Her life, too, will end some day, her last blossom
will have bloomed alone, her last tears will have fallen upon her own
bosom, her last sob will have rent the air, and the beautiful earth will
be dead for ever, borne on in the sweep of the race that will never end,
borne along yet a few ages, till her sweet body turns to star-dust in
the great emptiness of a night without morning.
But Ruggiero, plain strong man of the people, hard-handed sailor, was
not thinking of any of these things as he sat in his narrow place on the
stern behind his master, mechanically guiding the tiller in the latter's
unconscious hand, while he gazed silently at Beatrice's face, now turned
towards him in conversation, now half averted as she looked down or out
to sea. Ruggiero listened, too, to the talk, though he did not
understand all the fine words Beatrice and San Miniato used. If he had
never been away from the coast, the probability is that he would have
understood nothing at all; but in his long voyages he had been thrown
with men of other parts of Italy and had picked up a smattering of what
Neapolitans call Italian, to distinguish it from their own speech.
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