Fra Angelo and his nephew were silent for a few moments. The monk was absorbed by the bitter yet glorious memories of his younger days. Michel gazed at him with delight; and, no longer wondering at the martial air and muscular strength concealed beneath the frock, mused with the admiration of an artist upon the strange poesy of that life of devotion to a single idea. If there was something abnormal and, to a certain extent, entertaining in the history of the Capuchin, who still boasted of his life as a bandit and seriously regretted it, there was something truly noble in the way in which the ex-brigand preserved his individual dignity, compromised as it had been in such extraordinary adventures. Dagger or crucifix in hand, slaying traitors in the forest or begging for the poor at the gates of palaces, he was always the same, proud, ingenuous, unbending in his ideas, seeking to do good by the most vigorous methods, detesting cowardly acts with such intensity that he was still quite capable of punishing them with his own hand, utterly unable to understand the selfish motives by which the world is governed, or to believe that any man would not be ready at any moment to attempt the impossible rather than palter with the expedients suggested by cold circumspection.
"Why do you admire the secondary hero of my story?" he said to his nephew when he emerged from his reverie. "Self-sacrifice and patriotism must amount to something in your eyes, for that man had no other motive, and, in the present state of society, would have been only a poor fool—perhaps a lunatic."
"Yes, uncle, sincere devotion and the sacrifice of one's whole individuality to an idea are noble things, and if I had known you in those days—if I had been a man grown—I should probably have followed you into the mountains. I might have been less devotedly attached than you were to the Prince of Castro-Reale, but I trust I should have had the same illusions and the same love for the cause of my country."
"Really, young man?" said Fra Angelo, fixing his penetrating eyes upon Michel's face.
"Really, uncle," the young man replied, proudly raising his head, and sustaining that searching glance with the assurance of conviction.
"And is it too late now to attempt anything, my poor boy?" said Fra Angelo, with a sigh. "Has the time passed when we can believe in the triumph of the truth, and is the new society, which I have had no better chance to study in my cloister than in my bandit's cave, determined to allow itself to be crushed forever?"
"I hope not, uncle. If I thought so, it seems to me that I should no longer have any blood in my veins, inspiration in my brain, or love in my bosom, and that I should no longer be capable of being an artist. But still we must recognize the fact that society is not what it must have been in this island at the beginning of your enterprise. Even if it has taken some steps toward intellectual discoveries, it is certain that the impulses of the heart have lost their energy."
"And you call that progress?" exclaimed the Capuchin, sorrowfully.
"No, far from it," Michel replied; "but how can those who are born during this state of society breathe any other air than that in which they were born, or entertain other ideas than those which have been forced into them? Must we not yield to the evidence, and bend our necks to the yoke of reality? Did not you yourself, my excellent uncle, when you passed from the exciting life of a free adventurer to the inflexible discipline of the cloister, did not you find that society was not what you thought, and that it was no longer possible to effect anything by violence?"
"Alas! that is true!" replied the monk. "During the ten years that I passed in the mountains, I did not know what revolutions were taking place in the manners of civilized mankind. When the Destatore had sent me into the cities with his agents, to try to make satisfactory terms with the nobles whom he had known as loyal patriots, and with the rich and well-educated middle class citizens whom he had known as ardent liberals, I was forced to the conviction that those people were no longer the same, that they had brought up their children with other ideas, that they no longer cared to risk their fortunes and their lives in those hazardous undertakings in which only faith and enthusiasm can perform miracles. Yes, yes, the world had progressed—backward, according to my idea. People no longer talked of anything but making money, of fighting monopolies, of establishing competition, of founding new industries. They all deemed themselves rich already, they were in such haste to become so, and the government could purchase whomsoever it pleased, by the promise of the most trifling privilege. Yes, they had but to promise, to hold out hopes of fortune, and the most ardent patriots pounced upon those hopes, saying: 'industry will give us back our liberty!'