CHAPTER III

.*

The dog continued to bark in the olive-groves, while George and Hippolyte came back by the path towards Candia's house. When the animal recognized the guests of the house, he stopped barking, and came to meet them joyfully.

"Why, it's Giardino!" cried Hippolyte. And she stooped to caress the poor beast, with whom she had already become friends. "He was calling us. It's getting late."

The moon rose in the silence of the sky, slowly, preceded by a luminous wave which gradually covered the azure. All the sounds of the surrounding fields died away beneath this pacific light. And the unexpected cessation of every noise seemed almost supernatural to George, whom an inexplicable fright kept alert.

"Stop a moment," he said, holding Hippolyte back.

And he listened intently.

"What are you listening to?"

"It seemed to me----"

And both looked back in the direction of the barn, which the olive-trees concealed from view. But they heard nothing except the even and rocking rhythm of the sea in the curve of the little gulf. Over their heads a cricket clove the air in its flight with a grating sound like that of a diamond on a pane of glass.

"Don't you think the child is dead?" asked George, without dissimulating his emotion. "He stopped crying."

"That's true!" said Hippolyte. "And you believe he's dead?"

George did not reply. And they resumed their way back beneath the silvery olive-groves.

"Did you notice the mother well?" he asked at last, after a silence, possessed internally by the sombre image.

"My God! My God!"

"And that old woman who touched your elbow! What a voice! What eyes!"

His words betrayed the strange fright which dominated him, as if the recent spectacle had been a frightful revelation to him, as if life had suddenly been made manifest to him under a mysterious and savage aspect, bruising and stamping him with an indelible sign.

"You know, when I entered the house, on the ground behind the door there was the corpse of some beast--already half-decomposed. The smell was simply choking."

"What do you mean?"

"It was either a cat or a dog. I could not distinguish very well. It was difficult to see well inside."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, yes. Without any doubt there was a dead animal. The stench----"

A shudder of disgust ran through him as he thought of it.

"What could it be?" said Hippolyte, who felt herself becoming infected by the contagion of fear and disgust.

"How can I know?"

The dog gave a bark to announce their coming. They had arrived. Candia was waiting for them, and the table was already spread beneath the oak.

"How late you are, signora!" cried the affable hostess, with a smile. "Where have you been? What will you give me if I guess? Well, you have been to see the child of Liberata Maunella. May Jesus guard us from the Cunning One!"

When the lovers were at table, she approached, curious, to speak and question.

"Did you see him, signora? He gets no better; he's just as bad. Yet his father and mother have done everything to save him."

What had they not done! Candia related all the remedies attempted, all the exorcisms. The priest had been there, and, after having covered the child's head with the edge of his stole, had read verses from the Bible. The mother had suspended from the lintel of the door a waxen cross, blessed on Ascension Day; she had sprinkled with holy water the hinges of the imposts, and recited aloud the _Credo_, thrice in succession; she had put a handful of salt in a piece of linen, which afterwards she had knotted and hung around the neck of her dying son. The father _had done the seven nights_; for seven consecutive nights he had watched in the dark, before a lighted lantern covered with a pot, attentive to the slightest sound, ready to assail and seize the Ghoul. A single pin-prick would have sufficed to render it visible to human eyes. But the seven vigils had gone by without result. The child wasted away, and was consumed hour by hour, hopelessly. Finally, on the advice of a witch, the despairing father had killed a dog and put the body behind the door. This prevented the Ghoul entering before having counted all the hairs of the dead beast.

"Do you hear?" said George to Hippolyte.

They did not eat, their hearts oppressed with pity, struck with terror at the sudden apparition of these phantoms of an obscure and atrocious life, which environed the leisures of their useless love.

"May Jesus protect us from the Cunning One!" repeated Candia; and piously, with her open hand, she indicated the place where lay the living fruit. "May God protect your children, signora!"

Then she added:

"You're not eating this evening! You've no appetite. That innocent soul distresses your hearts. And your husband isn't eating, either. Look!"

Hippolyte said:

"Do many die--like that?"

"Oh!" went on Candia, "this is a bad district. The cursed brood swarms hereabouts. One is never safe. May Jesus protect us from the Cunning One!"

She repeated the conjuration, then added, pointing to a plate on the table:

"Do you see those fish? They are from the Trabocco; they were brought by Turchin."

And she lowered her voice.

"Do you want to know? For nearly a year, Turcum and all his family have been in the power of some witchcraft from which he has not yet been able to free himself."

"Who is Turchin?" asked George, listening breathlessly to the woman's words, fascinated by the mystery of these things. "The man from the Trabocco?"

And he recalled that earthy visage, almost chinless scarcely larger than a fist, with a long nose, prominent and pointed like the snout of a pike, between two small, glittering eyes.

"Yes, signor. Look over there. If your sight is good you can see him. To-night he is fishing by moonlight."

And Candia pointed out on the rocks the great fishing machine--that collection of trunks freed from their bark, planks and cables, whose strange whiteness resembled the colossal skeleton of some antediluvian amphibian. In the calm air was heard the creaking of the capstan. As the tide was low and the rocks were uncovered, the odor of the algae came up victorious from the beach, stronger and fresher than the effluvia from the fertile hill.

Hippolyte breathed in the intoxicating odor, already entirely occupied by that intense sensation which made her nostrils quiver and her eyes half-close. She murmured:

"Oh, how delicious! Don't you smell it, George?"

He, on his part, was very attentive to Candia's words, and saw in imagination the silent drama suspended over the sea. To the phantoms evoked by this simple woman in the serene night his soul, inclined to mystery and naturally superstitious, gave limitless life and tragic horror. For the first time he had a vast and confused vision of that race unknown to him, of all that miserable flesh, full of animal instincts and of bestial afflictions, bent and sweating on the glebe or buried in the depths of the cottages, beneath the perpetual menace of those dark powers. Amidst the sweet richness of the country which he had selected as the theatre of his love, he discovered a violent human agitation; and it was as if he had discovered a swarm of insects in the masses of magnificent hair impregnated with aroma. He felt the same shudder, already felt before this, at the contact with brutally revealed life: "recently, at the sight of his relatives, of his father, of his brother, of the poor, bigoted glutton." All at once, he felt as if he were no longer alone with his mistress amidst the benign growths, under the bark of which he had one day believed he had surprised a new emotion. He felt himself, on the contrary, environed and almost jostled by an unknown crowd, which, bearing in itself the same vitality which the trunks of trees possess, blind, tenacious, and unconquerable, adhered to him by the bond of the species and could immediately communicate to him its suffering, by a look, a gesture, a sigh, a sob, a groan, a cry.

"Ah! this district is bad," repeated Candia, shaking her head. "But the Messiah of Chapelles will come to purify the earth."[*]

{*} The episode of the Messiah of Chapelles is historical. Oreste de Amicis born in 1824 at Chapelles, played precisely the role assigned to him here by the novelist. He died in 1889. Antonio de Nino has collected and published curious documents concerning this personage.

"The Messiah?"

"Father," cried Candia, in the direction of the house, "when is the Messiah to be here?"

The old man appeared upon the threshold.

"One of these days," he replied.

And, turning toward the beach, which in the dim light cast by the half-moon disappeared to view in the direction of Ortona, he signified with a vague gesture the mystery of that new deliverer in whom the country people had placed their hope and faith.

"One of these days--very soon."

And the old man, who wanted to talk, approached the table, looked at his guests with an uncertain smile, and asked:

"Don't you know who it is?"

"Perhaps it is Semplice," said George in whose memory revived a distant and indistinct recollection of that Semplice di Sulmone who fell into an ecstasy, his eyes fixed on the sun.

"No, signor; Sembri is dead. The new Messiah is Oreste of Chapelles."

And the old man, in fervent and vividly colored language, related the new legend, such as it had been conceived by the rural population.

Oreste, being a capuchin monk, had known Semplice at Sulmone, and had learned from him the art of reading the future on the face of the rising sun. Then he began to travel all over the world: he had gone to Rome, and had spoken with the Pope; in another place he had spoken with the king. On his return to Chapelles, his birthplace, he had passed seven years in the cemetery in the company of skeletons, wearing a hair shirt, flagellating himself night and day, according to discipline. He had preached in the parish church, and had drawn tears and cries from the fishers. Then he had started once more on a pilgrimage to all the sanctuaries; he had remained thirty days on the mountain of Ancona; he had remained twelve days on Mount St. Bernard; he had climbed the highest peaks, struggling through the snow, his head bared. Returned again to Chapelles, he had recommenced to preach in his church. But, shortly afterwards, persecuted and driven away by his enemies, he had sought refuge in the Island of Corsica; and there he had made himself an apostle, resolved to traverse all Italy and to write the name of the Virgin in his blood on the gate of every city. As an apostle, he had returned to his native place, announcing that he had seen a star in the midst of a thicket of trees, and that from it he had received the Word. And, finally, by the inspiration of the Eternal Father, he had taken the great name of the New Messiah.

He was now making his pilgrimage through the rural districts dressed in a red tunic and a blue mantle, with long hair down to his shoulders, and his beard trimmed like Christ's. His apostles accompanied him--men who had abandoned the spade and plough to devote themselves to the triumph of the new faith. In Pantaleoni Donadio revived the spirit of Saint Matthew; in Antonio Secamiglio revived the spirit of Saint Peter; in Giuseppe Scurti, that of Maximin; in Maria Clara, that of Saint Elizabeth; and Vincent di Giambattista, who represented the archangel Saint Michael, was the messenger of the Messiah.

All these men had tilled the soil, mown the wheat, pruned the vines, pressed the olives; they had led the cattle to the fair and disputed over the prices; they had led a woman to the altar, and procreated children, and seen these children grow, flourish, die; in short, they had lived the ordinary life of country people amidst their equals. And now they passed, followers of the Messiah, considered as divine personages by the same people with whom, the previous week, they had argued concerning a measure of wheat. They passed transfigured,

## participating in the divinity of Oreste, invested with his grace.

Whether in the fields or in the house, they had heard _a voice_, they had all at once felt pure souls enter into their sinful flesh. The spirit of Saint John was in Giuseppe Coppa; that of Saint Zacharias, in Pascal Basilico. The women, also, had received the sign. A woman of Senegallia, married to a certain Augustinone, a tailor at Chapelles, in order to demonstrate to the Messiah the ardor of her faith, had wanted to renew the sacrifice of Abraham, by setting fire to a mattress on which slept her children. Other women had given other proofs.

And the Elect now wandered through the country with his escort of Apostles and of Marys. From the most distant places of the coast and mountain, multitudes flocked to see him pass. At daybreak, when he appeared at the door of the house in which he had lodged, he always saw a great crowd kneeling in expectation. Erect on the threshold, he delivered the Word, received confessions, administered communion with pieces of bread. For his nourishment, he preferred eggs prepared with elder flowers, or with the tips of wild asparagus; he also ate a mixture of honey, nuts, and almonds, which he called _manna_, to recall the manna of the desert.

His miracles could no longer be counted. By the simple virtue of the thumb, index and middle fingers, raised in the air, he delivered the possessed, cured the infirm, resurrected the dead. If anyone went to consult him, he did not even give him time to open his mouth, and immediately told him the names of his parents, explained his family affairs, and revealed to him the most obscure secrets. He also gave news of the souls of the dead; he indicated places where treasures were hidden; with certain scapularies in the form of a triangle, he delivered hearts from melancholies.

"It's Jesus come back to earth," concluded Colas di Sciampagne, with a voice fervent with faith. "He will pass near here, too. Didn't you see how high the wheat is? Have you not noticed how the olive-trees are flourishing? Didn't you notice how the vines are laden with grapes?"

Respectful of the old man's beliefs, George asked gravely:

"And where is he now?"

"He is at Piomba," replied the old man.

And he pointed to the distant shores on the other side of Ortono, evoking in his guest's mind the vision of that corner of the province of Teramo bathed by the sea--an almost mystic vision of fertile lands watered by little, sinuous rivers, where, beneath the endless shivering of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished sand.

After an interval of silence, Colas added:

"At Piomba, one word from him sufficed to stop the train on the railroad! My son saw it. Didn't Vito tell us that, Candia?"

Candia confirmed the old man's words, and gave the details of the wonderful event. The Messiah, attired in his red tunic, had advanced to meet the train, walking calmly between the two rails.

While speaking, Candia and the old man incessantly directed their gaze, as well as their gestures, towards the distance, as if the sacred person of the expected arrival were already visible to them.

"Listen!" interrupted Hippolyte, pulling the arm of George, who was absorbed in an inner view more and more vast and distinct. "Don't you hear something?"

She rose, crossed the court, went close to the parapet under the acacias. He followed her. They listened.

"It's a procession going on a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Casalbordino," said Candia.

In the peaceful moonlight a religious chant swelled its slow and monotonous rhythm, with an alternation of masculine and feminine voices at equal intervals. One of these half-choirs chanted a strophe in a low tone; the other half-choir chanted a refrain in a higher key, indefinitely prolonging the cadence. It was like the approach of a wave continuously rising and falling.

The procession approached with a rapidity which contrasted with the slowness of the rhythm. Already the first pilgrims appeared at the turn of the path, near the bridge of the Trabocco.

"Here they are," exclaimed Hippolyte, moved by the novelty of the scene and sounds. "Here they are. What a number of them!"

They advanced in a compact mass. And the opposition of the measure between their march and their chant was so strange that it gave them an almost fantastic appearance. It seemed as if a supernatural force impelled them on, unconscious, towards the goal, while the words emitted from their mouths remained suspended in the luminous air and continued to vibrate after their passage.

_Viva Maria!_ _Viva Maria!_

They passed with a heavy trampling, exhaling a sour, herdlike odor, so jammed one to the other that nothing emerged from their mass except the long sticks fashioned like a cross. The men marched in front, and the women, more numerous, behind, with the glittering of golden ornaments underneath their white bandelets.

_Viva Maria!_ _Viva her Creator!_

Near by, at every repetition, their chant had the vehemence of a cry; then it diminished in vigor, betraying fatigue, surmounted by a continual and unanimous effort, the initiative of which, in the two half-choirs, almost always started in a single and more powerful voice. And this voice dominated not only the others when it intoned the measure; but often, in the midst of the musical wave, it was maintained high and recognizable during the entire duration of the strophe or refrain, denoting a more imperious faith, a singular and dominating soul among that indistinct crowd.

George remarked it, and, very attentive, followed it as it waned in the distance, as long as his ear could recognize it. And that gave rise in him to an extraordinary sentiment of the mystic power which lay at the roots of the great indigenous race from which he himself had sprung.

The procession disappeared in the curve of the coast; then reappeared on the summit of the promontory, in the light; then disappeared again. And the chant, through the distant night, became veiled, softened; became so light that the slow and uniform modulation of the calm sea almost drowned it.

Seated on the parapet, her shoulders leaning against the trunk of an acacia, Hippolyte remained silent, motionless, not daring to disturb the religious meditations in which her lover seemed plunged.

What could the beams of the brightest sunlight reveal to George, that this simple chant in the night had not already revealed to him? All the scattered images, recent and ancient, those still vibrating with the keen sensation which had given birth to them and those buried in the deepest recesses of his memory, all these were bound together internally, and composed for him an ideal spectacle which carried him over the most vast and most august reality. His land and his race appeared to him transfigured, uplifted from time, with a legendary and formidable aspect, weighty with mysterious, eternal, and nameless things. A mountain, like unto an enormous primeval stump, reared up in the centre in the form of a breast, perpetually covered with snows; and the sloping sides, the promontories devoted to the olive-trees, were bathed there by an inconstant and sad sea, on which the sails bore the colors of mourning and flame. Roads wide as rivers, green with grass, and sown with bare rocks, with gigantic vestiges scattered here and there, descended from the heights to conduct to the plains the migrations of the herds. The rites of dead and forgotten religions survived; incomprehensible symbols of powers fallen since centuries subsisted there intact; the usages of primitive peoples, gone forever, persisted there, transmitted without change from generation to generation; the rich fashions, strange and useless, were retained there as witnesses of the nobility and the beauty of an anterior life. Long strings of horses laden with wheat-corn passed there; and the devotees rode on the loads, their heads crowned with ears of corn, with belts of paste, and deposited at the foot of a statue the cereal offerings. The young girls, with baskets of wheat on their heads, led along the roads a she-ass bearing a still larger basket on its crupper, and, with their offering, they went towards the altar, singing. The men and boys, crowned with roses and with dewy berries, climbed in their pilgrimage on a rock on which was impressed a footprint of Sampson. A white bullock, fattened for a year on a rich pasturage, covered by a vermilion _gualdrape_ and ridden by a child, advanced with pomp among the standards and candles; it knelt on the threshold of the temple, in the midst of the applause of the people; then, arrived at the centre of the nave, it voided its excrements, and the devotees drew from this steaming matter presages as to their agriculture. On feast days the fluvial populations bound their heads with bryony and, at night, they crossed the water with songs and music, bearing in their hands branches full of leaves. At daybreak, in the fields, the virgins washed their hands, feet, and faces in the fresh dew, to accomplish a vow. On the mountains, on the plains, the first sun of the spring was saluted by ancient hymns, by the clash of crashing metals, by cries and dances. Throughout the entire district the men, women, and children sought the first serpents emerged from their lethargy, seized them alive, and wound them around their necks and arms, so as to present themselves thus ornamented before their Saint, who would render them proof against venomous bites. On the inclines of the sun-bathed hills the young toilers, with their yoked oxen, in presence of their old men, rivalled one another as to who should trace the straightest furrow from the hill-top to the plain; and the judges awarded the prize to the conqueror, while the father, in tears, opened his arms to his well-deserving son. And so, in all the ceremonies, in all the pomps, in all the labors, in all the games, in the births, in the loves, in the marriages, funerals, everywhere was present and visible a georgic symbol, everywhere was represented and venerated the great producer Earth, from whose womb gushed forth the sources of all that was good and joyful. The women of the family gathered at the house of the newly married, bearing on their heads a basket of wheat-corn, on the wheat a loaf of bread, and on the loaf a flower; they entered one by one, and sprinkled a handful of that augural grain on the head of the happy wife. At the foot of a dying man's bed, when the death-agony was prolonged, two kinsmen deposited a ploughshare, which had the virtue of interrupting the horrors and of hastening death. The tool and the fruit thus assumed superior significance and power. A profound sentiment and continual desire for mystery gave to all these environing things an

## active soul, benign or malignant, of good or evil augury, that

## participated in every vicissitude of fortune, by a manifest or occult

## action. A vesicating leaf pressed on the bared arm revealed love or

indifference; the hearth-chain; thrown in the road exorcised the menacing hurricane; a mortar placed on the edge of the window recalled the lost pigeons; the swallowed heart of a sparrow communicated wisdom. Mystery intervened in every event, envelopes and bound every existence; and the supernatural life dominated, concealed, and absorbed the ordinary life by creating innumerable and indestructible phantoms, which peopled the fields, inhabited the houses, encumbered the heavens, troubled the eyes.

Mystery and rhythm, those two essential elements of every cult were scattered everywhere. Men and women continually expressed their soul in song, accompanied by song all their labors under roof and heaven, celebrated by song both life and death. Around the cradles and around the biers, music was shed, slow and persistent, very ancient, as ancient, perhaps, as the race whose profound sorrows they manifested. Sad, grave, fixed in immutable rhythm, they seemed the fragments of hymns that had belonged to the immemorial liturgies which had survived the destruction of some great primordial myth. They were few in number, but so dominating that the new songs could not displace them or diminish their hold. They were transmitted from generation to generation like an inner heritage, inherent in the corporeal substance; and each one, on awaking in this life, heard them resound in himself like an innate language to which the voice gave a visible form. Just as well as the mountains, the valleys, and the rivers; just as well as the customs, the vices, the virtues and beliefs, they termed a part of the structure of the country and of the race. They were as immortal as the glebe and as the blood.

Such was the country, such was the race, visited by this New Messiah, of whom the old peasant had related the life and miracles. Who was this man? An ascetic, ingenuous and innocent as Semplice, the worshipper of the sun? A cunning and covetous charlatan, who was trying to play upon the credulity of his devotees for his own profit? Who, really, was this man who, from the border of a small river, could gather, by his name alone, multitudes from both near and far, induce mothers to desert their children, awaken in the souls of the most ignorant the visions and the voices of another world?

And, once more, George evoked the figure of Oreste, attired in his red tunic, going up the little, sinuous river, where, beneath the endless shivering of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished sand.

"Who knows," he thought, "if this unexpected revelation will not be my salvation? In order that I should be myself again, in order that I should recognize my true essence, do I not need to put myself in immediate contact with the race from which I have sprung? In burying again the roots of my being in the natal soil, shall I not suck up a pure and revivifying sap, which will have the power to expel all that is false and heterogeneous in me, all that I have consciously and unconsciously received by a thousand contagions? Just now, I do not seek the truth; I seek only to recuperate my own substance, to replace in myself the characters of my race, so as to strengthen them and render them as intense as possible. In thus harmonizing my soul with the diffused soul, I shall recover that equilibrium which I lack. For the intellectual man, the secret of equilibrium is to know how to transport the instincts, the wants, the tendencies, and the fundamental sentiments of his race to a superior order."

Mystery and rhythm were scattered everywhere. Near by, on the foaming beach, the sea breathed at equal intervals; but during the pauses one heard, more and more feebly, the cadences of the waves, which touched the shore at constantly increasing periods. Reverberated, doubtless by the echo of some sonorous hollow, the chant of the pilgrims was heard once more, then died away. Over the Vasto d' Aimone the sky was lit up by frequent flashes of lightning, and in the calm moonlight the flashes appeared red. Hippolyte was dreaming, leaning against the trunk of a tree, her eyes watching the silent flashes.

She had not made a single movement. Her prolonged immobility in the same attitude was frequent enough; and, at times, it took on a cataleptic appearance which was almost alarming. She had then no longer the young and kind aspect which the plants and beasts knew so well, but the appearance of a taciturn and indomptable creature in whom were concentrated all the isolated, exclusive, and destructive virtues of the passion of love. The three divine elements of her beauty--her brow, her eyes, her mouth--had perhaps never attained such a degree of symbolic intensity to illustrate the principle of the eternal feminine fascination. It seemed that the serene night favored this sublimation of her form, that it liberated the true, ideal essence of her being, that it permitted her lover to know her entirely, not by the acuteness of view but by that of thought. The summer night, full of lunary brilliancy and of dreams, and of pale or invisible stars, and of the most melodious marine voices, seemed the natural field of that sovereign image. The same as the shadow grew at times out of entire proportion to the body that caused it, the same as against the infinity of that background, the fatality of love rendered the person of Hippolyte higher and more tragic for the spectators whose prescience became every instant more lucid and more terrible.

Was it not, in the same immobility, the same woman who, from the height of the loggia, had contemplated the single white sail on the dead waters? It was she; and now again, in spite of the night which despoiled her person of all brutal reality, the same hatred moved under the sentiment excited by her--that mortal hatred of the sexes which is at the bottom of love, and which, occult or openly, subsists at the bottom of every effect, from the first glance up to extreme disgust.

"So," he thought, "she is the Enemy. As long as she lives, as long as she can exercise her empire over me, she will prevent me from putting foot on the threshold I perceive. And how can I recover my substance, if a great portion of myself is in the hands of this woman? Vain is the aspiration towards the new world, towards a new life. As long as love endures, the axis of the world rests on a single being, and life is shut in by a narrow circle. To revive and conquer, I must free myself from love; I must deliver myself from the Enemy."

Once more he imagined her dead.

"Dead, she would become an object for thought, a pure ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence, she would enter into an integral and definite one, freed forever from her weak flesh, so frail and sensual. Destroy to possess! He who seeks the absolute in love has no other means."

Suddenly, Hippolyte started violently, as if an extraordinary shudder had shaken her. She said, alluding to the common superstition:

"Death has just passed."

And she smiled. But her lover, struck by the strange coincidence, could not repress an instinctive movement of stupor and fright.

"Could she have _felt_ my thought?"

The dog began to bark with sudden fury, and they both rose at the same time.

"Who is it?" said Hippolyte, uneasy.

The dog barked with renewed energy, still turned in the direction of the olive-groves. Candia and the old man came out of the house.

"What is it?" repeated Hippolyte, uneasy.

"Who can it be?" said the old man, gazing into the darkness.

The sound of a human voice came from the olive-trees, an imploring, sobbing voice. Then appeared an indistinct form, which Candia immediately recognized.

"Liberata!"

The mother carried on her head the cradle, covered with a dark cloth. She walked erect, almost rigid, without turning, without deviating from her path, absorbed in herself, mute like a sinister somnambulist, blindly impelled towards an unknown goal. And a man followed her bareheaded, beside himself, sobbing, imploring, calling her by her name, bending, beating his sides or burying his hands in his hair with gestures of atrocious despair. Grotesque and miserable, following the steps of the deaf woman, he howled, amidst his sobs:

"Liberata! Liberata! Listen! Listen! Come back to the house! Oh, my God, my God! where are you going? What are you going to do? Liberata! Listen! Listen! Oh, my God, my God!"

He implored to retain her, to stop her; but he did not touch her. He held his hands out to her with gestures frantic with pain; but he did not touch her, as if some mysterious cause prevented him, as if a charm had rendered that person intangible.

Candia neither went to meet her, nor did she bar her way. She simply asked the man:

"What's the matter? What's happened?"

The man, with a gesture, signified her dementia. And that recalled to the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "She is mad. She has become mute, signora. She has not spoken for three days."

"She is mad. She is mad."

Candia pointed to the covered cradle, asking again in a low voice:

"Is he dead?"

The man sobbed louder. And that recalled to the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "He's stopped crying. Poor creature! Is he asleep? He looks like a little corpse. He doesn't move. He's asleep, he's asleep.... He's not in pain now."

"Liberata!" cried Candia, with all the strength of her lungs, as if to rouse the impassive creature. "Liberata! Where are you going?"

But she did not move her, did not prevent her from going her way.

Then, all were silent, and watched.

The mother continued to advance, tall and erect, almost rigid, without turning, fixing before her her dilated and dry eyes, her mouth tightly closed, a mouth which seemed closed as by a seal, as if already vowed to perpetual silence and deprived of breath. On her head she balanced the cradle, changed into a coffin; and the lamentation of the man assumed the continuous rhythm of a monody.

The tragic couple crossed the court in this way, descended the path recently beaten by the steps of the pilgrims, and on which still floated the religious soul that the hymn had left there.

And the lovers, their hearts oppressed by pity and horror, followed with their eyes the figure of the funereal mother, who disappeared in the night, in the direction of the flashing lightning.

*