But many of them, though fascinated, remained afraid.

“When all is said, what can we do?” they muttered.  “Authority has a long arm.”

The people of the district talked under their breath of nothing else than of this resistance which was being preached as a holy war by the youth of Terra Vergine.  They were secret and silent, made prudent by many generations which had suffered from harsh measures and brutal reprisals, but the league he proclaimed fascinated and possessed them.  Conspiracy has a seduction subtle and irresistible as gambling for those who have once become its servants.  It is potent as wine, and colours the brain which it inflames.  To these lowly, solitary men, who knew nothing beyond their own fields and coppices and wastelands, its excitement came like a magic philter to change the monotony of their days.  They were most of them wholly unlettered; knew not their A B C; had only learned the law of the seasons, and the earth, and the trees which grew, and the beasts which grazed; but they had imagination; they had the blood of ancient races; they were neither dolts not boors, though Adone in his wrath called them so.  They were fascinated by the call to rise and save their river.  A feeling, more local than patriotism, but more noble than interest, moved them to share in his passionate hatred of the intruders, and to hearken to his appeals to them to arm and rise as one man.

But, on the other hand, long years of servitude and hardship had made them timid as gallant dogs are made so by fasting or the whip.  “What are we?” some of them said to him.  “We are no more than the earthworms in the soil.”  For there is a pathetic humility in these descendants of the ancient rulers of the world; it is a humility born of hope deferred, of the sense of every change of masters, of knowledge that the sun rises and sets upon their toil, as it did on that of their fathers, as it will do on that of their children, and will never see it lessened, nor see the fruits thereof given to themselves or to their sons.  It is a humility which is never ignoble, but is infinitely, because hopelessly, sad.

The river was their own, surely, yes; but, like so much else that was their own, the State claimed it.

“What can be more yours than the son you beget, the fruit of your loins, the child for whom you have laboured through long years?” said an old man to him once.  “Yet the State, as soon as he is of use to you, the State takes him, makes a beast of burden of him, kills his youth and his manhood; sends him without a word to you, to be maimed and slaughtered in Africa, his very place of death unknown to you; his body —­ the body you begat and which his mother bore in her womb and nourished and cherished —­ is devoured by the beasts of the desert and the birds of the air.  They take all; why shall they not take the river also?”

The glowing faith of Adone was flung, as the sunlit salt spray of the ocean is cast on a cliff of basalt, against the barrier of that weary and prostrate despair which the State dares to tell the poor is their duty and their portion upon earth.