“My son,” the priest answered solemnly, “Christ drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, for His House shall be called a House of Prayer, and they had made it a den of thieves.”
After a long silence, Arthur whispered tremulously:
“And Italy shall be His Temple when they are driven out——”
He stopped; and the soft answer came back:
“'The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith the Lord.'”
CHAPTER V.
THAT afternoon Arthur felt the need of a long walk. He intrusted his luggage to a fellow-student and went to Leghorn on foot.
The day was damp and cloudy, but not cold; and the low, level country seemed to him fairer than he had ever known it to look before. He had a sense of delight in the soft elasticity of the wet grass under his feet and in the shy, wondering eyes of the wild spring flowers by the roadside. In a thorn-acacia bush at the edge of a little strip of wood a bird was building a nest, and flew up as he passed with a startled cry and a quick fluttering of brown wings.
He tried to keep his mind fixed upon the devout meditations proper to the eve of Good Friday. But thoughts of Montanelli and Gemma got so much in the way of this devotional exercise that at last he gave up the attempt and allowed his fancy to drift away to the wonders and glories of the coming insurrection, and to the part in it that he had allotted to his two idols. The Padre was to be the leader, the apostle, the prophet before whose sacred wrath the powers of darkness were to flee, and at whose feet the young defenders of Liberty were to learn afresh the old doctrines, the old truths in their new and unimagined significance.