Leonora Casaloni. A novel

Chapter I

Very Hard Lines for II Gufone . . . .95 CHAPTEE II. Cesare Casaloni 113 CHAPTER in. A Friend in Need is not ad ways a Friend Indeed . 132 CHAPTEE IV. A Walk across Country CONTENTS. VII CHAPTEE V. PAGE "The Conquering Hero Comes" . . . .170 CHAPTEE VI. A Eamble in the Forest 183 CHAPTEE VII. A Bunch of Roses and a Token . . . .198 CHAPTER Vin. The Walk Home 212

CHAPTER IX.

"Good-bye, Sweetheart, Good-bye!" . . . 228

Chapter I. Talamone

It was a lovely evening about the middle of April ; just the time of which the ItaUan poet sings, in words which may often be heard warbled from the mouth of contadina maiden, or making night musical in the stronger tenor of some youngster strolbng homeward from the theatre through the moonhght streets, " Come e gentile la notte a mezzo d'Aprile ! " How beautiful, in truth, is a mid-April night in the land of beauty of every kind ; beautiful even in VOL. I. B the mome Maremma, where two or three months more wiU make the beauty of the night full of danger to any who may be rash enough to wander beneath the stars for the enjoying of it ! But in AprU the beauty of that wUd Maremma land may be enjoyed without danger, and even the nights are not yet poisonous. It is a strange country, that Maremma ; outlawed, it might seem, by both man and nature !

Or at least it was so at the period of the events I am about to relate — some forty years ago or so, that is. Since that time much has been done for the sanitary improvement of the district, and more towards the redemption of it from its old and weU-known character of lawless ness and savagery. Outlawed by nature, how ever, the Maremma could only be called in the sense of its unfitness for human habitation. For it was, and is stiU, a district of exceeding beauty, — a beauty ministered to by the very elements and conditions which render its atmosphere pestilential in the summer and autumn months. Maremma is but short for Marittima, and desiff nates the land by the sea — the maritime district which stretches along the coast aU the way from Leghorn southwards towards and beyond Civita TALAMONE.

Vecchia. It was not a shunned and banned region once. It is studded with the mighty ruins of Etruscan cities, whose colossal walls stiU serve to testify that an abundant and flourishing population once inhabited these now desolate hUls and valleys. HUls and valleys is a phrase correctly describing the entire region. Englishmen, when they hear of a district infested by malaria, are apt to picture to themselves the wide flats of a fenny country, like those portions of our own island which are, in a modified degree, subject to the same misfortune. But nothing can be more unlike the Tuscan and Roman Maremma. The northern portion of the tract of country so called is known as the Tuscan, and the more southern portion as the Roman Maremma. The characteristics of the scenery in both parts are much the same ; — a world of rolling hUls — green in the spring with a thousand varieties of shrub : laurel, laurestinus, hoUy, citysus, box, arbutus in great quantity, dwarfed oak, and stunted Uex, with many another ; gorgeous in the early summer with a wealth of colouring, among which the wonderful abundance of the scarlet arbutus berries is the most prominent feature ; and drearily brown in autumn — is intersected by a labyrinth of smaU and generally exquisitely picturesque valleys, in the narrow depths of which, especially where they near the sea, the Malaria witch brews the poison which every landward breeze carries over the hills and throughout the entire region.

But whether in spring, in summer, or in autumn, an inexpressible air of morne desolation is over it all ! The human habitations, as may be imagined, are few and far between; and the scanty inhabitants, who brave the perils of the region, have impressed on them, only too legibly, in face and form, mien and bearing, the mark of the curse to which they are doomed. It is not that the land is unfertile ; rich and heavy crops might be raised in those vaUeys reeking with fever and ague ; and in some cases rich crops are so raised ; but the cultivation is carried on at the risk of life, and with the certainty of destroyed health ; and for the most part the men and women who sow and reap these lands run from them to some healthier place of refuge as soon as ever the necessary labouf*has been done. But the inhabitants of the Maremma are, or it may be more correct to say, were, some forty or fifty years ago, recruited by a contingent of a different class.

It was, as has been said, a lawless district. Things were done in TALAMONE. 5 the Maremma, of which the law took Uttle heed, which would have made other districts too hot for the doers of them. It was for the most part, too, a safe asylum for those who had done that which had made other parts of the country too hot for them. For the murderer or the hunted robber — in some cases for the poUtical proscript — the tangled thickets of almost impenetrable thorn-bushes, or the covert afforded by the Titanic ruins of Etruscan waUs, situated in some cases in the depths of pathless forests, afforded a safe place of refuge, and an unmolested home. If it be asked how it has come to pass that this iU-starred region, which was once — from a thousand to two thousand years ago, perhaps — the thickly inhabited territory of many large and prosperous cities, has now come to be a type of desolation, shunned by man, and cursed by Nature, it must be answered that the change has been produced by long absence of aU that care of man's hand which is needed to make earth fit for his habitation.

The earth was given to man for his abode on the condition of subduing it, and holding it in subjection by the sweat of his brow and the skill of his brain. Left to itself, earth hastens back to its unredeemed state of unbeneficent wUderness : and in this Maremma region special causes have been at work to make neglect especially fatal. Many small streams, aU but dry in summer, swollen torrents in winter and spring, find their way to the neigh bouring sea among these hills. But these torrents come down from a part of the Apennine, the easily disintegrated and friable soil of which is carried away in large quantities by the waters when swollen by heavy rain. The earth thus torn from the mountains is carried by the streams as long as their course is of a sufficiently torrentlike kind to give a great impetus to the waters.

But as soon as they reach the more level portion of their course, in the immediate neighbourhood of the sea, they slacken their speed, and throw down their burden to the bottom of their channels. Thus their free exit to the sea is impeded. Pools and stagnant lakes are formed, in which the mingled fresh waters and sea waters are exposed to the action of a terribly powerful sun ; and it would seem that mingled fresh and sea water thus acted on, have the unfortunate property of producing a malaria far more poisonous than would result from even stagnant masses of either element unmingled with TALAMONE. the other. Thus it is that Nature revenges man's neglect. In the southern part of the Tuscan Maremma, on the coast, at the extremity of a promontory facing southwards, in such sort as to form a deep bay, of which the general coast-Une furnishes the other enclosing side, there is the town and port of Talamone.

The port of Talamone ! What memories and long-forgotten sweet classic rhythms are awakened in the mind by the word ! Now the port looks as if the galley that carried Æneas might well have been the last that ever entered it ! The port is scarcely so to be called now ; and the town as little deserves the name which courtesy, shown to the memory of what once was, assigns to it. Among aU the desolation of the Maremma, there is scarcely to be found a more desolate-looking spot. Decayed, squalid, dilapidated human dwellings have a phy siognomy which speaks an abomination of desola tion, more abhorrent to the heart of man than any mere absence of aU signs of man and his works can do. A few poverty-stricken fishers still own some half-a-dozen half-rotten boats, which seem to spend a much larger portion of their time rotting on the sandy beach in the sunshine, which blisters and bleaches them, than in the water.

And these, such as they are, lie not in what was once the port, now utterly choked up by sand and mud, the accumula tion of many a century, but on the beach at some little distance from it. Yet the material aspect of the scene is one of very great beauty ; and there is, especially at eventide, a melancholy character about it, which seems to harmonise singularly with the moral and social aspect of all around. The coast-line, after jutting out to the south wards, and sharply retiring to the north again, so as to form the promontory that has been spoken of, at the extremity of which Talamone is situated, resumes its southward course with a curve, and trends away in a long concave line of low sandy beach towards the foot of the Monte Argentario, some ten mUes to the southward. Having reached the foot of that lofty mass, which, standing out very boldly from the general coast-line, forms almost an island, the coast becomes high, cUff-like, and bold.

The long low curving Une of coast, which thus extends from Talamone to the port of Monte Argentario, may be said, for the greater and southern part of the distance, to be not the real coast, inas- TALAMONE. 9 much as it is merely a low Une of sand-hiUs, behind which is a large extent of shaUow salt water, made into a lake by another simUar accumulation of sand to the southward of the mountain, which but for these two connecting sand-lines would be entirely an island. The wide shaUow lake is thus shut in between what may be termed the real coast, the mass of Monte Argentario, and these two natural dykes of sand, one to the south of it, and the other to the north. They are very low; but yet that which forms the visible coast-line to the south of Talamone, is sufficiently high to prevent the ugly lake from being visible from that distance.

In the midst of this so-formed lake stands the Uttle town of OrbeteUo, communicating with the main-land by a spit of natural soU, at the extreme point of which it is built, and with the Monte Argentario by an artificial causeway. Strange as it may seem, this Uttle town so situated in the midst of its salt lake, is, though, not by any means free from malaria, yet much less scourged by it than many other localities of the neighbourhood. The Monte Argentario thus immediately faces Talamone ; and a very magnificent object it is, rising to tbe height of a very considerable mountain, whose craggy, and for the most part wooded sides, are bathed by the bluest of bright blue Mediterranean waters. Far to the west of it rises from out these gently sleeping waters the Island of the Lily, — the Isola del Giglio, — too far from the Talamone shore for the eye to distinguish the min gled woodland and crag-land nature of its steep sides, but near enough to contribute largely to the beauty of the scene by the shifting and rapidly varied effects of colour, light, and shade produced as the sun gloriously sets behind it.

It was the hour at which Italians, whether on the door-steps of narrow city alleys, or by wood-side, or field-side, or sea-side, so dearly love to come forth from the covering of roofs, and enjoy the sweet influences of their delicious air and of the evening hour, — the hour of the Ave Maria, — the dear " ventiquattro," at which aU toU ceases, and aU the world may lawfuUy give itself to enjoyment. It seemed an hour which the still and melancholy Maremma might in a special manner claim as its own. The silent shores, the silent hUls, the silent woods, gathered a special and expressive beauty from the lights peculiar to the dying hour of the day. Even the squalor of the miserable little town, TALAMONE. burrowing in the sand, seemed glorified into a sem blance of beauty, or at least of harmony, with the other elements of the scene.

But the outlook from the coast seaward was gorgeously and magnificently beautiful. The sun was fading into the western blue in unmitigated splendour ; and the golden pathway through the darkening blue of the waters came up from the far west Uke an angel's path, straight to the spot on the shore on which two women were sitting. A Uttle behind, and to the right hand of them, was what is caUed the town, and every pane of glass remaining in the western windows of it seemed a strongly burning fire, under the painting of the level rays. The entire outline of the western Island of the Lily was traced in burnished gold against a purple sky. And aU the woods and crags of the nearer Monte Argentario were bathed in light of every hue, from delicate bloom like the pink of a rose, to deepest indigo, warning that the glory was quickly passing away.

Chapter II. The Sea-shore

The two women, of whom I have spoken, sat on a huge stone imbedded in the sand of the beach. It was not a natural rock ; — there are none such on that part of the coast ; — but a stone that had been shaped by the hand of a buUder, for what purpose or how long ago, who shall say ? It was, perhaps, the sole remaining fragment of some pier, which the Trojan exiles may have sighted from their galleys as they fbUowed their exploring way along the coast, buUt when the neighbouring walls of Etruscan Ansedonia enclosed a living city instead of the wild boar's covert as now they do ! Or it may have been a portion of some coast fortification of the Spaniards, of a date some two thousand years later ! There it is, buUt into the sand, with the remains of a huge rusty iron staple bedded into one corner of it.

The people of Talamone assuredly never ask themselves how or why or when it came there. It is natural to them to live among nameless and voiceless fragments of dead and gone civiU sations ! Huge cyclopic watts, — vast foundations laid deeper far than any modern spade has cared to follow them, and now meaningless, — half-ruined towers standing solitary and purposeless in the midst of wide uncultivated fields or thick woods, — these are to the denizens of the Maremma manifestations of the general course of this world's affairs, as normal as the setting of the sun, or the falUng of the leaf, or the autumnal visitation of fever. The two women sat on the ancient stone side by side, and gazed out seaward. They were not looking for any coming, or for any seaborne thing Uving or dead. They were simply gazing at the scene before their eyes ; not consciously rendering to their own minds any account of its rare beauty ; and stUl less remarking on any feature of it in spoken words.

But none the less were they under the influence of it, and vaguely conscious of the enjoyment arising from the contemplation of it, and from the combinations of impression and sensation which resulted from the specialities of the place and the hour. " The holy Virgin knows what will come of it ! " said the younger of the two women with a sigh ; " I went round by the Madonna delle Grazie, as I came in, and put up a couple of candles, and said the whole rosary twice through ! God grant that it turn to good ! " " I don't know whether I would go with him if I was in your place, and you not a month out of bed since your child was born," said her older companion. " I am weU enough able to go. There will be no great hardship in the journey, for that matter. We shall travel with old Santi the procaccia as far as Civita Vecchia ; and from there to Rome Sandro wiU find some of the vetturini that have brought down fore stieri to Civita going back home.

There are plenty of them, and Sandro knows a many of them," replied the first speaker. " Oh yes ! I don't doubt me you'll travel com fortable enough for that matter," returned the elder woman ; " that's easy enough, I reckon, when there's money in the pocket. But I wonder you can bear to leave your own child, Lucia ; — you who have lost one — two — three chUdren," she added, holding up one finger after another, — "and that too to go and bring home a stranger to take its place ! " "No, not that ! Bio ne guardi ! God forbid ! And you are not to think, Giuditta, but what I would give one of my fingers off my hand, that there was no question of going to Rome, or that this business had never been heard of ! Santa Madonna ! that I would ! — any finger but that," she added, singling, as her hand lay in her lap, the finger which bore her marriage-ring ; " but Sandro says it must be so, and — and — you don't know, Giuditta, — but God and the Virgin know, that there is nothing — nothing I would not do, if it were only to get a smile from him !

" "And where did he first hear anything about it ? " asked the woman she caUed Giuditta. " How should I know ? I don't know whose chUd it is — how should I ? I don't know whether Sandro knows himself! He says that there is money to be got by it ; and that I don't know how hard money is to come by, and — and — that it must be done ! " " Pretty money ! that's to be the price of sacrificing your own child. Bless the pretty dear little face of it ! " said Giuditta. " I wish it had been a boy ! " said the mother, musingly, and gazing out into far distance along the path of gold, which the rays of the setting sun were making across the blue waters, — gazing with those eyes that seem to be looking into the far future rather than at any materially visible object in space. " I wish it had been a boy, for Sandro would have liked it better, and per haps " Two large silent tears weUed out from the large, liquid, mournful eyes that had once contributed powerfuUy to make the speaker's face a very lovely one, and might have made it seem so stiU to eyes which could appreciate form and expression more than the freshness of merely animal beauty.

Two tears rolled slowly down the pale sunken cheeks of delicate clearness and purity of complexion, apparently unnoticed by her in the abstraction of her mind, busy with the far-off " what might have been ! " " Nonsense! Have liked it better! What would he have better than a blessed infant that promises to grow into beauty with every day it lives ? You mark me, Lucia, if that child don't live to be a beauty one of these days ! And suppose you can't suckle 'em both ? " asked Giuditta suddenly, after a pause. " Then we shaU send the strange child to the Innocenti at Florence ! " said the mother with prompt energy. " Oh ! that is quite settled. Sandro says that if I find, when the child is here, that I cannot manage with both, he will send the other child away. He has promised me that. But I dare say I shall be able to keep 'em both, without one doing a bit of harm to the other."

" But why shouldn't you take the little one with you on your journey ?" inquired Giuditta. "I wish I might, with all my heart. Santa Madonna ! I wish I might ! But Sandro will not let me. He says I shaU be back the second day ; and that, properly cared for, the child can take no harm in that time. You will take care of her, Giuditta ! I know you will care for her ! " said the poor mother. "Never you fear for that, Lucia, mia poveretta! I'll care for the child as if she were twice over my own. How came you to call her Stella, instead of your owe name, Lucia?" asked Guiditta. vol. i. c "Stella was my mother's name; and two of the children I lost were baptized Lucia. I would not try the name again ! " said the mother, with a long quivering sigh. " Well, Stella is a good name. I like SteUa — SteUa !

Look at that big shining one that has just come out over the mountain there, a Uttle to this side. Little Stella will grow to be as lovely and as bright as that is ! " " Then you will come up to our house early to morrow morning ; — we shall be starting early ; — or better still, if you could come back with me to-night. You could have half my bed, you know. Sandro won't be at home tiU to-morrow morning, a little before it is time to start," said Lucia, again sighing deeply. " Who has got the child now ?" said Giuditta. " Old Marta Fosti. She looked in coming back from the town, and I begged her to take the little one a bit, while I came down to speak to you. She'll want to be going home, old Marta; and I must be going too, for I have kept her long enou°_i." " Well, I will go with you to-night, Lucia mia !

It will be better than coming to take the child all in a hurry to-morrow morning. You will have time to tell me anything about the little one. And then you'll be having a bit of something when you get home ; and, to teU the truth, I haven't so much as a crust in the house, or a quattrino in my pocket ! " " Come along, then. Yes, there is bread and a bit of salame, and a flask of wine, in the house ; and you are more than welcome, mia buona Giuditta. Let's go, and lock your own door, and be going up the hill." And the two women rose from their seat accord ingly. It was visible as she rose, that the younger woman, whom her friend had caUed Lucia, must have possessed also, besides great beauty of face, a tall, finely formed, and even elegant figure. But there was now an air of suffering and a faded appearance, which were at present more markedly characteristic of her person.

It was not that there was any symptom of hard poverty about her appearance. Her dress was of a superior kind to that of her friend Giuditta. And there was no appear ance, notwithstanding what Giuditta had said of the state of her finances, and of the emptiness of the cupboard at home, tbat she either was suffering from any very severe degree of poverty. She was a bony, square-built woman, rather under the middle height, the robust strength of whose constitution seemed to have given her an immunity from the normal attacks of fever and ague, which had left their marks on nearly every man and woman of the population. She was decently and comfortably dressed in a short petticoat of blue serge, with a gay-coloured little shawl, folded cornerwise, over her back and shoulders, so worn as to let her arms, clad in clean but coarse white cloth spun from hempen yarn, come freely out from beneath it.

On her head she wore nothing but her own abundant black hair, now streaked with grey. Giuditta Fermi was the widow of a man who had kept a small attempt at a mercer's shop in the town of Talamone, and she now maintained herself as best she mierht by acting as a tailoress for male or female customers indiscriminately ; often, in the case of her country patrons, going to their house and staying there to do what had to be done in the way of mendinoup the habiliments of the family, and remaining there till the job was done. She thus managed to " buscare la vita," as an Italian would say, without sufferino from any of the severer ills of poverty, though it often occurred to her to be sore in need of some Uttle assistance, which it had often been in the power of Lucia Vallardi — that was her friend's name — to give.

Lucia was the wife of Alessandro, or Sandro VaUardi, and they lived in a lone house amid the woods, on the high ground of the promontory at the point of which Talamone is situated. What Sandro Vallardi was it would not be easy to state so simply and straightforwardly as has been done with reference to Signora Giuditta Fermi and her late husband. To tell what he had been would involve a longer story than can conveniently be told here on the threshold of another story, with which his ante cedents had but smaU and indirect connection. He was a man evidently of superior education — to use the ordinary phrase — to that of the peasants and fishermen who lived around him. But it might be gathered, even from so much of him and his life as was patent to the observation of the very small Uttle world in which his home-life was passed, tbat whatever that education had been, the moral results of it could not be said to make him the superior of the more ignorant boors who almost exclusively made up that world.

In a word, it was tolerably well known in that little remote and isolated world that the occupations of Sandro Vallardi were such as put him at odds with the laws of the other big world which lived away under happier skies than theirs, in Florence, in Leghorn, or Sienna. And it was still more clear, though the house in which he occasionally, and his wife Lucia constantly, lived, was his own, together with the three or four acres of almost uncultivated land around it, yet that no miracle of highest agricultural care and success could extract thence the means of subsistence, and of that degree of comparative ease of circumstances which charac terised the Vallardi household, as contrasted with that of the other inhabitants. But nobody cared to make any inquiries, or even conjectures, on this subject.

It was one of those many matters which an Italian man's nature and breeding and traditional habits teach him are better not known or inquired into. What was the good of knowing ? Perhaps inquiry or spying might lead to knowledge which might at some day or other turn out to be very inconvenient. Who could say? Suppose those troublers of life, the lawyers, should one day or other come asking questions, how much better and pleasanter to be able to say at once, with a safe conscience, that they knew nothing ! — the answer which every Italian would always fain give to any legal, magisterial, or police inquiry. Nor did the vague general notion of the nature of the affairs in which Signor Sandro VaUardi might be supposed to occupy himself during his long and frequent absences from home, at aU tend to produce any feeling of dislike or reprobation in the minds of the people around him.

Who would not pitch lawyers, and tribunals, and courts, with aU their rules, and exactions, and botherations, and taxes, to the devil, if they could and dared ? Surely he who waged war against all this must be regarded as an exceptionally fine fellow, as long as he did so successfully, and must be entitled to commiseration and compassion if it should come to pass that in the long run the unequal struggle should go against him. And tben Vallardi looked like a fine fellow, a great point with aU people, and especially so with the southern nature of the Italians. He was a man of some forty years of age, tall and muscular, with a handsome face, abundant black beard, mous taches, and whiskers, a large dark eye deep sunken under a somewhat forbidding, but still handsome brow, a straight nose, white teeth, and a com plexion of cheeks, throat, and neck as deep-red a brown as quickly circulating blood, and plenty of it, and habitual exposure to sun and every sort of weather, could make it.