"Signor Cavalier speak less angrily: I am not what you take me for, but a friend who comes to set you free. Remember, signor, that the British are the friends of Calabria; which our victorious army has already freed from the yoke of France."
"What is this you tell me?" he exclaimed. "British troops in Calabria! And what am I reserved to hear? Naples has again become a province of France! yet not a voice has whispered it to me in this living tomb, where I have been kept in ignorance of all those great events that have shaken my country. From France—again from the grasp of France?" said you.
"From the brother of Napoleon, whose soldiers we have driven from the rocks of Scylla to the hills of Cassano; hoisting the banner of Ferdinand on the towns and castles of the provinces, and gaining one most signal victory in a battle on the plains of Maida."
"I am thunderstruck! And all this has passed in three years?"
"In as many months."
"O joy! And you have come to set me free, most reverend father?"
"Yes,—but address me not thus: I am a British officer in disguise, and placed in a most peculiar position," I replied; quite forgetting the part I intended to act, in my sympathy for this unfortunate, whose frank and graceful bearing gained my entire good-will. "This Bishop of Cosenza," I observed, "seems a tyrant, of whose cruelty and injustice I have heard innumerable instances."
"A tyrant, said you? Call him monster, fiend, or what you will: the flaming depths of hell contain not a darker spirit, a more designing devil! You offer me life: yet what is life to me now, when every flower that adorned my path in youth has been crushed and blighted, and every beam of joy extinguished, till gloom, horror, and revenge have settled like a shadow on my soul? O, signor! words cannot depict the bodily and spiritual agony I have endured. Ere we go, hear me, but a moment! My story is short, but bitter. Hear it, and pity me!"
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE SECOND PENITENT—THE CAVALIER.