“So say I; at least over what runs through our fields we, alone, have any title, and for that title I will fight to the death,” said Adone.  “River rights go with the land through which the river passes.”

“But, my son,” she said with true wisdom, “your father would never have allowed any danger to the water to make him faithless to the land.  If you let this threat, this dread, turn you away from your work; if you let your fears make you neglect your field and your olives, and your cattle and your vines, you will do more harm to yourself than the worst enemy can do you.  To leave a farm to itself is to call down the vengeance of heaven.  A week’s abandonment undoes the work of years.  I and Gianna and the child do what we can, but we are women, and Nerina is young.”

“No doubt you speak wisely, mother,” replied Adone humbly.  “But of what use is it to dress and manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera be in its sap and at its root?  What use is it to till these lands if they be doomed to perish from thirst?”

“Do your best,” said his mother, “then the fault will not lie with you, whatever happen.”

The counsel was sound; but to Adone all savour and hope were gone out of his labour.  When he saw the green gliding water shine through the olive branches, and beyond the foliage of the walnut-trees, his arms fell nerveless to his side, his throat swelled with sobs, which he checked as they rose, but which were only the more bitter for that—­all the joy and the peace of his day’s work were gone.

It was but a small space of it to one whose ancestors had reigned over the stream from its rise in the oak woods to its fall into the sea; but he thought that no one could dispute or diminish or disregard his exclusive possession of the Edera water where it ran through his fields.  They could not touch that, even if they seized it lower down, where it ran through other communes.  Were they to take it above his land, above the bridge of Ruscino, its bed here would be dried up, and his homestead and the village both be ruined.  The clear, intangible right which he meant to defend at any cost, in any manner, was his right to have the river run untouched through his fields.  The documents which proved the rights of the great extinct Seigneury might be useless, but the limited, shrunken right of the peasant ownership was as unassailable as his mother’s right to the three strings of pearls; or so he believed.

The rights of the Lords of Ruscino might be but shadows of far-off things, things of tradition, of history, of romance, but the rights of the peasant proprietors of the Terra Vergine must, he thought, be respected if there were any justice upon earth, for they were plainly writ down in the municipal registers of San Beda.  To rouse others to defend their equal rights in the same way, from the source of the Edera to its union with the Adriatic, seemed to him the first effort to be made.  He was innocent enough to believe that it would suffice to prove that its loss would be their ruin to obtain redress at once.