"Brother," rejoined the Piccinino, putting Michel's hand to his lips, "you did not do it from affection for me, I know; you did it for your own honor. But you are revenged for my hatred; for you continue to hate me, and I am doomed to love you!"
Two tears rolled down the brigand's pale cheeks. Were they a manifestation of genuine emotion, or were they caused by the nervous reaction that follows the violent strain of physical suffering? Doubtless they were due in some measure to both causes.
The peasant suggested a strange remedy, which Fra Angelo accepted with great eagerness: the application of a bituminous ooze which was found at the bottom of a spring of brackish water heavily charged with sulphur. The country people collect it and keep it in earthen jars to use in making poultices; it is their panacea. Fra Angelo made a poultice of it and placed it on the brigand's wound; then, having washed him and covered him with some wretched clothes which they bought from the peasant; having also washed off the blood with which Michel and himself were covered, he gave his companions a few swallows of wine, placed Carmelo on their host's mule, gave the man a round sum in gold, to prove to him that there were advantages in serving the good cause, and left him, having first made him swear that he would go the following night and get Magnani's body, and bury it with as much respect as if it were his own son's.
"My own son!" said the peasant in a hollow voice: "do you mean the one the Swiss killed last year?"
This question gave Michel more confidence in the man than any promises or oaths could have done. He looked at him for the first time, and noticed an expression of extraordinary vigor and fanatical enthusiasm on that wasted, earth-colored face. He was more than a brigand, he was a wolf, a vulture, always ready to fall upon a bleeding quarry, to tear it to pieces and glut his rage in its entrails. One could see that his whole life would be too short to avenge his son's death. He did not suggest to his guests that he should guide them in their flight. He was in haste to have done with his duty to them, so that he could go up to the castle to see if any campiere were still breathing and to insult him in his death agony.
LII
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.