Chapter XVII: Conclusion

The three fugitives occupied twice the time in returning to Catania that it had taken them to go to Sperlinga. The Piccinino could not travel long without falling forward on his mule's neck, prostrated by fever. Then they would halt in some cave or deserted ruin, and the monk was obliged to give him wine to drink to keep up his strength, although he realized that it increased the fever.

They had to follow steep and difficult roads, or rather to avoid every sort of road, in order not to expose themselves to the risk of inopportune encounters. Fra Angelo expected to find, halfway to Catania, a poor family upon whom he could rely as upon himself, to shelter his patient and nurse him; but he found only a deserted house, already half in ruins. Poverty had driven the poor creatures from their home. They could not pay the tax assessed on the house. Perhaps they were in prison.

It was a serious disappointment to the monk and his companion. They had purposely kept at a distance from the region overrun by the brigands, because the absence of danger made the police less active in the southern part of the island. But when they found the only place of refuge upon which they could rely in that part of the mountains entirely deserted, they were really alarmed. In vain did the Piccinino urge the monk and Michel to leave him to his fate, declaring that, as soon as he was alone, necessity would endow him with superhuman strength. They refused, as the reader will imagine, and, having discussed all possible expedients, they decided upon the safest and most certain of all, although it seemed the boldest; it was to take Carmelo to the Palmarosa palace and keep him in hiding there until he was in a condition to fly. The princess would simply have to treat certain persons with the faintest suggestion of deference to avert any possible suspicion of her conduct; and in such an emergency, when Michel might be suspected of having assisted in the rescue of the Piccinino, she would not hesitate to deceive the court party as to her political sentiments.

This idea of the monk's would have been most repellent to Michel a few days earlier; but each succeeding event made him more and more of a Sicilian, by impressing upon him more strongly the necessity of cunning. So he acquiesced, and they had nothing further to do except to smuggle the wounded man into the palace unseen. That was the only important point, for the seclusion in which Agatha lived, the small number and blind devotion of her servants, the fidelity and prudence of her maid Nunziata, who alone was allowed to enter certain rooms in the Casino, to say nothing of a thousand other details of the princess's mysterious existence, made that place of refuge as secure as could be desired. Moreover, there was the Serra palace a few steps away, to which the patient could be transported in case the Villa Palmarosa should become untenable. It was decided that Michel should go ahead and steal into the villa at nightfall; that he should warn his mother of the wounded man's arrival, and assist her to make the necessary arrangements to receive him and to admit him secretly a few hours later.

Agatha was in a state of anxiety impossible to describe when Nunziata told her that some one was waiting for her in her oratory. She hastened thither, and, catching sight of a monk's frock, nearly fainted, for she thought that one of the brethren of Bel Passo had come to bring some fatal news. But well disguised as Michel was, the mother's eye was not deceived for long, and she embraced him passionately, bursting into tears.

Michel said nothing of the dangers to which he had been exposed; she would divine them soon enough when the news of the Piccinino's rescue should spread through the country. He simply told her that he had been to a wild, out-of-the-way spot in the mountains, where his brother lay helpless and dying; that he had brought him to her to place him in her care; and that his new hiding-place must be made ready for him.

In the middle of the night the wounded man arrived unhindered; but he did not climb the stairs in the lava with the same haughty bearing as on the last occasion. His strength was failing more and more. Fra Angelo was obliged to carry him from the first stair to the last. He hardly recognized Agatha, and for several days he hovered between life and death.

Mila's anxiety was temporarily allayed when Michel told her that Magnani had gone to Palermo to do him a service. But many days passed, and, as Magnani did not return, his family was surprised and alarmed. Michel pretended that he had had news. He had gone to Rome, still in his service, and, later, he said that the important and secret business which the Palmarosa family had entrusted to the young artisan required him to go to Milan, Venice, Vienna--where you please. They kept him travelling for several years, and, to allay the anxiety and grief of his parents, read to them--for they did not know how to read--passages from pretended letters, and gave them large sums of money which he was supposed to send them.

The Magnani family grew rich, and marvelled at poor Antonio's good fortune. They lived in sadness and hope. His old mother died, sorely afflicted to have had no opportunity to embrace him, but bidding Michel send him her blessing.

As for Mila, it would have been more difficult to deceive her, had not the princess, in order to spare her a much greater sorrow, suggested a catastrophe to which she could more readily become reconciled. She hinted more and more definitely, and, finally, told her outright that Magnani, torn between his former passion and his new love for her, had feared that he could not make her happy, and so had gone away, resolved not to return until he was completely cured of the past.

Mila looked upon this as a noble and honorable proceeding; but she was piqued to find that she had not been able, unaided, to efface the memory of so persistent a passion. She strove to cure herself, for she was told that her lover's cure was not certain, and her unbounded pride came to her aid. Magnani's prolonged absence made her stronger and braver day by day. When he was supposed to have gone to Rome, she was told that he could not triumph over the old affection, and that he renounced the new. Mila did not weep; she prayed, without a shade of bitterness, for the happiness of an ingrate, and gradually recovered her former serenity.

Michel suffered terribly, of course, when, as occasionally happened, he heard her slighting references to the absent one, who deserved to be enshrined forever in her memory. But he sacrificed everything to the peace of mind of his adopted sister. He went secretly, with Fra Angelo, to see his friend's grave. The peasant who had buried him conducted them to the cemetery of a convent near by. Worthy monks, patriots like most of the monks in Sicily, had borne the body thither by night, and had inscribed these words in Latin on a stone which served as his monument, among the white roses and flowering broom:

_Here reposes an unknown martyr._

The Piccinino's convalescence was longer than they had anticipated. The wound healed quickly enough; but a nervous fever of some gravity detained him three months in Agatha's boudoir, which was transformed into his bedroom, and which was guarded with religious care.

A moral revolution was taking place in that headstrong and distrustful young man. Michel's and the princess's solicitude, the extreme delicacy of their consoling words, the innumerable joys of kindly treatment, which he had lost with his mother and had never hoped to find again in other hearts, gradually made an impression upon the pride and indifference in which he had encased himself, as in a coat of mail. He had always felt an ardent craving to be loved, although he was not himself capable of being moved so powerfully and persistently by affection as by hatred. At first he was, as it were, wounded and humiliated by being compelled to be grateful. But it happened that Agatha's heart, which had wrought a miracle upon Michel, did the same for Carmelo. Agatha, although outwardly cold and fastidious in her feelings, had such a vast and generous heart that she always ended by loving those whom she pitied. There were many times still when the patient's cold-blooded ideas horrified her; but pity gained the upper hand when she realized how unhappy he was made by that determination to harden his heart against everything. In his moments of physical suffering and of nervous excitement, the Piccinino, after vaunting and demonstrating his unerring keenness of vision in the matter of human affections, deplored that unhappy faculty with a bitterness which made a profound impression upon Agatha.

One evening, when she was talking about him with Michel, and he confessed that he had no sympathetic feeling for his brother, she said to him:

"Duty impels you to care for him, to incur danger for him, to overwhelm him with favors and consideration. Very good; one must love one's duty, and this brother of yours is a terrible trial. Duty would be easier if you could love him. Try, Michel; perhaps, if you succeed, that warlike heart of his will soften too, for he has the keen faculties of a sibyl. It may be that he feels that you do not love him, and so he continues cold to you. The instant that you have a feeling of sincere affection for him, even though you do not manifest it, he will divine it and perhaps will love you in his turn. I will try to set you the example. I will strive to persuade myself that he is my son--a very different son from you, Michel--and that his faults do not prevent my loving him."

Agatha kept her word, and Michel tried to second her. The Piccinino was conscious of a genuine interest in his mental suffering amid all the tender care bestowed upon his physical ills; he softened little by little, and one day put Agatha's hand to his lips for the first time, saying to her:

"You are good, like my mother. Oh! why am I not your son? Then I would love Michel, because the same womb would have borne us both. Men are really brothers only through the mother. She alone can make us understand what is called the voice of blood, the cry of nature."

Another day he said to Michel: "I do not love you, because you are my father's son. A man who mingled his pure blood with that of so many women of diverse ranks and natures, must have had an unstable, complicated character, lacking unity; so that his sons are as different from one another as day is from night. If I should ever love you, whom I already esteem and admire, it will be because you have a mother whom I love, and who, I sometimes persuade myself, is my mother too."

When the Piccinino was in condition to resume his adventurous life, which he had regretted so bitterly during the languorous days of his illness, he was suddenly appalled at the idea of putting an end to an existence which had become so sweet to him. He tried to assume a careless air, and refused the offers of a happier lot which Agatha and Michel made him; but it was evident that he was consumed by dismay and regret.

"My dear boy," said the marquis, "you should accept the means of increasing the scope and effectiveness of the mission to which you have devoted yourself. It has never occurred to us to introduce you in a puerile and cowardly way into the society which you despise and for which you are not adapted. But, without submitting to any constraint, without changing in any way your independent principles, you can make a veritable alliance, over the heads of established laws, with veritable humanity. Hitherto you have gone astray because you have forced yourself to hate your fellowmen. It is their false and mischievous institutions against which you protest. In the bottom of your heart, you love your fellows, for you suffer by reason of their aversion and your own isolation. So change your notion of your functions as _justicier d'aventure_. Hitherto your aversion has usurped that title, for you have used it only for your personal vengeance and for the gratification of your instincts. What you have lacked for playing a nobler part and serving our country more effectively is a larger stage and resources proportioned to your ambition. Your brother offers you these resources; he is ready to share his income with you; and such a division will make you more powerful for your chosen work, without binding you to society in any way. You could not, to be sure, become a noble and a landed proprietor without entering into engagements to be sanctioned by law; but, by accepting secretly, from brotherly affection, the strength which you must have, you will remain a stranger to the world we live in, while you will become capable of working to correct its vices. You will be able to leave this unhappy island, where your efforts are too cramped to have their due effect. You can seek elsewhere companions and neophytes, enter into relations with the enemies of the public misery, work for the cause of slaves everywhere, study the means of putting an end to slavery, and return to us with knowledge and reinforcements which will accomplish more in one year than expeditions against wretched _campieri_ would do in your whole life. Your faculties place you far above the trade of brigand. Your penetration, your prudence, your varied and extensive knowledge--everything even to the beauty of your face and the charm of your speech--stamps you as a typical man of action, prudent as well as daring, adroit as well as fearless. Yes, you are a born conspirator. The hazard of birth started you upon that path, and your character fits you to cut a most brilliant figure therein. But there are great conspiracies which, even when they prove abortive in one part of the world, forward the cause of universal liberty: and there are paltry ones which come to an end on a scaffold, with the unknown hero who organizes them. If you fall to-morrow in an ambuscade, your band is scattered, and national independence breathes its last in your breast. But conspire in the bright sunlight of humanity, instead of lurking in the shadow of our precipices, and some day you may be the liberator of our brothers instead of the terror of our old women."

These words were at once harsh and flattering to the Piccinino's sensitive self-love. The criticism of his past life cut him to the quick, but the favorable judgment concerning his capacity for usefulness in the future healed the wound. He blushed, turned pale, reflected and understood. He was too intelligent to contend against the truth. Agatha and Michel affectionately took his hands, and begged him on their knees to accept half of a fortune the whole of which they owed to him. Tears of pride, hope, joy, and perhaps of gratitude as well, started from his glistening eyes, and he accepted.

We must not forget to say that another miracle had taken place, unknown to all, in that strange man's heart. Love, true love, had vanquished him. Mila had been his nurse, and Mila had chained the tiger. She was proud of it, with good reason, and she was naturally very proud. The love of Captain Piccinino relieved her in her own eyes from the blemish upon her pride due to Magnani's desertion. She was brave too. She felt that she was born for a more difficult and more brilliant destiny than spinning silk. Her heroic and poetic instincts were exceedingly well adapted to a life full of danger and excitement. Carmelo, who had expressed his regret at their first interview that she was not a boy, whom, like Lara, he could take for his page, changed his mind, saying to himself that the beauty of a woman and the brave heart of a heroine added immensely to the charm of the young comrade of whom he had dreamed.

He did not obtain Mila at once, however. She voluntarily made herself the pledge and reward of his docility in following the advice of the princess and the marquis. I fancy that the day for the redemption of the pledge will soon come, if it has not come already.--But here ends the novel, which might last much longer, if I chose; for I persist in saying that no novel can end.

THE LAST OF THE ALDINIS