Vestigia Volume Ii Part 11

She walked on a few yards and added, 'The Padrone! ah, yes, that is another sort of weaving! The Padrone is a banker in the city: when he comes to shoot, he brings his luncheon with him in his pocket; two hard-boiled eggs; that's for fear he should leave any bones behind him.

Is it not true, Isola?'

Valdez laughed, and the girl walking beside Dino opened her blue eyes frankly and looked up in his face. 'That is true what my mother says.

But you are not like your friend there, you do not care for the schools?'

She was pretty, even in this dim light it was easy to see how pretty, with a round babyish face and crisp fair hair. She wore a bright cotton handkerchief knotted over her head, and in her hand she carried a large bundle.

'No. I am not so wise as my friend. But at least I am good for some things,' said Dino, smiling down at her. He put out his hand, 'If you will trust me with it, we are going the same way. I can carry your bundle.'

The peasant girl drew back. 'Nay. What should you do that for?' she objected quickly. Then after a pause for reflection she suggested, 'Perhaps that is the fas.h.i.+on in the country that you come from, to carry other people's burdens?'

'Surely.'

'_Guardate_! But that is quite different. No one would do it here; not even the _sposo_?

'Are you going to be married soon, Isola? I think I heard your mother call you Isola.'

'Ah, yes; Isolina; that is what they call me. I shall not be married until next Carnival. It is a long time off, but what would you have?

When one is poor one must learn to make oneself small enough to pa.s.s through the cat's hole. That is what I tell my Pio.' She ended with a laugh, a clear ringing bird-like sound.

'Tell me about him,' said Dino, smiling sympathetically, with a sense of pure comrades.h.i.+p in her youth, such as he had never felt before.

All that was living and joyous and young a.s.serted its claim over him; he looked across the road at the two middle-aged faces of their companions with an exaggerated perception of what they had outlived.

Life, young buoyant life, seemed the one thing to be valued. He was sick of tragedy. What he wanted was easy youthful laughter, and the warm bright satisfaction of being. The innocent chatter of this little peasant girl satisfied him better than all the theories about all the universe. He listened in a sort of vague dream to the rippling flow of her talk. When she ceased speaking he yielded to the impulse that was strong within him; he told her about Italia. What he said was very little, only that he and his sweetheart were parted; he put it in the simplest words which she would understand.

She listened; then she turned her bright face towards him, glowing with spirit and brave interest. 'Oh,' she said, 'I know what it is like, for there was a time, one week, when they would not let me speak to my Pio.'

She talked to him now of herself as to an old friend; with the unhesitating frankness of a child; the young man was strangely touched and pleased by her simple confidence.

When the footpath grew narrower she walked on in front of him. She walked well, with an easy carriage; her firm bare ankles gleamed in the moonlight below the hem of her short cotton gown; her loose wooden shoes made a short quick tapping at each step which she took.

The night was very warm and still. On one side of the road the Arno flowed past silently; the pale light in the sky was reflected upon its gla.s.sy surface as upon a sheet of metal; it looked like a river of lead. As the moon rose a faint wind stirred softly among the budding branches of the lime-trees which edge the fields, and the delicate shadows of the moving stems fell upon ploughed land. In each isolated farmyard the hay-ricks, cut close for last winter's fodder, a.s.sumed a curiously velvety texture as the moonlight rested on their blanched and weather-beaten tops.

As they drew nearer the mouth of the Arno the spreading pines of the Gombo made a dark line against the sky to their right and across the river. The fields grew wider; the night was full of a new sound which was not the sound of the wind. Dino listened more intently; his quick ear could distinguish the m.u.f.fled beat of the waves upon the sandy sh.o.r.e.

Presently they reached the borders of the wood; the footpath ended; the soil grew sandy underfoot. At the turning of the road there were lights burning in some cottages. The peasant women stopped at the door of one of the houses.

'Good-night,' Isolina called out in her friendly voice; 'good-night again; and thank you for the civil company.'

She disappeared amidst a rapturous chorus of welcome from the farmyard dogs. She had brought to Dino a charmed hour of forgetfulness; he watched her turning away from him with an air of regret.

Later, as they lounged upon the beach, smoking their pipes in the still moonlight, Valdez said, laying his hand affectionately upon Dino's shoulder, 'I liked hearing you laugh with that little girl to-night, my lad. You were such a light-hearted lad in the old days. You're fretting now. Courage! my Dino, courage! There are no depths for a brave heart from which hope cannot mount; hope which outlasts gold and the grave. And, for a man, whatever the consequence of his action may be, even to have meant well, is sufficient excuse in the eyes of the woman who loves him. Excuse? it's a vindication which, nine times out of ten, will make her end by asking him to forgive her suspicion.'

'I know it; but it won't save Italia from suffering,' said Dino quickly.

Valdez was silent. Then he said, 'Did it never occur to you that there is a chance, just a chance, of your getting away after all? Think of the crowd and the confusion. And if you once get outside of Rome the Society will soon find means of taking you safely beyond the frontier.

There is always that chance, you know.'

'I don't believe it,' said Dino, turning away abruptly.

But the words haunted him--'There's always a chance'--'always a chance;' they rang their changes upon his brain far into the wakeful night. Once, towards morning, unable to sleep, he rose and groped his way to the door of the hut belonging to Valdez's friend and host. The sh.o.r.e stretched before him, and the moonlight on the wild sea gra.s.s.

When the moon went under a cloud the wet sand by the edge of the receding wave was of a bright steely blue; far away near the horizon the light still shone, a streak of burnished silver, upon the tranquil sea.

Valdez was sleeping quietly; Dino went back and threw himself down by his side.

It was late when the young man awoke. The little hut was empty; his companion had gone hours before, leaving behind him a message, a few scribbled words, to say that the fis.h.i.+ng-smack which was to take Dino back, by another route, to Leghorn, might be expected to call at Bocca d'Arno towards sunset that same afternoon.

There was food and water in the hut. It was one of those small thatched cabins, built for the use and shelter of the owners of the great stationary nets suspended from beams and worked by means of a crank, of which there are several by the mouth of the river.

Dino spent the long day in the woods. It was a lovely morning when he first went out, with a touch of April sweetness in the air. It is a wild and silent sh.o.r.e. The flat-topped pines grow to the very verge of the sand-hills. On the sea side the forest ends in a thick undergrowth of dark-spreading juniper bushes, which fill the hollows of the dunes and mingle with the thistles and the tough salt gra.s.s. And the wood itself is always filled with the sound and savour of the sea. Before a storm the white-winged gulls flit wildly in and out between the pine tops. There is fine white sand underfoot beneath the moss and the fallen needles, and thick growths of all strong-stemmed aromatic sea-loving plants; blue rosemary, and tufted heather, and great golden-crested reeds. Dino lying in one of those sheltered hollows, with closed eyes, could scarcely distinguish between the melancholy murmur of the trees overhead and the sleepy murmur of the restless waves. The very air had its mingled breath of salt and spiciness, of the sea and the resinous pines.

By Monte Nero all nature had seemed dead in his eyes; the downs there had been nothing more to him than an empty hillside, a dull background to his own dominant existence. But here, in this still wood--perhaps because of his very surrender of that existence--there was infinite charm and interest in every moment of the long calm hours. He felt himself a mere spectator watching the natural life of things. He found occupation for half a morning in seeing the warm spring suns.h.i.+ne creep across the straight pine stems; in looking up at the tender blue of the sky above him; in listening to the myriad small noises of the woods; bird notes, and the tapping of the wood-p.e.c.k.e.rs, the hum of insects, the cracking and stirring of the branches, and the rustling furtive tread of shy four-footed creatures, young rabbits, and bright-eyed squirrels, or the quick darting of green lizards across the thin, short gra.s.s.

Once he reflected, 'They will say in the papers, afterwards, the prisoner pa.s.sed a day before his crime concealed in the woods at Bocca d'Arno. "Concealed in the woods!" But will it mean _this_ to them?'

He looked down, between his elbows, at a patch of greenest moss; a miniature pine-tree, some three inches high, raised itself proudly above the other small plants, and a couple of s.h.i.+ny-backed beetles wandered up and down its stem. Dino felt in his pocket for crumbs, and strewed them before the insects, but the motion of his hand frightened them away. Presently a company of red-headed ants came up out of the ground and attacked the provisions. Two of the ants fought one another for a particular crumb. Dino watched their movements with the intensest interest. When they had vanished--'The prisoner pa.s.sed the day before committing his atrocious crime concealed in the woods of Bocca d'Arno,' he repeated solemnly, and he laughed aloud.

No one came near him. Once he heard some quick footsteps and the cheery whistle of a woodman tramping along some hidden path on his way home to dinner. And once, from between the leaves of the neighbouring alder thicket--young leaves so brightly green that they might be mistaken for flowers--there came a heavy rustling sound which excited his curiosity. He strolled over to the place, and peered in between the branches at a pair of those great melancholy-eyed white oxen common to that part of the country.

Something in the presence of those 'slow moving animals, breathing content,' reminded him of his little _contadina_. A sudden wish to speak to her again made him abandon his wood. Inland, a broad, wet ditch, half full of faded sea-heather, divided him from the ploughed fields. He jumped the ditch, and there, hard at work behind a hedgerow, he stumbled upon Isolina.

Her short blue gown was tucked up above her knees; her scarlet kerchief was hanging loose from her hair; she was digging away like a man, and her bright, childish face was all rosy and warm with the exertion. She nodded in the most friendly fas.h.i.+on to Dino as he came nearer, but time was too precious to be wasted on mere talk this busy morning. Only, as he moved away again, she held her spade suspended in the air for a moment, and her round cheeks grew pinker still as she said, 'As you pa.s.s through the farther field, will you greet my Pio for me? Give him _tanti saluti_, for I have not seen him to-day.'

'Shall I tell him I left you making the cat hole bigger?' asked Dino, beginning to laugh.

Her white teeth flashed. 'Tell him to dig away at his own end of it.'

And presently Dino heard her voice singing as he strolled away between the moist brown furrows.

He had no difficulty in finding Pio, a short, thick-set _contadino_, with a smiling, good-natured face below its thatch of thick, irregularly-clipped hair, brown hair burnt red by the sun. His face was tanned to the colour of yellow bricks, except at the temples and behind the ears, where there were bits of white skin. He wore a ring on his hand, and used the most singular gestures in speaking.

Dino sat down on the edge of the ditch among the weeds and gra.s.ses to watch him at his work. Valdez would have talked of common schools, perhaps of politics; would have tried most likely to drive some faint idea of social equality and the rights of labour into this st.u.r.dy peasant with the Figaro face. The more Dino looked at him the more remote he felt from any impulse of proselytising.

This idyllic love-making, with its simple interests and its simple cares; its messages sent from field to field;--its _navete_, its sincerity, its security,--ended by plunging Dino into the profoundest melancholy. For the first time he absolutely realised what was this thing which he had undertaken. He gazed at the young fellow beside him; he noted how the strong muscles played along his back as he bent to his work, and the vigorous vital grip of his h.o.r.n.y hand.

'Will that piece of ditching be done to-morrow?' he asked suddenly.

The _contadino_ straightened his shoulders and kicked aside a heavy clod. 'Na--ay. I'll be at work here all o' Friday, if the master doesn't put me at something else,' he said slowly.

At work here o' Friday, and Friday was the day of the review. Dino's whiter hand was lying across his knee; he clenched the fingers together with a sudden pa.s.sion, and thrust his doubled fist into his pocket.

His hand, in his own eyes, had seemed the hand of a corpse.

CHAPTER X.

GOOD-BYE.

Late that afternoon, as Dino sprang out of the fis.h.i.+ng-smack on the stone steps of the landing-place at Leghorn, the first person whom his glance rested on was broad-shouldered Maso sitting on the edge of the quay with his legs and feet dangling over the water. He got up slowly as Dino came nearer, and nodded with cheerful friendliness.