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Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the English. This feeling,
born on the battlefields of Uruguay, was forty years old at the very
least. Several of them had poured their blood for the cause of freedom
in America, and the first he had ever known he remembered by the name of
Samuel; he commanded a negro company under Garibaldi, during the famous
siege of Montevideo, and died heroically with his negroes at the fording
of the Boyana. He, Giorgio, had reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and
cooked for the general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of
lieutenant, rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He had
cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole campaign; on the march to
Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the American manner;
he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic; he was one of
the four fugitives who, with the general, carried out of the woods the
inanimate body of the general's wife into the farmhouse where she died,
exhausted by the hardships of that terrible retreat. He had survived
that disastrous time to attend his general in Palermo when the
Neapolitan shells from the castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked
for him on the field of Volturno after fighting all day. And everywhere
he had seen Englishmen in the front rank of the army of freedom.
He respected their nation because they loved Garibaldi. Their very
countesses and princesses had kissed the general's hands in London, it
was said. He could well believe it; for the nation was noble, and the
man was a saint. It was enough to look once at his face to see the
divine force of faith in him and his great pity for all that was poor,
suffering, and oppressed in this world.
The spirit of self-forgetfulness, the simple devotion to a vast
humanitarian idea which inspired the thought and stress of that
revolutionary time, had left its mark upon Giorgio in a sort of austere
contempt for all personal advantage. This man, whom the lowest class in
Sulaco suspected of having a buried hoard in his kitchen, had all his
life despised money. The leaders of his youth had lived poor, had died
poor. It had been a habit of his mind to disregard to-morrow. It was
engendered partly by an existence of excitement, adventure, and wild
warfare. But mostly it was a matter of principle. It did not resemble
the carelessness of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct, born
of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion.
This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon Giorgio's old
age. It cast a gloom because the cause seemed lost. Too many kings and
emperors flourished yet in the world which God had meant for the people.
He was sad because of his simplicity. Though always ready to help his
countrymen, and greatly respected by the Italian emigrants wherever he
lived (in his exile he called it), he could not conceal from himself
that they cared nothing for the wrongs of down-trodden nations. They
listened to his tales of war readily, but seemed to ask themselves what
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