The Children of the King | Page 5

own. True it is, at
least, that they had no other name. Through generation after generation
they were christened Ruggiero, Guglielmo, and Sebastiano "of the

Children of the King." Thus they had anciently appeared in the ill-kept
parish registers, and thus was Ruggiero inscribed for the conscription
under the new law.
And now, as you know, gaunt, weather-beaten Luigione, licensed
master in the coast trade and just now captain of the Sorrentine felucca
Giovannina, from Amalfi to Diamante with macaroni, there are no
more of the Children of the King in old Verbicaro, and their goods have
fallen into divers hands, but chiefly into those very grasping and
close-holding ones of Don Pietro Casale and his wife. But they are not
all dead by any means, as you know also and you have even lately seen
and talked with one of the fair-haired fellows, who bears the name.
For the Children of the King have almost always had yellow hair and
blue eyes, though they have more than once taken to themselves
black-browed, brown-skinned Calabrian girls as wives. And this makes
one, who knows something more about your country than you do,
Luigione--though in a less practical way I confess--this makes one
think that they may be the modern descendants of some Norman
knightling who took Verbicaro for himself one morning in the old days,
and kept it; or perhaps even the far-off progeny of one of those
bright-eyed, golden-locked Goths who made slaves of the degenerate
Latins some thirteen centuries ago or more, and treated their serfs
indeed more like cattle than slaves until almost the last of them were
driven into the sea with their King Teias by Narses. But a few were left
in the southern fastnesses and in the Samnite hills, and northward
through the Apennines, scattered here and there where they had been
able to hold their own; and some, it is said, forgot Theodoric and
Witiges and Totila and Teias, and took service in the Imperial Guard at
Constantinople, as Harold of Norway and some of our own hard-fisted
sailor fathers did in later years.
Be that as it may--and no one knows how it was--the Children of the
King have yellow hair and blue eyes to this present time, and no one
would take them for Calabrians, nor for Sicilians, still less for
monkey-limbed, hang-dog mouthed, lying, lubberly Neapolitans who
can neither hand, reef nor steer, nor tell you the difference between a

bowline and a buntling, though you may show them a dozen times, nor
indeed can do anything but steal and blaspheme and be the foulest,
filthiest crew that Captain Satan ever shipped for the Long Voyage. Not
fit to slush down the mast of a collier, the best of them.
It must be a dozen years since Carmela died in that little house beyond
the cabbage garden. It was a glorious night in September--a strange
night in some ways, and not like other nights one remembers, for the
full moon had risen over the hills to the left, filling the world with a
transparent vapour of silver, so clear and so bright that the very light
seemed good to breathe as it is good to drink crystal water from a
spring. Verbicaro was all asleep behind Don Pietro Casale's house, and
in front, from the terrace before the guest-room, one could see the great
valley far below beyond the cabbages, deep and mysterious, with
silver-dashed shadows and sudden blacknesses, and bright points of
white where the moon's rays fell upon a solitary hut. And on the other
side of the valley, above Grisolia, a great round-topped mountain and
on the top of the mountain an enormous globe of cloud, full of
lightning that flashed unceasingly, so that the cloud was at one instant
like a ball of silver in the moonlight, and at the next like a ball of fire in
darkness. Not a breath stirred the air, and the strange thunderstorm
flashed out its life through the long hours, stationary and alone at its
vast height.
In the great silence two sounds broke the stillness from time to time;
the deep satisfied grunt of a pig turning his fattest side to the cobble
stones as he slept--and the long, low wail of a woman dying in great
pain.
The little room was very dark. A single wick burned in the boat-shaped
cup of the tall earthenware lamp, and there was little oil left in the
small receptacle. On the high trestle bed, upon the thinnest of straw
mattresses, decently covered with a coarse brown blanket, lay a pale
woman, emaciated to a degree hardly credible. A clean white
handkerchief was bound round her brow and covered her head, only a
scanty lock or two of fair hair escaping at the side