'Signor Valdez is nearest to you. Tell him, Valdez,' the German said peremptorily, and threw himself back in his chair.
And then Dino felt Valdez's warm breath in his ear. He heard certain words which, for a moment, seemed to convey no meaning. He looked straight across the room at the foolish painted door through which he had entered. He felt thirsty again—that intolerable thirst! and the gas flickered and made a curious sound—like a whistle; and—and——
He stood up suddenly in his place, and stared at the three impassive faces before him. They were all watching him.
'My God!' he said in a broken whisper; 'great God! you want me to assassinate the King!'
CHAPTER V.
RETROSPECTIVE.
In less than half an hour he had left the place. Valdez accompanied him as far as the café door, but there, with scarcely the exchange of a word, they parted.
'Are you not going home, lad? Go home and get some sleep,' the elder man said, speaking in a tone of great kindness and friendliness. And yes, Dino admitted, he was tired. And with that they separated: but he would not go home yet. With the instinct of one born and brought up by the sea, it was to the sea he turned, naturally and unconsciously, as another man might have turned to an open window. He walked fast until he reached the low parapet which runs along the embankment of the public walk; but, once there, his pace slackened. The night was growing quiet; the wind had fallen perceptibly with the setting of the moon. There were many clouds still, but broken and moving; and clear dark spaces of the sky where the stars sparkled frostily. Below, the water was still restlessly leaping and falling beneath the low sea-wall, a dark unquiet surface crossed with long pale streaks of foam. He walked up and down, slowly, by the edge of a clump of ilex trees, his hands in his pockets, his head a little bent, in the attitude of a man who is thinking intently. Now and then, at the louder splash of some wave which broke higher than its fellows, he lifted up his face automatically and looked about him with a blank, confused stare. In truth he was feeling little more than an overwhelming sense of confusion; nothing seemed real, within or without; he was only conscious that all was changed around him, and he could not realise the blow.
Dino's strongest personal impressions, all his most treasured boyish remembrances, were in some way connected with his father, who had died young, and when the boy was not more than twelve or thirteen years of age. Any one else remembering Olinto de Rossi—had there indeed been any one left in the very least likely to speak of him—any other person would, in all probability, have summed him up briefly as a handsome, fickle, enthusiastic young man, who—having begun life with a tolerable fortune, a persuasive tongue, a singularly equable and lovable temper, and an absolute incapacity for denying himself the smallest satisfaction—had ended by dying miserably of consumption at thirty-five; having in the interval married; spent all his money; and earned for himself some measure of local notoriety as a sort of popular demagogue, a speaker and leader at democratic meetings.