The Piccinino, Volume 2 (of 2); The last of Aldinis

by George Sand

"Let us rub it out," said Michel, "or my brother's audacity will be fatal to him."

"No, let us not rub it out," said the monk. "Your brother is too prudent not to be far away from here before this, and we have no right to deprive the nobles and people of Catania of a terrible example and a bloody lesson. The proud Castro-Reale assassinated! assassinated by the cardinal! lured into a trap by this vile abbé! Ah! I ought to have guessed it! He had too much vigor and courage still to stoop to suicide. Do not accuse your brother of being over severe, Michel, and do not look upon this vengeance as a mere useless crime. You do not know what your father was in his good days, his great days. You do not know that he was on the point of mending his ways and becoming once more the dispenser of justice on the mountain. He was repentant. He believed in God, he still loved his country, and he adored your mother. If he could but have lived as he was living a year more, she would have loved him, and would have forgiven everything. She would have come and shared his perils, she would have been the brigand's wife instead of being the prisoner and victim of his murderers. She would have brought you up herself, she would never have been parted from you! You would have drunk the milk of a lioness and you would have grown to manhood in the tempest. Everything would be better so! Sicily would be nearer its deliverance than it will be ten years hence; and I should not have continued to be a monk. Instead of walking up the mountain, with folded arms, to see this body lying in a corner and the Piccinino flying among the precipices, we should all be together, rifle in hand, fighting desperately against the Swiss mercenaries of Naples, and perhaps marching on Catania with the yellow flag flaunting its golden folds in the morning breeze! Yes, everything would be better so, I tell you, Prince of Castro-Reale!—But God's will be done!" added Fra Angelo, remembering at last that he was a monk.

Being certain that the Piccinino must have left the valley long before the hour named in the inscription as that of the murder, Michel and the monk went no farther, but retraced their steps from that wild spot where the abbé's corpse would be at the mercy of the vulture for some hours to come, before anyone would interrupt his ghastly feast. As they turned away, they saw the ill-omened bird fly over their heads, returning with savage eagerness to his prey.

"That is the fate you deserved," said the monk, calmly; "to be eaten by dogs and vultures! that is the malediction which people in all ages have called down upon spies and traitors. You are very pale, my young prince, and perhaps you think me very harsh in my judgment of a priest, being myself a churchman. What can you expect? It may be that I have seen and done with my own hand, perhaps, more killing than is consistent with the salvation of my soul! but in conquered countries, you see, war sometimes has no other resource than murder. Do not think that the Piccinino is worse than other men. He was born calm and long-suffering; but there are virtues which would become vices in us Sicilians, if we should cling to them. Reason and a sense of justice taught him to be a scourge at need. But you see that his heart is sound at bottom. He is very angry with your mother, you told me, and you dreaded his vengeance. You see that he absolves her from the crime which certainly never occurred to that saint-like woman's mind; you see that he does homage to truth, even in the heat of his anger; you see, too, that instead of cursing you he exhorts you to make common cause with him when occasion requires. No, no, Carmelo is no dastard!"

Michel was of the monk's opinion, but he held his peace; it would require a mighty effort on his part to fraternize with the gloomy mind of that civilized savage whom men called the Piccinino. He readily detected the monk's secret predilection for the brigand. In Fra Angelo's eyes the bastard rather than the prince was the Destatore's son and the heir of his strong nature. But Michel was too heavily burdened by the emotions—by turns delicious and painful—which he had experienced within a few hours, to maintain a conversation on any subject, and, even if he considered that the Capuchin was too revengeful and inclined to be too pitiless in his opinions, he did not feel that he had the right to contradict or even to pass judgment upon a man to whom he was indebted for the legitimizing of his birth, the saving of his life, and the joy of knowing his mother.

They saw in the distance the cardinal's villa all draped in black.

"You too, Michel, will be obliged to wear mourning," said Fra Angelo. "Carmelo is more fortunate than you at this moment, in not belonging to society. If he were the Princess of Palmarosa's son, he would have to wear the false livery of grief—mourning for his father's murderer."

"For love of my mother, my dear uncle," replied the prince, "do not force upon my notice the unpleasant side of my position. At present I can think of nothing except that I am the son of the noblest and loveliest and best of women."

"That is well, my child, that is well. Forgive me," continued the monk. "My mind is always in the past; it is always busy with the memory of my poor murdered captain. Why did I leave him? Why had I turned monk? Ah! I was a coward too. If I had remained faithful to him in his ill-fortune, and patient with his vagaries, he never would have fallen into a wretched ambuscade, and perhaps he would be alive still! He would be proud and happy to have two sons, both brave and handsome! Ah! Destatore, Destatore! here am I weeping for you more bitterly than at first. To learn that you died by another hand than your own is like losing you again."

And the monk, but a moment before so pitiless and unfeeling as he trampled upon the blood of the traitor, began to weep like a child. The old soldier, faithful beyond the grave, reappeared in him, and he embraced Michel, saying: "Comfort me; let me hope that we shall avenge him!"