In fact, he sighed incessantly for the moment when he could see again his dear furnace and its beloved gate of hell.
When Michel and Mila, who were accustomed to his cheerful humor, saw that he was pensive and downcast, they were grieved and disturbed, as always happens with respect to persons with whom mental depression is a rare phenomenon. Thereupon he confessed to his children that he was thinking of his native land. "If I were not in excellent health," he said, "and if I did not constantly argue with myself, homesickness would have killed me long ago."
But when his children spoke to him of returning to Sicily, he would wave his hands in a significant way, as if to say: "I cannot cross the strait again; I should escape Charybdis only to fall into Scylla."
Once or twice he inadvertently said to them: "Prince Dionigi died a long while ago, but his brother Hieronymo is still living." And when his children questioned him as to what reason he had to fear Prince Hieronymo, he shook his finger and said: "Hush! I should not even have mentioned those princes before you."
But it happened one day that Pier-Angelo, being at work in a certain palace in Rome, picked up a newspaper which he found on the floor, and showing it to Michel, who had looked in upon him on his way from the Museum of Painting, he exclaimed: "What a misfortune it is for me not to know how to read! I will bet that there is news from my dear Sicily in this paper. Look, look, Michel, what is this word here? I would swear that it was Catania. Yes, yes, I can read that name! Come, look and tell me what is going on at Catania in these days." Michel glanced at the paper, and saw that it was proposed to light the principal streets of Catania with hydrogen gas.
"Great Heaven!" ejaculated Pier-Angelo; "think of seeing Ætna by gaslight! How beautiful that will be!"
And he threw his cap up to the ceiling in his joy.
"There is more news," said the young man, looking over the paper. "The Prince-Cardinal Hieronymo of Palmarosa has been obliged to suspend the exercise of the important functions which the Neapolitan government has entrusted to him. His eminence has been stricken by paralysis, and his life is deemed to be in danger. Pending a definite decision from the medical profession concerning the mental and physical condition of that noble personage, the government has entrusted his functions temporarily to his excellency, the Marquis of——"
"What do I care to whom?" cried Pier-Angelo, snatching the paper from his son's hands with extraordinary excitement, "Prince Hieronymo is off to join his brother Dionigi in the tomb, and we are saved!"—Then, after trying to spell out Prince Hieronymo's name for himself, as if he feared that his son might have made a mistake, he returned the journal to him and bade him read the paragraph again, very carefully and very slowly.
When this was done, Pier-Angelo crossed himself devoutly.