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Gianna had muttered mumbled, rebellious words; he did not seem other than a child to her; she had been one of those present at this birth on the shining sands of the Edera. He could not sleep. He could only listen to the distant murmur of the river. With dawn the women awoke. Nerina came running down the steep stone stair and went to let out and feed her charges, the fowls.
It was not admitted that the Commune of San Beda had any local interest or local right sufficiently strong to oppose the project, as such a claim would amount to a monopoly, and no monopoly could exist in a district through which a running river partially passed, and barely one-fifth of the course of this stream lay through that district known as the valley of the Edera.
But Adone had no such dreams; he was as satisfied with his lot as any young steer which wants nothing more than the fair, fresh fields of its birth. But one day as he was sitting with the boy, then fifteen years old, on the south bank of the Edera, the spirit moved him and he spake. It was the day of San Benedetto, when the swallows come. The grass was full of pink lychnis and yellow buttercups.
Cold northern blasts blew from the upper Apennines, and piled the snows upon the grey and yellow rocks of the Abruzzo heights, as he crossed the valley of the Edera towards Ruscino. It seemed to him as though a century had passed since he had left it. In the icy wind which blew form the hills he shivered, for he had only one poor, thin coat to cover him.
"I could not understand; but they spoke of the water, I think, for they pointed to it and said a great deal which I did not understand, and seemed to measure the banks, and took your punt and threw a chain into the water in places." "Took castings? Used my punt? That is odd! I have never seen a stranger in my life by the Edera. Were they anglers?" "No." "Or sportsmen?" "They had no guns."
The Edera water belonged to them. Would they let it be turned away from their lands and given to strangers?
What are those which you claim in special on the Edera water?" Adone was silent for a few moments; he was astonished and embarrassed; he had never reflected on the legal side of his claim to the river; he had grown up in love and union with it; such affections, born with us at birth, are not analysed until they are assailed. "You are strangers," he replied. "But what right do you question me?
Outside the old walls of Ruscino nearly all the land of vale of Edera was untilled, and within them a few poverty-stricken people dragged out their days uncared for by any one, only remembered by the collectors of fiscal dues. "They never forget," said the people. "As soon as one is born, always and in every season, until one's bones rattle down into the ditch of the dead, they remember always."
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.
He was neither scholar nor poet; but he loved to muse upon that far-off time when his forefathers had been lords of the land and of the water. He did not want the grandeur, he did not envy the power which they had possessed; but he wished that, like them, he could own the Edera from its rise in the hills to its fall into the sea. "Oh, dear river!" he sang to it tenderly, "I love you.
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