"I knew that," said Obed Chute. "I hope you will forgive me. It was not curiosity. I wished to investigate this to the bottom; but I am satisfied--I respect your secret. Will you forgive me for the pain I have caused you?"
Zillah placed her cold hand in his, and said:
"My friend, do not speak so. It hurts me to have you ask my forgiveness."
Obed Chute's face beamed with pleasure.
"My poor child," he said, "you must go and rest yourself. Go and sleep; perhaps you will be better for it."
And Zillah dragged herself out of the room.
CHAPTER XLI.
OBED ON THE RAMPAGE.
A long illness was the immediate result of so much excitement, suffering, and grief. Gradually, however, Zillah struggled through it; and at last, under the genial sky of Southern Italy, she began to regain her usual health. The kindness of her friends was unfaltering and incessant. Through this she was saved, and it was Obed's sister who brought her back from the clutches of fever and the jaws of death. She had as tender a heart as her brother, and had come to love as a sister or a daughter this poor, friendless, childlike girl, who had been thrown upon their hands in so extraordinary a manner. Brought up in that puritanical school which is perpetually on the look-out for "special providences," she regarded Zillah's arrival among them as the most marked special providence which she had ever known, and never ceased to affirm that something wonderful was destined to come of all this. Around this faithful, noble-hearted, puritanical dame, Zillah's affections twined themselves with something like filial tenderness, and she learned in the course of her illness to love that simple, straightforward, but high-souled woman, whose love she had already won. Hitherto she had associated the practice of chivalrous principles and the grand code of honor exclusively with lofty gentlemen like the Earl and her father, or with titled dames; now, however, she learned that here, in Obed Chute, there was as fine an instinct of honor, as delicate a sentiment of loyalty to friendship, as refined a spirit of knight-errantry, as strong a zeal to succor the weak and to become the champion of the oppressed, and as profound a loathing for all that is base and mean, as in either of those grand old gentlemen by whom her character had been moulded. Had Obed Chute been born an English lord his manners might have had a finer polish, but no training known among the sons of men could have given him a truer appreciation of all that is noble and honorable and chivalrous. This man, whose life had been passed in what Zillah considered as "vulgar trade," seemed to her to have a nature as pure and as elevated as that of the Chevalier Bayard, that hero _sans peur et sans reproche_.
Obed, as has already been seen, had a weakness for Neapolitan life, and felt in his inmost soul that strange fascination which this city possesses. He had traversed every nook and corner of Naples, and had visited, with a strange mixture of enthusiasm and practical observation, all its environs. In the course of his wanderings he had fallen in with a party of his countrymen, all of whom were kindred spirits, and who hailed his advent among them with universal appreciation. Without in any way neglecting Zillah, he joined himself to these new friends, and accompanied them in many an excursion into the country about Naples--to Capua, to Cumae, to Paestum, and to many other places. To some of these places it was dangerous to go in these unsettled times; but this party laughed at dangers. They had acquired a good-natured contempt for Italians and Italian courage; and as each man, in spite of the Neapolitan laws, carried his revolver, they were accustomed to venture any where with the most careless ease, and the most profound indifference to any possible danger. In fact, any approach to danger they would have hailed with joy, and to their adventurous temper the appearance of a gang of bandits would have been the greatest blessing which this land could afford.