The Italian goes over seas, indeed; huddled under the hatches of emigrant ships; miserable, starved, confined; unable to move, scarce able to breathe, like the unhappy beasts carried with him. But he never goes willingly; he never wrenches himself from the soil without torn nerves and aching heart; if he lives and makes a little money in exile he comes back to the shadow of the village church, to the sound of the village bell which he knew in his boyhood, to walk in the lanes where he threw his wooden quoit as a lad, and to play dominoes under the green bough of the winehouse where as a child he used to watch his elders and envy them.
Most of these people dwelling on the Edera water had not been five miles away from the river in all their lives. The moorland birds and beasts went farther afield than they. They had no interest in what was beyond their own freehold; they did not even know or care whither the water went, or whence it came. Where it was, they owned it. That was enough for them.
"Sir, what is it Adone does?" said Clelia Alba, one dusky and stormy eve after vespers. "At nightfall out he goes; and never a word to me, only 'Your blessing, mother,' he says, as if he might lose his life where he goes. I thought at first it was some love matter, for he is young; but it cannot be that, for he is too serious, and he goes fully armed, with his father's pistols in his belt and his own long dagger in his stocking. True, they go so to a love tryst, if it be a dangerous one; if the woman be wedded; only I think it is not that, for men in love are different. I think that he broods over some act."
"Neither you nor I can do aught. He is of age to judge for himself," said Don Silverio; "but, like you, I do not think a woman is the cause of his absence."
"Can you not speak to him, sir?"
"I have spoken. It is useless. He is moved by a motive stronger than any argument we can use. In a word, good Clelia, this coming seizure of the water is suffering so great to him that he loses his reason. He is trying to make the men of the commune see as he sees. He wants to rouse them, to arm them. He might as well set the calves in your stalls to butt the mountain granite."
"Maybe, sir," said Clelia Alba, unwillingly; but her eye gleamed, and her stern, proud face grew harder. "But he has the right to do it if he can. If they touch the water they are thieves, worse than those who came down from the hills in the years of my girlhood."
"You would encourage him in insurrection, then?"
"Nay, I would not do that; but neither would I blame him. Every man has a right to defend his own. Neither his father nor mine, sir, were cowards."
"This is no question of cowardice. It is a question of common sense. A few country lads cannot oppose a government. With what weapons can they do so? Courage I honour; without it all active virtues are supine; but it is not courage to attempt the impossible, to lead the ignorant to death — or worse."