“She laughs,” he had told the friar, “as one might laugh in hell.”
For only answer Fra Sulpizio had looked at him and then veiled his eyes, almost as if, himself, he were suppressing laughter.
Soon, however, Bellarion grew accustomed to the ever-recurring sound and to the rest of the din, the rattle of platters and drinking-cans, the growling of a dog over a bone it had discovered among the foul rushes rotting on the bare earthen floor.
Having eaten, he sat back in his chair, a little torpid now, and drowsy. Last night he had lain in the open, and he had been afoot almost since dawn. It is little wonder that presently, whilst again the taverner was muttering with his cousin the friar, he should have fallen into a doze.
He must have slept some little while, a half-hour, perhaps, for when he awakened the patch of sunlight had faded from the wall across the alley, visible from the window under which they sat. This he did not notice at the time, but remembered afterwards. In the moment of awakening, his attention was drawn by the friar, who had risen, and instantly afterwards by something else, beyond the friar. At the open window behind and above Fra Sulpizio there was the face of a man. Upon the edge of the sill, beneath his face, were visible the fingers by which he had hoisted himself thither. The questing eyes met Bellarion’s, and seemed to dilate a little; the mouth gaped suddenly. But before Bellarion could cry out or speak, or even form the intention of doing either, the face had vanished. And it was the face of the peasant with whom they had dined that day.
The friar, warned by Bellarion’s quickening stare, had swung round to look behind him. But he was too late; the window space was already empty.
“What is it?” he asked, suddenly apprehensive. “What did you see?”
Bellarion told him, and was answered by an obscenely morphological oath, which left him staring. The friar’s countenance was suddenly transfigured. A spasm of mingled fear and anger bared his fangs; his beady eyes grew cruel and sinister. He swung aside as if to depart abruptly, then as abruptly halted where he stood.
On the threshold surged the peasant, others following him.
The friar sank again to his stool at the table, and composed his features.
“Yonder he sits, that friar rogue! That thief!” Thus the peasant as he advanced.
The cry, and, more than all, the sight of the peasant’s companions, imposed a sudden silence upon the babel of that room. First came a young man, stalwart and upright, in steel cap and gorget, booted and spurred, a sword swinging from his girdle, a dagger hanging on his hip behind; a little crimson feather adorning his steel cap proclaiming him an officer of the Captain of Justice of Casale. After him came two of his men armed with short pikes.
Straight to that table in the window recess the peasant led the way. “There he is! This is he!” Belligerently he thrust his face into the friar’s, leaning his knuckles on the table’s edge. “Now, rogue …” he was beginning furiously, when Fra Sulpizio, raising eyes of mild astonishment to meet his anger, gently interrupted him.
“Little brother, do you speak so to me? Do you call me rogue? Me?” He smiled sadly, and so calm and gently wistful was his manner that it clearly gave the peasant pause. “A sinner I confess myself, for sinners are we all. But I am conscious of no sin against you, brother, whose charity was so freely given me only today.”
That saintly demeanour threw the peasant’s simple wits into confusion. He was thrust aside by the officer.
“What is your name?”
Fra Sulpizio looked at him, and his look was laden with reproach.
“My brother!” he cried.
“Attend to me!” the officer barked at him. “This man charges you with theft.”
“With theft!” Fra Sulpizio paused and sighed. “It shall not move me to the sin of anger, brother. It is too foolish: a thing for laughter. What need have I to steal, when under the protection of Saint Francis I have but to ask for the little that I need? What use to me is worldly gear? But what does he say I stole?”
It was the peasant who answered him.
“Thirty florins, a gold chain, and a silver cross from a chest in the room where you rested.”
Bellarion remembered how the friar had sought to go slinking off alone from the peasant homestead, and how fearfully he had looked behind him as they trudged along the road until overtaken by the muleteer. And by the muleteer it would be, he thought, that they had now been tracked. The officer at the gate would have told the peasant of how the friar and his young companion in greed had ridden in; then the peasant would have sought the muleteer, and the rest was clear: as clear as it was to him that his companion was a thieving rogue, and that his own five ducats were somewhere about that scoundrel’s person.
In future, he swore, he would be guided by his own keen instincts and the evidence of his senses only, and never again allow a preconception to befool him. Meanwhile, the friar was answering:
“So that not only am I charged with stealing; but I have returned evil for good; I have abused charity. It is a heavy charge, my brother, and very rashly brought.”
There was a murmur of sympathy from the staring, listening company, amongst whom many lawless ones were, by the very instinct of their
