Valdez was silent. Then he said, 'Did it never occur to you that there is a chance, just a chance, of your getting away after all? Think of the crowd and the confusion. And if you once get outside of Rome the Society will soon find means of taking you safely beyond the frontier. There is always that chance, you know.'
'I don't believe it,' said Dino, turning away abruptly.
But the words haunted him—'There's always a chance'—'always a chance;' they rang their changes upon his brain far into the wakeful night. Once, towards morning, unable to sleep, he rose and groped his way to the door of the hut belonging to Valdez's friend and host. The shore stretched before him, and the moonlight on the wild sea grass. When the moon went under a cloud the wet sand by the edge of the receding wave was of a bright steely blue; far away near the horizon the light still shone, a streak of burnished silver, upon the tranquil sea.
Valdez was sleeping quietly; Dino went back and threw himself down by his side.
It was late when the young man awoke. The little hut was empty; his companion had gone hours before, leaving behind him a message, a few scribbled words, to say that the fishing-smack which was to take Dino back, by another route, to Leghorn, might be expected to call at Bocca d'Arno towards sunset that same afternoon.
There was food and water in the hut. It was one of those small thatched cabins, built for the use and shelter of the owners of the great stationary nets suspended from beams and worked by means of a crank, of which there are several by the mouth of the river.
Dino spent the long day in the woods. It was a lovely morning when he first went out, with a touch of April sweetness in the air. It is a wild and silent shore. The flat-topped pines grow to the very verge of the sand-hills. On the sea side the forest ends in a thick undergrowth of dark-spreading juniper bushes, which fill the hollows of the dunes and mingle with the thistles and the tough salt grass. And the wood itself is always filled with the sound and savour of the sea. Before a storm the white-winged gulls flit wildly in and out between the pine tops. There is fine white sand underfoot beneath the moss and the fallen needles, and thick growths of all strong-stemmed aromatic sea-loving plants; blue rosemary, and tufted heather, and great golden-crested reeds. Dino lying in one of those sheltered hollows, with closed eyes, could scarcely distinguish between the melancholy murmur of the trees overhead and the sleepy murmur of the restless waves. The very air had its mingled breath of salt and spiciness, of the sea and the resinous pines.
By Monte Nero all nature had seemed dead in his eyes; the downs there had been nothing more to him than an empty hillside, a dull background to his own dominant existence. But here, in this still wood—perhaps because of his very surrender of that existence—there was infinite charm and interest in every moment of the long calm hours. He felt himself a mere spectator watching the natural life of things. He found occupation for half a morning in seeing the warm spring sunshine creep across the straight pine stems; in looking up at the tender blue of the sky above him; in listening to the myriad small noises of the woods; bird notes, and the tapping of the wood-peckers, the hum of insects, the cracking and stirring of the branches, and the rustling furtive tread of shy four-footed creatures, young rabbits, and bright-eyed squirrels, or the quick darting of green lizards across the thin, short grass.
Once he reflected, 'They will say in the papers, afterwards, the prisoner passed a day before his crime concealed in the woods at Bocca d'Arno. "Concealed in the woods!" But will it mean this to them?' He looked down, between his elbows, at a patch of greenest moss; a miniature pine-tree, some three inches high, raised itself proudly above the other small plants, and a couple of shiny-backed beetles wandered up and down its stem. Dino felt in his pocket for crumbs, and strewed them before the insects, but the motion of his hand frightened them away. Presently a company of red-headed ants came up out of the ground and attacked the provisions. Two of the ants fought one another for a particular crumb. Dino watched their movements with the intensest interest. When they had vanished—'The prisoner passed the day before committing his atrocious crime concealed in the woods of Bocca d'Arno,' he repeated solemnly, and he laughed aloud.
No one came near him. Once he heard some quick footsteps and the cheery whistle of a woodman tramping along some hidden path on his way home to dinner. And once, from between the leaves of the neighbouring alder thicket—young leaves so brightly green that they might be mistaken for flowers—there came a heavy rustling sound which excited his curiosity. He strolled over to the place, and peered in between the branches at a pair of those great melancholy-eyed white oxen common to that part of the country.