Through the young friar who had replaced him they had heard something of the calamity which threatened to befall them through the Edera.  It was all dark to them; they could understand nothing.  Why others should want their river and why they should lose it, or in what manner a stream could be turned from its natural course —­ all these things were to them incomprehensible.  In the beginning of the world it had been set running there.  Who would be impious enough to meddle with it?

Whoever tried to do so would be smitten with the vengeance of Heaven.  Of that they were sure.  Nevertheless, to hear the mention of such a thing tormented them; and when they opened their doors at dawn they looked out in terror lest the water should have been taken away in the night.

Their stupidity irritated Adone so greatly that he ceased altogether to speak to them of the impending calamity.  “They are stocks and stones.  They have not the sense of sheep nor the courage of goats,” he said, with the old scorn which his forefathers had felt for their rustic vassals stirring in him.

“I believe that they would dig sand and carry wood for the engineers and the craftsmen who would build the dykes!” he said to his mother.

Clelia Alba sighed.  “My son, hunger is a hard master; it makes the soul faint, the heart hard, the belly ravenous.  We have never known it.  We cannot judge those who know nothing else.”

“Even hunger need not make one vile,” he answered.

But he did not disclose all his thoughts to his mother.

He was so intolerant of these poor people of Ruscino because he foresaw the hopelessness of forging their weak tempers into the metal necessary for resistance.  As well might he hope to change a sword-rush of the river into a steel sabre for combat.  Masaniello, Rienzi, Garibaldi, had roused the peasantry and led them against their foes; but the people they dealt with must, he thought, have been made of different stuff than these timorous villagers, who could not even be make to comprehend the magnitude of the wrong which was plotted against them.

“Tell them,” he said to old Trizio:  “tell them their wells will run dry; their fish will rot on the dry bed of what was once the river; their canes, their reeds and rushes, their osiers, will all fail them; when they shall go out into their fields nothing which they sow or plant will grow, because the land will be cracked and parched; there will be no longer the runlets and rivulets to water the soil; birds will die of thirst, and thousands of little river creatures will be putrid carcasses in the sun; for the Edera, which is life and joy and health to this part of the country, will be carried far away, imprisoned in brick walls, drawn under ground, forced to labour like a slave, put to vile uses, soiled and degraded.  Cannot you tell them this, and make them see?”

The old man shook his white head.  “They would never believe.  It is too hard for them.  Where the river runs, there it will always be.  So they think.”