Page 43 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

the worship and service of liberty.
When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading
to La Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo, then un-
der the command of Garibaldi. Afterwards, in the Italian
legion of the Republic struggling against the encroaching
tyranny of Rosas, he had taken part, on great plains, on the
banks of immense rivers, in the fiercest fighting perhaps the
world had ever known. He had lived amongst men who had
declaimed about liberty, suffered for liberty, died for liber-
ty, with a desperate exaltation, and with their eyes turned
towards an oppressed Italy. His own enthusiasm had been
fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty devotion,
on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed language of
proclamations. He had never parted from the chief of his
choice—the fiery apostle of independence—keeping by
his side in America and in Italy till after the fatal day of
Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors, and
ministers had been revealed to the world in the wound-
ing and imprisonment of his hero—a catastrophe that had
instilled into him a gloomy doubt of ever being able to un-
derstand the ways of Divine justice.
He did not deny it, however. It required patience, he
would say. Though he disliked priests, and would not put
his foot inside a church for anything, he believed in God.
Were not the proclamations against tyrants addressed to
the peoples in the name of God and liberty? ‘God for men—
religions for women,’ he muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an
Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evac-
uation by the army of the king, had given him a Bible in

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard