers ; it 
 was such a wan and weary little face, with its 
 
 no 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 great starry eyes, and the thick auburn curls, 
 dusty and tangled, above the low brow. 
 
 ** He looks homesick, he dew," said one of the 
 matrons. " Yer come from over seas, don't ye, 
 little man ? " 
 
 "Yes, ma'am," said Ruffo, humbly : he knew 
 that he had been brought over a wild waste of 
 waters, and that they called those waters a sea. 
 
 The good soul went into a baker's shop and 
 bought some stale rolls and a square of ginger- 
 bread, and shoved them into Rufifo's pocket. 
 
 '' Eat 'em when ye get home, child ; ye look 
 more'n half-starved." 
 
 Rufifo's eyes glistened ; for once he hoped he 
 and Ruff would have enough to eat when they 
 went to bed. 
 
 But Mrs. Todd was looking at him from 
 where she stood in the distance, guarding the 
 theatre and the puppets. He was never allowed 
 to keep anything that the public gave him. He 
 might learn to get habits of independence. She 
 wrenched the bread and cake away from him as 
 soon as she could do so unseen, and then boxed 
 his ears because he burst out crying, and cuffed 
 Ruff because in sympathy he howled. 
 
 " Gived yer, was it ? Yer own, was it .-' I'll 
 
 III 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 teach yer to think as the likes o' you can have 
 proputty ! " she said viciously, and drummed on 
 his head with the wooden money-tray. 
 
 And Ruff and he were sent supperless to their 
 bed in the straw. 
 
 " That good woman said ' home,' Ruff — what 
 is 'home'?" ^said Rufifo, hugging his fellow- 
 victim in the dark. "We haven't any home, 
 Ruff, you and I haven't any." 
 
 Ruff would have said, if he could have 
 spoken : " We have made a home in each 
 other's heart." 
 
 They sobbed themselves to sleep ; the painful, 
 restless, fitful sleep of those whose stomachs are 
 empty ; and Ruffo dreamed of the bright blue 
 sea and the shining sand, and the feathery 
 tamarisks, and Ruff dreamed of his lost little 
 lady as he had seen her last — so white, so still, 
 with her golden hair lying on the pillows, and 
 her motionless hands crossed on her chest, the 
 small soft hands which had never touched him 
 save to caress. 
 
 Who cared what dreams they had, or what 
 hunger they felt, a little Italian beggar boy, and 
 a dog Toby ? 
 
 Ruffo was sorry when, a few days later, he 
 
 113 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 heard Todd say that they should move on the 
 day after the morrow. Todd seldom stayed 
 long in any place ; he was nowhere popular 
 with authority, and small thefts from poultry 
 yards and fruit gardens and rabbit hutches were 
 always more frequent in any neighbourhood he 
 honoured with his presence. 
 
 " 'Tis fine bright weather, and we'll best move 
 on across the Dossetshire border," Ruftb heard 
 him say to his wife, who demurred that they 
 were doing very well where they were. 
 
 " Ay, ay, well enough ; but 'tis allcrs best to 
 keep moving," said Todd, 
 
 Movement was agreeable to Todd ; he went 
 third class by rail himself everywhere, and left his 
 " old woman " to toil on foot as she might, 
 driving on Ruffo before her ; sometimes getting 
 a lift on a carrier's cart, but not often, being 
 afraid to let her little slaves out of her sight. 
 
 " He may go and hide somewheres with that 
 dawg," she said to herself. " Child'en is that 
 ongrateful." 
 
 But for four days more they were to remain 
 in this friendly little town, with its grass-grown 
 hilly streets and its square church tower where 
 the owls built, and its sweet scents of hay, and 
 
 113 I 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 of strawberries blown in from the surrounding 
 country. 
 
 The little town had a market, and a market 
 day, when there were many country people, and 
 much open-air traffic, and loud bleating of 
 frightened sheep, and lowing of calves, and cack- 
 ling of hens, and crowing of barndoor monarchs, 
 and heaps of fresh vegetables and sheaves of 
 herbs and big bunches of homely roses, wall- 
 flowers, and clove pinks. 
 
 Above the market stalls with their leathern 
 awnings and wooden trestles there was a blue 
 sky, and it made that vague but unforgotten past 
 stir in Ruffo's mind as he stared up at it. It 
 was so seldom he saw a blue sky now ; and then, 
 by that train of connecting thoughts to which 
 learned people give a long name, there came 
 back to him the memories of the seashore, and 
 the orange boughs, and the laughing face of his 
 mother, and he ceased to see anything that was 
 actually around him. 
 
 " Was there iver yer like ? Drat ye fur dream- 
 in' and gapin' ! Wake up, and custoom the 
 dawg ! " screamed Jane Todd in his ear. 
 
 Rufifo started and opened frightened eyes 
 upon the scene before him ; the low homely 
 
 114 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 houses, the ranges of stalls and skips and bar- 
 rows, the country folks jostling one another ; the 
 solemn grey church closing one end of the square. 
 He took up Ruff tenderly and put on his little 
 red coat, his frill, and his cap and feather, then 
 kissed the little dog upon his nose to lessen the 
 humiliation. No amount of usage ever made 
 his travesty less hateful to poor Ruff, and his 
 eyes as dark and almost as large as Ruffo's own, 
 and equally full of wondering dumb sorrow, 
 gazed v/oefully out from the shade of the plumed 
 cap which was tied under his chin, and which, 
 he felt, made him look so ridiculous. 
 
 Some street boys were looking on and 
 laughing and pointing at him. Ruffo made 
 haste to disappear with him behind the drapery 
 
 of the show. 
 
 " There is nothing to mock at us for, darling 
 
 Ruffie ! " he murmured to his fellow-sufferer. 
 
 " Oh, if I could only run in on them with a 
 
 knife ! " 
 
 For Ruffo had slumbering in him, though 
 
 chilled and slackened by privation and fear, the 
 
 hot blood of southern mariners who had been 
 
 wont for generations to pay affronts with steel. 
 
 When the English children grinned and pointed 
 
 115 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 at his beloved four-footed friend he felt all his 
 hot blood boil in his little jaded, tired body. He 
 was a gentle little soul, with almost all spirit 
 beaten out of him, but he came of a fiery and 
 dauntless race, and he would not have been a 
 Calabrian if he had not felt a jeer still more 
 unendurable than a blow. 
 
 " Laugh ! Laugh ! Laugh ! " he said, with 
 his small white teeth clenched ; " laugh, you 
 boors, you asses ! You are not worth one hair 
 of Ruff's head ! " 
 
 " What bosh be yer a-mutterin' ? " said Mrs. 
 Todd. " Why, them boys could smash yer in a 
 jiffey, as if yer was a dumbledore. Yer mind 
 and keep a civil tongue in yer 'ead. 'Tis well 
 for ye as yer speaks so queer like as yer bain't 
 easy onderstood. 'Ere, give me the dawg and 
 get yer out with the music." 
 
 Ruffo obeyed, for her heavy hands pushed 
 him outside the curtain, and the pipes and the 
 triangle duly announced the approaching per- 
 formance of Mr. Punch, whilst Mrs, Todd within 
 grasped Ruff and the puppets to begin the 
 familiar, but ever-attractive tragedy. At the 
 sound of the " music " the street boys, already 
 in front of the show, were joined by others ; 
 
 ii6 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 children ran from all quarters, servants who had 
 their market baskets well filled upon their arms 
 stopped on their way home ; waggoners, carters, 
 yokels, and idlers joined the throng, and even 
 the market-women under their awnings turned 
 their heads towards Mr. Punch's temple, 
 and momentarily forgot their customers and 
 remembered their childhood. 
 
 Suddenly a big man strode through the crowd 
 and up to the little theatre. 
 
 "Stop that 'ere performance," he said, in 
 a loud, authoritative voice. " Dawg aren't 
 muzzled." 
 
 Ruffo lifted his eyes and ceased to blow on 
 the Pandean pipe and jingle the triangle. 
 
 He recognized the man who had collared 
 and threatened him in the lane ten days 
 before. 
 
 "Stop that 'ere performance," repeated the 
 man ; " muzzle the dawg ! " 
 
 Muzzle Toby ! The throng laughed jeeringly, 
 but murmured. Punch was popular, the police- 
 man was not. 
 
 " Muzzle the dawg," said the Jack-in-office ; 
 " matter o' public safety. Wheer's the 
 owner ? " 
 
 117 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 Ruffb threw the triangle down on the stones 
 and darted between the curtains. 
 
 " Oh, ma'am ! oh, ma'am ! They're after Ruff ! 
 Give him to me and let me run ! " 
 
 "What?" bawled Mrs. Todd, who did not 
 understand. 
 
 It was the moment of dog Toby's ever-effective 
 appearance, and she clutched him fiercely round 
 the throat. Ruffo clasped him round the body ; 
 Ruff struggled to get out of the woman's hands 
 and escape to his friend. The red rough face of 
 the constable showed itself at the aperture over 
 the limp forms of Punch and of Judy lying 
 prone upon their wooden platform. 
 
 " Stop this 'ere performance," repeated the 
 constable, "leastways, till yer dawg be muz- 
 zled." 
 
 " Muzzled ? What rot be ye a-talkin' ? " said 
 Mrs. Todd, her head and shoulders with Ruff 
 clutched under her arm appearing above the 
 bodies of Punch and Judy. 
 
 " Rot ? I'll see yer rotted ! " said the guardian 
 of the public weal. " Law kem down 'ere last 
 night. My lords' horders. Board o' Agricultur'. 
 Every dawg en the County to be muzzled for a 
 year : wire muzzle. What's yer name ? Wheer's 
 
 iiS 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 yer 'abitation ? What's yer callin' ? Whcer's 
 yer receipt for dog-tax ? " 
 
 " He ain't a dog ; he's a Toby ! " screamed 
 Mrs. Todd. " He can't act if he's muzzled. 
 Irvin' hisself couldn't act in a muzzle, ye know 
 that, man. Git away and let the show go 
 on " 
 
 " I'll run yer in at onst, with yer cur and yer 
 little shaver, if ye don't kip a civil tongue in 
 yer head," yelled the man in authority. 
 
 The crowd behind him, though still laughing, 
 began to mutter rebelliously. 
 
 " Dog can't act if ye strap his mouth up," said 
 a sturdy blacksmith ; " and there ought to be 
 some notice aforehand to the public." 
 
 " Don't yer cheek me, or it'll be the wuss for 
 ye," said the constable, turning round ominously. 
 "The law's the law, and shell be respecket as 
 long as I'm in the force. Ye all o' ye know Job 
 Perrett. Woman, what's yer callin' ? Where's 
 yer receipt for dog-tax ? " 
 
 " Woman .^ Mef Hoity-toity!" screamed Jane 
 Todd in great wrath, but inwardly quaking and 
 quailing, and throttling poor Ruff under her 
 bony arm. "And Lord ! sakes, Mr. Perrett ! ye 
 knows us well enow. We've a-bin this round 
 
 119 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 full twenty year, if one, my man and me ; and 
 
 as for this pore little Toby Hold yer row, 
 
 child, can't ye? Yc'll only make matters 
 worse." 
 
 These last words she whispered savagely to 
 Ruffo, who clung to her skirts and to Ruff. 
 
 " Let 'em go on ! Let 'em go on ! " shouted 
 several people in the crowd. 
 
 '• 'Tain't fair to stop 'em in the middle," said 
 the sturdy smith. 
 
 Another constable came up. 
 
 "Ye can summon 'em, Job. Summon 'em. 
 That'll do." 
 
 "Ay, that'll do," said the crowd. 
 
 " There's lots o' dogs loose. Take 'em first," 
 chimed Mrs. Todd. "This pore little Toby 
 can't hurt nobody." 
 
 " We'll take 'em up, all on 'em, don't ye fear," 
 said Job Perrett, grimly. " But this 'ere Toby- 
 dog's a wicious cur, and dangerous to the public 
 safety. He's a'out a muzzle in a public place. 
 The law's the law, aren't it the law, Garge ? " 
 
 George, who was his fellow-constable, assented 
 somewhat unwillingly. 
 
 "Summon 'em. That'll do," he said again, 
 for the crowd was getting more and more out 
 
 120 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 of temper, ill-pleased with the muzzling order in 
 all its aspects, and irritated at having the show 
 stopped. At this moment Ruff succeeded in 
 his frantic struggles to free himself from the 
 suffocating grasp of Jane Todd, and even from 
 the beloved hands of Ruffo. He had recognized 
 Ruffo's enemy of the hawthorn lane, and leaped 
 on to the little platform where the fallen forms 
 of Punch and Judy were lying, and flew at the 
 constable, his whole little person quivering with 
 rage, his eyes blazing, and his small white teeth 
 gleaming. Job Perrett sprang backwards in a 
 paroxysm of terror, and the crowd, delighted, 
 cheered the dog. Ruff, for the moment vic- 
 torious, stood upon the ledge barking and 
 growling furiously, his frill trembling in his 
 spasms of rage, his cap and feather fallen on the 
 ground, his tail vibrating in fury beyond the 
 lappets of the coat. He paid no heed to Ruffo's 
 prayers and trembling appeals ; he had driven 
 back a foe ; he was pleased and glad once more 
 after so many miserable years. 
 
 "Ye're a good pluckt one, ye are!" shouted 
 the smith ; and the crowd cheered the little dog 
 again, and pelted the policemen with derisive 
 
 *-t> 
 names. 
 
 121 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 Ruff was very small, but in these moments he 
 looked almost as large as a lion, where he stood 
 above the prostrate puppets, with his head held 
 up in fearless wrath, challenging his foe to come 
 near him again if he dared. 
 
 " Summon 'em, summon 'em," muttered his 
 comrade George to Job Perrett. "That'll do. 
 Summon 'em." 
 
 " Summon 'em?" shrieked Perrett. " Summon 
 them — when they bring a mad dog in public? 
 Look at 'im ! 'E's ravin' mad ! I've a duty to 
 perform, and PU do it ! " 
 
 Little Ruff stood on the ledge above the form 
 of Punch, showing his pretty pearl-like teeth and 
 drawing his breath fast and furiously ; all his 
 gallant Scottish blood was on fire ; for once he 
 was wholly deaf to the voice of his friend. All 
 the bondage of five cruel years was forgotten ; 
 he was once more Lady Helen's darling, defying 
 all the bullies and all the cowards of the 
 world. 
 
 " P've a duty to do, and Pll do it," cried Job 
 Perrett. " Yah, yer little brute !— take that ! " 
 
 And with all the force of a very strong man 
 strung to the highest pitch by personal terror, 
 he swung his truncheon above his head and 
 
 122 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 brought it down with murderous weight on the 
 little silvery head of Ruff. 
 
 Ruff dropped like a stone ; his skull was 
 fractured. 
 
 A sullen roar of censure rose up from the 
 indignant crowd. 
 
 "Which be the brute now?" cried the black- 
 smith. 
 
 "The poor dear little dog, he hadn't done 
 naught ! " cried an apple-woman. 
 
 The storm of hisses grew loud ; the constables 
 left the show and faced the angry throng, 
 nervously conscious that they had public opinion 
 against them. 
 
 "Ye bully blackguards!" screamed Jane 
 Todd. " Todd will be fit to kill me when he 
 hears o't. Ye'vc spoilt my gains for the Lord 
 knows how long. 'Tis Black Saturday with 
 a vengeance. Afore we'll be able to train 
 another Toby " 
 
 She leaned out over the aperture, yelling and 
 sobbing, thinking only of her lost receipts and 
 of the difficulty of training a Toby. 
 
 In the noise, the confusion, the bawling, the 
 sympathy of the crowd, the turbulence of her 
 own outcries and lamentation, she never looked 
 
 123 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 down at the little murdered dog, or saw that 
 Ruflb, who had caught him as he fell, had 
 rushed out of the show with the warm quiver- 
 ing body of his little friend clasped tightly to 
 his chest. 
 
 Ruffb thought that he was only stunned. He 
 ran with the fleetness of a hunted hare through 
 two or three of the narrow old streets which 
 twisted round about the market place, and never 
 paused until he reached a farrier's shop in 
 a dusky lane. The farrier had a few days before 
 praised Ruff as a "rare thoro'bred un," and had 
 said it was a cruel shame to see such a dosf 
 come down to a Punch's show. Ruffo rushed 
 breathless into the shop, and found the good 
 man there. 
 
 "Oh, sir, look at him, please!" he cried. 
 " The wicked man has struck him — struck him 
 on his head. Pray— pray do look at him ; do 
 save him ! " 
 
 The farrier, startled, put on his spectacles, 
 and bent down to look at the little dog in the 
 boy's arms. 
 
 "Ay, ay! What a pity!" he said sadly. 
 " My poor lad, he isn't hurt ; he's dead ! " 
 
 "Dead!" 
 
 124 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 "Dead, sure enough. Look at that," said 
 the farrier, gently touching the blood-stained, 
 fractured little skull. "Who did it? 'Twas 
 a brutal deed." 
 
 "Dead ! " repeated Rufifo, stupidly. 
 He had not understood ; he had known that 
 Ruff was cruelly injured, but because the body 
 was still warm and the eyes still open, he had 
 not thought that it was death. He stood still, 
 holding Ruff to him, the dark blood staining 
 his shirt. 
 
 " Don't look like that, child," said the old 
 man, earnestly. " The poor little dog's dead, 
 sure enough ; but 'twas no fault o' yours, I'm 
 certain. Who did it ? " 
 
 Ruffo did not answer, or even seem to hear ; 
 his gaze was strained and fixed, his small brown 
 face ashen grey. 
 
 " Leave the body with me," said the old man, 
 meaning to be kind. " I've a bit o' garden at 
 the back, I'll bury him decent, under the 
 elder tree. You can come and dig the hole, if 
 you like." 
 
 Rufifo still did not seem to hear ; he kept the 
 
 head of Ruff pressed to him. 
 
 " The blood's a-spoiling your clothes," said 
 
 125 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 the farrier. " What's the matter, child ? Don't 
 look like that. They'll give ye another do^. 
 Come out into my bit o' garden." 
 
 He stretched his hand out to take the body 
 of Rufif, meaning well ; but Ruffo shrank from 
 him in a spasm of terror. 
 
 " Do not touch him, or I will kill you ! " he 
 hissed through his white pointed teeth, as 
 white and as pointed as were poor little Ruff's ; 
 his eyes were strained open to an abnormal size ; 
 his whole frame was convulsed. He rushed from 
 the shop and was out of sight down the lane 
 before the farrier had time to get to the door- 
 way and call after him to come back, saying no 
 harm had been meant. 
 
 Once across the threshold, Ruffo ran on and 
 on, blindly and aimlessly, along the crooked 
 lane, which was silent and empty, for its 
 inhabitants were at the market square. 
 
 Nobody stopped him, or even gave a thought 
 to him — a little, ill-clad, hungry-looking being — 
 with his tangled curls blowing in the north-west 
 wind. He held the body of Ruff close to his 
 chest, and the poor little blood-stained head 
 rested upon his right shoulder. 
 
 He ran on at first at a furious speed, then at 
 
 126 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 a more halting trot, then at a laboured, breath- 
 less pace ; but he covered much ground, and had 
 soon passed the limits of the small town and 
 gained the outlying country. 
 
 He was dimly conscious that all was calm 
 and cool around him ; that there were no more 
 walls or houses ; that there were groves and 
 hedges and tall trees in their stead, great wide 
 green fields, and a slow, winding river. 
 
 But he continued to run onward, though his 
 feet were sore and all his bones were aching. 
 
 Of physical pain he had no consciousness. 
 All he was sensible of was that Ruff was dead — 
 that he was all alone. 
 
 He ran on because he had only one instinct 
 left : to get away from the brutal town, from 
 the men and women, from the people who had 
 killed Ruff, and who would take Ruff out of his 
 arms and thrust him out of sight under the 
 earth. 
 
 Some haymakers looked at him. 
 
 " What's that queer-looking little chap 
 about? " said one. 
 
 Another answered : 
 
 " He've got a cur he's a-goin' to drown," for 
 from the distance of the meadow in which they 
 
 127 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 were mowing, they could not see that the dog 
 was dead. 
 
 " He looks rare queer," said the first man ; but 
 they did not think any more about him. 
 
 He had no clear thought, no definite object. 
 All he knew was that Ruff was dead, and that 
 they wanted to take the body of his friend away 
 from him. He ran on as a hunted creature does, 
 on the mere mad instinct to escape. He had no 
 idea where to go, or what he meant to do ; he 
 only wanted to escape from every one and hide 
 himself with Ruff. 
 
 His little dirty shabby figure toiled on along 
 the roads, passing from sunshine to shade, and 
 out of shade into sunshine, unmolested, until 
 roads ceased, all cultivated land was far behind 
 him,'and wide moors covered with gorse stretched 
 to the north, to the west, to the east. On the 
 south was a plain, but a liquid plain : blue, 
 silver, radiant, rippling, moving, heaving. It 
 was only the estuary by Christchurch, but 
 the tide was high, and the noon was bright, 
 and the water, usually so dull and sad, sparkled 
 in the unwonted light, and tumbled and played 
 joyously, blown by the south-west wind. 
 
 Ruffo, standing amongst ^the sand of the 
 
 128 
 
RUFFO AND RUFF 
 
 mainland, saw the stir of waves for the first 
 time since he Had been brought to these English 
 shores. He thought it was the blue sea of his 
 memories, the southern sea of his lost home. 
 
 " Eccomi ! Eccomi ! " he cried, in the tongue 
 of his childhood. He was here. Did the sea 
 not know him ? 
 
 The sea was safety, refuge, peace ; the sea 
 would take him home ! 
 
 With the body of Ruft" clasped to his breast, 
 and the small blood-stained head lying on his 
 shoulder, he ran down the slope of the downs to 
 the beach below, and across the beach to the 
 fringe of foam. The glad water leaped up and 
 frolicked about his weary limbs, and kissed his 
 bruised feet, and washed white the stunned brain 
 of little Ruff. 
 
 " Eccomi ! Eccomi ! " he cried again, and 
 with the dog's body locked in his arms he ran 
 farther, and farther, and farther into the fresh 
 cool waves. 
 
 The sea was merciful, and took them both. 
 
 In their death they were not divided. 
 
 129 K 
 
EL BRUG 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 "You must not speak if you are spoken to, 
 Palma," said her mother. " If they ask you 
 questions you must say nothing in reply ; 
 nothing, do you hear? Nothing. You must 
 not say what is untrue, but neither must you 
 tell the truth. Be silent, only silent, whatever 
 they may say or do. Do you understand me, 
 my beloved ? " 
 
 " Of course I understand," said Palma. 
 
 She was a child of ten years old, strong and 
 tall for her age ; lithe, agile, and flexible as a 
 stem of the bamboos in their old garden. She 
 was fair, with the warm, bright fairness of a 
 Veronese angel ; her skin was like the snows of 
 the Lombard Alps when the sunrise makes them 
 flush ; her eyes were dark, wide-open, fearless, 
 under level brows. 
 
 She answered her young mother briefly. 
 
 " I understand." 
 
 Her mother, Silvia Dolabella, looked at her 
 
 133 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 wistfully. It was a frail bark to which to trust 
 so much sacred treasure. 
 
 "Your father's life is in your hands," she 
 murmured. 
 
 Palma nodded. There was a gleam of im- 
 patience in her eyes as of one who thought, 
 "What need is there to say the same thing 
 twice ? " She was a child of few words. 
 
 " Darling, do not be so cold," murmured Silvia 
 Dolabella. "You are so very young. To lay 
 such a load upon you ; it breaks my heart." 
 
 Palma pushed her hair up off her brow. 
 
 "I am little," she said; "but I am strong. 
 You should not doubt me, mother. He never 
 does." 
 
 She meant her father. 
 
 " I do not doubt you, love," said her mother. 
 " But you are a little angiolino in bronze ; you 
 are hard, Palma. When I clasp you to my 
 breast you are hard and cold, not as other 
 children are. And you are not with me as you 
 are with him ; you love him most, Palma." 
 
 The poor woman wept. 
 
 The child coloured. She did not deny the 
 charge. 
 
 "It is different," she said, after a pause, 
 
 134 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 " But I love you, mother, too. Only you want 
 it said, and it teases me to say it. Things 
 like that do not want talking of; they lie 
 down, down, down, deep down — down ever so 
 far." 
 
 " You are a strange creature ; you are out 
 of my reach," said her mother, with a sigh. 
 "You have heard of too many grave things 
 and heard too much strange talk for your years. 
 You should be as the kids that frolic and lambs 
 that frisk." 
 
 "And they are hung up on nails and bled to 
 death," said Palma. 
 
 She had seen them hung up so, in dusky, 
 cavernous places in the old streets of her native 
 town, and the piteous bleating rang in her ears 
 at night, and the scent of blood on the air was 
 smelt by her in her dreams, and she had always 
 refused to eat of Easter lamb or of Pentecost 
 kid. Her mother had only laughed good- 
 naturedly ; but her father had said, in his pleasant 
 serious tones : 
 
 " Little one, you do well." 
 
 That had been in the old happy days at 
 Gallarate, days which seemed so very long ago 
 to Palma, and to her mother also: the days 
 
 135 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 before Lelio Dolabella's arrest, when they had 
 all been living together in the old thirteenth- 
 century house built in what was in ancient times 
 called the Piazza of Pasquee. Dolabella was a 
 young man : he had married early a pretty and 
 not very wise young girl ; he was an advocate 
 by calling, but all his heart and soul and mind 
 were centred in the burdens of the people and 
 the doctrines of the future. He was extremely 
 beloved in Gallarate, and his slender form, his 
 handsome face, his far-reaching, silvery voice, 
 were well known all over the Lombard province. 
 In an evil day for him the attention of those in 
 authority was drawn to his public addresses. It 
 was at the time when Francesco Crispi was 
 imitating, in his brutal burlesque, the proscrip- 
 tions of Sylla ; martial law was everywhere 
 established, the prisons were full of young men 
 Vvho had no crime save to denounce conscription 
 and desire liberty, and Dolabella was arrested 
 with other of his fellow-citizens under the usual 
 accusation of inciting to class-hatred and revolt 
 against authority. For this his wife said to his 
 child : 
 
 " You must never speak ; neither the truth nor 
 
 a lie." 
 
 1^6 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 *' They may cut me in pieces, they will not 
 make me say a word," thought the child, as 
 others as valorous had vowed it before her on 
 the old Italiote soil. 
 
 They had been so happy together in the old 
 home, which was now ruined, like a bird's-nest 
 shaken down in a storm. The house was still 
 over their heads indeed — the dear old, dark, 
 kind house, with gleams of gold on its cornices, 
 and faded frescoed shapes upon its chamber 
 walls, with its great arched nail-studded door, 
 and its winding stone stair, and its nook of 
 garden-ground between machicolated walls, 
 green and damp with overgrowth of bay and 
 laurel. 
 
 But he who had been its sunlight and its 
 keystone, its keeper and master, was there no 
 more, would never be there again. His step 
 would fall no more on the old stones of the 
 silent street ; his smile would brighten no more 
 the gloom of the vaulted stair. Never again 
 would she sit in the recess of the grated window 
 watching through the bars for his coming. Even 
 though he escaped, even though he lived, there 
 he would never come again. She knew that, 
 and it was a knowledge too heavy for her years. 
 
 ^17 
 
 t> 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 She was only a young child, and she knew the 
 " viaggior dolore " of Dante. 
 
 " He has done no harm," she said to an old 
 man, his friend and her godfather. 
 
 " He has loved men," said the old Garibaldian, 
 bitterly. " There is no beast so ingrate to those 
 who serve it, so base to betray, so quick to forget 
 as the human beast." 
 
 " I know," said Palma, and it seemed to her 
 as if she had lived hundreds of years, and was as 
 old as the little church of San Pietro, hard by, 
 which they said had been there before the advent 
 of Christ. 
 
 She had been sitting with her father under 
 the old cypress in the garden one sunny fore- 
 noon, when the guards had entered without 
 warning or explanation, and had laid their 
 hands on him, and had put their irons on his 
 wrists, holding their revolvers to his temples. 
 
 '•What is my crime?" he had said, with 
 serenity ; they had not replied, except with 
 oaths, and two of them had pushed him out 
 through the garden postern door, forcing the 
 child aside, while others had rifled the house, 
 and ransacked his desks and coffers, and seques- 
 trated his papers. 
 
 1^,8 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 " Be quiet, love ; I shall be back In an hour ; 
 it is a mistake," he had said ; and then the 
 garden-door had been shut on him, and she had 
 been left alone, while the armed men had broken 
 open locks, and emptied cabinets, and piled 
 letters and documents together and sealed them. 
 
 But he had not come back ; not in an hour, 
 or in a day, or in a week, or in a month. He 
 had been taken away to another town, in 
 another province, to be judged by martial law, 
 and they heard naught from him, only of him 
 from rumour, and friends, and the Liberal press. 
 Her mother had a little money, not much ; most 
 of it had been sequestrated ; they lived on this ; 
 the old grey house was their own. Her mother 
 sold her beautiful pearls and the old silver plate 
 and other things of value to send to pay for his 
 defence by lawyers. But no defence by counsel 
 was allowed to such prisoners as he, except such 
 as might be made by some military man selected 
 for that purpose by the court. 
 
 Neither Palma nor her mother had understood 
 much ; they were like a doc and a fawn who see 
 the stag, their sole protector, pulled down by 
 hounds afar off, and strain their eyes and ears, and 
 scream piteously, and are unheeded and unpitied. 
 
 139 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 Their neighbours and friends did not, indeed, 
 forsake them, but were timid in showing 
 sympathy, for fear of being drawn into any 
 trouble themselves. A great terror was on the 
 country at that time, in the ninety-fourth year of 
 this dying nineteenth century. All the Gallara- 
 tese knew that Lelio Dolabella was as innocent 
 as a white wind-flower of any ill-doing ; but he 
 was accused of treason, of conspiracy, of agita- 
 tion, of setting class against class, of preaching 
 subversive doctrine. They were afraid to show 
 him and his any sympathy, lest they should 
 draw down upon themselves suspicion and 
 domiciliary visits and arbitrary arrest. Bad 
 government is like a virus in the blood of the 
 people ; it poisons the very marrow of their spine 
 and makes the manliest a craven. When you 
 cannot sit at a public table without a spy elbow- 
 ing you, or walk a step without hearing the click 
 of spurs and sabres behind you, or discuss the 
 news in your daily journal in the street without 
 the risk of a hand gripping your shoulder, you 
 lose nerve, you cease to be yourself; to use the 
 expression of Georges Darian, you are not a 
 coward, but you are a craven. 
 
 When her mother said in Palma's hearing 
 
 140 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 that the sorrow and misery would not have 
 come on them if only he would have minded his 
 own welfare and occupied himself with his own 
 affairs, and let the State bide in its own wicked- 
 ness and the people look to their own grievances, 
 Palma's eyes seemed to burn up her very soul ; 
 those eyes said without words: "You are his 
 wife, I am his child ; we belong to him ; cannot 
 Ave, at least, be worthy of him ? " 
 
 Poor Silvia sighed and was mute. She did 
 not dare to say, but she thought : What good 
 had he done with his eloquence and his altruism ? 
 Had not other young men gone into exile or 
 prison through his influence ? Were not other 
 women made desolate like her ? And what had 
 his efforts changed? Were not his proselytes 
 scattered like sheep, those strayed who were not 
 slaughtered ? What had he been able to alter ? 
 What had he gained in return for their desolated 
 hearths, their severed lives, their broken hearts ? 
 She loved him dearly, but she felt bitterly 
 against him for the wreck he had made of their 
 happiness. 
 
 She was a young woman, rather helpless, a 
 little pleasure-loving in a harmless, feminine 
 way ; her husband had been torn from her, her 
 
 141 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 home had been ruined, her money had been 
 confiscated ; she saw herself, for no fault, shunned 
 by her old acquaintances ; she was frightened, 
 cowed, miserable ; it was not wonderful if she 
 wished that her lot had been cast with those 
 who heeded neither politics nor "people, if it 
 seemed to her that charity should lie first at 
 home. But when she had said this thing she 
 was afraid of the look which came on her child's 
 face. Never had she seen on it so much scorn. 
 
 The little city of Gallarate is despoiled of 
 most of that beauty which it possessed in the 
 time of Visconti and Caracciolo, and the curse 
 of modernity has fallen upon it, heavier and 
 more destroying than the mailed hand of 
 Frederic Barbarossa. But there are still to be 
 found in it ancient nooks of peace, and nobly 
 designed houses, like the house of the Dolabella, 
 and beyond it there still stretches, in all its wild 
 and natural freedom, the solitude of vast, un- 
 broken moorlands, covered with what is called, 
 in the dialect of the district, el b rug : the heather. 
 The fumes of gaseous vapours and the clouds of 
 factory smoke may hang over the town, and 
 bawling vendors and fussing clerks may throng 
 the great colonnaded court of its Broletto, but 
 
 142 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 neither stench nor uproar reaches the vast 
 silences of the Brughicra, where the odour of 
 musk and thyme and the hum of bees and the 
 whirr of wings alone are smelt and heard. 
 
 Before her father's arrest, the very happiest 
 hours of her always happy life had been passed 
 on the Brughiera, especially on that great portion 
 of it which lies between seven villages and is 
 known by the name of Gradanasca, or Malpensa, 
 for it is these moors which lie nearest of all to 
 the gates of Gallarate. 
 
 Her father went there to read the works of the 
 leaders of his school of thought, and to write 
 his memoranda for those improvised lectures 
 with which he stirred the souls and roused the 
 spirits of the operatives of the town — weavers, 
 spinners, glass-workers, button-makers, copper- 
 smiths — who were moved by him as by no other 
 because he, born a citizen of Gallarate, addressed 
 them in that strange and resonant dialect which 
 is unintelligible to all outside the limits of what 
 was once the great Castrum Seprium. 
 
 Dolabella was a man of fine culture and 
 academic training ; but the local dialect was 
 dear to him as to Gallaratese of all classes, with 
 its sonorous vocables, its resonant consonants, 
 
 143 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 and its picturesque images. One of the greatest 
 crimes imputed to him was that he used the 
 vernacular in his addresses to the populace, and 
 opposed the use of anything else in the public 
 schools ; and therefore he was idolized by the 
 people and understood even by the rude husband- 
 men of the plain, who flock into the town with 
 their raw silk, their hay, and their grapes, and 
 to whom no single word of Italian, or even of 
 Milanese, is comprehensible. 
 
 " It was these dialects which were spoken at 
 Legnano, the Marathon of Lombardy," Dolabella 
 replied to his accusers. " V altera parola che il 
 Canth dira." 
 
 But this reply was regarded by the military 
 tribunal as a revolutionary insolence, and cost 
 him dear. 
 
 Palma, although she could read and write 
 Italian, never spoke anything except the dialect, 
 and therefore the heath she loved so well, with 
 its white bells and its honey odour, was to her 
 as to the people, el brug. She always wore a little 
 sprig of it in her belt or in her bosom ; while 
 she was shut up in the town it spoke to her of 
 the wide sea of blossom, of the fresh pungent 
 smell, of the clear azure sky, of the hawk and 
 
 144 
 
EL BRUC 
 
 kite sailing aloft, of the plover and the lark 
 nesting in its shelter, of the hare nibbling at 
 its shoots. 
 
 Her mother had never at any time gone to 
 the moors ; she was one of the many women to 
 whom all outside the streets seems barbarous 
 and desolate. Now that Palma was alone she 
 would not let the child go to them. 
 
 " Without your father you would be lost in 
 those dreadful wild places," she said obstinately. 
 
 Palma replied — 
 
 " In the blackest night I should find my way." 
 
 " Who would show it you ? " 
 
 " Who shows theirs to the shrew-mouse and 
 the mole ? " 
 
 She pined for the Brughiera. She was so 
 used to its solitudes, its liberties, its vast hori- 
 zons, its sweet, savage odours ; her father had 
 seemed to her king of its wilderness. Her 
 mother took her every morning and evening 
 to pray, for their prisoner, in the little Church of 
 San Pietro ; but it seemed to her that she could 
 pray for him so much better and so much more 
 hopefully if she could only get out to the open 
 heaths. It was now the time when the heath 
 was in blossom, all its little bells full of honey, 
 
 145 L 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 Once she asked her old godfather to take 
 her to the Gradanasca. But he said, "Your 
 mother says no, dear. We must not add to her 
 sorrows." So she was cooped up in the town, 
 and the long, empty, mournful days slipped away 
 and they had no news, and the police stalked 
 in and out of the house whenever they chose, 
 and seized the letters which came by post and 
 peered into the cupboards and coffers. 
 
 " Then they wonder that mild men grow into 
 murderous anarchists," whispered the old volun- 
 teer. " It was not for this that we fought with 
 the Milanese in the Cinque Giornate, and that 
 Garibaldi harangued us, the fifth regiment of his 
 levies, from the balcony yonder in the Via 
 Amelia." 
 
 The child knew by heart all the history of 
 those times ; her grandfather and two of his sons 
 had been killed in the 'Sixty-six, and no one 
 knew the place where their graves were made. 
 
 Her great sorrowful eyes looked at the men 
 of the Questura when they came about the house 
 with such hatred and disdain that they menaced 
 her with oath and gesture. 
 
 " 'Twere best that this little mastiff bitch-pup 
 should be strung up by the neck," said the 
 
 146 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 brigadier ; but had they not as yet received 
 permission to slaughter children, though, as 
 the brigadier observed, if you killed a swarm 
 of vipers, why not also the progeny of Socialists 
 and anti-Monarchists ? The public weal should 
 go, he said, before all. 
 
 One day they learned through the public press 
 that Dolabella had escaped from the prison at 
 Milan, in which he had been vainly awaiting his 
 trial for many months, having been constantly 
 called up for examination and remanded. It 
 seemed to Palma as if the very Angel of the 
 Annunciation had brought the tidings, coming 
 into the house on a ray of heavenly light, as he 
 was portrayed in the old pictures. 
 
 She was mute, but her face was so transfigured 
 that the men of the Questura, who redoubled 
 their vigilance around and about the house, said 
 to one another — 
 
 " The little beast knows where he is." 
 
 But neither she nor her mother knew, and 
 only at dead of night in their chamber did they 
 dare to whisper to each other. 
 
 " We shall hear from him ; maybe we shall 
 see him ; he will dare anything to come to see 
 us if he be living." 
 
 147 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 And Palma thought, " If he have really got 
 free he has come to the Brughiera." Did not 
 he and she know what an impenetrable shelter 
 the heath afforded ? Had they not explored 
 old subterranean chambers, vaults of dismantled 
 fortresses, caves of vanished peoples, lairs of 
 animals, in the tufa and the sandy soil ? Over 
 that vast and unbroken level could not any one 
 lying unseen under the heath, see the approach of 
 a foe leagues away ? Oh yes ! if he were living, 
 if he were really at liberty, it was to his own 
 beloved Brughiera that he would surely come. 
 
 She knew one place of all others which she 
 and he had explored together ; a lower chamber 
 or dungeon of some long-vanished I'occa (castle) 
 completely hidden by the heather growth, and 
 tapestried by the moneywort and the ivy-leaved 
 toad-flax. They had cleared it a little, and put 
 seats of moss in it, and there had passed many 
 of the hot hours of midsummer days, while the 
 sun tried in vain to penetrate its cool green 
 twilight. That was where he would come if he 
 had indeed escaped. The improbability that he 
 would be able to come so far without recapture 
 did not occur to her. She was accustomed to 
 think that he could work miracles. 
 
 148 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 The persuasion that he was on the Brughiera 
 grew so strong on her that she felt as intense an 
 instinct to escape there as any poor wild bird 
 taken among the heath and caged in Gallarate. 
 When her mother one night, frightened, joyful, 
 tremulous, awoke her from sleep, told her that 
 he was indeed as near them as the Gradanasca, 
 and would come disguised if he could to bid 
 them farewell before he crossed the Alps, Palma 
 was not surprised ; she had been so sure of it, 
 
 " Palma, listen, my love," said her mother, 
 breathlessly, " Idaliccio has been here ; he has 
 brought me word that your father is on the 
 Brughiera," 
 
 The child's whole face became radiant with 
 light ; but she was not surprised ; she had felt 
 so certain that he would come there, sooner or 
 later. 
 
 Idaliccio was a peasant who occupied a farm 
 belonging to them at Cardena, one of the seven 
 hamlets which fringe the great moors. He was 
 a rough old fellow, but of kind heart, and much 
 attached to Dolabella, though he had always 
 predicted that his master's eloquence would land 
 him in jail. 
 
 " But we must not let him come here, child," 
 
 149 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 said her mother. " Do not you understand ? 
 They are ahvays watching the house. He 
 will be taken like a bird in a net. Oh, my 
 love ! " 
 
 She threw her arms forward on the table, 
 and, leaning her forehead on them, wept pas- 
 sionately. 
 
 The light died out of Palma's face. No, he 
 must not come home. It was his home no 
 longer ; it was a sad, prison-like place, where 
 men of the police came in and out at their 
 pleasure, and whence joy had flown with 
 privacy. 
 
 " Some one must tell him not to venture here," 
 she said. " Will Idaliccio ? " 
 
 "No," answered Silvia, her voice choked by 
 weeping. " The old coward says he brought 
 the message for sake of your father and of us ; 
 but he is so scared with fear at what he has 
 done, that he has gone away to his brother, 
 the fisherman on the Olmo. Your father nearly 
 killed him with terror, starting up before him in 
 the gloaming." 
 
 " And my father said ? " 
 
 " Only this : ' Go tell my wife and child I 
 am in hiding here ; I will come into Gallarate 
 
 150 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 to-morrow night at all costs to see them, for 
 I must put the Alps between me and them.' " 
 
 " Put the Alps between us ? " 
 
 "Ay, it is his only chance of life, dear. 
 Staying here, he will be caught sooner or later, 
 and cast back in prison." 
 
 •' I see." Palma's face grew very grave with 
 the premature age of a great suffering. 
 
 The water dripped in the garden, the clock 
 ticked, the sounds which are heard in all old 
 houses in the stillness of night seemed to creep 
 on the silence like living things. Palma sat up 
 in her bed with her eyes wide open, full of 
 pain. 
 
 " Let me go," she said at last. 
 
 •' You— to the Brughiera ? " 
 
 The poor young mother wept convulsively 
 again, and cried to the Madonna to help her, 
 for her burden was greater than she could 
 bear. 
 
 " Hush, mother ; people in the street may 
 hear you," said the child. "Yes, I will go. 
 I know the Gradanasca as you know your chair 
 at church. He is hid in our old dungeon there 
 . — that we may be sure." 
 
 At last she wrung a reluctant, agonized 
 
 151 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 consent from her mother ; but Silvia Dolabella 
 thought her cold and strange, and said to 
 her — 
 
 " You are like a little statue of bronze ; you 
 bruise my breast." 
 
 All that night neither the child nor she could 
 sleep ; they thought he might arrive, that they 
 might hear some tap at the shutter, some step 
 on the flags ; they only heard the sound of the 
 water dripping from the pipe in the garden wall, 
 the chirp of crickets in the artichokes, the 
 tolling of the hours from city clocks, 
 
 Palma's eyes were wide open and sleepless ; 
 she saw her mother's red tear-laden lids with 
 impatience. She was very pale, but her face 
 was resolute. 
 
 At four of the clock she was ready to go 
 upon her quest. She wore a homespun smock- 
 shaped linen frock ; she had but to put on an 
 apron of many colours and a large yellow 
 kerchief over her head to look like a peasant's 
 child ; she put on wooden shoes, and took with 
 her a flask of wine and a roll of bread. She 
 withdrew herself a little impatiently from her 
 mother's embraces, and with her cheeks wet 
 from her mother's tears, not her own, she went 
 
 152 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 out of the garden doorway, which opened on 
 a paven lane. 
 
 She was as happy as a prisoned dove let 
 loose, as bold as had been those three doves 
 which had alighted and sat on the Italian 
 Carroccio throughout the carnage of Legnano, 
 striking terror with their white wings into the 
 soul of Barbarossa's self She was going to 
 find her father, and she was going to see the 
 heather in blossom. 
 
 It was now the dark which precedes the 
 dawn. 
 
 There was no one in the lane, or in the 
 piazza beyond it. Unquestioned and uninter- 
 rupted, she got outside the nearest barrier of 
 the town and took the road she knew so well, 
 which lead to the Gradanasca. She met a cart 
 or a waggon now and then, oxen-drawn, loaded 
 with fruit or hay or cans of milk, or the brooms 
 made on the moors of the Brughiera. But no 
 one noticed her — a little girl with a yellow 
 kerchief over her head and shoulders. The 
 dawn had come when she had passed out into 
 the open country. The sunrise lighted the 
 range of the Lombard Alps when she saw the 
 first plant of heather. She knelt down by it, 
 
 153 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 and crossed herself, and said a pater. Then she 
 kissed it, the beloved bnig which she had not 
 seen so long. 
 
 Soon, as far as her eyes could reach, she 
 saw nothing but the hriig, a vast expanse of 
 rose and green and white and purpling crimson 
 under the changes of light and shadow ; wide 
 as the sea and as mutable in colour, bounded 
 only by the distant snow-lines of the lower 
 Apennines. Its pungent, sweet odour came to 
 her on the breeze ; the familiar buzz of in- 
 numerable bees filled the silence ; high above 
 sailed great white clouds, a hawk hung poised 
 against the blue. 
 
 The child's heart heaved : the tears which had 
 not fallen for her mother's woe ran down her 
 cheeks in this intense rapture. She stood waist- 
 high in the branching heather, and kissed it again 
 and again. Then she gathered her courage up 
 in her hands, as they say here, and sought for 
 the little track which led to the vault of the 7'occa. 
 She went cautiously, hiding herself under the 
 thickly growing plants, as the hare did, and the 
 quail, the partridge and the polecat, the fern-owl 
 and the windovcr, and all other hunted and 
 harassed creatures. 
 
 154 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 There was not a soul in sight ; it was not the 
 season for cutting and carting the heather, or 
 for shooting ; the sole living thing she was the 
 least likely to see would be some old man or 
 woman looking for mushrooms. As far as the 
 sight could range there was nothing but heather : 
 acres on acres of heather, lying in the glow of 
 earliest summer. She had never been there un- 
 accompanied before ; her father had always been 
 with her, and to him the Brughiera had been 
 familiar from earliest boyhood. Palma had 
 nothing now to guide her but memory, and the 
 moors were almost as level and as trackless as a 
 desert of Africa. Childlike, she had never 
 realized until she reached them the great 
 difficulty of her task. She had never even 
 noticed whether the ruin of the rocca was to 
 north, south, east, or west. She had always run 
 in her father's footsteps, taking no heed herself. 
 But in the far distance she saw an old grey 
 round tower ; she remembered that he had told 
 her that tower had once been a pigeon-cote, a 
 colambarium, and was still the nesting-place of 
 wild birds. She remembered also that this 
 tower had been upon their left when they had 
 approached the site of the r^^^^, but always very, 
 
 155 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 very far away, looking black among the rosy 
 and purpled stretches of the moors. So she 
 went to the right, and in the contrary direction 
 from the pigeon-cote. She conquered her 
 weakness, and pressed on through the shrubs 
 which reluctantly yielded her a passage. But a 
 sense of the immense difficulty of her task came 
 over her. 
 
 If she had only a dog to aid her ! But their 
 dog, a spaniel, who had been four years older 
 than herself, had died in the very month of her 
 father's arrest. If he had only been with her 
 — poor, clever, good Morino — he would have 
 remembered better than she could. For the 
 vastness, the silence, the splendour of colour, 
 the immense tracks of flowering land stretching 
 away on every side, began to fill her with a 
 sense of awe, and to bewilder her. 
 
 The rocca had been on the right of the dove- 
 cote, and almost in a straight line with it, but 
 far away ; that was all she knew, all she had for 
 guidance. 
 
 She walked on and on till the sinews of her 
 legs ached and her step became less sure. The 
 shrubs were in many places stiff and stubborn ; 
 her hands were torn in parting them to make 
 
 156 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 a passage. The vertical sun beat through the 
 kerchief on to her thick, curiing hair and began 
 to make her head ache. Sitting up in her Httle 
 white bed, it had seemed so easy to find her 
 father on the Brughiera ; but the reaHty of the 
 search was hard. The reality which she did not 
 even yet herself realize was that she was lost 
 upon these moors. She rested a little while 
 upon the ground, and broke off a corner of the 
 loaf and ate it. The wine she did not touch ; 
 it was for him. There was a runlet of water 
 near her, almost dry but clear. She drank from 
 it, making a cup of her hands. The bees were 
 buzzing all around her, above the blossoms of 
 the bnig. It was a pleasant, mirthful, cheerful 
 sound, and banished her fears. The air was 
 absolutely still except for those humming 
 sounds. The sky and the plain looked im- 
 mense. The towers and roofs of the town had 
 long before sunk below the horizon. To the 
 north there was always the snow-line of the Alps. 
 She recalled a story her mother had told her, 
 to cure her passion for the moors, a true and 
 tragic tale of a child of six, a little boy, who had 
 been lost on Gradanasca, and who had been 
 found dead after three days' useless search, and 
 
 157 
 
EL DRUG 
 
 whose footmarks had shown that he had 
 wandered round and round Hke an ass in a mill 
 till he had fallen down and perished. 
 
 But she was sustained by the courage of a 
 great devotion, and she said to herself, " He has 
 no one else to save him, only his little girl." 
 And she threw back her head-covering, for the 
 sun began to mount in the heavens, and scanned 
 the wide expanse of blossoming heather, whose 
 colours melted in the distance into the softest 
 hues of opal and of amethyst. 
 
 A leveret scampered past her feet, a kestrel 
 sailed across the blue, a black-cap sang ; his 
 voice near, himself unseen ; she felt a sob rise 
 in her throat, and her eyes grew dim. Where 
 v.'as he ? 
 
 Under the ground at her feet ? Beneath the 
 purple cloud of the blossoms .'' Far away or 
 near? Where was the buried rocca? Would 
 no mole tell her who knew the underground 
 way ? No falcon who flew above so high and 
 must know everything ? 
 
 She saw an owl asleep, leaning as is the habit 
 of his family, against the stem of a heather 
 plant grey as himself. She stretched out her 
 hand to stroke him. 
 
 158 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 "Where is the road, dear owl? You must 
 know — you who can see when all is dark ! " 
 
 But the owl, annoyed and bewildered by 
 being awakened in broad day, said nothing, 
 and hobbled out of sight drowsily, and went 
 to continue his slumbers under other plants 
 of heather. There was nothinof to tell where 
 the place which she sought for was. She 
 had now left the colambarunn out of sight on 
 the eastern moors, and she walked on aimlessly, 
 stumbling often over the thick, entangled roots 
 of the heaths ; once she stumbled over a dust- 
 adder which looked like a root ; it hissed, but 
 did no more. The sense stole on her that she 
 might walk thus for hours, days, weeks, and be 
 no nearer to her goal. 
 
 And, unless she found him, he might go down 
 into Gallarate that very night, and fall into the 
 hands of the police. 
 
 Cold dews of anguish stood on her fair, warm 
 face ; she could have screamed aloud, but she 
 set her teeth and kept in her cries ; child as she 
 was, she knew that if she lost her self-control 
 she would lose her senses. 
 
 She could tell by the position of the sun that 
 it was now afternoon. She had been wandering 
 
 159 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 thus many hours ; her poor mother at home, 
 weeping and praying, counting the moments on 
 the clock ! 
 
 " Oh, I have not been good to her ! I have 
 not been good ! I have thought only of him ! " 
 she said to her own heart in repentance ; and 
 she thought of her little bed, of the blessed palm 
 hung above it, of the old green garden between 
 the stone walls, of the grey cat, of the evening 
 meal, of the big cento-foglio roses in the old 
 blue Savona vase — of all the familiar things 
 which she might never see again. 
 
 " But if I can only save him ! " she thought ; 
 if she could only save him, they might carry her 
 home dead. 
 
 The thought that he might go home that very 
 night if no one warned him was to her like 
 a knife being turned in an open wound. She 
 had been so foolish to be sure that she should 
 know her way on the Gradanasca ! Yet, again, 
 who was there to come if she had not } Idaliccio 
 could have done, of course ; but Idaliccio, in 
 terror and selfishness, had gone to the Olmo 
 river, forsaking his master in trial. 
 
 It was now three o'clock on the midsummer 
 afternoon. She could not tell the hour precisely, 
 
 160 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 but she guessed it ; she had been ten hours 
 away from home. The sense of solitude and 
 helplessness began to weigh on her like a leaden 
 hand, pressing her down into the earth. She 
 was very tired ; she dropped down like a lame 
 lamb, and fell asleep amongst the heather, too 
 fatigued to have either fear or reflection, or even 
 anxiety, conscious in her. She slept soundly, 
 dreamlessly, on the warm sand, the close-woven 
 stems of the plants shielding her from the sun. 
 She had put off her heavy, hard shoes, and her 
 little stuff jacket ; the dull white of her home- 
 spun frock made a point as of light amongst 
 the shadows of the blossomed hnig. It caught 
 the keen eyes of a mounted guard riding afar 
 off, pushing his horse with difficulty through the 
 heather growth. He with two others had come 
 out from the barracks at the Cascinale on the 
 search for Lelio Dolabella. 
 
 He rode up to where the child was lying 
 asleep, her cheek upon the sand, her small 
 feet in the sun. He saw the flask of wine. 
 He thought, " She has been sent to carry 
 food, and a message." He got off his horse 
 and stood beside her ; he was a man of 
 Gallarate ; he recognized the fugitive's little 
 
 i6i M 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 daughter. He stooped and grasped her 
 shoulder. 
 
 " Get up, bimba mia!' 
 
 Violently awakened from her deep, dreamless, 
 merciful sleep, Palma had for the moment no 
 sense of where she was or of who spoke to her. 
 The sun dazzled her eyes ; the buzzing of the 
 bees was in her ears. The guard pulled her up 
 on her feet with little courtesy. 
 
 "You are that outlaw's child," he said, and 
 shook her roughly. " You are going to 
 him." 
 
 Then she understood. She remembered at 
 the same time as consciousness returned to her 
 that she must say nothing. 
 
 "Speak!" said the man, getting angry; and 
 he struck the pommel of his sword with his 
 clenched fist. She did not speak. 
 
 The guard put his hands trumpetwise to his 
 mouth and shouted to his comrades, who were 
 some distance off, their horses' heads and their 
 own accoutrements showing above the heather. 
 They came at as quick a pace as they could 
 through the network of shrubs. 
 
 " Look here," he said to them ; " this is the 
 daughter of Dolabella. Of course, she knows 
 
 162 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 where he is hid. But the little mumchance will 
 not speak." 
 
 He shook her again. 
 
 " Where is your father, little one } " said one 
 of the new-comers. " Only say that and we will 
 let you go. We know he is on the Brughiera. 
 'Tis no use your being obstinate." 
 
 She might have been of wood or stone for 
 any sign she gave of hearing them. 
 
 " I have a mind to blow your brains out, you 
 little wretch ! " said the first-comer ; and he 
 picked up the flask, smelt it, tasted it, then took 
 a long draught and passed the rest to his 
 comrades. 
 
 The horses were pawing, snorting, shivering 
 under the torment of the flies ; the sun was at 
 its hottest ; the men had been out some hours 
 and were ill-disposed to waste their time there 
 on a little rebel who was dumb as a Gesu carved 
 in stone. 
 
 " Come with us to those who will make you 
 confess," said the first-comer, as he took a stout 
 bit of cord out of his breeches-pocket and bound 
 her right wrist to his stirrup. 
 
 But the milder man interposed : he had 
 children of his own. 
 
 163 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 " If you drag her through the heather you will 
 kill her," he said ; " she is but a small female 
 thing." 
 
 " She is big enough to speak," said her captor, 
 with an oath. 
 
 But Palma did not speak. 
 
 " Look here," said the other one to her, " show 
 us where your father is, my dear, and I will take 
 you to the town before me on my saddle. No- 
 body shall hurt you. You will have a nice ride, 
 and be home by sunset." 
 
 She might have told them that she did not 
 know where her father was, but they would not 
 have believed her, and it was best and simplest 
 to say nothing at all. That was the only idea 
 which stood out clear in the confusion and the 
 terror of her mind ; she must not say a word. 
 Whatever she might say they would turn in some 
 way against him. 
 
 The three armed men and the three fretting 
 horses were towering above her ; they looked 
 colossal in the blazing light ; the rosy and purple 
 haze of the heather looked like a sea of flame. 
 Where was her father ? At any moment he 
 might be seen and taken. The thought of his 
 peril numbed her to her own, 
 
 164 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 "Swing her up on your saddle if you do not 
 like me to make her run tied to mine," said the 
 man who had found her to the one who had 
 thought it would be cruel to tie her to the stirrup- 
 leather. The guard thus addressed bent down 
 and swung her by her right arm and the belt of 
 her frock up on to the saddle in front of him, 
 
 " Hold on by the horse's mane if you do not 
 wish to roll off," he said to her, and the three 
 riders began their slow trot across the moor in 
 the direction of what was once a large dairy-farm 
 in the last century, and is still called the Cascinale, 
 though it is now changed into the barracks of a 
 battalion of infantry, the only pile of buildings 
 which breaks the solitude of the Gradanasca. 
 
 It is difficult work, riding through the heather, 
 which in many places is as high as a horse's 
 girth, and to move quickly is impossible ; if they 
 had gone fast she would have fallen, giddy as she 
 was from fear, from fasting, from grief, and from 
 the unusual motion. 
 
 Jeering and joking at their comrade for his 
 load, the other men pushed their way through 
 the tangle, and he who was burdened by her 
 followed, keeping hold with his right hand on 
 the child's skirts, lest she should at all risks 
 
 165 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 slide to the ground and run away. The sound 
 of the horses' hoofs muffled on the turf alternated 
 with the other sound of the bending and break- 
 ing of the plants, the whirr of wings as birds flew 
 up affrighted, the jingle of the chains, the bits, 
 the scabbards. 
 
 For a while she lost consciousness ; the sun 
 beat on the back of her neck, a deadly terror, a 
 sickly heat, a burning thirst consumed her, and 
 ended in insensibility. 
 
 The horses paced on and on, now trotting 
 where they could, now pushing their flanks 
 through the heather. It was two hours from the 
 time they had discovered her when they at last 
 drew rein before the outhouses and outposts of 
 what had been the old dairy-farm. The men 
 were hot, jaded, hungry, ill-disposed. The one 
 who carried her on his saddle swung her roughly 
 to the ground, shaking consciousness into her by 
 the shock of her body on the stones. The others 
 dashed some water on her face from a tank in 
 the courtyard. The one who had been the first 
 to find her stooped and tied her wrists behind 
 her back, then gave her a kick. 
 
 " Get up, you spawn of rebellion," said he. 
 
 There were many soldiers in the yard ; they 
 
 1 66 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 looked on with indifference. He left her lying 
 on the stones, and went indoors to make his 
 report of the day's work. 
 
 She was but half-conscious still ; her limbs 
 were sore and aching from the long jolting ride ; 
 she lay on her side, her hands tied behind her ; 
 the soldiers came and stared, and made their 
 jokes ; she was wet from the water thrown over 
 her ; mosquitoes swarmed on her face ; her linen 
 frock was stained with all the colours of the 
 moors, and heavy with gathered sand. 
 
 They left her lying there on the pavement of 
 the court like a bundle of hay or a faggot of 
 brambles ; there was no fear that she could set 
 herself free. 
 
 After a time her captor came, and took hold 
 of her, and pulled her up on to her feet. Then he 
 drove her before him to the interior of the build- 
 ing, to a small bare room, into the presence of 
 his superiors. She reeled and tottered, and with 
 difficulty kept herself from falling. Every limb 
 seemed broken and every nerve seemed bleeding. 
 " She is a little child," said the commandant 
 of the Carabineers in surprise ; and he asked her 
 f^ently, "You are the daughter of Lelio Dola- 
 
 bella?" 
 
 167 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 Palma was silent. 
 
 " Why do you not reply ? " 
 
 She was mute. 
 
 " Why were you on the Brughiera ? " 
 
 She gave no ansu ^r. 
 
 " You know where your father is ? " 
 
 She said nothing. 
 
 "We will compel you to speak," said the 
 officer, losing his temper, though he still felt 
 surprise and compassion. She was so small, so 
 bruised and broken, so miserable-looking, like 
 any little leveret bathed in its mother's blood. 
 He saw that she could scarcely stand, and bade 
 her sit down. She dropped upon the stone 
 bench near her. She looked no more than a 
 heap of wet, sand-stained leaves. 
 
 " If you remain thus obdurate you will 
 force me to punish you," he said to her ; and 
 he tried with every question, argument, threat, 
 and persuasion to make her speak, but in 
 vain. 
 
 " She will die or go mad," he thought, " but 
 she will not speak." 
 
 Her first captor, standing erect beside her, 
 smiled in triumph. He had told his captain 
 that the little wretch would not speak. 
 
 i68 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 "Take her away," said his superior at last, 
 out of patience. " Put her in a cell. Let a 
 woman search her ; she may carry some missive, 
 some plan of conspiracy. Then untie her and 
 leave her alone. Hunger and darkness will un- 
 lock her lips." 
 
 His orders were carried out to the letter. A 
 woman stripped her, finding nothing on her ; 
 her clothes were bundled on again hurriedly ; 
 her arms were untied, but she was left to sit or 
 lie on the damp brick pavement as best she 
 could. Then the door was shut and barred on 
 the outside. Within was an impenetrable dark- 
 ness. She was not afraid of the dark. She was 
 used to sleep without a light. But darkness 
 in this dread stone place was not a soft and 
 friendly thing, like the dark in her own dear 
 little room at home, where the stoup of holy 
 water hung close to her bed and her parents 
 slept in the next chamber. 
 
 Shriek after shriek rose to her lips, but she 
 repressed them by putting her fingers in her 
 mouth and holding her tongue to keep it mute. 
 From her cries they would have learnt nothing, 
 but she felt that they would dishonour her father 
 and encourage his enemies. 
 
 169 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 The hours passed on ; no sound reached her, 
 for the cell was in an isolated part of the build- 
 ing, adjoining the cattle-stables ; no one remem- 
 bered her. She was worse than nothing in the 
 eyes of her captors — less in their sight than a 
 newt or a locust. The child of a rebel, of an 
 Anarchist, what matter if she lost her reason or 
 died of terror in that underground room ? Such 
 seed of the devil was best spilt, and stamped on, 
 and destroyed. The commandant, who had 
 been more interested in her resistance, was play- 
 ing cards and had forgotten her. The child of a 
 revolutionist, what mattered if such trash as that 
 died of fright, were stung by scorpions, or were 
 eaten by rats ,? She had deserved any fate by 
 her contumelious obstinacy. 
 
 She lay on the stones, her arms outstretched 
 and her head resting on them. She tried not to 
 think of all the horrible, unknown things which 
 might have been creeping and crawling near her ; 
 after all, her father would have said they were 
 " the little children of Nature " as much as she 
 was so. But it is difficult for the mind of a man 
 to resist the impression of terror made by total 
 darkness and by captivity in an unfamiliar place. 
 For a little girl it was impossible. She felt that 
 
 170 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 her brain was going, that she would soon be dead 
 or worse than dead. 
 
 A key groaned in the rusty lock, a flood of 
 light flashed over her. It was the woman, who 
 returned to tempt her. 
 
 " Only tell what you know," she said again, 
 "and you shall have such a feast — water and 
 wine too, as much as you like ; and with the 
 morning be back at your mother's house. Why 
 be such a little wicked fool ? You are bound to 
 obey authority. We all are." 
 
 The woman sent to her had been ordered to 
 spare no effort to terrify or to persuade her, but 
 she had succeeded in neither. The child re- 
 mained dumb. She was in pain all over her 
 body, bruised and sore and stiff; her mind was 
 dulled, her throat was parched : but she did not 
 forget that she had one supreme duty to fulfil — 
 the duty of silence. 
 
 " You are very little to be so mulish," said the 
 woman. "You should be soundly flogged." 
 
 Pal ma scarcely heard the words. Her ears 
 were full of booming sounds like the buzzing of 
 the bees in the heather multiplied a thousand- 
 fold. 
 
 The woman, irate, snatched up the lamp and 
 
 171 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 went out with it, locking the door again on the 
 outside. Once more the impenetrable darkness 
 descended. 
 
 Hunger and thirst tormented her ; never 
 before in her life had she ever wanted for any- 
 thing or had an appetite unsatisfied ; she was 
 now sick for want of food, fevered by want of 
 water, racked by pain of every kind. 
 
 The woman entered more than once, bringing 
 bread, soup, and fruit, and a flask of water. She 
 put them before Palma, but out of her reach. 
 
 " You shall have all these if you will only 
 speak." 
 
 Palma shut her eyes not to see them, and 
 made a motion of refusal with her head. 
 
 The woman left her for an hour, and then 
 returned, with the tray in her hand. 
 
 " You will speak now, eh ? " 
 
 Palma shook her head. 
 
 The wolf of hunger and the shark of thirst 
 were together tearing at her entrails ; but she 
 would not yield. 
 
 " It is impious to defy authority," said the 
 
 woman, who was a brigadier's wife. " Your 
 
 father is a bad man, setting class against class, 
 
 and defying the law." 
 
 172 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 Palma's eyes blazed with wrath as they 
 looked upward ; but she did not answer in 
 words. 
 
 " Come," said her temptress, " thirsty you 
 must be." She poured out from a flask she 
 carried some bright cold water into a glass. 
 
 All the child's frame thrilled and writhed in 
 longing for the draught ; but she covered her 
 eyes with her hands not to see it. 
 
 " You little beast ! " cried the woman, savagely. 
 " You should be thrown down the well and 
 drink your fill there once and for ever. I shall 
 go and say so to the commandant. The well 
 in the court has no bottom. It goes to the 
 centre of the earth, they say." 
 
 A shudder ran through the child from head 
 to foot, but she did not speak. 
 
 " Come," said the brigadier's wife in wheedling 
 tones, "'tis so little to do. Just say where your 
 father is, and you shall come and eat of the best, 
 and sleep in my daughter's bed, and at morning 
 away to your mother, who will say you have 
 done well. For, poor soul ! she must lose her 
 husband ; she need keep her child." 
 
 The argument was subtle and penetrating ; but 
 Palma was proof against its sophism. She made 
 
 ^73 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 no answer. " Poor, poor mother ! " she thought ; 
 but she did not open her lips. 
 
 The woman tried all persuasions she could 
 think of; then, furious at her failure, for success 
 would have brought credit and reward, she 
 dashed the flask of water down on Palma's 
 body, and with zest saw it shiver into atoms 
 and the good spring water flow away useless 
 over the child's clothes and the stones of the 
 floor. 
 
 Palma did not speak, 
 
 " Stay where you are, you dumb toad ! " the 
 brigadier's wife cried with violence. " At dawn 
 the scorpions will come out of their holes and 
 find you." 
 
 Then she went out, slamming the door behind 
 her, the key again grating in the rusty lock. The 
 child, sick with terror, turned on her side and 
 lapped the spilt water on the ground ; it was 
 but little she could get thus and rather tortured 
 than assuaged her burning thirst ; the pieces of 
 broken glass, too, cut her lips. She dragged 
 herself up painfully upon her knees, and then up 
 on to her feet ; there was a little blessed gleam 
 of light ; it was a moon-ray shining through the 
 narrow slit of the unglazed window. From the 
 
 174 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 open air there came to her the sweet wild smell 
 of the blossoming briig. The familiar light 
 and the friendly scent restored her fainting 
 senses, steadied her dizzy brain ; she thought, 
 with a gleam of hope, could she get out by that 
 loophole ? 
 
 It was no more than a loophole, very narrow 
 and at least two meters above her head. 
 
 From her captors she knew she could expect 
 no pity ; such prisoners as she are protected 
 neither by youth nor old age. 
 
 All that the police does is well done, and 
 deaths in the cells are never inquired into ; a 
 complaisant surgeon is always ready to write 
 the cause down under the name of some natural 
 disease or stroke of fate. 
 
 Palma had heard much of these things from 
 listening to the conversation of the young men 
 who came to her father's house. Young as she 
 was, she knew she would have no mercy from 
 her jailers, illegal though her detention might be. 
 The window looked very narrow, but then she 
 was very slight of form, and her linen frock, wet 
 through, clung close to her. 
 
 There was nothing in the cell by which she 
 could scale the wall ; it was entirely bare ; but 
 
 175 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 in the wall itself there were projections and 
 irregularities, made by stones jutting out beyond 
 others, and in one place an iron stanchion. She 
 had been taught agility in climbing by her father, 
 but she was now so feeble from exhaustion and 
 fatigue and hunger, so feverish from fear and 
 misery and ill-treatment, that she had scarcely 
 the power to drag herself up to the wall. She 
 could not tell, either, what there might be upon 
 the other side ; by the smell of the heather, she 
 thought it opened on the moors, but she could 
 not be certain. 
 
 She knew, however, that where she was she 
 had no mercy to hope for, that the scorpions 
 would feel pity sooner than her jailers, and that 
 knowledge spurred her to superhuman effort. 
 She grasped the first projecting stone with her 
 toes, and set her nails to clutch another higher 
 up ; she lifted herself high enough to grasp the 
 iron stanchion, and, clinging to that, pulled her- 
 self still higher and higher upward, with the 
 movement of a woodpecker climbing a tree. 
 
 The smell of the heaths came into her nostrils, 
 the moon-ray fell across her face ; they gave her 
 courage. She managed, slipping and bruising 
 her feet and hands, to reach the window and 
 
 176 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 look out ; all she saw was the wide expanse of 
 the Brughiera lying peacefully in the light of the 
 moon. But the opening was so narrow that she 
 feared she could never force herself through it ; 
 and if she fell head downward ? Well, even that, 
 she thought, were better than to stay here to be 
 starved, or beaten to death, or perish of thirst. 
 At least, thus she would die quickly and dis- 
 appoint her father's pursuers. 
 
 She put her head through the aperture, then 
 she drew her shoulders together, making them 
 as narrow as she could ; then she forced herself 
 through the opening, bruising and tearing the 
 skin of her arms. She could by no possibility 
 turn so as to descend feet foremost ; she could 
 only push herself through, and go down head 
 foremost to whatever might wait for her below. 
 And this she did. When her knees were on a 
 level with the coping of the window, she thrust 
 herself through the aperture ; her own weight 
 overbalanced her, and she fell, thus, as a man 
 falls who tries to fly. By good fortune there 
 was a pile of dried heather underneath the wall ; 
 it was elastic and yielded under her. She was 
 stunned for a few moments, but was not other- 
 wise hurt except for scratches and bruises on her 
 
 177 N 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 bare limbs. She was able to look about her, and 
 realized that there was no barrier between her 
 and the open country. 
 
 The high walls of the barracks loomed behind 
 and above her, but facing her there was the open 
 moorland. She heard some dogs bark on the 
 other side of the building ; hurt and half sense- 
 less as she was, she gathered herself up and 
 stumbled across the stretch of turf which parted 
 her from the open moor. She drew in new 
 strength from the knowledge of her freedom and 
 the smell of the dear wild brng ; she ran on and 
 on, like a poor little broken-kneed pony, falling 
 often, but getting up again and going onward, 
 bruising and dashing herself against the 
 heather, but having no sense except of recovered 
 liberty. 
 
 The stars grew larger, the moon grew higher ; 
 perhaps hours had passed, she did not know. 
 Suddenly her limbs gave way under her, and 
 she dropped, powerless to do more, struck down 
 by utter exhaustion, like a bird felled by a stone. 
 But she fell among the heather, and it closed 
 over her and hid her from sight, so that when 
 the armed men rode out over the moorland in 
 pursuit of their lost prey they passed within a 
 
 178 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 few yards and never saw her, but saw only the 
 moonlit blossoms of the flowering heaths. 
 
 The heather sheltered her as if it returned the 
 affection which she had conceived for it, and the 
 timid creatures of the night which hid among it 
 stirred around her and did her no harm. The 
 toad drank the night dews, the little brown owl 
 hunted the moth, the water-beetle boomed 
 through the dark. The child remained motion- 
 less and senseless, in a stupor which resembled 
 death. 
 
 When the first faint grey of the dawn came 
 on the eastern edge of the moors, an old man 
 with a mule, the animal carrying large panniers, 
 came across the heather by a narrow track which 
 he knew. It was the old peasant of Cardano, 
 Idaliccio. He had repented him of his cowardice 
 and desertion, and when on his way to the Olmo 
 water had turned back and taken his mule out 
 of its stall, and gone on to the Brughiera at 
 evening, and at nightfall had made his way to 
 the place where Lelio Dolabella was in hiding, 
 which was not the rocca, and warned him not to 
 enter Gallarate, but to get across the Lombard 
 plains, and escape with all speed across the 
 Spliigen into Switzerland. Now, after speeding 
 
 179 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 his master on his northward way, he was 
 returning to his own homestead at Cardano, his 
 mule's panniers filled with white sand as reason 
 for his presence on the moorland, were any 
 wanted. 
 
 He had heard nothing of Palma's wandering, 
 but, as they passed the place where she lay, his 
 mule dropped its head towards the ground and 
 stopped and whinnied ; it knew her well, for she 
 had often given it bits of bread and carrots when 
 she had come to the peasant's dwelling on the 
 edge of the moor, or when the old man had 
 broueht his beast into the town. Idaliccio, who 
 was well aware that his mule was wiser than he, 
 looked to see what was under the heather, and 
 recognized the child. 
 
 He guessed at once why she had come there. 
 She looked to him as if she were dead, but he 
 put his old horny hand to her lips and felt her 
 breath warm upon it, though the pulse of her 
 heart was too faint to be heard. 
 
 He stood still a few moments in doubt, then 
 shovelled the sand out of his panniers, cut some 
 heather with a billhook which always hung at 
 his waistband, laid the plants across the mule's 
 back from pannier to pannier, and raising the 
 
 l8o 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 child in his arms, placed her gently on them as 
 on her bed. Then, with a piece of rope which 
 was in one of the panniers, he bound her safely 
 to the mule's back amid the heaths. 
 
 " She was always so fond of the bnig," he 
 thought. " Poor little soul ! she came after her 
 father and got lost, no doubt ; and it was all 
 my fault because I said I should go to the Olmo 
 river. 
 
 Then he turned his back on his village, and 
 took his way slowly across the moor, knowing 
 nothing of the search which the mounted guards 
 had made for her. Going as he did, perforce, at 
 a foot-pace, walking beside her lest she should 
 slip downward, it was noon before he reached 
 the gates of Gallarate ; he had covered her with 
 heather to keep off the sun-rays and the flies. 
 
 "'Tis my grandchild as I am taking in to 
 hospital ; she had a bad fall on Gradanasca, and 
 is stupid from it ; she has hurt her head," he said 
 to the men at the toll-house, and moved the 
 bundles of heath that they might see the human 
 burden he carried. 
 
 They looked, and let him pass, after thrusting 
 their hands into the panniers to make sure that 
 they were empty. 
 
 i8i 
 
EL BRUG 
 
 And so he took her in safety home to the old 
 grey, kindly house in the Piazza of Pasquee. 
 
 When she regained consciousness, which was 
 not until many days later, she was lying in her 
 own little bed under the bleached palm. 
 
 " I never spoke ! " she cried aloud. " Tell him 
 I never spoke ! " 
 
 Silvia Dolabella kissed her small bruised feet. 
 
 182 
 
TOTO 
 
TOTO 
 
 They had a small shop, a very small one, in a 
 narrow passage which debouched from the Rue 
 des Francs-Eourgeois, and passed behind the 
 tower of the Hotel Barbette. It is a sorry time 
 for le petit commerce in Paris, as in all other 
 cities ; the great establishments destroy the 
 humble little traders. It is difficult to live on 
 le petit commerce in any town, still more difficult 
 to do so in great capitals. But they managed 
 to pay their way ; they had their customers, 
 faithful if few ; they spent little on themselves, 
 and they were able to put something by for 
 a rainy day. They had been in this same shop 
 ever since their marriage, forty years before — 
 a bit of old Lutetia, possibly unaltered from the 
 day when Louis d'Orleans rode out to his death 
 from the Barbette. 
 
 It was a shop and a dwelling-house in one, 
 with a high roof and deep eaves and mullioned 
 windows. When the door opened there were 
 
 185 
 
TOTO 
 
 two steps which led down into the shop ; and 
 above the door was one of the old painted and 
 gilded signs, the Pot aux Roses, which creaked 
 when the wind was high, and pleased the 
 sparrows as a perch. At the Pot aux Roses 
 they sold wooden toys and tapes, and threads 
 and linens, and the like. Nanon usually looked 
 to the one and Chariot to the other. They 
 were Nanon and Chariot to the whole neigh- 
 bourhood. No one except the tax-collectors 
 and the postmen ever called them Monsieur and 
 Madame Dulac. They were merry little people, 
 short of stature, vivacious, bright-eyed, quite 
 contented with their lot, very fond of each 
 other, and although thrifty, very charitable. 
 They had both been born in this Quarter of 
 the Temple, and seldom went out of their 
 faubourg except on summer Sundays to one 
 of the woods or villages near. 
 
 They had seen many changes since they had 
 first come there on their wedding-day, when the 
 Pot aux Roses had been fresh painted and 
 gilded, and the Prince President had been at 
 the Elys^e. But the storms had passed and 
 burst over Paris without touching them ; they 
 hid themselves like two birds during rain, and 
 
 1 86 
 
TOTO 
 
 when each tempest was past, came out to chirp 
 and twitter again. They had the old gay elastic 
 temper of France, which is vanishing from the 
 race under the influence of German beer, and 
 militarism, and machines, and absinthe, and 
 science. They had had their sorrows, sharp 
 and sad ; they had lost two children in early 
 infancy, and a nephew whom they had loved 
 dearly had been shot in the Siege of Paris ; 
 but all that was now far away, and they were 
 happy in a simple, pleasant, kindly way, which 
 showed itself in doing all they could for those 
 less fortunate. 
 
 " For fortunate we are ; fmit le dire, hein f " 
 said Chariot, very frequently ; and, though he 
 knew it not, they were most fortunate of all 
 in their contented dispositions and their mutual 
 affection. There are many such cheerful bour- 
 geois interiors in Paris, but not one was more 
 cheerful than theirs. They had good health, 
 good appetites, good tempers, good neighbours ; 
 and if many would have thought it a hard life 
 to serve in a little dark shop all day, and spend 
 the evenings counting up sous and centimes, 
 they did not think so. They were used to 
 it, and they gained enough by it to keep 
 
 187 
 
TOTO 
 
 themselves and to afford one luxury, Toto — 
 Toto, who ate as much as two dragoons, and 
 for whom they were obliged to pay the tax regu- 
 larly to have civic permission for him to live. 
 
 One cold, wet, windy autumn night, boys had 
 been stoning Toto in the Rue Vieille du Temple. 
 Toto, being then a shapeless mass of wool, got 
 out by himself — no one knew how — from some 
 stable-yard or travelling circus. Chariot, who 
 had been to the greengrocer's and poulterer's 
 to buy his Sunday dinner, was going home in 
 that windy night. He drove the boys off, and, 
 after some hesitation, invited the frightened, 
 friendless bundle of wool to waddle after him 
 in the gaslight. There was scarcely any one 
 about ; the night was chilly and wet. He 
 reached home with his foundling in safety, 
 having been obh'ged to take it up in his arms 
 for the last few yards, because it was so tired. 
 
 "It is very dirty," said Nanon, when he and 
 the pup reached the Pot aux Roses. 
 
 " It is very wet," said Chariot. 
 
 " It will be a great trouble," said Nanon. 
 
 " I will take the trouble." 
 
 "There will be the tax to pay," persisted 
 Nanon. 
 
 i88 
 
TOTO 
 
 "I will go without my piquette." 
 
 " He will destroy everything." 
 
 "We will keep him in the yard." 
 
 " There is no shape nor make in him." 
 
 " That is because he is young." 
 
 " He must be kept in the yard." 
 
 " Yes, yes ; in the yard — yes," replied Chariot, 
 who was practised in the art of giving an inch 
 to get an ell. The yard had once been a 
 portion of an old palace court ; it was spacious, 
 flagged, and contained, beside its well, a large 
 fig tree. 
 
 The puppy whimpered. Nanon ran into the 
 kitchen for some bread and milk. 
 
 "Now he has eaten with us he must stay. 
 The very savages would say that," said Chariot. 
 And the waif was put for that night in the wood- 
 cellar. It was raining too heavily to turn him 
 out into the yard. 
 
 That was now seven years ago, and the stray 
 was still at the Pot aux Roses. With time he 
 had shown himself to be a magnificent New- 
 foundland dog, black except for one white spot 
 on his chest and one white glove ; a very 
 monarch and god amongst dogs, grave as 
 Buddha, powerful as Zeus, kind as Krishna. 
 
 189 
 
TOTO 
 
 When his nose was out of the shop-doorway 
 his tail was in the Httle room behind. He was 
 a Colossus in a nutshell ; but he was as happy 
 as his owners, and he was the idol of the neigh- 
 bourhood. There was always eager competition 
 for the honour of taking Toto for his daily swim 
 in the Seine. 
 
 Chariot was a good walker, and the apothe- 
 cary had told him to walk to keep down his 
 tendency to embonpoint^ and often in the very 
 early mornings or the late evenings he left the 
 shop to his wife and took Toto to Bercy, or to 
 Charenton, along the quays, or over one of 
 the bridges, and even sometimes to Vincennes 
 and St. Mand^ on Sundays ; to Nogent, where 
 Toto could plunge in the Marne as much as he 
 pleased ; to the Lac Dumesnil, where he was 
 sure to get sugar and biscuits and cutlets from 
 the merry-makers at the cafi of the two little 
 isles ; or to Joinville-le-Pont, where he was 
 welcomed as a comrade by the oarsmen and 
 swimmers who assembled there. 
 
 He and Chariot became an attraction to the 
 canotiers at that double bend where Marne and 
 Seine embrace, and Toto used to swim now with 
 one canoe, now with another, and dive, and go 
 
 190 
 
TOTO 
 
 after sticks, and steer himself with his great tail. 
 Sunday would not have been Sunday on the 
 water without him to a great many frequenters 
 of the river. No doubt in that little house, in 
 that city life, Toto had not all the freedom he 
 deserved. No doubt he would have liked to see 
 the meadows and the woods oftener than now 
 and then on a fete day ; no doubt his line 
 instincts and his vast strength were cribbed, 
 cabined, and confined. But he had always 
 about him that affection which to the dog, as to 
 the child, makes up for so much else that may 
 be lacking in his home. They both loved him, 
 Chariot the more ardently of the two, and they 
 were very proud of him : he was so big, and so 
 beautiful ; and he had saved the lives of people 
 — once at Charenton, when a wherry had been 
 upset by a river steamer; and once one bitter 
 black night when in the ice-cold muddy water 
 by the Pont d'Austerlitz a woman had been 
 drowning. 
 
 A little paragraph had been put in the 
 Gaulois about this latter good action, and 
 Chariot cut it out and framed it under a photo- 
 graph of the hero. It hung in the shop, and 
 every one saw it and read it, and to those who 
 
 191 
 
TOTO 
 
 might otherwise have missed it, Chariot said, 
 as he served them over the counter — 
 
 " It is in print what Toto did — yes — over there ; 
 you can read it ; I cut it out of the Gaitlois. I 
 was with him, such a night as it was ! Ink-black, 
 with broken ice in the Seine, and he in the water 
 — pong! pouf! as if it were summer, without 
 waiting a moment, once he had seen that poor 
 drowning creature struggling. The light from 
 the bridge was on her." 
 
 Many new customers, as well as old ones, 
 came to the Pot aux Roses to see the dog who 
 had been mentioned in the Gaulois, and, of 
 course, all of them bought something, and the 
 till was the fuller for it. 
 
 " See the injustice of it," said Nanon, proud 
 and pleased, yet vexed. " What Toto did at 
 Charenton was really finer than what he did off 
 the Pont d'Austerlitz, because there were three 
 of them at Charenton, and he saved all three, 
 one after another ; and he had to fight with the 
 swirl and froth that were made by the paddles 
 of the moiicJie which had upset the wherry ; but, 
 ouf! no one of the newspapers noticed that, and 
 so nobody ever asked to see him then — not 
 even the lads he had saved, if you will believe it. 
 
 192 
 
TOTO 
 
 '•' That is the way of the world," said Chariot, 
 with his cheery laugh. " Toto did not do it for 
 praise or for profit ; he did it because his good, 
 big heart told him. He would do the same for 
 a Tropmann, for a Bismarck, for — for — even for 
 a sergent-de-vilU ! " 
 
 He selected the worst epithet he could think 
 of. 
 
 "Christian charity!" he continued. "Ah, 
 ma mie, if you want to see Christian charity, 
 you must leave your priests and come to Toto." 
 
 Chariot was not so fond of the Church as 
 his wife, and often let her go alone to Mass, 
 whilst he smoked his best tobacco in the yard 
 under the fig-tree with Toto stretched out on 
 the flags. 
 
 " Give me your hand, my friend," he would 
 say often ; and Toto would lift up his right foot, 
 the one with a white glove, and have it solemnly 
 shaken. Then Chariot would call him " dear 
 little cabbage," "sweet little pigeon," "angel 
 of the hearth," "glory of the quarter," and 
 many other caressing epithets ; to which Toto 
 responded with a bang of his tail on the stones, 
 the tail which Chariot called Ic phimeau de 
 paradis ! 
 
 193 O 
 
TOTO 
 
 " What a child you are, Chariot ! " said his 
 wife, when she came back with her prayer-book 
 in her hand ; but she smiled as she said it, for 
 Chariot, childish as he might be, never forgot 
 to keep the charcoal alive and look at the sim- 
 mering broth in her absence. He had always, 
 too, laid the table ready, with its washed radishes 
 and its modest pint of wine ; its long baker's 
 roll ; its sugared flat cake ; its old flowered 
 Rouen plates ; and its oil and vinegar and 
 lemon waiting their combination for that crown 
 of a French feast, the salad. Toto did not care 
 for the salad, but he did care very much for 
 what was left of the stewed meat and the sweet 
 cake, which came to him as bojtnes boiiches after 
 his own solid meal on ship-biscuits and dried fish. 
 
 On the whole he was a very happy dog. He 
 was the darling of the quarter ; he knew all 
 the families by their names ; he let the shoe- 
 maker's three-year-old baby ride on his back ; 
 he carried the slates and schoolbooks in his 
 mouth ; he would sit erect, grave as a judge, 
 while Aimee and Jeannot, the tailor's children, 
 explained their lessons to him ; he was friends 
 with all the dogs around, for the biggest of them 
 was so small beside him that they evoked that 
 
 194 
 
TOTO 
 
 magnanimity which was his most marked 
 characteristic. Even when a little loidou which 
 belonged to a notary near flew at him every 
 morning, he only shook his leonine head and 
 walked onward in peace. The notary's loiilou 
 was convinced that Toto was a coward. So 
 was the notary's wife. The only quarrel which 
 was ever heard over the counter of the Pot aux 
 Roses came out of this. 
 
 "Your big hippopotamus has no courage," 
 said the notary's wife, a stout, red-faced lady 
 in a yellow wig, to Nanon, of whom she had 
 been buying some needles and thread. 
 
 " No courage ! " echoed Nanon, her little 
 bright brown eyes sparkling. "Say that again, 
 Madame Viret, if you will be so good." 
 
 " I will say it again, and ten times again, and 
 twenty times again," said the notary's wife. 
 " My loiilou has the spirit of a lion, but your 
 rhinoceros is a poltroon. Large animals and 
 big men are often the poorest in temper." 
 
 "Your little fox is a little devil," retorted 
 Nanon, furiously, forgetful of her commercial 
 interests. " He is a spitfire, a bully, a fiend. 
 Toto is but too good to him ; he could snap him 
 up in one mouthful if he chose ; he refrains 
 
 195 
 
TOTO 
 
 because Toto is truly great — truly great, madame 
 — he would not soil his teeth with your little 
 bully and bastard." 
 
 " If I only come here to be insulted," Madame 
 Viret began very hotly, growing red in the face, 
 for she was a choleric woman, and liked her 
 wine at breakfast and dinner. 
 
 " Insulted ! What did you call our angel ? 
 A hippopotamus — a rhinoceros ! Is that not 
 insult? I tell you if Chariot but lifted one 
 finger, Toto would kill your little bastard with 
 a single stroke of his paw ! " 
 
 " I will never buy a paper of pins in your den 
 again if I live fifty years ! " 
 
 " Ah, madame, there is no fear of that. People 
 who love the juice of the grape too well " 
 
 "What! After all you owe to my custom; 
 paying you three times over the prices of the 
 Bon Marche for your rubbish ! " 
 
 " Nanon, ma ink ! Oh, Madame, pray, pray, 
 a thousand pardons ! But you did say ' hippo- 
 potamus,' and you did say 'rhinoceros'! I 
 was in the kitchen peeling the potatoes, but 
 I heard," cried Chariot, as he rushed into the 
 shop very greatly alarmed, for the notary was 
 a man of weight in the neighbourhood. 
 
 196 
 
TOTO 
 
 "She said 'juice of the grape'!" cried the 
 notary's lady. "Your wife said, 'juice of the 
 grape,' Monsieur ! It is libel ! I will tell my 
 husband. He will summon her. Juice of the 
 grape ! And your prices, which are a score 
 of times higher than those of the Printemps ! 
 I will never come down into your dusky hole 
 again ! No, not if the Prussians come back 
 and burn down every shop except yours ! And 
 Pierrot a bastard, a bastard ! It is libel ! My 
 husband will make you pay ! " 
 
 "Pierrot is a lovely little dog, pur sang,'' 
 murmured Chariot, very conciliatingly. " But 
 he does fly at Toto." 
 
 "Because Toto is a poltroon!" said the 
 notary's wife. 
 
 Then Chariot himself flung prudence to the 
 winds and cried, "A poltroon! If Toto is a 
 poltroon, then so were Alexander, and Caesar, 
 and Charlemagne, and Napoleon Premier ! " 
 
 And Nanon muttered — 
 
 "If I did say 'juice of the grape,' many 
 people say worse of you, Madame. Many 
 people say, ' drinks of the American Bars.' " 
 
 Then the notary's wife, incensed and enraged, 
 threw the packet of needles and thread which 
 
 197 
 
TOTO 
 
 she had bought, down on the counter, and 
 Nanon gathered up the sous she had received 
 for them, and cast them forth into the gutter, 
 and Toto, having heard his own name uttered 
 by his master amidst all this pother, came into 
 the shop from his broken slumbers under the 
 fig-tree. 
 
 " A poltroon, you, Toto ! " cried Chariot. " So 
 were the Trois Mousquetaires then, so were the 
 Sept Fils d'Aymon, so was the great Roland 
 himself." 
 
 Toto, seeing the bronze coins lying in the 
 gutter, went out, put his paw on them, and 
 picked them up with his teeth one by one, then 
 trotted off, as he had been taught to do, to the 
 baker's round the corner, and received in return 
 a pound of gaiiffres in a paper bag, which he 
 brought intact to his friends at the Pot aux 
 Roses. They had been too absorbed in vexation 
 and misgiving to see what he was doing, but 
 when he laid the bag of gauffres between them 
 on the counter they kissed him. 
 
 " What intelligence ! " cried Nanon. 
 
 "What honesty!" cried Chariot. 
 
 " What kindheartedness ! " 
 
 *' What a memory ! " 
 
 198 
 
TOTO 
 
 " He deserves one," said Chariot ; and gave 
 him two. 
 
 "But I must send her the needles and thread 
 since he has spent her money," said Nanon. 
 
 She did so by Aimee, the tailor's little 
 daughter ; and the notary's wife refused to take 
 them ; and the little girl went backwards and 
 forwards with the packet a great many times, 
 until, getting tired and being less honest than 
 Toto, she fibbed about the matter, told Nanon 
 that the notary's wife had kept them, and in 
 reality kept them herself. 
 
 The breach between the Pot aux Roses and 
 the notary's house remained impassable. 
 
 " You told her she drank ! How can she for- 
 give that ? " said Chariot. " If she did not drink 
 she might, perhaps, forgive it ; but when she 
 does " He shook his head. 
 
 To lose a customer so regular and so in- 
 fluential as Madame Viret was no light matter ; 
 but Nanon would have let herself be chopped in 
 fine pieces like parsley for a potage rather than 
 take any steps towards apology. " We do not 
 want their sous," she said proudly ; but she would 
 not have been a Parisian shopkeeper if she had 
 not known that no single sou is ever flouted by 
 
 199 
 
TOTO 
 
 the wise. The notary, who was a meek man, 
 regretted his bizique and his can siicr^ with 
 his lost friend, Chariot ; but his wife told him 
 that he was a miserable creature not to summon 
 Toto and his owner before the tribunal, and 
 he dared make no movement towards recon- 
 ciliation. 
 
 Three months had gone by thus, when one 
 day Chariot and Toto, walking on the Quai de 
 Bercy, saw Madame Viret with her Pierrot 
 walking some yards ahead, the little loulou, with 
 his tail curled over his back, very smart with 
 silver bells and a blue bow of ribbon. 
 
 On the other side of the road there was a 
 large Ulm dog. Pierrot, with his habitual 
 impertinence, darted across the road and flew 
 at the foreigner. The German hound bore the 
 attack for a second or two, then struck Pierrot 
 down with one of his huge paws, and would then 
 and there have ended his days, had not Toto 
 seen the danger, and thinking, no doubt, " He 
 has always been rude to me, but he is a neigh- 
 bour and a compatriot, this big fellow is a 
 Prussian, and the odds are unfair," he rushed 
 across the road before Chariot had realized what 
 he was about, and threw himself forcibly upon 
 
 200 
 
TOTO 
 
 the Ulin hound's back. The German let go the 
 loulou to turn upon his mightier assailant. 
 Pierrot scampered off in terror to his mistress, 
 and Toto and the Ulm hound looked at each 
 other and measured their respective forces, 
 growling low. 
 
 Happily, there were no policemen near to 
 make mischief; the passers-by did not interfere ; 
 Chariot watched, breathless and agonized ; 
 Madame Virct watched too, clasping her Pierrot, 
 whose blue ribbon was torn and bedraggled. 
 
 For one — two — three minutes the two stately 
 combatants stood facing each other like human 
 duellists ; their attitude was superb ; then some- 
 thing in Toto's gaze cowed the other ; some- 
 thing in his regard said, " You are in the wrong 
 — go." The German dog felt that he had met 
 his master ; very stiffly, very slowly, very re- 
 luctantly, he acknowledged himself vanquished. 
 He turned and went away without fighting ; not 
 afraid, but humbled and rebuked, like Launcelot 
 by Arthur. Toto stood like a rock until his 
 adversary had disappeared, then he shook him- 
 self and trotted up to Chariot ; some working 
 men who had looked on cheered him. Madame 
 Viret burst into tears. 
 
 201 
 
TOTO 
 
 « And I called him a coward ! And he has 
 saved Pierrot's life ! " 
 
 Everything was forgotten and forgiven. 
 Chariot and the notary played bhiqtie that 
 evening, and Madame Viret told the tale for 
 the seventieth time to an admiring crowd around 
 the counter of the Pot aux Roses. 
 
 Even Pierrot conquered his natural temper so 
 far that he never again flew at his saviour. 
 
 Thus slipped the pleasant years away ; and 
 with each season Toto grew in dignity, and was 
 held in higher consideration by his neighbours. 
 All round the tower of Louis d'Orleans, people 
 loved and were proud of the hero of the Pot aux 
 Roses who had avenged Sedan. 
 
 When, in the winter evenings, the lamp was 
 lit, and the two little people talked together of 
 their early life, of their courtship and marriage, 
 of their dear children, of all which had been and 
 all which might have been, they always wound 
 up by looking at Toto asleep in the warmth on 
 his bit of carpet, and saying in chorus — 
 
 " But we have had many mercies, and we have 
 Toto." 
 
 And they looked forward with just confidence 
 and natural hope to a green old age. 
 
 202 
 
TOTO 
 
 But they had reckoned without that fiend 
 which everywhere ruins the natural lives of the 
 people, seizes and wastes their earnings, poisons 
 and kills their wholesome pleasures : that fiend 
 which is called the State, and which is always 
 equally a devil whatever its disguise be called — 
 Republic, Empire, or Monarchy. 
 
 Chariot had often been worried by fine, by 
 interference, by citation for this, that, and the 
 other ; he had always dreaded the sight of a 
 printed paper, he had always heard with a 
 quickened pulse the step of the police on the 
 pavement, but he had been prudent, he had been 
 fortunate, and no great trouble had ever come 
 upon him since the days of the Siege of Paris. 
 
 He had many friends, too, even in the Ad- 
 ministration ; he was so kind himself, so cheery, 
 pleasant, and sociable, other men could not be 
 very morose with him. 
 
 " No one can tell why the Good God made 
 spiders, and beetles, and sergenis-de-ville," he 
 said once ; but all the rest of the races upon 
 earth seemed to him amiable and agreeable. 
 Nanon thought less well of the world on the 
 whole : he always told her she had a defective 
 digestion, pessimism was spleen. And then 
 
 203 
 
TOTO 
 
 they laughed together, for the notion of 
 associating pessimism with his little, round, 
 bright-eyed, chirping tomtit of a wife struck 
 both as very comical. 
 
 One morning in one month of June, when all 
 Paris was gay with green leaves, glancing waters, 
 red geraniums, and the sunshine made mirth 
 even in the warehouses of Bercy and the mad- 
 house of Charenton, Toto was lying outside the 
 shop-door waiting for the hour to come for his 
 splash and his swim in the Seine. There was 
 no one in the shop itself; Nanon was milling 
 coffee, and Chariot was shelling peas ; each 
 could leave in a moment if a customer entered. 
 The sun-rays came into the little dusky interior 
 and lighted up the gilded frame which contained 
 the paragraph from the Gaiilois about Toto's 
 exploit by the Pont d'Austerhtz. 
 
 As Nanon turned the handle of the coffee- 
 mill, and Chariot cracked the pea-pods, they 
 heard a loud, deep-toned bay ; it was the bark 
 of the grand dog, in anger ; they heard also 
 voices, outcries, the sound of stamping feet, the 
 jingle of scabbards, the oaths of men. They 
 both became as white as the linen of Nanon's 
 coif and Chariot's apron. 
 
 204 
 
TOTO 
 
 " Toto ! " they exclaimed in one breath, 
 and both rushed into the street. That which 
 they had ahvays so piteously dreaded had 
 happened. The dog-snatchers, with their pro- 
 tecting posse of poHce, had come into the passage 
 at the moment when Toto was basking in the 
 sun under the sign of the Pot aux Roses. The 
 murderous noose was round his noble throat. 
 He had sprung to his feet and was struggling 
 against the brutes half strangled. 
 
 " Messieurs ! Messieurs ! " shrieked Chariot. 
 " Stop, for the love of Heaven ! " 
 
 " Let go ! He is choking ! " screamed Nanon. 
 " Let go, let go ! " 
 
 " He pays his tax." 
 
 " He has saved two lives." 
 
 " Messieurs ! Messieurs ! Enter my shop and 
 see ! There is the bit out of the Gaulois 
 framed." 
 
 " He is choking ! " 
 
 " You will kill him ! " 
 
 "There is his silver medal in there. Come 
 and see it ; his medal for life saved ! " 
 
 " Let me pay any fine — any fine — what you 
 will ! " 
 
 "Oh, God help me ! They are strangling him !" 
 
 205 
 
TOTO 
 
 Nanon seized the noose in her hands and 
 wrenched it open ; Chariot flung himself on the 
 man who had thrown it. 
 
 " Resistance to authority ! " shouted the 
 police. 
 
 " Yes ! yes ! a hundred times yes ! Resis- 
 tance to the death ! " shrieked Chariot. " We 
 are good citizens. We pay all that is asked of 
 us. We have lived here for forty years. We 
 deserve respect and " 
 
 The brigadier in command dealt him a blow 
 in the chest with the pommel of his sword. 
 Chariot reeled back against the wall of his 
 house. Toto, feeling Nanon's hands round him 
 and the noose loosening, aided her efforts with 
 a weighty wrench of his great shoulders, and 
 rushed to his fallen master. The guards seized 
 Nanon and flung her as if she were a rag into 
 the middle of the road. 
 
 " Arrest them both ! " said the brigadier. 
 " They revolt against authority." 
 
 Toto saw two men seize Chariot ; with one 
 bound he sprang upon them, and they lay 
 prostrate in the gutter. 
 
 " The dog is mad ! " cried the brigadier, and 
 he plucked his revolver from his belt and fired 
 
 206 
 
TOTO 
 
 between the dog's eyes. Toto dropped like a 
 stone, his brains oozed out upon the pavement. 
 Chariot saw from where he leaned, sick and 
 dizzy, against the wall of his house. With a 
 shrill scream he fell forward on the body of his 
 dead friend, his face bathed in blood. 
 
 " He is dead, too ; so best," said the brigadier ; 
 and he kicked the bodies of the man and the 
 dog where they were lying one on the other. 
 
 A crowd had assembled, and at the windows 
 and in the doorways the people who dwelt in 
 all the houses near were looking on, horrified, 
 grieved, but paralyzed by their fear of the 
 police. Nanon lay insensible upon the stones ; 
 Madame Viret ran to her, and raised her head 
 and wiped her temple, which was cut and 
 bleeding. 
 
 The brigadier wrote his prods-verbal in his 
 note book. It began — 
 
 " Whereas, resistance to authority " 
 
 He foresaw praise and promotion which 
 would accrue to him for his zeal in defence of 
 authority : it is such servants as these that the 
 State prizes. 
 
 His narration set forth how he had slain a 
 rabid animal at great risk, in his own defence, 
 
 207 
 
TOTO 
 
 and for the public safety ; he felt sure that the 
 Pasteur Institute would send him some recom- 
 pense ; perhaps even put his statue in the 
 garden there, beside that of the Swiss shepherd, 
 who beat a dog to death with his sabots. 
 
 That night the notary and his wife buried by 
 stealth the body of Toto in a cherry orchard 
 which they possessed at St. Mande, and buried 
 with him the little gilded frame which held the 
 record of the life he had saved at the Pont 
 d'Austerlitz. 
 
 Nanon was lying on her bed, with the wounds 
 on her temple and forehead bandaged, and her 
 brain dulled with morphine. In the shop, on 
 the counter, a mattress was spread, and on the 
 mattress there was stretched the body of Chariot. 
 The medical certificate of his death wrote down 
 its cause as hemiplegia. The populace was 
 quiet for fear of the police ; but it muttered, low 
 and bitterly, savage words, and many small 
 traders near closed their shutters. 
 
 The Pot aux Roses was never opened as a 
 shop again. 
 
 Nanon partially recovered her health, but she 
 was childish and stupid ever after that day. She 
 lived for more than a year, but she never fully 
 
 208 
 
TOTO 
 
 recovered her senses. She murmured, " Chariot 
 — Toto" almost incessantly, and spent the whole 
 of her time, from dawn to dark, in watching for 
 them, looking up and down the street from what 
 had been so long the shop door, expecting them 
 home to dinner. 
 
 Then, one night, in her sleep, she also died, 
 from the breaking of a blood-vessel on the 
 brain. 
 
 The old house has been pulled down this 
 summer, and the sign of the Pot aux Roses has 
 been broken up and sold for matchwood. 
 
 Four years have gone by, and every one has 
 forgotten Nanon and Chariot, and the grass 
 grows long over their graves in the Cemetery of 
 Mont Parnasse, as over that of Toto in the 
 orchard at St. Mandc. Only now and then 
 Madame Virct still says to little Pierrot — 
 
 " Ah, ce panvre Toto ! C^tait un brave ! " 
 
 209 
 
TONIA 
 
TONIA 
 
 It was a little shawl, of a golden yellow, made 
 of floss silk and interwoven with threads of gold 
 twist. It was of oriental make, and had a heavy 
 fringe of its own silk. The girl Tonia did not 
 know its manufacture or its value, but she knew 
 it was some lady's toy, where it hung on a low 
 branch of vine among the dock-leaves and fox- 
 
 'to 
 
 grass. 
 
 The sun was shining on it, and made its 
 golden hue gleam like molten gold ; she looked 
 round her, up and down hill, and across the 
 fields. There was no one in sight. She pulled 
 up her apron, and into the pocket which she 
 wore beneath it she thrust the shawl, in company 
 with a pair of rusty scissors, a clasp-knife, some 
 coppers, a dead chaffinch, and a half-eaten piece 
 of black bread. 
 
 Then she went on with her work, which was 
 that of cutting grass for the cattle. She hated 
 work. She was seventeen years old, not very 
 
 213 
 
TONIA .- 
 
 pretty, but well made and well featured. She 
 had an aquiline profile, a rosy mouth with snow- 
 white teeth, and a fair skin, made to glow like a 
 ripe apricot by the sun. She had abundant 
 auburn hair, which was now hidden away under 
 a large cotton handkerchief of orange colour, 
 which came over her face and covered her 
 shoulders and bosom ; she wore a blue cotton 
 frock, very short, and on her bare feet were 
 wooden shoes. She cut and slashed recklessly 
 at the long grass, forgetting to be afraid of the 
 snakes in it, so much occupied was she by the 
 thought of the shawl. She cut thorns and nettles 
 and hemlock indifferently with the grasses, and 
 crammed them all into the basket beside her. 
 Then, when it was full, she swung it on her back 
 by its bit of cord and went down the grass path 
 towards the house where she lived, of which only 
 the red-brown, lichen-covered tiles were visible 
 amongst the foliage of fruit and walnut trees. 
 Tonia, which was the abbreviation of Antoinetta, 
 was a young woman who could keep her own 
 counsel. The shawl remained in her pocket, and 
 the secret of its discovery on her mind, unknown 
 and untold, whilst she joined her people in the 
 noonday meal. 
 
 214 
 
TONIA 
 
 There were present her father, Dario FoUani 
 by name, and her three brothers, black and wet 
 with sun and toil and perspiration ; her mother, 
 a woman who at forty looked sixty, with sagging 
 breast, wrinkled face, and rough grey hair ; her 
 elder and younger sisters, Camilla and Pia, and 
 the youngest of all the family, a ruddy, curly, 
 five-year-old male called Tito. There was one 
 member of the family absent ; her father's father. 
 " Where is Nonno ? " asked Tonia. 
 " He is gone to the mill ; he will be back to- 
 morrow ; he got a lift in the carrier's cart," her 
 mother answered her. 
 
 Tonia ate her bean-soup in silence. Nonno 
 was the only person she respected in the 
 world, and the only one with whom she took 
 counsel. 
 
 There was some desultory talk amongst the 
 men, but not much ; the jaws moved chiefly to 
 eat, and then closed on wooden pipes ; the mother 
 with a groan took up her dibble and went to sow 
 melon-plants ; the children ran off to school, or 
 what they called school, which was to play in 
 the dust of the highway with their fellows, stone 
 the birds, and if they were in luck, steal cress or 
 lettuce or unripe gooseberries. Tonia carried 
 
 215 
 
TONIA 
 
 her basket of grass into the cow-house, where the 
 week-old calves, only allowed to approach their 
 mothers for two half-hours in each twenty-four 
 hours, were moaning piteously, and being ans- 
 wered by the lamentations of the cows. Tonia 
 gave them no heed ; she put her load into a 
 corner, and then, being sure of no witnesses, drew 
 the yellow shawl out of her pocket and gazed on 
 it by the dim light of the stable. 
 
 It must have belonged to some lady. There 
 were ladies up at the big villas scattered among 
 the pine woods and distant hills, and now and 
 then, very rarely, such people passed through the 
 fields walking for health or going out sketching. 
 It was a lady's pretty trifle, to put round her 
 throat when the wind rose or the clouds darkened. 
 Tonia knew quite well that she ought to take it 
 down to the police-station in the little town six 
 miles away, where her father went with his pigs 
 and his fowls and his cabbages ; but she had no 
 intention of doing anything so simple. She 
 meant to keep it. She was very fond of dress ; 
 she ate her heart out with envy of them when 
 she saw the richer peasantry, at church, with 
 their leather shoes, their silver pins, their sleeves 
 cut like huge gourds. She had never worn 
 
 216 
 
TONIA 
 
 anything but the clogs cut out of a bit of deal, 
 and the gowns stitched by her mother and sister, 
 plain things made like the Holy Virgin's in old 
 paintings, with the skirts stitched on to the 
 waistband. There was a broken looking-glass 
 nailed up on one of the walls of the cow-house. 
 She had put it there for her own pleasure, and 
 she tied the golden shawl on over her curls and 
 looked at herself, and then draped it round her 
 shoulders and made believe to be a duchess 
 going to the theatre, and then again wound it 
 about her over her hair, and thought how well 
 her skin glowed, ruddy and blooming as it was, 
 against the bright floss silk. 
 
 Suddenly a brown arm went round her throat 
 and drew her head back, while warm lips kissed 
 her own. 
 
 *' Linto !" she cried, half angry, half delighted, 
 as she pushed the arm off her throat. Linto 
 was a sturdy, dark-eyed, handsome youth, who 
 was paying his court to her. She hurried the 
 shawl away into her pocket, but not before he 
 had seen it. 
 
 " Where did you get that smart thing ? " he 
 asked ; he was quick of eye and temper. 
 
 " A lady in the town gave it me," answered 
 
 217 
 
TONIA 
 
 Tonia. "But don't speak of it. You know 
 Camilla is always so jealous." 
 
 " Humph ! " said Linto. He did not believe 
 her, and he thought Camilla was, on the con- 
 trary, always good-natured and unselfish. But 
 he was enamoured with Tonia, and her mouth 
 was as fresh as a rose, and they were alone in 
 the dusky cow-house. He had pleasanter things 
 to think of than a fib, more or less. They were 
 but a few moments uninterrupted, for her father 
 came in noisily, shouldering a great mound of 
 grass : unmarried women are looked sharply 
 after in the provinces in Italy. 
 
 " Get you gone, Linto," said her father ; " 'tis 
 no time for philandering, with all the grass to cut 
 and carry up hill and down hill, and rain threaten- 
 ing. Get to work, Tonia, you lazy wench ! " 
 
 Tonia's face grew sullen and dark, like the 
 threatening cloud without, but she did not dare 
 to disobey. Her father drove her on before him 
 out of the stable and up the hillside, where the 
 winds were tossing the wreathed vines to and 
 fro. Linto lounged off to his own parents' 
 farm, which was on the other side of a runlet of 
 water and a screen of willows ; a farm where he 
 was one amongst twelve. 
 
 218 
 
TONIA 
 
 His girl had lied to him, but he did not think 
 twice of that ; who ever minds a lie in his 
 country ? Lies are like daily bread. Only he 
 did think to himself: "If any man gave her 
 that yellow thing he should taste my knife when 
 I found him 1 " 
 
 The land lay on one of the spurs of what are 
 called the Carrara mountains ; it was situated 
 somewhat low, and the day dawned late upon 
 it, but it was high enough to see the sea gleam- 
 ing on the south-west, and in the north and 
 east the mists of marshes and the silvery streaks 
 of rivers, whose names, so dear to poets, are the 
 Arno and the Serchio. 
 
 The views beneath and around them were 
 divine, above all at sunset, but neither Linto 
 nor Tonia had any eyes for them. 
 
 Linto went to ladle out liquid dung over the 
 roots of young cauliflowers, and Tonia went to 
 take in hay till the sweat ran like water off her 
 face and soaked through her hempen shift. He 
 thought a good deal of her as the stench 
 steamed up into his nostrils unperceived, and of 
 how he should be able to get his people's con- 
 sent to marry, seventh son as he was, and so 
 many mouths as there already were in his 
 
 219 
 
TONIA 
 
 parents' household to feed ; but she thought 
 only of the shawl which was all the while in her 
 pocket, as she raked and stacked and carried 
 the great pile of grass on her head to the place 
 where the poor wistful cow mothers stood in 
 the shafts of the waggon, muzzled and yoked, 
 tortured by their milk, and whining for their 
 children. No one in this part of the country 
 has either oxen or horses ; the cows do all the 
 labour, and go to the butcher afterwards : for 
 man, we are assured, had the earth made for 
 him. 
 
 All the afternoon she was puzzling in her 
 head what to do with the shawl. She dared not 
 keep it long in her pocket, for her mother often 
 turned out the girls' pockets to see that she and 
 her sisters had nothing there which was wrong ; 
 no stolen fruit, no hidden pence, no bit of finery 
 ill-got, no trinket from an unacknowledged 
 suitor. If her mother found the shawl, down 
 to the police in the town would it go on the 
 morrow ; not so much from honesty as from 
 apprehension ; that Tonia knew full well. The 
 only person whose counsel she could have asked 
 was away, so she put her treasure in an empty 
 tub, covered it with straw, and trusted to fortune 
 
 220 
 
TONIA 
 
 with an anxious heart; for what we call trust 
 in fate is generally fear of it. 
 
 Linto came across the fields again to smoke 
 with her brothers at supper-time ; she felt afraid 
 that he might say something as to what he had 
 seen. She took no pleasure in his company, 
 and she answered his jokes roughly. When she 
 got upstairs, she could not sleep, though she 
 was tired ; she could think of nothing but the 
 shawl in the tub by the well. Rats might 
 gnaw it, cats might claw it, hens might lay in it, 
 rain might fall on it : what a fool she had been 
 not to put it under some shelter ! She got up 
 and tried to go down the ladder which served 
 for a stair, that she might get out and go and 
 look at it ; but her mother heard a noise 
 through the wall, and called sharply to know 
 who was moving. Tonia slunk swiftly back to 
 her pallet, and dared not stir again until in the 
 dawn, with the Ave Maria chimes coming over 
 the hills, every one awoke and rose. 
 
 Under pretence of seeking for eggs, she, un- 
 noticed, got her treasure out of the tub and put 
 it again in her pocket. It was not hurt in any 
 way, only some bits of straw had caught in it. 
 "Nonno will know what to do with it," she 
 
 221 
 
TONIA 
 
 said to herself, as she carried some eggs she had 
 really found to her mother with an elaborate 
 ostentation of honesty. 
 
 In the still, cool hours of early morning her 
 grandfather arrived, brought by the miller's 
 men on a pile of sacks behind two buffaloes, 
 but she could not get a word alone with him 
 all the forenoon ; it was not till after the noon- 
 day meal that she found him alone with his 
 pipe in a shady corner where some myrtle- 
 bushes grew behind the cow-house. He was a 
 very old man, and for twenty years of his early 
 life had been a smuggler by choice on that 
 distant blue sea which sparkled under the sun 
 in the south-west. He was very proud of that 
 time and of the men he had killed in it ; had 
 " made cold " in his own figurative language. 
 He was bent in two, and black as a bit of 
 charcoal, but his eyes were sharp and his 
 senses were clear. To Tonia, to all his children 
 and grandchildren, indeed, he was an oracle. 
 He scoffed at them all as poor, white-livered 
 namby-pamby poltroons, who had never done 
 more than pick a quarrel in a wine-shop. 
 
 The old man had seen a great deal of various 
 goods in his contraband days, and when she 
 
 222 
 
TONIA 
 
 showed him the shawl he knew its origin and 
 value. 
 
 "Sell it, my dear; sell it," he said to her. 
 " 'Tis a pretty trifle, and comes from the Indies." 
 
 " But I want to keep it, Nonno ! I want to 
 go to church in it next Sunday ; and I daren't," 
 said Tonia, with tears trembling in her voice. 
 " I thought I would say you gave it me ? " 
 
 " They'd know better than to believe that," 
 replied the old man. *' They know I've only got 
 my tobacco money, and that I shouldn't spend 
 any of it on you ; they'd cut me short of it if 
 they thought I did. Sell it ! sell it ! sell it ! " 
 
 " No ! " sobbed Tonia. 
 
 The old man chuckled. 
 
 " You've got my blood in you. You like what 
 comes left-handed. Where did you find it, 
 Tonia?" 
 
 " On our vines ; 'tis mine ! " 
 
 "'Tis the foreign Princess's up yonder, I am 
 thinking ; she walks past here now and then." 
 
 Tonia winced and twisted her apron ; she had 
 had the same thought. 
 
 " Take it to her ; you'll get something," sug- 
 gested her grandsire. 33ut she sobbed hysteri- 
 cally. 
 
 223 
 
TONIA 
 
 " No, no, no ! " 
 
 She clung to her treasure-trove passionately. 
 Possession was law ; she had looked so well in 
 it, with its shining gold about her dark hair and 
 peach-like face. The old man had but little 
 warmth left in his dry veins, but the little he had 
 was for her. He turned the matter over in his 
 mind. 
 
 " Take it to the Presto," he said at last. " It 
 will be safe there, you'll get a little money on it ; 
 and you'll take it out when you like, when time 
 has passed and there's no danger. You go in 
 with the salad to-morrow. Get away by your- 
 self and go to the Presto." 
 
 The Presto is the State pawning-place, a 
 branch of which respectable institution is to be 
 found in every town. 
 
 *' Give a name not your own," he added, " and 
 stitch the ticket they'll give you inside your 
 shift." 
 
 Tonia stood irresolute, listening nervously to 
 any sound, twisting her apron round and round, 
 wondering how she should find the Presto in the 
 town, of which she knew little except the vege- 
 table-market, which was outside the gates in the 
 ruins of a Latin amphitheatre. 
 
 224 
 
TONIA 
 
 " Pawn it," said tlie old man, stuffing more 
 tobacco in his pipe ; " you can't hide it here, 
 and you'll get five francs at the Presto, and still 
 keep the thing." 
 
 " Five francs ! " said Tonia, with a deep breath ; 
 she had never had as much as a whole franc of 
 her own in her life, 
 
 " Ten, perhaps. There's a lot of gold in it," 
 said her adviser. His sight was dim ; but he 
 still knew a good thing and a pretty thing when 
 he saw them. 
 
 "There isn't any danger .-' " asked Tonia. 
 
 " None in life," said Nonno. " The Presto 
 doesn't ask any questions ; no more than the fine 
 folks used to ask where the French silks and the 
 French brandies I took them came from ; not 
 they, not they, my dear. But mind your father 
 don't see the thing," he added. " He is a poor, 
 white-livered soul, is your father, and his 
 stomach turns mighty soon ; men who can 
 read are always like that." 
 
 Tonia was comforted, but nervous. She knew 
 that it would be better to give the shawl to her 
 parents, and let them do what they saw fit ; but 
 she could not bring herself to surrender it. What 
 use to have found the shawl unless she gained 
 
 225 Q 
 
TONIA 
 
 some pleasure and profit out of it? To get 
 money on it, and yet to have it always for her 
 own, seemed the acme of utility to her. It was 
 only Nonno who ever thought of such clever 
 things. He might be palsied and purblind and 
 have one foot in the grave, and wander in his 
 talk sometimes, but he was cleverer than all of 
 them, old as he was. Reverence for age is not 
 a common virtue in Italy, but Nonno compelled 
 it from his descendants ; he was so crafty and so 
 cruel, and all the hillside knew that in his young 
 days he had strangled a coastguard or knifed a 
 spy as easily as you squash a frog, or crush a 
 snail, and yet had managed so well that he had 
 never spent an hour in jail. His comrades had 
 gone in his place, as he often remembered with 
 a cheerful chuckle. 
 
 He liked her better than Camilla. Camilla 
 was afraid of him, and showed it ; she shrank 
 from his tales of his smuggling life ; and when 
 he said, with a chuckle, " Li freddai " (" I made 
 them cold," meaning, " I slew them "), she turned 
 pale and went away. Tonia, on the contrary, 
 joined in his mirth, and would listen for the 
 twentieth time with unflagging interest to his 
 story of how he had dashed out the brains of 
 
 226 
 
TONIA 
 
 the young coastguard on the lugger-deck with 
 the butt of his gun, or of how he had cut 
 the throat of a spy with his knife one hot 
 summer night on the beach by the light of the 
 stars. " Ah ! those had been good times," he 
 said ; " men were men then " ; and Tonia always 
 listened greedily, and wished that she had 
 lived then, and seen the blood run amongst the 
 shingle. 
 
 There was a good deal of stabbing still ; no 
 cattle fair or horse fair passed off without its 
 quarrel. Roughly cut in deal, and painted with 
 pitch, there were new black crosses raised on the 
 turf of the high-road most years, marking the 
 place where murder had been done ; and only 
 a month before this a gentleman of the neighbour- 
 hood who was disliked had been shot dead as he 
 had driven past a pine-wood, and public sym- 
 pathy had screened and sheltered his assassin. 
 But all these things seemed trivial to her. She 
 did not see them ; she only heard of them. In 
 Nonno's days, if she could believe him, men could 
 scarcely smoke their pipes in peace if the moon 
 had moved into the light of morning without 
 seeing some enemy or some rival lying face up- 
 ward on the sea-sand or the hill-thyme. 
 
 227 
 
TONIA 
 
 That night Tonia left the shawl once more to 
 the shelter of the tub, and tossed restlessly on 
 her mattress through the early dark hours. Her 
 salads were all cut and packed ready for the 
 market, and she had nothing to do except to get 
 up at four o'clock and go down with her elder 
 brother to the town. She had placed her baskets 
 of lettuce and endive close to the tub, and it was 
 no hard matter to take the shawl out unperceived 
 in the grey, dusky dawn, when there was no one 
 near but the cat, and slip it once more in her 
 pocket. 
 
 " Buy me some sewing-thread from the shop, 
 Tonia," cried her sister Camilla, opening a case- 
 ment in the dark. Her voice made Tonia start 
 and turn cold, but the errand was welcome, for 
 it would give her an excuse to go into the streets. 
 A little later she was on the road with her 
 brother Domenico, her great tray-likc basket 
 balanced on her head, her feet stepping firmly 
 in their wooden zoccoli ; the boy had his skip 
 upon his back filled with cabbages and marrows. 
 It was dark, and the stars were dim, for it was 
 cloudy weather. 
 
 Out of the darkness and the rows of the vines 
 sprang Linto with a shout. 
 
 228 
 
TONIA 
 
 " I'm coming too, sai ! " he cried, as he jumped 
 the ditch. 
 
 There was no light by which to see her face, 
 or he would have seen its disconcerted gloom. 
 How would she be able to get rid of him in the 
 town ? He was so merry himself that he did 
 not notice the want of any greeting from her. 
 He had to carry a broken rotatory-pump to be 
 mended, and had ingeniously delayed the errand 
 to coincide with hers. 
 
 Their wooden shoes covered the miles rapidly, 
 while with every furlong the gleam of dawn 
 brightened and broadened until, before they 
 reached the gate, the day had come. They had 
 the usual tedious, weary, useless waiting in the 
 road to undergo in common with others, the 
 same insolence and injustice to endure from 
 the weighers and tax-takers, the same hunger 
 and thirst and fatigue and useless inaction, and 
 the morning was warm before they were free to 
 pass through the turnstiles and go into the 
 centre of the little city. 
 
 Tonia would not trust her sales to either her 
 brother or her betrothed : in matters of interest 
 it is best not to trust your nearest and dearest. 
 She had a knack of selling well, of putting the 
 
 229 
 
TON I A 
 
 best side up, and getting a centime more than 
 her neighbours for what was worth a centime 
 less. Linto, having disposed of his pump, came 
 back and watched her with admiration as her 
 basket was quickly emptied. 
 
 " Come and take a pennyworth with me," he 
 said in her ear ; " I'll pay for it. Come ; we'll 
 have a look at the shops before we go home." 
 
 She did not refuse the offered pennyworth of 
 wine ; and, after drinking it, she consented to 
 make the round of the shops — small, homely 
 places, which seemed marvels of magnificence 
 to her — but all the while she was pondering how 
 to get rid of Linto ; her brother was still in the 
 market with a half-load of cabbages unsold. 
 Linto, never dreaming that he was other than 
 desired and desirable, stuck close to her, his hat 
 on the back of his head, his brown face flushed 
 by the wine. At last, in front of the cathedral, 
 fortune favoured her : there was a crowd round 
 a Cheap- Jack. Linto pushed into the thick of 
 it, very eager to get something for nothing. 
 She gave him the slip, and, carried by the press 
 of country people, hurried round to the back of 
 the Duomo. There, true enough, was the long 
 building with a grey arcade, of which Nonno 
 
 230 
 
TONIA 
 
 had spoken. She was not shy. She asked a 
 woman if that were the pawning-place. 
 
 " Yes, yes," said the woman. " Have you 
 anything to pledge ? I can take it in for you if 
 you like." 
 
 Tonia shook her head and walked herself 
 through the great gloomy arch of this temple 
 of Plutus under a paternal Government. She 
 joined a string of anxious and sad-looking 
 people, some ill, some fairly well, clad, but all 
 with pain and want written on their features. 
 She did not think of them ; she held her trea- 
 sure under her apron with both hands. The 
 two gendarmes, one at each end of the passage, 
 intimidated her. She did not know how time 
 went, but it seemed to her more than an hour 
 before her turn came at the wicket ; her heart 
 turned sick as she surrendered the precious 
 shawl to inspection. She thought one of the 
 gendarmes looked oddly at her ; her name was 
 asked, she stammered a false one ; the shawl 
 did not return ; they pushed across to her seven 
 francs, and a printed card, written on, and she 
 was hastily bundled away and out at an oppo- 
 site door to the one by which she had entered. 
 The doors of the Presto were opposite the 
 
 231 
 
TONIA 
 
 northern doors of the Duomo. With a bright 
 inspiration she darted across the hundred yards 
 of stone pavement which divided the two build- 
 ings, and entered the cathedral, traversed the 
 nave from north to south, and went out into the 
 square again. She had the money she had 
 taken for her salads, which was all in pence and 
 half-pence, jingling in a knotted handkerchief ; 
 but the sum for the shawl, minus a franc, and 
 the pawn-ticket, were safe behind the busk of 
 her stiff stays ; leaving out what was necessary 
 to pay for the tobacco, she had stopped in a 
 side chapel of the Duomo to fasten it there in 
 safety. How wise Nonno had been ! How 
 shrewdly he had thought of everything ! As she 
 let fall the massive leather curtain behind her, 
 and went out, dazzled by the sunshine, Linto 
 caught hold of her with a shout. 
 
 " Good heavens, Tonia, where have you been 
 all this time?" 
 
 " I have been at Mass," said Tonia, in a tone 
 of severity. " You were so intent on that cheat 
 with his shams, that you never saw me leave 
 you." 
 
 " What could you want with Mass ? It's not 
 a holy day." 
 
 232 
 
TONIA 
 
 " Every day is holy, if we make it so. Come, 
 let us get home." 
 
 Linto felt abashed, but he was not ill-pleased ; 
 pious wives are as wholesome to their husbands 
 as sulphur is to the vines. 
 
 They found Domenico, who was rueful be- 
 cause he had only got rid of his cabbages at 
 next to nothing, and they all went home on 
 their strong young legs, Tonia stopping at a 
 shop near the gate to buy the sewing-thread and 
 the ounce of tobacco, paying for the latter with 
 part of the Presto money, for she had no other. 
 
 "She is a good girl," thought Linto, and 
 when Domenico was walking a little in front of 
 them, he put his arm round her shoulders, and 
 kissed her heartily. 
 
 When she got home she gave the old man 
 his tobacco, but she did not think it necessary to 
 tell him how much she had received on the shawl. 
 
 " They only gave me three francs," she said, 
 when they met in secrecy behind the cow-house ; 
 "but I spent one and six soldi for your tobacco." 
 
 " Let me see the ticket," said the old man, 
 suspiciously ; but he was very dim of sight, and 
 could not make out the numerals ; he was 
 obliged to take her word. Besides, he was for 
 
 233 
 
TONIA 
 
 the moment easy to content, being pleased with 
 himself for his perspicacity in sending her to 
 the Presto. 
 
 For a few days Tonia was as well pleased as 
 he. She had six franc-notes stitched in her 
 shift, and the pretty thing was safe down in the 
 town. She was very proud of herself, was rude 
 to her mother, pert to her sister, unkind to the 
 children, and imperious with Linto, assuming 
 the airs natural to a person who has risen in 
 the world. She admired her own astuteness, 
 and considered herself an owner of property. 
 She walked with her head so high that her 
 brothers asked if the house-door should be 
 heightened for her ; but for such silly jokes she 
 had no reply. The cat suffered at her hands, 
 and the chickens and the pigs, for she had seen 
 herself with that silken shawl about her curls 
 and had seen that she was too good for farm- 
 work. Linto began to doubt her piety, or felt 
 that at heart it was not sweet towards others ; 
 but he was in love, and every evening, when the 
 nightingales were singing in the myrtle-bushes 
 and walnut-trees, he came across the fields to 
 sit with her on the bench or walk with her 
 where the moonlight shone. 
 
 234 
 
TONIA 
 
 " A good lad, Linto," said her father ; " I 
 think they may marry come All Saints." 
 
 Linto knew that her people and his were all 
 saying this, and that, though he was so young, 
 his elder brothers, who intended to go to La 
 Plata, were willing to waive their rights in his 
 favour in consideration of a little money for 
 their voyage and outfit. But, herself, she began 
 to doubt. That money in her bosom seemed 
 to talk to her of all manner of finer things. She 
 hated the heat, she hated the cold, she hated 
 washing linen, weeding, slug-seeking, beating 
 linen in the water, drying it on the bushes, 
 gathering peas, cutting broom, stacking heather 
 — any and every one of the daily tasks which 
 were her lot, with the sun embrowning her face 
 and the work making hard and horny her 
 hands. The only thing she liked to do was to 
 sit still and weave hempen sheeting upstairs in 
 her attic, for then she could let the frame lie 
 idle on her lap whilst she dreamed of all the 
 fine life there must be in the world if only she 
 could get at it. The worm of discontent was 
 in her, as the evil of the phylloxera works in 
 the healthy vine, making it unsound. 
 
 After a few days of this satisfaction and 
 
 235 
 
TONIA 
 
 exultation she grew less elated, more uneasy. 
 After all, the shawl was no pleasure to her, shut 
 away down in the town, and the money was of 
 no use to her since she did not dare to spend it. 
 
 " What is the matter with you, Tonia ? " her 
 sister asked her kindly more than once. 
 
 But Tonia shook her off impatiently. 
 
 " Can't you let me alone .-' You are like a 
 swarm of bees buzzing in one's ears ! " 
 
 Even Nonno did not seem to her any longer 
 infallible. She called him in her thoughts an 
 old dotard. He, when he had come to the end 
 of the tobacco, pinched her ear, 
 
 " You should take the shawl out and sell it," 
 he said to her. " What will you give me for 
 holding my tongue ? Nonno's mum, my pretty. 
 Fill his pipe for him. Fill it as often as 'tis 
 empty, if you want Nonno to be mum." 
 
 Tonia began to understand that the old hero 
 might talk to her hurt if she did not humour 
 him. He was fond of her, certainly, as far as 
 his sluggish feelings still moved at all ; but he 
 was fonder of good tobacco ; he had smoked 
 the best in the days of old, when his brigantine 
 had sailed on that shining stretch of sea to the 
 south-west, and he knew very well that what 
 
 236 
 
TONIA 
 
 the family supplied him with was chopped straw 
 and dried dung. She could not tell how to get 
 any money ; when she went in to market her 
 father set a price on each leaf and root she 
 carried, and she had to give him on her return 
 their value, and show what she had not sold of 
 them. There was no possibility of stealing a 
 centime unless she sold at a higher price than 
 the one he had set, which was not often pos- 
 sible ; even when she did so one of her brothers 
 was always at her side and knew how much she 
 got. 
 
 So she had to take more of the Presto money 
 to get the stuff for his pipe, and more and more 
 till there was little left. 
 
 The desire to get back the shawl grew intense 
 on her, but she was afraid to be seen going back 
 to the Presto, and, besides, she must have the 
 full seven francs, and something as well for 
 interest, before they would allow her to redeem 
 it, and where was she to keep it if she got it 
 back ? She would have to show it boldly, and 
 make up some tale of a friendly giver. But her 
 family were suspicious of her tales. They had 
 heard a good many of them. And Linto — 
 Linto, who was easily jealous — would be sure to 
 
 237 
 
TONIA 
 
 ask many tiresome questions if his curiosity was 
 once aroused. 
 
 " Fill my pipe, Antoinetta ! " said her grand- 
 father, shaking the pipe at her ; and she knew 
 that what he meant was: "Get me good stuff 
 to smoke, or I'll tell ! " 
 
 She grew to hate the sight of him, shambling 
 along under the vines, or sitting on the cow- 
 house wall with his little, sharp, black eyes, 
 like gimlets, seeming to bore into her very 
 brain. 
 
 " Get me some good tobacco for Nonno," she 
 said to her betrothed; 
 
 Linto demurred ; good tobacco was very 
 dear. But, at last, wishing to please her, he 
 bought half an ounce of the best he could get ; 
 but wishing also to stand well with the old 
 man, presented it himself to the hoary, aged 
 figure, seated doubled together in the sun. 
 
 "He knows now that you bought it!" cried 
 Tonia, almost in tears. 
 
 " Why shouldn't he know ? " asked Linto. 
 " Perhaps it'll make him like me. Wasn't that 
 why you wished me to get it ? " 
 
 "Yes, yes!" she said impatiently; "but I 
 wanted to give him some, too ! " 
 
 21^ 
 
TONIA 
 
 "Poor Tonia!" said Linto, ruefully. "I'll 
 try and buy some next week. I didn't think. 
 I haven't got a soldo left now." 
 
 " What a gaby he was ! " thought Tonia, who 
 had no patience with people who did not under- 
 stand at a gallop, taking hints as a night-jar 
 takes gnats on the wing. 
 
 "Tonia is always out of temper with me," 
 said the young man, sadly, to Camilla, who 
 answered with a smile : 
 
 " People in love are always tetchy, Linto." 
 " Humph ! " said the young man. He doubted 
 Tonia's love for him; he had a glimmering 
 perception that if there were any suitor better 
 oft in the neighbourhood, Tonia would soon 
 send him about his business, though she was 
 enamoured of him in a capricious way. 
 
 " My mother is right, perhaps. Camilla is the 
 flax-flower and Tonia the poppy," he thought ; 
 he had heard this said very often at his home, 
 where the elder girl was the greater favourite, 
 but he had never attended to the comparison. 
 
 In the dusk of the evening Nonno said slyly 
 to her : 
 
 " Linto brought me some rare good stuff. 
 I've a mind to tell him, little one, what you've 
 
 239 
 
TONIA 
 
 got stitched in your stays. Fie, you mean 
 vixen ! grudging a poor old man his pipe." 
 
 "You smoke all day," said Tonia, out of 
 patience, but turning hot and cold. 
 
 "Chopped straw," grumbled Nonno. He 
 meant to get enough good tobacco to last him 
 into the winter out of her before he had done ; 
 and he did get it, until the francs of the Presto 
 were all spent. 
 
 Tonia wished she had never seen the shawl ; 
 her rosy face grew grey with fear, for she knew 
 her grandfather, if feeble on his legs and con- 
 fused in his memories, held on to an idea as the 
 cat clung to a branch where a nest was. When 
 the tobacco should be forthcoming no longer, 
 he would revenge himself on her, she was sure. 
 
 Her father was sacristan of the parish church, 
 and it is part of the sacristan's duties to keep 
 the church accounts, buy candles, wafers, bread, 
 brooms, anything which is wanted, and account 
 for such expenses to the Vicar and the parish. 
 A peasant is usually sacristan of his church for 
 a year, and this year the office had fallen to 
 him. He kept a little of the church money in 
 a bag, in a locked box, in the wide shaft of an 
 unused chimney in the back of the house. It 
 
 240 
 
TONIA 
 
 was put there for safety from beggars and 
 tramps, but its hiding-place was no secret to 
 the family, and its key was always hidden in 
 the salt-pan. 
 
 Tonia watched for an occasion when every 
 one of them was working in the more remote 
 fields, and she was left to guard the house and 
 weave at her sheeting. She got the key of the 
 box out of the kitchen cupboard, got the box 
 itself out of the chimney, opened it, and helped 
 herself to four francs from the bag, then to six 
 more ; then it seemed a pity to leave any ; she 
 took two more, and only another two remained. 
 She took those also, and hurried back the box 
 and the key to their respective places. With 
 the money in her bosom she went upstairs to 
 her frame, and was weaving diligently, sitting 
 by the window, when her people came in from 
 the fields hot and hungry. The next day she 
 bought her grandfather's tobacco : the best she 
 could get in the village. 
 
 " Good girl, good girl," said the old man. 
 " I'm mum, Tonia." 
 
 Fortunately for her there was no need at that 
 moment for her father to go to the church-bag ; 
 every purchase had been made that was necessary 
 
 241 R 
 
TONIA 
 
 for ecclesiastical purposes, and it was never 
 opened except when there was some need. But 
 Corpus Domini was not far off; it fell that 
 summer on the twentieth of June. For that 
 feast the bag would be opened certainly. She 
 felt sick when she thought of it ; but it was 
 only the seventh of June now. She said to her- 
 self that she would put the amount back some- 
 how or other before that time came. Some 
 vague scruple withheld her from asking the aid 
 of the saints in this difficulty, but she told her 
 beads and said a paternoster. " That never can 
 do harm," she thought. So completely did her 
 own affairs engross her that she did all other 
 things ill : mixed threads in her weaving, forgot 
 to feed the pigs, spilt the milk in carrying it, 
 and received many a sound scolding from her 
 people. But she returned these with scorn and 
 indifference : they seemed to her a pack of 
 fools, worrying their lives out over a broken 
 flask or an empty swill-tub. 
 
 She had money enough left when the tobacco 
 had been bought to get the shawl out of the 
 Presto: how to do it without being seen was 
 the problem which engrossed her, for her 
 mother, who fancied her manner odd, had gone 
 
 242 
 
TONIA 
 
 in herself with the salad and cabbages for the 
 last ten days. 
 
 Even buying the tobacco in the village had 
 been attended with danger, for if her family 
 heard of it she knew that they would certainly 
 question her as to how she had got the money. 
 She could not say that she had received it from 
 Nonno, because the old man never had a far- 
 thing : their filial admiration for him never went 
 so far as to give him a halfpenny. The aged 
 are looked on in peasant families as so much 
 lumber that would be better cut down and put 
 on the fire, like old tree-stumps, if there were 
 not a law against it. Nonno's splendid past, in 
 his smuggling days, secured him respect, but 
 respect did not go so far as filling his waistcoat 
 pocket with good pence. 
 
 She might have coaxed her mother into 
 giving permission, or she might have gone with- 
 out permission, for they were used to her disobe- 
 dience ; but she did not care to go again into 
 that place, with its watching gendarmes and its 
 suspicious-looking assayers and clerks at the 
 wickets. She had got off safely once, but she 
 knew that it was a mere chance. Another time 
 she might be questioned. 
 
 243 
 
TONIA 
 
 Being at her wits' end, and having long ex- 
 perience of Camilla's trustworthiness and affec- 
 tion, she confided a part of the truth to her 
 sister ; a small part, and that garbled, but 
 enough to enlist assistance and win sympathy. 
 
 She told her that she had been given the 
 shawl by the foreign lady up at the ducal 
 villa, and had pawned it by her grandfather's 
 counsels, being afraid that her parents would 
 take it from her as too fine a thing to be worn ; 
 that she had always kept the money received 
 for it, and wished now to take it out, as she 
 could sell it and buy her gown for her wedding 
 with the proceeds. Would Camilla go and get 
 it for her? Her parents would never suspect 
 Camilla of anything wrong. 
 
 Camilla was a simple girl, of no great wit ; 
 but even she thought the narrative a lame one, 
 and concluded that there was something that 
 was not told to her. 
 
 " Did the lady really give it you ? " she asked 
 doubtfully. 
 
 " Certainly she gave it me," said Tonia, very 
 proudly. " I have done her many favours : 
 showing her the way in the woods, finding her 
 ferns, and the like." 
 
 244 
 
TONIA 
 
 " I did not know you had ever seen her," said 
 Camilla, much surprised. 
 
 " Do you suppose you know all I see and all 
 I do ? " said Tonia, with much arrogance. " The 
 lady would take me away if I would go," she 
 added ; for, in invention, as in eating, appetite 
 grows on what it feeds on, and has no limits 
 once having left the realms of fact. 
 
 " But you would never go away from Linto 
 and from us?" cried Camilla, in great dismay. 
 
 Tonia gave a toss of her head, and a fine ges- 
 ture of immeasurable disdain. 
 
 " Who knows what grand fate I might not get 
 in the world ? I am handsome, you know, and 
 I am clever." 
 
 " Yes, dear," said Camilla, in meek acquies- 
 cence, but disturbed. " But don't you love 
 Linto .'' " she added. 
 
 Tonia shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 "That is all foolish talk," she said roughly. 
 " Will you go to the Presto, or won't you ? " 
 
 "I will go, if you wish it so much," said 
 Camilla, reluctantly. " But I don't see " 
 
 " Never mind that. Nobody wants you to 
 understand," said Tonia. " Mother'U let you 
 go into the town, and she won't let mc go 
 
 245 
 
TON I A 
 
 anywhere. That's why I tell you to do this 
 thing." 
 
 •'You arc sure this shawl is really your 
 own ? " 
 
 " Really ? really ? " replied Tonia, with mimicry 
 of her tones. " Yes, it is ; and the lady offered 
 me a bracelet, too, but I wouldn't take it, for one 
 likes to show these great folks that one can have 
 a spirit as well as they can." 
 
 Camilla looked at her with tenfold increased 
 admiration ; to talk with princesses and to refuse 
 bracelets seemed to her to place her young sister 
 on a pinnacle absolutely unattainable by any one 
 else. It created such a confusion in her simple 
 brain that she forgot to observe the discrepancies 
 in the narrative. 
 
 Camilla was, as usual, subdued and credulous ; 
 she admired her sister so greatly that it seemed 
 quite natural, after all, that Tonia should be 
 acquainted with fine folks. She did not like the 
 errand to the Presto at all, for she was shy and 
 easily frightened, and the secrecy enforced upon 
 her was disagreeable to her. Nevertheless, she 
 took the ticket and the money, and consented 
 to do the unpleasant errand. 
 
 One thing Tonia did not tell her, for fear of 
 
 246 
 
TONIA 
 
 exciting her alarm : she did not tell her that she 
 had given a false name and address. 
 
 Two days later Camilla went into the town 
 with the salads and some early cherries, accom- 
 panied by her youngest brother. As she went 
 out of the courtyard she looked at Tonia and 
 nodded, touching her breast. She meant to say 
 that she would do the errand faithfully ; and 
 Tonia understood, where she stood stacking 
 dung, but did not need the assurance. She knew 
 that Camilla was such a simpleton that she 
 would never think of cheating. How she hated 
 the work ! She drove her fork into it passion- 
 ately. What was the use of marrying Linto, 
 when this was the kind of labour which would 
 await her — always in the sun and the rain, 
 always bending her back and straining her 
 muscles, always spoiling her nails and burning 
 her skin ! What a life these women all round 
 her led, working like men even when they were 
 with child, toiling worse than even the men did, 
 toiling like so many cows, with children at their 
 breasts year after year for a dozen years ! What 
 a life ! 
 
 At that moment a loud shriek broke on her 
 ear ; out of the house her father came with 
 
 247 
 
TONIA 
 
 outstretched arms, and screaming like a stabbed 
 hog. Tonia lost all her colour ; she compre- 
 hended what had happened ; he had the empty 
 church-bag in his hand, and was shaking it in 
 the air like a madman. 
 
 " Tonia ! Tonia ! " he shouted. " They have 
 stolen the church money. Perdition seize them ! 
 Flames everlasting burn them ! " 
 
 His wife came out behind him, rending the 
 air with her shrieks. Tonia, with admirable 
 presence of mind, sprang down from the dung- 
 heap, and joined in the outcry with well-acted 
 amaze and horror. 
 
 " Twenty years has the box been there and 
 never a finger touched it ! " cried her father. 
 "Sacrilege! 'tis sacrilege ! The thief will burn 
 for all eternity." 
 
 Tonia, despite her courage, shook in every 
 limb as she heard ; but she continued to scream 
 at the top of her voice, and her parents suspected 
 her of nothing but sympathy and alarm. 
 
 " When did you open it last, father ? " she 
 asked, with chattering teeth. 
 
 " Oh, 'tis ten days or more ago," he answered, 
 wildly tearing his hair. " There's been nothing 
 to go to it for ; but now Corpus Domini's right 
 
 248 
 
TONIA 
 
 ahead of us. I said to myself, ' I'll count the 
 money.' 'Twas locked ; locked all safe and 
 sound, and the key in the salt-pan ; and I open 
 it, and every stiver's gone. You would give a 
 drink to that pedlar last Monday," he said 
 fiercely, turning to his wife. " Like enough 
 'twas he." 
 
 She defended herself as fiercely. 
 
 " A decent man who has sold tins along the 
 road twenty years! Not he, not he. There 
 was a tramp last Wednesday week I found 
 sitting on the bench " 
 
 "Oh yes, to be sure 'twas the tramp," said 
 Tonia, eagerly. "An ill-looking man, with a 
 squint, and he asked for broken crusts." 
 
 " What's the matter ? " asked Nonno, getting 
 off his seat on the wall, and coming towards them 
 feebly, bent in two over his stick. 
 
 " Father's found the church-bag empty," said 
 Tonia. 
 
 For one instant the little, sharp eyes of the 
 old man met the girl's large, startled, dilated 
 eyes, and said to her as plainly as if he had 
 spoken, " So that is where my tobacco came 
 from ! " But he did not say a word to com- 
 promise her, and neither of her parents suspected 
 
 249 
 
TONIA 
 
 her for a moment. Only her father, grown a 
 little calmer, said, rubbing his forehead ruefully : 
 
 " How the deuce could anybody from out-of- 
 doors know that the key of the box was kept 
 in the salt-pan ? " 
 
 The shouting and screaming had brought 
 in the boys from the fields and half a dozen 
 people who were on the high-road going up 
 into the woods to cut heather and underwood : 
 the clamour was loud, the chatter endless, and 
 the man was almost consoled for the loss of the 
 money by being the hero of such a misfortune. 
 Tonia was weeping with great effect ; her 
 fright, being genuine, made her tears flow abun- 
 dantly. So great was the excitement, so absorb- 
 ing the theme, that they none of them noticed 
 that Camilla had not returned, nor the boy who 
 had accompanied her either. Only when they 
 were about to eat a mouthful at ten o'clock, as 
 their habit was, did they perceive her absence. 
 
 " She has been detained at the Presto," thought 
 Tonia, with a quaking spirit. 
 
 As they were eating their bread and salt fish, 
 her father never ceasing to swear against the 
 thieves, the youngest of the boys, who had gone 
 with her, came back. 
 
 250 
 
TONIA 
 
 " I can't find Milla," he said breathlessly, and 
 afraid of being scolded. " I've been all over the 
 town ; I got so hungry I thought I'd better come 
 home." 
 
 " What did you leave her for ? " shouted his 
 mother, cuffing his ear, 
 
 " She left me ! " said the child, sobbing ; " she 
 went shopping." 
 
 " Did you give her any errands to do ? " asked 
 her mother of Tonia. 
 
 " No, mother," said Tonia, innocently. " She 
 must have gone to buy for the neighbours." 
 
 It was unlike Camilla; she v/as punctuality 
 itself, and she always did exactly what she was 
 told, neither more nor less. But they finished 
 their meal, and, to punish the boy, gave him 
 bread without a morsel of fish. 
 
 They were just done, and were going out to 
 their respective labours, when her father, struck 
 by a sudden thought, said, smiting his thigh : 
 
 " Damned if I haven't forgot to tell the police ! 
 They won't find the thief; but there is a fine if 
 you don't tell them when there's been any rob- 
 bery." 
 
 " Ah, to be sure there is," said Tonia, eagerly. 
 Her face was hidden as she tied on her big 
 
 251 
 
TONIA 
 
 orange kerchief and pulled it over her eyes. 
 " You had better go, father." 
 
 "Who asked your leave?" said her father, 
 crossly. He was a good-natured man, but he was 
 sorely put out by the loss of the church money, 
 which, of course, he would have to make up out 
 of his own savings, and his savings were fewer 
 than his debts. 
 
 " You can describe the tramp to them, father, 
 can't you ? " continued Tonia, with officious zeal. 
 "I can. A short, lean, ill-looking fellow, with 
 red hair, and a blue shirt and corduroy breeches 
 all torn. I marked him well." 
 
 Nonno, listening where he was smoking, 
 chuckled silently : she was a chip of the old 
 block, a brave girl, with a glib tongue : he was 
 proud of her. 
 
 " How should the tramp have known of the 
 salt-pan ? " said her father, dissatisfied and per- 
 plexed. 
 
 " The police will make him tell," said his wife. 
 " Go and clean yourself, Dario, and go and talk 
 to them." 
 
 At that moment there was a clatter of horses' 
 hoofs on the dry road at the back of the house, 
 and a jingling of chains and sabres rang upon the 
 
 252 
 
TONIA 
 
 air as two gendarmes rode through the opening 
 from the road into the courtyard before the 
 house. Dario ran out to them, alarmed and 
 annoyed. 
 
 " I was just coming to tell you of it, sirs," 
 he said breathlessly, afraid that they would 
 denounce him for having delayed the declaration 
 of the theft, and making sure that, in some un- 
 known way, they had heard of it. The old man 
 and Tonia shrank back into the shadow of the 
 yawning hearth : he had had many a hard tussle 
 with officers of the law in his day, and hated the 
 sight of any ; and she, when she saw these dread 
 shapes, felt her heart thump against her stays 
 until it seemed to burst them. 
 
 One of the riders, the brigadier, looked sur- 
 prised. 
 
 " Why are you here } " he said. " You should 
 go to the town." 
 
 " I know I ought, sir," said Dario, piteously ; 
 " but I only waited to eat a bit." 
 
 " You are an odd father," said the brigadier. 
 
 '• Eh, sir ? " Dario thought he could not hear 
 aright. He began a long, confused narrative of 
 the loss of the church money, to which the cara- 
 bineers listened as impatiently, as their horses 
 
 253 
 
TONIA 
 
 shook their heads under the torment of the flies 
 and horse-flies. 
 
 " If you have lost anything, denounce it at the 
 office," said the brigadier, cutting short the story. 
 " There is more trouble for you than that. 
 You do not seem to know. Your elder daughter 
 has been arrested down in the town. I came 
 as a friend to tell you. Go down at once, or she 
 will pass the night in prison. This is quite 
 irregular on my part, but I have known you 
 many years." 
 
 Dario stared, with his eyes starting out of their 
 sockets. 
 
 " Camilla, my Camilla arrested ? " he gasped. 
 " Oh, there must be some frightful mistake, sir ! 
 What do they think she can have done ? " 
 
 *' Go and see. They will tell you at the 
 Questura. If you have been robbed here as well, 
 denounce the theft. She may be guilty of that 
 too." 
 
 They turned their horses' heads and rode out 
 of the courtyard, having their beat to follow 
 along the lonely road which wound up through 
 the woods. Dario clung to the brigadier's stirrup, 
 and his wife clutched the horse's tail, screaming ; 
 but they could get nothing more from him than 
 
 254 
 
TONIA 
 
 the bidding to go down to the town and see for 
 themselves. The brigadier was sorry for the 
 news he had brought, for he liked Camilla, 
 but he was afraid of being mixed up with the 
 affair, and embroiled with the authorities. The 
 mother and father hurried away without chang- 
 ing their working-clothes, beside themselves 
 with anxiety, and drowned in tears, which 
 washed deep channels in the dirt of their faces. 
 They had given no thought to Tonia and the 
 old man, who were left alone facing each other. 
 
 Nonno grinned. 
 
 "You sent Milla to bear the brunt of it, eh, 
 my wench ? You're a rare one, Tonia ! And 
 you've got your father's money, too, or I'm a 
 dead man. Lord, child, don't squirm with me ; 
 I know what you've been after ; and I've been 
 mum, haven't I? — mum as the very stones?" 
 
 But Tonia turned from him in disgust ; she 
 was sobbing with terror and the certainty of ex- 
 posure, for, of course, if Camilla had been taken 
 up by the police, it must be about the shawl, 
 she reasoned ; and if Camilla were questioned, 
 she would be obliged to speak ; that was equally 
 
 sure. 
 
 " Why did you tell me to go to the odious 
 
 255 
 
TONIA 
 
 place?" she sobbed. "You are a wicked old 
 man. Everybody is wicked who lives when 
 they ought to be dead, and eats when they 
 can't earn ! " 
 
 No sooner were the words out of her mouth 
 than she would have given ten years of her life 
 to recall them ; for she dreaded her grandfather 
 beyond all other persons, good or evil, and she 
 realized that she had undone at a blow all the 
 work of establishing herself in his favour which 
 she had toiled at with so much ardour ever since 
 she had been a baby. The old man said nothing, 
 but his face, as he leaned forward hstening, with 
 his hands on his knees, was that of a demon ; 
 his little eyes glittered through their rheum, his 
 toothless jaws gibbered and chattered noiselessly, 
 his lips foamed. Then he staggered on to his 
 feet, tottered towards her to strike her, and, his 
 weak knees giving way, dropped heavily on the 
 bricks of the hearth, struggling and choking. 
 
 Tonia was so terrified at his aspect that she 
 threw down the platter she was holding, and 
 dashed out into the open air and into the green 
 fields, leaving him still vainly striving to utter 
 oaths and striking violently with his stick at the 
 place where she had stood. She fled upward 
 
 256 
 
TON I A 
 
 through the wheat and the vines to the wood 
 which edged them, far above where the water- 
 courses ran and the broom was flowering, and the 
 cuckoo calling from the distant oaks. She flung 
 herself down, face forward, on the earth, and 
 wished that its brown soil would open and 
 swallow her. 
 
 How long she remained there she did not 
 know : it might be minutes, hours, or days for 
 any count that she kept of time ; but all at 
 once the wood seemed filled with a clamour of 
 voices calling on her name. She knew the 
 voices : they were those of her brothers and of 
 Linto. She stumbled to her feet and changed 
 her path like a hunted animal, and scrambled 
 higher and higher, where the stone-pines grew, 
 and hid herself in a hole in the ground, where 
 the thickly growing vegetation formed a screen 
 for her. She scarcely knew why she ran away, 
 for flight could only postpone the hour of 
 discovery, it could not avert it ; but she had 
 ceased to reason. She acted on mere non- 
 reflecting instinct, the impulse to run away 
 and hide. But the voices pursued her, and she 
 could distinguish what they said. They were 
 shouting to her to come down, for Nonno was 
 
 257 S 
 
TONIA 
 
 struck dead. Trembling from head to foot, she 
 came out from the tangled undergrowth and 
 showed herself. 
 
 " What arc you up here for when there is such 
 trouble in the house?" said her elder brother 
 Domenico in angry surprise. " Nonno is dead ; 
 we found him dead just now. Why on earth 
 did you leave him alone ? " 
 
 She was about to say that she was going to cut 
 wood, but she remembered that she had no bill- 
 hook, and that she must look alarmed and odd. 
 " I saw him die," she said, with shaking voice. 
 "It frightened me so, I dared not stay." 
 
 "And you called nobody?" said her elder 
 brother, incredulously. 
 
 " I did not think," she stam mered, " I was so 
 frightened." 
 
 " Frightened ? You ? " cried her brother. 
 " Well, come down. The neighbours are there ; 
 they will want something to eat." 
 
 As they went down the hill, the young men 
 pushing and pulling her along with them, she 
 began to recover her spirits ; if Nonno were dead, 
 the chief witness against her was silenced for 
 ever; she felt sure that Camilla would find some 
 way to shield her, let her suffer what she might. 
 
 258 
 
TONIA 
 
 When they reached the house, some women 
 from the neighbouring farms had pulled up the 
 old man from the hearth and had got him on 
 to a big settle, where he was struggling between 
 them, breathing stertorously and looking like 
 death, but still not dead, as she had hoped. 
 How foolish she had been to leave him there ! 
 A little force at the right moment, a tap of his 
 own oak staff on the right place, and he would 
 have been safe and sound, out of the way for all 
 time. Now the neighbours had got him, and 
 were burning feathers, holding lighted paper 
 under his nostrils, and putting to his clenched 
 teeth a decoction of herbs and spiders which 
 was considered of sufficient virtue to call the 
 dead from their graves. 
 
 Tonia shrank from the sight of the doubled-up, 
 motionless figure. 
 
 " He was always so good to me ! " she whim- 
 pered. 
 
 She was still horribly afraid ; but fear looked 
 very like grief, and passed muster for it with the 
 neighbours. 
 
 It was now very late in the day ; the sun was 
 setting, and its light streamed through the open 
 door of the dwelling-house ; outside the cows 
 
 259 
 
TONIA 
 
 were lowing, the pigs grunting ; their fodder and 
 food had been forgotten ; the nightingales sang 
 in the myrtle hedge. Over the threshold with 
 heavy step returned her parents, alone ; they 
 looked crushed to the ground with shame and 
 sorrow. When they saw the old man they were 
 mute and callous. What did that matter ? 
 They hoped he would die. There would be one 
 mouth less to feed. 
 
 "Where's Camilla?" called the wom.en and 
 the boys. Tonia alone was silent : as silent as 
 the paralyzed old man. 
 
 " They've got her," said Dario, hoarsely. 
 " They won't let her out." 
 
 His wife had covered her head with her apron 
 and was weeping as she had wept all the way 
 from the town. 
 
 Linto had followed them into the room, and, 
 without saying a word, had come and stood 
 behind Tonia's shoulder. His face was dark 
 and moody. At this juncture he leaned down 
 behind her and muttered in her ear : 
 
 " Confess ! Confess, then. Do you hear ? " 
 
 She heard, but she did not obey. A shiver 
 went over her, and the tan of her face grew 
 greyer, that was all. 
 
 260 
 
TOMA 
 
 Her father, with his hat dashed on the floor 
 and his arms folded, was still filling the kitchen 
 with his lamentations. 
 
 " So good a girl ! So modest, so docile, so 
 quiet! A thief ? Camilla— my i\Iilla ? I won't 
 even believe it. Things look black. Oh, they 
 look black 1 I don't deny it. And the money 
 went out of the church-bag, too ; but that M ilia 
 took it I can't believe. I'd as soon believe that 
 the Virgin got down off the wall there and did it 
 — may the Holy One forgive me my blasphemy! " 
 
 " Confess, you jade ! " said Linto in Tenia's 
 car. In the uproar of the women's shouts and 
 sobs, and the noisy weeping of the children, none 
 heard him. The old man was struggling 
 violently between the arms of those who held 
 him. lie wanted to say something and could 
 not ; his toothless jaws were shut tight like the 
 teeth of a trap, his eyes started out of their 
 sockets ; he was alive, but he was impotent. 
 Tonia's eyes watched him with fascinated gaze. 
 If he continued paralyzed she would be safe. 
 
 Linto moved away from her and swore a 
 fierce oath. 
 
 " What has Milla done ? " asked the neigh- 
 bours and the youths in shrill chorus. 
 
 261 
 
TONIA 
 
 The father, staring stupidly at the old man on 
 the settle, answered : 
 
 " She won't speak, they say. She went to the 
 Presto with a ticket to take out a shawl she'd 
 put in, so they say ; and it seems that the shawl 
 was stolen, and the police were looking for it, 
 and at the Presto it had been ordered to stop it. 
 I don't know — she'd given a false name with it 
 — so the police took her ; and they've got her, 
 and we couldn't see her ; but they said there 
 was no manner of doubt of her being in fault, 
 because she has nothing to say for herself and 
 won't speak." 
 
 Then he lapsed into silence, and his head 
 sank on his breast. 
 
 " Perhaps she took the money out of the 
 church-bag, father. But I don't think she 
 would," whimpered Tonia, through floods of 
 tears. " There must be some mistake — some 
 dreadful mistake." 
 
 " Yes, there is a mistake," said the voice of 
 Linto ; " and you will set the mistake right, 
 Tonia, or I will wring your neck like a fowl's. I 
 saw that shawl on your head in the stables ; you 
 hid it. I'll swear you pawned it the day you 
 said you'd been to Mass in the Duomo. As to 
 
 262 
 
TONIA 
 
 the church-bag, I don't know ; but as to the 
 shawl, I do. I'll take you down to the town to- 
 morrow and make you confess. You cheat, you 
 thief, you jade, sending your sister to suffer 
 instead of you ! " 
 
 The struggling, doubled-up form on the settle 
 wrested itself out of the women's hold ; a thin, 
 strangled voice came from under the battered 
 hat ; Nonno gasped for breath. 
 
 " I am not dead — not dead — not yet," he 
 said, with a faint rattle as of laughter. " I'll 
 bear witness — against you — Tonia — he ! he ! 
 he ! — bought my tobacco and grudged it — 
 yah ! " 
 
 Linto, with his strong hands on Tonia's 
 shoulders, pushed her towards her father. 
 
 " Lock her up, Dario," he said sternly. " Lock 
 her up somewhere safe, and to-morrow we'll take 
 her down to the town, and have Camilla out. 
 Love you, you jade .-* Marry you ? Faugh ! 
 not if there wasn't another girl in all the whole 
 wide world." 
 
 The old man on the settle struggled to get 
 free from the restraining hands of the women 
 who were ministering to him. 
 
 " Shouldn't eat when we can't earn, Tonia, 
 
 263 
 
TONIA 
 
 eh? Well, you'll go and eat jail bread, my 
 dear — because you've earned it — he ! he ! — 
 and you'll tell me how you like it, my pretty, 
 eh?" 
 
 Tonia was dumb. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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