Adone's sight was troubled as soon as he passed out of the dusky room
into the blaze of noonday sunshine. His eyes seemed filled with
blood. His brain was dizzy. That which had been his sheet-anchor in
all doubts and contrition, his faith in and his reverence for Don
Silverio, availed him nothing now. A blind sympathy with his most
violent instincts was the only thing which could now content or
console him.
He was in that state to which all counsels of moderation appear but
so much treason and unkindness. As he went out of the priest's house
in that dazzling light, a hand caught his sleeve and that young
flutelike voice of which he had thought murmured to him --
"Adone! what tidings? What has he told you?"
Nerina, having run across the bridge and up the street after the
little dog, had seen him and Don Silverio enter, and had waited for
Adone to come out of the house.
Adone pushed her away.
"Let me be!" he said impatiently. "It is all bad -- bad -- bad. Bad
as ill-blood. Bad as crime."
She clung to his arm nevertheless.
"Come into the church and tell me. No one cares as I do."
"Poor little soul!"
He let her draw him into the great porch of the church and thence
into the church itself; it was dark, as it always was, cold as an
autumn evening, damp even in the canicular heat.
"No one will hear; tell me!" said the child.
He told her.
"And what are you to do?" she asked, her eyes dilated with horror.
"According to him," said Adone bitterly, "I am to be meek and
helpless as the heifer which goes to the slaughter. Men must not
resist what the law permits."
Nerina was mute. To dispute what Don Silverio said was like blasphemy
to her; she honoured him with all her soul, but she loved Adone.
She loved the Edera water too; that fair green rippling water, on
whose bank she had sat naked under the dock leaves the day the two
rams had fought. That which was threatened was an unholy, wicked,
cruel robbery. Was it indeed necessary to yield to it in submission?
She remembered a saying of Baruffo's: "If a man stand up to me I
leave him some coins in his pocket, some life in his body; but if he
crouch and cringe I stick him in the throat. He is a craven."
The doctrine of Baruffo seemed to her the more sound. It warmed the
blood of the little Abruzzo-born maiden to recall it. In the high
mountains and forests the meeker virtues are not greatly honoured.
She stood by Adone's side, knitting her brows under her auburn
curling locks, clenching her hands.
"Is there _one_ who does this evil most of all?" she said at length.
"_One_ we could reach?"
"You are a brave child, Nerina!" said Adone, and his words made her
proud. "I fear there is a crowd. Such men are like locusts; they come
in swarms. But the first man who touches the water--"
"Shall sup of it and drown!"
The little girl added the words with a fierce joy in her great bright
eyes.
"Hush!" said Adone, "and get you homeward, and tell my mother that
Don Silverio has returned, and that I will come back to my work in a
little while. Tell her he says there is no hope."
Nerina obeyed him instantly, her bare feet flying over the stones of
the street. He was left alone in the sombre church, with the great
winged angels of stone above his head.
He was grateful for its gloom. He shrank from the light of the
morning. Every drop of blood in his body, and in his brain, and in
his limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire -- a fire which all the
waters of the Edera would never quench.
How could they be accused of rebellion or wrong-doing because they
wanted to keep the water running in the channel which it had made for
itself in the very beginning of the world?
The Edera was ancient as its neighbours, the Fiumicino which heard
the voice of Cæsar, or the Marecchia which was bridged by Augustus;
ancient as the fountain of Arethusa, as the lake of Diana Nemorensis.
What sacrilege could be more heinous than to chase it from its chosen
course? No Lucumon of Etruria, or Esarch of Ravenna, or Pope or Rome,
had ever dared to touch it. Revolutionists! they, who only sought to
preserve it? The revolutionists were those who with alien hands and
vampire's greed would seek to disturb its peace.