"Send these howling children away," he said.
She caught up a thong of leather and lashed it about them as if there was no other mode of dispersing them, and they scattered out of the way, yelping like dogs. Trevor looked on, wondering if any one of these almost naked and wholly filthy brood could be Sidney Martin's son.
"Tell me," he said, "which is the English boy."
Without a word the woman turned into the hut, and dragged out a child, with no clothing on but a ragged shirt scarcely reaching to his knees. The child's eyes were dazzled with the light, but they were red and weak; his skin was grimy with thick dirt, and his uncombed hair hung in matted tufts about his face and neck. No sooner did the other children see him than they began to howl and yell again; and the boy, tearing himself away from the woman's grasp, sprang like a monkey up the rocks, and having reached a safe height, looked down with a savage, uncouth grin upon those below him. The other children tried in vain to dislodge him by throwing stones at him; he had them at an advantage, and hit so many of them with the larger stones he hurled from above that they gave up the attack and went back to their sheep and goats.
"Good Heavens!" cried Trevor, with a sudden emotion of pity flooding his cold nature, "is it possible that this can be Sidney Martin's son?"
He sat down on a rock and looked around him. Here almost all traces of civilization were absent. These hovels were not fit for human habitation—hardly fit for pigs, he said to himself. Certainly there was a hideous crucifix erected in a conspicuous spot; but it was only a brutal and distorted representation of the central fact of Christianity, and appeared to partake of the savagery of its surroundings. There was nothing to be seen from this point but a gloomy circle of rocks, barren and hard and cold, upon which neither tree nor flower grew, and as his eye glanced round them it fell upon the nearly naked but vigorous form of Sidney's child, standing erect on a peak, and jabbering in some unknown and barbarous dialect. Chiara's sister shook her clenched fist at him, and screamed out some rough menace.
"What do you call the boy?" he asked.
"Martino," she said; "that was his father's name."
"Does he know anything? Does he learn anything?" Trevor inquired.
"He knows as much as the rest," she answered sullenly; "there's no schoolmaster up here. Besides, he is the child of heathen parents, though our good padre did baptize him. His mother was buried like a dog in the cemetery; only Chiara and the gravedigger went to her funeral, and no masses were said for her. Martino isn't like the child of Christian people. His mother is in hell, and his father will go there when he dies. It was very good of our padre to have him baptized."