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But Adone was hurt and humiliated, and made excuse of field work, which pressed by reason of the weather, and so he did not name to his friend and councillor the visit of the three men to the river. Don Silverio went home and boiled his coffee; he always did this himself; it was the only luxury he ever allowed himself, and he did not indulge even in this very often.
"What an insolent priest!" thought Giovacchino Gallo, and struck the paper-knife with anger on the table. "Take my own parishioners alone," pursued Don Silverio.
"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 is blameless in his domestic relation, an indulgent landlord, a gentleman, respectful of religion, assiduous in his duties; but he is in debt; his large estates produce little; he has no other means. I would not take upon me to say that he would be above a bribe." At five of the clock, as the Syndic had told him to do, Don Silverio presented himself at the Palazzo Corradini.
"It will be a hard matter," said the Prior to Don Silverio as they walked together in the little burial-ground of the monastery between its lines of rose-trees and its lines of crosses, after the frugal noonday meal had been eaten in the refrectory. "It will be a hard matter. You will fail, I fear. The municipalities here smell money. That is enough to make them welcome the invasion.
Adone had gone across the bridge, but he had remained by the waterside. "Pray and sleep!" Don Silverio had said in his last words. But to Adone it seemed that neither prayer nor sleep would ever come to him again so long as this impending evil hung over him and the water of Edera.
"I can hear your Excellency where I am," replied Don Silverio, and did not stir. "I have here reports from certain of my agents," said Gallo, fingering his various papers, "that there is and has been for some time a subversive movement amongst the sparse population of the Valdedera." Don Silverio did not speak or stir.
Don Silverio sat down at his deal writing-table and wrote in his fine, clear calligraphy a few lines: "In the name of my holy office I forbid you to risk the life and good name of the maiden Nernia on your unlawful errands." Then he signed and sealed the sheet, and sent it by his sacristan to Adone. He received no answer.
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.
He had come to cut a waggon load of furze, and had been at work there since eight o'clock, when he had come out of the great porch of the church after attending mass, for it was the twentieth of June, the name-day of Don Silverio.
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