The remorse in his soul was keen, inasmuch as without him Adone would never have known of his descent from the lords of Ruscino, and never, probably, have acquired that “little learning” which a poet of the north has said is a dangerous thing.

“Better,” thought Don Silverio, with tormenting self-reproach, “better have left him to his plough, to his scythe, to his reaping-hook; better have left him in ignorance of the meaning of art and of study; better have left him a mere peasant to beget peasants like himself.  Then he would have suffered less, and might possibly have taken peaceably such compensation as the law would have allowed him for the loss to his land, and have gone away to the West, as so many go, leaving the soil they were born on to pass out of culture.”

Would Adone ever have done that?  No; he would not; he was wedded to the soil like the heaths that grew out of it.  He might be violently dragged away, but he would never live elsewhere; his heart had struck its roots too deeply into the earth which nurtured him.

“Why did you tell him of all the great men that lived?” Clelia Alba had often said to him.  “Why did you fill his soul with that hunger which no bread that is baked can content?  We, who work to live, have no time to do aught except work, and sleep awhile to get strength for more work; and so on, always the same, until age ties knots in our sinews, and makes our blood thin and slow.  What use is it to open gates to him which he must never pass, to make his mind a tangled skein that can never be undone?  When you work hard you want to rest in your resting hours, not to dream.  Dreaming is no rest.  He is always dreaming, and now he dreams of blood and fire.”

Don Silverio’s heart was with them, and by all the obligations of his calling was forced to be against them.  He was of a militant temper; he would gladly have led them into action as did the martial priests of old; but his sense, his duty, his conscience, all forbade him to even show them such encouragement as would lie in sympathy.  Had he been rich he would have taken their cause into the tribunals and contested this measure inch by inch, however hopelessly.  But who would plead for a poor parish, for a penniless priest?  What payment could he offer, he who could scarcely find the coins to fill his salt-box or to mend his surplice?

A great anxiety consumed him.  He saw no way out of this calamity.  The people were wronged, grossly wronged, but how could they right that wrong?  Bloodshed would not alter it, or even cure it.  What was theirs, and the earth’s, was to be taken from them; and how were they to be persuaded that to defend their own would be a crime.

“There is nothing, then, but for the people to lie down and let the artillery roll over them!” said Adone once, with bitter emphasis.