Adone was still silent.

His thoughts were not such as he could utter aloud in the priest's presence; and he heard nothing that was said; he heard only little Nerina's voice saying: "Could we not kill these men?" That flutelike whisper seemed to him to sigh with the very voice of the river itself.

Don Silverio rose, his patience, great as it was, exhausted.

"My son, as you do not give ear to me it is useless for me to speak.

I must go to my office. The friar from San Beda desires to return this evening. I have done all I can. I have told you the facts as they stand. Take courage, Be peaceable for your mother's sake and restrain yourself for your own. It is a frightful calamity which hangs over us all. But it is our duty to meet it like men."

"Like men!" muttered Adone as he rose to his feet; had not the child from the Abruzzo rocks a better sense of men's duty than this priest so calm and wise?

"Men resist," he said very low.

"Men resist," repeated Don Silverio. "They resist when their resistance serves any purpose, but when it can only serve to crush them uselessly under a ma.s.s of iron they are not men if they resist, but madmen."

"Farewell, sir," said Adone.

And with an obeisance he went out of the chamber.

"Poor boy! Poor, pa.s.sionate, dear youth!" thought Don Silverio as the door closed. "He thinks me cold and without emotion; how little he knows! He cannot suffer as I suffer for him and for my poor wretched people. What will they do when they shall know? They will mourn like starved sheep bleating in a field of stones, and I, their shepherd, shall not have a blade of gra.s.s wherewith to comfort them!"

XI

Adone's sight was troubled as soon as he pa.s.sed out of the dusky room into the blaze of noonday sunshine. His eyes seemed filled with blood. His brain was dizzy. That which had been his sheet-anchor in all doubts and contrition, his faith in and his reverence for Don Silverio, availed him nothing now. A blind sympathy with his most violent instincts was the only thing which could now content or console him.

He was in that state to which all counsels of moderation appear but so much treason and unkindness. As he went out of the priest's house in that dazzling light, a hand caught his sleeve and that young flutelike voice of which he had thought murmured to him --

"Adone! what tidings? What has he told you?"

Nerina, having run across the bridge and up the street after the little dog, had seen him and Don Silverio enter, and had waited for Adone to come out of the house.

Adone pushed her away.

"Let me be!" he said impatiently. "It is all bad -- bad -- bad. Bad as ill-blood. Bad as crime."

She clung to his arm nevertheless.

"Come into the church and tell me. No one cares as I do."

"Poor little soul!"

He let her draw him into the great porch of the church and thence into the church itself; it was dark, as it always was, cold as an autumn evening, damp even in the canicular heat.

"No one will hear; tell me!" said the child.

He told her.

"And what are you to do?" she asked, her eyes dilated with horror.

"According to him," said Adone bitterly, "I am to be meek and helpless as the heifer which goes to the slaughter. Men must not resist what the law permits."

Nerina was mute. To dispute what Don Silverio said was like blasphemy to her; she honoured him with all her soul, but she loved Adone.

She loved the Edera water too; that fair green rippling water, on whose bank she had sat naked under the dock leaves the day the two rams had fought. That which was threatened was an unholy, wicked, cruel robbery. Was it indeed necessary to yield to it in submission?

She remembered a saying of Baruffo's: "If a man stand up to me I leave him some coins in his pocket, some life in his body; but if he crouch and cringe I stick him in the throat. He is a craven."

The doctrine of Baruffo seemed to her the more sound. It warmed the blood of the little Abruzzo-born maiden to recall it. In the high mountains and forests the meeker virtues are not greatly honoured.

She stood by Adone's side, knitting her brows under her auburn curling locks, clenching her hands.

"Is there _one_ who does this evil most of all?" she said at length.

"_One_ we could reach?"

"You are a brave child, Nerina!" said Adone, and his words made her proud. "I fear there is a crowd. Such men are like locusts; they come in swarms. But the first man who touches the water--"

"Shall sup of it and drown!"

The little girl added the words with a fierce joy in her great bright eyes.

"Hush!" said Adone, "and get you homeward, and tell my mother that Don Silverio has returned, and that I will come back to my work in a little while. Tell her he says there is no hope."

Nerina obeyed him instantly, her bare feet flying over the stones of the street. He was left alone in the sombre church, with the great winged angels of stone above his head.

He was grateful for its gloom. He shrank from the light of the morning. Every drop of blood in his body, and in his brain, and in his limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire -- a fire which all the waters of the Edera would never quench.

How could they be accused of rebellion or wrong-doing because they wanted to keep the water running in the channel which it had made for itself in the very beginning of the world?

The Edera was ancient as its neighbours, the Fiumicino which heard the voice of Caesar, or the Marecchia which was bridged by Augustus; ancient as the fountain of Arethusa, as the lake of Diana Nemorensis.

What sacrilege could be more heinous than to chase it from its chosen course? No Luc.u.mon of Etruria, or Esarch of Ravenna, or Pope or Rome, had ever dared to touch it. Revolutionists! they, who only sought to preserve it? The revolutionists were those who with alien hands and vampire's greed would seek to disturb its peace.

XII

All that day the people of Ruscino crowded round the Presbytery.

"What of the Edera water, sir?" they asked him a hundred times in the shrill cries of the women, in the rude bellow of the men, in the high-pitched, dissonant clamour of angry speakers. And all the day his patience and kindness were abused, and his nerves racked and strained, in the effort to persuade them that the river which ran beneath their walls was no more theirs than the stars which shone above it.

It was hopeless to bring home to their intelligence either the invalidity of their claim, or the peril which would lie in their opposition.

"'Twas there in the beginning of time," they said. "There it must be for our children's children."

He talked nonsense, they thought; who should be able to stop a river which was for ever running? The Edera water was carried in the womb of the Leonessa: Leonessa gave it fresh birth every day.