IACOMO was returning home after many years. He paused in a turn of the winding road that led up from the undulating plains of Etna, and looked up at the town of Santa Rosa, his native place, and at the castle on the height above the town, his ancestral home.
Santa Rosa, walled and fortified, rose compactly. Beneath the walls the rock, grown with cactus, sloped to the fertile valley and the broad plain that rolled to the foot of Etna.
The town, grey in colour, and with the streets climbing one above the other, was a sharp outline of roofs, cupolas, and towers against the autumn sky of blue, flushed with the first faint gold of sunset.
To the right of the road the grand and open landscape showed the great volcano in the distance, the base swathed in purple shadow, the summit veiled in wreaths of great clouds.
Giacomo took off his flat pilgrim's hat and saluted the mountain and the town of Santa Rosa and his own castle rising on the crag above the city walls.
It was fifteen—sixteen—years since he had seen his home; it might have been longer, even much longer, for Giacomo had spent the time partly in an Algerian gaol, partly in a Turkish galley, and partly as a slave in Tunis, and he had lost count of the years.
At least they had wrought their change in him—of that he was grimly aware; at least they had taken from him all youth—though he had not yet reached middle age—all joy in the world, all pleasantness towards his fellow-men, all gaiety, all gladness of heart.
He stood looking at his native place and his home with nothing but hardness and bitterness in his soul towards all the universe. As he could recall no kindness, no tenderness from others, so he felt none; as all his life was shadowed, and ever must be shadowed, by the great wrong that had sent him into the unspeakable anguish of prison and slavery, so he looked at the world from the darkness of his soul, and it, too, was dark.
There was only one person he recalled with respect, perhaps with gratitude, and that person was his Excellency the Viceroy, who had listened to him, believed him, and furnished him with a perfect instrument of vengeance. He was coming home for that—not for any joy of the home-coming, but to be avenged on the man who had, all those years before, trapped, lured him, and delivered him to an African corsair sailing the Sicilian seas. This man had his own name, his own blood—his father's brother.
Giacomo had learnt from the Viceroy that this man had been tranquilly enjoying castles and lands, and that no one had suspected that the young man had not been drowned, as he reported. Who was to guess that the pleasure journey on the blue summer waters had ended in a drugged boy being cast out in an open boat at the mouth of the great ocean where the Straits of Messina begin? Who was to guess that this boat had been picked up by a heathen pirate and the victim saved?
Not even the murderer himself, who believed his nephew dead, and who had cunningly saved himself, as he thought, from direct blood-guilt.
And Giacomo had suffered worse than death—suffered so that only the thought of future vengeance had kept him alive through the long agony of pain and humiliation, and most incredibly his chance had come. He had been a galley-slave in a Turkish ship captured by a Spanish vessel soon after the great battle of Lepanto; he had been landed at a Sicilian port, and he had gone to Palermo in rags, with the marks of the galley chains on wrists and ankles, and proved to the astonished Viceroy his identity, his wrong, his claim.
And now he returned to Santa Rosa with the official documents in his pockets for the deposition of his uncle and his own reinstatement in the honours of Bescemi. He might have come in state, with soldiers behind for the arrest of the usurper, but the instinct, cruel and cunning, to spring a deadly surprise on his enemy, to gloat and torture before striking, to lengthen his vengeance so that he might enjoy every moment of it, was strong in Giacomo. This discomfiture of his uncle, this complete vengeance, was the only dark pleasure he possessed, and he meant to enjoy it to the utmost.
Therefore he came secretly in the ragged guise of a pilgrim, he who was the Conte di Bescemi, and lord of Santa Rosa and all the lands around, hill and plain, as far as eye could see.