“Now, children,” he cried, all out of breath, throwing himself into an arm-chair. “Have you heard the great news? The ultimatum——”
“I have just told my wife.”
“Tell me, dear papa, what you think,” I asked anxiously. “Will that prevent the war?”
“I am not aware that an ultimatum ever prevented a war. It would indeed be only prudent of this wretched rabble of Italians to give in and not expose themselves to a second Novara. Ah! if good Father Radetzky had not died last year I believe he would, in spite of his ninety years, have put himself again at the head of his army, and, by God! I would have marched along with him. We two have, I think, shown already how to manage these foreign scum. But it seems they have not yet had enough of it, the puppies! They want a second lesson. All right. Our Lombardo-Venetian kingdom will get a handsome addition in the Piedmontese territory, and I already look forward to the entry of our troops into Turin.”
“But, papa, you speak just as if war were already declared, and you were glad of it! But how if Arno has to go too?” And the tears were already in my eyes again.
“That he will too—the enviable young fellow!”
“But my terror! The danger——”
“Eh! what? Danger! ‘A man may fight and not be slain,’ as the saying goes. I have gone through more than one campaign, thank God, and been wounded more than once—and yet I am all alive, just because it was ordained that I should live through it.”
The old fatalist way of talking! the same as prevailed to settle Ruru’s choice of a profession—and which even now appeared to me again as quite philosophical.
“Even if it should chance that my regiment is not ordered out——” Arno began.