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. My fancy shapes the air till I see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman in the age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of France, Spain, and Sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill-wide. "Oh, wherefore?" I whisper; and all is silent save the surge still lifting round the coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I have wondered that the children of Etna should dwell in its lovely paradise, as I thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcanic eruption overwhelmed the land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here 

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