Carnesecca leaves Don Aurelio's home and is taken to the Rose Villa

Carnesecca leaves Don Aurelio’s home while ill and apparently bent on confronting the clergy he believes are threatening the priest. His disappearance turns a rumored ecclesiastical crisis into an urgent search, then into a strange roadside rescue: Don Aurelio’s effort to protect him ends with a makeshift cart and a difficult journey arranged toward Villino delle Rose.

The letter and the flight

The immediate background is a letter from the archpriest of Velo, delivered while Don Aurelio is celebrating Mass. Ismaele Pestagran takes the message as evidence that the priests of Velo mean to drive Don Aurelio from Lago because of his own presence and books. Donna Fedele Vayla fears that Don Aurelio’s position is indeed in danger, though she thinks suspicion has been gathering for some time around his preaching. She describes a hierarchy of clerical risk: the chaplain seems more threatening than the archpriest, and the archpriest more than the bishop. Don Aurelio, by contrast, speaks well of his superiors and does not discuss them critically.

The letter’s arrival sets the household on edge, but the danger to Don Aurelio is not the same as guilt on Carnesecca’s part. When Massimo Alberti enters the sick man’s room, Carnesecca seems displeased by his presence, and Massimo withdraws. Donna Fedele then explains what Ismaele has heard and why he fears that the letter concerns him. As the adults discuss the threat, Carnesecca’s agitation rises: Donna Fedele hears Don Aurelio refuse him, followed by Carnesecca insisting that he wants to go. She suspects that the letter has made him decide to leave.

The suspicion proves right. When Lúzia goes to check on the sick man, the room is empty. Don Aurelio rushes downstairs with Massimo and Lúzia; Carnesecca’s clothes have disappeared too. He has left a franc on the straw chair beside a ball of yarn and two knitting needles, but forgotten his watch. The small, orderly traces of his departure sharpen the alarm: an ill man has gone out without the watch he meant to take, while leaving behind money and the room in which he was meant to recover.

A search that turns toward Velo

Donna Fedele is stunned when the others tell her Carnesecca is gone. She had been close by, yet had not seen or heard him leave; her attention had been on Lúzia in the garden. Don Aurelio says the fugitive is still feverish and could harm himself. He and Massimo divide the search. Don Aurelio hurries down toward Lago, thinking Carnesecca may have gone to La Montanina, while Massimo takes the uphill road toward Maso.

Donna Fedele cannot run. After silently clasping Don Aurelio’s hand, she returns to her chair; later, she has to ask the girl bringing milk to support her as far as a candelabra-shaped chestnut tree, where a hired carriage is waiting. The contrast between her wish to help and her physical inability to pursue him makes the search a measure not only of Carnesecca’s impulsiveness but also of the frailty surrounding him.

Don Aurelio reaches the chestnut trees above Lago without finding Carnesecca. Once Massimo reports that no one on the road to Maso has seen him, Don Aurelio changes his guess. A feverish man in his sixties, almost without food, could not have travelled far; perhaps, Don Aurelio thinks, Carnesecca has gone directly to confront the archpriest. He turns back and takes the road leading toward Velo, while Massimo is directed to La Montanina.

Found by the roadside

Carnesecca is eventually located at an inn, where a woman had found him half-dead on the road. The innkeeper says he will not stay, and threatens to make him leave even by force if he does not go of his own accord. Don Aurelio finds him in the adjoining yard, near a manure heap, slumped precariously on an old chair in the mud and supported by the innkeeper’s wife. She explains that Carnesecca had refused to be brought inside and had asked to be put on the manure heap instead. When she describes him as a fool, he rouses enough to correct her with a reference to Job. Even in collapse, he holds on to his own account of himself.

The episode’s rough comedy does not cancel its danger. Carnesecca is pale, unstable, and has only just come round after being lifted from the road. Don Aurelio steadies him and reproaches the woman for leaving him outside, while she explains that both her husband and Carnesecca had resisted taking him indoors. The inn, which might have offered shelter, has instead become another place from which the sick man is determined to depart.

The improvised journey

Carnesecca tries to rise and leave again. Don Aurelio has considered sending him to Villino delle Rose, where Donna Fedele can receive him, but will not let him set out on foot. He asks the innkeeper’s wife to allow the sick man to stay at least until evening; she resists, citing the suffering of the donkey. The animal’s condition threatens to leave Carnesecca with no safe means of travel, while Carnesecca himself insists he can walk.

Calàpo offers a substitute: he will pull a handcart as far as Villino delle Rose. When some Alpine soldiers volunteer to help, the arrangement changes into a noisy procession intended to reach Velo, where they can look for a sound donkey. They lift Carnesecca into the cart, but he dislikes the soldiers’ boisterous company and courteously dismisses their help. Calàpo remains to pull, promising he can manage the road and more. Carnesecca blesses Don Aurelio for his hospitality, the innkeeper’s wife for the cart and chair, and even the coffee; he also blesses the innkeeper, observing that the man has a Christian wife despite his own irreligion. The innkeeper emerges to demand an explanation for the scene, only to be left speechless as the cart turns onto the road toward Velo.

The departure thus ends not with the dramatic confrontation Carnesecca may have intended, but with practical care imposed on a man who resists being cared for. Don Aurelio’s response distinguishes the sick fugitive from the ecclesiastical suspicions surrounding him: whatever the letter may mean for the priest, Carnesecca himself must first be kept from further harm. The comic blessings and the ungainly cart give that act of protection its memorable shape, carrying the episode from rumor and panic toward a planned refuge at Villino delle Rose.