“You speak as you feel bound to speak, sir, no doubt.”

“But think of the end?  Must not every action be weighed and considered and judgment passed on it by what will be its issue?  No rising of our poor people can effect anything except their own destruction.  It is only a demagogue who would urge them on to it.  Adone is not a demagogue.  He is a generous youth frantic from sorrow, but helpless.  Can you not see that?”

“I do not see that he is helpless,” said his mother with obstinacy.  “The thing that are about to do us is unjust.  I would load a gun myself against them, and if money be what is wanted I would give Adone my pearls.  He asks me for nothing, but when he does I will strip myself to my shift to aid him.”

“It is a terrible madness!” cried Don Silverio.  “What can your fowling-piece or your necklace do against all the force these speculators and contractors will employ?  It is a great, a heinous wrong which will be done to you; that no one can feel more strongly than I. But there are wrongs to which we must submit when we are weak; and, my good Clelia, against this we poor folks in the Vale of Edera are as weak as the teal in the marshes against the swivel guns of the sportsmen’s punts.”

But he argued in vain; logic and persuasion are alike useless when opposed to the rock of ignorance and obstinacy.  She held him in deep reverence; she brought her conscience to his judgment; she thought him beyond ordinary humanity:  but when he endeavoured to persuade her that her son was wrong he failed.

“Sir, you know that this crime against the river will ruin us,” she said doggedly.  “Why then should you try to tie our hands?  I do not know what Adone does; his mind is hid from me, but if, as you say, he wants a rising of our people, it is natural and just.”

When the mind of the peasant —­ man or woman —­ be made up in its stubbornness, all learning, wisdom, experience, even fact, speak in vain; it opposes to all proofs the passive resistance of a dogged incredulity:  to reason with it is as useless as to quarry stone with a razor.

Many and many a time had he given up in exhaustion and nausea his endeavours to convince the rural mind of some simple fact, some clear cause, some elementary principle.  He knew that Clelia Alba would never believe in the exile which would be her certain fate until the armed and liveried creatures of the State should drive her from her home by order of the State.  He had seen in Rome that there was no possible chance of opposing this enterprise against the Edera water.  It had been decided on by men of money who had the ear of ministers, the precedence in ante-chambers, the means of success in political departments and in commercial centres.  A few scattered provincial owners of land and labourers on land might as well try to oppose these men as the meek steinbok in the mountain solitudes to escape the expanding bullet of a prince’s rifle.  Yet he also saw how impossible it was to expect a young man like Adone, with his lineage, his temperament, his courage, and his mingling of ignorance and knowledge, to accept the inevitable without combat.  As well might he be bidden to accept dishonour.