The Third Macabre Megapack (20 page)

Her father looked at her in amazement; in his eyes she was a little child still.

“Why, baby, you speak like a woman!” he said stupidly. “I am glad this lad goes away, as he puts such nonsense into your head.”

“But if we both wish, you would not mind,
babbo
?” she asked, persistent and serious.

“The angels save us! She speaks like a grown woman!” cried her father. “My poor little dear,” he thought sadly, “you will never be able to wed anyone. We are poor! so poor! I can never give you even a set of shifts. Who could go to a house so naked—in rags, as one may say? My poor little angel, you must live a maid or go to a husband as beggared as I.”

He wished to say all this, but the words choked him in his throat. It seemed so cruel to set before the child the harsh, mean demands of life, the merciless rules and habits of that narrow world of theirs, which was bounded by the river and the sand on one side, and the cornfields and orchards on the other.

“Let be, let be,” he said to himself. “She is but a child, and the youth is going away for years; if it please her to think of this thing, it can hurt no one. He will forget, and she will forget.”

So he patted her pretty brown cheek, and drew her closer and kissed her.

“You are but a baby, my treasure,” he said softly. “Put these grave thoughts out of your head. Many moons will wax and wane before Cecco will be free again to come to his old home. The future can take care of itself. I will say neither yea nor nay. We will see what the years will bring forth.”

“But you would not mind?” she murmured coaxingly.

The tears started to his eyes.

“Ah! God knows, dear, how sweet it would be to me!”

He thought of his little girl safe and happy for her lifetime in that pleasant and plentiful household under the red-brown roofs where the big pine grew amongst the pear and cherry trees. The vision of it was beautiful and impossible. It hurt him to look on it, as the sun dazzles the eyes at noon.

“But put it out of your head—out of your head, little one!” he said. “Even if the boy should keep of the same mind, never would Lillo consent.”

“Cecco will keep in the same mind,” said Lizina, with the serene undoubting certainty of childhood, and she broke off a little twig of the lemon-tree, with a bud upon it and three leaves, and gave it to Cecco that evening in the dusk as they sat again upon the river-wall. It was all she had to give, except her little waking heart.

The next day he went away along the dusty high-road in his father’s cart to begin his new life. He sobbed as if his heart would break, and fastened in his shirt was the lemon shoot.

“To break off a bud! Oh, Lizina!” cried her father, in reproof and reproach. “A bud means a fruit, and a fruit means a halfpenny, perhaps a penny.”

“It is only one,” said the child; “and I have nothing else.”

Lizina did not speak of him, nor did she seem to fret in any way. Her blithe voice rang in clear carol over the green river water, as she sat on the wall whilst her father worked below, and she ate her dry bread with healthy and happy appetite.

“She is only a baby. She has forgotten the boy already,” thought her father, half disappointed, half relieved, whilst he broke up the earth about the roots of the lemon-tree, and counted the little pointed fruits coming out on it, green as malachite, and promising a fair crop.

No letters could arrive to stimulate her memory, for Cecco could scarcely scrawl his name, and Lizina could not read her A B C. Absence to the poor is a complete rupture, an absolute blank, over which the intelligence can throw no bridge.

Fringuello worked early and late, worked like a willing mule, and lost no chance of doing anything, however hard, which could bring in a centime; and he was so tired when night fell that he could do little except swallow his bread-soup and fling himself down on his bed of dry leaves thrust into an old sack. So that as long as Lizina’s voice was heard in song, and her little bare feet ran busily to and fro, he noticed nothing else, and was content, believing all was well with her.

The winter which followed on Cecco’s departure to his military service was of unusual rigour for the vale of Arno; the waters were stormy and dark, and the fields were frozen and brown, and snow lay on the long lines of the mountains from their summit to their base. But the lemon-tree flourished before its narrow window, and Lizina was well and gay in the cold little brick-floored, plaster-walled, unceiled garret; and her father asked nothing more of Fate, and went out to his work in the bitter coldness and darkness of the morning dawns with an empty stomach but a warm heart, leaving her sleeping, easily and dreamlessly, curled up like a little dormouse in her corner of the room.

The winter passed and the spring came, making all the orchard lands once more become seas of white flowers, and setting the chaffinches and linnets and nightingales to work at their nests amongst the lovely labyrinth of bursting blossom; and one sunlit afternoon, towards the close of April, the village priest, coming along the road by the river, saw Fringuello, who was backing his sand-cart into the bed of the now shallow stream, and beckoned to him. The priest had an open letter in his hand, and his plump, smooth olive face was sad.

“Dario,” he said gravely, “I have some terrible news in this paper. Lillo’s son, Cecco, is dead. I have to go and tell the family. The authorities have written to me.”

He stopped suddenly, surprised by the effect which his news had on his hearer.

“Saints protect us, how you look!” he cried. “One would think you were the lad’s father!”

“Is it sure? Is it true?” stammered Fringuello.

“Ay, ay, it is true and sure enough. The authorities write to me,” answered the vicar, with some pride. “Poor lad! Poor, good, pretty lad! They sent him to the Marenna marshes, and the ague and fever got on him, and he died in the fort a week ago. And only to think that this time last year he was bringing me armfuls of blooming cherry boughs for the altar at Easter-day! And now dead and buried. Good lack! Far away from all his friends, poor lad! The decrees of heaven are inscrutable, but it is of course for the best.”

He crossed himself and went on his way.

Fringuello doffed his cap mechanically, and crossed himself also, and rested against the shaft of his cart with his face leaning on his hands. His hope was struck down into nothingness; the future had no longer a smile. Though he had told himself, and them, that children were fickle and unstable, and that nothing was less likely than that the lad would come back in the same mind, he had nevertheless clung to and cherished the idea of such a fate for his little daughter with a tenacity of which he had been unconscious until his air castle was scattered to the winds by the words of the priest. The boy was dead; and never would Lizina go to dwell in peace and plenty at the old farmhouse by the great pine.

“It was too good to be. Patience!” he said to himself, with a groan, as he lifted his head and bade the mule between the shafts move onward. His job had to be done; his load had to be carried; he had no leisure to sit down alone with his regret.

“And it is worse for Lillo than it is for me,” he said to himself, with an unselfish thought for the lad’s father.

He looked up at the little window of his own attic which he could see afar off; the lemon-tree was visible, and beside it the little brown head of Lizina as she sat sewing.

“Perhaps she will not care; I hope she will not care,” he thought.

He longed to go and tell her himself lest she should hear it from some gossip, but he could not lea
ve his work. Yet, he could not bear the child to learn it first from the careless chattering of neighbouring gossips.

When he had discharged the load he carried, he fastened the mule to a post by the water-side, and said to a fellow-carter, “Will you watch him a moment whilst I run home?” and on the man’s assenting he flew with lightning speed along the road and up the staircase of his house.

Lizina dropped her sewing in amazement as he burst into the room and stood on the threshold with a look which frightened her.

She ran to him quickly.

“
Babbo!
Babbo!
What is the matter?” she cried to him. Then, before he could answer, she said timidly, under her breath, “Is anything wrong—with Cecco?”

Then Fringuello turned his head away and wept aloud.

He had hoped the child had forgotten. He knew now that she had remembered only too well. All through the year which had gone by since the departure of the youth she had been as happy as a field-mouse undisturbed in the wheat. The grain was not ripe yet for her, but she was sure that it would be, and that her harvest would be plenteous. She had always been sure, quite sure, that Cecco would come back; and now, in an instant, she understood that he was dead.

Lizina said little then or at any time; but the little gay life of her changed, grew dull, seemed to shrink into itself and wither up as a flower will when a worm is at its root. She had been so sure that Cecco would return!

“She is so young; soon it will not matter to her,” her father told himself.

But the months went by and the seasons, and she did not recover her bloom, her mirth, her elasticity; her small face was always grave and pale. She went about her work in the same way, and was docile, and industrious, and uncomplaining, but something was wrong with her. She did not laugh, she did not sing; she seldom even spoke unless she was spoken to first. He tried to persuade himself that there was no change in her, but he knew that he tried to feed himself on falsehood. He might as well have thought his lemon-tree unaltered if he had found it withered up by fire.

II

Once Lizina said to her father, “Could one walk there?”

“Where, dear? Where?”

“Where they have put Cecco,” she answered, knowing nothing of distances or measurements or the meaning of travel or change of place.

She had never been farther than across the ferry to the other bank of the river.

Her father threw up his hands in despair.

“Lord! my treasure! why it is miles and miles and miles away! I don’t know rightly even where—some place where the sun goes down.”

And her idea of walking thither seemed to him so stupefying, so amazing, so incredible, that he stared at her timorously, afraid that her brain was going wrong. He had never gone anywhere in all his life.

“Oh, my pretty, what should we do, you and I, in a strange place?” moaned Fringuello, weeping with fear at the thought of change and with grief at the worn, fevered face lifted up to his. “Never have I stirred from here since I was born, nor you. To move to and fro—that is for well-to-do folks, not for us; and when you are so ill, my poor little one, that you can scarcely stand on your feet—if you were to die on the way——”

“I shall not die on the way,” said the child firmly.

“But I know nought of the way,” he cried wildly and piteously. “Never was I in one of those strings of fire-led waggons, nor was ever any one of my people that ever I heard tell of. How should we ever get there, you and I? I know not even rightly what place it is.”

“I know,” said Lizina; and she took a crumpled scrap of paper out of the breast of her worn and frayed cotton frock. It bore the name of the seashore town where Cecco had died. She had got the priest to write it down for her. “If we show this all along as we go people will put us right until we reach the place,” she said, with that quiet persistency which was so new in her. “Ask how one can get there,” she persisted, and wound her arm about his throat, and laid her cheek against his in her old caressing way.

“You are mad, little one—quite mad!” said Fringuello, aghast and affrighted; and he begged the priest to come and see her.

The priest did come, but said sorrowfully to him:

“Were I you, I would take her down to one of the hospitals in the town; she is ill.”

He did so. He had been in the town but a few times in his whole life; she never. It was now wintry weather; the roads were wet, the winds were cold; the child coughed as she walked and shivered in her scanty and too thin clothes. The wise men at the hospital looked at her hastily among a crowd of sick people, and said some unintelligible words, and scrawled something on a piece of paper—a medicine, as it proved—which cost to buy more than a day of a sand carter’s wage.

“Has she really any illness?” he asked, with wild, imploring eyes, of the chemist who made up the medicine.

“Oh no—a mere nothing,” said the man in answer; but thought as he spoke: “The doctors might spare the poor devil’s money. When the blood is all water like that there is nothing to be done; the life just goes out like a wind-blown candle.” “Get her good wine; butcher’s meat; plenty of nourishing food,” he added, reflecting that while there is youth there is hope.

The father groaned aloud, as he laid down the coins which were the price of the medicine. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! They might as well have bidden him feed her on powdered pearls and melted gold. They got home that day footsore and wet through; he made a little fire of boughs and vine-branches, and, for the first time ever since it had been planted, he forgot to look at the lemon-tree.

“You are not ill, my Lizinanina?” he said eagerly. “The chemist told me it was nothing.”

“Oh no, it is nothing,” said the child; and she spoke cheerfully and tried to control the cough which shook her from head to foot.

Tears rolled down her father’s cheeks and fell on to the smouldering heather, which he set all right. Wine! Meat! Nourishment! The three vain words rang through his head all night. They might as well have bade him set her on a golden throne and call the stars down from their spheres to circle round her.

“My poor little baby!” he thought; “never did she have a finger ache, or a winter chill, or an hour’s discomfort, or a moment’s pain in mind or body until now!”

The child wasted and sickened visibly day by day. Her father looked to see the lemon-tree waste and sicken also; but it flourished still, a green, fresh, happy thing, though growing in a place so poor. A superstitious, silly notion took possession of him, begotten by his nervous terrors for his child, and by the mental weakness which came of physical want. He fancied the lemon-tree hurt the child, and drew nourishment and strength away from her. Perhaps in the night, in some mysterious way—who knew how? He grew stupid and feverish, working so hardly all day on hardly more than a crust, and not sleeping at night through his fears for Lizina. Everything seemed to him cruel, wicked, unintelligible. Why had the State taken away the boy who was so contented and useful where he was born? Why had the strange, confined, wearisome life amongst the marshlands killed him? Why was he himself without even means to get decent food? Why, after working hard all these years, could he have no peace? Must he even lose the one little creature he had? The harshness and injustice of it all disturbed his brain and weighed upon his soul. He sank into a sullen silence; he was in the mood when good men turn bad, and burn, pillage, slay—not because they are wicked or unkind by nature, but because they are mad from misery.