XII
I
It was early in September when they caught the roan pony, and they caught him as he stood beside Gian-Luca. A farmer and his boy came quietly forward, and the man slipped a halter on to the pony. The beast looked surprised, but not really resentful, because he now trusted men.
The farmer nodded, grinning at Gian-Luca. “Strong little devil,” he remarked, “got plenty of work in him, look at his loin; no trouble with him either, it seems.”
Gian-Luca’s heart gave a bound of fear. “You are taking him away?” he faltered.
“Yes,” said the farmer, “his turn’s about come; we’ve all got to work for our living.”
The pony began to pull back on the halter, edging towards Gian-Luca.
“Come up!” ordered the boy.
“Steady now!” coaxed the farmer, patting the pony’s neck.
Gian-Luca said: “Where are you going to take him?”
“I’ve sold him,” the man replied; and he eyed this scarecrow of a tramp with interest. “Are you keen on horses?” he inquired.
“Yes, but where will he go to?” Gian-Luca persisted, laying his hand on the pony.
“To the mines,” said the farmer; “they most of ’em go there, that is, when they’re small enough.”
For a moment Gian-Luca stood as though turned to stone, then he threw up his arms with a cry. “No, no!” he babbled; “not the mines. Oh! for God’s sake—he will never see the light in the mines—he will go blind! I cannot let him be taken to the mines, the creature has been my friend.” He spread out his hands and pointed to the trees. “Look, look!” he went on wildly; “all this beauty and freedom, all this greenness and joy—the mines, they are dark, all his life in the darkness—his body full of sores from straining at the trucks, his eyes filming over for want of the sunshine, his heart breaking because he has known the forest, because he remembers and remembers—” And now he was clutching at the farmer’s arm. “Listen! per amore di Dio, but listen! I will buy him, I tell you I will buy the beast’s freedom, only tell me how much and I will buy him!”
“You!” growled the farmer, pushing him off, and staring skeptically at him; then his eyes grew more kind: “Poor devil, you look starving—what’s the matter, you’re lightheaded, can’t you find work, or what?” His hand went quickly down to his pocket: “Here, take this,” he muttered, producing some silver; “take this and buy yourself a square meal.” And he handed Gian-Luca three shillings.
Quite firmly but gently he thrust out his arm between Gian-Luca and the pony. He gave the rope of the halter to the boy. “Get on with it!” he ordered. “Come along, now, look sharp!”
And the pony went with them, giving no trouble, because he had learnt to trust men.
Gian-Luca threw himself down on the ground, burying his face in his hands, and he spoke to the earth, asking it to show pity.
“Let him die, let him die, let him die!” he entreated, as though the earth had ears wherewith to hear, as though it were a mother who must surely feel compassion for the creatures her bounty had nourished.
Then he told the earth, in low, broken words, of the life of the ponies in the mines; all that he knew of that life he told it, and all that his half-distraught mind must picture.
“He trusted them because of me,” moaned Gian-Luca; “I gave him his faith, and yet I cannot save him—he is little but he has a heart full of courage—he will work until that heart breaks!”
He stopped speaking as though he were waiting for an answer, then a most peculiar thing happened; Gian-Luca heard a voice inside his own head, quite loudly it spoke, with a kind of precision.
“Merripen,” said the voice, “death is life, Gian-Luca—it is only for such a little while.”
Gian-Luca sat up and pressed his fingers to his temples. “I must be going mad,” he muttered.
II
The forest was turning scarlet and golden, touched by the first sudden frosts of autumn, and Gian-Luca felt terribly cold these nights, so that sometimes he must get up and walk. The fever had left him, its place being taken by an ever-increasing weakness, yet the thought of four walls that would shut him in, the thought of a roof that would shut away the sky, and above all the thought of leaving the trees, filled him with misery.
“If I eat more I may feel less cold,” he reasoned; so whenever he felt able he went into Lyndhurst, and while there he would try to pull himself together, smiling as he purchased his food. “If they think I am ill they will catch me!” he would mutter; “and of course I am not really ill—”
But when he had tramped slowly back to the forest, he would find that he could eat very little after all; his stomach had grown unaccustomed to food, and some days he suffered great pain.
“It must be that I do not need it,” he would argue; “everyone eats too much!”
The fine weather broke and it rained a good deal; strong winds swept over the forest that October, the beech trees sighed and groaned under the storms, while Gian-Luca got wet to the skin. He must always be lighting fires, and this distressed him, for now he lived in the dread of getting caught; keepers and foresters were after him, he fancied, waiting to shut him up between walls. In the end he grew desperate, preferring to go wet than to risk getting caught by those keepers.
“The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he would sometimes think, smiling ruefully; and then he would wonder where these words had come from—surprised when his memory failed him.
His money was running very short by now, he had only about three pounds left; but he firmly resolved not to write home for more, he was not going to rob Maddalena.
“When it is gone I must find work in the forest, perhaps with the charcoal-burner,” he thought vaguely. “If I cannot find work, well then, I must beg.” And he tried to remember what the tramp had once told him regarding those signs chalked on gateposts.
He began to have a queer feeling in his heart, his heart was constantly moving. “Keep quiet!” he would tell it, pressing his side. “Ma che! you behave exactly like a wild thing.” But his heart would continue to change its position, for that was what it felt like to Gian-Luca: “Are you in bed that you have to turn over?” he would ask. “Do not beat like the caged richiami! You turn over and then you beat with your wings—yet I am not cruel like Sisto—”
Whenever he saw the wild ponies now, he pitied, thinking of the horror of the mines; and whenever he pitied his sick heart grew restless, beating like Sisto’s richiami. Then one evening he came face to face with himself, as he walked slowly back to his beech tree. Towards him came walking another Gian-Luca, a gaunt, ragged fellow with a little cleft beard.
“Ah!” said Gian-Luca, “I have found you at last; I have looked for a very long time!” Yet even as his arm shot out to detain him, this other Gian-Luca vanished. “Never mind,” thought his twin, “I shall see him again; he lives, as I suspected, in the forest.”
But this strange apparition had reminded him of God, who still remained to be found; so now he went scouring the thickets for God, and the glades and the long, green rides.
“God!” he would call softly, as he called to the ponies, “come here, I have something to give You! I will give You Gian-Luca—he is not very grand, he is not the smart fellow who served at the Doric; but that, as You know, is because he came to find You.” And then he would hold out his hand.
“Magari!” Gian-Luca would presently mutter, having failed to coax God from His hiding: “Magari! I am dirty, and my clothes are in rags—perhaps that is why He avoids me.”
They were saying in Lyndhurst that Gian-Luca must be starving, judging from his haggard appearance.
“Well,” said the baker, “he certainly looks queer, but he seems to have money enough to buy bread; I changed a pound note for him three days ago.”
“He’s some ‘new-religion’ crank, I expect,” suggested the girl from the Post Office.
III
A week later, when Gian-Luca called for his letter, the girl eyed him curiously. “An unpleasant change in the weather—” she began; but Gian-Luca had thanked her and had hurried away before she could get any further.
He shuffled along in his battered old shoes, which now felt too small for his feet; as he went he kept staring down at the letter—it seemed heavy, he thought, it was thicker than usual—and his fretful heart thudded against his side because the letter looked thicker.
He opened the letter under the beech tree, sitting with his back against its trunk. “No wonder it was thicker than usual,” he murmured as he drew out the closely written pages.
“I am well, Gian-Luca,” the letter began—Maddalena never stooped to deception—“I am well, Gian-Luca—” but the rest of those pages were covered with the ache that was in her.
“All that I have promised I have done,” wrote Maddalena; “no one knows this address that I write to. They worry, they question, Rosa and the others, and I answer: ‘Gian-Luca writes that he is well, he has gone away to think over our future, I expect him home any day now.’ I pray to the Madonna every night and every morning—she must surely be weary of my poor prayers, amore. I say: ‘Do whatever is best for Gian-Luca, whatever will bring him happiness,’ I say. And I pray the Madonna to give you her peace, and the peace of her blessed Son. But oh, Gian-Luca, I am only a woman, I am not brave and holy like Our Lady of Sorrows—I am only Maddalena, who was born on the Campagna, just a poor, loving, ignorant peasant—”
Then Maddalena wrote as a woman will write to the man she has taken for her mate—all the love and the longing of her soul and her body; all the emptiness of days and the loneliness of nights; all the difficult, hopeless, yearning frustrations of a mother-of-men without child. The letter was terribly truthful and simple, as simple as the law of the forest: “Come back to me, Gian-Luca, amore, come quickly. You are all I have in the world.”
Gian-Luca folded Maddalena’s letter and slipped it into his pocket. Getting to his feet, he stood against the beech tree, then, scarcely conscious of what he was doing, he stretched out his hands, palms upwards. He stood so still that the birds fluttered down, thinking he had come there to feed them; but his palms were empty, so they lit on his fingers, waiting for a miracle to happen. But Gian-Luca was seeing the streets of a city, all the noise and confusion of crowds; he was seeing the Doric with its ignoble service—the little Milady, Jane Coram and the others … “Gian-Luca!”
“Signorina?”
“Do send me Roberto!”
“Momento, I will find him, signorina.”
He was seeing the hideous struggle for existence, with its cruelty, its meanness and its lusts; the breath of it hot and sickeningly fetid, the heart of it cold and unspeakably callous, its body a mass of festering sores from the sins of its blinded mind. His own body shrank and quivered a little, as a bird will quiver who is thrust into a cage, for the ruthless walls seemed to be closing around him; and the dull slate roof that would shut away the sky hung over him like a pall. Nerone had shut away the sky from his skylarks, in case they should beat themselves to pieces in despair; Robert’s bright eyes were the eyes of a skylark, a skylark looking through the bars of the Doric—but the child of the beggar had lost his eyes, and that surely was the fault of the world.
“I cannot go back to that world!” cried Gian-Luca; “I cannot go back to that world!”
Yet even as he said it, he knew that he would go back, for something far stronger than the world stood beside him, the steadfast, enduring courage of mankind that draws all men up to the divine.
Then, as though a mist had been swept from his vision, he seemed to see clearly for the first time in his life, and seeing the darkness, yet perceived a great glory, shining steadily through that darkness. He was conscious of a vast and indomitable purpose to which all things would ultimately bow; he himself, Gian-Luca, was a part of that purpose as was everything else on this struggling earth—and at that supreme moment he must cry out to God:
“I have found You; You are here in my heart!”
There were spent, hunted stags; there were blind pit-ponies; there were children without eyes; and to such things he belonged by reason of his infinite pity. He was theirs, the servant of all that was helpless, even as God was their servant and their master. But one helpless thing needed him above all others, the sad, patient woman who waited—it was better to make one poor creature happy, than to mourn for the ninety and nine. He must turn and go back, he must try to find work—it would have to be humble at first, a beginning; and whatever he did must be done with great patience, patience with himself and with Maddalena, but above all, patience with the world.
He had been young and strong and had caught at the world, determined to make it serve him; he had grown very angry and had spat at the world, seeing only its sins; he had grown very sorrowful, pitying the world, seeing only its sorrows; and then he had grown frightened because he was lost, because he could not find God. And all the time God was here in himself, that was where He was, in Gian-Luca, and in every poor struggling human heart that was capable of one kind impulse. Why, God must be somewhere in the heart of Jane Coram, consoling her solitary spirit. Nothing was too base or too humble for God, He was patient and undefeated. The path of the world was the path of His sorrow, and the sorrow of God was the hope of the world, for to suffer with God was to share in the joy of His ultimate triumph over sorrow.
Gian-Luca sank quietly on to his knees, and his body fell sideways and lay waiting; for now his mind was wandering again, and he fancied that someone was stooping towards him—someone very tender who would gather him up and carry him a long way away. A peace that was passing all understanding lay in his heart and on his eyelids, so that he closed his peace-laden eyelids, like a child who is heavy with sleep. And now his body was lighter than air, he was floating above the treetops; and now he was down on the kind earth again, lying there under the beech tree. Maddalena was coming, she was saying her prayers, her voice was all over the forest—Maddalena was saying her favorite prayer—it began—it began—how did it begin?
“Blessed be God,” breathed Gian-Luca.
A leaf drifted quietly down and touched him, but Gian-Luca lay very still. Then a rabbit that was scampering over the grass, sat up on its haunches, staring. In the beech tree the birds began talking to each other, for now it was the hour of the sunset—
And that was how Gian-Luca returned to his country after thirty-four years of exile.