Part 3

"One night towards the end of August I had a headache, having drunk more wine than usual, and the mosquitoes were more unconscionable than ever: so that I sat up in bed, and began to think whether I had not better strike a light and write some verses. All of a sudden through the stillness of night I heard two shots, then again others, and from the direction in which they came I judged that they must be somewhere near the captain's villa. '_Corpo della Madonna!_' thought I, 'what can he be about! Is he shooting bats or owls?' But they did not sound like the English rifle of Signor Gustavo, and they succeeded each other too rapidly and irregularly to be fired by any one man, and all at once I jumped horrified out of bed, for I no longer had any doubt about it,--what I had long silently feared had happened: Il Rosso and his banditti had fallen upon the lonely man, and they were fighting there in the vineyard for life and death. I got on my clothes, snatched a pair of old pistols from the wall, wakened up my apprentice, and told him to run through the streets, and call out 'help! murder!' as loud as ever he could. I myself knocked up a couple of neighbours, and encouraged all who were already roused to follow me. When we came down from the village we were a party of ten or twelve, each armed with rifle or pistol. And to be sure the firing did come from the vineyard, and we to whom the moon fortunately served instead of lanterns, scrambled over hedge and ditch towards the house, where we saw firing going on from the windows. That comforted me somewhat. He had withdrawn then into his fortress, and those rascals had to content themselves with firing into the room at him at random. I was just about to explain my plan of operations to our party,--how we were to form four divisions, surround the enemy, and attack him in the rear; but some out-post must have observed us, for there was a shrill whistle, and at the same moment the attack came to an end, and here and there where the moon shone on the open space between the rocks and the wood, we saw the band scatter, some of them so lame that we might have captured them if that had been our aim--over and above defending the captain--to take Il Rosso, our own fellow-citizen, prisoner. But we wished to spare his father the pain of that, and thanked God that we had come just in time, for at our loud call we saw Signor Gustavo step out on the balcony into the bright moonlight, and wave a white handkerchief to us. But when we saw the handkerchief nearer, it proved by no means pure white, but had large spots of blood, from a bullet having grazed his temple. It was nothing of any consequence, and did not prevent the captain sitting out of doors with me the next morning when all the rest had gone to their homes. Only Maddalena in her passionate way, besotted with the man in spite of her sister's story, could not be tranquillised, and went on searching for one healing herb after the other, and he had to apply them all to prevent her becoming quite frantic. The good creature, whose sleep was like a cat's, was aware of footsteps creeping about the house even before the dog heard them; and she ran up to wake her master. On the first bandit who placed a ladder against the balcony, she bestowed such a blow on the head with the barrel of a gun, that he fell backwards, and the ladder with him. And so there she was at hand to load one rifle after the other, and indeed every now and then she herself took a shot through the window, and swore with might and main that she had sent a ball through the coat of the murderous villain Il Rosso himself, and that he gave a great start but went on firing. As for the room, it had a ruinous aspect, not a pane was whole, the plaster had fallen in great sheets from the ceiling, and Erminia's picture had been struck in two places, but fortunately only the dress and the frame were injured. When the day began to break, the Captain and the dog too did get a few hours sleep, but Maddalena would not hear of it, although for the present the cut-throats had been scared away.

"I spent the next day at the villa, and kept imploring my friend to leave the district. Indeed all the reasonable people from the village who came to see the battle-field gave the same advice. He most obstinately refused to do so. It was only on the following day when the Roman Prefect of Police came over to keep up appearances, and draw up a protocol, by way of doing something, that he let himself be turned from his foolhardy resolve. 'I most earnestly advise you,' said the official, a monsignore N----, 'as soon as possible to leave the mountains, and indeed the country itself. A youth who witnessed the attack of the bandits--if indeed he were not one of them--has told me that more than one bullet has been cast for you; that Il Rosso has sworn upon the host that he will pay you off. Were I to remain here I could only protect you so long as you kept by my side. But if you took again to your lonely wanderings through the ravines you might expect out of every bush a shot that would consign you to another world.'

"And so at last he made up his mind to leave, and that at once, in the carriage of the Prefect of Police. When I pressed his hand at parting, 'Now then, Signor Gustavo,' said I, 'this will certainly be the last time we two ever meet on earth.' 'Who knows?' he replied. 'After all I am half a countryman of yours, and have no other home.' Then he gave me some directions with regard to Maddalena. She was not to leave the villa, nor did the captain think of selling it. If he failed to return within a certain number of years, she was to consider the house and garden her own property, and meanwhile to appropriate their profits. To the priest he gave in token of gratitude for the assistance rendered him by the villagers, a considerable sum for the poor. On me he bestowed a small picture of Lord Byron, which he had always carried about with him. The portrait of Erminia he had rolled up in a tin cylinder, and that and his fire-arms were all that he took away with him. So we parted, and as I believed, never to meet again, and Maddalena, who insisted upon going with him, and clung like a wild cat to the carriage, had to be forcibly dragged off and locked into the house till it had rolled far away.

"However that very night, so soon as they left off watching her, she vanished, and for days ran up and down the streets of Rome like a maniac, looking in vain for her master. At last she returned, and hobbled about the villa alone, but she let everything go to waste; the grapes might rot on the vines, and the fruit on the trees, rather than she take the trouble of gathering them and carrying them to market. She had always been idle, indeed, as a toad--a creature she resembled in appearance too--and it was only when it concerned the captain that she could work and bestir herself like three people in one.

"Of him, however, we heard nothing more; of his mortal foe Barbarossa we heard far too much. Since that night he and his band had lingered about our neighbourhood, and he seemed to have conceived a hatred against his countrymen, because they had gathered to the assistance of the foreigner. But for the company of papal gendarmes who were sent us as a permanent support from Rome, I do believe he would have fallen upon his own native village and taken a bloody revenge.

"Accordingly no one who had been present on the occasion, ever ventured himself a rifle-shot from the last houses without taking his fire-arms with him, and such as had to go into the mountains always begged for two gendarmes as escort. Those were sad times, _amico mio_, and I even lost my pleasure in rhyming, for I knew that he had a special spite against me. Twice there were great expeditions undertaken against the bandits, but not much came of them, for they had their scouts posted everywhere; they knew every crag and cranny of the mountains as intimately as the devil does his own den, and they were merely driven for awhile a little further back into the Sabina.

"However when in the winter old Serone, Domenico's father, died from grief on his son's account, we had an interval of peace. Il Rosso, whom of course the fact reached, may perhaps have felt some remorse, for by nature, as I have said, he was not bad-hearted, only his unfortunate love had hardened and frenzied him. It really seemed as though he meant to keep quiet during his year of mourning, and until midsummer we heard no more of banditti. Whether they were at work further south, or how they kept themselves alive during this holiday, God knows. But when we took it for granted that our deliverance from them was final we reckoned without our host. Our neighbourhood began all of a sudden to be haunted again. My neighbour, Pizzicarlo, who had been one of us that night at the villa, was captured by these villains while riding his donkey to Nerni, dragged off into their haunts, and only released on payment of a considerable ransom. And so with others, whom they sadly maltreated. This could not go on. The gendarmes obtained reinforcements, the razzia into the mountains began anew, but not with much better success. At that time Barbarossa seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, terrible as a basilisk, and slippery as an eel, and far and wide mothers quieted their screaming children by saying: _Zitto_, Barbarossa is coming! But other stories were told too, more to his credit; how he behaved to the poor and defenceless like a knight in a legend, intent mainly on righting the defective justice of the world, though every now and then robbing the egregiously wealthy just to supply his own needs. As I have before said, he was to be pitied, and if he had not run up so heavy a score that the law could not possibly wink at it, perhaps an amnesty would yet have changed him back into a peaceable honest citizen.

"Under these circumstances we lived wretchedly enough, much like shipwrecked sailors on a plank, with a shoal of sharks around. Thirteen months had now passed since the captain's departure, and no one spoke of him, at least no one said any good of him, fearing to be overheard by somebody who might repeat it to Barbarossa. Imagine, therefore, my horror one afternoon. I had just opened a bottle of castor oil, and was thinking of nothing worse, when Signor Gustavo his own very self entered my room as though nothing had happened. '_Corpo della Madonna!_' I cried, 'What wind has blown you here? Are you so weary of life that you determine to make your villa your mausoleum?' Then he told me that he had not been able to endure either the East or West. Nowhere had he found any flavour in the wine, everywhere the women were tedious, and since he had fired at men, the chase of lions and hyenas had become insipid. And always too he had been pursued by the feeling that he had, like a contemptible coward, left the field to his foe, instead of waiting to measure his strength against him. And a short time back, when staying at some German Spa, he read a newspaper account of the Sabine mountains being again ravaged by banditti, and of Papal carabinieri having for months pursued the vagabonds, who seemed as inexterminable as toadstools after rain: why then he had found the monotonous elegant world in which he was living, simply intolerable, and taking an extra post, he had travelled day and night without halting, crossed the Alps, and got here. And now here he was again settled in the vineyard. Maddalena had been actually wild with joy, and he himself felt more at home than he had done for a year and a day. 'And what then was he going to do here?' asked I in horror and amazement. 'Oh!' said he, 'I shall have no lack of occupation; I shall join the patrol of gendarmes that are constantly on the mountains, and so as a volunteer and dilettante face my man. When I come to consider it, it was I who hung this mill-stone about your necks, and so it is only fair that I should try to help you off with it. Good-day, Angelo, pay me a visit in my mausoleum.'

"And away he went: he had grown so strangely restless--quite unlike his former self--that he could not stay long in any one place. What I felt about the whole affair, I leave you to imagine. Meanwhile it had never been my wont to play the coward, and indeed here it behoved me to take the initiative, on account of my old acquaintance with Signor Gustavo. So I boldly visited him in the villa, and found everything just as though he had never left it. Maddalena hobbling about as before, and busy enough now, gathering the grapes with her long arms; the dog, who had grown old and blind of one eye; and in the salon the marks of the bullets still visible, but the holes in Erminia's portrait had been carefully repaired. When I went in, the captain was walking up and down, smoking and reading, but on seeing me he laid aside his book--as usual verses by his English poet--and heartily shook my hand. He had spent the whole night between the rocks and woods, lying out to stalk his game, and only slept a little in the morning. At midnight he was going out again with three stout fellows who did honour to the Pope's uniform. If I liked I might go with him.

"I declined with thanks on this occasion, and did not remain long, for his manner, half fierce and half reckless--as though he were playing a game of chance--gave me an uncomfortable feeling. On my way home, I laid a kind of wager as it were with myself--that if seven days passed without his coming to a bad end, I would print my sonnets to Erminia at my own expense; if otherwise I would leave them in manuscript. And an end did indeed come, but whether it could be called good or bad, God knows, and so to the present day I am in doubt whether I won the wager or not.

"It was he himself who circumstantially related to me the way things fell out, so that you can receive my narrative as though you had it from his own lips. He began to wonder much, he said, that Barbarossa did not confront him, for his return was nothing else than a direct and open challenge. Twice when on his rounds with the gendarmes, he had stumbled upon suspicious-looking characters, but they had not held their ground--dived out of sight like frogs when the stork appears. He fancied they did this with the intention of drawing him on further into the mountains in order to attack him with less risk. So he was glad when an expedition on a large scale into the Sabina was planned, although not for the next night, but the next but one, for the soldiers were determined to get their fill of sleep first, so as to be all the fresher.

"But the captain could not remain so long inactive, and as he had no companions--his usual escort preferring a good night to an aimless ramble--he loaded his double-barrelled gun, called his dog, who seemed disinclined to follow him, and left his vineyard just as the moon rose.

"Fool-hardy as he was, he yet guarded himself against any unnecessary exposure. He wore a dark coat, and dark trowsers which he pushed into his high boots, and also a grey hat, one of those called, you know, _Comecipare_, in which attire, so long as he kept in the shadow of the oaks and chestnuts, it would have been hard even in the day-time to distinguish him from the trunk of a tree.

"Now it so happened that the night was still and beautiful, and he told me he had never so much enjoyed the gloomy forest, and had never had Erminia's form and face so vividly present and near to him as they then seemed. The dog silently and wearily crept on after him, and he himself was lost in dreams, having never hoped that on this occasion he should meet with his enemy, but being led on and on merely for the sake of exercise, and by the exquisite coolness of the night.

"He had he thought wandered thus--creeping and climbing alternately--for more than an hour, when the dog suddenly stood still and growled. Instantly the captain's hand was on his gun, but before he could look round, two shots were fired close to him, and he felt that he had received a wound in the leg. At the same moment he saw a fellow stand out from behind a great ilex and level a pistol, but he was beforehand with him, and took such good aim that he shot off the lock of the pistol and two fingers of the hand that held it; whereupon the villain took flight, and ran along the steep path with such speed that neither the dog--who to be sure was no longer so agile as he had been--nor the second barrel of the English gun reached him. The captain had paid dear for his night walk. The wound in his leg bled so much that the bandage he improvised with pocket and neck-handkerchief was of little use. So having re-loaded both barrels, he set out homewards, but contrived to lose his way, the moonlight confusing him, and it was only after much fruitless wandering about that he saw the roof of his villa shining above the vineyards, and he was then so exhausted with loss of blood and fatigue, that he sank down on a stone, and was obliged to rest awhile before he could rise and drag himself over the last hundred yards.

"But one there was past rising, and that was the dog. The second shot had wounded him more seriously than the first his master, and having limped after him thus far without a whine of complaint, his strength was spent, and he moaned away his faithful life. The captain told me he felt his blood run cold when he saw his old ally feebly wag his tail and then stretch out his four legs stiffly. He himself was hardly able to stand, yet he could not find it in his heart to leave his dead comrade there in the open plain where vultures would soon have found him out next morning. He wished to give him the honourable burial he had so well earned, in the vineyard at home, and so he took him up, supporting the weight with the stock of the gun--that gun itself being heavy enough for him in his present condition--and with tottering steps he reached the vineyard, and found the iron gate as usual locked from within. He opened it by a trick known only to him and Maddalena. But he was surprised that the sound of his steps should not have roused the wakeful creature: thought she had perhaps been drinking some strong wine which he had just had from the village, and as he passed the door of her room did not care to disturb her. The dog he laid down in the kitchen, and covered with an old straw mat, then he tottered up the steps that led to the upper room, feeling as if he should hardly live to reach his couch, and re-bandage his burning wound.

"But when he opened the door of the salon, he stood motionless on the threshold, turned to stone by what he saw. The moon was shining full upon the balcony and through the windows, and lit up the stand of fire-arms in the corner. In the middle of the room, his back to the light, erect and stiff as a marble pillar, arms crossed, and contemplating the picture of Erminia, stood Domenico Serone, Il Rosso. He no longer deserved this nick-name, however, for he had cut off his beard, and his long wild hair looked ashy grey against the old yellow straw hat that so shadowed his face nothing was to be seen but the white of his eyes. But Signor Gustavo knew him at a glance.

"They looked full at each other for a moment, those two deadly foes, Domenico, however, without changing his position, while the captain leant upon his gun, and called up his last remnant of strength to play the man, spite of his wound.

"'You are come at last then,' said Il Rosso, and his voice trembled. 'I have waited for you here, since I did not find you at home. You know that I have sworn to reckon with you, and the time is fully come. Tomorrow night you are going to make a great sally and surprise my band. Bravo! Set to! Only what you and I have to settle could be better done, I thought, by ourselves. Let your gun alone,' for the captain was about to stand on his guard. 'If I had chosen, you would have drawn your last breath long before this. Do you suppose I did not hear you outside when you were opening the iron gate, and had I wished for your blood I had but to shed it then and there. I own I was very near doing so. But I was not able. _She_ would not suffer it,' and he hurriedly pointed to the picture. 'If you have still the heart to love your life you may thank _her_ for it.'

"'Domenico,' said the captain, 'let there be an end to this. You are in my house, and I cannot tolerate your playing the master here, and acting as if I was at your mercy. I will have no gift from him who plotted to deprive me of the dearest thing I had on earth. You had no right to the girl, none--that she herself assured me. And as nevertheless you murdered her, and are now seeking after my life, why you are nothing better than a wild beast, and whoever renders you harmless does a good work. It is pure mercy on my part not to avail myself of my advantage, and shoot you down before you can lift your gun from the floor. But I feel sorry for you. I can understand how one might lose one's reason for that girl's sake, and not recover it after her death. Therefore I offer you honourable terms. Take up your gun. When I have counted three--one or both of us will have ceased to live.'

"Domenico never stirred. 'Do as you will,' he said, 'I shall not fire. If I were to kill you, what better should I be? I am a miserable man. I have murdered the fairest woman in the world, like a wild beast that I was; you do well to call me one. I thought I should be happier if I got you too out of the world. I was a fool. If you were to meet her again up yonder, rage and jealousy at not being able to part you any more, would devour my heart till I went down to hell damned beyond redemption. No, make an end of me as you said. See, I stand quite still. This gun,' he pushed it away from him with his foot, 'I will not touch. Fire, captain, and with my last breath I will forgive you. For by God's holy blood the life I have led was purgatory, and now it would be hell itself since I have seen _her_ again, and _you_ whom she loved.' While so speaking, his strength seemed to fail him, he fell on his knees before the picture, and hid his face in his hands, his whole body, as it were, convulsed.

"At last the conflict ended. He sobbed aloud, wailed and writhed like one mortally wounded, then trying to rise he groaned out, 'My God! My God! She is dead! Lord have pity upon her murderer!' and down he fell again as in a swoon and pressed his sobbing lips against the cold flags, and seemed to have utterly forgotten that any one stood by and saw it all.

"And meanwhile there was the picture on the wall standing silent and stately, and in its bloom of bliss and youth looking down upon the poor sinner.

"'Domenico,' said the captain, gently drawing near, binding over him, and laying a hand on his shoulder, 'neither of us can call her back, and what we have to do is to get through our remnant of life. If you will take my advice you will leave this country and cross the seas. There is war going on in Africa, and the French need brave men. Your crime--I forgive it, and there is One who weighs with other scales than we do, who sees your heart and knows how you repent and suffer. If I can help you in any way to get off, and fling your past behind you, tell me. You shall find a brother in me.'