“I can well believe it. But the fearlessness of our seamen has ceased to astonish the world long ago,” murmured the young traveller.
“There are plenty of fearless people in the world, but luck is even better than courage. The brig sailed away unscathed. Yes, luck is even better than courage. Surer than wisdom and stronger than justice. Luck is a great thing. It is the only thing worth having on one’s side. And you people have always had it. Yes, signore, you belong to a lucky nation or else you would not be standing here on this platform looking across the water in the direction of that crumb of land that is the last refuge of your greatest enemy.”
Cosmo leaned over the stone parapet near the embrasure of the gun on the other side of which the man with the short pipe in his hand made a vaguely emphatic gesture: “I wonder what thoughts pass through your head,” he went on in a quiet detached tone. “Or perhaps you are too young yet to have many thoughts in your head. Excuse my liberty, but I have always heard that one may be frank in speech with an Englishman; and by your speech there can be no doubt of you being of that nation.”
“I can assure you I have no thoughts of hatred. … Look, the Elban ship is getting farther away. Or is it only the darkness that makes her seem so?”
“The night air is heavy. There is more wind on the water than up here, where we stand; but I don’t think she has moved away. You are interested in that Elban ship, signore.”
“There is a fascination now about everything connected with that island,” confessed the ingenuous traveller. “You have just said that I was too young to think. You don’t seem so very much older than myself. I wonder what thoughts you may have.”
“The thoughts of a common man, thoughts that could be of no interest to an English milord,” answered the other, in a grimly deprecatory tone.
“Do you think that all Englishmen are lords?” asked Cosmo, with a laugh.
“I didn’t think. I went by your appearance. I remember hearing an old man once say that you were a lordly nation.”
“Really!” exclaimed the young man and laughed again in a low, pleasant note. “I remember hearing of an old man who called us a nation of traders.”
“Nazione di mercante,” repeated the man slowly. “Well, that may be true too. Different men, different wisdoms.”
“This didn’t occur to me,” said Cosmo, seating himself with a little spring on the stone parapet of the tower. He rested one foot on the massive gun-carriage and fixed his clear eyes on the dark red streak on the western sky left by the retreating sun like a long gash inflicted on the suffering body of the universe. … “Different men, different wisdoms,” he repeated, musingly. “I suppose it must be. People’s lives are so very different. … And of what kind was the wisdom of your old man?”
“The wisdom of a great plain as level almost as the sea,” said the other gravely. “His voice was as unexpected when I heard it as your own, signore. The evening shadows had closed about me just after I had seen to the west, on the edge of the world as it were, a lion miss his spring on a bounding deer. They went away right into the glow and vanished. It was as though I had dreamed. When I turned round there was the old man behind me no farther away than half the width of this platform. He only smiled at my startled looks. His long silver locks stirred in the breeze. He had been watching me, it seems, from folds of ground and from amongst reed beds for nearly half a day, wondering what I might be at. I had come ashore to wander on the plain. I like to be alone sometimes. My ship was anchored in a bight of this deserted coast a good many miles away, too many to walk back in the dark for a stranger like me. So I spent the night in that old man’s ranch, a hut of grass and reeds, near a little piece of water peopled by a multitude of birds. He treated me as if I had been his son. We talked till dawn and when the sun rose I did not go back to my ship. What I had on board of my own was not of much value, and there was certainly no one there to address me as ‘My son’ in that particular tone—you know what I mean, signore.”
“I don’t know—but I think I can guess,” was the answer whose lighthearted yet earnest frankness was particularly boyish and provoked a smile on the part of the older man. In repose his face was grave. His English interlocutor went on after a pause. “You deserted from your ship to join a hermit in a wilderness simply because the tone of his voice appealed to your heart. Is that your meaning?”
“You have guessed it, signorino. Perhaps there was more in it than that. There is no doubt about it that I did desert from my ship.”
“And where was that?”
“On the coast of South America,” answered the man from the other side of the big gun, with sudden curtness. “And now it is time for us to part.”
But neither of them stirred and for some time they remained silent, growing shadowy to each other on the massive tower, which itself, in the advancing night, was but a gray shadow above the dark and motionless sea.
“How long did you stay with that hermit in the desert?” asked Cosmo. “And how did you leave
