Now that it had been lopped off, the tree would not suffer, and would even grow the taller, as its limbs divided at a greater height.
Before Fabrizio had travelled a league, a brilliant strip of white light in the east outlined the peaks of the Resegon di Lek, a well-known mountain in that country. The road he was now following was full of peasants, but instead of thinking of military matters, Fabrizio was filled with emotion by the sublime or touching aspects of the forest round the Lake of Como. They are perhaps the most lovely in the world. I do not mean those which bring in the greatest number of “_new crowns_,” as they say in Switzerland, but those which appeal most strongly to the human soul. For a man in Fabrizio’s position, exposed to all the attentions of the gendarmes of Lombardy and Venetia, it was mere childishness to listen to their language. At last he said to himself: “I am half a league from the frontier. I shall meet the customs officers and the gendarmes making their round. This fine cloth coat of mine will rouse their suspicions; they will ask me for my passport. The said passport bears a name doomed to a prison, written in fair characters, and so I find myself under the agreeable necessity of committing murder. If the gendarmes walk two together, as they generally do, I dare not wait till one of them seizes me by the collar before I fire; if he should hold me for one instant before he falls, I shall find myself at the Spielberg.”
Fabrizio—filled with a special horror at the idea of firing first, and possibly on an old soldier who had served under his uncle, Count Pietranera—ran to hide himself in the hollow trunk of a huge chestnut tree. He was putting fresh caps into his pistols when he heard a man coming through the wood, singing, as he came, in a charming voice, a delightful air by Mercadante, then fashionable in Italy.
“That’s a good omen!” said Fabrizio to himself; he listened attentively to the melody, and the sound of it wiped out the little touch of anger which had begun to season his arguments. He looked carefully up and down the high-road and saw nobody. “The singer will come up some side road,” thought he to himself. Almost at that very moment he saw a servant, very neatly dressed in the English style, ride slowly up the road on a hack, leading a very fine blood-horse, perhaps a trifle too thin.