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How their hearts must have leapt when they saw him, at length, with his companion, coming across that little arched bridge from the town a conspicuous, unmistakable figure, clad in the pied frock of his brotherhood and wearing the familiar halo above his closely-shorn pate. Cavina stands now over the fallen Saint, planting the short dagger in his heart.
The woodmen and the shepherd in the olive-grove by the roadside, the cowherds by the well, yonder they have seen the scroll, I dare say, but they are not scholars enough to have read its letters. Cavina and his comrade in arms, lying in wait here, probably did not observe it, so intent were they for that pious and terrible Inquisitor who was to pass by.
Cavina plants the dagger methodically, and the Inquisitor himself is evidently filled with that intense self-consciousness which sustains all martyrs in their supreme hour and makes them, it may be, insensible to actual pain. One feels that this martyr will write his motto in the dust with a firm hand. His whole comportment is quite exemplary. What irony that he should be unobserved!
On Cavina himself their impression was less delible, for did he not submit himself to the Church, and was he not, after absolution, received into that monastery which his own victim had founded? Here, before this picture by Bellini, one looks instinctively for the three words in the dust. They are not yet written there; for scarcely, indeed, has the dagger been planted in the Saint's breast.
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