“No--no--I shall remember. I shall say nothing--“
“Think nothing?”
“Think nothing,” I said with a last effort.
“God bless you!” he answered.
My son, for eight years I kept my word to him. We met daily almost, we ate
and walked and talked together, we lived like David and Jonathan--but
without so much as a glance at the past. How he had escaped from Milan--how
he had reached New York--I never knew. We talked often of Italy’s
liberation--as what Italians would not?--but never touched on his share in
the work. Once only a word slipped from him; and that was when one day he
asked me how it was that I had been sent to America. The blood rushed to my
face, and before I could answer he had raised a silencing hand.
“I see,” he said; “it was _your_ penance too.”
During the first years he had plenty of work to do, but he lived so
frugally that I guessed he had some secret use for his earnings. It was
easy to conjecture what it was. All over the world Italian exiles were
toiling and saving to further the great cause. He had political friends in
New York, and sometimes he went to other cities to attend meetings and make
addresses. His zeal never slackened; and but for me he would often have
gone hungry that some shivering patriot might dine. I was with him heart
and soul, but I had the parish on my shoulders, and perhaps my long
experience of men had made me a little less credulous than Christian
charity requires; for I could have sworn that some of the heroes who hung
on him had never had a whiff of Austrian blood, and would have fed out of
the same trough with the white-coats if there had been polenta enough to go
round. Happily my friend had no such doubts. He believed in the patriots as
devoutly as in the cause; and if some of his hard-earned dollars travelled
no farther than the nearest wine-cellar or cigar-shop, he never suspected
the course they took.
His health was never the same after the fever; and by and by he began to
lose his pupils, and the patriots cooled off as his pockets fell in. Toward
the end I took him to live in my shabby attic. He had grown weak and had a
troublesome cough, and he spent the greater part of his days indoors. Cruel
days they must have been to him, but he made no sign, and always welcomed
me with a cheerful word. When his pupils dropped off, and his health made
it difficult for him to pick up work outside, he set up a letter-writer’s
sign, and used to earn a few pennies by serving as amanuensis to my poor
parishioners; but it went against him to take their money, and half the
time he did the work for nothing. I knew it was hard for him to live on
charity, as he called it, and I used to find what jobs I could for him
among my friends the _negozianti_, who would send him letters to copy,
accounts to make up and what not; but we were all poor together, and the
master had licked the platter before the dog got it.
So lived that just man, my son; and so, after eight years of exile, he died
one day in my arms. God had let him live long enough to see Solferino and
Villa-franca; and was perhaps never more merciful than in sparing him Monte
Rotondo and Mentana. But these are things of which it does not become me to
speak. The new Italy does not wear the face of our visions; but it is
written that God shall know His own, and it cannot be that He shall misread
the hearts of those who dreamed of fashioning her in His image.
As for my friend, he is at peace, I doubt not; and his just life and holy
death intercede for me, who sinned for his sake alone.