The Waters of Edera | Page 8

her pains had been brief though sharp, and her son had first seen
the light beside the water; a strong and healthy child, none the worse
for his too early advent, and the rough river-women had dipped him in
the shallows, where their linen and their wooden beaters were, and had
wrapped him up in a soiled woollen shirt, and had laid him down with
his face on his mother's young breast, opening his shut unconscious
mouth with their rough fingers, and crying in his deaf ear, "Suck! and
grow to be a man!"
Clelia Alba was now a woman of forty-one years old, and he, her only
son, was twenty-four; they had named him Adone; the beautiful Greek

Adonais having passed into the number of the saints of the Latin
Church, by a transition so frequent in hagiology that its strangeness is
not remembered save by a scholar here and there. When he had been
born she had been a young creature of seventeen, with the wild grace of
a forest doe; with that nobility of beauty, that purity of outline, and that
harmony of structure, which still exist in those Italians in whom the
pure Italiote blood is undefiled by Jew or Gentile. Now her abundant
hair was white, and her features were bronzed and lined by open-air
work, and her hands of beautiful shape were hard as horn through
working in the fields. She looked an old woman, and was thought so by
others, and thought herself so: for youth is soon over in these parts, and
there is no half-way house between youth and age for the peasant.
Clelia Alba, moreover, had lost her youth earlier even than others: lost
it for ever when her husband at five-and-twenty years of age had been
killed by falling from an olive-tree of which the branch sustaining him
had cracked and broken under his weight. His neck had been broken in
the fall. She had been dancing and shouting with her two-year-old child
on the grassland not far off, romping and playing ball with some
dropped chestnuts; and when their play was over she had lifted her boy
on to her shoulder and run with him to find his father. Under one of the
great, gnarled, wide-spreading olives she had seen him, lying asleep as
she thought.
"Oh, lazy one, awake! The sun is only two hours old!" she had cried
merrily, and the child on her shoulder had cooed and shouted in
imitation, "Wake--wake--wake!" and she, laughing, had cast a chestnut
she had carried in her hand upon the motionless figure. Then, as the
prostrate form did not stir, a sudden terror had seized her, and she had
set the baby down upon the grass and run to the olive-tree. There she
had seen that this was death, for when she had raised him his head had
dropped, and seemed to hang like a poppy broken in a blast of wind,
and his eyes had no sight, and his mouth had no breath.
From that dread hour Clelia Alba had never laughed again. Her hair
grew white, and her youth went away from her for ever.
She lived for the sake of her son, but she and joy had parted company

for ever.
His death had made her sole ruler of the Terra Vergine; she had both
the knowledge and the strength necessary for culture of the land, and
she taught her boy to value and respect the soil.
"As you treat the ground ill or well, so will your ground treat you," she
said to him.
She always wore the costume of the province, which was similar to that
of the Abruzzo villages, and suited her cast of features and her strong
and haughty carriage. On feast-days she wore three strings of fine
pearls round her throat, and bracelets of massive gold and of fine
workmanship, so many in number that her arms were stiff with them;
they had been her mother's and grandmother's and great-grandmother's,
and had been in her dower. To sell or pawn them under stress of need,
had such occurred, would never have seemed to any of her race to be
possible. It would have seemed as sacrilegious as to take the chalice off
the church altar, and melt its silver and jewels in the fire. When she
should go to her grave these ornaments would pass to Adone as
heirlooms; none of her family were living.
"Never talk of death, mother," he said, whenever she spoke of these
things. "Death is always listening; and if he hear his name he taps the
talker on the shoulder, just to show that he is there and must be
reckoned with."
"Not so, my son!" replied Clelia Alba, with a sigh. "He has every soul
of us