"Martino!" she said again in her foreign accent, "we are your friends."
"Martino!" repeated a friendly voice beside him, and he felt a hand laid gently on his bare arm, "we are your friends."
He turned round with a start of terror; but the face he met was that of the young English gentleman whom he had seen a few days ago, before Chiara died, and who had given him the silver coin, which he carried carefully concealed in his rags. He knelt down again to him, laid his hands on his feet, muttering and mumbling his recognition and delight. Philip glanced round to the dark doorway where his father stood unseen. What must he be suffering in seeing such a sight as this?
"Get up, Martino," he said, trying to raise him from his abject posture, "we are your friends," he repeated, at a loss for words. "Father," he continued in a low voice, "come and speak to him. You know his language better than I do. Oh! if I could only make him understand how much my mother and I pity him!"
Sidney approached his sons cautiously. For a moment Martin stood as if about to take a sudden flight; but the sight of an Englishman alone pacified him; there was no need to be afraid of him. They were very rich, these English; Chiara had always said so; they could give him enough money to buy the right of building a little hut for himself in some place on the mountains, where he could keep goats and sheep. He stood quietly, therefore, watching them from under his shaggy eyebrows, while Philip still held him by a slight yet firm grasp, of which he was unconscious, so light his touch was. They waited, both of them in silence, for their father to speak.
But Sidney could not speak. He had seen Martin for only one moment before, when he fled past him from the infuriated mob that had burnt Chiara's hut over his head. Now he stood close beside him: a strongly built man, with thews and sinews of iron, yet worn looking, with bowed shoulders and stooping head, as though even his great strength had been overtaxed with too many labors and hardships. His squalid face, the almost brutish dullness of its expression, the untamed savagery of his whole appearance, were too revolting to Sidney. Here was his own folly, his own sin personified. He could have hated this monster but for the remembrance of Margaret.