The Third Macabre Megapack (21 page)

But she was so young, and had been always so strong, he thought; this would pass before long, and she would be herself again—brisk, brown, agile, mirthful, singing at the top of her voice as she ran through the lines of the cherry-trees. He denied himself everything to get her food, and left himself scarce enough to keep the spark of life in him. He sold even his one better suit of clothes and his one pair of boots; but she had no appetite, and perceiving his sacrifice, took it so piteously to heart that it made her worse.

The neighbours were good-natured and brought now an egg, now a fruit, now a loaf for Lizina; but they could not bring her appetite, and were offended and chilled by her lassitude, her apparent ignorance of their good intentions, and her indifference to their gifts.

Some suggested this nostrum, others that; some urged religious pilgrimages, and some herbs, and some charms, and some spoke of a wise woman, who, if you crossed her hand with silver, could relieve you of any evil if she would. But amidst the multitude of counsellors, Lizina only grew thinner and thinner, paler and paler, all her youth seeming slowly to wane and die out of her.

Her little sick heart was set obstinately on what her father had told her was impossible.

None of Cecco’s own people thought of going to the place where he died. He was dead, and there was an end to it; even his mother, although she wept for him, did not dream of throwing away good money in a silly and useless journey to the place where he had been put in the ground.

Only the little girl, who had laughed at him and flouted him as they sat on the wall by the river, did think of it constantly, tenaciously, silently. It seemed to her horrible to leave him all alone in some unfamiliar, desolate place, where no step was ever heard of any whom he had ever known. She said nothing of it, for she saw that even her father did not understand; but she brooded over the thought of it constantly, turning to and fro in her mind the little she had ever known or heard of the manner and means by which people transported themselves from place to place. There were many, of course, in the village who could have told her how others travelled, but she was too shy to speak of the matter even to the old man of the ferry, in whose boat, when it was moored to a
poula
driven in the sand, she had spent many an hour of playtime. She had always been a babbling, communicative, merry child, chattering like a starling or a swift, until now. Now she spoke rarely, and never of the thing of which her heart was full.

One day her father looked from her pinched, wan face to the bright green leaves of the flourishing lemon-tree, and muttered an oath.

“Day and night, for as many years as you are old, I have taken care of that tree, and sheltered it and fed it; and now it alone is fair to see and strong, whilst you—verily, oh verily, Lizina, I could find it in my heart to take a billhook and hew it down for its cruelty in being glad and full of vigour, whilst you pinch and fade, day by day, before my sight!”

Lizina shook her head, and looked at the tree which had been the companion of her fifteen years of life.

“It’s a good tree,
babbo
!” she said gently. “Think how much it has given us; how many things you bought me with the lemon money! Oh! it is very good; do not ever say a word against it; but—but—if you are in anger with it, there is a thing which you might do. You have always kept the money which it brought for me?”

“Surely, dear. I have always thought it yours,” he answered, wondering where her thoughts were tending.

“Then—then,” said Lizina timidly, “if it be as mine really, and you see it no more with pleasure in its place there, will you sell it, and with the price of it take me to where Cecco lies?”

Her eyes were intensely wistful; her cheeks grew momentarily red in her eagerness; she put both hands to her chest and tried to stop the cough which began to choke her words. Her father stared, incredulo
us that he could hear aright.

“Sell the tree?” he asked stupidly.

Not in his uttermost needs had the idea of selling it come to him. He held it in a superstitious awe.

“Since you say it is mine,” said the child. “It would sell well. It is strong and beautiful and bears good fruit. You could take me down where the sun sets and the sea is—where Cecco lies in the grass.”

“Good Lord!” said Fringuello, with a moan.

It seemed to him that the sorrow for her lost sweetheart had turned the child’s brain.

“Do, father—do!” she urged, her thin brown lips trembling with anxiety and with the sense of her own powerlessness to move unless he would consent.

Her father hid his face in his hands; he felt helpless before her stronger will. She would force him to do what she desired, he knew; and he trembled, for he had neither knowledge nor means to make such a journey as this would be to the marshlands in the west, where Cecco lay.

“And the tree—the tree!” he muttered.

He had seen the tree so long by that little square window, it was part of his life and hers. The thought of its sale terrified him as if he were going to sell some human friend into bondage.

“There is no other way,” said Lizina sadly.

She, too, was loth to sell the tree, but they had nothing else to sell; and the intense selfishness of a fixed idea possessed her to the exclusion of all other feeling.

Then the cough shook her once more from head to foot, and a little froth of blood came to her lips.

Lizina, in the double cruelty of her childhood and of her ill-health, was merciless to her father, and to the tree which had been her companion so long. She was possessed by the egotism of sorrow. She was a little thing, now enfeebled and broken by long nights without sleep and long days without food, and her heart was set on this one idea, which she did not reveal—that she would die down there, and that then they would put her in the same ground with him. This was her idea.

In the night she got up noiselessly, whilst her father was for awhile sunk in the deep sleep which comes after hard manual toil, and came up to the lemon-tree and leaned her cheek against its earthen vase.

“I am sorry to send you away, dearie,” she said to it; “but there is no other way to go to him.”

She felt as if it must understand and must feel wounded. Then she broke off a little branch—a small one with a few flowers on it.

“That is for him,” she said to it.

And she stood there sleepily with the moonlight pouring in on her and the lemon-tree through the little square hole of the window.

When she got back to her bed she was chilled to the bone, and she stuffed the rough sacking of her coverture between her teeth to stop the coughing, which might wake her father. She had put the little branch of her lemon into the broken pitcher which stood by her at night to slake her thirst.

“Sell it,
babbo
, quick, quick!” she said in the morning.

She was afraid her strength would not last for the journey, but she did not say so. She tried to seem cheerful. He thought her better.

“Sell it today—quick, quick!” she cried feverishly; and she knew that she was cruel and ungrateful, but she persisted in her cruelty and ingratitude.

Her father, in despair, yielded.

It seemed to him as if he were cutting the throat of a friend. Then he approached the tree to carry it away. He had called in one of his fellow-carters to help to move it, for it was too heavy for one man. With difficulty it was forced through the narrow, low door and down the steep stair, its leaves brushing the walls with a sighing sound, and its earthen jar grinding on the stone of the steps. Lizina watched it go without a sigh, without a tear. Her eyes were dry and shining; her little body was quivering; her face was red and pale in quick, uneven changes.

“It goes where it will be better than with us,” said Fringuello, in a vague apology to it, as he lifted it out of the entrance of the house.

He had sold it to a gardener in a villa near at hand.

“Oh yes, it will be better off,” he said feverishly, in the doubtful yet aggressive tone of one who argues that which he knows is not true. “With rich people instead of poor; out in a fine garden half the year, and in a beautiful airy wooden house all winter. Oh yes, it will be much better off. Now it has grown so big it was choked where it stood in my little place; no light, no air, no sun, nothing which it wanted. It will be much better off where it goes; it will have rich, new earth and every sort of care.”

“It has done well enough with you,” said his comrade carelessly, as he helped to shove the vase on to the hand-cart.

“Yes, yes,” said Fringuello impatiently, “but it will do better where it goes. It has grown too big for a room. It would starve with me.”

“Well, it is your own business,” said the other man.

“Yes, it is his own business,” said the neighbours, who were standing to see it borne away as if it were some rare spectacle. “But the tree was always there; and the money you get will go,” they added, in their collective wisdom.

He took up the handles of the little cart and placed the yoke of cord over his shoulders, and began to drag it away. He bent his head down very low so that the people should not see the tears which were running down his cheeks.

When he came back to his home he carried its price in his hands—thirty francs in three paper notes. He held them out to Lizina.

“All is well with it; it is to stand in a beautiful place, close to falling water, half in shade, half in sun, as it likes best. Oh, all is well with it, dear! do not be afraid.” Then his voice failed him, and he sobbed aloud.

The child took the money. She had a little bundle in her hand, and she had put on the only pair of shoes she possessed.

“Clean yourself, father, and come—come quickly,” she said in a little hard, dry, panting voice.

“Oh wait, wait, my angel!” he cried piteously through his sobs.

“I cannot wait,” said the child, “not a minute, not a minute. Clean yourself and come.”

* * * *

In an hour’s time they were in the train. The child did everything—found the railway-station, asked the way, paid their fares, took their seats, pushing her father hither and thither as if he were a blind man. He was dumb with terror and regret; he resisted nothing. Having sold the tree, there seemed to him nothing left for him to do. Lizina obeyed him no more—she commanded.

People turned to look after this little sick girl with death written on her face, who spoke and moved with such feverish decision, and dragged after her this thin dumb man, her small lean hand shut with nervous force upon his own. All the way she ate nothing; she only drank thirstily of water whenever the train stopped.

The novelty and strangeness of the transit, the crowd, and haste, and noise, the unfamiliar scenes, the pressure of unknown people, and the stare of unknown eyes—all which was so bewildering and terrible to her father, had no effect upon her. All she thought of was to get to the place of which the name was written on the scrap of paper which she had shown at the ticket-office, and which she continued to show mutely to anyone who spoke to her. It said everything to her; she thought it must say everything to everyone else.

Nothing could alarm her or arrest her attention. Her whole mind was set on her goal.

“Your little lady is very ill!” said more than one in a crowded railway-waggon, where they jammed one on to another, thick as herrings in a barrel.

“Ay, ay, she is very ill,” he answered stupidly; and they did not know whether he was unfeeling or daft. He was dizzy and sick with the unwonted motion of the train, the choking dust, the giddy landscape which seemed to run past him, earth and sky together; but on Lizina they made no impression, except that she coughed almost incessantly. She seemed to ail nothing and to perceive nothing. He was seized with a panic of dread lest they should be taken in some wrong direction, even out of the world altogether; dreaded fire, accident, death, treachery; felt himself caught up by strong, invisible hands, and whirled away, the powers of heaven or hell alone knew where. His awful fear grew on him every moment greater and greater; and he would have given his soul to be back safe on the sand of the river at his home.

But Lizina neither showed nor felt any fear whatever.

The journey took the whole day and part of the ensuing night; for the slow cheap train by which they travelled gave way to others, passed hours motionless, thrust aside and forgotten, and paused at every little station on the road. They suffered from hunger and thirst, and heat and draught, and fatigue and contusion, as the poor cattle suffered in the trucks beside them. But the child did not seem to feel either exhaustion or pain, or to want anything except to be there—to be there. The towns, the mountains, the sea, the coast, all so strange and wonderful to untravelled eyes, had no wonder for her. She only wanted to get beyond them, to where it was that Cecco lay. Every now and then she opened her bundle and looked at the little twig of the lemon-tree.

Alarmed at her aspect, and the racking cough, their companions shrank away from them as far as the crowding of the waggon allowed of, and they were left unquestioned and undisturbed, whilst the day wore on and the sun went down into the sea and the evening deepened into night.

It was dawn when they were told to descend; they had reached their destination—a dull, sun-baked, fever-stricken little port, with the salt water on one side of it, and the
machia
and marsh on the other.

Lizina got down from the train, holding her little bundle in one hand and in the other her father’s wrist. Their limbs were bruised, aching, trembling, their spines felt broken, their heads seemed like empty bladders, in which their brains went round and round; but she did not faint or fall—she went straight onward as though the place was familiar to her.

Close to the desolate, sand-strewn station there was a fort of decaying yellow stone, high walls with loopholes, mounds of sand with sea-thistle and bryony growing in them; before these was the blue water, and a long stone wall running far out into the water. To the iron rings in it a few fisher boats were moored by their cables. The sun was rising over the inland wilderness, where wild boars and buffalo dwelt under impenetrable thickets. Lizina led her father by the hand past the fortifications to a little desolate church with crumbling belfry, where she knew the burial-ground must be. There were four lime-washed walls, with a black iron door, through the bars of which the graves within and the rank grass around them could be seen. The gate was locked; the child sat down on a stone before it and waited. She motioned to her father to do the same. He was like a poor steer landed after a long voyage in which he has neither eaten nor drank, but has been bruised, buffeted, thrown to and fro, galled, stunned, tormented. They waited, as she wished, in the cool dust of the breaking day. The bell above in the church steeple was tolling for the first Mass.

In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his shoulder, said to them, “You are strangers—what would you?”

Lizina rose and answered him: “Will you open to me? I come to see my Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.”

The sacristan looked at her father.

“Cecco?” he repeated, in a doubtful tone.

“A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,” said Fringuello, hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his head swam. “He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man, where his grave is made?”

The sacristan paused, standing before the leathern curtain of the church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and some die in the fort and in the town.