My wife and children would look on
me with scornful eyes should I be renegade; for shame is not the reward
that sweetens life, but burdens it. If the Messenians stain themselves
with innocent blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but
the heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse." Then he was
silent. But treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish.
One Gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was
already escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in
hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, "to save his
wages," struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead in
his blood. I thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else in
the castle's filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowly
fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes.
VIII
Yet once more I step out upon the terrace into the night. I hear the
long roar of the breakers; I see the flickering fishers' lights, and
Etna pale under the stars. The place is full of ghosts. In the darkness
I seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of
many tongues that have perished here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost
Oscan, Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves,
Byzantine and Arabic confused with strange African dialects, Norman and
Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp
battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the
death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the
hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer
pain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe.
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