The Waters of Edera

by Ouida

But he argued in vain; logic and persuasion are alike useless when opposed to the rock of ignorance and obstinacy. She held him in deep reverence; she brought her conscience to his judgment; she thought him beyond ordinary humanity: but when he endeavoured to persuade her that her son was wrong he failed.

"Sir, you know that this crime against the river will ruin us," she said doggedly. "Why then should you try to tie our hands? I do not know what Adone does; his mind is hid from me, but if, as you say, he wants a rising of our people, it is natural and just."

When the mind of the peasant — man or woman — be made up in its stubbornness, all learning, wisdom, experience, even fact, speak in vain; it opposes to all proofs the passive resistance of a dogged incredulity: to reason with it is as useless as to quarry stone with a razor.

Many and many a time had he given up in exhaustion and nausea his endeavours to convince the rural mind of some simple fact, some clear cause, some elementary principle. He knew that Clelia Alba would never believe in the exile which would be her certain fate until the armed and liveried creatures of the State should drive her from her home by order of the State. He had seen in Rome that there was no possible chance of opposing this enterprise against the Edera water. It had been decided on by men of money who had the ear of ministers, the precedence in ante-chambers, the means of success in political departments and in commercial centres. A few scattered provincial owners of land and labourers on land might as well try to oppose these men as the meek steinbok in the mountain solitudes to escape the expanding bullet of a prince's rifle. Yet he also saw how impossible it was to expect a young man like Adone, with his lineage, his temperament, his courage, and his mingling of ignorance and knowledge, to accept the inevitable without combat. As well might he be bidden to accept dishonour.

The remorse in his soul was keen, inasmuch as without him Adone would never have known of his descent from the lords of Ruscino, and never, probably, have acquired that "little learning" which a poet of the north has said is a dangerous thing.

"Better," thought Don Silverio, with tormenting self-reproach, "better have left him to his plough, to his scythe, to his reaping-hook; better have left him in ignorance of the meaning of art and of study; better have left him a mere peasant to beget peasants like himself. Then he would have suffered less, and might possibly have taken peaceably such compensation as the law would have allowed him for the loss to his land, and have gone away to the West, as so many go, leaving the soil they were born on to pass out of culture."

Would Adone ever have done that? No; he would not; he was wedded to the soil like the heaths that grew out of it. He might be violently dragged away, but he would never live elsewhere; his heart had struck its roots too deeply into the earth which nurtured him.

"Why did you tell him of all the great men that lived?" Clelia Alba had often said to him. "Why did you fill his soul with that hunger which no bread that is baked can content? We, who work to live, have no time to do aught except work, and sleep awhile to get strength for more work; and so on, always the same, until age ties knots in our sinews, and makes our blood thin and slow. What use is it to open gates to him which he must never pass, to make his mind a tangled skein that can never be undone? When you work hard you want to rest in your resting hours, not to dream. Dreaming is no rest. He is always dreaming, and now he dreams of blood and fire."

Don Silverio's heart was with them, and by all the obligations of his calling was forced to be against them. He was of a militant temper; he would gladly have led them into action as did the martial priests of old; but his sense, his duty, his conscience, all forbade him to even show them such encouragement as would lie in sympathy. Had he been rich he would have taken their cause into the tribunals and contested this measure inch by inch, however hopelessly. But who would plead for a poor parish, for a penniless priest? What payment could he offer, he who could scarcely find the coins to fill his salt-box or to mend his surplice?

A great anxiety consumed him. He saw no way out of this calamity. The people were wronged, grossly wronged, but how could they right that wrong? Bloodshed would not alter it, or even cure it. What was theirs, and the earth's, was to be taken from them; and how were they to be persuaded that to defend their own would be a crime.