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"That's all stale news!" cried Miss Prunty, jumping up. They walked out on to the terrace. The girl was not there, but by the gate into the olive-yard, where there was a lean-to shed for tools, they found her sitting on a cask, whittling a piece of wood and talking to a curly-headed little contadino. Hearing steps, Goneril turned round. "He was asleep," she said.
The old father was left in the charge of a contadino family, a small loan was raised for them to which the English visitors contributed, and the mother and daughter started for home. "But without us, or some one else to help her," said Victoria, "she would never never! get through the business. Her terror of Melrose is a perfect disease. She shakes if you mention his name.
When he had climbed up, and stepping forward, stood ready to receive the terno, the crowd jeered and cheered the villano, making fine fun of his goat-skin, and not a little jealous that a contadino should take the money out of the city.
Here was the same long passage with rooms on either side, but in even worse condition. At the far end was a glow of light and a hum of voices, coming from the corner of the building occupied by the contadino, and their own kitchen.
The contadino acknowledged that he received a fair price for the cottage and the land about it; but the house, he declared, would go to rack and ruin with no one ever in it, and the land was lying idle, for the English lady would have everything left exactly as it had been when she lived there with her husband.
He wanted it because it would satisfy an imperious desire of tender passion, not because it would infuriate a man who hated him. He forgot the father in the daughter. "Suppose I were quite poor, Maddalena!" he said. "But you are very rich, signorino." "But suppose I were poor, like Gaspare, for instance. Suppose I were as I am, just the same, only a contadino, or a fisherman, as your father is.
All the latent superstition that dwells in the contadino was stirred as dust by a wind. In clouds it flew up about his mind. Fear looked out of his great eyes. Dread was eloquent in his gestures. And he, too, referred to the child, to the povera piccola bambina. It would cast ill-luck on the child to bring her up in a chamber of death. Her saint would forsake her. She too would die.
It is a painting in encaustic, and has been used as a door for his oven by the contadino who dug it up yet it remains a marvel of genius. The subject is a female head a muse, or perhaps only a portrait; the delicacy and mellowness of the flesh tints equal those of Raphael or Leonardo, and a lock of hair lying across her breast is so exquisitely painted that it seems to move with her breath.
The roads were frozen hard; the ascent becoming more difficult, the vetturino was obliged to stop at a farm-house and get another pair of horses, with which, and a handsome young contadino as postillion, we reached Narni in a short time.
It is a relief to mark at no great distance on the hill-side a contadino guiding his oxen, and from a lonely farm yon column of ascending smoke. At least the world goes on, and life is somewhere resonant with song. But here there rests a pall of silence among the oak-groves and the cypresses and balze.
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