CHAPTER VII
It was a strange and memorable journey home with the escaped prisoner, and men have been rarely more embarrassed than Brunow and myself. We had to deal with the strangest creature, a thing alternately beast and gentleman, sensitive in every fibre of his nature, and so animalized by that awful life of imprisonment that he was a constant dread and terror to himself. To see him slinking in his corner of the railway carriage or any room at our one or two halting-places, dull, blear-eyed, with his fingers tapping at his teeth, was pitiable and dreadful, but not so pitiable and dreadful as to see him grow suddenly conscious of his state and aspect and awake to some shamefaced effort to arouse himself and reassert the manhood that had once been in him.
The most astonishing thing in him was the way in which, through all these silent and horrible years, he had possessed his faculty of speech. He had been an exceptional linguist in his youth, and he was an exceptional linguist still. He was most companionable and least embarrassed with us when he was in the dark, and it was in the dark on the deck of the steam-packet which carried us to Dover that he gave me the secret of his retention of this faculty.
He sat with one arm thrown over the vessel's rail and with his face half averted.
“Do you know, sir,” I said, after trying in a dozen ways to draw him out, and after having failed in all of them—“do you know, sir, that I am quite sure of one thing about you?”
“What is that?” he asked.
“During all those years of cruel solitude you never abandoned the hope of freedom.”
“How should you know that?” he demanded, with a strange and vivid manner. I had never known him so roused and interested, even when I bad told him of the existence of his daughter.
“You have carefully preserved your power over language,” I answered. “You would never have cared to do that if you had not had some hope of future freedom.”
“I had no hope of freedom,” he returned. “But everything else had gone that held me from the beasts, and that I determined should not go. I am no poet, but I have occupied myself in making verses. I have done into verse every incident of my life, and the character and aspect of every person I have known. I have translated every line into every language of which I am master. I have hundreds of thousands of lines in my head—how can I tell how many? They are poor enough, I dare say, but I could talk every working day for weeks and not exhaust them. They are in French, Italian, German, English, Spanish, in Greek and Latin, in the patois of a half-dozen districts of my native country. How many hundreds of thousands of hours have had no other occupation. But for that I had gone mad, my friend.”
He rose and began to pace the deck, and I watched him. The night was calm, and the sea was like a mill-pond. Sometimes he forgot himself, and prowled with bent shoulders and clasped hands in a limited space, walking to and fro, with a sharp check at the end of such brief promenade, as if an invisible world had put a limit to the space he moved in; that was the jail-bird's gait, and the prison limits were about him again to his unconscious memory. Then, at other times he would assert himself with an effort only too visible. He would lift his head, throw out his chest, and march the full length of the deck with an assurance of freedom and manhood. But the slouching gait was always back in a minute, and his unconscious fancy began to confine his footsteps once more. On a sudden he paused in his walk and stretched out his right hand.
“That light?” he said.
“Dover,” I answered. “We shall land in half an hour.”
We were fortunately alone, for I would not have had it happen in the presence of a stranger for a thousand pounds. I had scarcely spoken when he dropped his face into both his hands and broke into an hysteric fit of crying. His limbs failed him; and in the passion of his emotion he would certainly have fallen to the deck if I had not put an arm about him. His poor body was all crate and basket, ribs and spine; and the wretched man's skeleton figure shook in my arms as if each sob were an explosion. He laid his head on my shoulder at last, and I put my other arm round him and held him to my breast. I love my country, and I thank God for her daily that she is free, and has taught the world the lessons of freedom, for that is the great and just pride of all Englishmen; but I never blessed her in my heart as I did then.
“God bless the dear old land,” I said. “There is freedom there at least.”
I did not know that I had spoken until he answered me.
“There is freedom there,” he said, in his foreign voice, broken with sobs. “Thank God for freedom.”
The town lights were almost blotted out for me; but I hugged him and patted him with less shame than I should have felt if he had been an Englishman. He disengaged himself at last and shook me by the hand, and began his promenade again. Before we had exchanged another word we were slowing alongside the pier, and men were bustling along the deck and racing beside us on the land. Brunow came on deck, and Hinge got together our simple baggage.
We had but just landed when I saw two ladies, whom I recognized at once. Miss Rossano and Lady Rollinson were waiting to meet us. Miss Rossano came to me and took my hand in both hers.
“Thank you, Captain Fyffe,” she said. “My father is here?”
“You are my daughter?” said the count.
She bent and kissed him on the forehead gravely, and with perfect self-possession. An onlooker, who had known nothing of the story, would have guessed little from their meeting. They had a carriage in waiting, and Miss Rossano led the count towards it.
“You will join us at the Lord Warden?” she said. And at that minute Brunow approached her. She took his hand in both of her own, precisely as she had taken mine; but entered the carriage without a word to him. Now, I have said nothing lately of my feeling for Miss Rossano; but anybody who reads this record may be sure that what had happened since I had last seen her had not tended to put her out of my mind. I knew that I was going to be very happy, or very unhappy, about her. I knew that the power lay in her hands to make my life mainly cloud or mainly sunshine. That was quite settled in my own mind by this time, and my wife and I have laughed a thousand times and more about it. Yes; I knew scarcely anything about her, and yet I was prepared to fight in the assurance that she possessed every virtue and every grace of character which I have since proved in her. This is the folly of love; but it is at the same time that which makes it so beautiful. Most young men, and most young women, live to be disillusioned. But I fell in love with better fortune, if with no more discretion, than the average man displays, and after many years of trial and happiness I know my wife to be a better woman than I had power to guess all those years ago. And I know, as every husband of a good wife knows, that I was a much better man than I could ever have been without her influence.
All this leads me away from what I meant to say, which was simply that Miss Rossano's wordless reception of Brunow made me furiously jealous of him, and altogether dashed my happiness. She had spoken to me—ergo, she could speak. She had not spoken to him—ergo, the emotion of encountering him was too great for her. We had been six years married when I told her of this.
I saw her with both hands reached out to help her father into the carriage. I saw her beautiful face, so soft and serious and lofty in its look that I have no words to say how it touched me. The carriage drove away. Hinge shouldered our bit of luggage easily, and Brunow and I walked up to the hotel side by side. We were met in the hall by a waiter who asked us if we would go to Lady Rollinson's sitting-room in half an hour, and then Brunow and I went to a private room of our own, and drank each a pint of English ale, as every Englishman did on reaching the Lord Warden in those days. It was a libation to liberty, the health of welcome home which the loneliest traveller poured when he felt himself upon his native land again after an absence however temporary.
When we had got through this ceremony we sat glum and silent enough, and I have since thought it likely that Brunow was as much hurt at the difference in our greetings as I had been. For Miss Rossano had thanked me in words and had not spoken to him, and he was probably reading the thing the other way about. But he was much more at home within himself than I was, and at any time I don't think he was capable of any very deep feeling. Perhaps I do him less than justice, and we are all apt to think our sensations more striking and real than those of other people.
At the appointed time we went out into the corridor and walked to the room which bore the number the waiter had already given us. I tapped at the door, and Lady Rollinson admitted us. The count sat in a plush-covered arm-chair and his daughter leaned above him with a hand on either shoulder. The scene looked purely domestic, and if a stranger had seen it he would have discovered nothing unusual in it. At the moment at which I entered the count's hand strayed to his shoulder, and for a mere instant touched the hand which rested there. His daughter's hand closed upon it and held it, and she looked up with her beautiful face bright with feeling.
“Be seated, gentlemen,” said the count, and we obeyed him. “I have tried to thank you often, but I have never succeeded. I shall succeed less than ever now, but I thank you.”
Lady Rollinson sat in one corner of the room with some trifle of woman's work in her hand, pretending to be busy over it. She looked up at Miss Rossano once or twice, and it was plain to see that she had been crying. As for the girl herself, her eyes shone, her beautiful lips were apart, her color came and went, and it would have been evident to the dullest sight that she was deeply moved; but she showed no sign of having shed tears, and looked altogether brave and exultant. It was a beautiful thing to notice the caressing and protecting air with which she leaned above the count; and it was strange to read the likeness which existed between her bright young face and his worn lineaments.
We had paused more than once upon our journey, and he was in all respects trimmed and dressed as became a gentleman. As he sat there with his face alight and his whole manner animated, there was no trace of the jail-bird period about him. I remembered the man I had first seen at Pollia—the man with the colorless face, the sunken eyes, the matted hair and beard—and was puzzled to identify him with the polished gentleman who sat before me. And yet, in spite of the disguise, the jail-bird was back again in as little time as it would take to snap your thumb and finger. The cloud lowered upon him in a second, and he sat biting his nails with an air altogether lost and furtive. I think his daughter first read the change in him from my own look, for after one swift glance at me she bent over him and gazed into his face. He seemed unconscious of her presence or of ours.
“You were saying, dear—” she said, and there halted.
He looked up with an undecided half-return to his former brightness.
“I was saying—” he began, and then stopped, as if searching in his own mind for the clew to what had passed a moment earlier.
“You were thanking Captain Fyffe and Mr. Brunow.”
“Gentlemen,” said the count, with a complete momentary repossession of himself, “I know not how to thank you. You have seen enough already to know that the life I have led this many year's has left its mark upon me. I fail in words—sometimes, to tell you the whole truth, I fail in feelings. There are moments when I have not even the heart to be glad that I am free again. But you will understand, and you will forgive because you understand. If words of gratitude do not come easily to my tongue, it is not because you have not deserved them.”
“The man who really deserves the thanks of all of us,” I answered, “is Corporal Hinge. Without him we should have been nonplussed; with him everything fell out in the simplest way. We have encountered no difficulty, and run no dangers.”
“But,” said Brunow, in his lightest and airiest fashion, as if he disclaimed credit in the very act of claiming it, “I need hardly tell Miss Rossano that in fulfilling the commission we accepted at her hands we should have been delighted to encounter either. As it was we had the most extraordinary good-fortune in the world. The whole thing has been a chapter of happy accidents.”
“It pleases you to say so,” said the count; “but my daughter and I enjoy no less the privilege of gratitude.”
The position was embarrassing; for the more I thought about it the more I saw how little we had done, and how plain and simple a piece of duty it had been to do that little.
“Your father is tired, Miss Rossano,” I said, taking the shortest way out of the difficulty. “You and he, besides, will have a thousand things to say to each other with which nobody else will have a right to interfere.” I rose and held out my hand, and she came from behind her father's chair to meet me with an exquisite frankness.
“You shall have my thanks, Captain Fyffe,” she said, “all my life long, whether you disclaim them or not. And you too, Mr. Brunow. I suppose we all go to town together?”
The count had risen from his seat while she spoke, and stood before us with one hand stretched out to Brunow and the other to myself. “I am poor in words,” he said, with a shaking voice; “I am poor in everything. But believe me, gentlemen, I thank you, and shall thank you always. For whatever of life is left to me I am yours.”
Two or three tears rolled over from his bright, sunken eyes, ran down the deep-channelled line in his cheeks, which misery and solitude had bitten there, and rested in his white mustache. He gripped our hands hard, and, turning away from us, sat down again.
We said good-night in hushed voices, as if we were speaking in a church or a sick-chamber, and came away.
Even at this, distance of time I am ashamed of my own sensations; but when I got away to my own room my whole feeling was one of disappointment and dissatisfaction. I had meant to do everything by myself—to have had no rival, to have brought back Miss Rossano's father unaided, and to have taken whatever gratitude was due for that service entirely to myself. As it turned out, I had done nothing. The original discovery of the count's whereabouts was entirely due to Brunow. Without him the expedition would have been fruitless, and but for the pure accident of Hinge's presence we should both have been helpless.
My bedroom window overlooked the sea, and I sat at it for three or four hours, smoking and staring across the motionless waste of water before the truth about myself occurred to me. When it came it brought as little comfort as the truth is apt to bring. I saw that my whole purpose had been to do something that should make me look noble and exceptional in Miss Rossano's eyes, and that the recovery of a living man from that infernal dungeon meant almost nothing in contrast with my own selfish wishes.
It took a long time to swallow that pill, and it took a longer time yet to digest it; but it had a wholesome effect upon me, and I was all the better for it in the end.
When I got down into the public breakfast-room I found Brunow there in the act of making inquiry of a waiter as to the hour of the arrival of the London papers. I attached no particular importance to the fact at the moment, but a few minutes later I passed him in the corridor and found him repeating the same inquiry to another waiter; and a little later, when we were seated at table together, he propounded the same question to a third.
“You're in a hurry for news,” I said.
“I want to see what they've made of it,” he answered, smilingly. “The local man down here seems to be a smartish sort of fellow, and I was careful to see that he had the facts all right before he went away.”
“What local man? What facts?” I asked.
“My dear fellow,” said Brunow, smiling and waving his table-napkin in the air, “we are people of distinction, and under the circumstances our comings and goings are naturally chronicled. We shall have a reception in town, I promise you.”
I understood by then what he had been doing, and I was almost as much ashamed as if I had done it myself. He had taken the trouble to blaze the whole affair in the newspapers; and when, an hour later, the train which brought the London journals down to Dover arrived at the station, I was there with him to meet it. He was so obviously satisfied with his own action that it would have been useless to say a word to him. And yet I fairly boiled over when I saw the travesty of the whole adventure with which he had duped the Times. One would have supposed from the story with which he had primed the representative of that journal that we had run every conceivable kind of risk, and had, by our own courage and cunning, surmounted every obstacle the wit of man could compass. All this was absurd enough and annoying enough, but the introduction of Miss Rossano's name into the narrative looked altogether wanton and unwarranted, and, I dare say, now that I can recall the whole thing in cool blood, that I was more disturbed and angry than I need have been. Brunow took what I had to say with imperturbable good-humor, and was altogether satisfied with himself.
“We shall have a crowd to meet us,” he prophesied. “There are thousands of Italian refugees in London at this minute, and they will all be there to cheer the illustrious Fyffe, and the no less illustrious Brunow. All the exiled noblemen who live in Hatton Garden, and make London stand and deliver at the barrel-organ's mouth, all the dukes and counts who shave and teach dancing, and sell penny ices, and keep cheap restaurants, will be there to welcome their delivered compatriot. The railway terminus will be odorous with garlic and the humanity of Italy. Fyffe, my dear fellow, we shall have a glorious day.”
When I told him, as I did, that he was a thick-skinned idiot and braggart, he looked amazed. But I left him to his surprise, and took what precautions I could against the newspaper falling into the hands of Miss Rossano. We all travelled to London together at her request, and I had some difficulty in persuading Brunow that I was in earnest in insisting that she should see nothing of the nonsense he had caused to be written and printed about our expedition.
“My dear fellow,” he declared, “the man was eager to get the news, and would have printed three times as much if I had felt inclined to give it him. You can't expect,” he went on, “to do a thing of this kind at this time of day and not have it talked about. And of course it's best to let these press fellows come to the fountain-head and get the plain, simple, unadulterated truth.”
This, in face of the story he had told, was so monstrous, and, when I came to think about it, so astonishingly like him, that I forbore to say another word, except to warn him that the newspapers should not reach Miss Rossano with my good-will.
He gave in at last, though he grumbled a great deal, and was evidently as far from understanding me as I was from comprehending him.
We made a dull party on the whole, for nobody could help feeling that the count and his daughter were absolute strangers to each other, or that our presence was a little awkward at the time. It was ridiculous to try to talk commonplace. It felt brutal and unsympathetic to sit in silence, and almost equally brutal and unsympathetic to say a word of what was nearest to all our hearts. But if we had been embarrassed on the journey, all our memory of it vanished for the moment in the deeper embarrassment of the reception which Brunow's babble had prepared for us. His prophecy of what would happen was fulfilled, and more than fulfilled. The platform of the terminus swarmed with people of every nationality known to London, and everybody there present seemed crazy with excitement. How, or by whom, our little party was singled out was beyond my power to guess. But we were recognized in a moment, and in another moment were swept asunder from each other amid such a polyglot babel of voices as I had never heard before. People were laughing and crying and cheering and fighting all at once, and I had a glimpse of the count in the arms of a score of mustachioed, sallow-featured men who were weeping and shouting, and hugging and kissing him and each other like a pack of lunatics inspired with the instinct of welcome. I was faring little better at the hands of the populace, though I cooled the enthusiasm of more than one patriot, I am afraid, as I fought my way out of the railway station. I escaped to a hackney carriage and found my way to my own lodgings, accompanied by Hinge, who was as delighted at the scene as I was angry at it. Before I had driven away from the terminus I had seen from no great distance that the count, Miss Rossano, and Lady Rollinson had safely reached her ladyship's carriage, which had been telegraphed for before our leaving Dover. I had interfered to prevent the taking out of the horses, and had seen the carriage start for home amid a roar of “vivas” and “bravas” and “hurrahs.” The last I had seen of Brunow was in the middle of a crowd, with whom he was exchanging polyglot congratulations in the height of good spirits and enjoyment.
Hinge had not been three minutes in my room before he had made himself master of the place. He installed himself without engagement or invitation as my body-servant, and I found him in my bedroom hunting the wardrobe and chest of drawers for a change of clothes.
“You'll find me 'andier when I gets to know my way about, sir,” he said. “I was the colonel's batman for three years, and I can valley a gentleman as well here as there, sir. You'll feel more like London when you've got into these, sir.”
He pointed to the garments laid out symmetrically on the bed, and, motioning to me to be seated, knelt down before me and began to unlace my boots.
I was still in the act of dressing when a knock sounded at the outer door; Hinge marched off to answer it, returning with a large visiting-card edged with a line of mourning. He presented this to me, and I read the words “Count Ruffiano,” printed very badly in blunt script type.
I told Hinge to ask the visitor his business, and I learned that he came direct from Miss Rossano with a message. I excused myself for a minute, and hastily finished dressing.
The Count Ruffiano, a head and shoulders taller than myself, stood in the middle of the room and bowed with surprising courtliness when I entered. He was six feet seven or eight in stature, had an eagle beak, a huge gray mustache, and a head of stiff, upstanding hair, close cropped and mottled in jet black and snow white. His cheeks and chin had been strange to the razor for a week; his linen was limp and discolored; and his clothes, which were of foreign cut, had once been shapely and fashionable, but were now seedy beyond belief. The hat he held in one hand was a monument of shabbiness; but his habitual stoop had the air of having been acquired by a constant courtly condescension. He was as lean as his own walking-cane, and his air of condescending gentility put a strange emphasis on his shabby clothes, and made them ten times as noticeable as they would have been without it. And yet at the very first sight of him I was persuaded that he was a gentleman.
“You are Captain Fyffe?” he said, with a marked Italian accent.
“That is my name,” I responded.
“You are possessed of mine,” he answered. “Permit me that I shake hands. I read in your English Times this morning of the arrival of the Conte di Rossano. I have seen my friend, and, so far as I know, I am the only survivor of the enterprise in which he lost his liberty. I lose no moment in coming here to pay my homage to the disinterested valor which gave my compatriot his freedom, I am, sir,” he bowed and extended his hands with a smiling humility—“I am, sir, this many years a pensioner on the bounty of Miss Rossano. She knows me as a comrade of the father whom she has always until now thought of as lost to her. She has pencilled for me a line or two on the back of my card.”
I held the card still, and, turning it over, I read: “This brave and loyal gentleman is my father's one surviving friend. He wishes to know you. V. R.”
I looked up after reading this brief but expressive message, and the face of the gaunt spectre who stood before me was flushed, and his head was in the air, as if he had read it with me, and was proud of the testimony it conveyed on his behalf.
I asked him to be seated, and gave him to understand that anybody carrying such a recommendation was welcome. He held out a long, lean hand, and when I gave him my own stooped over it and kissed it.
“Sir,” he said, “you have done more than restore an individual to liberty. You have reanimated a cause: you have inspired a people. There are a thousand of us at this hour in London to whom the name of the Conte di Rossano is a legend and an inspiration. Twenty years ago he was our leader—a spirit of the subtlest and most indomitable. A soul without fear, and of resource astonishingly varied. 'You have restored him to us, and before a month is over his name will ring through Italy. We are preparing for such a rising as we have never made. For years our names have been written on the sands of failure. We shall write them to-morrow on the lasting granite of success.”
He talked with any amount of fire and vigor, and in a voice pitched so high that he might have been haranguing a multitude. He gesticulated with the shabby old hat and the slim walking-stick as if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the fact that he was in earnest, and I felt an immediate liking for him.
“I am not here,” he said, “on a visit of impertinence. I have an actual object. I am charged by the Conte di Rossano to tell you that a meeting has been already arranged to welcome him to London. It will be held to-night, and he beseeches you through me to be present at it.”
I demurred at first, for I had no mind to be publicly embraced by the tatterdemalion patriots I had seen in the crowd that morning. But when my visitor incidentally mentioned the fact that Miss Rossano would accompany her father, I gave him my promise at once.
The ragged nobleman promised to call and conduct me to the place of meeting, and so went his way with a torrent of thanks and a rage of gesticulation.
CHAPTER VIII
I found Miss Rossano and her father in the vestry of a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. The room was crammed almost to suffocation, and there was such a crowd outside that it took us ten minutes' hard fighting to reach the neighboring school-room in which the public meeting was to be held. The way was cleared at last, and a score or so of us filed on to the platform, which was erected at one end of the crowded hall. My visitor of that afternoon immediately preceded Miss Rossano and the count, and I followed on their heels.
As we reached the platform the gaunt phantom swung round upon us, and in a voice like the call of a trumpet announced “The Exile.”
I had already had a taste of the patriotic enthusiasm of the crowd that morning, but I had never seen anything which did more than approach the delirious excitement which set in at this announcement.
There was not a seat in the body of the room, and the men who occupied the floor were packed like herrings in a barrel. One could see nothing but a great wave of swarthy, eager faces, and could hear nothing but a tumult like the roaring of the sea. There was hardly a man in the whole assemblage who was not weeping with excitement; and though I have rather a knack of keeping a cool head under such circumstances, I have to own that I was deeply moved.
It seemed impossible to stop the cheering. Ruffiano, who had constituted himself chairman, gesticulated like a windmill, and roared till he was hoarse in the vain effort to secure silence. It took a full quarter of an hour to wear out this prodigious welcome, and even then it broke out anew in scattered bursts and spurts, as if the people could never have enough of it.
All this while Miss Rossano stood at her father's side, holding one of his hands in both her own. The tears were streaming down her face without cessation, but I had never seen her look so radiant—not even on the night when I first saw her, and the happy brightness of her beauty made me her life-long servant.
The count, poor man, was shaken altogether out of self-control. He hid his eyes with his frail hand, and his tears ran like rain through his wasted fingers. I have tried many and many a time to realize in my own mind what he must have felt, but I have always known the futility of the effort.
Twenty years of solitary imprisonment, a martyrdom of physical degradation quite unspeakable, and sickening even to think of for a moment, darkness, torture, utter despair, and then freedom and human tears, and this astounding roar of triumph, sympathy, and welcome! It was no wonder the scene unmanned him. The wonder was that he had not sunk into an unquestioning animalism—a mere brute state of idiocy—years ago.
There was speech-making enough and to spare when the cheering at last was over. The count himself spoke a few broken words of thanks, which elicited another roar of sympathy and welcome scarcely inferior in volume to the first and only less prolonged. To tell the truth, I felt the whole business rather trying, and I got heartily sick of the name of the courageous, illustrious, magnanimous, and altogether noble and magnificent Signor Fyfa. I knew perfectly well, though I could not understand a tenth part of what was said, that Brunow's shameless exaggerations were accepted here as solid truth, and that I was being lauded for a number of splendid qualities which, to say the least, I had had no chance of displaying. The illustrious, courageous, magnanimous, and altogether noble Brunow came in for his share of the praise, and bowed solemnly, with his hand upon his heart, whenever the crowd cheered him. He made a speech in Italian, and achieved an overwhelming success.
Finally, the whole business was over. We had got back to the vestry, and all but a few of the chieftains had gone away, when I first became aware of the presence of the Baroness Bonnar. A light hand touched my sleeve, and a foreign voice spoke to me in English.
“This is a noble occasion. I have never been so moved in my life. I have cried until I am not fit to be seen.”
Turning and looking at the speaker, I failed for a mere instant to recognize her. I had seen her but twice before, and then only for a moment at a time, and under circumstances of no especial interest. She saw the doubt in my face, and reintroduced herself. She looked extremely pretty, and even fascinating, in a coquettish little bonnet of the fashion of that time.
When her face was in repose one could judge of her age, but when she smiled all her wrinkles—and there were a good many of them—melted into the smile, and her face looked almost girlishly young and innocent. She owned that look of youth and freshness in spite of the fact that she was rouged and powdered and painted as if she had been ready for the stage. It was pretty easy to see that she had not been quite as much affected by the “noble occasion” as she pretended to have been, for the slightest shower of tears would have ruined that admirable and artistic make-up.
“I pass for Austrian,” said the baroness; “but I am Hungarian all over, and I hate, I hate, I hate the Austrians! If I had my way I would kill them every one.”
She spoke with a pretty enough pretence of vindictiveness, but her manner was not very convincing.
Supposing I had been aware of this little person's purpose, what should I have done, I wonder? What should I have been justified in doing? I had rather not answer that question, even to myself. But if I had known for a certainty what was in her heart, and what lay in the future, there are not many things at which I should have hesitated to spoil her plans.
She did not find me very sympathetic or very ardent. I was tired, for one thing, and for another I can never take very kindly to humbug, even when a pretty woman offers it. The baroness turned from me to Brunow, beseeching him to introduce her to the acquaintance of that dear and charming Miss Rossano, who had so much her sympathy, and the spectacle of whose natural emotion had so much affected her. I am not very observant in such matters, but though Brunow disguised it pretty well, I am sure that I noticed some reluctance in his manner. He made the presentation, however, and the baroness flowed out in sympathy and congratulation.
“I am myself Hungarian,” I heard her say, “but I have lived in Austria half my life. There is no need to tell you anything about that terrible government, but—mon Dieu! the things I have seen and known! I am a stranger, Mees Rossano, and the hour is sacred; but you will forgive this intrusion, will you not? because I could not help it.”
She spoke with so much vivacity and feeling that I felt a little sorry for my contemptuous thoughts of her. She had said her say, and she behaved with more reticence and more apparent delicacy than I should have been disposed to give her credit for. She said something to the count in a low and rapid voice, and he answered by the offer of his hand, and a mere broken murmur of response. I made out that she had asked to be honored by taking the hand of one ennobled by so much suffering, and the quiet and unobtrusive fashion in which she slipped from the room after offering this tribute raised her anew in my opinion. It would have been a just thing, had one known all, to have crushed that dangerous and wicked little viper exactly as if she had really been a snake, instead of a woman with a snake's nature.
She went her way, however, having begun her work of mischief under my eyes.
Another night or two of such emotion would have been fatal to our rescued prisoner; and, indeed, he gave us all a fright before we got him home that evening. All the enthusiasts had cleared away, and I was leading the poor gentleman towards a cab which had been already summoned and was now waiting in the street, when, without warning, he swooned away. I felt his arm slipping rapidly from mine, and caught him just in time to save him from a heavy fall. I carried him back to the vestry, and there we loosened his collar and laid him on the couch, and dashed water in his face, while Brunow ran for brandy. He recovered in a while, but was even then too weak to walk, so that I carried him in my arms to the street, and set him down in the cab. My wife has often told me, in talking over those old times, that she looked on me at that moment as a man possessed of Herculean strength; but, in truth, the poor fellow was so attenuated that his weight was scarcely greater than a child's.
I could hardly do less than call at Lady Rollinson's house next day to inquire after the sufferer's condition; and yet I went with great reluctance. I was so eager to be there, I was so willing to spend every hour in Miss Rossano's company, that I was afraid of being intrusive, and my very anxiety to be near her kept me away from her in this foolish fashion many a time.
The Baroness Bonnar was before me when I called, and I found her there in the daintiest and most becoming of visiting costumes, chatting away with excellent tact and unfailing vivacity.
She gave Miss Rossano time to welcome me, and then assailed me at once with laudation's of my devotion and courage, which I received, I know, with an extremely evil grace. I resemble my neighbors in liking to have credit for what I have done, but I know nothing more hateful than unmerited praise. I silenced her at last, and she turned upon Miss Rossano with a stage-whisper intended for my hearing: “I adore these brave men who are too modest to endure praise.”
“You are too oily for my personal taste, madame,” I said to myself, and my earlier dislike for her came back again.
The count, I learned, was better. Immediately on his arrival at Lady Rollinson's the family doctor had been sent for. Like a wise man, he had prescribed rest and complete freedom from all excitement. There were to be no more public meetings, and the sufferer was seriously warned against all stress of emotion.
“We have had great difficulty,” said Miss Rossano, “in bringing him to reason. The enthusiasm of last night's meeting has convinced him that a great uprising is near at hand, and that in a year or two at the outside Italy will have her freedom back again. He would die for that,” she said, with a flash of her beautiful eyes, and her face suddenly pale with feeling. “The house was overrun with Italians yesterday,” she added. “My father saw some of them, and they are all full of the news that Charles Albert is ready to march into Piedmont, and that the Pope is favorable to devolution. One never knows how much truth there is in these stories, but I have lived in an atmosphere of them all my life.” Then she laughed on a sudden, and, clapping her hands together, turned on me with a swift gesture like that of a pleased child. “You saw the Count Ruffiano yesterday?” she asked; and I, answering in the affirmative, she laughed again. “The poor dear old gentleman,” she said, “is my father's one surviving comrade, and ever since I have been able to understand he has talked to me about Italy and The Cause. He is in fiery earnest, and such a dreamer that he has been looking forward to every month of his life as the date of Italy's liberty. I have had a great deal of influence with the count”—she was serious again by this time—“and through him over the Italian revolutionists in London, and I have always counselled them not to strike until they were sure of their aim. An unsuccessful revolution is a crime. You think it strange that a girl should be thinking of these things.”
“Indeed, no,” I answered. “I should think it strange in your case if you had no such thoughts. And let me tell you, Miss Rossano, that I think your friend Count Rumano's dream is coming near at last. He may wake any fine morning to find it very near indeed.”
“You think so?” she cried, with a restrained vehemence. “You have heard news while you were abroad?”
“No news,” I answered; “but I can see the general trend of things. There is an awakening spirit of liberty on the Continent, and unless I am much mistaken, a map of Europe of this date will be a surprising thing to look at in half a dozen years.”
I should be a fool to pretend that I foresaw all the political changes which have taken place since then, but I should have been blind if I had not foreseen some of them. Liberty was in the air; there was an underlying strife and turmoil in the world's affairs which was not evident to everybody, though a soldier of fortune like myself, who made the cause of liberty his trade, was bound to be aware of it. The great politicians knew it all, no doubt; but they kept their knowledge to themselves, and waited, as we know now, with a bitter anxiety and fear for what events might bring. For the great politicians were, for the most part, then, as now, afraid of liberty, and looked on it as being very much of a curse rather than a blessing.
“You would fight for Italy,” she said, “if there were a real chance?”
“If there were anything approaching a chance,” I responded, “I would fight for Italy.”
If I had dared I would have told her what was really at the bottom of my thought: I would have fought gladly for Italy; but the fact that it was her cause, that she espoused it and hoped for it, that her father had been buried alive for it, made it dearer to me than any other in the world. I had almost forgotten that we were not alone when the Baroness Bonnar proclaimed her presence.
“Italy!” she cried; and as I turned at the sound of her voice I saw her bring the palms of her gloved hands together and turn her fine eyes to the ceiling as if the word inspired her—“Italy! oh, if I were a man I would fight for Italy! Ah, those hateful Austrians! And what a man is Cavour! and what a man Garibaldi! Oh, they will fight! They will win!”
“There is plenty of time yet. Liberty, my dear Miss Rossano, will restore your father to health, and he will not lose his share of the glory.” We English always excuse a foreigner who shows a tendency to bombast in conversation; and allowing for her partial knowledge of the language, and for the oratorical turn her people have, I saw nothing overstrained in the little woman's raptures. I had even a modified belief in their reality; and even to this day I cannot blame myself for having been deceived by her. She had an astonishing capacity in her own line, and though she had achieved no great success on the stage, she was the most perfect actress off it I have ever known.
She showed no disposition to prolong her visit, but withdrew after a stay of a quarter of an hour or so, with many expressions of good-will and ardent hope for the count's early recovery. If she might have the honor, she would call again upon Miss Rossano.
“Pardon me,” she said; “beside you I am an old woman, and I can take a liberty. I like you for your interest in poor Italy and for your father's sake, who has been a martyr in such a cause. You will let me see you sometimes. People who know me better than you do will tell you that I am a butterfly, and without a heart. But that is not true. I do not show my heart often, and never unless I mean it.”
She was gone without waiting for a response, and Miss Rossano, turning to me with a blush and a smile, asked me if I did not consider her visitor quite a charming little person. It would have been ungracious on no evidence at all to have stated my real mind, and I compromised by saying nothing. My silence on that topic went unobserved; and until I took my leave we talked about the count and the prospects of The Cause. It makes me smile now to remember how savagely in earnest I grew to be about that matter of Italian independence when once I had discovered that Miss Rossano was seriously interested in it. That, if I had only thought about it, was the way to her heart; but anxious as I was to secure her good opinion, I was guilty of no pretences. The mere fact that she desired it would have been enough to make me desire it also, even if I had had no wishes that way to begin with.
“Captain Fyffe,” said Miss Rossano, suddenly, in the midst of our enthusiastic talk upon this theme, “I am going to ask you a favor. I know very little of my father as yet. I have not spent twelve hours in his society, but it is easy to find out two things about it: he will be mad to join in any effort that The Cause may make, and—”
She paused there, with a look of semi-embarrassment.
“And?” I interrogated.
“I think,” she continued, “that he is likely to be very much influenced by your opinion.”
“We have scarcely exchanged a word together on that topic,” I responded.
“Ah,” she returned, quickly, “you have influenced his judgment without that. He has formed opinions about you, and he has expressed them more than once. He thinks you are a man of unusually solid character, and I am sure you will be able to influence him greatly. You must remember, too, what a debt of gratitude he owes you. The more warmly you are disposed to The Cause yourself, the more necessary it seems to beg you not to allow him to rush into any new danger. Give us, at least, a little time in which to know each other before he leaves me again.”
I promised earnestly that I would never say a word to induce him to leave her side. I promised that if any undertaking should seem to lead him into useless danger, I would do my best to warn him from the enterprise. I promised further (but this was to myself, and I said no word about it) that in the event of any effort being made the count should be my comrade, and that I would do my loyal best for him.
That brought our conversation to an end, and I took leave of her, but not before she had assured me that I should always be a welcome visitor. I went away mighty proud and happy, and when I got home to my chambers who should I find awaiting me but the Count Ruffiano, buttoned to the throat to disguise the absence of the linen which had been so shabbily conspicuous yesterday. He was in a state of intense excitement, and when I entered was pacing up and down the room like one scarcely able to control himself.
“Pardon this second intrusion, my dear sir,” he began; “I will explain its purport in a moment.”
I induced him to be seated; but before he had got out half his statement he was on his feet again, striding about my little room in such a heat of excitement that, lean as he was, the perspiration fell in big drops from his thatched eyebrows and the tip of his Quixote nose.
“To begin with, sir,” he said, when I had persuaded him to be seated, “you are one of us? That you are a friend to humanity, I know, but a friend to Italy—yes?”
I was still hot from my talk with Miss Rossano, and I assured the count that I was very much a friend to Italy indeed.
“Then, sir,” he cried, “we have need of you! We have need of every counsel—of every hand.”
He was on his feet again, and had intrenched himself behind the arm-chair. He declaimed from that position as if it had been a rostrum, employing a wealth and variety of gesture which no English mimic could succeed in copying in a year.
News, it appeared, had arrived that morning from Paris which led to the belief that an uprising against Louis Philippe might shortly be looked for. The messenger who brought that news had within twenty-four hours encountered a messenger from Turin, who prophesied insurrection there; this messenger in turn had news from Vienna from another comrade, who was assured that Metternich was trembling in his shoes at the thought of Charles Albert's threatened advance on Piedmont.
“The wine,” cried my Italian Quixote, “is in ferment! We drink of it, and our hearts are turned to madness! We need more of your English sang-froid”—he called it “sanga-froida,” and puzzled me for a passing instant. “The hour is here,” he declared, “and the men are here! But, until now, we have ruined everything by too much precipitation, and against that we must now be on our guard!”
Of the volubility and energy with which he delivered himself of all this, and much more, I cannot convey even the slightest idea. I can give no notion of his fertility in unnecessary vowels, and I should be afraid to say how many syllables he made of the word precipitation, or how he would have spelled it in English if he had tried.
“It is for you, sir,” he thundered, stopping in his headlong walk to shake a long forefinger in my face—“it is for you to teach us to be calm!”
I asked him to take his first lesson there and then, and to begin it by being seated.
“Ah,” said he, “that is to be practical—that is to be English. To be practical and to be English is to be successful. You shall advise us—you shall lead us to victory!”
In his discovery of the excellence of my practical method he had forgotten all about it, and was pounding up and down the room at as great a rate as ever, when I took him by the shoulders and forced him into a chair.
“Let us talk business,” I said, severely; “if this means anything at all, it means action.”
“Action,” he responded, “decisive and immediate!”
“Action,” I retorted, “well matured and sane!”
“Ah! yes, yes,” cried Ruffiano; “again, dear sir, you correct me. That is why I am here. But do not think because I have no patience—do not think because I am an old—an old—” He searched in his mind for a simile, and burst out with “gas-balloon” with a laugh of childish amusement at his own impetuosity. “Do not you think because I am an old gas-balloon that there are not among us no wiser and cooler heads than mine! We are at a white-heat now, but there are men among us who can keep their wits even in a furnace like this. I, dear sir”—he would have been on his feet again but that I checked him—“I am of the inner council. We meet to-night, and, hot as I am, I fear my own heat and that of others. If you wish well to Italy, be one of us. And be sure, sir, that the rescuer of our one most dearest and most prized shall be received with honor.”
I promised; and he undertook to call upon me at nine o'clock that evening. And thus, within a day of my return to London, I found myself pledged to Italy; and a few hours later made one of a caucus of conspirators, poor and needy and inconsiderable enough to look at, but holding in their hands, after all, one or two of the strings which, being pulled at the ripe hour of time, changed the scene for more than one land in Europe.