In the mean while, the grandmother had read the letter over and over again. When she was told that I wished to take my leave, she stood up and delivered to me the folded paper. "Say to my son," she said, with a noble vivacity, not to say enthusiasm, "tell my son how happy the news you have brought me of him has made us. Say to my son, that I thus fold him to my heart," (here she stretched out her arms and again closed them over her bosom)—"that every day in prayer I supplicate God and our blessed Lady for him; that I give my blessing to him and to his wife, and that I have no wish but, before I die, to see him once again, with these eyes, which have shed so many tears on his account."
The peculiar elegance of the Italian favoured the choice and the noble arrangement of her words, which, moreover, were accompanied with those very lively gestures, by which this people usually give an incredible charm to everything they say. Not unmoved, I took my leave; they all held out their hands to me: the children even accompanied me to the door, and while I descended the steps, ran to the balcony of the window which opened from the kitchen into the street, called after me, nodded their adieus, and repeatedly cried out to me not to forget to come again and see them. They were still standing on the balcony, when I turned the corner.
I need not say that the interest I took in this family excited in me the liveliest desire to be useful to them, and to help them in their great need. Through me they were now a second time deceived, and hopes of assistance, which they had no previous expectation of, had been again raised, through the curiosity of a son of the north, only to be disappointed.
Palermo—Count Cagliostro.
My first intention was to pay them before my departure these fourteen once, which, at his departure, the fugitive was indebted to them, and by expressing a hope that he would repay me, to conceal from them the fact of its being a gift from myself. When, however, I got home, and cast up my accounts, and looked over my cash and bills, I found that, in a country where, from the want of communication, distance is infinitely magnified, I should perhaps place myself in a strait if I attempted to make amends for the dishonesty of a rogue, by an act of mere good nature.
The subsequent issue of this affair may as well be here introduced.
I set off from Palermo, and never came back to it; but notwithstanding the great distance of my Sicilian and Italian travels, my soul never lost the impression which the interview with this family had left upon it.
I returned to my native land, and the letter of the old widow, turning up among the many other papers, which had come with it from Naples by sea, gave me occasion to speak of this and other adventures.
Below is a translation of this letter, in which I have purposely allowed the peculiarities of the original to appear.