“You mean they die young in the mines?  That is what I have been told.”

“Yes, Signore, in their twenty-eighth year the people are at the end of life; at the age of twelve they are already stooped and wrinkled old men and women.  For the children it is most terrible; it is they who climb up the high ladders out of the pits in the earth—­it gives one a foretaste of inferno to see such things. Cosi Dio, m’ ajuti, it is true!  Yet so they live—­otherwise they must die.  What can we do?  Since the Santa Maria does not intervene, the poor must work or starve.  They have not the money to go away to the country beyond the sea, to America, the land of plenty!  If some of the rich abundance might be brought to my people——­” He shook his head, looking, it seemed, beyond the white walls of the room, as though he saw a vision.

Then slowly, carefully, Derby explained.  It was to bring some of the customs of the land of plenty that he had come.  He would pay the men—­the father, the brother, the big son—­more money than had been earned hitherto by the whole family.  No, His Eminence did not understand—­the work was not to be harder, but easier!  And for the reason that he had already explained:  Machinery would take the place of children’s hands; steel pipes, and not human beings, would descend into the stifling fumes.  He wanted to get a few intelligent men to go with their families to the deserted village clustered about the “Little Devil.”

Still the old man sat, looking straight before him.

“All that you tell me, Signore,” he said at last, his voice echoing a sweetness, a cheerful patience that was doubtless the keynote to his nature—­“it all sounds very beautiful; but, indeed, it cannot be!  The great Duke Scorpa has given the matter much thought.  The mine owners cannot pay the people more—­there is scarcely any profit as it is.  The duke has often told me this himself, so I know it to be true.”

Derby thereupon said that the great Duke Scorpa had doubtless done everything possible, and that under the old method there had been no help for the conditions, but—­and again he expressed himself as clearly as possible—­with the new method and with machinery, one man could do the work of many.  So the wages might be trebled and yet the mines be made to pay.

As Derby talked, a faint color mounted in the cheeks of the archbishop—­his eyes grew eagerly wistful, and at last he leaned forward in his chair, his voice almost breathless as he asked, “Can such a thing be true—­that in your country the father can earn sufficient that the little children need not work?  Ah, Signore—­who knows?—­who knows?—­may be at last the cry of the bambinos has reached the throne of the Santa Vergine!” He sat again silent, but this time with a smile on his lips.  Then the old woman appeared in the doorway and the archbishop arose.