Tales of the Wonder Club Volume II Part 26

"At length the moon breaking from behind a cloud, revealed to me the features of the brigand chief. He was standing erect whilst the rest of his band were squatting or lounging around him in a circle. He then proceeded to harangue them.

"I trembled from head to foot, and felt that my only chance of escaping observation was to continue rooted to the spot without disturbing the dead leaves that lay strewn at my feet, but the wretched animal, my companion, commenced grunting and squealing, as if purposely to mark my whereabouts, and I made sure every moment that the brigands would be down upon us both.

"'Hush!' I cried, coaxingly.

"'Grunt,' went the brute, louder than ever.

"'Madonna mia Santissima!' I muttered, crossing myself, 'preserve a poor man and his pig from the depredations of these marauders!'

"I know not if our good lady vouchsafed to hear my prayer, but certain it was that the brigands paid no attention whatever to either of us, so engrossed did they all seem with the oration of their chief, every word of which fell distinctly on my ear in the stillness of the night, and I must own that the tenor of it surprised me, for instead of the profane oaths, fiendish laughter, or the planning of some new daring exploit, as I should have expected from such men, I now listened to a pious discourse, filled with G.o.dly phrases such as you, Signor Arciprete, might have used yourself from the pulpit. I think I can give you almost word for word the discourse as it ran.

"'My comrades,' he commenced, 'we have for many years toiled together in an arduous and perilous profession; at war with society, wresting from the innocent and good their hard-earned substance to supply our own wants, instead of getting our own livelihood honestly and by the sweat of our brow, as G.o.d hath decreed. Oppressed in our turn by the avengers of our victims, we are hunted like wolves, and have to take refuge from our pursuers in the most inaccessible parts of the mountains, in caves, in forests and such-like secret places.

"'Rest has departed from our slumbers--for what man can rest in the fear that the vigilant myrmidons of the law with which he has lived at enmity are ever on his track?

"'Like Ishmael, our hand is against every man, and every man's hand is against us. This is the lot of the brigand, as we all know. Born and bred in danger, nurtured from the breast, not with the milk of human kindness, but by the blood of his fellow men; his childish joys, the groans and sufferings of his mutilated victims; feasting on horrors from his earliest youth, unbridled and brutal in his appet.i.tes, his highest ambition through life to be a hardier ruffian than his father before him.

"'Have we not, my friends, committed every sort of atrocity of which degraded humanity is capable? Nay, revelled in it, impiously defying that very G.o.d whom we ought humbly and reverently to thank as the Author of our beings? Let each of us look back upon our past lives and ask ourselves how we have thanked Almighty G.o.d for his innumerable blessings.

"'How have we repaid His ineffable love and care over us? Has it not been by subverting His wise laws, despising His holy ordinances, brutalising our natures, even to a degree lower than the very brutes themselves? My brethren, we may be powerful against the weak and against the law, yet there is One above us more powerful than ourselves, to Whom we shall all one day have to give an account. Let us fight no longer against G.o.d; for what is man when matched against Omnipotence. Deem it not cowardice, my friends, to relinquish a life of evil now that your souls have received the light of truth, but rather thank G.o.d for His infinite mercy in vouchsafing so great a miracle through His Holy Mother to save our souls from the bottomless pit.

"'I confess that almost from my earliest youth I never have looked upon religion as aught but priest-craft, and scoffed at all miracles as tricks of the priesthood to impose upon the ignorant and simple; but what shall we say, my brethren, to the miracle we have all so lately witnessed, or how shall we attempt to explain it away? Was it not the intervention of the blessed Virgin herself to scare us--the impious desecraters of her holy Church--from our evil ways? Could anything short of Divine power have raised the dead at the lonely hour of midnight within the very church itself, and have struck such terror into us, the hardy sons of the mountains, who never yet quailed before mortal man?

"'Tell me, my friends, if in all my wild life, in all our joint villainies and wicked enterprises, in the very face of death, if you have ever known me to lack courage before to-night?'

"'Never, Capitano, never,' cried several voices at once. 'We know your courage to be undaunted, and that there is no mortal man that you stand in awe of; but when it comes to running counter to spirits raised from the dead, or devils from h.e.l.l, that is quite another sort of thing, and a man need be the arch-fiend himself to be without fear.'

"'Just so,' replied the brigand chief; 'then, since none of you are able to accuse me with a lack of human courage, you may know that my exhortation to you to repent and alter the course of your unholy lives is not the mere words of a craven soul who fears the law and seeks to shun the just penalty of his misdeeds, but those of a repentant sinner miraculously brought to conversion through the intervention of the blessed Madonna, whom, in her boundless mercy, she had deigned to bring to a sense of his wickedness, even in the very midst of his crimes.

"'Let us turn from our evil ways, oh, my comrades! Take the advice of a brother sinner, more deeply dyed in iniquity than any of yourselves, and repent ere it be too late! What can atone for all our past wickedness save the utter renouncement of our evil ways, a life of rigid penance and the entire devotion of ourselves to G.o.d? Marvel not, then, my comrades in wickedness, that you hear the man once your chief and foremost in wrong, exhort you to throw down your arms, divest yourselves of your trappings, and don the holy convent garb, in order that by a life of fasting and prayer you may endeavour to open up a communication with Heaven, and wrest your souls from the hands of the Devil. I myself will set you the example.

"'As I have been the first to incite you to evil, so will I be the first to exhort you to repentance. Follow me, all ye that have a mind to save your souls. Yet I no longer command, but entreat you for your own good, for I aspire no longer to be your chief, but to live humbly as your fellow labourer in Christ, to whom be all honour and glory, now and for evermore. Amen.'

"As the chief brigand terminated his harangue the pale grey of the morning sky lighted up the faces of the whole band, so that I could now distinguish the features of each individual and the various expressions of their countenances. Several appeared deeply affected, with tears of repentance standing in their eyes, others sullen and obdurate. Some with a look of vacant astonishment, others scowling and suspicious, or with a suppressed grin.

"Their chief's harangue seemed to call for a reply, and there was a silence of some minutes, during which period the members of the band appeared debating among themselves by means of winking and nudging as to what their reply should be, and who should take it upon himself to speak for the rest. I observed that they looked towards a st.u.r.dy brigand, whom next to their chief they honoured with the deepest veneration. To him they turned as the mouthpiece of the gang, and seemed to intimate that they would abide by his decision.

"This man, who appeared wrapt in thought, finding himself thus appealed to, and feeling that he represented the sentiments of the whole band, at length addressed his chief in these words:--

"'Signor Capitano, we are ready as ever to follow you to the very jaws of death, according to our oath. We have served you long and faithfully in all your deeds of daring and crime, and we will not abandon you now in your change of sentiment, knowing, as we do, that you are still the same brave and generous man as ever, and as such will always remain, in whatever capacity, whether as the lawless brigand of the mountains, or as a holy monk in the retirement of the convent cell; therefore, in the presence of the whole band I repeat my former vows of fidelity and friendship, and reiterate my protestations of following you through life, to the utmost ends of the earth, if need be. The discipline of our monastic life will be merely the exchanging one life of hardships for another no less hard, therefore we cannot be charged with cowardice or idleness, since there are duties before us that will call forth all the courage and endurance of our natures.

"'As for learning and psalm-singing, it has never been exactly my speciality; nevertheless, I quite agree with you, Captain, that the life we have been in the habit of leading for years past is not the best to suit us for Heaven, and I am not ashamed to say that I have long had qualms of conscience for my past misdeeds, and had resolved upon repentance at some future period, but never did I look back upon the past with such horror and remorse as at the present moment, having now been brought to a thorough knowledge of my crimes and of the bountiful mercy of our blessed Lady to us miserable sinners, as shown in the undoubted miracle that we all so clearly witnessed.

"'After having received so great a proof of the blessed Virgin's love and care for us, would it not be the blackest ingrat.i.tude to continue in mortal sin? Would it not be the most egregious folly as well, after having had Divine warning to alter our lives, still to persist in preferring death and h.e.l.l to the sublime promises held out to the good?

"'Why longer delay, then, my friends? Think of your precious souls, and repent while there is still breath left in your bodies. It may not be long ere we shall be captured and executed. How shall we pa.s.s our last moments on earth, or how brook the vengeance of a just G.o.d with all our crimes upon our heads?

"'Enough, then, of pusillanimous disbelief and impotent struggling against Divine will. Let us hasten to the nearest convent, confess our sins, then, with a clean breast and humble spirit, endeavour to atone for the past by a life of penitence and prayer, that we may fearlessly meet our end as men and Christians.'

"This exhortation was universally applauded, and as every man is governed by the public opinion of the little circle wherein he lives and moves, so even those who had shown themselves obdurate and suspicious felt themselves forced to yield to the overwhelming tide of changed opinion, feeling ashamed of being left in the minority.

"The chief, doffing his hat, fell upon his knees and thanked the Most High for his conversion and that of his whole band, in which prayer all the rest reverently joined. Then rising from their knees, but with heads still uncovered, they walked on towards the convent, singing an 'Ave Maria,' by the way.

"I did not know what to make of all this, for as yet I had heard nothing of the miracle, but I had hardly reached home safely with my pig, when I heard from almost every mouth in the village of the great miracle wrought on the night of the robbery."

The peasant having concluded his narrative, was dismissed with an a.s.surance from the arch-priest that should his revelation lead to the capture of the brigands he would be duly rewarded. Nevertheless, he informed him that he was not the person to apply to, and that he should mention the affair to the authorities.

Being left once more alone with my friend, I asked him what he thought of the man's tale, and whether or no it corroborated the statements made by Luigi and Antonio. All three witnesses bore testimony to a plurality of brigands, which seemed to me completely to overthrow my worthy friend's hypothesis as to there being only one brigand.

I confess, though, I was still puzzled by the peasant's wonderful story.

I could hardly bring myself to believe in the utter and simultaneous conversion of a whole band of brigands, even though they _had_ been terrified and thwarted for a moment in their crimes by an apparent miracle, and yet what object could the man have had in inventing such a lie, knowing, as he must have done, that he was not ent.i.tled to the reward until after the capture of the brigands.

My friend the priest suggested that possibly he might have been fool enough to expect payment beforehand, and that he had concocted this fable on the strength of it. The man was simple enough, it is true, but there was an air of truth about the manner in which he told his tale that induced me to give credit to it, strange though it appeared.

In any case, I knew that the truth or falsity of the man's statement would soon be made manifest, for the brigand-catchers, once sent off in the direction indicated by the peasant, would not fail to call at the convent and inquire if the brigands were taking shelter there, in which case the monks would be forced to deliver up their charge into the hands of justice. As it happened, the brigand-catchers had already started in search of their prey, though in quite an opposite direction.

But let us return to our landlady, who had been impatiently awaiting me, having now prepared my noon-day meal some time.

"The signor is late to-day," she said, as I entered. "I fear he will find the macaroni cold."

"No matter," I replied. "I have a good appet.i.te, from having been very busy all the morning."

"The signor has been busy--yes? And yet I notice that he left all his painting tools at home," observed the landlady.

"True, my good woman," I replied. "The morning being rainy, I was prevented from painting out-of-doors, but I have been very busy, nevertheless."

"Indeed, Signor," she exclaimed, "what could have occupied you so much as to forget your dinner, if I may be permitted to ask?"

I expected this question, knowing that my hostess inherited the vice of curiosity, in common with the rest of her s.e.x, in a marked degree.

"How was I occupied?" I repeated. "Why, how else than by searching to the bottom that confounded miracle you were so full of all yesterday and the day before."

"Oh, Signor, how you talk!" exclaimed my hostess, horrified. "What! do you mean to say that the Blessed Virgin has not wrought among us the greatest miracle ever heard of in these parts?"

"Well, if this is one of the greatest," I replied, "I should advise her to give up miracles for the future, for she is no hand at them."

"How say you, Signor?" cried the landlady, shocked at my levity, and crossing herself again and again. "Oh, you Protestants believe in nothing! What! Is it not a great miracle to raise the dead?"

"It would be, if it were true," I interrupted.

"If it were true!" she repeated. "How should it not be true? Have you not heard that the arch-priest himself believes it, that all the village believes it, that the good Ricardo the sacristan was an eye-witness of the miracle?"

"I must have better testimony than his in order to believe in the miraculous character of the story you related to me. However, I have since looked into the case myself and find it to be a gross piece of imposture."

"_Imposture!_" cried the hostess. "Impossible! Who has been imposing--his reverence, perhaps?"

"No," I said; "the arch-priest was only one of the dupes. His rascal of a sacristan was at the bottom of all the mischief. That scoundrel Peppe, too, was another prominent actor in the farce."