VESTIGIA NULLA RETRORSUM.
One cloudless April morning, some three weeks later, the warm bright
sunshine was making a pleasant difference even to the prisoners who
were taking their usual hour of exercise between the four high walls of
the paved courtyard at the Carcere Nuove. But there was one among
them, a middle-aged man with gray hair and a curiously piercing look in
his heavy-lidded eyes, who seemed to be expecting something beside the
blue sky and the soft air of this balmy morning. And presently that
something came.
The other prisoners looked after him rather enviously as he left the
court in answer to the turnkey's imperative summons. Apparently he had
been sent for to speak to a friend; they grumbled a little between
themselves at this sign of the governor's favour.
It was Dino de Rossi who was waiting for Valdez in that small
high-walled cell. The two men had not met since the morning of the
attempted assassination; they grasped hands and looked into one
another's face with an emotion which lay too deep for mere speech.
Presently the older man's mouth relaxed into a faint smile. 'Well,
lad. So you have come to see me. You are looking better. They told
me you were very ill, and I've been anxious about you,' he said simply.
'I came to you as soon as I could get up,' Dino answered, in a voice
that was broken with repressed feeling. He looked about him, at the
prison bed, the grated window, the bare stone walls. 'You've put
yourself here,--here, in my place, Valdez. Valdez, it nearly drives me
mad to remember it. I'd give half my life if I could change places
with you to-day.'
'Nay, my lad, there's nothing the matter with the place. It's
comfortable enough; and it's of my own choosing. Come, come, my Dino;
you're weak still with the fever; sit down, lad, sit down.'
They sat down side by side on the narrow straw pallet. Then Valdez
added cheerfully, 'And there's better news still of your friend Gasparo
this morning. I'm glad of that. I bore the young man no malice; I'm
glad to think he's likely to get over it, after all.'
'Valdez, I never could understand that part of it; they said at the
trial you wanted to shoot him purposely. They said you had had some
quarrel with him?'
'Ay, lad. There was no denying we had had words together; and that fat
old fool, Sor Giovanni, whom they got up from Leghorn as a witness,--he
was willing to swear till he was black in the face that he had heard me
threaten to murder the young Marchese.' He lowered his voice and
added, 'I'd had my directions beforehand--from them--up at the
committee there, what to say in case the attempt on the King proved a
failure. I know the best thing I can do for them is to hold my tongue.
If the judges chose to shut their eyes to what's staring them in the
face, it's not my duty to correct their blunders. But they wanted to
hush it up, lad; they did not want to make it into a political scandal,
with those elections coming on.'
He was silent again. Then he turned and laid his hand affectionately,
in the old way, on Dino's shoulder.
'How are they all at Leghorn, boy?'
'All well. I had a letter from my mother this morning.'
'And Italia?'
Dino half smiled. 'Well too. She sent me a message for you. She
wanted you to know she never would believe you had meant to hurt
anybody. You don't mind my telling you, Valdez? She meant only what
was kindest.'
'Ay. She's a good girl that; a good girl. And when are you going back
to them all, my boy,' he asked suddenly, fixing his companion with his
piercing glance.
Dino flushed red. 'I shall stay and see you through it. Valdez, that
is little enough to do for you. You don't think I would leave you till
I see you free?'
'Nay, lad,' said the old man very gently, 'you'll let me have my own
way i' this matter, I know. I've seen you; and you know I'm pretty
safe as it is. Unless things take a bad turn for that young Gasparo,
they can't do much worse to me than shut me up in prison for a bit.
And that's nothing.'
He started up to his feet, and began pacing backwards and forwards
between the four walls of the narrow cell.
'The plan's miscarried. It may have been a good one or a bad one, but
we know where the orders came from, and it wasn't our place to judge of
that. And I don't judge of it. I've chosen my place in life, and I'll
abide by it to the end. When a man has meant anything strongly there's
never any real going back again for him. It isn't the failure or the
success, it's the purpose, the will that is in him, that makes the
difference.'
He stopped, leaning against the wall beneath the grated window.
'What is the whole teaching of daily life, my Dino, if it is not to
accept the material success--_le fait accompli_--as if it were a very
law from heaven? Not to do that, they tell us, is to be a fool or a
madman; it is to shut one's eyes against evidence, and one's ears
against common-sense; to wear out friendship and to forfeit sympathy.
That's the lesson you may learn at any street corner, and, if you
listen, you will hear it cried out in the wilderness. It's what your
old fisher friend, how do you call him? old Andrea, has preached to
you. 'Tis the Alpha and Omega of many a good man's philosophy. But
I,' the old socialist drew himself up, and his eyes flashed fire, 'I
think otherwise. To me, half the time, material success, and what
society teaches, and what poverty enjoins, are but the negation of
every high ideal, of every disinterested protest against injustice, of
every struggle against social tyranny and bitter social wrong. That's
my creed, lad. That's my creed, and, good or bad, I'll never turn my
back upon it. No! not if I had to spend every hour of my existence
here!'
'I wish to God that I could do more than merely understand you, I wish
to God that I were capable of feeling with you, believing with you,
Valdez.'
'Nay, lad, you've tried; you've done your best. And when you found
you'd undertaken more than you could well accomplish, still you went
on,--you went on. To be faithful, my Dino, to keep faith simply and
joyously, is to reach and hold the essential best of life. But to keep
faith at any price, in any fashion, to do it even grudgingly, counting
the cost, looking back at the world with all its temptations, yet, even
then, moving away from them, however slowly--well, even that is enough
to give some touch of divine dignity to a life. It is reaching the end
without the glow of the triumph, but still the end _is_ reached. We
can't all of us claim the praise as well as the victory, and yet the
victory is there.'
He spoke with all the force and fervour of a life-long conviction. The
faint light streaming in at the small high window gave a solemn look of
isolation to the narrow room; it seemed a fitting background for the
worn undaunted face.
But presently the old man's glance softened. He held out both his
hands.
'You're young, lad, you're young, and all the best of life's before
you. It makes me glad to think of that still. For you've made a great
difference in my life, Dino. And it hurt me, ay, it hurt me to think
that I had injured yours.'
'Valdez--if I'm ever worth anything--if I ever learn to believe
unreservedly in anything---- Oh, I can't say it. But you know what I
mean;--I owe it all to you.'
They grasped one another's hands hard as the key turned harshly in the
lock of the door behind them. They spoke no word of farewell.
Palmira was waiting for Dino in the jailor's lodge by the entrance.
The child gave one quick anxious look into her brother's quivering
face, then she slipped her hand quietly into his without speaking.
Both were silent until they stood outside the iron gates. Then Dino
stood still. He was weak yet, and confused from the fever. He could
scarcely understand how much of what was passing around him was real.
He stood there hesitating; surely it was no delusion that he had
pledged his very life away? Yet he stood there, a free man, in the
April sunlight; with the hand of a little child in his, and behind him
was the prison door.
He crossed over to the small piazza; he went and sat on a wooden bench
beside the fountain; it wanted an hour yet to the time of the starting
of the Leghorn train.
'Are we not going back now, my Dino, to Italia?' Palmira asked, after a
long pause, eyeing him anxiously.
'Ay.'
He answered like a man in a dream. And it was a dream of coming joy
which held him silent; a vision of flood-tides filling all the empty
places of existence; a happy vision of love, strong to conceal and
strong to forget;--of Italia, waiting by the sea.
THE END.