The room was dusky, cool, silent; he sat down in it and waited; he could hear the loud, uneven beating of his own heart in the stillness.
As he felt now, so, he thought, must feel men who have heard their own death-sentence, and are thrust alone into a cell.
If Don Silverio could do nothing, to whom could he turn?
Could he induce the people to rise? It would be their ruin as well as his, this rape of the river. Would they bear it as they bore taxation, neglect, conscription, hunger?
It was not half an hour, although it seemed to him half a day, which passed before Don Silverio came down the stone stair, his little dog running and leaping about him. He seated himself before Adone, by the shuttered window, through which, by chinks and holes in the wood, there came rays of light and tendrils of vine.
Then detail by detail, with lucidity and brevity, he narrated all he had heard and done in Rome, and which it was exceeding hard to bring home to the comprehension of a mind wholly ignorant of such things.
"When I reached Rome," he explained, "I was for some days in despair. The deputy of San Beda was not at the Chamber. He was in Sicily. Another deputy, a friend of the Prior at San Beda, to whom I had a letter, was very ill with typhoid fever. I knew not where to turn. I could not knock at the doors of strangers without credentials. Then I remembered that one with whom I had been friends, great friends, when we were both seminarists, had become a great man at the Vaticano. It was scarcely possible that he, in his great elevation, would recollect one unseen for a quarter of a century. But I took courage and sent in my name. Imagine my surprise and emotion when I was admitted at once to his presence, and was received by him with the uttermost kindness. He assisted me in every way. He could not of course move ostensibly in a matter of the government, himself, but he gave me letters to those who could obtain me the information and the interviews which I desired. He was goodness itself, and through him I was even received by his Holiness. But from all those political and financial people whom I saw I learned but the same thing. The matter is far advanced, is beyond any alteration. The company is formed. The concurrence of parliament is not to be, but has long been, given. The ministry favours the project. They all repeated to me the same formula: public works are to the public interest. They babbled commonplaces. They spoke of great advantages to the province. I pleaded as forcibly as I could in the interests of this valley, and I opposed fact to formula. But my facts were not those which they wanted; and they told me, politely but unmistakably, that a churchman should not seek to interfere with civil matters. The promoters are masters of the position. They are all of accord: the foreign bankers, the Italian bankers; the foreign engineers, the Italian engineers; the Technical office, the President of Council, the dicastero of Hygiene, of Agriculture, of Public Works, all of them. Our poor little valley seems to them a desirable prey; they have seized it, they will keep it. They were all courteous enough. They are polite, and even unwilling to cause what they call unnecessary friction. But they will not give an inch. Their talons are in our flesh as an eagle's in a lamb's. One thinks fondly that what a man possesses is his own, be it land, house, stream—what not! But we mistake. There is a thing stronger, higher, more powerful than any poor title of property acquired by heritage, by purchase, or by labour. It is what they call expropriation. You think the Edera cannot be touched: it can be expropriated. You think the Terra Vergine cannot be touched: it can be expropriated. Against expropriation no rights can stand. It is the concentration and crystallisation of Theft legitamised by Government; that is by Force. A vagrant may not take a sheaf of your wheat, a fowl from your hen-house: if he do so, the law protects you and punishes him. A syndicate of rich men, of powerful men, may take the whole of your land, and the State will compel you to accept any arbitrary price which it may choose to put upon your loss. According as you are rich or poor yourself, so great or so small will be the amount awarded to you. All the sub-prefects, all the syndics, all the officials in this province, will be richly rewarded; the people defrauded of the soil and the river will get what may be given them by an enforced valuation. I have conversed with all kinds and conditions of men; and I have heard only one statement in the mouths of all: the matter is beyond all alteration. There is money in it; the men whose trade is money will not let it go. My son, my dearest son, be calm, be prudent. Violence can only injure yourself, and it can save nothing."
He had for the moment spoken as he had been speaking for the last two weeks to men of education and of the world.
He was recalled to the fact that his present auditor did not reason, did not comprehend, only felt, and was drunk with his own force of feeling. The look on Adone's face appalled him.
The youth seemed almost to have no intelligence left, almost as if all which had been said to him had reached neither his ear nor his brain.