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

by George Sand

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.