Why, Enrico, after our father has already reproved you for having behaved badly to Coretti, were you so unkind to me? You cannot imagine the pain that you caused me. Do you not know that when you were a baby, I stood for hours and hours beside your cradle, instead of playing with my companions, and that when you were ill, I got out of bed every night to feel whether your forehead was burning? Do you not know, you who grieve your sister, that if a tremendous misfortune should overtake us, I should be a mother to you and love you like my son? Do you not know that when our father and mother are no longer here, I shall be your best friend, the only person with whom you can talk about our dead and your infancy, and that, should it be necessary, I shall work for you, Enrico, to earn your bread and to pay for your studies, and that I shall always love you when you are grown up, that I shall follow you in thought when you go far away, always because we grew up together and have the same blood? O Enrico, be sure of this when you are a man, that if misfortune happens to you, if you are alone, be very sure that you will seek me, that you will come to me and say: “Silvia, sister, let me stay with you; let us talk of the days when we were happy—do you remember? Let us talk of our mother, of our home, of those beautiful days that are so far away.” O Enrico, you will always find your sister with her arms wide open. Yes, dear Enrico; and you must forgive me for the reproof that I am administering to you now. I shall never recall any wrong of yours; and if you should give me other sorrows, what matters it? You will always be my brother, the same brother; I shall never recall you otherwise than as having held you in my arms when a baby, of having loved our father and mother with you, of having watched you grow up, of having been for years your most faithful companion. But do you write me a kind word in this same copy-book, and I will come for it and read it before the evening. In the meanwhile, to show you that I am not angry with you, and perceiving that you are weary, I have copied for you the monthly story, Blood of Romagna, which you were to have copied for the little sick mason. Look in the left drawer of your table; I have been writing all night, while you were asleep. Write me a kind word, Enrico, I beseech you.
Thy Sister Silvia.
I am not worthy to kiss your hands.—Enrico.
BLOOD OF ROMAGNA.
(Monthly Story.)
That evening the house of Ferruccio was more silent than was its wont. The father, who kept a little haberdasher’s shop, had gone to Forli to make some purchases, and his wife had accompanied him, with Luigina, a baby, whom she was taking to a doctor, that he might operate on a diseased eye; and they were not to return until the following morning. It was almost midnight. The woman who came to do the work by day had gone away at nightfall. In the house there was only the grandmother with the paralyzed legs, and Ferruccio, a lad of thirteen. It was a small house of but one story, situated on the highway, at a gunshot’s distance from a village not far from Forli, a town of Romagna; and there was near it only an uninhabited house, ruined two months previously by fire, on which the sign of an inn was still to be seen. Behind the tiny house was a small garden surrounded by a hedge, upon which a rustic gate opened; the door of the shop, which also served as the house door, opened on the highway. All around spread the solitary campagna, vast cultivated fields, planted with mulberry-trees.
It was nearly midnight; it was raining and blowing. Ferruccio and his grandmother, who was still up, were in the dining-room, between which and the garden there was a small, closet-like room, encumbered with old furniture. Ferruccio had only returned home at eleven o’clock, after an absence of many hours, and his grandmother had watched for him with eyes wide open, filled with anxiety, nailed to the large arm-chair, upon which she was accustomed to pass the entire day, and often the whole night as well, since a difficulty of breathing did not allow her to lie down in bed.
It was raining, and the wind beat the rain against the window-panes: the night was very dark. Ferruccio had returned weary, muddy, with his jacket torn, and the livid mark of a stone on his forehead. He had engaged in a stone fight with his comrades; they had come to blows, as usual; and in addition he had gambled, and lost all his soldi, and left his cap in a ditch.