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Updated: September 11, 2025
Were they to take it above his land, above the bridge of Ruscino, its bed here would be dried up, and his homestead and the village both be ruined. The clear, intangible right which he meant to defend at any cost, in any manner, was his right to have the river run untouched through his fields.
But this was only at such times as daybreak or early night when he was alone. There were but a few people within the ruined walls of Ruscino; most of the houses were tenantless and tottering to their fall.
"It is lamentable and unjust," continued the mayor, "that any one of your evident mental powers and capacity for higher place should be wasting your years and wasting your mind in a miserable solitude like Ruscino. If you will aid us to a pacific cession of the Valdedera I will take upon myself to promise that your translation to a higher office shall be favoured by the Government-"
"Their criminal habit always: continue." "Sometimes in one district, sometimes in another, he was often in the macchia of the Valdedera. The people of the district, and especially of Ruscino, protected him.
"If you touch a hair of Don Silverio's head, or the hem of his cassock, I will burn Ruscino," said Adone to one of those who had threatened his friend, "and you will all burn with it, for the river will not help you; the river will turn to oil and make the flames rage tenfold." The people were afraid as they heard him, for the wrath of the gentle is terrible from its rarity.
And for almost a score of years she had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he.
Unless more soldiery were patrolling the district in all directions it was little likely, he thought, that these men would conduct themselves thus in Ruscino; he had no doubt that it was a concerted movement, directed by the Prefect, and the General commanding the garrisons of the province, and intended to net in one haul the malcontents of the Valdedera.
And nearest of all these to him were the Longobardo church and the ancient houses and the dismantled fortress and the ruined walls of what had been the fief of the Toralba, the mediaeval fortified town of Ruscino. It still kept this, its latest, name, but it kept little else. Thrice a thousand centuries had rolled over it, eating it away as the sea eats away a cliff.
Adone went onward northward to his tryst: his soul was dark as night; it enraged him to have been forced by his conscience and his honour to obey the command of Don Silverio. But she did not go over the bridge to Ruscino. She waited a little while then followed on his track. Gianna was right. She was a wild bird. She had been caught and tamed for a time, but she was always wild.
He would have asked Don Silverio if he had heard or seen anything of any strangers, but the priest was away that day at one of the lonely moorland cabins comprised in his parish of Ruscino, where an old man, who had been a great sinner in his past, was at his last gasp, and his sons and grandsons and great-grandchildren all left him to meet his end as he might.
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