"In heaven's name, explain yourself," said Michel, unable to endure these attacks any longer. "It seems to me that we are fighting a duel in the darkness. I cannot parry your blows, and I apparently strike you when I am trying to defend myself. With what do you reproach me, or what do you ask of me? If I am a man of my time and of my class, is it my fault? I have just stepped foot for the first time on this island devoted to the worship of the past. I am not an atheist, but I am not pious. I do not believe in the superiority of certain classes, nor in the necessary inferiority of my own. I do not feel that I am the born servant of the old patricians, the old prejudices, and the old institutions of my native land. I place myself on a level with the haughtiest and most venerated heads, in order to pass judgment on them, so that I may know whether I should bend my head before true merit, or protect myself against unwarranted prestige. That is the whole of it, uncle, I give you my word. Now you know me. I admire what is noble, great and sincere before God. My heart is susceptible of affection and my mind prostrates itself before virtue. I love art, and I am ambitious of renown, I agree; but I love serious art and seek pure renown. I will not sacrifice any one of my duties to them; but I will not accept false duties, and I will spurn false principles. Am I a miserable wretch for that? and must I, in order to have the honor of being a true Sicilian, become a monk in your convent, or a brigand on the mountain?"
Michel's spirited outburst did not displease the Capuchin. He listened to it with interest, and his face softened. But the young man's last words produced the effect of an electric shock upon him. He leaped up from his bench, and seizing Michel's arm with that herculean strength of which he had given him a specimen in the morning, exclaimed: "What is that metaphor? What are you talking about?"
But, observing Michel's air of stupefaction at this new outbreak, he began to laugh: "Well, even if you do know it—even if your father has told you—what does it matter? Other people know it, and I am none the worse off. Well, my child, you have unconsciously used a very powerful illustration; it was what one might call the marrow of the truth. All men are not made to be fed upon it; there are milder and more digestible truths which suffice for the majority. But to those who desire to be absolutely logical in their opinions and their acts, what seems to you a paradox is the merest commonplace. You look at me in amazement? I tell you that you did, without knowing it, speak like an oracle when you said that, in order to have the honor of being a true Sicilian, one must be a monk in my convent, or a brigand on the mountain. I should prefer that you would be one or the other, rather than a cosmopolitan artist as you aspire to be. Listen to a story, and try to understand it:
"There was once in Sicily a poor devil, but blessed with a vivid imagination and a certain amount of courage, who, being unable to endure the disasters by which his country was overwhelmed, took his gun one fine morning and went into the mountains, resolved to lose his own life, or to destroy one by one as many of the enemy as possible, pending the day when he could fall upon them in a body with the outlaws whom he joined. They formed a large and select band. Their leader was a noble, the last descendant of one of the greatest families of the country—Prince Cæsar de Castro-Reale. Remember that name. You may never have heard it, but a time will come when it will have more interest for you.
"In the woods and mountains the prince had taken the name of Destatore,[1] by which name he was known, loved, and feared for ten years, nobody suspecting that he was the young and brilliant nobleman who had run through his fortune at Palermo, and led a most dissipated life with his friends and mistresses.
"Before speaking of the poor devil who turned brigand from patriotic despair, I must say a few words of the noble patrician who had become a leader of brigands for the same reason. It will assist you to a knowledge of your country and your countrymen. Il Destatore was a man of thirty years, handsome, well-educated, lovable, brave and generous,—he had all the characteristics of a hero; but he was persecuted and crushed by the Neapolitan government, who detested him particularly because of the influence he exerted over the common people. He resolved to put an end to the life he was leading, to consume the balance of his fortune, which was reduced every day by taxes to the profit of the enemy; in short, to drown his sorrow in drunkenness, and to kill himself or brutalize himself in debauchery.
"He succeeded only in ruining himself. His robust health withstood all sorts of excess, his sorrow survived his dissipation, and when he found that, instead of falling asleep, he became intensely excited in his cups, that a frantic rage took possession of him, and that it would be necessary for him to run a sword through his body, or, as he said, to eat à la Neapolitan, he disappeared and became a bandit. He was supposed to have been drowned, and his inheritance never caused his nephews any great embarrassment or afforded much profit to the authorities.
"Thereafter he was a tiger, a devouring lion, who spread terror through the country districts and avenged his fatherland in the bloodiest way. The poor devil whom I mentioned at the outset of my story became passionately attached to him, and served him with fanatical loyalty. He never stopped to think whether he was worshipping the past, or bending the knee to a man who deemed himself superior to him, but who was only his equal before God; whether he was fighting and risking his life for the benefit of a master, who might prove to be ungrateful and despotic; whether, after destroying the foreign tyranny, as they hoped to do, they would fall again under the yoke of the old prejudices, the old abuses, the nobles, and the monks. No, all those shades of distrust were too subtle for such a straightforward and simple mind as his. To beg would have seemed a degradation to him in those days; and as for work! why he had never done anything in his life but work, and work zealously, for he loved work, and was not afraid of it. But I do not know whether you have noticed as yet that in Sicily every man does not work who wants to. Although we have the richest and most fertile soil in the world, taxation has destroyed commerce, agriculture, all the industries and all the arts. The man of whom I speak had sought the hardest, roughest, varieties of labor in the salt marshes, in the mines, even in the very bowels of the earth, which, on the surface, was devastated and neglected. Work was lacking everywhere, and all the enterprises in which he had been employed being abandoned, one after another, he was reduced to begging alms of his fellows who were as badly off as he, or to stealing. He preferred to take openly.
"But in the Destatore's band they took with discernment and justice. They maltreated and held to ransom none but enemies of the country or traitors. They had a secret understanding with every well-meaning or unfortunate man. They hoped to form a party large enough to attempt to seize one of the three principal cities, Palermo, Catania, or Messina.
"But Palermo, before placing confidence in us, demanded that we should be led by a noble; and as the Destatore was supposed to be an adventurer of low birth, he was rejected. If he had told his true name, it would have been worse. He was execrated throughout the country for his previous conduct, and that was a difficulty for which he could blame no one but himself.