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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Nerina!" he cried as the girl stopped him, and was more distressed than pleased to see her there; he had not thought of her. In the moonlight, under the silvery olive foliage her little sunburnt face and figure took a softer and more feminine grace. But Adone had not sight for it. For him she was but a sturdy little pony, who would trot till she dropped.
"It is the least you can do. But you must not forget the cattle. Nerina is not there to see to them." She pushed past him and went on to the footbridge; but midway across it she turned and called to him: "I lit the fire, and the coffee is on it. Where am I to look for the child? In the heather? in the woods? up in Ruscino? down in the lower valley? or may be at the presbytery?"
There were four men standing and talking by the water. They were doubtless the same persons as Nerina had seen, for they were evidently men from a city and strangers. Disquietude and offence took alarm in him at once. He conquered that shyness which was natural to him, and which was due to the sensitiveness of his temperament and the solitude in which he had been reared.
Leaving him to his lament, the play introduces us to the huntress Nerina, courted by the rich shepherd Daphnis, whose suit is favoured by her father, and the poor swain Hylas. Daphnis is in his turn loved by the nymph Dorinda.
This, stripped of glamour, is the lot nine times out of ten of the female peasant a creature of burden like the cow she yokes, an animal valued only in her youth and her prime; in old age or in sickness like the stricken and barren goat, who has nought but its skin and its bones. Poor little Nerina!
For he knew the character of Nerina in the confessional better than Clelia Alba judged of it in her house. "It was not wise to bring her here," he added aloud. "But having committed that error it would be unfair to charge the child with the painful payment of it. You are a just woman, my good friend; you must see that." Clelia saw it clearly, for she never tried to trick her conscience.
In order to investigate Nerina it was indispensable that he should make several actual observations at various points of the orbit; and for this purpose he repeatedly made his way up to the grotto above, where, in spite of the extreme severity of the cold, he would persevere in the use of his telescope till he was all but paralyzed.
Capte Nerina en passant. Vivres vont manquer et..." The rest of the document had been so damaged by the beaks of the gulls that it was illegible. Servadac was wild with vexation. He felt more and more convinced that the writer was a Frenchman, and that the last line indicated that he was in distress from scarcity of food.
I do not want to speak without respect to you, Adone, for I have eaten your bread and been sheltered by your roof through many a year; but for whatever end you send that child out of nights, you do a bad thing, a cruel thing, a thing unworthy of your stock; and if I know Clelia Alba and who should know her if not I? she will never let Nerina enter her house again." Adone's face grew dark.
He was cruel as those who are possessed by one intense and absorbing purpose always are: he was cruel to Nerina as Garibaldi, in the days of Ravenna, was cruel to Anita.
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