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The practice of cutting it into dialogue had perhaps crippled him. As he has made the characters in his plays too attentive to the decorations of the scene-painter, so in the last book of the English Garden he has turned his landscape into a theatre, for the representation of a play. The story of Nerina is too long and too complicated for an episode in a didactic poem.
Nerina had reached the other side of the morass in safety, and her mocking laughter rang upon their ears. "I have led you well!" she cried to them. "I have led you well, oh servants of the king! oh swine! oh slaves! oh spies! oh hunters and butchers of men!" And she danced on the edge of the field of death, and the light of the great planets shone upon her face.
The hands of Nerina trembled with excitement, her eyes looked on fire, her lips shook, her breath came feverishly and fast. The smell of the soup made her feel beside herself. She said nothing, but seized the food and began to drink the good herb-broth with thirsty eagerness though the steam of it scorched her.
"It is but this, sir; if Nerina enter here, I go." "You cannot be serious!" "If you think so, look at me." He did look at her; at her severe aquiline features, at her heavy eyelids drooping over eyes of implacable wrath, at her firm mouth and jaw, cold as if cut in marble. She was not a woman to trifle or to waver; perhaps she was one who having received offence would never forgive.
"Don Silverio is absent," Adone called back to her; and he passed on under the olive-trees towards his home. Gianna paused on the bridge and watched him till he was out of sight; then she went back herself by another path which led to the stables. A thought had struck her: Nerina was too devoted to the cattle to have let them suffer; possible she was even now attending to them in their stalls.
If I am athirst there is water as yet there is water!" he murmured bitterly, for the menace of this impending horror began to grow on him with the fixity and obsession of a mania. Nerina continued to fan the cattle and drive off the flies from their necks. She looked at him wistfully from behind the figures of the stately animals. She was afraid of the sorrow which was in the air.
One terrible passion had warped his nature, closed his heart, and invaded his reason to the exclusion of all other thoughts or instincts; but he was not yet so lost to shame as, now that he knew what he had done, to send out a female creature into peril to do his bidding. "Tell me, then, tell me," pleaded Nerina, "when will anything be done?"
I and Gianna and the child do what we can, but we are women, and Nerina is young." "No doubt you speak wisely, mother," replied Adone humbly. "But of what use is it to dress and manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera be in its sap and at its root? What use is it to till these lands if they be doomed to perish from thirst?"
He fronted the church, and that breach in the blocks of the Etruscan wall through which Nerina had taken her path to the river a few hours before. He knew every inch of the descent. Hundreds of times in his boyhood had he run along the ruined wall and leaped in sport over the huge stones, to spring with joyous shouts into the river below.
The private translated to his superior. "She prays of your mercy to leave her free, or she cannot pass through the heather." The sergeant let her go unwillingly, but pushed her in front of him, and levelled his revolver at her. "Tell her, if she try to get away, I fire." "Tell him I know that," said Nerina.
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