Vestigia Volume Ii Part 15

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 G.o.d that I could do more than merely understand you, I wish to G.o.d 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 pa.s.sing 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.