Taquisara Part 33

"Not at all," answered the old man. "You are coming to take care of your own people, and it is a good deed. Good deeds generally seem eccentric to society--and considering their rarity, that is not extraordinary."

He smiled again, and Veronica laughed.

"Your carriage is here," said Don Teodoro. "May I take you to it? Will you give me the tickets, Elettra? They take them at the gate."

Veronica felt a new thrill of joyous freedom and independence, as for the first time in her life she set her little foot upon the step of her own carriage, and glanced at the simple, well-appointed turnout. The coachman sat alone in the middle of the box, a broad-shouldered, clean-shaven young fellow of six-and-twenty, in a dull green livery with white facings--the colours of the Serra.

"You would not even have a footman," observed Don Teodoro.

"No--not I!" she laughed, still standing in the carriage. "How are the horses doing, Giovanni?" she asked of the coachman. "Are they strong enough for the work?"

"They are good horses, Excellency," the man answered. "They need work."

"And how is Sultana?" inquired the young girl, who had not seen the mare for several days.

"The mare is well, Excellency."

Veronica made Don Teodoro sit beside her, and Elettra installed herself opposite them, with her mistress's bags and other things. The luggage was piled on a cart which was to follow, and they drove away.

"I sent the carriage down yesterday," observed Don Teodoro. "I came by the coach this morning."

"Is it so far?" asked Veronica, whose ideas about the position of her property were still uncertain, for it had never struck Elettra that her mistress did not know how far it was from Eboli to Muro.

"It is over thirty miles," answered the priest, with a smile. "We are beyond civilization in Muro--we are in the province of Basilicata. But there are little towns on the way, and you must stop to rest the horses and to eat something. It will be almost dark when you get home."

"Home!" repeated Veronica, thoughtfully.

A confused vision rose in her mind, of an imaginary room, looking down from a height upon a town below--a room in which she would live altogether, with her books and her favourite objects and the companionship of her favourite ideas and plans, all of which were to be realized and executed in the course of time. She fancied herself gazing down from the wide window upon what was almost all hers, upon the dwellings of people who lived upon her land, who pastured her flocks and drove her cattle, living, moving, and having being as integral animate parts of her great inheritance; children of men and women whose fathers'

fathers had laboured in old days that she might have and enjoy the fruits of so much toil, who had given much and from whom had often been taken even that which they had not been bound fairly to give; who had received nothing in return for generations of blood and bone worn out, dried up, and consumed to dust in the service of the great house of Serra. They had a right to her, as she had a right to the lands on which they lived. There was much talk of rights, Veronica thought, nowadays, and those who had none were privileged to speak the loudest and to be heard first. But those who, having right on their side, were blinded and smitten dumb by the enormous despotism of their self-styled betters--by the glare and noise of blatant power in possession--they were the ones who really had rights, and if she could give any of them a single hundredth part of what was their due, she should be glad that she had lived. Wealth, she thought, should not be an acc.u.mulation, but a distribution, of goods. Charity should no longer mean alms, nor should poverty be pauperism. In the young, whole-hearted simplicity of her desire to do good, it seemed likely that she might soon be a specimen of the strangest of all modern anomalies--the princely socialist. It was certainly in her power to try almost any experiment which suggested itself, and on a scale which might ultimately prove something to herself and others.

It was not that she meant to study political economy, or socialism, nor to give the name of an experiment to anything she did. She had been struck by the practical necessity for doing something, when Don Teodoro had first written to her about the condition of the people in Muro, and her own observations made on her farms in the Falernian district--one of the richest corners of vine land in all Italy--had convinced her that some sort of action was urgently necessary. And if, in the midst of such riches, the Falernian peasants were half starved, what must be the state of the people on her lands in the Basilicata? Don Teodoro had drawn her an accurate picture, full of those plain details which carry more than the weight of their mere words. Something should be done at once. She had given him power and money to help the very poorest, before she came; but her common sense told her that the evil lay too deep in the soil to be reached by a light shower of silver--or even by a storm of gold rain.

Inventors, great or small, are rarely theorists; the invention must be suited to the necessity, before all things, and the theory may come afterwards if anybody cares for it. For a theory is nothing but an attempted explanation, and the fact must exist before it can possibly need explaining. Bread is a great invention against hunger, and a man needs to know nothing about the gastric juices to save himself from starvation when the loaf is in his hand. Veronica meant to put the loaves where they were needed, within reach of those who needed them.

As she was driven through the rugged country on that May afternoon, she felt that she had a future before her, that she was going into action, and leaving stagnation behind, and that her own life, which was to be her very own, was just beginning. It was to be a life quite different from the existence of any one she knew, for, unlike the lives of her friends, hers was to have an integral, independent existence of its own, with one determined object for all its activity.

The months she had pa.s.sed in Bianca's house had rather strengthened than weakened the unformulated resolution which she had first vaguely reached in the dark days after Bosio's death. There had been much solitude, and many rides and drives into the country with her beautiful, silent friend; and there had been very little contact with the world to disturb the onward current of her thoughts. More than all, the first breath of liberty after long restraint had enlarged and widened her determination to be always free, in spite of the world, and society, and the drone of the busy-bodies' gossip. In her heart, the memory of Bosio had grown in dignity, till it was solemn and imposing out of all proportion with what the man himself had been, even as Veronica had known him. To know the truth of what his real life had been would have shaken her own to its foundations. But there was no fear of that; and now, her chief companion was to be the priest who had loved him as a friend. Possibly that last fact had even influenced her a little in her final determination to live at Muro, rather than in any other of four or five equally habitable or uninhabitable places which she owned, and where she might have begun her work under circ.u.mstances quite as favourable to success.

She had thought very little of any need she might feel for relaxation and amus.e.m.e.nt, and she was very far from realizing what that solitude meant, which she was seeking with so much enthusiasm. She had never yet been as much alone as she should have liked to be, and she could not imagine that she might possibly become tired of playing the princess in the tower for months together, with only the company of one learned old ecclesiastic as her sole diversion. The vision of home which she evoked was always the same, but she did not even know whether the castle had a room which looked down upon the little town. She imagined but a single room; the rest was all a blank. She had been told that it was a great old fortress, with towers and halls and courts, gloomy, grand, and haunted by the ghosts of murdered kings and queens; but the slight descriptions she had heard produced no prevision of the reality as compared with what she really wanted and was sure that she should find.

She thought of Gianluca, as the carriage rolled along through the lower hills, and she looked forward with pleasure to writing about what she saw and expected to see. It seemed probable that she would write even longer letters to him, now that she was to be quite alone, and she hoped that his would be as interesting as ever. She thought again with anger of Taquisara's extraordinary conduct, for she was positively sure that she was not playing with his friend in any sense of the word. The very suggestion would have been insulting, if he had made it in the most carefully guarded and tactful language. As he had put it, it had been nothing short of outrageous.

Gianluca must be blind indeed, she a.s.sured herself, if he fancied that she meant more than friendship by the constant exchange of letters with him. It might be eccentric; it might be looked upon as utterly and unpardonably unconventional, but it could never be regarded as a flirtation by letter. The proof of that, Veronica argued to herself, was that both of them knew that it was nothing of the sort, a manner of begging the question familiar to those who wish to do as they please without hindrance from within or without.

CHAPTER XIX.

The roads were good, for it was the month of May. In winter, even Veronica's strong horses could hardly have dragged the light carriage to its destination in one day. It was but little after ten o'clock in the morning when Veronica got out upon the platform of the railway station at Eboli; it was sunset, and the full moon was rising, when her carriage stopped at the entrance of the mountain town.

It had been a very long day, and she had seen much that was quite new to her, and different from what she had expected. At first, indeed, she was amazed at the richness of the country beyond Eboli, as she was driven for nearly an hour through what was literally a forest of ancient olive trees, interrupted only here and there by a broad field of vines, cut low and trained upon short stakes; and from the rising ground beyond Carpella, where the road winds up the first hill, she looked back and saw the shimmering grey-green light of the olive leaves, lying like a delicate mantle over the flat country and in the great hollow, from Eboli to the deep gorge wherein the ancient city of Campania lies as in a nest. A part of the olive land was hers; and as she drove along, the midday breeze blew some of the tiny, star-like olive blossoms into her lap. She took one in her fingers and looked at it closely and could just smell its very faint, aromatic odour.

"It is the first greeting from what is yours," said Don Teodoro, with a smile.

"The wind brings me my own flowers," answered Veronica, and she laughed softly and happily.

Up steep hills and down into deep valleys, across high, arched stone bridges, beneath which the water of the Sele was streaming fast and clear amid white limestone boulders and over broad reaches of white pebbles that were dazzling in the sun--and the olive trees were left behind, and here and there were patches of big timber, oaks to which the old, brown leaves still clung in the spring, and many poplars straight and feathery with leaves but yet half grown. But the land was by degrees less rich and less cultivated, till gradually it changed to a rough and stony country, and even from far off Veronica could see the little flocks of sheep dark brown and white, and small herds of cloud-grey cattle, pasturing and moving slowly on the hillsides above and below the winding road.

She looked at the shepherds when they were near enough for her to see them. As she had left Eboli, she had seen one, driving a flock of sheep along the high road, and she had wondered whether there were many of his kind. He was a magnificently handsome young fellow of two or three and twenty, dressed in loose brown velveteens, with a belted jacket and a spotless shirt, strong, well-made shoes, leathern gaiters, and a flat cap, and he carried the traditional hatchet of the southern shepherd. He strode along with a light and easy gait, and looked more like a young gentleman in a rather eccentric but well-made shooting-dress, than like a herdsman. But he was from Eboli itself, and a native would have told her that the people of Eboli were "exceedingly fanatic about dress." The men and the clothes she now saw were very different; tall, grim figures in vast and often ragged brown cloaks that reached almost to their feet; small, battered, pointed hats; rough, muddy hose that should have once been white; shoes that loaded their steps like lead; and they moved slowly, with bent heads, rough, long-unshaven faces, eyes too hollow, h.o.r.n.y hands too lean--wild, half-fed creatures, worse off than the flocks they drove, by all the degrees of the inverse ratio between man, who needs man's help, and beast, that needs only nature.

There was that same grimness--there is no other word--in the faces of almost all the people Veronica now met, as the road wound higher and then descended through Oliveto, the first of the mountain villages.

There was in them all the look of men and women who know that the struggle is hopeless, but who will not, or cannot, die and be at rest.

There was the expression of those who will no longer make any effort except for the bare, hard bread that keeps them above ground, and who, having toiled through the terrible daylight that is their cruel task-master, lie down as they are, when work is done, to forget daylight and life if they can, in a mercifully heavy sleep. But before their bones are half rested, the pitiless day is upon them, and drives them out to labour again till they are stupid with weariness and only not faint enough to faint and forget.

The people sometimes stood still and stared at the young princess as she drove by, with the old priest beside her. But the majority went on, indifferent and far beyond anything like interest or curiosity. Only the shepherds' great cur dogs, of all breeds and colours, but always big and fierce, barked furiously at the carriage and plunged furiously after it, pulling up suddenly and turning back with a growl when they had followed it for half a minute. The women, in ragged black or dark, checked skirts, with torn red woollen shawls hanging from their heads, glanced sidelong at Veronica, when they were still young; but the older ones went by without giving her a look, their leathern, Sibylline faces set, their old lids wrinkled by everlasting effort till they almost hid the small dark eyes. The most of them carried something in their hands,--f.a.ggots, covered baskets, small sacks of potatoes, or corn, or beans; and when the load was heavy they walked with a sharp, jerking turn of the hips to right and left that was almost like a dislocation, and the wrinkles in the faces of these heavy-laden ones were deep folds, as in the hide of a loose-skinned beast. For in that country to be strong is to be cursed; it means double work and double burden, where everything that breathes and moves and can be found to labour is driven to the very breaking point of strain.

But as Veronica drove on, there were fewer men and women in the road, and only once in an hour or so, a huge cart, piled up with wine barrels, lumbered along, drawn by four or five deathly-looking mules that stumbled when they had to stop or start--shadowy creatures, the ghosts of their kind, as it were.

The villages were worse than the open country, for in them the appalling poverty was gathered together in its muddiest colours and set in fixed pictures which Veronica never forgot. In the May weather, the doors of low dwellings were open, and the black and white pigs wandered unhindered from the filthy street without to the misery within, fattening on the poor waste of the desperately poor, fattening in the sun that drove their wretched betters to the daily fight with starvation, fattening in the vile filth to which starvation was dully indifferent, since cleanliness meant labour that brought no bread.

To the right and left the barren mountains reared their enormous baldness to the sun, deserts raised up broadside, as it were, and set on end, that their bareness might be the better seen and known to the world around. Here and there, from their bases, dark wooded spurs ran out across the rising valley, and the road wound round them, in and out, and up and down, and over stone bridges big and little, and then up in terribly steep ascent, southeastwards to high Laviano, looking towards the pa.s.s by which the highway leads from Ciliento to Basilicata.

In Laviano, facing the wretched houses, stood the grand beginning of a wretchedly unfinished building, one of those utter failures of great hopes, which trace the track of invading liberty through the south. It came, it saw, and it began many things--but it did not conquer and it completed very little. In the first wild enthusiasm of the Garibaldian revolution, even poor, hill-perched, filth-stricken, pig-breeding Laviano was to be a city, and forthwith, in the general stye, the walls of a great munic.i.p.al building, from which lofty destinies were to be guided and controlled in the path to greatness, began to rise, with strength of stone masonry, and arches of well-hewn basalt, and divisions within for halls and stairways, and many offices. But the beams of the first story were never laid across the lower walls. There was no more money, and what had been built was a palace for the pigs. Laviano had spent its little all, and gone into debt, to be great, and had failed; and though the people had earned some of their own money back as wages in the building, more than half of it slipped into the pockets of architects, who went away smiling, jeering, and happy, to prey upon the next foolish village that would be great and could not. And above, from a hill on the mountain's spur outside the village, still frowned intact the heavy four-towered castle, complete and sound as when it had been built, the lasting monument of those hard warriors of a sterner time, who could not only take, but hold--and they held long and cruelly.

Veronica looked up backwards at the towers, as the horses stood a while to breathe after the steep ascent, and she asked Don Teodoro to whom the castle belonged.

"It is yours," he answered. "The castle is yours, the village is yours, the hills are yours. Your steward lives in the castle. You have much property here, more miles of good and bad land than I can tell."

"And is it all like this? Are the people all like these?"

"No. There are poorer people in the hills."

The happy laugh that had come when the wind had blown the olive blossoms of Eboli upon her lap had long been silent now. Her face was grave and sorrowful, and she drew in her lips as though something hurt her. Some half-naked children stood shyly watching her from a little distance.

Pigs grunted and rubbed themselves against the wheels of the carriage, and the coachman lashed backwards at them with his whip. But the cruel day was not yet over, and the people had not come back from their toil, so that the place was almost deserted still. There was an evil smell in the air, and the children's faces were pale and swollen and dirty.

Veronica wondered how any people could be poorer than these, and her face grew still more sad. She tried to speak to the children, but they could not understand her. She got some little coins from her purse, but they were too much frightened to come forward and take them. They were not afraid of the priest, however, and Don Teodoro got out of the carriage and put the money into their horrible little hands, and they ran away with strange small cries and wild, half-noiseless laughter--if laughter can be anything but noisy. Let such words pa.s.s as come; for no words of our tongue can quite tell all Veronica saw and heard on that day. The great Italian myth survives in foreign nations; it has even more life, perhaps, in Italy itself, north of the Roman line; but only those know what Italy is, who have trudged on foot, and ridden by mountain paths, and driven by southern highways, through hill and valley and mountain and plain, from house to house, where there are neither inns nor taverns, throughout that vast region which is the half of the whole country, or more, and where the abomination of desolation reigns supreme in broad day.

That Italy has done what she has done in thirty years, to be a power among nations, is a marvel, a wonder, and almost a miracle. That she should have done it at all, is the greatest mistake ever committed by a civilized nation, and it is irrevocable, as its results are to be fatal and lasting. But upon the good reality of unity, the deadly dream of military greatness descended as a killing blight, and the evil vision of political power has blasted the common sense of a whole people. It is one thing to be one, as a united family, each working for the good of each and all; it is another thing, and a worse thing, to be one as a vast and idle army, sitting down to besiege its own storehouses, each eating something of the whole and doing nothing to increase that whole, till all is gone, and the vision fades in the awakening from the dream, leaving the bare nakedness of desolation to tell the story of a huge mistake.

Even Veronica's strong horses were well nigh tired out when they reached the dismal solitude of the high pa.s.s above Laviano; and she herself was wearied and faint with the gloom, and the poverty, and the barrenness of so much that was hers. But her mouth was set and firm, and she meant that something should be done before many days, which should begin a vast and lasting change. She did not know what she was undertaking, nor how far she might be led in the attempt to do good against great odds of evil on all sides; but she was not discouraged, and she had no intention of drawing back.

It was a very long day. As the hours wore on, the three ate something from time to time, from a basket of provisions which Elettra had brought, and at which Veronica had laughed. But the air of the mountains was keen, and there was not too much in the basket, after all.

Then, in the shadow below the sun-line cut by the mountains across the earth, she saw a sharp peak, grey and regular as a pyramid, rising in the midst of the high valley, and then beyond it, as the carriage rolled along, there was a misty landscape of a far, low valley--and then, all at once, the brown, tiled roofs of her own Muro were at her feet, and far to the left, out of the houses, rose the round grey keep of the fortress. The setting sun was behind the mountains, and the moon, near to the full, hung, round and white, just above the tower, in the pale eastern sky. From the second turning of the steep descent, Veronica could see a huge bastion of the castle above the roofs, jutting out like an independent round fort.

Many of the people knew that she was coming, and some had hastened from their work to see her as soon as she arrived. Curious, silent, pale, dirty, they thronged about the carriage. An old woman touched Veronica's skirt, and then brought her hand back to her lips and kissed it. Then another did the same--a thin, dark-browed girl with a ragged red shawl on her head. The uncouth men stood shoulder to shoulder, staring with unwinking eyes. A tall, pale shepherd youth was erect and motionless in a tattered hat and a brown cloak, overtopping the others by his head and thin throat, and there was something Sphinx-like in the expression of his still, sad face.