"Come," said I, consolingly, "you must not look so gloomily at things. I will do what I can to get you off, but you must tell me exactly how the whole affair happened."
"Ah! that I will, Signor, and with pleasure," said he.
Walking me up and down his narrow cell, the turnkey waiting at the door with his bunch of keys the while, he began his story thus:—
"You will remember, Eccellenza, that before parting from you last, I informed you of my intention of concealing myself within the confessional of the church and to remain there all night, for the purpose of observing attentively if the would-be corpse of Peppe there laid out should make any movement or betray the slightest signs of life.
"At a late hour, therefore, when all was dark—that is to say, about three hours after Ave Maria—I entered the church, and there was my late friend attired as a corpse with a candle left burning at his head, as is the custom, you know, Signor, in these parts. I approached him, though not without a certain tremor, for to me there has always been something solemn and awful in being left alone with the dead, especially at midnight when the corpse is laid out in state in the middle of the church, with nothing but the feeble light of one candle to illumine its ghastly features.
"Nor did this feeling at all abate when I reflected, that in all probability the supposed corpse was not really dead, but only feigning to be so. If anything, I felt more terrified. However, I advanced steadily, and gazed full in the face of it. It was very pale, and perfectly motionless, and I began to think that this must be death, and that your Excellency had been mistaken in being so positive that my friend was yet alive.
"I fancied that perhaps you had seen his spirit and had mistaken it for himself in the flesh. I forebore to touch the corpse from that same feeling of awe that I have just described, and though at the time I was perfectly satisfied that he was really dead, yet I still resolved to sit up all night, concealed within the confessional, so as to be able to tell your Excellency on the morrow that I had fulfilled my promise.
"I accordingly shut myself in, and gazed steadfastly at the features of the corpse, never taking my eyes off all the time, in order to assure myself beyond a doubt whether this were really death or merely its counterfeit. I gazed long and intently, but in vain did I endeavour to discover the slightest breathing or other signs of life. Whether the dim light of one candle prevented me from seeing sufficiently well, I know not.
"All was silent as the tomb, and as I gazed in breathless suspense, hour after hour flew by, till at length I heard the old church clock toll forth the dread hour of midnight. The last stroke had hardly died away—How shall I describe to you my terror, oh, Signor?—when suddenly I heard the church doors violently shaken. You know how nervous one becomes in the dead of the night at hearing any sort of noise unexpectedly that one cannot account for. Imagine, then, my sensations, Eccellenza, if you can, when, hidden within the confessional at this witching hour of night, with every nerve on the stretch, and looking out into the solemn gloom of the church, illumined only by the solitary candle placed at the head of the corpse—when all honest peasants, with their families, were in bed and fast asleep, and the greatest silence reigned everywhere, suddenly to hear a bang and a crash at the old church doors, which soon gave way—you know how rotten they are, Signor—and there entered, cursing and swearing, a troop of—well, upon my soul, Signor, I took them to be emissaries of the arch-fiend, sent to secure the soul of the defunct.
"However, after having attentively examined their forms, which were hardly less wild than those of the foul fiends themselves, if all accounts of them be true, I satisfied myself that they were, after all, human—men of flesh and blood like ourselves. Signor, they were the brigands.