“Garibaldi,” muttered Adone, “he had naught but raw levies!”

“Garabaldi was an instinctive military genius, like Aguto, like Ferruccio, like Gian delle Bande Neri, like all the great Condottieri.  But he would probably have rotted in the Spielberg, or been shot in some fortress of the Quadrilateral, if he had not been supported by that proclamation of Genoa and campaign of Lombardy, which were Louis Napoleon’s supreme errors in French policy.”

Adone was silent, stung by that sense of discomfiture and mortification which comes upon those who feel their own inability to carry on an argument.  To him Garibaldi was superhuman, fabulous, far away in the mists of an heroic past, as Ulysses to Greek youths.

“You, sir, may preach patience,” he said sullenly.  “It is no doubt your duty to preach it.  But I cannot be patient.  My heart would choke in my throat.”

Don Silverio looked him straight in the face.

“What is it you intend to do?”

“I tell you that you can do nothing, my son.”

“How know you that, reverend?  You are a priest, not a man.”

A faint red colour came over Don Silverio’s colourless face.

“One may be both,” he said simply.  “You are distraught, my son, by a great calamity.  Try and see yourself as other see you, and do not lead the poor and ignorant into peril.  Will the Edera waters be freer because your neighbours and you are at the galleys?  The men of gold, who have the men of steel behind them, will be always stronger than you.”

“God is over us all,” said Adone.

Don Silverio was silent.  He could not refute that expression of faith, but in his soul he could not share it; and Adone had said it, less in faith than in obstinacy.  He meant to rouse the country if he could, let come what might of the rising.

Who could tell the issue?  A spark from a poor man’s hearth had set a city in flames before now.

“How can you think me indifferent?” said Don Silverio.  “Had I no feeling for you should I not feel for myself?  Almost certainly my life will be doomed to end here.  Think you that I shall see with callousness the ruin of this fair landscape, which has been my chief consolation through so many dreary years?  You, who deem yourself so wholly without hope, may find solace if you choose to take it.  You are young, you are free, all the tenderest ties of life can be yours if you choose; if this home be destroyed you may make another where you will.  But I am bound here.  I must obey; I must submit.  I cannot move; I cannot alter or renew my fate; and to me the destruction of the beauty of the Edera valley will be the loss of the only pleasure of my existence.  Try and see with my eyes, Adone; it may help you to bear your burden.”

But he might as well have spoken to the water itself, or to the boulders of its rocks, or to the winds which swept its surface.

“It is not yours,” said Adone, almost brutally.  “You were not born here.  You cannot know!  Live elsewhere?  My mother and I?  Sooner a thousand times would we drown in Edera!”