'I say, De Rossi, get up on your chair, man. We can't hear you,' some one called out again; the suggestion was received with another hoarse roar of approval. Two or three men moved towards the orator as if with the intention of forcing him to adopt this new position.
'For God's sake, can't you let the man alone? Don't you see that he is ill?' cried Valdez, suddenly starting forward.
Some one, more humane than his fellows, had poured De Rossi out a glass of wine. He lifted it to his lips now, facing them all, with flushed face and wild glittering eyes, 'I drink to your health, gentlemen!'
He stood so for a second amidst frantic shouts of applause, with one hand outstretched. To Dino's eyes he looked like some demi-god mastering a whirlwind. And then all of a sudden the brimming glass slipped from his nerveless hand, and was dashed into a thousand pieces. He watched it fall with a half-bewildered laugh; he staggered, and clutched at the table; a sudden red mark discoloured his smiling mouth, and he fell heavily forward, face downwards, without a word or a groan.
He had broken a blood-vessel; he was still insensible as they carried him back to his home through the dark and empty streets; and Dino walked beside the litter and held his father's hand. His wife met them at the door with Palmira, who was then a baby, in her arms. Her face seemed turned to stone as she listened to Valdez's explanations. Only, as they laid her husband gently down upon his bed, and uncovered his face, a quick spasm contracted her rigid mouth, and she stooped and kissed the dying man upon his forehead.
'I knew it would come. It had to come,' she said drearily. And after that she scarcely spoke again, turning away from all consolation, and seeming to find relief only in the few practical cares which were left to her.
And so, like some impatient wave breaking too far from shore, whose troubled existence reaches its climax in but one instant of wasted force, in the midst of a sea where every wave which lifts itself must fall, so Olinto died, and his idle raving was hushed, and his place knew him no more. Of mourners he had few or none; it was only to his boy that he left so much as a memory. That was almost the lad's entire heritage, that and the friendship of Pietro Valdez.
As little Dino grew up every other detail of his life seemed to change about him, as things do change in the lives of people too poor to order their surrounding circumstances. The Marchesa came less and less often to the Villa Balbi; he had lost the familiar companionship of his foster-brother; of his first childish recollections there was only old Drea left, and the dear face of Italia, to illuminate the past. But, whatever else was altered, he had never lost sight of Valdez. Indeed, since that night the man seemed to have taken a strange fancy to the boy; as the years went on those two were always more and more together; an arbitrary friendship, in which one was ever the leader and teacher and guide.
Even to Dino there was always a certain mystery about Valdez, but it was the mystery of pure blankness; there were no secrets about him, chiefly because he seemed to own no history. He never willingly spoke of himself, or alluded to former acquaintances or habits. If he had any one belonging to him, if he had ever been married, no one precisely knew. He never spoke to women, or appeared interested in them. He lived alone, where he had lived for twenty years, in two small rooms in one of the narrowest streets of Leghorn. His wants were few and unchanging, and the money which he earned amply sufficed for them. In his working hours he followed his trade, as he called it, with the sober exactitude and indifference of a machine. He was a Spaniard by birth, and a Protestant by conviction; and he believed in a coming universal republic as he believed in the rising of the sun. After a dozen years of companionship that was the most that Dino knew of him.
*****