Bellarion, tired and hungry, did justice to the viands, without permitting himself more than a passing irritation at his companion’s whining expositions of the signal advantages of travelling under the ægis of the blessed Francis. The truth is that he did not hear more than the half of all that Fra Sulpizio found occasion to urge. For one thing, in his greed, the friar spoke indistinctly, slobbering the while at his food; for another, the many tenants of the inn were very noisy. They made up a motley crowd, but had this in common, that all belonged to the lower walks of life, as their loud, coarse speech, freely interlarded with blasphemy and obscenity, abundantly bore witness. There were some peasants from Romaglia or Torcella, or perhaps from Terranova beyond the Po, who had come there to market, rude, brawny men for the most part, accompanied by their equally brawny, barelegged women. There were a few labourers of the town and others who may have been artisans, one or two of them, indeed, so proclaimed by their leather aprons; and at one table a group of four men and a woman were very boisterous over their wine. The men were soldiers, so to be judged at a glance from their leather haquetons and studded girdles with heavy daggers slung behind. The woman with them was a gaudy, sinuous creature with haggard, painted cheeks, whose mirth, now shrill, now raucous, was too easily moved. When first he heard it Bellarion had shuddered.
‘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 to-day.’
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 kind, ready to range themselves against any who stood for law.
The friar opened his arms, wide and invitingly:
‘Let me not depart from my vows of humility in the heat of my own defence. I will say nothing. Do you, sir, make search upon me for the gear which this man says I have stolen, though all his evidence is that it chanced to be in a room in which for a little while I rested.’
‘To accuse a priest!’ said some one in a tone of indignation, and a murmur arose at once in sympathy.
It moved the young officer to mirth. He half swung on his heel so as to confront those mutterers.
‘A priest!’ he jeered. Then, his keen eyes flashed once more upon the friar. ‘When did you last say Mass?’
Before that simple question Fra Sulpizio seemed to lose some of his assurance. Without even giving him time to answer, the officer fired another question. ‘What is your name?’
‘My name?’ The friar was looking at him from eyes that seemed to have grown beadier than ever in that white, pitted face. ‘I’ll not