“Believe me, Donna Micaela,” he said, “it will be accomplished in less than seven years. In the year nineteen hundred it will be ready. Then martyrs will have bled; then apostles will have spoken; then shall crowds upon crowds have been won over! We, the rightful sons of the earth, shall have the victory! And she shall lie before us in all her loveliness; she shall bring us beauty, bring us pleasure, bring us knowledge, bring us health!”
Gaetano’s voice began to tremble, and tears quivered in his eyes. He went forward to the edge of the terrace, and he stretched out his arms as if to embrace the moonlit earth. “You are so dazzlingly beautiful,” he said, “so dazzlingly beautiful!”
And Donna Micaela for a moment thought she felt his grief over all the sorrow that lay under the surface of beauty. She saw life full of vice and suffering, like a dirty river filled with the stench of uncleanliness, wind through the glistening world of beauty.
“And no one can enjoy you,” said Gaetano; “no one can dare to enjoy you. You are untamed, and full of whims and anger. You are uncertainty and peril; you are sorrow and pain; you are want and shame; you are the force that grinds; you are everything terrible that can be named, because the people have not wished to make you better.
“But your day will come,” he said, triumphantly. “Some day they will turn to you with all their love; they will not turn to a dream, which gives nothing and is good for nothing.”
She interrupted him roughly. She began to fear him more and more.
“So it is true that you have had no success in England?”
“What do you mean?”