'Good God!' said Dino, under his breath, looking up with blank eyes at the clear starlit sky above him.
'There's no need for many words to settle it.' He hesitated; and then went on with sudden fluency as if the long meditated speech were forcing its own way out. 'See here, lad. It's not so much more than a week since you lost your place because o' that infernal tomfoolery of a procession. I'm not casting it up at you, my boy; not I. But there 'tis; you made a mistake. It might have been a worse one, for you meant no harm, and as things go it's all turned out for the best. I wouldn't have cared to marry my little girl to a writing fellow, and you've got the make of a sailor in you, lad; I always said it. When God Almighty shuts one door in an honest man's face, if you look about you you'll see He's opened another. But it might ha' turned out different.'
He lowered his voice, and added: 'I don't blame you, but I've kept my ears open, and there are things said about you that I don't like; I don't like. When a man lets his net down to the bottom he's sure to catch mud. I saw your father do it. He called himself a republican too. You must give it up, my Dino.'
'I can't do that,' said Dino, in a very low voice.
The words implied so much to himself that he could scarcely believe in the reality of things—he felt involved in the fantastic irony of a dream—when Drea burst out laughing, good-naturedly.
'Why, lad, you don't understand me? Where are your wits? I am speaking Italian, mi pare. It isn't to oblige me I want you to give up that confounded club of yours, and all the nonsense that goes with it. It's so that you can marry Italia. Why, lad, one would think that I was torturing you instead of telling you how to marry your sweetheart. You one o' those damned radical rogues, my Dino, the little chap I taught how to handle an oar? Come, come, lad, drop the nonsense. It's being shut up between four walls that put it into you, I'll go bail. Politics! Lord bless you! a capful o' wind will soon blow 'em out of you. They're like weevils in a biscuit, they eat all the good; you can't get rid o' them too quickly.'
'Drea, it is you who will not understand. You are unjust; you have always been unjust to my father. But his ideas are mine. I will not——' he stopped, with a horrible sense of sinking at his heart. What were these ideas to which he professed himself so willing to sacrifice all the rest? But it was imperatively necessary to make Drea understand the situation. 'I cannot give up my—my convictions. For no reason in the world. Not even to marry Italia.'
There was an instant of terrible silence.
'Are you mad, boy?' demanded Drea, in a sort of subdued growl.
'I am not mad,' Dino answered.