Dusk! It was getting towards dark now!
He stirred in his chair and looked about him. The place seemed less crowded than it had been when he had last observed it, and, thinking that the moment had arrived when he could at last fling aside the world and return to his family, he rose to depart.
What were those dark shapes hovering near his chair? Those were no Senators! He peered at them as he passed, but they paid him no attention and he moved on towards the door.
Instantly he felt himself seized from behind and the dark shapes materialised into Sbirri—soldier police—as he struck out right and left, bellowing and roaring in his fury. But he was only one, and there were twenty or thirty of them, and he was chained hand and foot before he had recovered from his first amazement.
The place was deserted now, save for them, and in the gloom he was hurried along, pushed and hustled, down, down, until a door creaked open and he was flung into a cell, pitch-black and damp. The door slammed to behind him, and his little part in the world was played.
The next day he was “put to the question,” but no records remain, none being kept, of what passed in the little cell during the dread ordeal; and twenty days later, gagged and chained, he was led out to the Piazza, and there, between the pillars, beheaded.
His grave is in the great Church of St. Francis, in Milan, beside his wife.
While we are still in the North, the story of the Patron of Pisa, St. Raniero, may interest my readers.
He was a Scacciari, born in Pisa about the year 1100, and grew up with the other noble children of the place, cheerful and pleasure-loving as were they—and as, it may be noticed in passing, were several of the greatest Saints in the Calendar.