The Waters of Edera | Page 7

to her that the child could not really be asleep all this
time in a strange place and the open air. At last she got up, went again
to the bench and drew her handkerchief aside, and looked down on the
sleeper; on the thin, narrow chest, the small, bony hands, the tiny
virginal nipples like wood strawberries.
She saw that the slumber was real, the girl very young and more than
half-starved. "Let her forget while she can," she thought, and covered
her face again. "It is still early in the day."

The bees hummed on; a low wind swept over a full-blown rose and
shook its loose leaves to the ground. The shadow from the ruined tower
began to touch the field which lay nearest the river, a sign that it was
two hours after noon.

II
The large square fresh-water fishing-net had sunk under the surface, the
canes which framed it were out of sight; only the great central pole,
which sustained the whole, and was planted in the ground of the
river-bank, remained visible as it bent and swayed but did not yield or
break. Such nets as this had been washed by the clear green waters of
the pools and torrents of the Edera ever since the days of Etruscan gods
and Latin augurs; religions had changed, but the river, and the ways of
the men of the river, had not altered.
Adone did not touch it, for it was well where it was; he seated himself
on the bank ready to seize and hold it if its pole showed any sign of
yielding and giving way and heeling over into the stream. He sat thus
amongst the bulrushes for many an hour, on many a spring day and
summer night. Although fish were not numerous he never tired of his
vigil, lulled by the sound of the current as it splashed among the stones
and rippled through the rushes; a deeper music coming from its higher
reaches, where it fell over a ledge of rock and leapt like a live thing into
the air. And, indeed, what thing could be more living than this fresh,
pure, untroubled water, glad as a child, swift as a swallow, singing for
sport, as a happy boy sings, as it ran down on its way from the hills?
To the young man sitting now on its bank amidst the bulrushes it was
as living as himself, his playmate, friend, and master, all in one. First of
all things which he could remember were the brightness and the
coolness of it as it had laved his limbs in his childhood on mid-summer
noons, his mother's hands holding him safely as he waded with rosy
feet and uncertain steps along its pebbly bottom! How many mornings,
when he had grown to boyhood and to manhood, had he escaped from
the rays of the vertical sun into its acacia-shadowed pools; how many

moonlit, balmy nights had he bathed in its still reaches, the liquid silver
of its surface breaking up like molten metal as he dived! How many
hours of peace had he passed, as he was spending this, waiting for the
fish to float into his great net, whilst the air and the water were alike so
still that he could hear the little voles stealing in and out amongst the
reeds, and the water-thrush pushing the pebbles on its sands in search
for insects, though beast and bird were both unseen by him! How many
a time upon the dawn of a holy-day had he washed and swam in its
waters whilst the bells of the old church in the village above had tolled
in the softness of dusk!
He thought of none of these memories distinctly, for he was young and
contented, and those who are satisfied with their lot live in their present;
but they all drifted vaguely through his mind as he sat by the side of the
river, as the memories of friends dear from infancy drift through our
waking dreams.
He was in every way a son of the Edera, for he had been born almost in
the water itself; his mother had been washing linen with other women
at the ford when she had been taken with the pains of labour two
months before her time. Her companions had had no time or thought to
do more than to stretch her on the wet sand, with some hempen sheets,
which had not yet been thrown in the water, between her and the
ground; and the cries of her in her travail had echoed over the stream
and had startled the kingfishers in the osiers, and the wild ducks in the
marshes, and the tawny owls asleep in the belfry tower of the village.
But