‘No, I cannot eat,’ said the boy, as he wiped the tears from his eyes.
‘Come and taste a glass of the generous Orvieto, however.’
‘No, Pippo; I could not swallow it,’ said he, in a half-choking voice.
‘Ah!’ muttered the old man with a sigh, ‘Signor Gabriel’s talk rarely makes one relish the meal they wait for,’ and with bent-down head he re-entered the house.
The feeling Gerald had long experienced toward Gabriel was one of fear, almost verging upon terror. There was about the man’s look, his voice, his manner, something that portended danger. Do what he would, the boy never could make his sense of gratitude rise superior to his fear. He tried, over and over again, to think of him only as one who had saved his life, and to whom he owed all the present comforts he enjoyed; but above these thoughts there triumphed a terrible dread of the man, and a strange, mysterious belief that he possessed a sort of control over his destiny.
‘If it were indeed so,’ muttered he to himself, ‘and that his shadow were to be over me through life, I ‘d curse the day he carried me from the shore of the Lagoscuro!’
Night was rapidly closing in, and the dreary landscape was every moment growing sadder and drearier. As the sun sank beneath the hills the heavy exhalations began to well up from the damp earth, till a bluish haze of vapour rested over the plains and even partly up the mountain side. An odour, oppressive and sickening, accompanied this mist, which embarrassed the respiration, and made the senses dull and weary; and yet there sat Gerald, drinking in these noxious influences, careless of his fate, and half triumphing in his own indifference as to life. A drowsy stupor was rapidly gaining on him, when he felt his arm violently shaken, and, looking up, saw Gabriel at his side. In a gruff, rude voice, he chided him for his imprudence, and told him to go in.
‘Isn’t my life, at least, my own?’ said Gerald boldly.
‘That it is not,’ said the other. ‘Your priestly teachers might have told you that you hold it in trust for Him who gave it. I, and men like me, would say that each of us here has his allotted task to do in life; and that he is but a coward, or as bad as a coward, who skulks his share of it. Go in, I say, boy.’
Gerald obeyed without a word; and now a slavish sense of fear came over him, and he felt that this man swayed and controlled him as he pleased.