Volume Ii Part 10 (1/2)

Italia drew his hard hand down against her cheek, and kissed it softly, without speaking.

'Ay. I was fond of her once--main fond. And 'twas partly for that, perhaps, I always had a sort o' fancy for the lad. I never could bear to be hard on him. An' he's disappointed me. It's i' the breed, my girl; a bad breed, and you can't alter that with wis.h.i.+ng. You can't turn a porpoise into a dolphin, no matter how long you leave him in the water.'

As still she made no answer, he added more insistingly:

'I'd have saved you from this if I could, my pretty. I did all I knew how. But you can't get a grip on the anchor when there's no bottom but only s.h.i.+fting sand. Faithlessness---- Look here, girl, it's like poison in one's daily bread.' He stroked her cheek tenderly, 'My girl, it's poison, you _can't_ live on it.'

Then Italia lifted up her head.

'Dino is not faithless,' she said gently.

'Girl, no one believes in him. Not a soul. Not even the young master--and they were boys together.'

'I do, I believe in him, father.'

She knelt with clasped hands gazing at the fire, and all the ardour and devotion of her impa.s.sioned soul sounded in her soft girlish voice.

For the moment she felt superior to all suffering, uplifted to a region of feeling which knows neither la.s.situde nor reluctant pain. And such love makes all things easy; it floods dry places; it drowns the slime and weeds. It is good, no doubt, to be strong; it is wiser to be the master of our fortunes than their slave. The truth is obvious enough.

But we are not all strong, G.o.d knows; let us still be thankful for that divine gift of pity,--tender and loving pity,--the heritage of the outcast; that last possession of the disinherited, of the unsuccessful; who, owning this, shall yet know something, even on this earth, of the very kingdom of heaven.

After a while she rose to her feet; she laid her gentle hand upon the old man's shoulder. 'Come, father. Come to your supper. You are so tired, dear; you must let me take care of you. For the harder things are, father, the more we will need each other's love,' Italia said.

CHAPTER IX.

WITH VALDEZ.

The sun was not more than half an hour high in the east when Valdez and Dino started in their boat to row up the disused ca.n.a.l to Pisa. It was a mild gray morning. A pearly-tinted scirocco sky hung low above the flat country beyond Leghorn; on either side were stretches of bare ploughed land; the only colour was in the thick fringe of tall yellow reeds which bordered the ca.n.a.l, and on the scarlet-stained leaves of the water plants and brambles which had survived the winter, hidden deep under the faded bents of last year's gra.s.s, in sheltered nooks below the overhanging banks.

It would have been easy to tow the boat: there was a narrow path trodden out along the margin by the feet of the men who still dragged the slow weight of their flat-bottomed barges, laden with barrels of oil and sacks of corn, in preference to sending the merchandise to Pisa by the new line of railway. But Dino liked better the labour of rowing against the sluggish current. The monotonous action soothed him like the reiteration of old words which carried pleasant memories. He felt more himself with the oars in his strong young hands; and the long regular sweep of the blades was like a visible sign of the vigour and force of his determination. About nine o'clock it felt very warm upon the water. The March sun s.h.i.+ning behind the thin gray veil of mist, filled the sky with a diffused whitish glare,--and there was no escaping it, no possibility of shadow. By the time he had rowed eight or ten miles Dino was glad enough to act on Valdez's suggestion, and run the boat to land under the shelter of some drooping alders. They stretched themselves out luxuriously on the short new gra.s.s, where a point of smooth ground projected for a few feet from the bank. The water gurgled with a cool liquid sound as it hurried past them, and the air was sweet with the smell of bruised herbs. There was a tuft of scented thyme growing by Dino's feet. He plucked off a leaf or two and held them in his hand while he said:

'It is pleasant being here, Valdez.'

'Ay, lad.'

'I like rowing. I like everything which implies being out-of-doors,--doing something and being no one in particular. If I had to live over again, Valdez, I'd have more to do with men than books.'

'You may be right there, lad, there's no saying. After all, a man's personal experience is the only reality; the rest is mere hearsay.'

Dino crushed the aromatic herbs closer within his hands, and rubbed them over his face. 'Valdez!' he said abruptly, 'that man over there,--in Rome,--you know whom I mean--I know nothing about him; he has done me no harm.'

'No, lad. And I see what you mean. But that's just the puzzling part of it--when things pull both ways. But there must come a time in a man's life when he ceases to ask himself questions, when he must give up even wanting to know how well he may be doing the work that's been set before him, or else the work doesn't get itself done. For, look you, lad, in a way, what is absolutely bad is nearly as satisfactory as what is absolutely good. It's black or white; and a man--a man, I say--can understand either. But it's the thing between--it's life--which upsets our calculations.'

'It's so d.a.m.ned hard to know that, do what one will, one can never get any credit for it. If you stake your life on any desperate attempt to make things a little better, people always imagine it was your own choice, you liked doing it. They don't ask what it was that made you give up the pleasantness; if you get credit for anything, it's only credit for a morbid taste for being wretched.'

'Credit from society? credit for what you do? why, lad, who gives credit for anything now, except the tradesmen? And they are not in society,' said Valdez, with a short laugh. He pulled the brim of his shabby felt hat farther down over his eyes. 'Society cheapens life.

Makes it full of small interests, small triumphs, small, bitter disappointments. I've been through it; I've seen enough of it in my day.'

'Valdez,' said Dino, looking at him rather curiously, 'you must have been leading a very different sort of life before you came to Leghorn?

You yourself must have been very different?'

'Ay, lad, a different sort of fool, most likely. There's a variety in fools, or life would be too monotonous. I've been among a good many people in my time,' he added in his deepest voice; 'but all that's past now. Past and forgotten. And what's over is safest let alone. It's twenty years now since I've been tuning pianos. 'Tis a good trade; and one must live somewhere.'