The Waters of Edera | Page 4

and sinew, and looked like stakes of wood. All the veins and muscles stood revealed as in anatomy, and her face, which would have been a child's face, a nymph's face, with level brows, a pure straight profile, and small close ears like shells, was so fleshless and sunburnt that she looked almost like a mummy. Her eyes had in them the surprise and sadness of those of a weaning calf; and her hair, too abundant for such a small head, would, had it not been so dusty and entangled, have been of a read golden bronze, the hue of a chestnut which has just burst open its green husk.
"Who are you?" said the young man, looking at her in surprise.
"I am Nerina," answered the child.
"Where do you come from? What is your country?"
She pointed vaguely to the south-west mountains, where the snow on the upper ranges was still lying with bands of cloud resting on it.
"From the Abruzzo?"
She was silent. She did not know the mountains of her birthplace by their names.
"Who was your father?" he asked, with some impatience.
"He was Black Fausto."
"What did he do for a living?"
"He went down with the fair season to the Roman plain."
He understood: the man had no doubt been a labourer, one of those who descend in bands from the villages of the Abruzzo heights to plough, and mow, and sow, and reap, on the lands of the Castelli Romani; men who work in droves, and are fed and stalled in droves, as cattle are, who work all through the longest and hottest days in summer, and in the worst storms of winter; men who are black by the sun, are half naked, are lean and hairy and drip with continual sweat, but who take faithfully back the small wage they receive to where their women and children dwell in their mountain-villages.
"He went, you say? Is he ill? Does he work no longer?"
"He died last year."
"Of what?"
She gave a hopeless gesture. "Who knows? He came back with a wolf in his belly, he said, always gnawing and griping, and he drank water all day and all night, and his face burned, and his legs were cold, and all of a sudden his jaw fell, and he spoke no more to us. There are many of them who die like that after a hot season down in the plains."
He understood; hunger and heat, foul air in their sleeping places, infusoria in the ditch and rain water, and excessive toil in the extremes of heat and cold, make gaps in the ranks of these hired bands every year as if a cannon had been fired into them.
"Who takes care of you now?" he asked with pity, as for a homeless bitch.
"Nobody. There is nobody. They are all gone down into the earth."
"But how do you live?"
"I work when I can. I beg when I cannot. People let me sleep in the stalls, or the barns, and give me bread."
"That is a bad life for a girl."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"I did not make it."
"And where are you going?"
She opened her arms wide and swept the air with them.
"Anywhere. Along the water, until I find something to do."
"I cannot do much," she added, after a pause. "I am little, and no one has taught me. But I can cut grass and card wool."
"The grass season is short, and the wool season is far off. Why did you not stay in your village?"
She was mute. She did not know why she had left it, she had come away down the mountainside on a wandering instinct, with a vague idea of finding something better the farther she went: her father had always come back with silver pieces in his pocket after his stay down there in those lands which she had never seen, lying as they did down far below under the golden haze of what seemed an immeasurable distance.
"Are you not hungry?" said the fisher.
"I am always hungry," she said, with some astonishment at so simple a question. "I have been hungry ever since I can remember. We all were up there. Sometimes even the grass was too dried up to eat. Father used to bring home with him a sack of maize; it was better so long as that lasted."
"Are you hungry now?"
"Of course."
"Come to my house with me. We will feed you. Come. Have no fear. I am Adone Alba, of the Terra Vergine, and my mother is a kind woman. She will not grudge you a meal."
The child laughed all over her thin, brown face.
"That will be good," she said, and leapt up out of the water.
"Poor soul! Poor soul!" thought the young man, with a profound sense of pity.
As the child sprang up out of the river, shaking the water off her as