"True, I am a soldier, Giuseppe—a soldier of the king; yet am I not the less your friend," replied Velda gently.
"Back, I say! I seek not your friendship, boy, and I want not your blood! Yet," continued the robber, wrathfully, "how am I to save my own if I permit you to return alive after having dared to track me to my hiding-place?"
As Rivarola spoke he involuntarily raised the musket to his right shoulder.
"Hold, Giuseppe Rivarola!" cried his visitor. "Have you quite forgotten me? I am Raphael, the son of Agostino Velda."
The brigand uttered a cry, threw down his musket, and springing forward, with all that volubility of gesture and violent declamation which proclaims the Calabrian a genuine child of nature—a rough and impetuous mountaineer—he embraced the young man, took him in his arms and led him into his hiding-place.
It was indeed a squalid den, and lighted only by a few dim rays of the fading sunshine which stole in through fissures in the basalt. In a recess a little Madonna of coarse clay was fixed to the wall of rock, and the flame of a brass oil-lamp was flickering before it. Beneath lay a bed or rather a pallet, the neat arrangements of which indicated the presence of a female hand.
Outside this lay a couch of leaves and deer-skins whereon doubtless old Rivarola snatched his few hours of repose. Some vessels of coarse pottery, an iron pot, a bullet-mould, a powder-flask, and other similar et cetera, made up the furniture; and Raphael looked round him with a saddened and anxious eye.
"Francesca?" said he, inquiringly.
"She has gone to vespers, and to market at Oppido. The poor child requires other comforts than my gun can procure her on these bleak mountain sides, or even on the highway, for few men travel now without an escort of the Carabinieri. I am in hopes that she may be employed as a zitella—(a girl who will make herself useful)—by the good sisters of the Benedictine convent—God and His Mother bless them!" continued the brigand, lifting off his old battered hat with reverence. "The sisters pity her for her own sake, though they execrate me as one of the godless Garibaldini. Once that our Francesca is safe within their walls, I shall go farther west, among the mountains, where some of the men of Aspromonte are still lurking, though heaven knows that to leave this place for that may be only noi cadiamo da Scilli in Cariddi," he added, using the old classic proverb. "But while talking of my own affairs I forget yours. What of your father, my boy?"
"He has been taken by the National Guard, and is now with us in Oppido; but under sentence of death, as I too justly fear it must be," replied Raphael, in a broken voice.