The Bravo: A Tale. Джеймс Фенимор Купер

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СКАЧАТЬ returned the senator, covertly removing the moisture from his eyes; "an honest and a proud man, for thy condition!"

      "She from whom we both drew our first nourishment, Signore, often told me, that next to my own kin, it was my duty to love the noble race she had helped to support. I make no merit of natural feeling, which is a gift from Heaven, and the greater is the reason that the state should not deal lightly with such affections."

      "Once more the state! Name thy errand."

      "Your eccellenza knows the history of my humble life. I need not tell you, Signore, of the sons which God, by the intercession of the Virgin and blessed St. Anthony, was pleased to bestow on me, or of the manner in which he hath seen proper to take them one by one away."

      "Thou hast known sorrow, poor Antonio; I well remember thou hast suffered, too."

      "Signore, I have. The deaths of five manly and honest sons is a blow to bring a groan from a rock. But I have known how to bless God, and be thankful!"

      "Worthy fisherman, the Doge himself might envy this resignation. It is often easier to endure the loss than the life of a child, Antonio!"

      "Signore, no boy of mine ever caused me grief, but the hour in which he died. And even then"—the old man turned aside to conceal the working of his features—"I struggled to remember from how much pain, and toil, and suffering they were removed to enjoy a more blessed state."

      The lip of the Signer Gradenigo quivered, and he moved to and fro with a quicker step.

      "I think, Antonio," he said, "I think, honest Antonio, I had masses said for the souls of them all?"

      "Signore, you had; St. Anthony remember the kindness in your own extremity! I was wrong in saying that the youths never gave me sorrow but in dying, for there is a pain the rich cannot know, in being too poor to buy a prayer for a dead child!"

      "Wilt thou have more masses? Son of thine shall never want a voice with the saints, for the ease of his soul!"

      "I thank you, eccellenza, but I have faith in what has been done, and, more than all, in the mercy of God. My errand now is in behalf of the living."

      The sympathy of the senator was suddenly checked, and he already listened with a doubting and suspicious air.

      "Thy errand?" he simply repeated.

      "Is to beg your interest, Signore, to obtain the release of my grandson from the galleys. They have seized the lad in his fourteenth year, and condemned him to the wars with the Infidels, without thought of his tender years, without thought of evil example, without thought of my age and loneliness, and without justice; for his father died in the last battle given to the Turk."

      As he ceased, the fisherman riveted his look on the marble countenance of his auditor, wistfully endeavoring to trace the effect of his words. But all there was cold, unanswering, and void of human sympathy. The soulless, practised, and specious reasoning of the state, had long since deadened all feeling in the senator on any subject that touched an interest so vital as the maritime power of the Republic. He saw the hazard of innovation in the slightest approach to interests so delicate, and his mind was drilled by policy into an apathy that no charity could disturb, when there was question of the right of St. Mark to the services of his people.

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