“Anywhere.  What a question!  Signorino, you are but little more than a boy to ask such a question of a man having this tale in his family.  Ah!  Traditore!  What made me ever own that spawn of a hungry devil for our own blood!  Thief, cheat, coward, liar—­other men can deal with that.  But I was his uncle, and so . . .  I wish he had poisoned me—­charogne!  But this:  that I, a confidential man and a Corsican, should have to ask your pardon for bringing on board your vessel, of which I was Padrone, a Cervoni, who has betrayed you—­a traitor!—­that is too much.  It is too much.  Well, I beg your pardon; and you may spit in Dominic’s face because a traitor of our blood taints us all.  A theft may be made good between men, a lie may be set right, a death avenged, but what can one do to atone for a treachery like this? . . .  Nothing.”

He turned and walked away from me along the bank of the stream, flourishing a vengeful arm and repeating to himself slowly, with savage emphasis:  “Ah!  Canaille!  Canaille!  Canaille!. . .”  He left me there trembling with weakness and mute with awe.  Unable to make a sound, I gazed after the strangely desolate figure of that seaman carrying an oar on his shoulder up a barren, rock-strewn ravine under the dreary leaden sky of Tremolino’s last day.  Thus, walking deliberately, with his back to the sea, Dominic vanished from my sight.

With the quality of our desires, thoughts, and wonder proportioned to our infinite littleness, we measure even time itself by our own stature.  Imprisoned in the house of personal illusions, thirty centuries in mankind’s history seem less to look back upon than thirty years of our own life.  And Dominic Cervoni takes his place in my memory by the side of the legendary wanderer on the sea of marvels and terrors, by the side of the fatal and impious adventurer, to whom the evoked shade of the soothsayer predicted a journey inland with an oar on his shoulder, till he met men who had never set eyes on ships and oars.  It seems to me I can see them side by side in the twilight of an arid land, the unfortunate possessors of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the emblem of their hard calling on their shoulders, surrounded by silent and curious men:  even as I, too, having turned my back upon the sea, am bearing those few pages in the twilight, with the hope of finding in an inland valley the silent welcome of some patient listener.

XLVI.

“A fellow has now no chance of promotion unless he jumps into the muzzle of a gun and crawls out of the touch-hole.”