Turning to the leader of the Provencals, the friar sternly plied him with questions, but his replies seemed far from satisfying, for the monk demanded to be conducted straightway to their master. Francesco heard them scurry from his prison, after securing the door, and, exhausted from his mental and bodily sufferings, his limbs aching as in the throes of a fever, he fell back against the damp stone and swooned.
When he waked, he found himself on a bed in a chamber, the only window of which opened on to a courtyard. The sun was riding high in the heavens and his beams, falling aslant on the opposite wall, exercised such a magical effect on the awakened sleeper, that he sat bolt upright on his couch and, turning to the friar at his bedside, demanded to know where he was.
The friar enjoined him to be silent and arose, to fetch a repast, but when he found that Francesco's restlessness was not likely to be assuaged by this method, he slowly and cautiously informed him of the events which had transpired, since he had visited him in his cell, to accompany him, on what was to have been, his last walk on earth.
Dwelling on the probable causes leading to his summary condemnation, the monk hinted at rumors, that Conradino, son of Emperor Conrad IV, had crossed the Alps in armed descent upon Italy, to wrest the lands of Manfred from Anjou's grasp. He further hinted at a conspiracy afoot among the Northern Italian Ghibellines, to rescue from her prison in Castel del Ovo, where she had been confined since the fatal battle of Benevento, the luckless Helena, Manfred's Queen. A fatal resemblance to one, known to have been entrusted with a similar task, had caused the swift issuance of the death-warrant on the part of Anjou's procurator, a sentence which no denial on his part would have suspended or annulled, as, incensed at Francesco's bearing and demeanor, he of the Leaden Lamb had remorselessly consigned him to his fate. And, but for his timely arrival and speedy intervention, and the vigorous protests with which the monk supported his claim of Francesco's innocence, the latter's fate would have been hopelessly sealed.
Francesco, partaking of the viands the monk had placed before him, listened attentively, while the friar assisted him, for as yet he could barely make use of his arms and hands, cut and bruised as they were from the cords of the Provencals.
The abuse and the insults to which he had been subjected since his arrival at Benevento, and the dire peril from which he had so narrowly escaped, had exasperated Francesco to a degree, that he was trembling in every limb with the memory of the outrage, and he vowed a heavy reckoning against the fiend who, unheard and untried, would have sent him to an ignominious death. Thereupon the friar informed him, that the Provencals had departed shortly after he had been released from his prison, and exhausted, Francesco fell back among the cushions into a deep and dreamless slumber, while the friar resumed his office of watchfulness by his bedside.
He awoke strengthened, and, save for the bruises testifying to his treatment at the hands of the Provencals, his splendid youth swiftly re-asserted itself. It suffered him no longer within the ominous confines of the Witches' City.
Heedless of the friar's protests, who declared that he was not strong enough to continue his journey, he summoned the Calabrian landlord whose deferential demeanor, when he entered Francesco's presence, was at marked variance with his conduct on the previous night.
After having paid his reckoning and secured his steed, Francesco thanked the friar for his intervention on his behalf, then, with some difficulty, he mounted and rode out of the gates of Benevento, without as much as looking back with a single glance upon the city's ominous walls.