The shores where the four boats put in were swarming with the enemy's explorers, sent to trace the fugitives. Anita was lying a little way off the shore, concealed in a corn-field, her head supported by the Recluse. Leggiero, a valiant major belonging to the island of Maddalena, who had followed the General in South America, and returned to Italy with him, was their only companion. He lay peeping through the stalks, and very soon discovered some of the cursed white curs in search of blood. Cicernachio, Bassi, and nine others, who by our advice had taken a different direction in order to escape the enemy, were all captured, and shot like dogs by the Austrians.
When the nine victims were taken, the Austrians compelled nine peasants, by force of blows, to dig nine holes in the sand, after which a discharge from the enemy's picket dispatched the unhappy heroes. The youngest, a son of a Roman tribune, only thirteen years of age, still moved after the fire, but a blow from the butt-end of an Austrian's musket smashed in his skull, and thus brutally ended his young life. Bassi and his brother, Cicernachio, met with the same fate at Bologna. The foreigner and the priest made merry in that hour of slaughter over the purest Italian blood; and the mitred master of Rome remounted his polluted throne, having for a footstool the corpses of his compatriots.
Let this cold brutality, this savage butchery of their honest noble-hearted compatriots live in the memory of Italians, and give their consciences no peace while they leave their magnificent city a prey to the foreigner and to the vile priests, who use it as a den of infamy.
The Recluse, bearing his precious burden—that dear and faithful wife—wandered sadly, with his companion, Leggiero, through the lagoons of the lower Po, until he had closed her eyes, and wept over her cold corpse tears of desperation. Onward he wandered then, through forests and over mountains, ever pursued by the agents of the Pope and of Austria. Fate, however, spared him, to suffer anew both danger and fatigue, and to reap some triumphs too. The tyrants of Italy again found him upon their tracks—those tracks indelibly stained by them with tears and blood. Ill was it for them that he escaped until the day when they, in turn, took to flight, and, like cowards, left their tables spread for him, while the carpets of their superb palaces bore the imprint of the rough shoes of his Thousand.
Meanwhile, however, our tale has brought the Recluse to Venice to witness the liberty for which he had sighed so much. It was then that the lagunes, covered with gondolas, saluted the red shirt as the token of national redemption, and sad memories faded in the light of the joy and freedom of that Queen of the Adriatic.
CHAPTER LII. THE SPY IN VENICE
It is eleven o'clock at night. The canals of Venice are covered with gondolas, and the Place of St. Mark, illuminated, is so crowded with people that scarcely a stone of the pavement is visible. From the balcony of the Zecchini Palace, on the north side of the Piazza, the Recluse has saluted the people, and the redeemed city ("redeemed," yes, but by a bargain—the ancient bulwark of European civilization was, alas! bought and sold a bargain between courts), and that salutation was frantically responded to by an exulting and affected multitude. And above all was the beholder struck by the aspect of the populace, as he said to himself, "The stigma which despotism imprints upon the human face can even be depicted here."
A people, once the ancient rulers of the world, transformed by the foreigner and the priest, whose rod of deception, dipped in the chemistry of superstition, is able to change good into evil, gold to dross, and the most prosperous of nations into one of beggars and sacristans; these have bartered away this noble city of the sea, which calls herself "daughter of Rome"—left her disheartened, dishonored, and defamed! And he who loved the people cried out in the anguish of his soul, "Alas, that it should be so!"
But moved as he was by the contemplation of the scene, nevertheless he did not fail to cast a scrutinizing look over the buzzing crowd. After a life of sixty years, into which so many events had been crowded, the man of the people was not wanting in experience that enabled him to analyze fairly the component parts of a densely-packed crowd, among whom were hidden the thief, the assassin, the spy, and the hireling of the priest. And many such were purposely mingled with the good and honest of that population.