Chapter 19

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_ 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, horny 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,--faggots, 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 pass 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 municipal 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 pass 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 pass 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.

On Veronica's right, as the carriage halted, was the public fountain. Twenty or thirty tall, thin girls in short black frocks, displaying grimy stockings and coarse shoes, or bare legs and muddy red feet, were waiting their turns to fill the long wooden casks they carried on their heads. The fountain had but two little streams of water, and it took a long time to fill a cask. At the sound of the carriage wheels, most of the girls turned slowly round to see the sight, their empty barrels balanced cross-wise on their heads. They did not even lift a hand to steady their burdens as they changed their positions. They stared steadily. Veronica looked to the right and left and tried to smile, to show that she was pleased. But the visible, jagged edges of their outward misery cut cruelly at her heart, for they were her people; nominally, by old feudal right, they were all her people, and her father's father had held right of justice and of life and death over them all; and in actual fact they were almost all her people, since they lived in her houses, worked on her lands, and ate a portion of her bread, though it was such a very little one as could barely keep them alive.

She tried to smile, and some of the girls held out their fingers towards her and then kissed them, as though they had touched her dress, as the old woman had done. But the men stared stolidly from under the low brims of their battered hats. Only the fever-struck shepherd smiled in a sickly way and lost his Sphinx-like look all at once.

A man in a white shirt came forward, leading Veronica's mare, all saddled for her to mount.

"The carriage cannot go through the streets," said Don Teodoro, in explanation. "They are too narrow and too rough."

"No," answered Veronica, as she stepped from the carriage upon the muddy stones. "I will walk. If the streets are good enough for my people, they are good enough for me."

Even to the good priest this seemed a little exaggeration on her part. But she had seen much that day of which she had never dreamed, and in her generous heart there was a sort of fierce wrath against so much misery, with a strong impulse to share it or cure it, to face the devil on his own ground, and beat him to death, hand to hand. It was perhaps foolish of her to walk to her own gate, but there was nothing to be ashamed of in the feeling which prompted her to do it.

Don Teodoro walked beside her on the left, and Elettra pressed close to her on the right, as they threaded the foul black lanes towards the castle. The moment she had left the carriage, men and women and children had seized eagerly upon her belongings, to carry the bags and rugs and little packages, and now they followed her in a compact crowd, all talking together in harsh undertones; and from the dark doorways, as she went by, old women and old men came out, and more children, half clothed in rags, and cripples four or five. The pigs that were out in the lanes were caught in the press and struggled desperately to get out of it, upsetting even strong men with their heavy bodies as they charged through the crowd, grunting and squealing. A few people coming from the opposite direction, too, flattened themselves against the black walls and low, greasy doors, but there was not room even there, and they also were taken up by the throng and driven before, till the small crowd grew to a little multitude of miserable, curious, hungry, scrambling humanity, squeezing along the narrow way to get sight of the lady before she should reach the castle gate.

From time to time the tall old priest turned mildly and protested, trying to get more air and elbow room for Veronica.

"Gently, gently, my children!" he called to them. "You will see your princess often, for she is come to stay with you."

"Eh, uncle priest!" cried a rough young voice. "That is fair and good, but who believes it?"

"Eh, who believes it?" echoed a dozen voices, young and old.

Veronica laid her hand upon Don Teodoro's arm to steady herself as she trod upon the slimy stones. She could not have stopped, for the crowd, extending far behind her in the dim street, would have pushed her down, but she turned her head as she walked and spoke in the direction of the people. Her voice rang high and clear over their heads.

"I have come to live with you," she said, and they heard her even far off. "It is true. You shall see."

"God render it you!" said a woman's voice. "May God make it true!"

"More than one of them are saying that to themselves," observed Don Teodoro, as Veronica looked before her again, and walked on.

Suddenly she came out upon a broader, cleaner way, which led out beyond the houses and up, by a sweep, to the low gate of the castle; close before her was the great lower bastion which she had seen from a distance. She saw now that there was a trellis high up, all over it, on which grew a vine; but the leaves were scarcely budding yet. She had not time to see much, for the crowd would not let her stop, and as the way widened, many ran before her, up to the gate, where they stopped short, for there were half a dozen men there in dark green coats, and silver buttons, foresters of the estate, who kept them back.

Veronica would have turned once more, to nod to the people and smile at the poor women who pressed close upon her, but the crowd was so great that as the foresters made way for her, she found herself driven almost violently into her own gate, and in the rush, Elettra nearly fell to her knees as they got in. The gate clanged behind her, and she heard the great bolts sliding into their sockets, as it was made fast. Her men had known well enough what to expect from the curiosity of the people. They opened a little postern and let in the few who carried her things, and who had been shut out with the crowd.

She drew a long breath and looked upward, before her. It was very unlike what she had expected. She was in the dark, vaulted way, scarcely eight feet broad, and paved with flagstones, which led up to the first small court. The masonry was rough, enormous, damp, and blackened with dampness and age. From the building around the little enclosure small, dark windows looked down upon her. A narrow door was on her right. On the left, rough stone steps led up to the keep, and to the eastern side of the castle. The door stood open, and there was a lamp in the small entry. Before entering, she glanced up at the lintel and saw that the ancient arms of the Serra were roughly sculptured in the old marble, and she knew that she was on the threshold of her home.

It was more like a gloomy dungeon than the princely castle of which she had dreamed. That, indeed, was what it had been through many ages, and nothing else. She wondered where the great staircase could be where the poor ghost of Queen Joanna sat and shrieked at midnight on the twelfth of May. It was near the day, and not being at all timid, she smiled at the thought, as she went in. Three or four decently clad women in black came forward into the vaulted passage, and smiled and nodded awkwardly. They were the people Don Teodoro had engaged for her service. She had a word for each and patted them on the shoulder, and they led the way, two and two, carrying a light between them, for it was very dark within, though there was still broad daylight without.

Then, all at once, she scarcely knew how, Veronica was standing upon a little balcony. Behind her, the walls of the embrasure were fully fifteen feet thick. Before her, under the glow of the sunset on the one hand, and the first pale moonlight on the other, lay a great valley, deep and long and broadening fan-like from below her to the far distance, where the evening mists were beginning to gather the white light of the moon, while the great mountains of the southeast were still red with the last blood of the dying day--a view of matchless peace and surpassing beauty, such as she had never yet seen. Just then, she looked down, and there, at her feet, were the brown roofs of Muro. Her dream seemed to be suddenly realized, and she had found the room of which she had so often made the picture in her imagination. But it was far more beautiful than she had dared to imagine or dream. The lofty fortress was built lengthwise along the rock, facing the southwest, to meet the winter sun from morning till night; and forever before it lay the wide Basilicata, the peace of the valley, the height of the huge mountains, the infinite tenderness of a distance that is seen from a vast height--in which even what would be near in one plane, is already far by depth.

Veronica looked out in silence for a long time, and the day faded at last in the sky, while the moon's light whitened and strewed blackness across the twilight shadows. The old priest stood beside her, his three-cornered hat in his hand. But the silver spectacles had disappeared. He could feel what was before him without seeing it distinctly.

"I knew that I should find it," said Veronica, at last. "I always knew that it was here. I shall live in this room."

"It is a good room," said Don Teodoro, quietly, and not at all understanding what she meant.

"And I have an idea that I shall die in this room," added the young girl, in a dreamy tone, not caring whether he heard or not. "I am the last of them, you know. They all came from here in the beginning, ever so long ago. It would be natural that the last of them should die here."

"For Heaven's sake, let us not talk of such sad things!" cried the priest, protesting against the mere mention of death, as almost every Italian will.

"Have they made it a sitting-room?" asked Veronica, turning from the balcony into the deep embrasure.

She had scarcely glanced at the furniture, for she had made straight for the window on entering. She looked about her now. There were dark tapestries on the walls. There was a big polished table in the middle, and a dozen or more carved chairs, covered with faded brocade, were arranged in regular order on the three sides away from the windows. The high vault was roughly painted in fresco, with cherubs and garlands of flowers in the barbarous manner of Italian art fifty years ago. There was a low marble mantelpiece, and on it stood six brass candlesticks at precisely even distances, one from another, the six candles being all lighted. But there was a lamp on the table. Veronica smiled.

"You must forgive me if I have not known what to do," said Don Teodoro, humbly, but smiling also. "I have seen something of civilization in my wanderings, but I never attempted to arrange a house before. This is a very large house, if one calls such a place a house at all."

"I suppose there are thirty or forty rooms?"

"There are three hundred and sixty-five altogether," answered the priest, his smile broadening. "They are all named in the inventory. There is a legend about the place to the effect that there is a three hundred and sixty-sixth, which no one can find. Of course the inventory includes every roofed space between walls, from the dungeon at the top of the keep to the dark room under the trap-door in the last hall on this lower story. But you will be surprised, to-morrow, if you go over the place. It is much bigger than seems possible, because you can never really see it from outside unless you go down into the plain."

"And where do you think that other room is?" asked Veronica, who was young enough to take interest in the mystery.

"Heaven knows! Perhaps it does not exist at all. But as I was saying, my dear princess, I found it hard to arrange an apartment for you, not knowing how you might choose to select your quarters. So I had the tapestries cleaned and hung up, and the chairs dusted and the tables polished, and some lights got ready on this floor, and your bedroom is the last."

"The one with the trap-door?" asked Veronica. "That is very amusing!"

"I had the dark room below well cleaned, and the trap has been screwed down," said Don Teodoro. "I thought that there might be rats there. Elettra has the room before yours. But you are tired, and you must be hungry. It is my fault for not leaving you at once."

"But you will dine with me? To-night and every night, Don Teodoro--that is understood."

Half an hour later, they sat down to table in the light of the lamp and the six candles, in the room from which Veronica had looked out upon the valley. But they were both too tired to talk, though they made faint attempts at conversation, and as soon as the meal was over, the old priest begged leave to go home.

"Do not be afraid," he said, as he bade Veronica good night. "There are several men in the house. You are not all alone with your five women. The foresters have their headquarters here."

Veronica was anything but timid or nervous, but when she was in bed in her own room at the south corner of the castle, watching the shadows cast up by the flickering night light upon the ancient tapestries, she realized that she was very lonely indeed, she and scarcely a dozen servants, in the vast fortress wherein a thousand men had once found ample room to live. Brave as she was, she glanced once or twice at the corner of the room where the trap-door was placed. There was a carpet over it, and a table stood there which Elettra had arranged hastily for the toilet table. Veronica wondered what end that dark place below had served in ancient days, and whether she were not perhaps lying in the very room in which Queen Joanna had been smothered by the two Hungarian soldiers. It seemed probable.

But she was very tired, and she fell asleep before long, fancying that she was looking out from the balcony again, with the brown roofs of her people's houses at her feet. _

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