CHAPTER XXI.

DON MARIO AT HOME

The sunny April afternoon was warm and drowsy in the high-up, ancient rock-village of Santa Lucia which, perched upon the summit of a conical hill, commands a magnificent view of the high purple Apennines on the one hand, while on the other lies the broad Lake of Bolsena, like a mirror in the sun, and beyond the great fertile plain stretches away to the hazy horizon a white road running across it like a ribbon--the ancient Via Cassia, the road to Rome.

Long ago, when the world was young, the place was an important centre, and strongly fortified, as the grass-grown ruins of its cyclopean walls and the round massive tower of its castello still mutely show. Eretum was the name by which it was known to the Etruscans--the Romans called it Sulmo, and in the eleventh century, when the church with its high, square, inartistic tower was built, it was renamed Santa Lucia.

It is a village to which no traveller, save perhaps a stray motorist, ever comes, far removed from the railway, lying midway between the Mediterranean and the Apennines, fanned by the cool mountain winds in summer and fresh in all seasons by breezes from the sea.

Like many another dwindling and obscure village in Central Italy, it bears a bad reputation. Its people are not friendly towards the stranger. Indeed, over the surface of the steep road which comes up from the plain and over the hills to Siena the _contadini_ have placed six inches of gravel, rendering it impassable to motor-cars, and obliging motorists to hire bulls to draw them up the steep incline. Those who refuse to submit to blackmail are stoned, and many a motorist has returned to the Eternal City with his car badly damaged and his wind-screen smashed by the hostile villagers.

Hence, nowadays, motorists, who might bring prosperity to the little inn, the Gran’ Duca, give the place a wide berth.

Viewed from the plain it is most picturesque, the high, square church-tower rising above the cluster of red roofs and white houses. But on nearer acquaintance its ill-paved streets, where fowls run at will, are very narrow and tortuous; the ancient houses, high and prison-like, are huddled together as was the custom in ancient days, for protection against the Saracens. In the little piazza the grass grows over the stones, and there is everywhere signs of poverty and decay.

Mighty in the days of the Papacy, Santa Lucia has now shrunk to a mere miserable relic of its former self, a place wherein scarce any man knows anything but of the few men and women who make their dwelling there, sons of the soil who spring from its dust and return to it.

Yet they have earned for themselves a reputation of being a bad people. They were feared in the days of the Papacy; they gave shelter to the brigands of the Maremma until the last of them were killed ten years ago, and even to-day the carabineers never ascend there unless called, and then they go in force. The usual patrol, consisting of a pair, refuse to enter the village. More than one has been shot from a window and the assassin remained unknown. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Italian Automobile Club issue an urgent warning to motorists to avoid the place.

To this poverty-stricken village, fifteen years before, its hook-nosed parish priest, or _curato_, Don Mario Mellini, had been sent from Milan as chastisement for his too sceptical and inquiring mind. By long, weary years in that solitude, and among that brutal, uncouth people he had become chastened; the fire had died out of his soul and the light out of his eyes.

The small white presbytery with the iron-barred windows stood in the deserted little piazza where the lizards darted over the moss-grown stones. Next it was the church, the stucco of which was peeling from the old red bricks, while from the open door, disclosing a dark interior with candles burning in the gloom, there issued the sweet fragrance of incense.

In a bare room with stone floor, uncomfortable old rush-bottomed chairs, a tiny shrine before which a light burned in a red glass, and a crucifix upon the whitewashed wall--a room which opened upon a small courtyard shaded by trailing vines and adorned by bits of broken statuary--sat the thin old priest in rusty black cassock and black biretta, lazily smoking his long Tuscan cigar after luncheon.

Upon the table there still stood a big rush-covered _fiasca_ of good red Chianti and a couple of long glasses, while opposite, in a chair drawn near the open door, sat John Ambrose.

Don Mario had just blown out the candle by which he had lit his long thin cigar, as is the Italian habit, and as he did so glanced across at his visitor, who sat drowsy and dozing.

The old _curato_, or rather _piovano_ was his actual title, was tall and stately, but his clean-shaven face was thin and drawn for want of good food, his eyes were dark and brilliant, impenetrable wells of thought, his finely-cut lips smiled but rarely, and had upon them always an expression of bitterness, while his complexion was yellow, like old marble.

His was a cure of souls which covered many miles, but counted few persons.

Below those great ruined walls of Santa Lucia nearly all the land lay untilled, and within them the few wretched, half-starved people, fierce in their antagonism towards the rich and against all forms of law or government, dragged out a poverty-stricken existence, forgotten by all save the tax-collector.

And for fifteen years, with many short vacations, Don Mario had lived, a cultured scholar among the barbarians. In Milan he had preached in the great Duomo and been popular. In London, in Turin and Genoa his fame was known, and the women had crowded to hear his marvellous discourses, and even in St. Peter’s itself had his clear voice sounded. He would have been a great prelate, perhaps even a Cardinal, but, being a reformer, the Vatican would have none of him; therefore, like many another brilliant cleric, he had been crushed, broken and banished to that lonely village of bad repute.

Late one night, a fortnight before, the Signor Inglese had arrived at Santa Lucia in the dusty, ramshackle old _carrozzella_ in which Don Mario had driven twenty miles to meet him at the wayside station. He was a foreigner, and would have fared badly had he not been under the protection of the Signor Piovano. At first the low-browed, sunburnt men, some of whom were in sheepskins, scowled at him darkly as he passed, but already he had chatted with some of them, and they had therefore admitted him into their midst, even though they were not altogether satisfied because of his inordinate inquisitiveness and his constant poking about the old ruins of the castello and elsewhere.

Old Teresa, a bent, grey-haired old crone, the _donna di casa_, who looked after the priest’s domestic affairs, hobbled across the courtyard, arousing the Englishman from his drowsiness.

“This place, Santa Lucia, has a bad name,” the priest was remarking to his guest. “Its people have earned it; they are mostly Anarchists and law-breakers, some murderers who snap their fingers at the _carabinieri_! Why? Who has made them Anarchists but the adventurers who have lately been in power at Monte Citorio! They legislate for themselves, put money into their pockets, in the shape of fat commissions, and drive the _contadini_ to Anarchism, or else compel them to emigrate. Already poor Italy has lost her backbone, her youth and her energy. The condition of Santa Lucia is the condition of all our remote villages. Ah! if the English only knew our dear unfortunate Italy as she is, and would not look out upon her through the windows of the grand hotels, I fear the charm she is supposed to possess would soon be dispelled. Surely no peasantry in all Europe is so oppressed, so hopeless, so famished, so despairing as our once light-hearted people, the honest, easygoing men and women who, for the past ten years, have been driven to desperation and to Anarchism--nay, to death--by unfair taxation, the glorification of the signore, the lack of justice in the courts, and the bribery and corruption on every hand.”

“Pray be careful, Mario,” remarked his friend, glancing at the door. “Some official may overhear you. Surely such sentiments had better remain unuttered, for it would fare ill with you if your words were reported to Rome.”

“Probably it would, my dear Ambrose,” laughed the old priest. “But I only speak what I feel. Though this place is wretched, poverty-stricken, and barbaric, yet I have the welfare of my people at heart. They are not half as black as they are painted. Here, a word is quickly followed by a knife-thrust, and jealousy is often responsible for a secret stab in the dark. Quick, hot-headed, hot-tempered, they are swift to take offence or execute vendetta, and so strange are their religious convictions that I have actually known men pray before the wayside Madonna that the theft they were about to commit might be successful, and remain undiscovered!”

Ambrose smiled.

“And you, my dear Mario, are trying to teach them different!” he said. “A hard task, I should fancy, with such a people.”

Don Mario sighed sadly, then, tapping his big horn snuff-box, he opened it and took a pinch. His white collar was soiled, his cassock was greasy, and down its many-buttoned front were the marks of many of old Teresa’s soups, her stews and her minestras. Upon his chin was a three days’ growth of beard. He was passing from neglect into oblivion, for now that the Sacred College was against him, no one at the Vatican dared to speak in his favour.

Only on the previous night, as he sat chatting with his guest beneath the oil lamp, he had declared with a bitter laugh that he was as forgotten as a folio upon a library shelf, and that nowadays his only object in life was to gabble through the ritual twice a day in the big, gloomy church, heedless whether anybody were present or not.

Once he had had pious women of rank pleading at Rome for him, and magnates soliciting his preferment. Once he was fêted in the big cities, women hung upon his words, and crowds jostled in the great cathedrals to hear his remarkable and scholarly discourses.

But that was all of the past. Instead of becoming an archbishop he was merely Don Mario Mellini, _piovano_, or parish priest of Santa Lucia, an obscure rock-village.

He rose, and, opening the rickety old _persiennes_, let light and air into the bare room. Then he took from a drawer in a side table a small roll of ancient brown parchments--musty manuscripts of the Middle Ages, closely written in Latin with many contractions, and sat down to study them with the aid of a big lens.

As with many priests in Italy, his hobby was the study of palæography. From the old Franciscan monastery of Radicofani, across the valley, he obtained many of the documents on loan, and spent hours, weeks, nay, years, in poring over them, deciphering them, and from them gaining a knowledge of local history and customs.

It was his only pleasure--the only pastime allowed him--the only pursuit which caused him to forget the brilliant past.

Through the open door came the hum of the insects and the constant crick of the _cicale_, that harbinger of heat which the dweller in Italy knows so well. And as he unrolled one of the half faded parchment rolls and began to pore over it with his lens and slowly transcribe it from the abbreviated Latin into modern Italian, his guest sat regarding him in silence.

A secret existed between the pair--one of the strangest and most remarkable of the many secrets in this modern world of ours--a secret of which neither ever spoke. They always kept a mutual silence upon the point.