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What kind of a soldier would you make, I'd like to know, dreaming every few minutes? Come along, get up, we must hurry back to Nana, or she will be worried." She took his hand and together they drove the goats before them to the cottage. Nana Rudini was waiting for them at the door. She was a little, wrinkled-up, old woman with bright blue eyes and thin gray hair.
"He is not naughty," she protested angrily, "and he may be lost this very minute. Anyway I am going to find him and I am not coming home until I do. If you are afraid to stay here go to Maria, she and aunt will look after you, and when I find Beppi I will meet you there." Nana Rudini protested excitedly, but Lucia did not wait to hear what she said.
Lucia was well enough now to go wherever she pleased, and after she had talked for a few minutes with Captain Riccardi, and made sure that Maria had not exaggerated, she went out of the convent with the intention of going into town. Some of the refugees had returned, but so far there had been no news of Señora Rudini, Nana, or Beppi, and she was growing anxious.
The Premier, however, Signor Crispi, a man of unquestioned ability, but who lived in advance of his time, before the nation was ready to follow him in his Imperial policy, was overwhelmed by a storm of indignation, and his successor, Marchese di Rudini, terrified by the riots promoted by unscrupulous Socialist and Anarchist agitators as a protest against the African campaign, concluded a disastrous peace with the enemy.
I was told that the Marquis Rudini, on hearing that his mother had met her death in a railroad accident, sought in the dream-book for the number attached to "railroad accident," and bought a ticket before going to get her remains. A winning terno brings its lucky owner I don't know exactly how much but I know it is something enormous. Well, this would be a terno worth having.
Señora Rudini covered her face with her apron and cried. "My sons! My sons! Where are they, dead or prisoners?" "No, no, they are safe," Lucia protested. "They are with the Army. Don't worry, when the reënforcements reach them they will go forward again." But her aunt refused to be comforted.
Personally Lucia scorned the very idea of the Austrian guns, but she could not help realizing the danger to Nana and Beppino and Garibaldi. She was still undecided what to do when she reached the cottage. Nana Rudini was standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her withered old hand, and staring intently in the direction that the soldiers had taken. "Did you see the troops, Nana?"
Lucia exclaimed, "he did pull his boat up on shore, but I pushed it off. I heard you this afternoon, and I knew you wanted to go away to that big ship out there, and perhaps sail to Austria. I know what you are, you two-faced man. You speak, you laugh, you scold in Italian, and all the time your black heart is Austrian." "You shall not go away from here. I, Lucia Rudini, tell you, you shall not!"
An insurrection at Palermo assumed threatening proportions owing to the smallness of the garrison, and might have had still more serious consequences but for the courage and presence of mind shown by the Syndic, the young Marquis di Rudini.
I met there a Roman deputy who was one of the amphibious politicians that breed freely in Italian politics, who gave his right hand to Crispi and his left to Rudiní, and who, under the impression that I had great personal influence with the old man, begged me to urge him to offer the portfolio of Foreign Affairs to Rudiní.
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