Ursula K Le Guin - Malafrena

When the Aisnar Post was on time, which it sometimes was, it came into Erreme, a junction point, at about four in the morning, some twenty hours out of Krasnoy. Passengers for Aisnar need only be roused by the changing of horses and then went on as before, briskly, over level roads; passengers for the Montayna had to get out in the cold darkness or colder dawn and change to the waiting Montayna Diligence. If they were new to the journey they looked at the outlandish vehicle and asked with misgiving, “Is this the Portacheyka coach?” If they had previously travelled in the southwest they merely sighed and made ready to endure. Four shaggy horses, short in the barrel and powerful of shoulder, were in the traces; a boy of nine or ten with a shapeless hat and a contemptuous eye mounted the wheeler; a tall dark man whose mouth seemed to have rusted shut, letting out only monosyllables in a flat unanswerable voice, got onto the box and said not “Get up!” but “Hoy!” to the horses, and off the Montayna Diligence would go, jouncing and jolting on a rutted road, its back to the sunrise, towards the mountains that rose blue and forbidding from the retreating night.

On the morning of August twentieth, four passengers made the change, stumbling through the half-light from the big coach to the smaller one amongst horses being led about, mailbags being transferred, and other obscure hurlyburly. “Is this the Portacheyka coach?” one of the four, a young woman, asked the driver with misgiving. “Aye,” he said flatly. Sangiusto handed her in and soon they were off, with a snarl from the coachman’s horn, a shout of “Hoy!” and a groaning protest from every joint of the vehicle, soon to be echoed silently in every joint of three of the passengers. The fourth one was under two years old, and light enough to find the jolts and lurches entertaining. The young mother and Sangiusto promptly went to sleep again; Itale and the baby waked. The baby played with the bundles piled round him and with bits of straw from the floor that had got within his reach; he gazed about him often with a thoughtful and unhappy air, but made no complaint. The air was misty grey and very cold. Itale sat huddled, his collar up round his ears and his hands in his pockets. Ever since St Lazar, where he had suffered from cold more than from any other misery, he felt cold easily, and dreaded it, but had no resistance to it. So he sat now huddled up trying to keep his teeth from chattering. To keep his mind off his discomfort he watched steadily out the narrow slit of front window, through which he could see the wheelboy’s hat and the sky and, when the road turned that way, a glimpse of peaks ahead. Day came fast. Now the round hills to either hand brightened with the morning sun, the clear light of a harvest day in the high country. The hay was long since in, the grain coming in; in fields far off on the hillsides Itale would see a line of mowers, the tiny glint of lifted sickles. When they passed through villages or past estates, small freeholds with the house set near the road, white and red hens cackled away from the wheels, dogs ran out and barked till the coach was out of earshot. Over the hills in the sun sometimes a hawk circled, lazy in the dry blue air. Ahead, seen only at the crests of the long climbs, the mountains rose up from behind the yellow hills.

Itale remembered how, years ago now, he had pulled out his watch to check the hour that he first lost sight of those mountains; nine-twenty of a September morning it had been, he recalled the hour though not the date. He had been on his way to Solariy. And from Solariy, in time, to Krasnoy. And to Aisnar, and to Esten, and to Rakava; to the dark cold room where he had been chained to the wall; to Roukh Square at dawn, and Ebroiy Street in the smoky evening. And now he was come round full circle and even so did not know where he was going, or where was any place he could with a clear heart call home. He felt for his watch, but did not have it; he thought he had lost it, then remembered that since it no longer ran he had left it in his room at Karantay’s flat. The police probably had it again by now. Let them have it, he thought.

Sangiusto sighed in his sleep. Though a farrier in Fontanasfaray had set and splinted his hand it continued to give him a great deal of pain, and he slept when he could. Propped up in the corner across from him the young mother also slept, her childish, round face curiously stern. Her child beside her had slid down uncomfortably among the bundles and was looking unhappier. Itale looked away from the child guiltily. It was going to cry, and it would be up to him, being awake, to do something about it. Sure enough the baby gave a series of gasps, preliminary to the howl. He looked very sad and helpless. He stared straight at Itale and gasped more loudly. Itale returned his look, uneasily, and said in a low tone, “Don’t do that. You’ll wake up your mother.” The eyes filled immediately with tears, the small face went all into folds, and the baby gave a piteous wail. “Damn!” Itale said, and reached across, picked the baby out of the nest of bundles, and set him on his knees. He was startled at the lightness and fragility of the burden. Really there was not much to a baby.

The baby gasped a couple of times, then settled down with a sigh like a tiny echo of Sangiusto’s, put his thumb in his mouth, and fell to playing with a button of Itale’s coat. What did the mother call him? Stasio. “Stasio’s father died,” she had said to someone in the Aisnar coach last night, “in June, the consumption it was.” Itale felt a touch on his hand, the faint brush of the child’s hand. Not the young man’s name nor “my husband,” but “Stasio’s father”; all the dead man’s life was that now, his fatherhood. Stasio discovered the top button of Itale’s waistcoat and fingered it delicately as a miser with a jewel; he sucked his thumb and slowly, with many starts and little movements, dropped his head down against Itale’s coat and fell asleep. He had been cold, Itale thought, he was warmer now, in the shelter of Itale’s arm, and could sleep. Itale no longer gazed ahead at the hills but down at his little, transitory charge. The child’s hair was brown, very fine. Itale touched it very lightly, thinking of his friend Egen Brunoy; Brunoy’s hair had been brown like this but coarse and dry. Itale tried to recall Brunoy’s face, but could not. He could rouse no reality of memory, only a dull regret and a dull shame. He thought of Isaber, and his mind as always flinched away. He thought of Frenin, of Karantay who was hurt or dead or jailed; but from that too his mind flinched away, to Brelavay, but the thought of Brelavay in the dark cold room, chained, was unendurable—his hands clenched, and he had to control his sudden tension lest he waken the sleeping child. But the list would be finished. Amadey, dead. And then last, and unexpected for he had never thought of her as a friend among his friends, Luisa: unkind, unforgiving and un-self-forgiving, loyal: and like the others, self-betrayed. And betrayed, like the others, by him. By his desires and her own, and their hope; by their love. Where he had most passionately set his heart and mind he had done injury; and the worst injury, the worst betrayal, was the knowledge of it. His arm grew cramped but he did not move lest he wake the child. At last he too dozed off.

In midmorning the coach stopped in a tiny village. Itale handed Stasio over to his mother with relief and, rubbing his numbed arm, climbed out of the coach with Sangiusto.

“Aye,” said the rusty coachman, not uncivilly, for his passenger had said the name of the village with the broad Montayna accent.

“We’re on the border,” Itale said, coming over to the roadside where his friend stood stretching and yawning. “Walk over to where that pig’s rooting and you’ll be in the Montayna.”

They walked in the bright sunlight down the rutted streets of Bara, and patted a dog that came up hungry and fawning. Neither had anything to say. They turned back to take some breakfast at the hovel that called itself, in faded letters and obscure picture on a signboard, the Traveller’s Rest. While the peasant girl left in charge of the place was fetching bread and cheese, Itale looked about the room, at its dirt floor, dirty walls, benches, table, and out the door onto the bright, desolate street where the mangy dog sunned himself and nothing else stirred. The child who brought them sour wine—she had only gaped when they asked for coffee—had a neck thickened by incipient goitre and a dull way of staring. He had forgotten that dull look, that country look.

He sat down at the table to drink his wine, and picked up a couple of printed sheets lying on it, left by travellers; one was the broadsheet of a song such as mountain peddlers sold or gave with their wares, the other a handbill which he started to read without recognition. “REVOLUTION,” it was headed. “On the twenty-seventh of July the citizens of Paris rose in the name of the French People to protest…” He read no further, though his eyes found the line at the foot of the sheet, “August 13, 1830. From the office of Novesma Verba.” Sangiusto had wandered over, chewing on a hunk of bread. Itale left the handbill lying, got up and went out. He stood there in the sunlight and looked at the hut opposite, with its clumsy door and oilpaper window, at the pig rooting in the street by a pump where the dust had turned to mud, at the white dog cringing, at the poor, short length of the village where the coach loomed on its high wheels taller than the huts beside it. Behind the huts and before them the street became again the highroad, the road he must follow, that had brought him, so far, here.

“The horses are in, I suppose we leave soon,” said Sangiusto, coming out beside him.

Itale turned away and set his hands against the wall of the Traveller’s Rest, hard, as if to push the sorry little house down. He felt the hot dry clay under his palms, the heat of the sun on his shoulders. Here I come to ground, he thought. I thought I must succeed, because my hopes were so high, and I have failed. I thought I must win, because my cause was just, and I have been defeated. It was all air, words, talk, lies: and the steel chain that brings you up short two steps from the wall.

For five years he had been sick for home, and now, forced to it as a fugitive, he must come to it knowing that he had no home.

Slowly and steadily the little horses pulled, the coach jolted on towards the mountains that now dominated all the lower sky. After the midday stop at Vermare they still had to climb two thousand feet up and some twelve miles on, winding now more south than west. The air grew yet more clear and dry, the mountains darker blue, the cricket-chant on the slopes deeper and more long drawn out; and the boy riding the wheel horse pulled his cap down over his eyes and sang half-dozing the song that seemed as monotonous and timeless as the cricket song,

Grey will fall the autumn rain,

Sleep, my love, and sleep thee well,

My heart has broken and will break again,
Sleep till thou wilt waken…

“He’s all right here.” Itale let the baby investigate his waistcoat, grateful for the distraction, seeing always the mountains rise around him in reproach.

The road wound in and out; the young mother looked down the plunge of a ravine to the right and shut her eyes.

“We’ll be out of this in a couple of miles. Then there’s a straight pull to the pass.”

They were going at less than a footpace now, the tough little horses straining, the wheelboy wide awake, the driver’s whip crackling lightly over the horses’ necks.

The coach righted itself and settled back into the ruts, the little horses pulled sturdily. Declining, the sun shone to their right, and the long shadow of Sinviya Mountain stretched up the forested slope of San Givan like a barrier before them dividing the mountain valley from the open, golden weather of the hills.

“This is like my own country,” Sangiusto said. His voice was soft. “Yet there is no one thing the same.” After a while he said, “So I come here with you after all.”

Itale nodded, dodging the memory of Easter in Aisnar; but it would not be dodged, and he said at last, “I wish I’d thrown it over then. Gone home. Before I went too far to be able to come back.”

Sangiusto glanced at him calmly and keenly. After a time he said, “Five or six months is not long enough. One comes back, Itale.”

“I was a fool before I—before that. Now I’m wise, now I know what a fool I was, right? But what use is wisdom, what good is it, when the price of it is hope?”

Itale caught himself, was ashamed, and was silent. He would not talk again. The habit of protest was strong, well-nourished; but it was time to go back to the older habit, silence.

Stasio had wakened whimpering among his bundles again, and Itale picked him up, set him on his knee, let him play with the endlessly wondrous waistcoat buttons, while sunlit and shadowed slopes closed in on the road and the horses quickened their pace. The road levelled out, Portacheyka lay before them in the pass, greeted by the wheelboy’s long whistle, Portacheyka, peaked roofs, streets of slate stairs twining between crowded houses, the monastery of Sinviya frowning over it white on the dark mountain shoulder, the Golden Lion where as a child Itale had watched the high coaches roll in, dusty, come from remote and unimaginable lands.

“Where to now?” asked Sangiusto when they were standing on the cobbled street, since Itale, looking bewildered, made no more.

“Come on, this way,” Itale said, and set off abruptly, leading Sangiusto down a long slate stair, across a little street, through a back alley, and up another set of stairs to a garden gate. There he stopped.

“Itale,” said Sangiusto, who had also been making decisions, “this is your family, and you are unexpected. I shall put up at the inn, and meet you when it’s convenient.”

Itale looked at him with the same angry bewilderment; then he laughed. “You can’t,” he said, “we haven’t got a krune left. Come on.” He pushed open the gate, and Sangiusto reluctantly followed him up the path between phlox and pansies to the door; to the little servant girl who went rigid with dismay at the sight of strangers, the stiff, neat, high-windowed parlor, the grey-haired woman who came in looking puzzled, and then looked frightened, and putting her hands to her throat whispered, “Itale—Oh mercy of heaven, Itale!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Itale said as she embraced him. “There was no way to let you know. I’m sorry—”

“You’re so thin,” she whispered, and then releasing him, “It’s all right, my dear, I was startled but I don’t faint, you know,” and already she was turning to Sangiusto to welcome him with the fine courtesy and profound distrustfulness of the Montayna; taking his hand and repeating his name as Itale introduced them; inviting them both to sit down; ascertaining that they were tired, hungry, dirty, and looking after their needs. Not a word came from her that could distress Itale, after the first cry. Only she asked in her blunt way, when he had given a sketchy explanation of why he had arrived so suddenly, “Then how long will you stay?”

“I don’t know.” His tone cut her off and she asked nothing more about his plans; nor did Emanuel, at first, when he came home to find the little maid in a flurry, his wife preternaturally calm and ironical, and his bedroom, bath, razors and clean shirts sacrificed to the unknown foreigner and unexpected nephew. “When did you leave Krasnoy?” was his first question.

“What’s going on? The Post didn’t come last week, still no papers on the Diligence—”

“Why not?” Emanuel exploded, and a summary of the days of the insurrection only enraged him—“You mean that never a word of all this reached us until you came here? Good God! We might have been a kingdom for a week and never known it!”

“But we’re only a grand-duchy,” Itale said, “so it doesn’t matter. Look here, uncle, I want to ask you—I want to go on to the house, to see mother. But I can’t—I don’t know what my status is, I’ve been proscribed from Krasnoy but it may go farther—I don’t want—”

“I came here because I had nowhere else to go,” Itale said, going dead white, “but if there are going to be any conditions, any accusations, I’ll go on, now, across the border.”

Sangiusto, coming in from the other room, stopped in the doorway, a towel around his bare neck. “Oimè!” he said to himself, and withdrew. The uncle and nephew stood face to face. “You damned, arrogant fool,” Emanuel said, “who said anything about conditions and accusations? What I’m talking about is that Guide is ill and needs a bit of protection from shocks.”

“Since November. Why did you think it was I that came to the Sovena, not he or Eleonora?”

“He told me to say as little as possible about it to you. I obeyed him. I’ve always done what Guide says. Maybe I was wrong, I don’t know. He was ill again about a month ago. I wanted to write you. They both said not to.”

Itale sat down on the bed. He was still very white, and there was a forced rigidity in the way he held his shoulders and arms that made Emanuel realise at last that he was very near breakingpoint. “None,” he said.

“He’s all right, Itale. No worse than he was, now. It’s the same heart trouble, it can go along for years like this, you know. I didn’t mean to alarm you. But you cannot walk in on him in anger—”

“Emanuel,” said Perneta outside the bedroom door, “if you’ll ride on out to the lake and tell Guide and Eleonora we’re coming, I’ll give Itale and his friend a little supper and put Allegra in the gig and we’ll come along in an hour or so.”

“Right,” Emanuel said. He turned back to Itale, wanting to say something more, to reassure him; but he did not know what to say. The relation between Guide and Itale, the bond of absolute loyalty strained impossibly by competitive pride, the understanding and hostility, the vulnerability of each to the other, all that was beyond Emanuel now as always. Whenever he came close to that passionate and essential relationship in either the son or the father he burned his fingers in the fire of it, fumbled, lost his temper, guessed wrong. And yet it was always he who had to bring the news to Guide, he thought as he saddled his horse and set off through lengthening shadows towards the lake; always he who was the intermediary. Thirty months ago he had been driven down here to tell Guide that the boy had been arrested and jailed, and had gone about it all wrong, jabbed his clumsy fingers into the wound. This time he had as badly misunderstood Itale, when all the young man was doing was clinging desperately to the last fragments of pride. It was always pride with these two; their strength and patience, their violence and vulnerability, all came down to pride, to the resistance of the will to the insults and indifference of time. Resistance, never acceptance. They gave with open hands, but they had never learned to receive. Guide’s somber temper had turned ardent in the son, but the root of it still was pride and pain. The world is a hard place for the strong, Emanuel thought; it gives no quarter; no man ever defied evil and got off lightly.

He hoped to find Guide alone, but saw him with Laura in the garden behind the house. To judge by their gestures they were discussing replantings, and they did not see him coming down the road till he was at the fence. Then Laura looked round and came alive. “There’s uncle! Was there a letter?”

“Oh aye,” he said, smiling. It would have been so easy to tell Laura his news, why was it so hard to tell Guide? “Perneta’s coming along behind me. Will you give us dinner?”

“It’s a message rather than a letter. Itale wants to know if he can come here, Guide.”

“In Portacheyka. At the house. Came in on the Diligence this afternoon. With another man.”

“He has nowhere else to go. He came with the clothes on his back. There was a revolution in Krasnoy, the Assembly’s been dissolved, there was fighting for two days, he’s under ban and doesn’t know how far it extends—You must let him come without questioning him, without conditions, Guide, he’s lost everything he was working for—”

“Conditions?” Guide said. “Tell your mother,” he said to Laura. “I’ll go to Portacheyka.” He was out of the gate and coming round past Emanuel to the stables as he spoke.

“They’re probably on the way already,” Emanuel said, and seeing there was no stopping Guide, “Here, then, take the horse, he’s fresh.” He dismounted, Guide swung up and was off. Laura, looking after her father, trembled all over and laughed.

“How strange it is. You riding up there while we were standing here talking about the hollies. And the house, and the road. As if it had happened before. I was standing here and you rode up to tell us he was coming. As if there was only one moment, and this was it.”

“Indoors.” They walked, she on this side of the picket fence and he on that, back to the gate. Laura went lightly, hurrying, but before going in she looked back once at the garden in the clear light, the roses, the empty paths.

When they came, she was confused. She had forgotten Emanuel had said there was a stranger with Itale. She could not tell which was her brother as the gig came out from under the oaks in the late dusk. She went forward with her mother and uncle; she felt herself moving over the short grass, in the warm twilight air. A tall man jumped down from the gig and came to them, that was his blue coat, it was Itale, when she held him in her arms he was as thin as a child, but his face was a man’s face now; was this her brother? Who was the other man, with his hand tied up in a bandage, holding back from them? “Welcome home,” she said to him, and after a moment he smiled, someone else laughed. All at once she was happy, caught the moment passing never to return, was herself and the waiting was over, they were home. “Come in, come into the house,” she urged them, the father, brother, stranger.

Late in a September afternoon, coming past the orchards of Valtorsa, where the golden light shone broken by transparent walls of shadow that stretched eastward from each row of trees, Itale saw his sister come towards him on the road. “Letter,” she called, “Uncle brought it,” and then, when they met, “Are the grapes ready to pick?”

“We’ll pick the Oriya vines tomorrow.” As they walked side by side he opened the letter and read it, frowning against the level sunlight. It was dated from Solariy.

“Dear Itale: The old count writes that you are home. So am I. I was released on the 20th, got as far as Kolonnarmana, then sent back with an escort; released again after three interrogations, got across the street, was brought back and interrogated twice more. Have been home a week now but can’t say I count on it. K’s fiancée wrote; he had a severe concussion of the brain but is recovering well, and they are to be married in October. I expect you know that young V was not so lucky. Or in the end he may prove to have been luckier, who knows. I have called upon GF. He wears a corset, satin waistcoat, gold watch-chain, married, infant son, did not invite me to return. Do you have any word of Carlo? No one has heard from him since the party and he is on my mind. I am going to go on and study for the Bar examinations since journalism, I find, does not pay. Let me hear from you. Believe me yours in constant affection, Tomas.”

“He wrote us several times when you were in prison. It was he that wrote us you had been arrested. It must have been hard for him, he never had good news for us; but he sounded so kind.”

“Here, read it.” He had to explain the initials to her. “K, that’s Karantay, you know, the novelist. He was hurt in Palazay Street when they fought the guards. V is Vernoy. A student. He was killed. Givan Frenin, he was our college friend. He went home three years ago, he’s a merchant in Solariy now. They proscribed him anyhow. Poor Brelavay! he must feel lonely there!”

“Oh, Sangiusto. His English letters to the paper were signed Carlo Franceschi. Must be a middle name.”

He nodded. He glanced at her fine, rather pale face, her brown hair pulled back in a loose knot. She walked along stride for stride with him. In the four weeks he had been home he had taken great comfort from her presence, yet he had seldom spoken much with her about any but immediate concerns, Guide’s health, farm matters and accounts. She had learned to keep the books for her father, but when Itale had complimented her on the order and clarity of the accounts she had sighed and said, “I hate them. I do it because it’s all he’ll let me do. I keep them neat because I get lost at once if they’re not. I hate figures. I’d rather clean the stables, if I could.” Then she had laughed and made light of the matter. The great candor of her girlhood had become, in the woman, infinite reserve. Walking now beside her, brother and sister, Itale realised that he knew nothing of her life.

“I try to imagine,” she said, “what you did, down there—what your life was. The revolution—”

“The insurrection. You say of the student, ‘He was killed.’ I know how Mr Sangiusto’s hand was hurt, by a soldier with a gun, hitting him. You spoke once about the fire. I know, in a way, what you did before that, before the prison; I read your paper. But I have never been able to understand, to imagine your life there. As if I lived in another world.”

“Because there is nothing left of that life. It’s finished—gone, scattered. Overnight. There never was anything to it.”

“All that has given my life any meaning for five years has been my belief that you were free—that you were working for freedom, doing what I couldn’t do, for me—even when you were in jail—then most of all, Itale!”

He stopped, staggered by the passionate and unexpected reproach; their eyes met for a moment. He saw that she knew what he could not say directly, that he had failed, that he was utterly defeated: that she knew it and yet it was not of overwhelming importance to her, she did not see him as a failure or a fool. If she had she would not have reproached him.

“But you must not trust me, Laura!” he said desperately, all pretense of irony abandoned. “When I used to talk about freedom, I didn’t know what prison was. I talked about the good but I—I didn’t know evil—I am responsible for all the evil I saw, for the—For the deaths—There is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is be silent, not to say what I’m saying now. Let me be silent, I don’t want to do more harm!”

They walked on, coming in sight of the orchards above the Sorde house, the forested slopes above those.

“I don’t know. It’s not likely any time soon. In any case, I’m more use here, while father’s ill.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course. But he…Some day he would fall ill; someday he will die; that was always true.”

“I know,” she said, and he saw to his wonder that she was smiling. “What I wanted to say was that you should not worry about that—about the estate. When the time comes to go. I’m nothing like Piera, but at least I can keep it going. I wanted you to be able to count on that.”

“I just got home,” he said, “for God’s sake, are you trying to send me away again?”

“I am trying to make you see that no matter what the stupid police say you are a free man,” she said, fierce. “Am I not allowed to work for freedom? You are my freedom, Itale.”

When they came into the house Guide called him into the library to discuss the grape harvest with him. Since the recurrence of his ailment Guide had grudgingly admitted that everybody else including the doctor had been right and he must go easy if he wanted to go on. Methodically, then, he rested at certain times, gave up certain labors and pursuits. He was visibly changed, his hair entirely grey, his hands and face less tanned, his spare figure looking both taller and frailer. Itale, entering the study, was struck by his resemblance to Laura, even in the tone of his voice.

Laconic and amicable, they discussed the condition of the vines and the probable pace and order of the grape harvest if the temperate weather continued.

“If it gets hot,” Guide said, bringing into their mutual view the frantic and relentless labor entailed by hot weather during grape harvest, and Itale’s relative inexperience, perhaps also his not yet fully recovered health “There’s Bron, though.”

Itale smiled. He had been waiting for his father to admit that he approved of Sangiusto. “He’s all right with orchards” was the admission.

He spoke with an indifferent bluntness that was new in him, though not in Guide.

Guide was much offended by the proposal, but he was caught. He could not pretend that he was able to carry on the work alone any longer if Itale left, nor could he admit that the idea of Itale’s going, implied in the suggestion, frightened him. He sat there on his couch under the windows, trying to think of an argument to defeat Itale’s suggestion; he scowled; but little by little, and with singular conviction, he understood that there was no argument. If he had had power of veto he would not even have sought an argument. He was not in control. Some time in these past few weeks he had, without even noticing it, abdicated; and his son, as unknowingly, had come into his inheritance.

Turning from the bookshelves to look at him Itale caught in his face a shadow of pleasure, and did not understand. He had expected a battle on this subject. It alarmed him that Guide should give in easily and, giving in, smile. “Maybe I’m thinking ahead too far—”

“Maybe,” Guide said. “There’s Payssy. Might do better than Karel. Go on, now, I’m supposed to lie here till suppertime.”

Itale bowed and went out, and Guide lay back on the couch, obeying doctor’s orders. He felt a little empty, lightened; the way a woman might feel after childbirth, he thought: light, quiet, tired. A queer thing to be comparing himself to a woman, and a woman after childbirth. But there was Eleonora’s face, the morning of Itale’s birth: her smile then, the center of his life. Nothing of his own.

There was a great red sunset over the lake, the weather was turning; the next day was hot, the next hotter.

Itale was up at four, at the vineyards and the winery all day till dark. He saw nothing at all in the world beyond the vines, the grapes, the boxes, baskets, carts and wagons loaded with the grapes, the pressing tubs in a stone courtyard stained and reeking with must, the brief dark coolness of the storage cellars dug into the hillside, the swing of the sun across the hot September sky. Then that work was done; and other harvests from the fields and orchards were coming in. Silent and absorbed, irascible when pushed past the limit of his strength, otherwise patient, Itale got on with the work and never raised his eyes from it to look back or ahead. Most of his waking hours were spent outdoors, in the fields and orchards, and more of his time in the farm-buildings than in the house itself; he came in only to eat and sleep. When the work let up he went hunting several times with Bron’s grandson Payssy and Berke Gavrey, with whom he had struck up a taciturn kind of friendship, or with Sangiusto. He went in to Portacheyka as seldom as possible, and paid no calls. When Rodenne or the Sorentays or other neighbors came to call he often stood in for Guide, receiving them with stiff courtesy, seeing to it that hospitality was prompt and unlimited, and then sitting silent, unparticipating, while they talked.

His mother watched him, and said nothing. So she had watched Guide for thirty years. Often at her housework or at night, lying awake in autumn darkness, she thought of the merry child, the awkward, gallant boy, and the man she had seen him—barely seen him—becoming. It had not been this man; this somber, restless, silent man, this second Guide—yet not like Guide as she had first known him, for Guide as a young man had rejoiced in his work, and had suffered no defeat. In Eleonora’s heart those October nights was the same bitter resentment against the world that offers so vast a chance to the young spirit and, when it comes to the point, gives so narrow a lot; the same scorn and resentment that her daughter had felt, that Piera had felt, and that she recognised in them, but with little hope for them and none for herself.

Sangiusto worked along with Itale, made himself useful and pleasant in the house, went sailing in Falkone. Karantay’s fiancée had sent a necessarily cryptic warning: the government had Sangiusto’s name and description and were watching for him at the borders as a professional revolutionary. At this Sangiusto, as if accepting a challenge, announced that he would walk out, over the mountains, past Val Altesma, where there were no border stations. “What for?” Itale said. “Where to?”

“Next spring,” Sangiusto said. And he stayed; so easy, steady, and cheerful a man that Itale, in his present mood, took him quite for granted, never questioning the character of their congeniality, scarcely remembering its origins. He forgot even that before their meeting lay a life of which he knew nothing. One day in late October, the first day of rain, he came by the pear orchards to pick up Sangiusto and could not find him. He tethered his horse and the one he had led, and hunted the orchard aisles for twenty minutes before he came on his friend standing with a peculiar expression under a tree. Off down an alley a garnet-red skirt and white blouse twinkled, vanished. The rain pattered softly, multitudinously, on leaf and grass. “I’ve been calling,” he accused, wet and annoyed.

“Yes. I heard.” Sangiusto blinked, pushed off from the tree, came along beside him.

Itale strode along through the wet grass for a while. “She’s barely fifteen.”

They mounted their horses, rode in silence. Suddenly Sangiusto began to laugh, and Itale flushed red.

“I know, I know. But someone must talk to pretty girls, look at them, neh? What are they pretty for?”

“Then why are you so angry?” Sangiusto said in a slightly different tone. “Angry with me? What do you want of me? You want dignity, abstinence, romantic passion? I have had all that. I would rather kiss pretty girls in an orchard. I am ten years older than you, sad to say. I have had the romantic passion. I was in love, betrothed to a young lady. That was in 1819. Oh, God, I was in love, I wrote poetry, I got thin. So also I got sent to prison and got still more thin, and she married, in Milan, she married an Austrian officer. I learnt it when I came out of prison. So. So there I am. Austria has taken my children from me before they were ever born…So I cross the mountains and become nobody, always in exile. But I have nothing more to do with that, ever again, with love, with young ladies. But if I meet Annina and she smiles? Gesumaria, Itale, what do you want?”

Itale stammered, “Sorry, Francesco,” and was red, and silent. But as his shame began to cool he wondered a little at the strength, the circumstantiality, of Sangiusto’s disclaimer.

The Italian meantime, placid as ever, made his young horse prance, lifted his face to the rain falling from the ragged, drifting clouds, and hummed; he burst out in a strong tenor, “Un soave non so che…Ha! that pig Rossini! You know he wrote an oratorio for Metternich, The Holy Alliance? Musicians are idiots, blessed idiots, God has exempted them from reason. Look there, your count has already picked his pippin apples. Maybe we start? That little countess is very wise with her orchards.”

Itale made no answer. They trotted along through the rain, towards the house on the shore.

Before he saw the Valtorskars on his second night home he had been nervous, but as soon as he saw them his apprehension and excitement had vanished. He had greeted Count Orlant with affection, grieved to see how the robust man had aged. Beside him was Piera, hardly changed, he thought, though she must be twenty-one or twenty-two now: still small, a round girlish face, a timid girlish manner, a smile and a few polite words. The vividness and vitality of her childhood were gone, leached away no doubt by this lonely life, replaced by no richer being, no opulence of womanhood. She was sterile, faded before flower. He saw this with a kind of luxuriation in the bitterness of being once again confirmed in the conviction that had come upon him first clearly in the wayside inn at Bara: the conviction that all he had worked for, that his whole understanding of freedom, had been delusion—moonshine, verbiage. Estenskar had seen it. This girl, in her way, had seen it. The Jew Moyshe knew it; and the girl in Bara, the girl with dull eyes and thick, chapped, dirty hands, knew nothing but her own wants which would never be filled and knew it better than them all: There is no freedom.

Laura was in the garden behind the house, in a tentlike cape and shapeless hat, pruning the roses her grandfather had planted. The year’s last flowering was over, and the leaves looked rusty on the gnarled, rainwet stocks. She looked round as the two horsemen came down the road, and held up her pruning-shears in salute.

“Ah, there—” said Sangiusto unexpectedly, made a sweeping gesture, and said nothing else.

Laura came to the garden fence. “Drowned rats,” she said. “You prune back your roses too early!”

Itale consciously held back his horse and watched them, the tall woman smiling, her fine, thin hands wet with rain, and the man handsome and vigorous on his horse, asking her something about mandevilia suaveolens.

“Yes, by the front walk,” she said. “The only one in the valley. Grandfather planted it.”

“I’ll take him,” Itale said. Sangiusto gave Itale the reins, vaulted the fence, and went off with Laura through the wet autumnal garden.

“Nothing more to do with that ever again, eh?” thought Itale, leading the grey horse to the stables, and his heart was confused between tenderness and rancor.

October ended full of rain and mist, with a few last golden evenings; November came in cold; in midmonth Itale waking one morning saw from his window the Hunter whitened with snow against a dark grey sky. Work slackened, the farm was settling into its winter patience. Though the roads were foul there was much calling and visiting among the farms and households of Val Malafrena, every afternoon there were people in the front room, women’s voices, Eva trotting past with a tray of cakes and strawberry wine and cherry brandy, or else Kass was bringing out the gig to drive Eleonora and Laura to the Pannes’ or the Sorentays’. In the cold weather Guide seldom went out. He worked at small jobs, the kind of harness-mending, tool-sharpening, furniture-repairing that he had used to leave to servants or get done in a half hour before breakfast; he took his rest on the couch in the library dutifully, and then came to the front room, if there were no visitors, to sit down and work his way slowly and thoughtfully, with long pauses, through Virgil. His copy of the Aeneid had been his own in school, then Itale’s, and was full of schoolboy glosses. He held it off on his knees to read, being very farsighted. It was strange to Itale, who had never seen him read, to see him sit there perfectly still, the book a yard from his eyes, so that it appeared that he did not so much read as absorb by long silent watching the story in the scarred and scribbled book, the tenderness, heroism, and pain. If visitors came he greeted them but often returned to his solitude in the library; if it was Eleonora, Laura, Piera, he stayed with them. And Itale too, when he came in at dusk and took off his sheepskin coat, was content to be in the company of his family; then, not before. He was at the mercy of a driving restlessness, the same strained, unreasoning energy that had taken him back from the Sovena to Krasnoy, through the sixty hours of the August insurrection, on out of Krasnoy, to Bara, to Malafrena, through the vintage, through the autumn. Now that it was winter and there was less to do he made work, or walked, or hunted. Only when he was physically worn out could he turn home and be content to sit down by the fire, talk with Guide about the work, with Sangiusto about events in Greece and Belgium; with the women he found little to say.

He came in one night early in December. Rain had followed snow, the ground was boggy, the air heavy with a soft, chill mist. Despite his tireless activity he had found that he still got cold easily and suffered a good deal from it: as if he carried St Lazar with him in the marrow of his bones. He was very cold this evening, and headed for the hearth directly. It was a Saturday; Emanuel and Perneta were there, Count Orlant and Piera; even Auntie, now one hundred years old, was ensconced in a straight chair with a ball of red wool in her lap. Talking, they had let the night come in. It was dark except for the firelight. Sangiusto had been telling them something about his years in England—he was as good as any storybook to this audience—and Count Orlant summed up the subject: “A fine, enterprising race, the English. They’ve done wonders in astronomy.”

Guide looked up as his son came by his chair in the firelit dusk of the room. “You’re here too, Itale?” he said.

The dark room, four candles, the room where death was, and his father’s voice.

“I’m here.” He sat down on the hearthseat near Guide’s chair, and put out his hands to the fire, repressing a tremor, feeling he would never get warm.

“Itale dear,” said his mother in serene greeting. “Are you starved? Eva’s having trouble with the chicken. Old George. He’s taking hours and all he’s fit for is soup in the first place. And the mutton’s drying up. But there really is no use even trying to argue with Eva any longer, after all she’s run that kitchen thirty years, we must all just get old and cross together. Although it’s rather hard on you young ones. But your teeth are better…”

Piera too was silent, across the hearth from him. She spoke little when the families were together. Itale had seen her and Laura talking away a whole afternoon here by the hearth or down on the slope by the boat house, but she seemed to talk only to Laura. He glanced at her, thinking how Sangiusto had more than once remarked on her beauty. Sangiusto was rather given to finding women beautiful, but did he himself in this case, for some reason, merely persuade himself that she was plain? Her features certainly were good, her figure unexceptionable. But she was plain. No wonder, with her life spent between Malafrena and Portacheyka, two years in a convent school in Aisnar, a broken engagement to a widower in his forties, an aging household, filling up her time by trying to run the estate—no wonder she was dry and colorless, a withered branch. Life had defeated her before she had got fairly started. She was weak, and had been given no weapons with which to delay the inevitable, to fight back a while before she lost the hopeless struggle. It was not her fault.

The hot, bright fire had begun to sting his face pleasantly and he felt the heat of it through his shirt. She had put up a hand to screen her face from it. She looked at him above that delicate, red-lit hand. “We haven’t seen you for several days,” he said, wanting to be kind.

“No,” she said, “the weather’s been so bad. I have a book for you, I finally remembered to bring it along.”

“You’ve probably forgotten. It was a long time ago you lent it to me, five years ago. It’s called The New Life.”

Emanuel was watching the two of them, profiled against the fire. Itale looked floored. Evidently Piera had got tired of being overlooked. She would know how to make herself felt, once she put her mind to it; she had become formidable in her competence. Berke Gavrey, her obedient lieutenant, had told Emanuel that she had doubled the cash income of Valtorsa in two years, and was laying out the profit on improvements. Emanuel had seen her at estate business in Portacheyka, and had acted as her lawyer or legal adviser several times; he had found her both prudent and decisive, an excellent client, though he would have been happier with her qualities if they belonged to a young man. “She’s extremely strong-willed,” he had said to Perneta, who had replied, “And you would prefer her to be weak-minded?”—unfairly, he thought. But if she could shake Itale out of his silence, more power to her. To do that would require strength, and wits. It was easy to floor Itale, he was never on guard; but it was not easy to touch, or hold, or change him.

“Here ends the new life. With affection, from Piera Valtorskar. Would that do? It’s right over there in my sewing bag on the chest.”

“I won’t take it back. Burn it if you like!” Itale got up, strode off to the south windows, and stood there with his back to them all.

Piera sat by the fire; her face half in shadow, half lit red by the flames, had turned to watch Itale. She did not move. Her hands lay clasped together in her lap.

Dinner was announced at last. As Itale went in to the dining room with Perneta he watched his sister and Sangiusto, ahead of him. Laura and Francesco!—sonnets to fair ladies, it was too much. He had been a fool to bring the Italian here, and Sangiusto, a homeless, aimless man, should know better than to play at Petrarch while hiding from the Imperial police. What did he or Laura think could come of it? They were sleep-walking, play-acting. Yesterday Sangiusto had said to him, “I wish all my money was not bound up in our land, in the Piedmont, I think I could be a good farmer here,—fifty acres of orchard like that one—” Then he had laughed, and let his lively horse out, and cantered on ahead of Itale, singing, “Un soave non so che…”

At table, serious now, he said across the mutton, “Itale, your sister has explained Karantay’s letter, perhaps.”

A second letter from Karantay had come that week, containing some news of mutual friends and recent events, and, towards the end, in the midst of a sentence about something else, a curious clause: “Now that I am no longer a writer of fiction.” They had discussed it at some length, as all letters, all outside news, always get discussed in winter in the Montayna, and had speculated on the implications of that clause, arriving at no explanation.

“I wondered,” Laura said, “if he means that he hasn’t recovered from his injury—that he’s not well enough to write. It seems his marriage has been put off. And you said, when his first letter came, how much his handwriting had changed.”

“I thought he meant—” Itale began, and stopped. Laura’s theory was sickeningly plausible. “It can’t be that,” he said.

“He can get better,” Sangiusto said, calm as always, hopeful as always, but revealing for once, unknowing, perhaps to Itale’s eyes only, the foundation of his hopefulness and calmness, the intense unchanging sadness that was the condition of his life.

“I loved it,” Eleonora said. “I wish you’d give it back, Perneta, you’ve had it three years, and I’ve been wanting to see it; when I got near the end it was so upsetting.”

“I didn’t want to. I was afraid he was going to die. I know it’s silly to cry over books, but I always used to cry over the New Heloise, and there’s a great deal more to cry over in this one.”

“I kept thinking that the young man, what’s his name,” Perneta said, “—Liyve, was like Itale.”

“Karantay had the book planned out before he ever knew me,” Itale said with covert violence.

“None the less it can be true to life,” Sangiusto remarked. “He writes about his generation.”

“But it’s not true to life. It’s a great book but it’s in some ways a false one—Karantay himself is absolutely levelheaded and honest, but the book’s all heights and depths and exaggerations; people don’t behave like that.”

“It’s a great book, of course, it’s the best we have, but he could have done—he could do much greater things!”

“And will,” Sangiusto said, raising his wine glass as if in a private toast. “God willing.”

The conversation drifted on, the good, heavy food came and was eaten, the plain, familial faces in the candle light brightened with conviviality. Itale, doubly shaken, avoided looking at Piera at all, and tried to avoid the thought of Karantay; he drank more wine than usual, but his unhappy self-consciousness continued. They were there, around him, his own people, but he was not one of them. They were at home, all of them but him. What have I done? he thought. Why have I no home?

“You wrote about some man once, down there,” Guide said to him without preliminary, “that knew my father. Who was he?”

Startled from his brooding, he tried to describe Count Helleskar. His description sounded inevitably like one of the characters in Karantay’s novel, and fascinated his hearers; they asked questions, leading him on to explain how he had met old Helleskar through his son, and to mention the Paludeskars, Enrike and Luisa.

“So is the one in flesh and blood,” Emanuel said, soberly, almost with reproof.

“Yes,” Piera said, “she is. I think the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

“Where did you see her?” Itale demanded, shocked into speech by the idea, incredible to him, of Luisa and Piera in the same room.

“I knew she was good,” Eleonora said, speaking soberly as Emanuel had done, “I’m glad she’s beautiful too.” She looked at Itale with a faint anxiety or query.

“She’s to be married,” Laura said. “It’s in Mr Karantay’s letter.”

“I drink to her happiness,” said Emanuel; and they raised their glasses, and drank to her, and talked of other things.

III

The next day the weather was so foul that only Laura had the determination to set off for church. As she was waiting at the stable for Kass to hitch up the horse—the horse sidling ill-temperedly, trying to get his tail to the wind, and Kass swearing as he struggled with the harness—her brother appeared. “I’ll drive you over,” he said.

Unheeding, he brought the horse around with a slap, hitched him, gave Laura a hand up; and they set off along the lake-shore road to San Larenz through the dripping, wind-twisted woods. To the left, between bare trees, the lake lay grey and flat.

The horse plodded on through mud, branches dripped, now and then sleet cut and stung in a light shower.

After a little while he answered, “I couldn’t think about much. My mind wouldn’t hold. It was always dark. The closest I could get to God was mathematics…It wasn’t much good. Do you know what worked? Not very often, but the only thing that ever did. I wouldn’t think of God’s love. I would think about the water inside the boat house in afternoon in summer, when the light comes from underneath. Or the plates—the dinner plates, the ones we used last night. If I could see them I was all right. So much for the things of the spirit…”

“Except the Lord build the house,” Laura said, almost in a whisper, but with a smile.

He did not know what she meant. Though it had been a relief to speak of St Lazar it had been a great effort also, and he drove on in silence.

Several people of the Valtorsa household had come to St Anthony’s: Piera, Berke Gavrey, Mariya and a couple of maids, Godin the coachman. The little chapel was bitter cold, full to the roof with cold grey light. Itale sat, stood, knelt with the rest of them through the Mass. Only when Father Klement began, “Credo in unoom Deoom!” he wanted to laugh, but with sudden pleasure. He saw what Laura had meant. He saw why she had been able to say to him, “You are my freedom,” knowing what he had not known, that she was his freedom; that you cannot leave home unless there is a home to leave. Who builds the house, and for whom is it built, for whom kept?

Father Klement, as usual, wanted to speak to Laura after the service. Itale waited for her in the porch of the chapel. Old Mariya and the Valtorsa maids were there, waiting for Godin and Gavrey to bring the buckboard around; Piera came out, retying her kerchief. She glanced at Itale, said hello in her polite way, and went on down the steps, into wind and rain. But there was nowhere to go. She stood down at the churchyard gate at the edge of a sea of mud, small and erect, her back turned.

“Go back out of the rain. I’ll stay down here,” he said, softly, half teasing.

She looked up at him with her clear eyes. She was in tears, or the wind had made her eyes water. “If you like,” she said, and went back up the steps. Gavrey drove up, the Valtorsa people climbed into the buckboard and rolled off under the pines.

He turned back and stood with his hands on the gate, looking out at the lake and the dark mountains on the other side. The wind was in his eyes. A sky of grey clouds ran overhead, ceaseless, in rapid, silent tumult. He remembered the sky over the courtyard of St Lazar; so the clouds had run there all winter long, three winters long, indifferent, unattainable, beautiful. There was nothing to keep. Life ran like the clouds. One voyaged and the other stayed, yet they met on the way; and in their meeting was all the goal of voyaging, and all the substance of fidelity. The shape and motion of a cloud.

A few yards from him across the gate of the churchyard lay the grave marked with his grandfather’s name, his name. He thought of the moment last night, the earliest and most terrible memory roused when his father had said, “You’re here too, Itale?” But it was no longer terrible. “I’m here,” he said into the wind.

His sister was out in the chapel porch now, and he went round to bring up the trap. As they drove back, the wind was weaker and a fine, wintry, drifting rain whispered on the road and passed in dim masses over the forest and the lake. The mountains were full of the sound of the rain.

The winter was endlessly wet but there was not much snow, and spring came early. By mid-March when the north wind cleared the sky, the forest rippled paler green, showing new growth at the tips of the dark branches, and the same light, clear green broke in the waves of the lake on windy mornings. Since it rained hard on the morning of the solstice, Laura and Itale put off the trip they had planned to Evalde until the next fair day. It rained almost daily well into April, and by that time Laura, without consulting her brother, had invited everybody else to come along, and Sangiusto and the Valtorskars had accepted. Itale was annoyed. He had anticipated the trip as he had in his boyhood, a solitary course, at dawn, in the little boat, the ceremony with which spring began. He had thought Laura understood that and felt the same way. This would be a mere pleasure-trip, a picnic over at the caverns, meaningless. And there would be all the constraint of being in Piera’s company. Ever since he had seen her drive off under the pines of San Larenz that winter day he had felt he must speak to her, but he was not certain, when it came to the point, what he wanted to say; and in any case he was unable to, since she was unwilling to say anything to him at all.

Falkone could not carry five, and they were planning to go in Mazeppa. That was the last straw. He would not sail across in that cow of a boat. He wanted his own boat under his own hand, and he said, autocratic, “I want to take Falkone.” So there he was on a morning of early April, his boat skimming over the water a quarter mile ahead of the other, with Piera sitting in the stern to steer.

They went a mile before anything was said, except Itale’s orders concerning steering as he tried to catch the fresh, fitful wind. At last they were sailing steadily, the house on its peninsula grown small behind them under the great slope of San Givan. The sound of the cascade came faint and clear over the water in the silence of the midlake. Piera sat with her hand on the tiller, her dark head turned away from him. “I wish there was more wind,” she said, “and we could sail clear to Kiassafonte.”

She watched him as he stood up, coatless, long-legged, to recoil a rope from the gear box. The sunlight of April poured down on his head, his back, his hands, the lake beyond him, the mountains above the lake. The wind blew his brown hair, grown out long again, across his eyes; he brushed it away with a gesture she remembered.

“Pier Sorentay took a rowboat down once on a dare. Broke up on a rock just past the village.”

“No. Envious,” said Itale, whose heart was growing lighter as they sailed on through the wind and sun. But their wind was beginning to fail them, and the lake lay glassy.

Their wind lasted until they entered the gulf of Evalde in the shadow of the overhanging mountain. There the air was hot and still in the fire of noon, the clear brown water utterly motionless. Itale rowed. Before them loomed the dark cliffs and basalt columns of the shore; they heard but could not see the cascade, hidden from them by the cleft it had cut itself in the jutting cliffs.

“Like rowing in oil,” he said, whispering, in the strange hush of the gulf that had no sound in it but the dull vibration of the river plunging to the lake.

They came to the landing place, a gravel beach a few yards long, to the right of the Hermit’s Rock. Itale raised the oars and got his breath a minute before landing the boat. “Winded,” he said, with reference to the general direction of Piera.

She did not say anything, but took the little dipper from under the stern seat, dipped it up full of the transparent lake water, and offered it to him. He took it from her and drank.

He ran the boat up on the beach with one great push of the oars and a flying leap, when it touched gravel, to pull it up so that Piera could step out dryshod: his timing was perfect, elegant, and he was smiling with pleasure as he handed Piera out of the boat.

A path of sorts wound up past the Hermit’s Rock to the top of the cliffs. Piera set off at once, very quick in her dark red skirt, unhesitating even when the way was nothing but a jump from one boulder to another, or when the black broken rock of the cliffside slid and rattled underfoot. Long after her, Itale came out at the top of the climb, in open sunlight, at the head of the falls where the river escaped from the cavern to plunge down its vertical cleft to the lake. They watched it till they were dizzy and deafened, and still went on watching it; at last they went to sit on the stone-broken grass under a low wall-like cliff, the outer wall of the caverns. The dark rock was full of a vibration like distant thunder: the roar of the imprisoned river.

Piera got up again, trying to see the other boat through the pines below the clearing. The sunlit air was warm about them. Restless, nervous, she wandered down the wild slope among the rocks, near the edge of the falls.

She came over slowly, listening for the voices of their people through the dull roar of the river. Itale held out to her a spray of small rock plant. She took it, and sat down with a small sigh.

Piera sat twirling the flowered spray, gazing at the contorted rocks, the pines that grew tall among them, the bright lake out beyond the gulf. The sun, straight overhead in the dark blue sky, poured down heat and light till the clearing brimmed like a cup.

“Francesco spoke to me last night. He said if I decided he should not, he won’t speak to father. I don’t know what I should do.”

“Of course it’s up to Laura. But it will upset father badly. Not without reason. Francesco is a homeless man, dependent on his sister’s sending enough to live on. Austria will hound him all his life, I suppose. He could go to France or England, but what would Laura do there? She never wanted to leave Malafrena…I brought him here. It is my responsibility. I don’t know what to say.”

“Why shouldn’t she leave Malafrena? It was me that wanted to stay. She has always wanted to go, to see things. Where he is would be her home.”

Itale was silent for a bit. “He can’t leave now. They’ll arrest him at the border.”

“Perhaps not with a wife and a false name,” Piera suggested, mildly, but startling Itale.

“Not about that…We haven’t really ever said much at all. About that. I know she loves him. Why can’t they stay here? As long as they want to, I mean. Nobody’s using the old Dowerhouse. I thought of having it fitted up. He certainly is a very useful man on a farm.”

“Then if one of you wanted to go back down there, there would be one of you running the estate.”

“And since no one is using the Dowerhouse, they could live there. I’d like to have it looked after.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. Then presently, “It all seems practicable. You must—you must have thought about this a good deal?”

Her voice trembled as she spoke. He looked at her again intently, wonderingly; his face was grave and still.

“There was something I wanted to say to you, too,” she said; her voice, over-controlled, sounded thin. He nodded, acceptant; she paused for a long time.

“There are so many reasons. Habit. And the land adjoining at so many places. And so on. And I suppose they talked about it when we were children, people always do. I’m sorry I was unpleasant to you, that night, last winter. That was stupid. I was just trying to say what I want to say now. That people will think we will—we are likely to get married, but they’re mistaken; and that keeps us from being friends.” The small, strained voice trembled continually, like the trembling of water, but remained clear. “I should like to be your friend.”

“You are,” he said almost inaudibly; but his heart said, you are my house, my home; the journey and the journey’s end; my care, and sleep after care.

“All right,” she said, this time with a great sigh; and they were silent for a while, there on the grass in the great heat and light of noon.

“You have to keep it,” he said with intensity. “I didn’t know why I left till I came back—I have to come back to find that I have to go again. I haven’t even begun the new life yet. I am always beginning it. I will die beginning it. Will you keep it for me, Piera?”

Piera looked at Itale directly for one instant, then scrambled to her feet and went to greet the others. “Well, well, well,” said Count Orlant surmounting the last steps of the way heavily, “what a pull. Hello, daughter.”

“Indeed we did. Laura and I pulled two strokes to Mr Sangiusto’s one, and still we went in circles.”

“I thought you two would be keeping cool in the caverns,” said Laura. “It’s as hot as summer here!”

“Have an apple, your face is purple,” said Sangiusto, proffering the hamper.

“No, I want to see the caverns,” Sangiusto announced, stretching his strong arms and looking about him blissfully.

“Stay him with flagons,” Count Orlant said, “comfort him with apples. Are you all going, then?”

“No, I want to sit down right here. Caverns and torrents and all that are for the young. Leave me with the lunch. Go on! You don’t think I’ll eat it all?”

PART SEVEN Malafrena

I

II

III

PART SEVEN
Malafrena