Ouida, 1839-1908 / 2008-09-23 00:00:00
When he had been
born she had been a young creature of seventeen, with the wild grace
of a forest doe; with that nobility of beauty, that purity of
outline, and that harmony of structure, which still exist in those
Italians in whom the pure Italiote blood is undefiled by Jew or
Gentile. Now her abundant hair was white, and her features were
bronzed and lined by open-air work, and her hands of beautiful shape
were hard as horn through working in the fields. She looked an old
woman, and was thought so by others, and thought herself so: for
youth is soon over in these parts, and there is no half-way house
between youth and age for the peasant.
Clelia Alba, moreover, had lost her youth earlier even than others:
lost it for ever when her husband at five-and-twenty years of age had
been killed by falling from an olive-tree of which the branch
sustaining him had cracked and broken under his weight. His neck had
been broken in the fall. She had been dancing and shouting with her
two-year-old child on the grassland not far off, romping and playing
ball with some dropped chestnuts; and when their play was over she
had lifted her boy on to her shoulder and run with him to find his
father. Under one of the great, gnarled, wide-spreading olives she
had seen him, lying asleep as she thought.
"Oh, lazy one, awake! The sun is only two hours old!" she had cried
merrily, and the child on her shoulder had cooed and shouted in
imitation, "Wake--wake--wake!" and she, laughing, had cast a chestnut
she had carried in her hand upon the motionless figure.
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