“You will not go, Belotti,” said the priest firmly.  “If you still insist on having your own way, at least do not call yourself a Christian.”

“You will stay,” cried Wilhelm, “if only for the sake of the young lady, to whom you still feel kindly.”  Belotti shook his head, and answered quietly: 

“You can add nothing, young sir, to what the holy Father represented to me yesterday.  But my mind is made up, I shall go; yet as I value the holy Father’s good opinion and yours, I beg you to do me the favor to listen to me.  I have passed my sixty-second birthday, and an old horse or an old servant stands a long time in the market-place before any one will buy them.  There might probably be a place in Brussels for a Catholic steward, who understands his business, but this old heart longs to return to Naples—­ardently, ardently, unutterably.  You have seen our blue sea and our sky, young sir, and I yearn for them, but even more for other, smaller things.  It now seems a joy that I can speak in my native language to you, Herr Wilhelm, and you, holy Father.  But there is a country where every one uses the same tongue that I do.  There is a little village at the foot of Vesuvius—­merciful Heavens!  Many a person would be afraid to stay there, even half an hour, when the mountain quakes, the ashes fall in showers, and the glowing lava pours out in a stream.  The houses there are by no means so well built, and the window-panes are not so clean as in this country.  I almost fear that there are few glass windows in Resina, but the children don’t freeze, any more than they do here.  What would a Leyden house-keeper say to our village streets?  Poles with vines, boughs of fig-trees, and all sorts of under-clothing on the roofs, at the windows, and the crooked, sloping balconies; orange and lemon-trees with golden fruit grow in the little gardens, which have neither straight paths nor symmetrical beds.  Everything there grows together topsy-turvy.  The boys, who in rags that no tailor has darned or mended, clamber over the white vineyard walls, the little girls, whose mothers comb their hair before the doors of the houses, are not so pink and white, nor so nicely washed as the Holland children, but I should like to see again the brown-skinned, black-haired little ones with the dark eyes, and end my days amid all the clatter in the warm air, among my nephews, nieces and blood-relations.”

As he uttered these words, the old man’s features had flushed and his black eyes sparkled with a fire, that but a short time before the northern air and his long years of servitude seemed to have extinguished.  Since neither the priest nor the musician answered immediately, he continued more quietly: 

“Monseigneur Gloria is going to Italy now, and I can accompany him to Rome as courier.  From thence I can easily reach Naples, and live there on the interest of my savings free from care.  My future master will leave on the 15th, and on the 12th I must be in Antwerp, where I am to meet him.”