Chance having thrown him, while very young, among men of determined political sympathies, he had insensibly acquired so many of their opinions, which he afterwards retailed and amplified with so much natural ingenuity and eloquence, as to have earned no slight fame for himself as a radical patriot of extreme views. In point of fact, he had taken to speech-making in the first place, almost by accident, and as he would have taken to drink, or to gambling, or to any other form of excitement which appealed to his pleasure-giving, pleasure-loving, nature. And having once begun to taste the sweets of popularity, he was fascinated by them; he required no especial convictions, the applause and admiration he received were quite enough to determine his vocation.
But it was not to be supposed that a reputation obtained in this manner could last for ever, or indeed for very long. Before many years had passed there had come a sensible diminution in the number and the fervour of De Rossi's political adherents. The elder men of his party had long since ceased to take serious notice of his impassioned prophecies; and now even the editors of the fiercest socialistic papers—the compiler of Il Lucifero of Ancona, and the gentleman who was responsible for the appearance of the Leghorn Thief—even they had begun to fight shy of their old and brilliant contributor. By the time little Dino was old enough to become his father's companion, following him about from meeting to meeting with undoubting, enthusiastic admiration and love, it is probable that the faith and awe the elder De Rossi excited in his little listener was very nearly the sum total of the credence he received.
On the whole, this defection did not depress him seriously. Perhaps he never thoroughly believed in it, or that he had in any way deserved it; one's own account of one's motives, and the way they strike a friend, often bearing much the same relation to each other as a photograph does to a portrait. Each represents the same individual; but one is fact; the other may be a poem. And from first to last Dino saw nothing but the poem; his father treating him throughout with a gentleness, a pride in his clever boy, and an amount of expansive affection, which cost him nothing, and which bound the lad to him with a more than common reverence and love. As for his wife, for Dino's mother, she was by nature a silent woman, who did not need to express all that she thought; and this, Olinto sometimes reflected, was perhaps fortunate: the view other people take of the less admirable consequences of our actions being apt to strike one as morbid. After all, her husband was never positively unkind to her. He had never purposely deceived her. He was simply an ordinary man; selfish, good-humoured, eager for any new amusement; a creature of fine moments and detestable habits. And, after all, when his wife had married him it was because she wanted to do so; because nothing else could or would satisfy her. If she had made a mistake, well! perhaps he too had had his illusions. And it is the law of life—a woman loves what she can evoke, but what she marries in a man is not his best, but his average, self.
Being gifted with a perfect, an unalterable good humour, De Rossi accepted his wife's altered opinion of him as he accepted the reduced circumstances of his material life: both were more or less of his own making, and between them they troubled him but very little. His experience of life was a succession of easy contentments. He enjoyed his own emotions. He liked sinning as he liked repenting, and in both phases he was alike sincere—and unreliable. He was capable of the deepest enthusiasms—the tenderest emotions—but he was unable to master his own shifting moods for a week. His facile nature lapsed away from the highest points it reached with the inevitableness of water which seeks its level. He was attractive; he was weak; he was untrustworthy;—and yet he was always attractive. 'The sort of man,' Valdez said of him, 'the sort of man who orders his dog "to come here," and when the beast lies down in a corner,—"Ah, the clever dog! he knew I was going to tell him to do that next!" says my amiable gentleman.'
Before her marriage—-she was five years older than her husband—Catarina had been the confidential maid of the Marchesa Balbi. She had never wholly lost her place at the Villa. When the young heir was born, a month or two after the birth of Dino, she was, at her own earnest entreaty, made the balia of the little Marchese. Whenever the family came to Leghorn she was always going up to the Villa; the Marchesa was perpetually sending for her. There was no great mental barrier between the Italian lady and her old servant: both were convent bred, with much the same sort of education—and what hopes and fears had they not shared since then in common! Catarina would stand for hours at the foot of her old mistress' sofa, talking to her in undertones of things which every one else had forgotten. The two women were bound to one another by a whole world of recollected emotions—the night young Gasparo was ill; his first steps; the day he had first moved alone from the arms of his nurse to the arms of his mother,—to each of them these had been events in life.
As the years went by Olinto objected less and less to his wife's frequent absences. 'She is a good woman, my Dino, but hard—hard,' he would say sometimes to his boy—and by the very passion with which the child loved him he could see how much he had inherited of his mother's loyal and serious nature. He began to fear vaguely lest, his boy growing older, he should begin to learn to judge him—and he had grown strangely dependent on that one unhesitating faith.
Things were then in this condition, when one day, Dino being at the time some twelve years old, he was taken by his father to a political banquet, a sort of subscription supper given by one of the clubs to which Olinto had at some time belonged.
Dino never forgot that supper. There had been some objection made to his own presence when he was first taken in; high words exchanged between some of the men present and his father; sneering references, which the child only half understood, to other debts, and former feasts unpaid for. In the midst of the confusion Dino saw his father rise suddenly from his place at the table; he looked about him, waving his hand to command silence: his face was very white.
There was a general outcry of 'Sit down! sit down!'—'It's too early yet!'—'We don't want any more speeches;' and then Dino saw the man who was sitting on his other side lean well forward and put his hand upon his father's shoulder. 'Don't try and talk to them now. Wait till after supper. And—sit down, De Rossi, do. There's a good fellow,' he said. And then, as Olinto yielded mechanically to the pressure, his neighbour drew back, looking kindly enough into Dino's terrified face.
'Don't be frightened, my little fellow. They often make a noise at these suppers. It means—nothing,' he said, with a half contemptuous smile.