The Waters of Edera | Page 6

mother, do not come to this valley
nowadays. Ulisse Ferrero was the last of them. Indeed, I think this poor
little creature is all alone in the world. Go and look at her. You will see
how forlorn and small she is."
She went to the doorway and looked at the sleeping beggar; her eyes
softened as she gazed, the whole attitude and appearance of the child
were so miserable and so innocent, so helpless, and yet so tranquil, that
her maternal heart was touched; the waif slept on the stone bench
beside the door of strangers as though she were in some safe and happy
home.
Clelia Alba looked down on her a few moments, then took the kerchief
off her hair, and laid it gently, without awakening the sleeper, over the
breast and the face of the child, on which flies were settling and the sun
was shining.

Then she picked up the empty earthenware bowl, and went indoors
again.
"I will go back to the river," said Adone. "I have left the net there."
His mother nodded assent.
"You will not send this little foreigner away till I return?" he asked.
Every one was a foreigner who had not been born in the vale of Edera.
"No; not till you return."
He went away through the sunshine and shadow of the olive-trees. He
knew that his mother never broke her word. But she thought as she
washed the bowl: "A little stray mongrel bitch like that may bite badly
some day. She must go. She is nothing now; but by and by she may
bite."
Clelia Alba knew human nature, though she had never been out of sight
of the river Edera. She took her spinning-wheel and sat down by the
door. There was nothing urgent to do, and she could from the threshold
keep a watch on the little vagabond, and would be aware if she awoke.
All around was quiet. She could see up and down the valley, beyond
the thin, silvery foliage of the great olive-trees, and across it to where
the ruins of a great fortress towered in their tragic helplessness. The sun
shone upon her fields of young wheat, her slopes of pasture. The
cherry-trees and the pear-trees were in bloom, her trellised vines
running from tree to tree. Ragged-robin, yellow crowsfoot, purple
orchis, filled the grass, intermixed with the blue of borage and the
white and gold of the oxeye. She did not note these things. Those
fancies were for her son. Herself, she would have preferred that there
should be no flower in the grasses, for before the cow was fed the
flowers had to be picked out of the cut grass, and had served no good
end that she could perceive, for she knew of no bees except the wild
ones, whose honey no one ever tasted, hidden from sight in hollow
trees as it was.
Nerina slept on in peace and without dreams. Now and then another

rose let fall some petals on her, or a bee buzzed above her, but her
repose remained undisturbed.
The good food filled her, even in her sleep, with deep contentment, and
the brain, well nourished by the blood, was still.
Clelia Alba felt her heart soften despite herself for this lonely creature;
though she was always suspicious of her, for she had never known any
good thing come down from the high mountains, but only theft and
arson and murder, and men banded together to solace their poverty with
crime. In her youth the great brigands of the Upper Abruzzo had been
names of terror in Ruscino, and in the hamlets lying along the course of
the Edera, and many a time a letter written in blood had been fastened
with a dagger to the door of church or cottage, intimating the will of the
unseen chief to the subjugated population. Of late years less had been
heard and seen of such men; but they or their like were still heard and
felt sometimes, up above in lonely forests, or down where the moorland
and macchia met, and the water of Edera ran deep and lonely. In her
girlhood, a father, a son, and a grandson had been all killed on a lonely
part of the higher valley because they had dared to occupy a farm and a
water-mill after one of these hillmen had laid down the law that no one
was to live on the land or to set the waterwheel moving.
That had been a good way off, indeed, and for many a year the Edera
had not seen the masked men, with their belts, crammed with arms and
gold, round their loins; but still, one never knew, she thought; unbidden
guests were oftener devils than angels.
And it seemed