After an hour he began to feel very weak. “Now then,” he thought, “am I going to faint? If I faint somebody will steal my horse, and perhaps my clothes, and with my clothes my valuables.” He had not strength to guide his horse, and was doing his best to keep steady in the saddle, when a peasant digging in a field hard by the high-road noticed his pallor, and offered him a glass of beer and a bit of bread.
“Seeing you so pale,” said the man, “I thought you might have been wounded in the great battle.” Never did help come more in the nick of time. When Fabrizio began to chew that morsel of black bread his eyes had begun to sting when he looked in front of him. When he had pulled himself together a little he thanked his benefactor. “And where am I?” he inquired. The peasant informed him that three quarters of a league farther on he would find the little town of Zonders, where he would be well cared for. Fabrizio reached the town without well knowing what he was doing, his only care being how not to fall off at every step his horse took. He saw a big gate standing open and rode through it; it led to a tavern, The Currycomb. The good-natured mistress of the house, an exceedingly fat woman, ran forward, calling for help in a voice that shook with pity. Two young girls assisted Fabrizio to dismount. Before he was well out of his saddle he fainted dead away. A surgeon was summoned and he was bled. On that day and those following it he hardly knew what was being done to him. He slept almost incessantly.
The puncture in his leg threatened to turn into a serious abscess. Whenever he was in his senses he begged that care might be taken of his horse, and frequently reiterated that he would pay well, which mightily offended the good hostess and her daughters. He had been admirably tended for a fortnight, and was beginning to collect his thoughts a little, when he noticed, one evening, that his nurses seemed very much disturbed. Presently a German officer entered his room. The language in which his questions were answered was one which Fabrizio did not understand, but he clearly perceived that he himself was the subject of the conversation; he pretended to be asleep. Some time afterward, when he thought the officer must have departed, he called his hostess.
“Did not that officer come to write my name down on a list and take me prisoner?”
With tears in her eyes his hostess admitted the fact.
“Well, then,” he cried, raising himself up in his bed, “there’s money in my pocket. Buy me civilian clothes, and this very night I’ll ride away. You’ve saved my life once already by taking me in when I should have fallen and died in the street. Save it again by helping me to get back to my mother.”
At this point the landlady’s daughters both burst into tears. They trembled for Fabrizio’s safety, and as they could hardly understand any French, they came close to his bed to question him. They held a discussion with their mother in Flemish, but every moment their wet eyes turned pityingly upon our hero. He thought he gathered that his flight might compromise them seriously, but that they were ready to take the risk. He clasped his hands together and thanked them earnestly.
A local Jew undertook to provide him with a suit of clothes, but when he brought it, about ten o’clock that night, the young ladies discovered, by comparing the coat with Fabrizio’s hussar jacket, that it was a great deal too large for him. They set to work on it at once; there was no time to be lost. Fabrizio showed them several napoleons hidden in his garments, and begged them to sew them into those which had just been bought. With the suit the Jew had brought a fine pair of new boots. Fabrizio did not hesitate to ask the kind-hearted girls to cut open his hussar boots at the place he showed them, and his little diamonds were soon hidden in the lining of his new foot-gear.
A singular result of his loss of blood, and his consequent weakness, was that Fabrizio had almost entirely forgotten his French. He talked to his hostesses in Italian, and as they spoke nothing but their Flemish patois, intercourse was really carried on solely by signs. When the young girls, perfectly disinterested as they were, beheld the diamonds, their admiration for our hero knew no bounds. They were convinced he was a prince in disguise. Aniken, the younger and more artless of the two, kissed him without further ceremony. Fabrizio, for his part, thought them charming, and toward midnight, when, in consideration of the journey he was about to take, the surgeon had allowed him to drink a little wine, he was half inclined not to depart at all.