One day I gave voice to my curiosity. “Do tell me about yourself, Mrs. ——,” I said to the mother. “You look just as young as your own daughters. I don’t think you can ever have had a trouble!”
“I never have,” she replied, turning on me her mild, satisfied gaze. “I cannot remember a single sorrow in all my life, not a death in my family, not an hour’s sickness even, amongst us all. We have all, always, had everything we could wish for.”
It was the first time I had ever heard any one say such a thing, and I felt awe-struck and envious. A few months afterwards they all went back to America—at least they started to go. Their ship went down in mid-ocean, and the dear people reached home sooner than they had expected. But for that sharp, short suffering, it is just possible that life and its unending pleasantnesses might have made it hard for them to get to heaven at all.
There was more than mere fun in Thackeray’s tale of “The Rose and the Ring.” When the Fairy Blackstick frowned at Prince Giglio and said, “What you need, young man, is a little misfortune!” she asserted a most obvious and irritating fact. But it has one delightful side to it—that bitter draught that wise Doctor Fate insists on our taking from time to time; the good things, even tiny little ones that we never noticed before, do taste so wonderfully sweet afterwards!
We were talking of shore forests—there is one, not of pine, but beeches, on the Adriatic, exactly opposite Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea.[13] Here a great promontory runs out towards the east, rising into mountains which have caused the whole to be called the “Monte Gargano,” though each peak has its own name besides. People call the isolated district (which really belongs to the Province of Molise) Manfredonia, from the name of its chief town, long a pet stronghold of Suabian King Manfred, who founded and fortified it in the thirteenth century. But Nature protected the Monte Gargano in another way and a very effectual one. It was meant to be an island; on the western side the Abruzzi shrinking back in the real mainland, and the Adriatic, withdrawing slowly from the coast, have left a strip of land many miles wide, flat, marshy, abominably feverish, as a kind of defensive trench to cut off the Gargano promontory from the rest of Italy, and, as it were, remind it for ever that by formation it does not belong to her at all, but to the limestone plateau of Dalmatia, across the way.
This vast plain (for it stretches far and far past the promontory, towards the south) refuses to nourish a single tree on the few feet of soil which cover the mother-rock, but it provides such splendid food for sheep that since time immemorial it has been given up to them. Alphonsus I annexed it as a royal meadow in 1445, and imported his Spanish merinos with such success that two hundred years later four and a half million of the beautiful creatures were herded by Neapolitan peasants on these pastures. Even now, though only a scanty half-million graze on them, the sheep are lords and owners of all that ground.
During the summer they are led to the mountains, partly for their own sake, partly for that of their keepers, who could not live in the miasma-haunted plains in August and September. In crossing, even by train, the twenty-two miles that separate Foggia from Manfredonia, the traveller is always warned to close the carriage windows; but in October the sheep are all driven back, and for weeks the three great roads that converge towards the flats are just broad ribbons of dust through which comes the drumming of invisible millions of little hoofs. Along the edges of the yellow cloud phantom figures of shepherds dressed in sheepskins take shape at intervals and disappear again, and the dogs, dear faithful things, fly round and herd up the stragglers and nip at the legs of truants with the noisy joy that even long marches through the scorching plains can never quite suppress.
From every point on those plains Monte Gargano can be seen, raising its peaks against the blue, and clothed down to the very water’s edge in magic beechwoods, homes of light and shadow and flickering gold, musical with song, fragrant with wild flowers and carpeted with the rich mould that a thousand autumns have spread along its ways. Nothing is ever disturbed on Monte Gargano. But for the sea and the fever-land, the forest would long ago have been cut down, its riches dispersed, its very site perhaps forgotten; but now all stands as it did from the first, and winter and summer have their own way there, and the herdsmen fold their cattle in the deep caves of the hills even as they did fourteen hundred years ago, in the reign of the holy Pope St. Gelasius, when heaven’s gates opened one May morning to let through a flash of wings and the gleam of an archangel’s sword, and the fairest of Gargano’s peaks became Monte Sant’ Angelo.
And this was the way of it. While the rest of Italy was torn with the struggles of rival barbarians, and desolated by the rapacity of men like the Galla who drove his poor captives before him to the feet of St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, the peasants of Monte Gargano, safe in their isolation, lived as they live to-day, obscure, contented, minding their own affairs—which are chiefly their own cattle—with all their mind.
In that wild place the cattle stray sometimes, and it is hard to find them again. And so it happened that on May 8, towards 493, or thereabouts, a young herdsman went climbing in the hills with some companions to look for a valuable steer that he had lost. Having wandered and searched for some time in vain, they were feeling deeply discouraged, when they perceived the creature hopelessly entangled in a thicket of briars at the entrance of a deep cavern. In fear, or irritation, one of the pursuers drew his bow and let fly an arrow at the animal, but, to the men’s amazement, the missile turned in the air and struck him who had shot it. Terrified at this portent, they all fled and did not stop till they reached the town of Sipontum, far below, where they related what had happened to them. Fear fell on the inhabitants, and no one had the courage to go and examine the cavern, though all were consumed with curiosity to know what, or who, it contained. In this dilemma they referred the case to their Bishop, and he replied that he must lay the thing before the Lord, and ordained three days of fasting and prayer for all the population, during which they were to join him in begging that Heaven’s will in the matter might be made clear.