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They were most of them wholly unlettered; knew not their A B C; had only learned the law of the seasons, and the earth, and the trees which grew, and the beasts which grazed; but they had imagination; they had the blood of ancient races; they were neither dolts not boors, though Adone in his wrath called them so. They were fascinated by the call to rise and save their river.
Every night the people of Ruscino hung up a lantern on a loophole of the belfry, and another on the parapet of the bridge, that their pastor might not miss his way if he were coming on foot beside the river; and every night Adone himself watched on the river bank or by the town wall, sleepless, longing for, yet dreading that which he should hear.
"Do not leave your land for me," he said. "Every hour is of gold at this season. Go back, my son! I pray that I may bring you peace." "Give me your blessing," said Adone meekly, and he knelt down in the dust of the roadside. His friend gave it; then their hands met in silent farewell. The sun had risen, and the cold clear air was yielding to its rays.
"Sir, what is it Adone does?" said Clelia Alba, one dusky and stormy eve after vespers. "At nightfall out he goes; and never a word to me, only 'Your blessing, mother, he says, as if he might lose his life where he goes.
"I think he would no more have thought it needful to say it was his than to say that you were his son. It is certain we are writ down in the district as owners of the ground; we pay taxes for it; and the title of the water must be as one with that." "So say I; at least over what runs through our fields we, alone, have any title, and for that title I will fight to the death," said Adone.
"Listen, Adone, and control yourself," said Don Silverio. "I saw something in a journal a few days ago which made me go to San Beda. But there they knew nothing at all of what the newspaper had stated. What I said startled and alarmed them. I begged the Prior to acquaint me if he heard of any scheme affecting us.
He stopped abruptly, for no complaint of the injustice from which he suffered had ever in those eighteen years escaped him. "Go, go," said Adone. "You carry respect with you. You are learned and will know how to find those in power and how to speak to them. Go, go! Have pity on all of us, your poor, helpless, menaced people." Don Silverio was silent.
Soon, before the sun was rising, Adone came in sight, passing with firm, accustomed step across the undressed trunks of trees which were here thrown across the river to make a passage lower down the stream than the bridge of Ruscino.
My dear friend, you are a woman of sense and foresight; try to see this thing as it is." "I will hear what Adone says, sir," replied Clelia Alba doggedly. "If he bids me burn the house, I shall burn it." Don Silverio was heart-sick and impatient. What use was it to argue with such minds as these? As well might he waste his words on the trunks of the olives, on the oxen in their stalls.
Their stupidity irritated Adone so greatly that he ceased altogether to speak to them of the impending calamity. "They are stocks and stones. They have not the sense of sheep nor the courage of goats," he said, with the old scorn which his forefathers had felt for their rustic vassals stirring in him.
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