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Title: Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel

Author: Joseph Conrad

Release date: August 27, 2021 [eBook #66156]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Doubleday, Page &amp; company

Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUSPENSE: A NAPOLEONIC NOVEL ***


SUSPENSE

A NAPOLEONIC NOVEL




BY

JOSEPH CONRAD




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1925




CONTENTS
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV




PART I




SUSPENSE


I


A deep red glow flushed the fronts of marble palaces piled up on the
slope of an arid mountain whose barren ridge traced high on the
darkening sky a ghostly and glimmering outline. The winter sun was
setting over the Gulf of Genoa. Behind the massive shore the sky to the
east was like darkening glass. The open water too had a glassy look with
a purple sheen in which the evening light lingered as if clinging to the
water. The sails of, a few becalmed feluccas looked rosy and cheerful,
motionless in the gathering gloom. Their heads were all pointing towards
the superb city. Within the long jetty with the squat round tower at the
end, the water of the harbour had turned black. A bigger vessel with
square sails, issuing from it and arrested by the sudden descent of the
calm, faced the red disc of the sun. Her ensign hung down and its
colours were not to be made out; but a lank man in a shabby sailor's
jacket and wearing a strange cap with a tassel, who lounged with both
his arms thrown over the black breech of an enormous piece of ordnance
that with three of its monstrous fellows squatted on the platform of the
tower, seemed to have no doubt of her nationality; for to the question
of a young civilian in a long coat and Hessian boots and with an
ingenuous young countenance above the folds of a white neckcloth he
answered curtly, taking a short pipe out of his mouth but not turning
his head.

"She's Elban."

He replaced his pipe and preserved an unsociable air. The elegant young
man with the pleasant countenance, (who was Cosmo, the son of Sir
Charles Latham of Latham Hall, Yorkshire), repeated under his breath,
"Elban," and remained wrapped up in still contemplation of the becalmed
ship with her undistinguishable flag.

It was not till the sun had sunk beneath the waters of the Mediterranean
and the undistinguishable flag had been hauled down on board the
motionless ship that he stirred and turned his eyes towards the harbour.
The nearest prominent object in it was the imposing shape of an English
line-of-battle ship moored on the west side not far from the quay. Her
tall spars overtopped the roofs of the houses and the English ensign at
her flagstaff had been just hauled down and replaced by a lantern that
looked strange in the clear twilight. The forms of shipping crowded
towards the head of the harbour were merging into one another. Cosmo let
his eyes wander over the circular platform of the tower. The man leaning
over the gun went on smoking with indifference.

"Are you the guardian of this tower?" asked the young man.

The other gave him a sidelong glance and made answer without changing
his attitude and more as if speaking to himself:

"This is now an unguarded spot. The wars are over."

"Do they close the door at the bottom of this tower at night?" enquired
Cosmo.

"That is a matter worth consideration especially for those like you, for
instance, who have a soft bed to go to for the night."

The young than put his head on one side and looked at his interlocutor
with a faint smile.

"You don't seem to care," he said. "So I conclude I need not. As long as
you are content to stay here I am safe enough. I followed you up the
stairs, you know." The man with the pipe stood up abruptly. "You
followed me here? Why did you do that, in the name of all the saints?"

The young man laughed as if at a good joke. "Because you were walking in
front of me. There was nobody else in view near the Mole. Suddenly you
disappeared. Then I saw that the door at the bottom of the tower was
open and I walked up the stairs on to this platform. And I would have
been very surprised if I hadn't found you here."

The man in the strange cap ornamented with a tassel had taken his pipe
out of his mouth to listen. "That was all?"

"Yes, that was all."

"Nobody but an Englishman would behave like that," commented the other
to himself, a slight appearance of apprehension passing over his
features. "You are an eccentric people."

"I don't see anything eccentric in what I've done. I simply wanted to
walk out of the town. The Mole was as good as any other part. It is very
pleasant here."

A slight breeze touched the two men's faces, while they stood silent,
looking at each other. "I am but an idle traveller," said Cosmo easily.
"I arrived this morning by land. I am glad I had the idea to come out
here to behold your town glowing in the sunset and to get a sight of a
vessel belonging to Elba. There can't be very many of them. But you, my
friend . . ."

"I have as much right to idle away my time here as any English
traveller," interrupted the man hastily.

"It is very pleasant here," repeated the young traveller, staring into
the dusk which had invaded the platform of the tower.

"Pleasant?" repeated the other. "Yes, perhaps. The last time I was on
this platform I was only ten years old. A solid round shot was spinning
and rattling all over the stone floor. It made a wondrous disturbance
and seemed a living thing full of fury."

"A solid shot!" exclaimed Cosmo, looking all over the smooth flagstones
as if expecting to see the traces of that visitation. "Where did it come
from?"

"It came from an English brig belonging to Milord Keith's Squadron. She
stood in quite close and opened fire on us. . . . Heaven only knows why.
The audacity of your people! A single shot from one of those big
fellows," he continued, slapping the enormous bulging breech of the gun
by his side, "would have been enough to sink her like a stone."

"I can well believe it. But the fearlessness of our seamen has ceased to
astonish the world long ago," murmured the young traveller.

"There are plenty of fearless people in the world, but luck is even
better than courage. The brig sailed away unscathed. Yes, luck is even
better than courage. Surer than wisdom and stronger than justice. Luck
is a great thing. It is the only thing worth having on one's side. And
you people have always had it. Yes, signore, you belong to a lucky
nation or else you would not be standing here on this platform looking
across the water in the direction of that crumb of land that is the last
refuge of your greatest enemy."

Cosmo leaned over the stone parapet near the embrasure of the gun on the
other side of which the man with the short pipe in his hand made a
vaguely emphatic gesture: "I wonder what thoughts pass through your
head," he went on in a quiet detached tone. "Or perhaps you are too
young yet to have many thoughts in your head. Excuse my liberty, but I
have always heard that one may be frank in speech with an Englishman;
and by your speech there can be no doubt of you being of that nation."

"I can assure you I have no thoughts of hatred. . . . Look, the Elban
ship is getting farther away. Or is it only the darkness that makes her
seem so?"

"The night air is heavy. There is more wind on the water than up here,
where we stand; but I don't think she has moved away. You are interested
in that Elban ship, signore."

"There is a fascination now about everything connected with that
island," confessed the ingenuous traveller. "You have just said that I
was too young to think. You don't seem so very much older than myself.
I wonder what thoughts you may have."

"The thoughts of a common man, thoughts that could be of no interest to
an English milord," answered the other, in a grimly deprecatory tone.

"Do you think that all Englishmen are lords?" asked Cosmo, with a laugh.

"I didn't think. I went by your appearance. I remember hearing an old
man once say that you were a lordly nation."

"Really!" exclaimed the young man and laughed again in a low, pleasant
note. "I remember hearing of an old man who called us a nation of
traders."

"_Nazione di mercante_," repeated the man slowly. "Well, that may be
true too. Different men, different wisdoms."

"This didn't occur to me," said Cosmo, seating himself with a little
spring on the stone parapet of the tower. He rested one foot on the
massive gun-carriage and fixed his clear eyes on the dark red streak on
the western sky left by the retreating sun like a long gash inflicted on
the suffering body of the universe. . . . "Different men, different
wisdoms," he repeated, musingly. "I suppose it must be. People's lives
are so very different. . . . And of what kind was the wisdom of your old
man?"

"The wisdom of a great plain as level almost as the sea," said the other
gravely. "His voice was as unexpected when I heard it as your own,
signore. The evening shadows had closed about me just after I had seen
to the west, on the edge of the world as it were, a lion miss his spring
on a bounding deer. They went away right into the glow and vanished. It
was as though I had dreamed. When I turned round there was the old man
behind me no farther away than half the width of this platform. He only
smiled at my startled looks. His long silver locks stirred in the
breeze. He had been watching me, it seems, from folds of ground and from
amongst reed beds for nearly half a day, wondering what I might be at. I
had come ashore to wander on the plain. I like to be alone sometimes. My
ship was anchored in a bight of this deserted coast a good many miles
away, too many to walk back in the dark for a stranger like me. So I
spent the night in that old man's ranch, a hut of grass and reeds, near
a little piece of water peopled by a multitude of birds. He treated me
as if I had been his son. We talked till dawn and when the sun rose I
did not go back to my ship. What I had on board of my own was not of
much value, and there was certainly no one there to address me as "My
son" in that particular tone--you know what I mean, signore."

"I don't know--but I think I can guess," was the answer whose
light-hearted yet earnest frankness was particularly boyish and provoked
a smile on the part of the older man. In repose his face was grave. His
English interlocutor went on after a pause. "You deserted from your ship
to join a hermit in a wilderness simply because the tone of his voice
appealed to your heart. Is that your meaning?"

"You have guessed it, signorino. Perhaps there was more in it than that.
There is no doubt about it that I did desert from my ship."

"And where was that?"

"On the coast of South America," answered the man from the other side of
the big gun, with sudden curtness. "And now it is time for us to part."

But neither of them stirred and for some time they remained silent,
growing shadowy to each other on the massive tower, which itself, in the
advancing night, was but a gray shadow above the dark and motionless
sea.

"How long did you stay with that hermit in the desert?" asked Cosmo.
"And how did you leave him?"

"Signore, it was he who left me. After I had buried his body I had
nothing more to do there. I had learned much during that year."

"What is it you learned, my friend? I should like to know."

"Signore, his wisdom was not like that of other men and it would be too
long to explain to you here on this tower and at this late hour of the
day. I learned many things. How to be patient, for instance. . . .
Don't you think, signore, that your friends or the servants at the inn
may become uneasy at your long absence?"

"I tell you I haven't been much more than two hours in this town and I
have spoken to nobody in it till I came upon you, except of course to
the people at the inn."

"They may start looking for you."

"Why should they trouble their heads? It isn't late yet. Why should they
notice my absence?"

"Why? . . . Simply because your supper may be ready by this time,"
retorted the man impatiently.

"It may be, but I am not hungry yet," said the young man casually. "Let
them search for me all over the town if they like." Then in a tone of
interest, "Do you think they would think of looking for me here?" he
asked.

"No. This is the last spot anybody would think of," muttered the other
as if to himself. He raised his voice markedly, "We must part indeed.
Good-night, signore."

"Good-night."

The man in the seaman's jacket stared for a moment, then with a brusque
movement cocked his cap with the strange tassel more on the side of his
head. "I am not going away from this spot," he said.

"I thought you were. Why did you wish me good-night then?"

"Because we must part."

"I suppose we must some time or other," agreed Cosmo in a friendly
voice. "I should like to meet you again."

"We must part at once, this moment, on this tower."

"Why?"

"Because I want to be left alone," answered the other after the
slightest of pauses.

"Oh, come! Why on earth do you want to be left alone? What is it you
could do here?" protested the other with great good humour. Then as if
struck by an amusing notion, "Unless indeed you want to practise
incantations," he continued lightly, "and perhaps call the Evil One to
your side." He paused. "There are people, you know, that think it can be
done," he added in a mocking tone.

"They are not far wrong," was the other's ominous reply. "Each man has a
devil not very far from his elbow. Don't argue, signore, don't call him
up in me! You had better say no more and go in peace from here."

The young traveller did not change his careless attitude. The man in the
cap heard him say quietly, almost in a tone of self-communion:

"I prefer to stay in peace here."

It was indeed a wonderful peace. The sound of their quiet voices did not
seem to affect it in the least. It had an enormous and overpowering
amplitude which seemed rather to the man in the cap to take the part of
the Englishman's calm obstinacy against his growing anger. He couldn't
repress an impulsively threatening movement in the direction of his
inconvenient companion but it died out in perplexity. He pushed his cap
still more on one side and simply scratched his head.

"You are one of those people that are accustomed to have their own way.
Well, you can't have your way this time. I have asked you quietly to
leave me alone on this tower. I asked you as man to man. But if you
won't listen to reason I . . ."

Cosmo, putting the palms of his hands against the edge of the parapet,
sprang lightly nearly to the middle of the platform and landed without a
stagger. His voice was perfectly even.

"Reason is my only guide," he declared. "But your request looks like
mere caprice. For what can you possibly have to do here? The sea birds
are gone to sleep and I have as much right to the air up here as you.
Therefore . . ."

A thought seemed to strike him. "Surely this can't be your trysting
place," he commented in a changed tone through which pierced a certain
sympathy.

A short scornful laugh from the other checked him and he muttered to
himself soberly, "No. Altogether unfit . . . amongst those grim old
guns." He raised his voice. "All I can do is to give you all the room."
He backed away from the centre of the platform and perched himself this
time on the massive breech of a sixty-pounder. "Go on with your
incantations," he said then to the tall and dim figure whose immobility
appeared helpless for a moment. It broke the short period of silence,
saying deliberately:

"I suppose you are aware that at any time since we have begun to talk
together it was open to me to fling myself upon you unawares as you sat
on the parapet and knock you over to the bottom of this tower?" He
waited a moment, then in a deeper tone, "Will you deny it?" he said.

"No, I won't deny it," was the careless answer. "I hadn't thought to be
on my guard. But I can swim."

"Don't you know there is a border of big blocks of stone there? It would
have been a terrible death. . . . And now, will the signore do what I
ask him and return to his inn which is a much safer place than this
platform?"

"Safety is not a great inducement; and I don't believe for a moment you
ever thought of attacking me in a treacherous manner."

"Well," the tall shadowy figure crowned by the shape of the strange cap
admitted reluctantly. "Well, since you put it in those words, signore, I
did not."

"You see! I believe you are a fine fellow. But as it is I am under no
sort of obligation to listen to you."

"You are crafty," burst out the other violently. "It's in the blood. How
is one to deal with people like you?"

"You could try to drive me off," suggested the other.

There was no answer for a time, then the tall figure muttered
reflectively to itself.

"After all--he's an Englishman."

"I don't think myself invincible on that account," observed Cosmo
calmly.

"I know. I have fought against English soldiers in Buenos Ayres. I was
only thinking that, to give the devil his due, men of your nation don't
consort with spies or love tyranny either. . . . Tell me, is it true
that you have only been two hours in this town?"

"Perfectly true."

"And yet all the tyrants of the world are your allies," the shadowy man
pursued his train of thought half aloud.

The no less shadowy traveller remarked quietly into the gathering night:

"You don't know who my friends are."

"I don't, but I think you are not likely to go with a tale to the
Austrian spies or consort with the Piedmontese _sbirri._ As to the
priests who are poking their noses everywhere, I . . ."

"I don't know a single soul in Italy," interrupted the other.

"But you will soon. People like you make acquaintances everywhere. But
it's idle talk with strangers that I fear. Can I trust you as an
Englishman not to talk of what you may see?"

"You may. I can't imagine what unlawful thing you are about to commit
here. I am dying from curiosity. Can it be that you are really some sort
of sorcerer? Go on! Trace your magic circle if that is your business,
and call up the spirits of the dead."

A low grunt was the only answer to this speech uttered in a tone between
jest and earnest. Cosmo watched from the breech of his gun with intense
interest the movements of the man who objected so strongly to his
presence but who now seemed to pay no attention to him at all. They were
not the movements of a magician in so far that they certainly had
nothing to do with the tracing of circles. The figure had stepped over
to the seaward face of the tower and seemed to be pulling endless things
out of the breast pocket of his jacket. The young Englishman got down
from the breech of the gun, without ceasing to peer in a fascinated way,
and moved closer step by step till he threw himself back with an
exclamation of astonishment. "By heavens! The fellow is going to fish."
. . . Cosmo remained mute with surprise for a good many seconds and then
burst out loudly:

"Is this what you displayed all this secrecy for? This is the worst hoax
I ever . . ."

"Come nearer, signore, but take care not to tangle all my twine with
your feet. . . . Do you see this box?"

The heads of the two men had come together confidentially and the young
traveller made out a cylindrical object which was in fact a round tin
box. His companion thrust it into his hand with the request, "Hold it
for me a moment, signore," and then Cosmo had the opportunity to
ascertain that the lid of it was hermetically sealed. The man in the
strange cap dived into the pocket of his breeches for flint and steel.
The Englishman beheld with surprise his lately inimical companion
squeeze himself between the massive tube of the piece of ordnance and
the wall of stone and wriggle outwards into the depth of, the thick
embrasure till nothing of him remained visible but his black stockings
and the soles of his heavy shoes. After a time his voice came deadened
along the thickness of the wall:

"Will you hand me the box now, signore?"

Cosmo, enlisted in these mysterious proceedings, the nature of which was
becoming clear enough to him, obeyed at once, and approaching the
embrasure thrust the box in at the full length of his arm till it came
in contact with the ready hand of the man who was lying flat on his
stomach with his head projecting beyond the wall of the tower. His
groping hand found and snatched away the box. The twine was attached to
the box and at once its length laid on the platform began to run out
till the very end disappeared. Then the man lying prone within the
thickness of the gun embrasure lay still as death and the young
traveller strained his ears in the absolute silence to catch the
slightest sound at the foot of the tower. But all he could hear was the
faint sound of some distant clock striking somewhere in the town. He
waited a little longer, then in the cautious tone of a willing
accomplice murmured within the opening:

"Got a bite yet?"

The answer came hardly audible:

"No. But this is the very hour."

Cosmo felt his interest growing. And yet the facts in themselves were
not very exciting, but all this had the complexion and the charm of an
unexpected adventure, heightened by its mystery, playing itself out
before that old town towering like a carved hill decorated with lights
that began to appear quickly on the sombre and colossal mass of that
lofty shore. The last gleam had died out in the west. The harbour was
dark except for the lantern at the stern of the British ship of the
line. The man in the embrasure made a slight movement. Cosmo became more
alert but apparently nothing happened. There was no murmur of voices,
splash of water, or sign of the slightest stir all round the tower.
Suddenly the man in the embrasure began to wriggle back on to the
platform and in a very few minutes stood up to his full height facing
the unexpected helper.

"She has come and gone," he said. "Did you hear anything, signore?"

"Not a sound. She might have been the ghost of a boat--for you are
alluding to a boat, are you not?"

"_Si._ And I hope that if any eye on shore had made her out it had taken
her for only a ghost. Of course that English vessel of war rows guard at
night. But it isn't to look out for ghosts."

"I should think not. Ghosts are of no account. Could there be anything
more futile than the ghost of a boat?"

"You are one of the strong-minded, signore. Ghosts are the concern of
the ignorant--yet who knows? But it does sound funny to talk of the
ghost of a boat, a thing of brute matter. For wouldn't a ghost be a
thing of spirit, a man's soul itself made restless by grief or love, or
remorse or anger? Such are the stories that one hears. But the old
hermit of the plain, of whom I spoke, assured me that the dead are too
glad to be done with life to make trouble on earth."

"You and your hermit!" exclaimed Cosmo in a boyish and marvelling tone.
"I suppose it is no use me asking you what I have been just helping you
in."

"A little smuggling operation, signore. Surely, signore, England has
custom houses and therefore must have smugglers too."

"One has heard of them of course. But I wouldn't mind a bet that there
is not one of them that resembles you. Neither do I believe that they
deal with packages as small as the one you lowered into that ghostly
boat. You saw her of course. There was a boat."

"There was somebody to cut the string, as you see, signore. Look, here
is all that twine, all of it but a little piece. It may have been a man
swimming in the dark water. A man with a soul, fit to make a ghost of . . .
let us call him a ghost, signore."

"Oh yes, let us," the other said lightly. "I am sure that when I wake up
to-morrow all this will seem to me a dream. Even now I feel inclined to
pinch myself."

"What's that for, in Heaven's name?"

"It's a saying we have in our country. Yes, you, your hermit, our talk,
and this very tower, all this will be like a dream."

"I would say 'nothing better' if it was not that most people are only
too ready to talk about their dreams. No, signore, let all this be to
you of less consequence than if it were a tale of ghosts, of mere ghosts
in which you do not believe. You forced yourself on me as if you were
the lord of this place, but I feel friendly enough to you."

"I didn't ask for your friendship," retorted the young traveller in a
clear voice so void of all offence that the other man accepted it for a
mere statement of a fact.

"Certainly not. I spoke of my own feelings, and though I am, you may
say, a new-comer and a stranger in my own native city, I assure you it
is better to have me for a friend than for an enemy. And the best thing
of all would be to forget all about me. It would be also the kindest
thing you could do."

"Really?" said Cosmo in a tone of sympathy. "How can you expect me to
forget the most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me in all my
life?"

"In all your life! H'm! You have a long life before you yet, signorino."

"Oh, but this is an adventure."

"That's what I mean. You have so many marvellous adventures before you,
signorino, that this one is sure to be forgotten very soon. Then why not
at once?"

"No, my friend, you don't seem somehow a person one could easily
forget."

"I---- God forbid. . . . Good-night, signore."

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the man in the cap
bounded across the platform, dived into the black square opening on its
landward side, and ran down the steps so lightly that not a sound
reached the ears of the other. Cosmo went down the winding stair, but
cautiously in the profound darkness. The door at the bottom stood open
and he stepped out on to the deserted jetty. He could see on it nothing
in the shape of a fleeting shadow.

On the very edge of the shore a low little building with three arcades
sent a dim gleam of light through its open door. It seemed to be a sort
of guardroom, for there was a sentry, an Austrian soldier apparently, in
a white coat. His duty, however, seemed to be concerned with the
landing-steps in front of the guardhouse, and he let the young traveller
pass on as though he had not seen him at all. Dark night had settled
upon the long quay. Here and there a dim street lamp threw a feeble
light on the uneven stones which the feet of the young traveller with
his springy walk seemed hardly to touch. The pleasurable sensation of
something extraordinary having happened to him accelerated his
movements. He was also feeling very hungry and he was making haste
towards his inn to dine first and then to think his adventure over, for
there was a strong conviction within him that he certainly had had an
adventure of a nature at the same time stimulating and obscure.




II


Cosmo Latham had an inborn faculty of orientation in strange
surroundings, most invaluable in a cavalry officer, but of which he had
never made much use, not even during the few months when he served as a
cornet of horse in the Duke of Wellington's army in the last year of the
peninsular campaign. There had been but few occasions to make use of it
for a freshly joined subaltern. It stood him in good stead that night,
however, while making his way to his inn in a town in which he was a
complete stranger, for it allowed him, with but little concern for the
direction he took, to think of his home which he loved for itself, every
stone and every tree of it--and of the two people he left there, whom he
loved too, each in a different way: his father, Sir Charles, and his
sister Henrietta.

Latham Hall, a large straggling building showing traces of many styles,
flanked by a romantic park and commanding a vast view of the Yorkshire
hills, had been the hereditary home of Lathams from the times before the
Great Rebellion. That it escaped confiscation then might have been the
effect of the worldly prudence of the Latham of the time. He probably
took good care not to shock persons of position and influence. That,
however, was not the characteristic of the later Lathams down to Sir
Charles, Cosmo's father.

Sir Charles's unconventional individuality had never been understood by
his country neighbours. Born endowed with a good intellect, a lively
imagination, and a capacity for social intercourse, it had been his
fate, owing to the idiosyncrasies of his own father, to spend his early
youth in the depths of Yorkshire in surroundings not at all congenial to
his tastes. Later he served for a time in the Guards; but he very soon
left the army to make an extended tour in France and Italy. In those
last days before the Revolution _le chevalier_ Latham obtained a great
social recognition in Paris and Versailles amongst the very best people,
not so much by his brilliance as by the depth of his character and the
largeness of his ideas. But suddenly he tore himself away from his
friendships and successes and proceeded to Italy. There, amongst the
members of the English colony in Florence, he met the two Aston girls
and, for some reason or other, became a great favourite with their
widowed mother. But at the end of some months he suddenly made up his
mind to return home. During a long, sleepless night, which he spent
pacing up and down in the agony of an internal struggle with himself in
the magnificent rooms of his lodgings in Florence, he concluded that he
would go home by sea. It was the easiest way of avoiding coming near
Paris. He had heard not long before that the best friends he had made in
the brilliant society he had frequented in France, the Marquis and the
Marquise d'Armand, had a daughter born to them. At Leghorn on the very
eve of embarking he had another struggle with himself--but he went by
sea. By the time when, after a long sea passage, he put his foot on
native soil he had renounced the idea of hurrying on north to shut
himself up in his country home. He lingered in London, disdainful and
idle, and began reluctantly to fall into the ways of a man about town,
when a friend returning from Italy brought him news that Miss Aston was
going to marry a Tuscan nobleman of mature years, and, as a piece of
queer Florentine gossip, that if the younger sister. Miss Molly Aston,
had refused two suitors in quick succession it was because she regarded
herself in some way as being engaged to him, Charles Latham.

Whether stung by his conscience or urged by indignation Sir Charles
started impulsively for Italy, travelling across the south of France. It
was a long road. At first he had been amazed, confounded, and angry; but
before he came to the end of his journey he had time to reflect upon
what might have easily become an absurd and odious situation. He said to
himself that a lot of bother of one sort and another would be saved by
his marrying Molly Aston. He did so, to the applause of all right-minded
people, and at the end of two years spent abroad came home with his wife
to shut himself up in his ancestral hall commanding the view of a wide
and romantic landscape, which he thought one of the finest in the world.

Molly Aston had been beautiful enough in her time to inspire several
vagrant poets and at least one Italian sculptor; but as Cosmo grew older
he began to understand that his mother had been a nonentity in the
family life. The greatest piece of self-assertion on her part was his
name. She had insisted on calling him Cosmo because the Astons counted,
far back in the past, an ancestress of Florentine origin, supposed to
have been a connection of the Medici family. Cosmo was fair, and the
name was all about him that he had received from his mother. Henrietta
was a type of dark beauty. Lady Latham died when both her children were
still young. In her life she adorned Latham Hall in the same way as a
statue might have adorned it. Her household power was limited to the
ordering of the dinner. With habits of meticulous order and a
marvellously common-place mind she had a temperament which, if she had
not fallen violently in love at the age of eighteen with the same man
whom she married, would have made her fond of society, of amusement, and
perhaps even of dissipation. But her only amusement and dissipation
consisted of writing long letters to innumerable relations and friends
all over the world, of whom after her marriage she saw but very little.
She never complained. Her hidden fear of all initiative and the secret
ardour of her temperament found their fulfilment in an absolute
submission to Sir Charles's will. She would never have dreamed of asking
for horses for a visit in the neighbourhood, but when her husband
remarked, "I think it would be advisable for you, my lady, to call at
such and such a house," her face would light up, she would answer with
alacrity, "Certainly, Sir Charles," and go off to array herself
magnificently indeed (perhaps because of that drop of Medici blood), but
also with great taste.

As the years went on Sir Charles aged more than he ought to have done,
and even began to grow a little stout, but no one could fail to see that
he had been a very handsome man in his time and that his wife's early
infatuation for him was justified in a way. In politics he was a
partisan of Mr. Pitt rather than a downright Tory. He loved his country,
believed in its greatness, in its superior virtue, in its irresistible
power. Nothing could shake his fidelity to national prejudices of every
sort. He had no great liking for grandees and mere aristocrats, despised
the fashionable world, and would have nothing whatever to do with any
kind of "upstart." Without being gentle he was naturally kind and
hospitable. His native generosity was so well known that no one was
surprised when he offered the shelter of his Yorkshire house to a family
of French refugees, the Marquis and the Marquise d'Armand and their
little daughter Adèle. They had arrived in England in a state of almost
complete destitution but with two servants who had shared the dangers
and the miseries of their flight from the excesses of the Revolution.

The presence of all these people at Latham Hall which, considered at
first as a temporary arrangement, was to last for some years, did not
affect in the least Lady Latham's beautifully dressed, idle equanimity.
Had not the D'Armands been Sir Charles's intimate friends years ago, in
France? But she had no curiosity. She was vaguely impressed by the fact
that the Marquise was a god-daughter of the Queen of Naples. For the
rest it was only so many people more in the servants' hall, at the
dinner table, and in the drawing room where the evenings were spent.

High up on one of the walls a lamp with a shaded reflector concentrated
its light on the yellow satin coat on the half-length portrait of a
rubicund Latham in a white coburg, which but for the manly and sensitive
mouth might have been the portrait of his own coachman. Apart from that
spot of beautiful colour the vast room with its windows giving on a
terrace (from which Sir Charles was in the habit of viewing sunsets)
remained dim with an effect of immensity in which the occupants, and
even Sir Charles himself, acquired the appearance of unsubstantial
shadows uttering words that had to travel across long, almost unlighted
distances.

On one side of the mantelpiece of Italian marbles (a late addition
designed by Sir Charles himself) Lady Latham's profuse jewellery
sparkled about her splendid and restful person posed placidly on a sofa.
Opposite her, the Marquise would be lying down on a deep couch with one
of Lady Latham's shawls spread over her feet. The D'Armands in their
flight from the Terror had saved very little besides their lives, and
the Marquise d'Armand's life had by this time become a very precarious
possession.

Sir Charles was perhaps more acutely aware of this than the Marquis her
husband. Sir Charles remembered her gentle in her changing moods of
gaiety and thought, charming, active, fascinating, and certainly the
most intelligent as she was the most beautiful of the women of the
French court. Her voice reaching him clear but feeble across the drawing
room had a pathetic appeal; and the tone of his answers was tinged with
the memory of a great sentiment and with the deference due to great
misfortunes. From time to time Lady Latham would make a remark in a
matter-of-fact tone which would provoke something resembling curtness in
Sir Charles's elaborately polite reply, and the thought that woman would
have made the very Lord's Prayer sound prosaic. And then in the long
pauses they would pursue their own thoughts as perplexed and full of
unrest as the world of seas and continents that began at the edge of the
long terrace graced by gorgeous sunsets; the wide world filled with the
strife of ideas and the struggle of nations in perhaps the most troubled
time of its history.

From the depths of the Italian chimneypiece the firelight of blazing
English logs would fall on Adèle d'Armand sitting quietly on a low
stool near her mother's couch. Her fair hair, white complexion, and dark
blue eyes contrasted strongly with the deeper colour scheme of Henrietta
Latham, whose locks were rich chestnut brown and whose eyes had a dark
lustre full of intelligence rather than sentiment. Now and then the
French child would turn her head to look at Sir Charles, for whom in her
silent existence she had developed a filial affection.

In those days Adèle d'Armand did not see much of her own father. Most
of the time the Marquis was away. Each of his frequent absences was an
act of devotion to his exiled Princes, who appreciated it no doubt but
found devotion only natural in a man of that family. The evidence of
their regard for the Marquis took the shape mainly of distant and
dangerous missions to the courts of north Germany, and northern Italy.
In the general disruption of the old order those missions were all
futile, because no one ever stopped an avalanche by means of plots and
negotiations. But in the Marquis the perfect comprehension of that
profound truth was mingled with the sort of enthusiasm that fabricates
the very hopes on which it feeds. He would receive his instructions for
those desperate journeys with extreme gravity and depart on them without
delay, after a flying visit to the Hall to embrace his ailing wife and
his silent child and hold a grave conference with his stately English
friend from whom he never concealed a single one of his thoughts or his
hopes. And Sir Charles approved of them both; because the thoughts were
sober and absolutely free from absurd illusions common to all exiles,
thus appealing to Sir Charles's reason and also to his secret disdain of
all great aristocracies--and the second, being based on the Marquis's
conviction of England's unbroken might and consistency, seemed to Sir
Charles the most natural thing in the world.

They paced a damp laurel-bordered walk together for an hour or so: Sir
Charles lame and stately like a disabled child of Jupiter himself, the
Marquis restraining his stride and stooping with a furrowed brow to talk
in measured, level tones. The wisdom of Sir Charles expressed itself in
curt sentences in which scorn for men's haphazard activities and
shortsighted views was combined with a calm belief in the future.

After the peace of Amiens the Compte d'Artois, the representative of the
exiled dynasty in England, having expressed the desire to have the
Marquis always by his side, the Marquise and Adèle left Latham Hall for
the poverty and the makeshifts of the life of well-nigh penniless exiles
in London. It was as great a proof of devotion to his royal cause as any
that could be given. They settled down in a grimy house of yellow brick
in four rooms up a very narrow and steep staircase. For attendants they
had a dark mulatto maid, brought as a child from the West Indies before
the Revolution by an aunt of the Marquise, and a man of rather
nondescript nationality called Bernard, who had been at one time a
hanger-on in the country house of the D'Armands, but following the
family in its flight and its wanderings before they had found refuge in
England, had displayed unexpected talents as a general factotum. Life at
Latham Hall had bored him exceedingly. The sense of complete security
was almost too much for his patience. The regularity of the hours and
the certitude of abundant meals depressed his spirits at times. The
change to London revived him greatly, for there he had something to do
and found daily occasion to display his varied gifts. He went marketing
in the early morning, dusted the room he called the salon, cooked the
meals, inspired and made happy by the large white smile of Mlle. Aglae,
the Negress, with whom he was very much in love. At twelve o'clock,
after tidying himself a bit, he would go in on the tips of his heavy
square shoes and carry the Marquise from her room to the sofa in the
salon with elaborate sureness and infinite respect, while Aglae followed
with pillow, shawl, and smelling bottle, wearing a forced air of
gravity. Bernard was acutely aware of her presence and would be
certain--the Marquise once settled on her sofa--to get a flash of a
white grin all to himself. Later Mlle. Adèle, white and fair, would go
out visiting, followed by Aglae as closely as night follows day; and
Bernard would watch them down the depths of the staircase in the hope of
catching a sight of a quickly upturned dark brown face with fine rolling
eyes. This would leave him happy for the rest of the afternoon. In the
evening his function was to announce visitors who had toiled up the
stairs: some of the first names in France that had come trudging on foot
through the mud or dust of the squalid streets to fill the dimly lighted
room which was the salon of the Marquise d'Armand. For those duties
Bernard would put on a pair of white stockings, which Miss Aglae washed
for him every second day, and encase his wide shoulders in a very tight
green shabby jacket with large metal buttons. Miss Aglae always found a
minute or two to give him a hasty inspection and a brush-down. Those
were delightful instants. Holding his breath and in a state of rigid
beatitude he turned about as ordered in gay whispers by his exotic
lady-love. Later he would sit on a stool outside the closed door
listening to the well-bred soft uproar of conversation; and when the
guests began to depart he lighted them downstairs, holding a tallow dip
in a small candlestick over the banister of the landing. When his duties
for the day were over he made up for himself a bed on the floor of a
narrow passage which separated the living rooms from a sort of large
cupboard in which Miss Aglae reposed from her daily labours. Bernard,
lying under a pair of thin blankets and with the tallow candle burning
on the floor, kept slumber off till Miss Aglae stuck out her head tied
up in an old red foulard--nothing but her head through the crack of the
door--in order to have a little whispered conversation. That was the
time when the servants exchanged their views and communicated to each
other their ideas and observations. The black maid's were shrewder than
the white factotum's. Being a personal attendant of the two ladies she
had occasion to see and hear more than her admirer. They commented on
the evident decline of the Marquise's health, not dolefully but simply
as a significant fact of the situation; on the Marquis's manner of daily
life which had become domestic and almost sedentary. He went out every
day but now he never went away for weeks and months as he used to
before. Those sudden and mysterious missions for which a misanthropic
Yorkshire baronet had paid out of his own pocket had come to an end. A
Marquis d'Armand could not be sent out as a common spy and there was now
no court in Christendom that would dare to receive an emissary, secret
or open, of the royal exiles. Bernard, who could read, explained these
things shortly to Miss Aglae. All great folk were terrified at that
Bonaparte. He made all the generals tremble. On those facts Miss Aglae
would have it that he must be a sorcerer. Bernard had another view of
Napoleonic greatness. It was nothing but the power of lies. And on one
occasion after a slight hesitation he burst out: "Shall I tell you the
truth about him. Miss Aglae?" The tied-up black head protruding through
the crack of the door nodded assent many times in the dim light of the
tallow dip. "Well then," continued Bernard with another desperate
effort, "he is of no account."

Miss Aglae repressed with difficulty the loud burst of laughter which
was the usual expression of her unsophisticated emotions. She had heard
ladies and gentlemen in the salon express a very similar opinion of
Bonaparte, but she thought suddenly of Miss Adèle and emitted a sigh.

"He seems to get him paw on the whole world, anyhow. What sort of a
fellow is he, Bernard? You have seen him."

Bernard had seen the fellow. He assured Miss Aglae that he was a
miserable shrimp of a man in big boots and with lank hair hanging down
his yellow cheeks. "I could break him in two like a straw if I could
only get him into my hands."

Believing it implicitly, the black maid suggested that Bernard should go
and do it.

"I would go at once," said the faithful follower. "But if I went I would
never see you again. He has always a hundred thousand men around him."

At this Miss Aglae, who had begun to smile, ended with a sigh of such a
deeply sorrowful nature that Bernard assured her that the time would
come, yes, some day the time would come when everybody would get back
his own. Aglae was ready to believe this prophecy. But meantime there
was Miss Adèle. That sweet child was now ready to get married, but
everybody was so very poor. Bernard put on a sentimental expression in
the dim light of the tallow dip, the flame of which swayed by the side
of his straw mattress and made the shadow of his head, protected by a
nightcap, dance too, high up the wall of the drafty passage. Timidly he
muttered of love. That would get over all the difficulties.

"You very stupid man, Mr. Bernard. Love! What sort of trash you talk?
Love don't buy fish for dinner." Then with sudden anxiety she inquired:
"Have you got money for marketing to-morrow?" Bernard had the money. Not
much, but he had the money. "Then you go out early and buy fish for
dinner. This Madame la Marquise orders. Easier than killing an emperor,"
she continued sarcastically. "And take care fat woman in Billingsgate
don't cheat you too much," she added with dignity before drawing her
head in and shutting the door of her dark cupboard.

A month later, sitting upon his straw bed and with his eyes fixed on the
door of Miss Aglae's cupboard, Bernard had just begun to think that he
had done something to offend, and that he would be deprived of his
whispered midnight chat, when the door opened, the head of the girl
appeared in its usual position. It drooped. Its white eyeballs glistened
full of tears. It said nothing for a long time. Bernard was extremely
alarmed. He wanted to know in an anxious whisper what was wrong. The
maid let him cudgel his brains for a whole minute before she made the
statement that oh! she did not like the looks of a certain gentleman
visitor in a "too-much-laced coat."

Bernard, relieved but uncomprehending, snatched the candlestick off the
floor and raised it to the protruded head of the maid.

"What is there to cry about?" he asked. The tears glistening on the
dusky cheek astonished him beyond measure; and as an African face lends
itself to the expression of sorrow more than any other type of human
countenance, he was profoundly moved, and without knowing the cause, by
mere sympathy felt ready to cry himself.

"You don't see! You don't understand anything, Bernard. You stand there
at the door like a stick. What is the use of you I can't tell."

Bernard would have felt the injustice to be unbearable if he had not had
a strong sense of his own merits. Moreover, it was obvious that Aglae
was thoroughly upset. As to the man in the too-much-laced coat, Bernard
remembered that he was dressed very splendidly indeed. He had called
first in company of a very fine English gentleman, a friend of the
family, and he had repeated the call always with that same friend. It
was a fact he had never called by himself yet. The family had dined with
him only the day before, as Bernard knew very well because he had had to
call the hackney coach and had given the address, not to mention the
confidential task of carrying the Marquise down the stairs and then up
again on their return from that entertainment. There could be nothing
wrong with a man with whom the family dined. And the Marquise herself
too, she who, so to speak, never went out anywhere!

"What has he done?" he asked without marked excitement. "I have never
seen you so distressed. Miss Aglae."

"Me upset? I should think me upset. I fear him wants carry off Mlle.
Adèle--poor child."

This staggered the faithful Bernard. "I should like him to try," he said
pugnaciously. "I keep a cudgel there in this passage." A scornful
exclamation from the maid made him pause. "Oh!" he said in a changed
tone, "carry her off for a wife? Well, what's wrong in that?"

"Oh! you silly!" whimpered Aglae. "Can't you see him twice, twice and a
half, the age of Miss Adèle?"

Bernard remained silent a minute. "Fine-looking man," he remarked at
last. "Do you know anything else about him?"

"Him got plenty of money," sobbed out Aglae.

"I suppose the parents will have something to say about that," said
Bernard, after a short meditation. "And if Mlle. Adèle herself . . ."

But Aglae wailed under her breath, as it were. "It's done, Bernard, it's
done!"

Bernard, fascinated, stared upwards at the maid. A mental reference to
abundance of money for marketing flashed through his mind.

"I suppose Mlle. Adèle can love a man like that. Why not?"

"Him got very fine clothes certainly," hissed Aglae furiously. Then she
broke down and became full of desolation. "Oh, Bernard, them poor
people, you should have seen their faces this morning when I served the
breakfast. I feel as if I must make a big howl while I give plate to M.
le Marquis. I hardly dare to look at anybody."

"And Mademoiselle?" asked Bernard in an anxious whisper.

"I don't like to look at her either," went on Aglae in a tone of
anguish. "She got quite a flush on her face. She think it very great and
fine, make everybody rich. I ready to die with sorrow, Bernard. She
don't know. She too young. Why don't you cry with me?--you great stupid
man."




III


The marriage, the prospect of which failed to commend itself to the
coloured maid, took place in due course. The contract which expressed
the business side of that alliance was graced by the signature of a
Prince of the blood and by two other signatures of a most aristocratic
complexion. The French colony in London refrained from audible comments.
The gracious behaviour of H.R.H. the Duc de Berry to the bridegroom
killed all criticism in the very highest circles of the emigration. In
less exalted circles there were slight shrugs and meaning glances, but
very little else besides, except now and then a veiled sarcasm which
could be ascribed to envy as much as to any other sentiment. Amongst the
daughters of the emigration there must have been more than one who in
her heart of hearts thought Adèle d'Armand a very lucky girl. The
splendour of the entertainments which were given to the London society
by the newly wedded couple after their return from the honeymoon put it
beyond all doubt that the man whom Aglae described as wearing a
"too-much-laced coat" was very rich. It began also to be whispered that
he was a man of fantastic humours and of eccentric whims of the sort
that do not pass current in the best society; especially in the case of
a man whose rank was dubious and whose wealth was but recently acquired.
But the embittered and irreconcilable remnant of the exiled aristocracy
gave but little of its sympathy to Adèle d'Armand. She ought to have
waited till the King was restored, and either married suitably--or else
entered a convent for ladies of rank. For these too would soon be
restored.

The Marquis, before the engagement of his daughter had become public,
had written to his friend Sir Charles of the impending marriage in
carefully selected terms which demanded nothing but a few words of
formal congratulation. Of his son-in-law he mentioned little more than
the name. It was, he said, that of a long-impoverished Piedmontese
family with good French connections formed in the days before it had
fallen into comparative obscurity but, the Marquis insisted, fully
recognized by the parties concerned. It was the family De Montevesso.
The world had heard nothing of it for more than a century, the Marquis
admitted parenthetically. His daughter's intended husband's name was
Helion--Count Helion de Montevesso. The title had been given to him by
the King of Sardinia just before that unfortunate monarch was driven out
of his dominions by the armies of republican France. It was the reward
of services rendered at a critical time and none the less meritorious
because, the Marquis admitted, they were of a financial nature. Count
Helion, who went away very young from his native country and wandered in
many lands, had amassed a large personal fortune, the Marquis went on to
say, which luckily was invested in a manner that made it safe from
political revolutions and social disasters overwhelming both France and
Italy. That fortune, as a matter of fact, had not been made in Europe,
but somewhere beyond the seas. The Marquis's letter reached Latham Hall
in the evening of an autumn day.

The very young Miss Latham, seated before an embroidery frame, watched
across the drawing room her father reading the letter under the glare of
the reflector lamp and at the feet, as it were, of the Latham in the
yellow satin coat. Sir Charles raised his eyebrows, which with passing
years had become bushy and spoiled a little the expression of his
handsome face. Miss Latham was made very anxious by his play of
physiognomy. She had already been told after the first rustle of
unfolded paper that her big friend Adèle d'Armand (Miss Latham was four
years younger) was going to be married, and had become suddenly, but
inwardly, excited. Every moment she expected her father to tell her
something more. She was dying from impatience; but there was nothing
further except the rustle of paper--and now this movement of the
eyebrows. Then Sir Charles lowered his hands slowly. She could contain
herself no longer.

"Who is it, Papa?" she asked with animation.

Henrietta Latham was fifteen then. Her dark eyes had remained as large
as ever. The purity of her complexion, which was not of the milk-white
kind, was admirable and the rich shade of the brown curls clustering on
each side of her faintly glowing cheeks made a rich and harmonious
combination. Sir Charles gazed at his daughter's loveliness with an air
of shocked abstraction. But he too could not contain himself. He
departed from his stateliness so far as to growl out scathingly:

"An upstart of some kind."

Miss Latham was, for all her lively manner, not given to outward
manifestations of emotions. This intelligence was too shocking for a
gasp or an exclamation. She only flushed slowly to the roots of her
pretty hair. An upstart simply meant to her everything that was bad in
the way of a human being, but the scathing tone of Sir Charles's
outburst also augmented her profound emotion, for it seemed to extend to
Adèle d'Armand herself. It shocked her tender loyalty towards the
French girl, which had not been diminished by a separation of more than
three years. She said quietly:

"Adèle . . . Impossible!"

The flush ebbed out of her healthy cheeks and left them pale, with the
eyes darker than Sir Charles had ever seen them before. Those evidences
of his daughter's emotion recalled Sir Charles to himself. After looking
at his daughter fixedly for a moment he murmured the word "impossible"
without any particular accent and again raised the letter to his eyes.

He did not find it in anything to modify his first impression of the man
whom Adèle d'Armand was about to marry. Once more in his vaguely
explanatory message the Marquis alluded to the wealth of his prospective
son-in-law. It gave him a standing in the best society which his
personal merits could not perhaps have secured for him so completely.
Then the Marquis talked about his wife's health. The Marquise required
many comforts, constant care, and cheerful surroundings. He had been
enabled to leave the disagreeable lodgings in a squalid street for a
little house in Chiswick very near London. He complained to his old
friend that the uncompromising royalists reproached him bitterly for
having signed a three-years' lease. It seemed to them an abominable
apostasy from the faith in a triumphal return of the old order of things
in a month or two. "I have caused quite a scandal by acting in this
sensible manner," he wrote. "I am very much abused, but I have no doubt
that even those who judge me most severely will be glad enough to come
to Adèle's wedding."

Then, as if unable to resist the need to open his heart, he began the
next line with the words:


I need not tell you that all this is my daughter's own doing. The demand
for her hand was made to us regularly through Lord G., who is a good
friend of mine, though he belongs to the faction of Mr. Fox in which the
Count of Montevesso numbers most of his English friends. But directly we
had imparted the proposal to Adèle she took a step you may think
incredible, and which from a certain point of view might even be called
undutiful, if such a word could ever be applied to the sweet and devoted
child our Adèle has always been to us. At her personal request, made
without consulting either her mother or myself. Lord G. had the weakness
to arrange a meeting between her and the Count at his own house. What
those two could have said to each other I really cannot imagine. When we
heard of it, the matter was so far settled that there was nothing left
for us but to accept the inevitable . . .


Again Sir Charles let his big white aristocratic hands descend on his
knees. His daughter's dark head drooped over the frame, and he had a
vision of another head, very different and very fair, by its side. It
had been a part of his retired life and had had a large share of his
affection. How large it was he discovered only now, at this moment, when
he felt that it was in a sense lost to him for ever. "Inevitable," he
muttered to himself with a half-scornful, half-pained intonation. Sir
Charles could understand the sufferings, the difficulties, the
humiliations of poverty. But the Marquis might have known that, far or
near, he could have counted on the assistance of his friend. For some
years past he had never hesitated to dip into his purse. But that was
for those mysterious journeys and those secret and important missions
his Princes had never hesitated to entrust him with without ever
troubling their heads about the means. Such was the nature of Princes,
Sir Charles reflected with complete bitterness. And now came this . . .
A whole young life thrown away perhaps, in its innocence, in its
ignorance. . . . How old could Adèle be now? Eighteen or nineteen. Not
so very much younger than her mother was when he used to see so much of
her in Paris and Versailles, when she had managed to put such an impress
on his heart that later he did not care whom he married or where he
lived. . . . Inevitable! . . . Sir Charles could not be angry with the
Marquise, now a mere languid shadow of that invincible charm that his
heart had not been able to resist. She and her husband must have given
up all their hopes, all their loyal royalist hopes before they could bow
like this to the Inevitable. It had not been difficult for him to learn
to love that fascinating French child as though she had been another
daughter of his own. For a moment he experienced an anguish so acute
that it made him move slightly in his chair. Half aloud he muttered the
thought that came into his mind:

"Austerlitz has done it."

Miss Latham raised her lustrous dark eyes with an enquiring expression
and murmured, "Papa?"

Sir Charles got up and seized his stick. "Nothing, my dear, nothing." He
wanted to be alone. But on going out of the room he stopped by the
embroidery frame and, bending down, kissed the forehead of his
daughter--his English daughter. No issue of a great battle could affect
her future. As to the other girl, she was lost to him and it couldn't be
helped. A battle had destroyed the fairness of her life. This was the
disadvantage of having been born French or indeed belonging to any other
nation of the continent. There were forces there that pushed people to
rash or unseemly actions; actions that seemed dictated by despair and
therefore wore an immoral aspect. Sir Charles understood Adèle d'Armand
even better than he understood his own daughter, or at least he
understood her with greater sympathy. She had a generous nature. She was
too young, too inexperienced to know what she was doing when she took in
hand the disposal of her own person in favour of that apparently
Piedmontese upstart with his obscure name and his mysteriously acquired
fortune. "I only hope the fortune is there," thought Sir Charles with
grim scepticism. But as to that there could be no doubt, judging from
the further letters he received from his old friend. After a short but
brilliant period of London life the upstart had carried Adèle off to
France. He had bought an estate in Piedmont, which was his native
country, and another with a splendid house, near Paris. Sir Charles was
not surprised to hear a little later that the Marquise and the Marquis
had also returned to France. The time of persecution was over; most of
the great royalist families were returning, unreconciled in sentiment if
wavering in their purposes. That his old friend should ever be dazzled
by imperial grandeurs Sir Charles could not believe. Though he had
abandoned his daughter to an upstart, he was too good a royalist to
abandon his principles, for which certainly he would have died if that
had been of any use. But he had returned to France. Most of his exiled
friends had returned too, and Sir Charles understood very well that the
Marquis and his wife wanted to be somewhere near their daughter. This
departure closed a long chapter in his life, and afterwards Sir Charles
hardly ever mentioned his French friends. The only positive thing which
Henrietta knew was that Adèle d'Armand had married an upstart and had
returned to France. She had communicated that knowledge to her brother,
who had stared with evident surprise but had made no comment. Living
away from home at school and afterwards in Cambridge, his father's
French friends had remained for him as shadowy figures on the shifting
background of a very poignant, very real, and intense drama of
contemporary history, dominated by one enormously vital and in its
greatness immensely mysterious individuality--the only man of his time.

Cosmo Latham at the threshold of life had adopted neither of the
contrasted views of Napoleon Emperor entertained by his contemporaries.
For him as for his father before him, the world offered a scene of
conflicting emotions in which facts appraised by reason preserved a
mysterious complexity and a dual character. One evening during an
artless discussion with young men of his own age, it had occurred to him
to say that Bonaparte seemed to be the only man amongst a lot of old
scarecrows. "Look how he knocks them over," he had explained. A moment
of silence followed. Then a voice objected:

"Then perhaps he is not so great as some of you try to make him out."

"I didn't mean that exactly," said Cosmo in a sobered tone. "Nobody can
admire that man more than I do. Perhaps the world may be none the worse
for a scarecrow here and there left on the borders of what is right or
just. I only wished to express my sense of the moving force in his
genius."

"What does he stand for?" asked the same voice.

Cosmo shook his head. "Many things, and some of them too obvious to
mention. But I can't help thinking that there are some which we cannot
see yet."

"And some of them that are dead already," retorted his interlocutor.
"They died in his very hands. But there is one thing for which he stands
and that will never die. You seem to have forgotten it. It is the spirit
of hostility to this nation; to what we in this room, with our different
views and opinions, stand for in the last instance."

"Oh, that!" said Cosmo confidently. "What we stand for isn't an old
scarecrow. Great as he is he will never knock that over. His arm is not
long enough, however far his thoughts may go. He has got to work with
common men."

"I don't know what you mean. What else are we? I believe you admire
him."

"I do," confessed Cosmo sturdily.

This did not prevent him from joining the army in Spain before the year
was out, and that without asking for Sir Charles's approval. Sir Charles
condemned severely the policy of using the forces of the Crown in the
Peninsula. He did not like the ministry of the day and he had a strong
prejudice against all the Wellesleys to whose aggrandizement this whole
policy seemed effected. But when at the end of a year and a half, after
the final victory of Toulouse, his son appeared in Yorkshire, the two
made up for the past coolness by shaking hands warmly for nearly a whole
minute. Cosmo really had done very little campaigning and soon declared
to his father the wish to leave the army. There would be no more
fighting for years and years, he argued, and though he did not dislike
fighting in a good cause, he had no taste for mere soldiering. He wanted
to see something of the world which had been closed to us for so long.
Sir Charles, ageing and dignified, leaned on his stick on the long
terrace.

"All the world was never closed to us," he said.

"I wasn't thinking of the East, sir," explained Cosmo. "I heard some
people talk about its mystery, but I think Europe is mysterious enough
just now, and even more interesting."

Sir Charles nodded his bare gray head in the chill evening breeze.

"France, Germany," he murmured.

Cosmo thought that he would prefer to see something of Italy first. He
would go north afterwards.

"Through Vienna, I suppose," suggested Sir Charles with an impassive
face.

"I don't think so, sir," said Cosmo frankly. "I don't care much for the
work which is going on there and perhaps still less for the men who are
putting their hands to it."

This time Sir Charles's slow nod expressed complete agreement. He too
had no liking for the work that was about to begin there. But no
objection could be raised against Italy. He had known Italy well thirty
or more years ago, but it must have been changed out of his knowledge.
He remained silent, gazing at the wide landscape of blue wooded rises
and dark hollows under the gorgeous colours of the sunset. They began to
die out.

"You may travel far before you see anything like this," he observed to
his son. "And don't be in a hurry to leave us. You have only just come
home. Remember I am well over sixty."

Cosmo was quite ready to surrender himself to the peace of his Yorkshire
home, so different from the strenuous atmosphere of the last campaign in
the South of France. Autumn was well advanced before he fixed the day
for his departure. On his last day at home Sir Charles addressed him
with perfect calmness.

"When you pass into Italy you must not fail to see my old friend the
Marquis d'Armand. The French King has appointed him as ambassador in
Turin. It's a sign of high favour, I believe. He will be either in Turin
or Genoa. . . ." Sir Charles paused, then after a perfectly audible sigh
added with an effort: "The Marquise is dead. I knew her in her youth.
She was a marvellous woman. . . ." Sir Charles checked himself, and then
with another effort, "But the daughter of my old friend is I believe
with her father now, a married daughter, the Countess of Montevesso."

"You mean little Adèle, sir," said Cosmo, with interest, but on Sir
Charles's face there passed a distinct shade of distress.

"Oh, you remember the child," he said, and his tone was tender but it
changed to contempt as he went on. "I don't know whether the fellow, I
mean the man she married, is staying with them or whether they are
living with him, or whether . . . I know nothing!"

The word "upstart," heard many years ago from his sister Henrietta,
crossed Cosmo's mind. He thought to himself, "There is something wrong
there," and to his father he said, "I will be able to tell you all about
it."

"I don't want to know," Sir Charles replied with a surprising solemnity
of tone and manner which hid some deeper feeling. "But give the Marquis
my love and tell him that when he gets tired of all his grandeurs he may
remember that there is a large place for him in this house as long as I
live."

Late that evening Cosmo, saying good-bye to his sister, took her in his
arms, kissed her forehead, and holding her out at arm's length said:

"You have grown into a charming girl, Henrietta."

"I am glad you think so," she said. "Alas, I am too dark. I can never be
as charming as Adèle must have been at my age. You seem to have
forgotten her."

"Oh no," protested Cosmo carelessly. "A marvel of fairness, wasn't she?
I remember you telling me years ago that she married an upstart."

"That was Father's expression. You know what that means, Cosmo."

"I do know what it means, exactly," he said, laughing. "But from what
Father said this afternoon it seems as if he were a rather nasty
upstart. What made Adèle do it?"

"I am awed," confessed Henrietta. "I don't know what made her do it. I
was never told. Father never talked much about the D'Armands afterwards.
I was with him in the yellow drawing room the evening he got the letter
from the Marquis. After he read it he said something very extraordinary.
You know it's full nine years ago and I was yet a child, yet I could not
have dreamed it. I heard it distinctly. He dropped his hands and said,
'Austerlitz has done it.' What could he have meant?"

"It would be hard to guess the connection," said Cosmo, smiling at his
sister's puzzled face. "Father must have been thinking of something
else."

"Father was thinking of nothing else for days," affirmed Henrietta
positively.

"You must have been a very observant child," remarked her brother. "But
I believe you were always a clever girl, Henrietta. Well, I am going to
see Adèle."

"Oh yes, you start in the morning to travel ever so far and for ever so
long," said Miss Latham enviously. "Oh Cosmo, you are going to write to
me--lots?"

He looked at her appreciatively and gave her another brotherly hug.

"Certainly I will write, whole reams," he said.




IV


On his way from the harbour to the upper part of the town where his inn
was situated Cosmo Latham met very few people. He had to pass through a
sort of covered way; its arch yawned in front of him very black with
only a feeble glimmer of a light in its depths. It did not occur to him
that it was a place where one could very well be knocked on the head by
evil-intentioned men if there were any prowling about in that early part
of the evening, for it was early yet, though the last gleams of sunset
had gone out completely off the earth and out of the sky. On issuing
from the dark passage a maze of narrow streets presented itself to his
choice, but he knew that as long as he kept walking uphill he could not
fail to reach the middle of the town. Projecting at long intervals from
the continuous mass of thick walls, wrought-iron arms held lanterns
containing dim gleams of light. The enormous doors of the lofty gateways
he passed were closed, and the only sound he could hear was that of his
own deliberate footsteps. At a wider spot where several of those lanes
met he stopped, and looking about him asked himself whether all those
enormous and palatial houses were empty, or whether it was the thickness
of walls that killed all the signs of life within; for as to the
population being already asleep he could not believe it for a moment.
All at once he caught sight of a muffled feminine form. In the heavy
shadow she seemed to emerge out of one wall and gliding on seemed to
disappear into another. It was undoubtedly a woman. Cosmo was startled
by this noiseless apparition and had a momentary feeling of being lost
in an enchanted city. Presently the enchanted silence was broken by the
increasing sound of an iron-shod stick tapping the flagstones, till
there walked out of one of the dark and tortuous lanes a man who by his
rolling gait, general outline, and the characteristic shape of the hat,
Cosmo could not doubt, was a seaman belonging to the English man-of-war
in the harbour. The tapping of his stick ceased suddenly and Cosmo
hailed him in English, asking for the way.

The sturdy figure in the tarpaulin hat put its cudgel under its arm and
answered him in a deep pleasant voice. Yes, he knew the inn. He was just
coming from there. If His Honour followed the street before him he would
come to a large open space and His Honour's inn would be across the
square. In the deep shadows Cosmo could make out of the seaman's face
nothing but the bushy whiskers and the gleam of the eyes. He was pleased
at meeting the very day he had reached the Mediterranean shore (he had
come down to Genoa from Turin) such a fine specimen of a man-of-war's
man. He thanked him for the direction and the sailor, touching his hat,
went off at his slightly rolling gait. Cosmo observed that he took a
turning very near the spot where the muffled woman had a moment before
vanished from his sight. It was a very dark and a very narrow passage
between two towering buildings. Cosmo, continuing on his way, arrived at
a broad thoroughfare badly lighted but full of people. He knew where he
was then. In a very few moments he found himself at the door of his inn
in a great square which in comparison with the rest of the town might
have been said to blaze with lights.

Under an iron lantern swung above a flight of three broad steps, Cosmo
recognized his servant gazing into the square with a worried expression
which changed at once into one of relief on perceiving his master. He
touched his cap and followed Cosmo into a large hall with several doors
opening into it and furnished with many wooden chairs and tables. At one
of them bearing four candlesticks several British naval officers sat
talking and laughing in subdued tones. A compactly built clean-shaven
person with slightly sunken cheeks, wearing black breeches and a maroon
waistcoat with sleeves, but displaying a very elaborate frill to his
white shirt, stood in the middle of the floor, glancing about with
vigilance, and bowed hurriedly to his latest client. Cosmo returned the
greeting of Signor Cantelucci, who, snatching up the nearest
candlestick, began to ascend a broad stone staircase with an air of
performing a solemn duty. Cosmo followed him, and Cosmo's servant
followed his master. They went up and up. At every flight broad archways
gave a view of dark perspective in which nothing but a few drops of dim
fire were forlornly visible. At last Signor Cantelucci threw open a door
on a landing and bowing again:

"See, milord! There is a fire. I know the customs and habits of the
English."

Cosmo stepped into a large and lofty room where in the play of bright
flames under a heavy and tall mantelpiece the shadows seemed very much
disturbed by his entrance. Cosmo approached the blaze with satisfaction.

"I had enough trouble to get them to light it," remarked the valet in a
resentful tone. "If it hadn't been for a jack-tar with big whiskers I
found down in the hall it wouldn't be done yet. He came up from the ship
with one of these sea officers downstairs. He drove the fellows with the
wood in fine style up here for me. He knows the people here. He cursed
them each separately by their Christian names, and then had a glass of
wine in the kitchen with me."

Meantime Signor Cantelucci, wearing the aspect of a deaf man, had
lighted, on two separate tables, two clusters of candles which drove the
restless gloom of the large apartment half way up to the ceiling, and
retired with noiseless footsteps. He stopped in the doorway to cast a
keen glance at the master and the man standing by the fire. Those two
turned their heads only at the sound of the closing door.

"I couldn't think what became of you, sir. I was getting quite worried
about you. You disappeared without saying anything to me."

"I went for a walk down to the sea," said Cosmo while the man moved off
to where several cowhide trunks were ranged against the wall. "I like to
take a look round on arriving at a new place."

"Yes, sir; but when it got dark I wondered."

"I tarried on a tower to watch the sunset," murmured Cosmo.

"I have been doing some unpacking," said the servant, "but not knowing
how long you mean to stay . . ."

"It may be a long stay."

"Then I will go on, sir; that is if you are going to keep this room."

"Yes. The room will do. Spire. It's big enough."

Spire took up one of the two candelabras and retired into the
neighbourhood of a sort of state bed heavily draped at the other end of
the room. There, throwing open the trunks and the doors of closets, he
busied himself systematically, without noise, till he heard the quiet
voice of his young master.

"Spire."

"Yes, sir," he answered, standing still with a pile of shirts on his
arm.

"Is this inn very full?"

"Yes, very," said Spire. "The whole town is full of travellers and
people from the country. A lot of our nobility and gentry are passing
this way."

He deposited the shirts on a shelf in the depths of the wall and turned
round again.

"Have you heard any names, Spire?"

Spire stooped over a trunk and lifted up from it carefully a lot of
white neckcloths folded neatly one within the other.

"I haven't had much time yet, sir. I heard a few."

He laid down the neckcloths by the side of the shirts while Cosmo, with
his elbow on the mantelpiece, asked down the whole length of the room:

"Anybody I know?"

"Not in this place, sir. There is generally a party of officers from the
man-of-war staying here. They come and go. I have seen some Italian
gentlemen in square-cut coats and powdered hair. Very old-fashioned,
sir. There are some Austrians too, I think; but I haven't seen any
ladies. . . . I am afraid, sir, this isn't the right sort of inn. There
is another about a hundred yards from here on the other side of the
square."

"I don't want to meet anybody I know," said Cosmo Latham in a low voice.

Spire thought that this would make his stay in Genoa very dull. At the
same time he was convinced that his young master would alter his mind
before very long and change to that other inn patronized by travellers
of fashion. For himself he was not averse from a little quiet time.
Spire was no longer young. Thirty years ago, before the War and before
the Revolution, he had travelled with Sir Charles in France and Italy.
He was then only eighteen, but being a steady and trustworthy lad was
taken abroad to look after the horses. Sir Charles kept four horses in
Florence, and Spire had often ridden on Tuscan roads behind Sir Charles
and the two Misses Aston, of whom one later became Lady Latham. After
the family settled in Yorkshire he passed from the stables to the house,
acquired a confidential position, and whenever Lady Latham took a
journey he sat in the rumble with a pair of double-barrelled pistols in
the pockets of his greatcoat and ordered all things on the road. Later
he became intermediary between Sir Charles and the stables, the gardens,
and in all out-of-door things about the house. He attended Lady Latham
on her very last drive, all the details for that lady's funeral having
been left to his management. He was also a very good valet. He had been
called one evening into the library where Sir Charles, very gouty that
day, leaning with one hand on a thick stick and with the other on the
edge of a table, had said to him: "I am lending you to Mr. Cosmo for his
travels in France and Italy. You will know your way about. And mind you
draw the charges of the pistols in the carriage every morning and load
them afresh."

Spire was then requested to help Sir Charles up the stairs and had a few
more words said to him when Sir Charles stopped at the door of his
bedroom.

"Mr. Cosmo has plenty of sense. You are not to make yourself a nuisance
to him."

"No, Sir Charles," said the imperturbable Spire. "I will know how to
look after Mr. Cosmo."

And if he had been asked. Spire would have been able to say that during
the stay in Paris and all through France and Switzerland on the way to
Genoa Mr. Cosmo had given him no trouble at all.

Spire, still busy unpacking, glanced at his young master. He certainly
looked very quiet now, leaning on his elbow with the firelight playing
from below on his young thoughtful face with its smooth and pale
complexion. "Very good-looking indeed," thought Spire. In that
thoughtful mood he recalled very much the Sir Charles of thirty or
thirty-five years ago. Would he too find his wife abroad? There had been
women enough in Paris of every kind and degree, English and French and
all sorts. But it was a fact that Mr. Cosmo sought most of his company
amongst men, of whom also there had been no lack and of every degree. In
that, too, the young man resembled very much his father. Men's company.
But were he to get caught he would get caught properly; at any rate for
a time, reflected Spire, remembering Sir Charles Latham's rush back to
Italy, the inwardness of which had been no more revealed to him than to
the rest of the world.

Spire, approaching the candelabra, unfolded partly a very fine coat,
then refolded it before putting it away on a convenient shelf. He had a
moment of regret for his own young days. He had never married, not
because there had been any lack of women to set their caps at him, but
from a sort of half-conscious prudence. Moreover, he had a notion
somehow or other that Sir Charles would not have liked it. Perhaps it
was just as well. Now he was carefree, attending on Mr. Cosmo without
troubling his head about who had remained at home.

Spire, arranging the contents of a dressing case on the table, cast
another sidelong look at the figure by the fire. Very handsome.
Something like Sir Charles and yet not like. There was a touch of
something unusual, perhaps foreign, and yet no one with a pair of eyes
in his head could mistake Mr. Cosmo for anything but an English
gentleman.

Spire's memories of his tour with Sir Charles had been growing dim. But
he remembered enough of the old-time atmosphere to have become aware of
a feeling of tension, of a suggestion of restlessness which certainly
was new to him.

The silence had lasted very long. Cosmo before the fire had not moved.
Spire ventured on a remark.

"I notice people are excited about one thing and another hereabouts,
sir."

"Excited. I don't wonder at it. In what way?"

"Sort of discontented, sir. They don't like the Austrians, sir. You may
have noticed as we came along . . ."

"Did they like us when we held the town?"

"I can hardly say that, sir. I have been sitting for an hour or more in
the couriers' room, with all sorts of people coming in and out, and
heard very wild sort of talk."

"What can you know about its wildness?"

"To look at their faces was enough. It's a funny place, that room
downstairs," went on Spire, rubbing with a piece of silk a travelling
looking-glass mounted cunningly in a silver case which when opened made
a stand for it. He placed it exactly in the middle of a little table and
turned round to look at his master. Seeing that Cosmo seemed disposed to
listen he continued: "It is vaulted like a cellar and has a little door
giving into a side street. People come in and put as they like. All
sorts of low people, sir, _facchini_ and carters and boatmen and
suchlike. There was an old fellow came in, a gray-headed man, a cobbler,
I suppose, as he brought a bagful of mended shoes for the servants of
the house. He emptied the lot on the stone floor, sir, and instead of
trying to collect his money from the people that were scrambling for
them he made them a speech. He spouted, sir, without drawing a breath.
The courier-valet of an English doctor staying here, a Swiss I think he
is, says to me in his broken English: 'He would cut every Austrian
throat in this town.' We were having a glass of wine together and I
asked him, 'And what do you think of that?' And he says to me, after
thinking a bit, 'I agree with him. . . .' Very dreadful, sir," concluded
Spire with a perfectly unmoved face.

Cosmo looked at him in silence for a time. "It was very bold talk if
that is what the man really said," he remarked. "Especially as the place
is so public as you say it is."

"Absolutely open to the street, sir; and that same Swiss fellow had told
me just before that the town was full of spies and what they call
_sbirri_ that came from Turin with the King. The King is staying at the
Palace, sir. They are expecting the Queen of Sardinia to arrive any day.
You didn't know, sir? They say she will come in an English man-of-war.
That old cobbler was very abusive about the King of Piedmont too. Surely
talk like that can't be safe anywhere."

Spire paused suddenly and Cosmo Latham turned his back to the fire.

"Well, and what happened?" he asked with a smile.

"You could have heard a pin drop," said Spire in equable tones, "till
that Signor Cantelucci--that's the padrone of this inn, sir . . ."

"The man who lighted me up?" said Cosmo.

"Yes, sir. . . . I didn't know he was in the room till suddenly he spoke
behind my back telling one of the scullions that was there to give the
man a glass of wine. And what the old fellow must do but raise it above
his head and shout a toast to the Destructor of the Austrians before he
tossed it down his throat. I was quite astonished, but Signor Cantelucci
never turned a hair. He offered his snuffbox to that doctor's courier
and myself and shrugged his shoulders. 'It was only Pietro,' he said, 'a
little mad'--he tapped his forehead, you know, sir. The doctor's courier
sat there grinning. I got suddenly uneasy about you, sir, and went out
to the front door to see whether you were coming. It's very different
from what it was thirty years ago. There was no talk in Italy of cutting
foreigners' throats when Sir Charles and I were here. It was quite a
startling experience."

Cosmo nodded. "You seem impressed. Spire. Well, I too had an experience,
just as the sun was setting."

"I am sorry to hear that, sir."

"What do you mean? Why should you be sorry?"

"I beg your pardon, sir, I thought it was something unpleasant."

Cosmo had a little laugh. "Unpleasant? No! Not exactly, though I think
it was more dangerous than yours, but if there was any madness connected
with it, it had a very visible method. It was not all talk either. Yes,
Spire, it was exciting."

"I don't know what's come to them all. Everybody seems excited. There
was not excitement in Italy thirty years ago when I was with Sir Charles
and took four horses with only one helper from this very town to
Florence, sir."

Cosmo with fixed eyes did not seem to hear Spire's complaining remark.
He exclaimed: "Really it was very extraordinary," so suddenly that Spire
gave a perceptible start. He pulled himself together and asked in a
purely business tone:

"Are you going to dine in your room, sir? Time is getting on."

Cosmo's mood too seemed to have changed completely.

"I don't know. I am not hungry. I want you to move one of those screens
here near the fire and place a table and chair there. I will do some
correspondence to-night. Yes, I will have my dinner here, I think."

"I will go down and order it, sir," said Spire. "The cook here is a
Frenchman who married a native and . . ."

"Who on earth is swearing like this outside?" exclaimed Cosmo, while
Spire's face also expressed astonishment at the loud burst of voices
coming along the corridor, one angry, the other argumentative, in a
crescendo of scolding and expostulation which, passing the door at its
highest, died away into a confused murmur in the distance of the long
corridor.

"That was an English voice," said Cosmo. "I mean the angry one."

"I should think it's that English doctor from Tuscany that has been
three or four days here already. He has been put on this floor."

"From what I have been able to catch," said Cosmo, "he seems very angry
at having a neighbour on it. That must be me. Have you heard his name?"

"It's Marvel or some such name. He seems to be known here; he orders
people about as if he were at home. The other was Cantelucci, sir."

"Very likely. Look here. Spire. I will dine in the public room
downstairs. I want to see that angry gentleman. Did you see him, Spire?"

"Only his back, sir. Very broad, sir. Tall man. In boots and a riding
coat. Are you going down now, sir? The dinner must be on already."

"Yes," said Cosmo, preparing to go out. "And by the by. Spire, if you
ever see in the street or in that room downstairs, where everyone comes
in and out as you say, a long fellow wearing a peculiar cap with a
tassel, just try to find out something about him; or at any rate let me
know when you have seen him. . . . You could perhaps follow him for a
bit and try to see where he goes."

After saying those words Cosmo left the room before Spire could make any
answer. Spire's astonishment expressed itself by a low exclamation,
"Well, I never!"




PART II


I


Cosmo descended into a hall now empty and with most of its lights
extinguished. A loud murmur of voices guided him to the door of the
dining room. He discovered it to be a long apartment with flat pilasters
dividing its whitewashed walls, and resembling somewhat a convent's
refectory. The resemblance was accentuated by the two narrow tables
occupying its middle. One of them had been appropriated by the British
naval officers, had lights on it, and bristled with the necks of wine
bottles along its whole length. The talk round it was confused and
noisy. The other, shorter, table accommodated two rows of people in
sombre garments who at first glance struck Cosmo as natives of the town
and belonging to a lower station in life. They had less lights, less
wine, and almost no animation. Several smaller tables were ranged
against the walls at equal intervals, and Cosmo's eye was caught by one
of them because of the candles in the sconce on the wall above it having
been lighted. Its cloth was dazzlingly white, and Signor Cantelucci with
a napkin in his hand stood respectfully at the elbow of its sole
occupant, who was seated with his back to the door.

Cosmo was under the impression that his entrance had been unobserved.
But before he had walked half the length of the room Signor Cantelucci,
whose eyes had never ceased darting here and there while his body
preserved its deferential attitude at the elbow of the exclusive client,
advanced to meet him with his serious and attentive air. He bowed.
Perhaps the signore would not mind sharing the table of his illustrious
countryman.

"Yes, if my countryman doesn't object," assented Cosmo readily. He was
absolutely certain that this must be the doctor of whom Spire had
spoken.

Cantelucci had no doubt that His Excellency's company would be most
welcome to his illustrious countryman. Then stepping aside, he added
under his breath: "He is a person of great distinction. A most valued
patron of mine. . . ." The person thus commended, turning his head
ensconced in the high collar of his coat, disclosed to Cosmo a round
face with a shaved chin, strongly marked eyebrows, round eyes, and thin
lips compressed into a slightly peevish droop which, however, was at
once corrected by an attempt at a faint smile. Cosmo, too, produced a
faint smile. For an appreciable moment they looked at each other without
saying a word while Cantelucci, silent too, executed a profound bow.

"Sit down, sir, sit down," said the elder man (Cosmo judged him to be
well over forty), raising his voice above the uproar made by the
occupants of the naval table and waving his hand at the empty chair
facing his own. It had a high carved back showing some traces of
gilding, and the silk which covered it was worn to rags. Cosmo sat down
while Cantelucci disappeared and the man across the table positively
shouted, "I am glad," and immediately followed that declaration by an
energetic "Oh damn!" He bent over the table: "One can't hear oneself
speak with that noisy lot. All heroes, no doubt, but not a single
gentleman."

He leaned back and waited till the outburst of noisy mirth had died out
at the officers' table. The corners of his mouth drooped again and Cosmo
came to the conclusion that face in repose was decidedly peevish.

"I don't know what they have got to be so merry about," the other began,
with a slight glance at the naval table and leaning forward again
towards Cosmo. "Their occupation is gone. Heroes are a thoughtless lot.
Yet just look at that elderly lieutenant at the head of the table.
Shabby coat. Old epaulette. He doesn't laugh. He will die a
lieutenant--on half pay. That's how heroic people end when the heroic
times are over."

"I am glad," said Cosmo steadily, "that you recognize at least their
heroism."

The other opened his mouth for some time before he laughed, and that
gave his face an expression of somewhat hard jollity. But the laugh when
it came was by no means loud and had a sort of ingratiating softness.

"No, no. Don't think I am disparaging our sea service. I had the
privilege to know the greatest hero of them all. Yes, I had two talks
with Lord Nelson. Well, he was certainly not . . ."

He interrupted himself and raising his eyes saw the perfectly still gaze
of Cosmo fastened on his face. Then peevishly:

"What I meant to say was that he at least was indubitably a hero. I
remember that I was very careful about what I said to him. I had to be
mighty careful then about what I said to anybody. Someone might have put
it into his head to hang me at some yard-arm or other."

"I envy your experience all the same," said Cosmo amiably. "I suppose
your conscience was clear?"

"I have always been most careful not to give my conscience any license
to trouble me," retorted the other with a certain curtness of tone which
was not offensive; "and I have lived now for some considerable time. I
am really much older than I look," he concluded, giving Cosmo such a
keen glance that the young man could not I help a smile.

The other went on looking at him steadily for a while, then let his eyes
wander to a door in a distant part of the long room as if impatient for
the coming of the dinner. Then giving it up:

"A man who has lived actively, actively I say, the last twenty years may
well feel as old as Methuselah. Lord Nelson was but a circumstance in my
life. I wonder, had he lived, how he would have taken all this."

A slight movement of his hand seemed to carry this allusion outside the
confines of the vaulted noisy room, to indicate all the out-of-doors of
the world. Cosmo remarked that the hand was muscular, shapely, and
extremely well cared for.

"I think there can be no doubt about the nature of his feelings if he
were living." Cosmo's voice was exactly non-committal. His interlocutor
grunted slightly.

"H'm. He would have done nothing but groan and complain about anything
and everything. No, he wouldn't have taken it laughing. Very poor
physique. Very. Frightful hypochondriac. . . . I am a doctor, you know."

Cantelucci was going to attend himself on his two guests. He presented
to the doctor a smoking soup tureen enveloped in a napkin. The doctor
assumed at once a business-like air, and at his invitation Cosmo held
out his plate. The doctor helped him carefully.

"Don't forget the wine, my wine, Anzelmo," he said to Cantelucci, who
answered by a profound bow. "I saved his life once," he continued after
the innkeeper had gone away.

The tone was particularly significant. Cosmo, partly repelled and partly
amused by the man, enquired whether the worthy host had been very ill.
The doctor swallowed the last spoonful of soup.

"Ill," he said. "He had a gash that long in his side and a set of
forty-pound fetters in his legs. I cured both complaints. Not without
some risk to myself, as you may imagine. There was an epidemic of
hanging and shooting in the South of Italy then."

He noticed Cosmo's steady stare and raised the corners of his mouth with
an effect of geniality on his broad rosy face.

"In '99, you know. I wonder I didn't die of it too. I was considerably
younger then and my humane instincts, early enthusiasms, and so on had
led me into pretty bad company. However, I had also pretty good friends.
What with one thing and another I am pretty well known all over Italy.
My name is Martel--Doctor Martel. You probably may have heard. . . ."

He threw a searching glance at Cosmo, who bowed non-committally, and went
on without a pause: "I am the man who brought vaccine to Italy, first.
Cantelucci was trying to tell me your name but really I couldn't make it
out."

"Latham is my name," said Cosmo, "and I only set foot in Italy for the
first time in my life two days ago."

The doctor jerked his head sideways.

"Latham, eh? Yorkshire?"

"Yes," said Cosmo, smiling.

"To be sure. Sir Charles . . ."

"That's my father."

"Yes, yes. Served in the Guards. I used to know the doctor of his
regiment. Married in Italy. I don't remember the lady's name. Oh, those
are old times. Might have been a hundred years ago."

"You mean that so much history has been made since."

"Yes, no end of history," assented the doctor, but checked himself. "And
yet, tell me, what does it all amount to?"

Cosmo made no answer. Cantelucci having brought the wine while they
talked, the doctor-filled two glasses, waited a moment as if to hear
Cosmo speak, but as the young man remained silent he said:

"Well, let us drink then to Peace."

He tossed the wine down his throat while Cosmo drank his much more
leisurely. As they set down their empty glasses they were startled by a
roar of a tremendous voice filling the vaulted room from end to end in
order to "let Their Honours know that the boat was at the steps." The
doctor made a faint grimace.

"Do you hear the voice of the British lion, Mr. Latham?" he asked
peevishly. "Ah, well, we will have some little peace now here."

Those officers at the naval table who had to go on board rose in a body
and left the room hastily. Three or four who had a longer leave drew
close together and began to talk low with their heads in a bunch. Cosmo
glancing down the room seemed to recognize at the door the form of the
seaman whom he had met earlier in the evening. He followed the officers
out. The other diners, the sombre ones, and a good many of them with
powdered heads, were also leaving the room. Cantelucci put another dish
on the table, stepped back a pace with a bow, and stood still. A moment
of profound silence succeeded the noise.

"First rate," said Doctor Martel to Cosmo, after tasting the dish, and
then gave a nod to Cantelucci, who made another bow and retreated
backwards, always with a solemn expression on his face.

"Italian cooking, of course, but then I am an old Italian myself. Not
that I love them, but I have acquired many of their tastes. Before we
have done dining you will have tasted the perfection of their cookery,
north and south, but I assure you are sharing my dinner. You don't
suppose that the dishes that come to this table are the same the common
customers get."

Cosmo made a slight bow. "I am very sensible of the privilege," he said.

"The honour and the pleasure are mine, I assure you," the doctor said in
a half-careless tone and looking with distaste towards the small knot of
officers with a twenty-four hours' leave who had finished their
confabulation and had risen in a body like men who had agreed on some
pleasant course of action. Only the elderly lieutenant lagging a little
behind cast a glance at his two countrymen at the little table and
followed his comrades with less eager movements.

"A quarter of a tough bullock or half a roast sheep are more in their
way, and Cantelucci knows it. As to that company that was sitting at the
other table, well, I daresay you can tell yourself what they were, small
officials or tradesmen of some sort. I should think that emptying all
their pockets--and they were how many, say twenty--you couldn't collect
the value of one English pound at any given time. And Cantelucci knows
that too. Well, of course. Still he does well here, but it's a poor
place. I wonder, Mr. Latham, what are you doing here?"

"Well," said Cosmo with a good-humoured smile, "I am just staying here.
Just as you yourself are staying here."

"Ah, but you never saved Cantelucci's life, whereas I did and that's the
reason why I am staying here: out of mere kindness and to give him an
opportunity to show his gratitude. . . . Let me fill your glass. Not
bad, this wine."

"Excellent. What is it?"

"God knows. Let us call it Cantelucci's gratitude. Generous stuff, this,
to wash down those dishes with. Gluttony is an odious vice, but an
ambition to dine well is about the only one which can be indulged at no
cost to one's fellow men."

"It didn't strike me," murmured Cosmo absently, for he was just then
asking himself why he didn't like this pleasant companion, and had just
come to the conclusion that it was because of his indecisive expression
wavering between peevishness and jocularity with something else in
addition, as it were, in the background of his handsome, neat, and
comfortable person. Something that was not aggressive nor yet exactly
impudent. He wondered at his mistrust of the personality which certainly
was very communicative but apparently not inquisitive. At that moment he
heard himself addressed with a direct inquiry.

"You passed, of course, through Paris?"

"Yes, and Switzerland."

"Oh, Paris. I wonder what it looks like now. Full of English people, of
course. Let's see, how many years is it since I was last there? Ha, lots
of heads rolled off very noble shoulders since. Well, I am trying to
make my way there. Curious times. I have found some letters here. Duke
of Wellington very much disliked, what? His nod is insupportable, eh?"

"I have just had a sight of the Duke two or three times," said Cosmo. "I
can assure you that everybody is treating him with the greatest
respect."

"Of course, of course. All the same I bet that all these foreigners are
chuckling to themselves at having finished the job without him."

"They needn't be so pleased with themselves," said Cosmo scornfully.
"The mere weight of their numbers . . ."

"Yes. It was more like a migration of armed tribes than an army. They
will boast of their success all the same. There is no saying what the
Duke himself thinks. . . . I wonder if he could have beaten the other in
a fair fight. Well, that will never be known now."

Cosmo had a sudden sense of an epical tale with a doubtful conclusion.
He made no answer. Cantelucci had come and gone solemnly,
self-contained, with the usual two ceremonial bows. As he retreated he
put out all the candles on the central table and became lost to view.
From the illuminated spot at which he sat, Cosmo's eyes met only the
shadows of the long refectory-like room with its lofty windows closely
shuttered so that they looked like a row of niches for statues. Yet the
murmur of the piazza full of people stole faintly into his ear. Cosmo
had the recollection of the vast expanse of flagstones enclosed by the
shadowy and palatial masses gleaming with lights here and there under
the night sky thick with stars and perfectly cloudless.

"This is a very quiet inn," he observed.

"It has that advantage certainly. The walls are fairly thick, as you can
see. It's an unfinished palace, I mean as to its internal decorations,
which were going to be very splendid and even more costly than splendid.
The owner of it, I mean the man who had it built, died of hunger in that
hall out there."

"Died of hunger?" repeated Cosmo.

"No doubt about it. It was during the siege of Genoa. You know the
siege, surely?"

Cosmo recollected himself. "I was quite a child at the time," he said.

The venerated client of Cantelucci cracked a walnut and then looked at
Cosmo's face.

"I should think you weren't seven years old at the time," he said in a
judicial tone. "When I first came into Italy with the vaccine, you know,
Sir Charles's marriage was still being talked about in Florence. I
remember it perfectly though it seems as if it had all happened in
another world. Yes, indubitably he died of hunger like ten thousand
other Genoese. He couldn't go out to hunt for garbage with the populace
or crawl out at night trying to gather nettles in the ditches outside
the forts, and nobody would have known that he was dead for a month if
one of the bombs out of a bomb-vessel with Admiral Keith's blockading
squadron hadn't burst the door in. They found him at the foot of the
stairs, and, they say, with a lot of gold pieces in his pockets. But
nobody cared much for that. If it had been a lot of half-gnawed bones
there would have been blood spilt, no doubt. For all I know there were
or may be even now secret places full of gold in the thickness of these
walls. However, the body was thrown into a corpse-cart and the
authorities boarded the doorway. It remained boarded for years because
the heirs didn't care to have anything to do with that shell of a
palace. I fancy that the last of them died in the snows of Russia.
Cantelucci came along, and owing to a friendship with some sort of
scribe in the Municipality he got permission to use the place for his
hostelry. He told me that he found several half ducats in the corners of
the hall when he took possession. I suppose they paid for the whitewash,
for I can't believe that Cantelucci had much money in his pockets."

"Perhaps he found one of those secret hiding-places of which you spoke,"
suggested Cosmo.

"What? Cantelucci? He never looked for any gold. He is too much in the
clouds; but he has made us dine well in the palace of the starved man,
hasn't he? Sixteen years ago in Naples he was a Jacobin and a friend of
the French, a rebel, a traitor to his king if you like--but he has a
good memory, there is no denying that."

"Is he a Neapolitan, then?" asked Cosmo. "I imagined they were of a
different type."

"God only knows. He was there and I didn't ask him. He was a prisoner of
the royalists, of the reactionaries. I was much younger then and perhaps
more humane. Flesh and blood couldn't stand in the sight of the way in
which they were being treated, men of position, of attainments, of
intelligence. The Neapolitan Jacobins were no populace. They were men of
character and ideas, the pick of all classes. They were properly
liberals. Still they were called Jacobins and you may be surprised that
I, a professional man and an Englishman . . ."

Cosmo, looking up at the sudden pause, saw the doctor sitting with the
dull eyes and the expression of a man suddenly dissatisfied with
himself. Cosmo hastened to say that he himself was no friend of
reactionaries and in any case not conceited enough to judge the conduct
of men older than himself. Without a sign that he had heard a word of
that speech the doctor had a faint and peevish smile. He never moved at
all till, after a longish interval, Cosmo spoke again.

"Were you expecting somebody that would want to see you this evening?"
he asked.

The doctor started.

"See me? No. Why do you ask?"

"Because within the last five minutes somebody has put his head twice
through the door; and as I don't expect either a visitor or a messenger,
I thought he was looking for you. I don't know a single soul here."

The doctor remained perfectly unmoved. Cosmo, who was looking towards
the distant door, saw the head again and this time shouted at it an
inquiry. Thereupon the owner of the head entered and had not advanced
half the length of the room before Cosmo recognized in him the portly
figure of Spire. To his great surprise, however. Spire instead of coming
up to the table made a vague gesture and stopped short.

This was strange conduct. The doctor sat completely unconscious, and
Cosmo took the course of excusing himself and following Spire, who,
directly he had seen his master rise, had retreated rapidly to the door.
The doctor did not rouse himself to answer, and Cosmo left him leaning
on his elbow in a thoughtful attitude. In the badly lighted hall he
found Spire waiting for him between the foot of the stairs and the door
which Cosmo presumed was leading to the offices of the hotel. Again
Spire made a vague gesture which seemed to convey a warning, and
approached his master on tiptoe.

"Well, what is it? What do you mean by flourishing your arm at me like
this?" asked Cosmo sharply, and Spire ventured on a warning "Ssh!"

"Why, there is nobody here," said Cosmo, lowering his voice
nevertheless.

"I wanted to tell you, sir, I have seen that fellow."

"What fellow? Oh yes. The fellow with the cap. Where did you see him?"

"He is here," said Spire, pointing to the closed door.

"Here? What could a man like that want here? Did you speak to him?"

"No, sir, he has just come in and for all I know he may be already gone
away--though I don't think so."

"Oh, you don't think so. Do you know what he has come for?"

Spire made no answer to the question, but after a short silence: "I will
go and see, and if you stand where you are, sir, you will be able to
look right into the room. He may not be the man."

Without waiting for an answer he moved towards the closed door and threw
it wide open. The room, very much like the dining room but smaller, was
lighted gloomily by two smoky oil lamps hanging from the ceiling, over a
trestle table having a wooden bench on each side. Bad as the light was
Cosmo made out at once the peculiar cap. The wearer, sitting on one of
the benches, was leaning with both elbows across the table towards the
fair head of a girl half-hidden by a lace scarf. They were engaged in
earnest conversation so that they never turned their heads at Spire's
entrance. Cosmo had just time to discern the fine line of the girl's
shoulders, which were half-tinned from him when Spire shut the door.




II


Returning to his bedroom, Cosmo found the fire of logs still playing
fitfully upon the drawn curtains, upon the dim shape of the canopied bed
of state, and perceived that Spire as directed had prepared the writing
table and had placed a screen round the inviting-looking armchair.

He did not sit down to write. He felt more than ever that in a moment of
amused expansion he had made a rash promise to his sister. The
difficulty in keeping it had confronted him for the first time in Paris.
Henrietta would have liked to hear of people he met, of the great world
indulging in the new-found freedom of travel, the English, the French,
the Poles, the Germans. Certainly he had seen quite a lot of people; but
the problem was as to what could be said about them to a young girl,
ignorant of the world, brought up in the country, and having really no
notion of what mankind was like. He admitted to himself with
introspective sincerity that even he did not exactly know what mankind
was really like. He was too much of a novice, and she, obviously, was
too innocent to be told of his suspicions and of what it was like. Even
to describe the world outwardly was not an easy task--to Henrietta. The
world was certainly amusing. Oh yes, it was amusing; but even as he
thought that, he felt within him a certain distaste. Just before he had
left Paris he had been at a rout given by a great lady. There was a
fellow there who somehow became suspected of picking pockets. He was
extremely ugly and therefore attracted notice. The great lady, asked if
she had invited him, denied ever having seen him before, but he assured
her that he had spoken to her already that evening. Her Ladyship then
declared that if he was really the man he gave himself out to be, she
was not aware that he was in Paris. She imagined him to be in Ireland.
Altogether a peculiar story. Cosmo never knew how it had ended because
his friend Hollis led him away to introduce him to Mrs. R., who was most
affable and entertained him with a complete inventory of her daughter's
accomplishments, the daughter herself being then in the room, obviously
quite lovely and clever, but certainly a little odd; for a little later,
on his being introduced, she had discoursed to him for half an hour on
things of the heart, charmingly, but in a perfectly cool and detached
manner. There was also Lady Jane, very much in evidence, very much run
after, with a voice of engaging sweetness, but very free, not to say
licentious, in her talk. How could he confide his impressions of her to
Henrietta? As a matter of fact his head had been rather full of Lady
Jane for some time. She had, so to speak, attended him all the way from
Paris up to the morning of his arrival at Cantelucci's inn. But she had
now deserted him. Or was it his mind that had dropped her out of a
haunting actuality into that region where the jumble of one's
experiences is allowed to rest? But was it possible that a shabby fellow
in tight breeches and bad boots, with a peculiarly shaped cap on his
head, could have got between him and Lady Jane about the time of sunset?

Cosmo thought suddenly that one's personal life was a very bizarre
thing. He could write to his sister that before he had been three hours
in Genoa he had been involved in passing secret correspondence from
Italy to the Island of Elba. Henrietta had solemnly charged him to write
everything he could find out, hear, or even guess about Napoleon. He had
heard certainly a lot of most extraordinary stories; and if he had not
made any guesses he had been associating with persons who actually had
been doing nothing else; frightened persons, exulting people, cast-down
people, frivolous people, people with airs of mystery or with airs of
contempt. But by Jove, now he had been in personal touch and had
actually helped a man of the people who was mysteriously corresponding
with Elba. He could write something about that but, after all, was it
worth while? Finally he concluded he wouldn't write home at all that
evening; pushed the table away, and throwing himself into the armchair
extended his legs towards the fire. A moody expression settled on his
face. His immobility resembled open-eyed sleep with the red spark of the
fire in his unwinking eyes, and a perfect insensibility to outward
impressions. But he heard distinctly Spire knocking discreetly at the
door. Cosmo's first impulse was to shout that he wasn't wanted, but he
changed his mind. "Come in."

Spire shut the door carefully, and crossing the room at once put a log
on the fire. Then he said:

"Can't get any hot water this evening, sir. Very sorry, sir. I will see
that it won't happen again."

At the same time he thought, "Served him right for picking out such an
inn to stay at." Cosmo, still silent, stared at the fire, and when he
roused himself at last he perceived Spire in the act of putting down in
front of his chair a pair of slippers of shiny leather and red heels.

"Take your boots off, sir?" suggested Spire under his breath.

Cosmo let him do it. "Going to bed now, sir?" asked Spire in the same
subdued tone.

"No, but you needn't wait. I won't need you any more to-night."

"Thank you, sir." Spire lingered, boots in hand. "The two small pistols
are on the bedside table, sir. I have looked to the primings. This town
is lull of rabble from all parts just now, so I hear. The lock of your
door is fairly poor. I shall be sleeping just outside in the corridor,
sir. They are going to put me a pallet there."

"You will be very cold," protested Cosmo.

"It will be all right, sir. I have got the fur rug out of the carriage.
I had everything taken out of the carriage. The yard isn't safe, sir.
Nothing is properly safe in this house, so far as I can see."

Cosmo nodded absent-mindedly. "Oh, wait a moment, Spire. That man, that
fellow in the cap, is he still downstairs?"

Spire thought rapidly that he wouldn't be a party to bringing any of
those ragamuffins up to the bedroom. "Gone a long time ago, sir," he
said stolidly.

Cosmo had a vivid recollection of the man's pose of being settled for an
earnest and absorbing conversation to last half the night.

"He doesn't belong to this house?" he asked.

"No, sir, he only came to talk to a young woman. I left him taking leave
of her to come up to you, sir. I suppose he was the man you meant, sir."

"Yes," said Cosmo, "I have no doubt about it. He will probably turn up
again."

Spire admitted reluctantly that it was likely. He had been telling a
long tale to that young woman. "She is very good-looking, sir."

"Is she a servant here?"

"Oh no, sir. She came in with that old cut-throat cobbler. They seem to
be friendly. I don't like the looks of the people in this house."

"I wonder," said Cosmo, "whether you could manage to obtain for me a
quiet talk with that man on the next occasion he comes here."

Spire received this overture in profound silence.

"Do you think you could?" insisted Cosmo.

A dispassionate raising of the eyebrows preceded the apparently
irrelevant remark. "The worst of this house, sir, is that it seems open
to all sorts of rabble."

"I see. Well, try to think of some way. Spire. You may go now."

Spire, carrying the boots, walked as far as the door, where he turned
for a moment. "The only way I can think of, sir," he said, "would be to
make friends with that young woman." Before Cosmo could recover from the
surprise at the positive statement Spire had gone out and had shut the
door.

Cosmo slept heavily but fitfully, with moments of complete oblivion
interrupted by sudden starts, when he would lie on his back with open
eyes, wondering for a moment where he was, and then fall asleep again
before he had time to make a movement. In the morning the first thing he
did was to scribble a note to the Countess Montevesso to ask her
permission to call that very morning. While writing the address he
smiled to himself at the idea that it was after all the little Adèle
whom he remembered but dimly, mostly as a fair head hovering near his
father's armchair in the big drawing room, the windows of which opened
on the western terrace. As a schoolboy during his holidays he saw the
two girls, Adèle and his sister, mostly in the evening. He had his own
out-of-door pursuits while those girls stayed upstairs with their
governess. Remembering how he used to catch glimpses of them, the fair
and the dark, walking in the Park, he felt a greater curiosity to see
the Countess de Montevesso than if he had never seen her before. He
found it impossible to represent her to himself grown up, married for
years, the daughter of an ambassador.

When the family of D'Armand departed from Latham Hall, it was as if a
picture had faded, a picture of faces, attitudes, and colours, leaving
untouched the familiar background of his Yorkshire home, on to which he
could never recall them distinctly. He would be meeting a complete
stranger and he wondered whether that lady, who, young as she still was,
had lived through tragic times and had seen so many people, would
remember him at all. Him personally. For as to his home he had no doubt
she had not forgotten; neither the stones, nor the woods, nor the
streams. And as to the people Cosmo had a distinct notion that she was
more familiar with his father than he and Henrietta ever had been. His
father was not a man whom anybody could forget. And that Countess of
Montevesso, more difficult for him to imagine than a complete stranger,
would remember his mother better than he could himself. She had seen so
much more of her day after day for something like three years; whereas
he was at home only at intervals and while there took Lady Latham for
granted, a kind, serene presence, beautifully dressed.

He handed the note to Spire with orders to send it off by one of the
ragged idlers about the hotel door. There would be an answer. Then,
approaching the window, he perceived that he could not see very much out
of it. It was too high above the piazza, which furthermore was masked by
the jutting balconies. But the sky was blue with a peculiar deep
brilliance and the sunlight slanted over the roofs of the houses on the
other side of the piazza. When he opened the window the keen pure air
roused his vitality. The faint murmur of voices from below reached him
very much as it had reached him downstairs the night before through the
closed shutters of the dining room, as if the population of the town had
never gone to bed.

While Spire was serving his breakfast in his room he wondered what the
Countess of Montevesso would look like. The same fair head but higher
above the ground and with the hair no longer flowing over the shoulders,
but done up no doubt most becomingly and perhaps turned darker with age.
It would be the hair of the daughter of an ambassador, able to judge of
men and affairs, a woman of position, a very fine lady. Perhaps just a
fine lady; but the memory of the child came to him with renewed force,
gracious, quiet, with something timid and yet friendly in all its
gestures, with his father's hand smoothing the fair hair. . . . No. Not
merely a fine lady.

Cosmo had no inborn aptitude for mere society life. Though not exactly
shy, he lacked that assurance of manner which his good looks and his
social status ought to have given him. He suspected there was too much
mockery in the world, and the undoubted friendliness he had met with,
especially from women, seemed to him always a little suspect, the effect
not of his own merit, of which he had no idea, but of a shallow,
good-natured compassion. He imagined himself awkward in company. The
very brilliance of the entertainments, of which he had seen already a
good many, was apt to depress his spirits. Often during talk with some
pretty woman he would feel that he was not meant for that sort of life,
and then suddenly he would withdraw into his shell. In that way he had
earned for himself the reputation of being a little strange. He was to a
certain extent aware of it, but he was not aware that this very thing
made him interesting.

A gust of diffidence came over him while he was trying to eat some
breakfast. "I really don't want to see that Countess," he thought. Then
remembering the intonation in his father's voice when talking of Adèle,
he wondered whether perchance he would find an uncommon personality.
Cosmo had a profound belief in his father, though he was well aware that
he had never understood him thoroughly. . . . But if she is a woman out
of the common, he reflected further, then she can't possibly be
interested in a rough schoolboy grown into a young man of no particular
importance. No doubt she would be amiable enough. . . .

"Clear away all these things. Spire," he said, "and go downstairs to see
if the messenger is back."

The messenger was not back yet; and assisted by Spire, Cosmo began to
dress himself with extreme care. The tying of his neckcloth was an
irritating affair, and so was Spire's perfectly wooden face while he was
holding up the glass to him for that operation. Cosmo spoiled two
neckcloths and became extremely dissatisfied with the cut and colour of
various articles of attire which Spire presented to him one after
another. The fashions for men were perfectly absurd. By an effort of
mind Cosmo overcame this capricious discontent with familiar things and
finished his dressing. Then he sent Spire once more downstairs to
inquire if the messenger was back. Obediently, Spire disappeared, but
once gone it did not seem as though he meant to return at all. There was
no Spire. There was no bell-pull in the room either.

Cosmo stuck his head out through the door. Absolute silence reigned in
the well of the stairs. A woman in black, on her knees beside a pail of
water and scrubbing the floor of the corridor, looked up at him. Cosmo
drew his head in. She was a pitiful hag. . . . He was sure of a gracious
reception, of course. He was also sure of meeting a lot of people of all
sorts. He wondered what sort of society she received. Everybody, no
doubt; Austrians, Italians, French; all the triumphant reactionaries,
all the depressed heads bobbing up again after the storm, venomous,
revengeful, oppressive, odious. What the devil had become of Spire?

The long window right down to the floor had remained open. Suddenly the
sound of a drum reached Cosmo's ears. Stepping out on a balcony, he saw
a company of infantry in white coats marching across a distant corner of
the piazza. Austrians! Yes, their time had come. A voice behind him
said: "The messenger is back, sir." Cosmo stepped in and saw Spire
empty-handed. "There's a verbal answer, sir."

"What is it? You haven't spoken with the messenger, have you?"

"I have seen him, sir, but I got the message through the innkeeper. He
speaks a little English. The lady would be glad to see you as soon after
the fourth hour as possible. They have their own way of reckoning time,
but as far as I can understand it, sir, it means something between ten
and eleven. At any rate, it's what Cantelucci says, and he can tell the
time by an English watch all right."

"Shut the window, Spire. I don't want to hear that drum. Yes, it would
mean as soon after ten as possible, but why has the fellow been so long?
Is it very far?"

"No, sir, I think it's quite close, really. He was so long because he
has been trying to give your note to the lady herself and there was some
difficulty about it. That innkeeper tells me that instead of handing it
to the porter the fellow got in through the kitchen door and was dodging
about a passage for some time."

Cosmo looked fixedly at Spire, whose face expressed no opinion whatever
on those proceedings.

"Dodging in a passage," repeated Cosmo. "But did he see the lady
herself?"

"Apparently not, sir. Cantelucci slanged him for being so long, but he
said he thought he was acting for the best. He would have been there yet
if a black woman hadn't come along and snatched the letter out of his
hand. It was she too who brought down the message from the lady."

"Oh, yes," said Cosmo. "Don't you remember there was a black maid?"

"Yes, sir, I remember perfectly well, in the house-keeper's room. She
learned to talk English very quickly, but she was a little spitfire."

"Was she?"

Spire busied himself in brushing Cosmo's hat while he remarked in an
explanatory tone: "She could never understand a joke, sir."

He attended Cosmo into the hall, where Cantelucci with his usual intense
gravity and a deep bow asked whether the signore would want a carriage.
Cosmo, however, preferred walking; therefore the youth who had taken
Cosmo's note was directed to guide the English milord to the Palazzo
Brignoli. He had a tousled head of hair and wore a jacket that might
have belonged at one time to a hussar's uniform, with all its trimmings
and buttons cut off and a ragged hole in each elbow. His cheeks were
sunken, his eyes rolled expressively, and his smile discovered a set of
very sound teeth.

"_Si, si_, Palazzo Rosso," he said.

Cantelucci explained in his imperturbable and solemn manner that the
populace gave that name to the Palace on account of the red granite of
which it was built, and the thin-faced lad, bounding forward, preceded
Cosmo across the piazza, looking over his shoulder from time to time.
Cosmo's doubts and apprehensions disappeared before the inevitable charm
and splendour of the town. At the corner of a narrow lane and a small
open space with some trees growing in the centre of it the ragged guide
stopped and, pointing at a dark and magnificent building, left him
alone. Massive and sombre, ornate and heavy, with a dark aspect and
enormous carvings, the Palace where little Adèle was living had to
Cosmo's eye the air of a sumptuous prison. The portal with its heavy
iron-studded doors was reached by a flight of shallow steps, a segment
of a wide circle, guarded on each side by an enormous griffin seated,
tensely alert with wing and claw, on a high and narrow pedestal. On
ascending the steps Cosmo discovered that the heavy door was ajar, just
enough to let him slip in; and, at once, from the gloom of the arched
passage he saw the inner sunshine on the oleanders of the inner court,
flagged with marble, from whence a broad staircase ascended to the
colonnaded gallery of the first floor.

Cosmo had seen no porter or other living soul, and there was no sound of
any sort, no appearance of movement anywhere. Even the leaves of the
oleanders kept perfectly still. In the light of the morning a slanting
shadow cut the western wall into two triangles, one dark, the other
glowing as with a red fire; and Cosmo remained for a moment spellbound
by a strong impression of empty grandeur, magnificence, and solitude.

A voice behind him, issuing from somewhere in the big gateway through
which he had passed, cried: "Ascend, signore!" Cosmo began to mount the
open staircase, embarrassed as though he had been watched by thousands
of eyes. In the gallery he hesitated, for the several doors he could see
remained closed, and the only sound that reached his ears was the gentle
plashing of the fountain in the court below him.

Before he had made up his mind the door in front of him opened fairly
wide, but he could not see the person till he had entered an anteroom
with narrow red and gilt settees ranged along its white walls. The door
shut behind him and, turning round, he confronted a dark, plump mulatto
woman who was staring at him with an expression of intense admiration.
She clapped her hands in ecstasy and, opening her mouth, exhibited her
white teeth in a low cackling laugh.

"_Bonjour_, Aglae," said Cosmo readily.

The woman laughed again in sheer delight. "You remember my name, Mr.
Cosmo! You quite frighten me, you grow so big. I remember you climb tree
and throw nice ripe apple to the black girl. . . ." Her eyes gleamed and
rolled absurdly.

Cosmo was so strangely touched by this extremely slight reminiscence of
his tree-climbing boyhood, that when she added, "That was a good time,"
he was quite ready to agree, thereby provoking another burst of
delightful laughter. But Aglae was controlling herself obviously. Her
laughter was subdued. It had not the unbounded freedom of sound that
used to reverberate exotically in the dark passages at the back of
Latham Hall; though there, too, Aglae tried to subdue it in view of
rebukes or sarcastic comments in the servants' hall. It stopped suddenly
and Aglae in a tone of sober respect wanted to know how the Seignior
was. Cosmo said that his father was very well.

"He a very-great gentleman," commented Aglae. "I always tremble when I
see him. You very fine gentleman too, Mr. Cosmo."

She moved to one of the inner doors, but as Cosmo was following her she
raised her hand to prevent him and opened the door only a little way,
then came back and said in a lower tone, "It's to hear the bell better
when it rings. . . . Will you wait a little bit here?" she asked
anxiously.

"I will," said Cosmo, "but surely you don't want to tremble before me.
What is the matter?"

"Nothing at all is the matter." Aglae tossed her head, tied up in a
bandana handkerchief, with something of the spirit of the old days.

Cosmo was amused. "I no tremble before you," she continued. "I always
like you very much. I am glad with all my heart to see you here."

All the time she turned her ear to the door she had left the least bit
ajar. She had on a high-waisted white calico dress, white stockings, and
Genoese slippers on her feet. Her dark brown hands moved uneasily.

"And how is Madame la Comtesse?" asked Cosmo.

"Miss Adèle very well. Anyway she never says anything else. She very
great lady now. All the town come here, but she wants to see you alone
after all these years."

"It's very kind of her," said Cosmo. "I was wondering whether she
remembered me at all."

Now the excitement of seeing him had worn off, he was surprised at the
careworn expression of the mulatto's face. For a moment it seemed to him
like a tragic mask, then came the flash of white teeth, strangely unlike
a smile.

"She remember everything," said Aglae. "She . . . she . . . Mr. Cosmo,
you no boy now. I tell you that Miss Adèle had not a moment's peace
since she drive away from your big home in the country one very cold
day. I remember very well. Little birds fall dead off the tree. I feel
ready to fall dead myself."

"I was away at school," said Cosmo. He remembered that on his return the
disappearance of those people had not produced a very strong impression
on him. In fact, the only thing he had missed was, in the evening, the
fair head of the stranger Adèle near the dark head of his sister
Henrietta. And the next evening he had not even missed that!

While these thoughts were passing through his head he waited, looking at
Aglae with a faint smile of which he was not aware. The mulatto girl
seemed to have concentrated all her faculties on listening for the sound
of a bell. It came at last. Cosmo heard it, too, very distant, faint and
prolonged. A handbell.

"Now," said Aglae under her breath, and Cosmo followed her through a
suite of rooms, magnificent but under-furnished, with the full light
excluded by half-closed jalousies. The vista was terminated by a white
and gold door at which Aglae stopped and looked back at him over her
shoulder with an air of curiosity, anxiety, or was it hesitation? But
certainly without a smile. As to his own it had stiffened permanently on
his lips. Before turning the handle of the door the mulatto listened for
a moment. Then she threw it open, disclosing a room full of light indeed
but which Cosmo could not see in its full extent because of a screen
cutting off the view. His last thought as he crossed the threshold was,
"It will be interesting," and then he heard the door shut behind him,
leaving him as it were alone with the heavy screen of figured velvet and
three windows through which sunshine poured in a way that almost blinded
him after his long experience of half lights.

He walked clear of the screen, and he was surprised at the vast size of
the room. Here and there were other screens and a quite unexpected
quantity of elegant furniture amongst which he felt for a moment as if
lost. All this shone and gleamed and glowed with colour in the freshness
and brilliance of the sunny morning. "Why, there's nobody here," he
thought with a mingled sense of disappointment and relief. To his left
above a square of carpet that was like a flower-bed rose a white
mantelpiece which in its proportion and sumptuosity was like a low but
much carved portal surmounted by an enormous sheet of glass reaching up
to the cornice of the ceiling. He stepped on to the flowers, feeling now
somewhat vexed, and only then perceived away at the other end of the
room, in a corner beyond a fourth window, a lady seated at a writing
table with her back to him. Barred by the gilt openwork of the
chair-back he saw her dress, the only bit of blue in the room. There was
some white lace about her shoulders, her fair head was bent, she was
writing rapidly.

Whoever she was she seemed not to be aware of his presence. Cosmo did
not know whether to wait in silence or say something, or merely warn her
by a slight cough. What a stupid position, he thought. At that moment
the lady put the pen down and rose from her chair brusquely, yet there
was a perceptible moment before she turned round and advanced towards
him. She was tall. But for the manner of his introduction, which could
leave no room for doubt, the impression that this could not be the lady
he had come to see would have been irresistible. As it was Cosmo felt
apologetic, as though he had come to the wrong house. It occurred to him
also that the lady had been from the very first aware of his presence.
He was struck by the profundity of her eyes, which were fixed on him.
The train of her blue robe followed on the floor. Her well-shaped head
was a mass of short fair curls, and while she approached him Cosmo saw
the colour leave her cheeks, the passing away of an unmistakable blush.
She stopped and said in an even voice:

"Don't you recognize me?"

He recovered his power of speech but not exactly the command of his
thoughts, which were overwhelmed by a variety of strong and fugitive
impulses.

"I have never known you," he said with a tone of the profoundest
conviction.

She smiled (Cosmo was perfectly sure that he had never seen that sort of
smile or the promise even of anything so enchanting), and sank slowly on
to a sofa whose brocaded silk, gray like pure ashes, and the carved
frame painted with flowers and picked with gold, acquired an
extraordinary value from the colour of her dress and the grace of her
attitude. She pointed to an armchair, close by. Cosmo sat down. A very
small table of ebony inlaid with silver stood between them, her hand
rested on it; and Cosmo looked at it with appreciation, as if it had
been an object of art, before he raised his eyes to the expectant face.

"Frankly," he said, "didn't you think that a complete stranger had been
brought into the room?"

He said this very seriously, and she answered him in a light tone. "For
a moment I was afraid to look round. I sat there with my back to you. It
was absurd after having been imprudent enough to let you come in the
morning. You kept so still that you might have been already gone. I took
fright, I jumped up, but I need not have hesitated. You are still the
same boy."

Cosmo paid very little attention to what she said. Without restraint and
disguise, in open admiration he was observing her with all his might,
saying to himself, "Is it possible--this--Adèle!" He recollected
himself, however, sufficiently to murmur that men changed more slowly
and perhaps less completely than women. The Countess of Montevesso was
not of that opinion, or, at any rate, not in this case.

"It isn't that at all. I know because I used to look at you with that
attention worthy of the heir of the Latham name, whereas you never
honoured the French girl by anything more than a casual glance. Why
should you have done more? You had the dogs, the horses, your first gun.
I remember the gun. You showed it to both of us, to your sister and
myself while we were walking in the park. You shouted to us and came
across the grass, brandishing your gun, while the governess--I don't
remember her name--screamed at you. Oh _mon dieu! N'approaches pas!_ You
paid not the slightest attention to her. You had a flushed face. Of
course her screaming frightened us at first, and just as we were
preparing to get very interested in your gun you walked off with a look
of contempt."

"Did I behave so badly as that?" said Cosmo, feeling suddenly very much
at ease with that lady with whom he had never even exchanged a formal
greeting. She had grown more animated. As he was very fond of his sister
he answered her numerous questions about Henrietta with interest and
pleasure. From that subject the lady on the sofa, who may or may not
have been Adèle d'Armand at one time, went on putting a series of
questions about the house and all the people in it in a manner that
proved a precise and affectionate recollection of those days. The memory
of the countryside seemed to have been cherished by her too, and Cosmo's
heart warmed to the subject. She remembered certain spots in the park
and certain points of view in the neighbourhood as though she had left
them but a year before. She seemed not to have forgotten a single
servant in the house. She asked after Spire.

"I have got him with me," said Cosmo. "Of course he has grown elderly."

He almost forgot to whom he was speaking. Without associating her very
distinctly with the child Adèle, he was taking the Countess de
Montevesso for granted. He delighted in seeing her so quiet and so
perfectly natural. The first effect of her appearance persisted, with
only the added sense of the deep dark blue of her eyes, an impression of
living profundity that made his thoughts about her pause. But he was
unconsciously grateful to her for the fact that she had never given him
a moment of that acute social awkwardness from which he used to suffer
so much; though there could not be the slightest doubt that the little
Adèle (if there had ever been a little Adèle) was now a very fine lady
indeed. But she loved the old place and everything and everybody in it.
Of that too there could be no doubt. The few references she made to his
mother touched and surprised Cosmo. They seemed to imply some depth in
her which he, the son, and Henrietta, the daughter, had failed to
penetrate. In contrast with that, Cosmo remarked that after the inquiry
after Sir Charles's health, which was one of her first questions, his
father was not mentioned again.

"Are you going to make a stay in Genoa?" she asked after a pause.

"A few days," said Cosmo, in an irresolute tone, because he did not know
what answer was expected to this inquiry, the first which had nothing to
do with Yorkshire. His interest in the rest of Italy was, he perceived,
very small. But by the association of ideas he thought suddenly of the
passing hours. He raised his eyes to a faintly engraved brass disc with
black hands hung on the wall above one of the two doors at that end of
the room which he was facing. The black hands pointed to eleven, but
what prevented his eyes from returning at once to the delighted
contemplation of the Countess of Montevesso was the fact that the door
below the clock seemed to have moved slightly.

"I intend to see something of Italy," he said. "My time really is my
own, I have nothing special to do. It seems to me that the principal
object of my journey has been attained now. I don't think my father
would be surprised to hear that I had turned back after leaving Genoa."

The Countess looking up at this, their eyes remained fastened together
for a time and Cosmo thought: "What on earth am I saying?" He watched
her lips move to form the words which quite frightened him.

"Did Sir Charles give you a message for me?"

He thought he had brought this on himself. It was a painful moment. It
lasted long enough to give the Countess the time to assume an expression
of indifference, startling after the low tone of her question.

"No," said Cosmo truthfully. "I have only a message for your father." He
waited a moment. "But I will tell you one of the last things Henrietta
told me. She told me that when you were married my father could think of
nothing for days but you."

He did not venture to look at her; then added impulsively, "My father
loved you dearly. We children could see it very well. Ad----"

"Why don't you finish my name?" her seductive voice asked.

Cosmo coloured. "Well, you know, I never heard you really called by any
other name. It came naturally since I suppose you must be--Adèle."

Madame de Montevesso, who had been hanging on his lips, was surprised by
Cosmo raising his eyes to stare intensely into the part of the room
behind her back. Just as he was making his apology he had noticed the
door under the clock swing open without any sound at all; and there
entered quite noiselessly, too, and with something ambiguous in the very
motion, a young girl (nothing could have been more unexpected) in a sort
of dishabille of a white skirt and a long pink jacket of some very thin
stuff which had a silky shimmer. She made a few steps and stopped. She
was rather short, her hair was intensely black and drawn tightly away
from her forehead. Cosmo felt sure (though he couldn't see) that it was
done in one long plait at the back. Her face was a short oval, her chin
blunt, her nose a little too big and her black eyes perfectly round.
Cosmo had the time to notice all this because astonishment prevented him
from looking away. The girl advanced slowly if with perfect assurance,
and stared unwinkingly at Cosmo, who in the extremity of his
embarrassment got up from his chair. The young girl then stopped short
and for a moment the three persons in the room preserved an absolute
immobility. Then the Countess glanced over her shoulder leisurely and
addressed Cosmo.

"This is Clelia, a niece of my husband." Cosmo made a deep bow to the
possessor of the round black eyes. "I didn't know of her existence till
about a fortnight ago," added Madame de Montevesso carelessly. The
round-eyed girl still staring hard made a curtsey to Cosmo. "My
husband," went on Adèle, "has also two old aunts living here. I have
never seen them. This house is very big."

Cosmo resumed his seat and there was a moment of silence. The girl sat
down in the chair before the writing table sideways, folded her arms on
its back, and rested her chin on her hands. Her round eyes examined
Cosmo with a sort of animal frankness. He thought suddenly that it was
time to bring his visit to an end. He would have risen at once but for
the Countess de Montevesso beginning to speak to him, still in English.
She seemed to have guessed what was passing through his mind.

"Don't go yet for a moment," she said, in a perfectly unconcerned voice,
then paused. "We were talking about your father."

"As to him," said Cosmo, "I have nothing more to say. I have told you
all the truth as far as I am certain of it."

She inclined her head slowly and in the same level voice:

"The Court is here and most of the foreign ambassadors. We are waiting
here for the arrival of the Queen of Sardinia, who may or may not come
within the next month or so. This is considered a good post of
observation, but there is very little to observe just now from the
diplomatic point of view. Most of us have exhausted almost all emotions.
Life has grown suddenly very dull. We gossip a little about each other;
we wait for the end of the Vienna Congress and discuss the latest rumour
that floats about. Yes. The play is over, the stage seems empty. If I
were you I would stay a little longer here."

"I certainly mean to stay here for some time," declared Cosmo with
sudden resolution.

"That's right," she continued in the same indifferent tone. "But wait a
few days before you write home. You have awakened old memories in me.
Inconceivably distant," she went on in a voice more expressionless than
ever, "and the dormant feelings of what seems quite another age."

Cosmo smiled at this. The girl with round eyes was keeping perfectly
still with her watchful stare. Madame de Montevesso seemed to read
Cosmo's thoughts.

"Yes," she insisted. "I feel very old and everything is very far. I am
twenty-six and I have been married very nearly ten years now."

Cosmo, looking at her face, thought that those had been the most
agitated ten years of European history. He said, "I have no doubt that
Yorkshire must seem very far away to you."

"I suppose you write very often home?" she said.

Cosmo defended himself from being one of those people who write letters
about their travels. He had no talent for that; and then what could one
write to a young girl like Henrietta and to a man as austere as his
father, who had so long retired from the world? Cosmo had found it very
difficult. Of course he took care to let them know pretty often that he
was safe and sound.

Adèle could see this point of view. She seemed amused by the innocent
difficulties of a young man having no one but a father and a sister to
write to. She ascertained that he had no intimate friend left behind to
whom he could confide his impressions. Cosmo said he had formed none of
those intimacies that induce a man to share his innermost thoughts and
feelings with somebody else.

"Probably your father was like that too," said Madame de Montevesso. "I
fancy he must have been very difficult to please, and still more
difficult to conquer."

"Oh, as to that," said Cosmo, "I can safely say I've never been
conquered," and he laughed boyishly. He confessed further that he had
the habit of thinking contradictorily about most things. "My father was
never like that," he concluded.

The gravity with which she listened to him now disconcerted him
secretly. At last she nodded and opined that his difficulties had their
source in the liveliness of his sympathies. He declared that he suffered
most at times from the difficulty of making himself understood by men of
his own age.

"And the women?" she asked quietly.

"Oh, the women!" he said, without the slightest levity. "One would not
even try." He raised his eyes and, obeying a sudden impulse, added: "I
think that perhaps you could understand me."

"That would be because I am so much older," she said. Cosmo discovered
in her delicately modelled face, with all its grace and freshness of
youth, an interrogative profundity of expression, the impress of the
problems of life and the conflicts of the soul. The great light of day
had treated her kindly. Bathed in the sunshine entering through the four
windows, she appeared to him wonderful in the glow of her complexion, in
the harmony of her form and the composed nobility of her attitude. He
felt this wonderfulness of her whole person in some sort physically, and
thought that he had looked at her too long. He glanced aside and met the
dark girl's round unwinking stare of a cat ready to fly at one. She had
not moved a hair's breadth, and Cosmo felt reluctant to take his eyes
off her exactly as though she had been a fierce cat. He heard the voice
of the Countess of Montevesso and had to turn to her.

"Well, wait a few days before you write home about . . . Genoa."

"I had a mind to begin a letter yesterday," he said.

"What? Already! Only a few hours after your arrival!"

"Yes. Henrietta is very anxious to hear everything relating to the
Emperor Napoleon."

Madame de Montevesso was genuinely surprised. Her voice lost its equable
charm while she asked what on earth could he have had to tell of
Napoleon that he could not have written to her from Paris.

"Yes. He is in everybody's thoughts and on everybody's lips there," he
said. "Whenever three people come together he is the presence that is
with them. But last night . . ."

He was on the point of telling her of his adventure on the tower when
she struck in:

"The Congress will put an end to all that presently." It checked Cosmo's
expansiveness and he said instead:

"It's very possible. But last night on arriving here I experienced a
curious sensation of his nearness. I went down in the evening to look at
the Port."

"He isn't certainly very far from here. And what are your feelings about
him?"

"Oh," he rejoined lightly, "as about everything else in the
world--contradictory."

Madame de Montevesso rose suddenly, saying:

"I won't ask you, then, as to your feelings about myself." Cosmo stood
up hastily. He was a little the taller of the two but their faces were
nearly on a level. "I should like you to make up your mind about me
before you take up your traveller's pen," continued Adèle. "Come again
this evening. There will be a few people here; and, as you have said,
when a few people come together just now Napoleon is always with them,
an unseen presence. But you will see my father. Do you remember him at
all?"

Cosmo assured her that he remembered the Marquis d'Armand perfectly. He
was on the point of making his parting bow when Madame de Montevesso,
with the two words "_à l'Anglaise_," put out her hand. He took it and
forgot himself in the unexpected sensation of this contact. He was in no
haste to release it when to his extreme surprise, with a slight movement
of her eyes towards the girl at the writing table, Madame de Montevesso
said:

"Did you ever see anything like that?"

Cosmo was taken completely aback. He dropped her hand. He did not know
what to say, and even if it was proper for him to smile. Madame de
Montevesso continued in a voice betraying no sentiment of any kind: "I
can never be sure of my privacy now. Do you understand that I am her
aunt? She wanders all over this palazzo very much like a domestic
animal, only more observant, and she is by no means an idiot. Luckily
she knows no language but Italian."

They had been moving slowly towards the other end of the room, but now
Madame de Montevesso stopped and returned Cosmo's parting bow with a
slight inclination of her head. Before passing round the screen between
him and the door Cosmo glanced back. The girl on the chair had not
stirred.

He had half a hope that the mulatto maid would be waiting for him. But
he saw no one. As he crossed the courtyard he might have thought himself
leaving an uninhabited house. But the streets through which he made his
way to his inn were thronged with people. The day was quite warm.
Already on the edge of the pavements, here and there, there was a
display of flowers for sale; and at every turn he saw more people who
seemed carefree, and the women with their silken shoes and the lace
scarves on their heads appeared to him quite charming. The plaza was a
scene of constant movement. Here and there a group stood still,
conversing in low voices but with expressive gestures. As he approached
his hotel he caught an evanescent sight of the man he had met on the
tower. His cap was unmistakable. Cosmo mended his pace but the man had
disappeared; and after looking in all directions Cosmo went up the steps
of the inn. In his room he found Spire folding methodically some
clothes.

"I saw that man," said Cosmo, handing him his hat.

"Was he following you, sir?" asked Spire.

"No, I saw his back quite near this house."

"I shouldn't wonder if he were coming here," opined Spire.

"In any case I wouldn't have spoken to him in the piazza," said Cosmo.

"Much better not, sir," said the servant.

"After all," said Cosmo, "I don't know that I have anything to say to
him."

From these words Spire concluded that his master had found something
more interesting to occupy his mind. While he went on with his work he
talked to Cosmo, who had thrown himself into an armchair, of some
repairs needed to the carriage, and also informed him that the English
doctor had left a message asking whether Mr. Latham would do him the
honour to take his midday meal with him at the same table as last night.
After a slight hesitation Cosmo assented, and Spire, saying that he
would go and tell them downstairs, left the room.

In the solitude favourable to concentration of thought Cosmo discovered
that he could not think connectedly, either of the fair curls of the
Countess de Montevesso or of the vague story of her marriage. Strictly
speaking he knew nothing of it; and this ignorance interfered with the
process of consecutive thinking; but he formed some images and even came
to the verge of that state in which one sees visions. The obscurity of
her past helped the freedom of his fancies. He had an intuitive
conviction that he had seen her in the fullest brilliance of her beauty
and of the charm of her mind. A woman like that was a great power, he
reflected, and then it occurred to him that, marvellous as she was, she
was not her own mistress.

Some church clock striking loudly the hour roused him up, but before he
went downstairs he paced the floor to and fro several times. And when he
forced himself out of that empty room it was with a profound disgust of
all he was going to see and hear, a momentary repulsion towards the
claims of the world, like a man tearing himself away from the side of a
beloved mistress.




III


Returning that evening to the Palazzo Brignoli, Cosmo found the lantern
under the vaulted roof lighted. There was also a porter in gold-laced
livery and a cocked hat who saluted him, and in the white anteroom with
red benches along the walls two lackeys made ready to divest him of his
cloak. But a man in sombre garments detained Cosmo, saying that he was
the ambassador's valet, and led him away along a very badly lighted
inner corridor. He explained that His Excellency the Ambassador wished
to see Monsieur Latham for a few moments in private before Monsieur
Latham joined the general company. The ambassador's cabinet into which
he introduced Cosmo was lighted by a pair of candelabra. Cosmo was told
that His Excellency was finishing dressing, and then the man
disappeared. Cosmo noticed that there were several doors besides the one
by which he had entered, which was the least conspicuous of them all,
and in fact so inconspicuous, corresponding exactly to a painted panel,
that it might have been called a secret door. Other doors were framed in
costly woods, lining the considerable thicknesses of the walls. One of
them opened without noise and Cosmo saw enter a man somewhat taller than
he had expected to see, with a white head, in a coat with softly
gleaming embroideries and a broad ribbon across his breast. He advanced,
opening his arms wide, and Cosmo, who noticed that one of the hands was
holding a snuffbox, submitted with good grace to the embrace of the
Marquis d'Armand, whose lips touched his cheeks one after another and
whose hands then rested at arm's length on his shoulder for a moment.

"Sit down, _mon enfant_," were the first words spoken, and Cosmo obeyed,
facing the armchair into which the Marquis had dropped. A white meagre
hand set in fine lace moved the candelabra on the table, and Cosmo
good-humouredly submitted to being contemplated in silence. This man in
a splendid coat, white-headed and with a broad ribbon across his breast,
seemed to have no connection whatever with his father's guest, whom as a
boy he remembered walking with Sir Charles amongst deep shrubberies or
writing busily at one end of the long table in the library of Latham
Hall, always with the slightly subdued mien of an exile and an air of
being worried by the possession of unspeakable secrets which he
preserved even when playing at backgammon with Sir Charles in the great
drawing room. Cosmo, returning the gaze of the tired eyes, remarked that
the ambassador looked old but not at all senile.

At last the Marquis declared that he could detect the lineaments of his
old friend in the son's face, and in a voice that was low and kindly put
a series of questions about Sir Charles, about London and his old
friends there; questions which Cosmo, especially as to the latter, was
not always able to answer fully.

"I forget! You are still so young," said the ambassador, recollecting
himself. This young man sitting here before him with a friendly smile
had his friends amongst his own contemporaries, shared the ideas and the
views of his own generation which had grown up since the Revolution, to
whom the Revolution was only a historical fact and whose enthusiasms had
a strange complexion, for the undisciplined hopes of the young make them
reckless in words and sometimes in actions. The Marquis's own generation
had been different. It had had no inducement to be reckless. It had been
born to a settled order of things. Certainly a few philosophers had been
indulging for years in subversive sentimentalism, but the foundations of
Europe seemed unshakable. He noticed Cosmo's expectant attitude and
said:

"I wonder what my dear old friend is thinking of all this."

"It is not very easy to get at my father's thoughts," confessed Cosmo.
"After all, you must know my father much better than I do, Monsieur le
Marquis."

"In the austerity of his convictions your father was more like a
republican of ancient times," said the Marquis seriously. "Does that
surprise you, my young friend? . . ." Cosmo shook his head slightly. . . .
"Yet we always agreed very well. Your father understood every kind of
fidelity. The world had never known him and it will never know him now.
But I, who approached him closely, could have nothing but the greatest
respect for his character and for his far-seeing wisdom."

"I am very glad to hear you say this," interjected Cosmo.

"He was a scornful man," said the Marquis, then paused and repeated once
more: "Yes. _Un grand dédaigneux._ He was that. But one accepted it
from him as one would not from another man, because one felt that it was
not the result of mean grievances or disappointed hopes. Now the old
order is coming back and, whatever my old friend may think of it, he had
his share in that work."

Cosmo raised his head. "I had no idea," he murmured.

"Yes," said the Marquis. "Indirectly if you like. All I could offer to
my Princes was my life, my toil, the sacrifice of my deepest feelings as
husband and father. I don't say this to boast. I could not have acted
otherwise. But for my share of the work, risky, often desperate, and
continuously hopeless as it seemed to be, I have to thank your father's
help, _mon jeune ami._ It came out of that fortune which some day will
be yours. The only thing in all the activities the penetrating mind of
your father was not scornful of was my fidelity. He understood that it
was above the intrigued, the lies, the selfish stupidities of that
exiles' life which we all shared with our Princes. They will never know
how much they owe to that English gentleman. When parting with my wife
and child I was sustained by the thought that his friendship and care
were extended over them and would not fail."

"I have heard nothing of all this," said Cosmo. "Of course I was not
ignorant of the great friendship that united you to him. This is one of
the things that the world does know about my father."

"Have you brought a letter for me?" asked the Marquis. "I haven't heard
from him for a long time. After we returned to France, through the
influence of my son-in-law, communications were very difficult. Ten
years of war, my dear friend, ten years."

"Father very seldom takes a pen in hand now," said Cosmo, "but . . ."

The Marquis interrupted him. "When you write home, my dear friend, tell
him that I never gave way to promptings of mean ambition or an unworthy
vanity. Tell him that I twice declined the Embassy of Madrid which was
pressed on me, and that if I accepted the nomination as a Commissioner
for settling the frontiers with the representatives of the Allied Powers
it was at the cost of my deepest feelings and only to serve my
vanquished country. My secret missions had made me known to many
European statesmen. I knew I was liked. I thought I could do some good.
The Russians, I must say, were quite charming, and you may tell your
father that Sir Charles Stewart clothed his demands in the form of the
most perfect politeness; but all those transactions were based after all
on the right of the strongest. I had black moments and I suffered as a
Frenchman. I suffered . . ."

The Marquis got up, walked away to the other end of the room, then
coming back dropped into the armchair again. Cosmo was too startled by
this display of feeling to rise. The ambassadorial figure in the laced
coat exhaled a deep sigh. "Your father knows that, unlike so many of the
other refugees, I have always remained a Frenchman. One would have paid
any price almost to avoid this humiliation."

Cosmo was gratified by the anxiety of a king's friend to, as it were,
justify himself before his father. He discovered that even this old
royalist had been forced, if only for a moment, to regret the days of
imperial victories. The Marquis tapped his snuffbox, took a pinch of
snuff, and composed himself.

"Of course when this Turin mission was unexpectedly pressed on me I went
to the King himself and explained that, having refused a much higher
post, I could not think of accepting this one. But the King pointed out
that this was an altogether different position. The King of Sardinia was
his brother-in-law. There was nothing to say against such an argument.
His Majesty was also good enough to say that he was anxious to grant me
any favour I might ask. I didn't want any favours but I had to think of
something on the spur of the moment and I begged for a special right of
entrée on days on which there are no receptions. I couldn't resist so
much graciousness," continued the Marquis. "I have managed to keep clear
of prejudices that poison and endanger the hopes of this restoration,
but I am a royalist, a man of my own time. Remember to tell your father
all this, my dear young friend."

"I shall not fail," said Cosmo, wondering within himself at the power of
such a strange argument, yet feeling a liking and respect for that old
man torn between rejoicing and sorrow at the end of his troubled life.

"I should like him to know, too," the Marquis said in his bland and
friendly voice, "that M. de Talleyrand just before he left for Vienna
held out to me the prospect of the London Embassy later. That,
certainly, I would not refuse, if only to be nearer a man to whom my
obligations are immense and only equalled by the affection I had borne
towards him through all those unhappy years."

"My father--" began Cosmo--"I ought to have given you his message
before--told me to give you his love and to tell you that when you are
tired of your grandeurs there is always a large place for you in his
house."

Cosmo was surprised at the sudden movement of the Marquis, who leaned
over the arm of his chair and put his hand over his eyes. For a time
complete silence reigned in the room. Then Cosmo said:

"I think somebody is scratching at the door."

The Marquis sat up and listened, then raising his voice: "You may come
in."

The man in black clothes, entering through the hidden door, stopped at
some distance in a respectful attitude. The Marquis beckoned him to
approach, and the man, bending to his ear, said in a low voice which
was, however, audible to Cosmo: "He is here." The Marquis answered in an
undertone, "He came rather early. He must wait," at which the man
murmured something which Cosmo couldn't hear. He became aware that the
Marquis looked at him irresolutely before he said:

"My dear boy, you will have to make your entrance into my daughter's
salon together with me. I thought of sending you back the way you came,
but as a matter of fact the passage is blocked. . . . Bring him in and
let him sit here after we are gone," he directed the man in black, and
Cosmo only then recognized Bernard, the servant of proved fidelity in
all the misfortunes of the D'Armand family. Bernard withdrew without
responding in any way to Cosmo's smile of recognition. "In my position,"
continued the Marquis, "I have to make use of agents more or less shady.
Those men often object to being seen. Their occupation is risky. There
is a man of that sort waiting in the corridor."

Cosmo said he was at the Marquis's orders, but the ambassador remained
in the armchair, tapping the lid of his snuffbox slightly.

"You saw my daughter this morning, I understand." Cosmo made an
assenting bow. Madame de Montevesso had done him the honour to receive
him in the morning.

"You speak French very well," said the Marquis. "I don't really know why
the English are supposed to be bad linguists. We French are much worse.
Did you two speak French together?"

"No," said Cosmo, "we spoke in English. It was Madame de Montevesso's
own choice."

"She hasn't quite forgotten it, has she?"

"It struck me," said Cosmo, "that your daughter has forgotten neither
the language nor the people, nor the sights of her early life. I was
touched by the fidelity of her memory and the warmth of her feelings."

His own tone had warmth enough in it to make the Marquis look up at him.
There was a short pause. "None of us are likely to forget those days of
noble and infinite kindness. We were but vagrants on a hostile earth. My
daughter could not have forgotten! As long as there is anybody of our
name left . . ."

The Marquis checked himself abruptly, but almost at once went on in a
slightly changed tone: "But I am alone of my name now. I wish I had had
a son so that gratitude could have been perpetuated from generation to
generation and become a traditional thing between our two families. But
this is not to be. Perhaps you didn't know I had a brother. He was much
younger than myself and I loved him as though he had been my son.
Directly I had placed my wife and child in safety, your father insisted
on giving me the means to return to France secretly in order to try and
save that young head. But all my attempts failed. It fell on the
scaffold. He was one of the last victims of the sanguinary madness of
that time. . . . But let us talk of something else. What are your plans,
my young friend?"

Cosmo confessed that he had no plans. He intended to stay in Genoa for
some time. Madame de Montevesso had been good enough to encourage him in
that idea, and really there was such a feeling of leisure in the
European atmosphere that he didn't see why he should make any plans. The
world was enjoying its first breathing time. Cosmo corrected
himself--well no, perhaps not exactly enjoying. To be strictly truthful
he had not noticed much feeling of joy. . . . He hesitated a moment but
the whole attitude of the Marquis was so benevolent and encouraging that
he continued to take stock of his own sensations and continued in the
same strain. There was activity, lots of activity, agitation perhaps,
but no real joy. Or at any rate, no enjoyment. Not even now, after the
foreign troops had withdrawn from France and all the sovereigns of the
world had gone to Vienna.

The Marquis listened with profound attention. "Are those your
impressions, _mon cher enfant?_ Somehow they don't seem very favourable.
But you English are very apt to judge us with severity. I hear very
little of what is going on in France."

The train of his own thoughts had mastered Cosmo, who added, "What
struck me most was the sense of security . . ." he paused for an instant
and the ambassador, bending forward in the chair with the air of a man
attempting an experiment, insinuated gently:

"Not such a bad thing, that sentiment."

In the ardour of his honesty Cosmo did not notice either the attitude or
the tone, though he caught the sense of the words.

"Was it of the right kind," he went on, as if communing with himself,
"or was it the absence of sound thought, and almost of all feeling? M.
le Marquis, I am too young to judge, but one would have thought,
listening to the talk one heard on all sides, that such a man as
Bonaparte had never existed."

"You have been in the society of returned exiles," said the Marquis
after a moment of meditation. "You must judge them charitably. A class
that has been under the ban for years lives on its passions and on
prejudices whose growth stifles not only its sagacity but its visions of
the reality." He changed his tone. "Our present Minister of Foreign
Affairs never communicates with me personally. The only personal letter
I had from him in the last four months was on the subject of procuring
some truffles that grow in this country for the King, and there were
four pages of most minute directions as to where they were to be found
and how they were to be packed and transmitted to Paris. As to my
dispatches, I get merely formal acknowledgments. I really don't know
what is going on except through travellers who naturally colour their
information with their own desires. M. de Talleyrand writes me short
notes now and then, but as he has been himself for months in Vienna he
can't possibly know what is going on in France. His acute mind, his
extraordinary talents are fit to cope with the international situation,
but I suppose he too is uneasy. In fact, my dear young friend, as far as
I can judge, uneasy suspense is the prevailing sentiment all round the
basin of the Mediterranean. The fate of nations still hangs in the
balance."

Cosmo waited a moment before he whispered, "And the fate of some
individual souls perhaps."

The ambassador made no sound till after a whole minute had elapsed, and
then it was only to say:

"I suppose that like many of your young and even old countrymen, you
have formed a project of visiting Elba."

Cosmo at once adopted a conversational tone. "Half-formed at most," he
said. "I was never one of those who like to visit prisons and gaze at
their fellow beings in captivity. A strange taste indeed! I will own to
you, M. le Marquis," he went on boyishly, "that the notion of captivity
is very odious to me, for men, and for animals too. I would sooner look
at a dead lion than a lion in a cage. Yet I remember a young French
friend of mine telling me that we English were the most curious nation
in the world. But as you said, everybody seems to be doing Elba. I
suppose there are no difficulties."

"Not enough difficulties," said the ambassador blandly. "I mean for the
good of all concerned."

"Ah," said Cosmo, and repeated thoughtfully, "All concerned! The other
day in Paris I met Mr. Wycherley on his way home. He seemed to have had
no difficulty at all, not even in Elba. We had quite a long audience.
Mr. Wycherley struck me as a man of blunt feelings. Apparently the
Emperor--after all, the imperial title is not taken away from him
yet----"

The Marquis lowered his head slowly. "No, not yet."

"Well, the Emperor said to him: 'You have come here to look at a wild
beast,' and Mr. Wycherley, who doesn't seem to be at a loss for words,
answered at once: 'I have come here to look at a great man.' What a
crude answer! He is telling this story to everybody. He told me he is
going to publish a pamphlet about his visit."

"Mr. Wycherley is a man of good company. His answer was polite. What
would have been yours, my young friend?"

"I don't think I will ever be called to make any sort of answer to the
great man," said Cosmo.

The Marquis got up with the words: "I think that on the whole you will
be wise not to waste your time. I have here a letter from the French
Consul in Leghorn quoting the latest report he had from Elba. It states
that Bonaparte remains shut up for days together in his private
apartments. The reason given is that he fears attempts on his life being
made by emissaries sent from France and Italy. He is not visible.
Another report states that lately he has expressed great uneasiness at
the movements of the French and English frigates."

The Marquis laid a friendly hand on Cosmo's shoulder. "You cannot
complain of me; I have given you the very latest intelligence. And now
let us join whatever company my daughter is receiving. I think very few
people." He crossed the room, followed by Cosmo, and Cosmo noticed a
distinct lameness in his gait. At the moment of opening the door the
Marquis d'Armand said:

"Your arm, _mon jeune ami._ I am suffering from rheumatism considerably
this evening."

Cosmo hastened to offer his arm, and the Marquis with his hand on the
door said:

"I can hardly walk. I hope I shall be able to go to the audience I have
to-morrow with the King of Sardinia. He is an excellent man but all his
ideas and feelings came to a standstill in '98. It makes all
conversation with him extremely difficult even for me. His ministers are
more reasonable, but that is only because they are afraid."

A low groan escaped the ambassador. He remained leaning with one hand on
Cosmo's shoulder and with the other clinging to the door-handle.

"Afraid of the people?" asked Cosmo.

"The people are being corrupted by secret societies," the Marquis said
in his bland tone. "All Italy is seething with conspiracies. What,
however, they are afraid most of is the Man of Elba."

Cosmo for an instant wondered at those confidences, but a swift
reflection that probably those things were known to everybody who was
anybody in Europe made him think that this familiar talk was merely the
effect of the Marquis's kindness to the son of his old friend. "I think
I can proceed now," said the Marquis, pushing the door open. Cosmo
recognized one of the rooms which he had passed in the morning. It was
the only one of the suite which was fully lighted by a great central
glass chandelier, but even in that only two rows of candles were
lighted. It was a small reception. The rest of the suite presented but a
dim perspective. A semi-circle of heavy armchairs was sparsely occupied
by less than a dozen ladies. There was only one card table in use. All
the faces were turned to the opening door, and Cosmo was struck by the
expression of profound surprise on them all. In one or two it resembled
thunderstruck imbecility. It didn't occur to him that the entrance of
the French King's personal representative leaning on the shoulder of a
completely unknown young man was enough to cause a sensation. A group of
elderly personages, conversing in a remote part of the room, became
silent. The Marquis gave a general greeting by an inclination of his
head, and Cosmo felt himself impelled towards a console between two
windows against which the Marquis leaned, whispering to him, "If I were
to sit down it would be such an affair to get up." The Countess de
Montevesso advanced quickly across the room. Cosmo noticed that her
dress had a long train. She smiled at Cosmo and said to the Marquis
anxiously:

"You are in pain, Papa?"

"A little. . . . Take him away, my dear, now. He was good enough to lend
me his shoulder as far as this."

"_Venez_, M. Latham," said Adèle, "I must introduce you at once to Lady
William Bentick in order to check wild speculation about the appearance
of a mysterious stranger. As it is, all the town will be full of
rumours. People will be talking about you this very night."

Cosmo followed Adèle across the room. She moved slowly and talked
easily with a flattering air of intimacy. She even stopped for a moment
under the great chandelier. "Lady William is talking now with Count
Bubna," she explained to Cosmo, who took a rapid survey of a tall, stout
man in an Austrian general's uniform, with his hair tied up in a queue,
with black moustaches and something cynical though not ill-natured in
his expression. That personage interrupted suddenly his conversation
with a lady, no longer very young, who was dressed very simply, and made
his way to the ambassador, giving in passing a faintly caustic smile and
a keen glance to Cosmo.

"Let me introduce to you Mr. Cosmo Latham," said Adèle. "He is the son
of my father's very old friend. He and I haven't met since we were
children together in Yorkshire. He has just arrived here."

Cosmo bowed, and in response to a slight gesture took a seat close to
the lady, whose preoccupied air struck him with a sort of wonder. She
seemed to have something on her mind. Cosmo could know nothing of the
prevalent gossip that it was only the black eyes of Louise Durazzo that
were detaining Lord William in Italy. He explained in answer to a
careless inquiry as to the latest news from Paris that he had been
travelling very leisurely and that he could not possibly have brought
any fresh news. Lady William looked at him as if she had not seen him
before.

"Oh, I am not very much interested in the news, except in so far that
they may make a longer stay here unnecessary for us."

"I suppose everybody wants to see the shape of the civilized world
settled at last," said Cosmo politely.

"All I want is to go home," declared Lady William. She was no longer
looking at him and had the appearance of a person not anxious to listen
to anybody's conversation. Cosmo glanced about the room. The card game
had been resumed. The Austrian general was talking to the Marquis with
Madame de Montevesso standing close to them, while other persons kept at
a respectful distance. Lady William seemed to be following her own
thoughts with a sort of impassive abstraction. Cosmo felt himself at
liberty to go on with his observations, and sweeping his glance round
noticed, sitting half hidden by the back of the armchair Adèle had
vacated, the dark girl with round black eyes, whom he had seen that
morning. To his extreme surprise she smiled at him and, not content with
that, gave other plain signs of recognition. He thought he could do no
less than get up and make her a bow. By the time he sat down again he
became aware that he had attracted the notice of all the ladies seated
before the fire. One of them put up her eyeglasses to look at him, two
others started talking low together with side glances in his direction,
and there was not one that did not look interested. This disturbed him
much less than the fixed stare of the young creature, which became
fastened on him unwinkingly. Even Lady William gave him a short look of
curiosity.

"I understand that you have just arrived in Genoa."

"Yes. Yesterday afternoon late. This is my first appearance."

He meant that it was his first appearance in society and he continued:

"And I don't know a single person in this room even by name. Of course I
know that it is Count Bubna who is talking to the Marquis, but that is
all."

"Ah," said Lady William with a particular intonation which made Cosmo
wonder what he could have said to provoke scepticism. But Lady William
was asking herself how it was that this young Englishman seemed to be
familiar with the freakish girl who was an object of many surmises in
Genoa, and whose company, it was understood, Count Helion of Montevesso
had imposed upon his wife. Meantime Cosmo, with the eyes of all the
women concentrated upon him with complete frankness, began to feel
uncomfortable. Lady William noticed it and out of pure kindness spoke to
him again.

"If I understood rightly you have known Madame de Montevesso from
childhood."

"I can't call myself really a childhood's friend. I was so much away
from home," explained Cosmo. "But she lived for some years in my
parents' house and everybody loved her there; my mother, my father, my
sister--and it seems to me, looking back now, that I too must have loved
her at that time; though we very seldom exchanged more than a few words
in the course of the day."

He spoke with feeling and glanced in the direction of the group near the
console where the head of Adèle appeared radiant under the sparkling
crystals of the lustre. Lady William, bending sideways a little, leaned
her cheek against her hand in a listening attitude. Cosmo felt that he
was expected to go on speaking, but it seemed to him that he had nothing
more to say. He fell back upon a general remark.

"I think boys are very stupid creatures. However, I wasn't so stupid as
not to feel that Adèle d'Armand was very intelligent and quite
different from us all. Her very gentleness set her apart. Moreover,
Henrietta and I were younger. To my sister and myself she seemed almost
grown up. A couple of years makes a very great difference at that age.
Soon after she went away we children heard that she was married. She
seemed lost to us then. Presently she went back to France, and once
there she was lost indeed. When one looked towards France in those days
it seems to me there was nothing to be seen but Napoleon. And then her
marriage, too. A Countess de Montevesso didn't mean anything to us. I
came here expecting to see a stranger."

Cosmo checked himself. It was impossible to say whether Lady William had
heard him, or even whether she had been listening at all, but she asked:

"You never met Count Helion?"

"I haven't the slightest idea of the man. He is not in this room, is he?
What is he like?"

Lady William looked amused for a moment at the artless curiosity of the
Countess de Montevesso's young friend; but it was in an indifferent tone
that she said:

"Count Helion is a man of immense wealth which he amassed in India
somewhere. He is much older than his wife. More than twice her age."
Cosmo showed his surprise, and Lady William continued smoothly: "Of
course all the world knows that Adèle has been a model wife."

Cosmo noted the faintest possible shade of emphasis on those last words
and thought to himself: "That means she is not happy and that the world
knows it." But, several men having approached the circle, the
conversation became general. He vacated his seat by the side of Lady
William and got introduced by Adèle to several people, amongst whom was
a delicate young woman splendidly dressed and of a slightly Jewish type
who, though she was the wife of General Count Bubna, commander-in-chief
of the Austrian troops and the representative of Austria at the Court of
Turin, behaved with a strange timidity and appeared almost too shy to
speak. A simple Madame Ferrati, or so at least Cosmo heard her name, a
lady with white tousled hair, had an aggressive manner. Cosmo remarked
in the course of the evening that she seemed rather to be persecuting
Lady William, who, however, remained amiably abstracted and did not seem
to mind anything. The Marquis, getting away from the console, had seated
himself near the little Madame Bubna. This, Cosmo thought, was an
unavoidable sort of thing for him to do. A young man with a grave manner
and something malicious in his eye, apparently a First Secretary of the
Embassy, informed Cosmo shortly after they had been made known to each
other that "the wife of the general would not naturally be received in
Vienna society," and that this was the secret of Bubna sticking to his
Italian command so long, even now when really all the excitement was
over. Of course he was very much in love with his wife. He used to give
her balls twice a week at the expense of the Turin Municipality. Old
Bubna understood the art of pillaging to perfection, but apart from that
he was a _parfait galant homme_ and an able soldier. Bonaparte had a
very great liking for him. Bubna was the only friend Bonaparte had in
this room. He meant sympathy as man for man. Years ago when Bubna was in
Paris he got on very well with the Emperor. Bonaparte knew how to
flatter a man. It was worth while to sit up half the night to hear Bubna
talking about Bonaparte. "I am posting you up like this," concluded the
secretary, "because I see you are in the intimacy of the Marquis and of
Madame de Montevesso here."

He went away then to talk to somebody else, and presently Madame de
Montevesso, passing close to Cosmo, whispered to him, "Stay to the
last," and went on without waiting for his answer. Cosmo amongst all the
groups engaged in animated conversation felt rather lonely, totally
estranged from the ideas those people were expressing to each other. He
could not possibly be in sympathy with the fears and the hopes, strictly
personal, and with the royalist-legitimist enthusiasms of these
advocates of an order of things that had been buried for a quarter of a
century and now was paraded like a rouged and powdered corpse putting on
a swagger of life and revenge. Then he reflected that in this room, at
any rate, it was probably nothing but scandalous gossip and trivial talk
of futile intrigues. There was no need for him to be indignant. He was
even amused at himself, and looking about him in a kindlier frame of
mind he perceived that the person nearest to him was that strange girl
with the round eyes. She had kept perfectly still on her uncomfortable
stool like a captured savage. Her green flounced skirt was spread on
each side of the seat. The bodice of her dress, which was black, was cut
low, her bare arms were youthfully red and immature. Her hair was done
up smoothly and pulled up from her forehead in the manner of the
portraits of the 15th Century.

"Why do they dress her in this bizarre manner?" thought Cosmo. It
couldn't be Adèle's conception. Perhaps of the Count himself. Yet that
didn't seem likely. Perhaps it was her own atrocious taste. But if so it
ought to have been repressed. He reflected that there could be nothing
improper in him talking to the niece of the house. He would try his
conversational Italian. With the feeling of venturing on a doubtful
experiment he approached her from the back, sat down at her elbow, and
waited. She could not possibly remain unaware of him being there.

At last she turned her head for a point-blank stare, and once she had
her eyes on him she never attempted to take them away. Cosmo uttered
carefully a complimentary phrase about her dress, which was received in
perfect silence. Her carmine lips remained as still as her round black
eyes for quite a long time. Suddenly in a low tone, with an accent which
surprised Cosmo but which he supposed to be Piedmontese, and with a sort
of spiteful triumph, she said:

"I knew very well it would suit me. You think it does?"

Her whole personality had such an aggressive mien that Cosmo, startled
and amused, hastened to say, "Undoubtedly," lest she should fly at his
eyes.

She showed him her teeth in a grin of savage complacency, and the
subject seemed exhausted. Cosmo set himself the task to daunt her by a
steady gaze. In less than two seconds he regretted his venture. He felt
certain that she would not be the one to look away first. There was not
the slightest doubt about that. In order to cover his retreat he let his
eyes wander vaguely about the room, smiled agreeably, and said: "Your
uncle is not here. Shall I have the pleasure of seeing him this
evening?"

"No," she said. "You won't see him this evening. But he knows you have
been here this morning."

This was, strictly speaking, news to Cosmo, but he said at once and with
great indifference:

"Why shouldn't he? Probably Madame de Montevesso has told him. I used to
know your aunt when she was younger than you are, signorina."

"How do you know how old I am?"

Cosmo asked himself if she would ever wink those black eyes of hers.

"I know that you are not a hundred years old."

This struck her as humorous, because there was a sound as of a faint
giggle which, generally speaking, is a silly kind of sound but in her
case had a disturbing quality. It was followed by the hoarse
declaration:

"Aunt didn't. I told Uncle. I looked a lot at you in the morning. Why
didn't you look at me?"

"I was afraid of being indiscreet," said Cosmo readily, concealing his
astonishment.

"What silliness," she commented scornfully. "And this evening too! I was
looking at you all the time and you did nothing but look at all those
witches here, one after another."

"I find all the ladies in the room perfectly charming," said Cosmo.

"You lie. I suppose you do nothing else from morning till night."

"I am sorry you have such a bad opinion of me, but it being what it is,
hadn't I better go away?"

"Directly I set eyes on you I knew you were one of that sort."

"And did you impart your opinion of me to your uncle?" asked Cosmo. He
could be no more offended with that girl than if she had been an
unmannerly animal. Her peculiar stare remained unchanged but her general
expression softened for a moment.

"No. But I took care to tell him that you were a very handsome
gentleman. . . . You are a very handsome gentleman."

What surprised Cosmo was not the downright statement but the thought
that flashed through his mind that it was as dreadful as being told that
one was good to eat. For a time he stared without any thought of
unwinking competition. He was not amused. Distinctly not. He asked:

"Where were you born?"

"How can I tell? In the mountains, I suppose. Somewhere where you will
never go. How can it possibly concern you?"

Cosmo offered his apology for his indiscretion, and she received it with
a sort of uncomprehending scorn. She said after a pause: "None of those
witches, young or old, ever speak to me. And even you didn't want to
speak to me. You only spoke to me . . . Oh, no! I know why you spoke to
me."

"Why did I speak to you?" asked Cosmo thoughtfully. "Won't you tell me?"

Upon the firm roundness of that high-coloured face came a subtle change
which suggested something in the nature of cunning, and the rough,
somewhat veiled voice came from between the red lips which had no more
charm or life than the painted lips carved in a piece of wood.

"If I were to tell you would be as wise as myself."

"Where would be the harm of me being as wise as yourself?" said Cosmo,
trying to be playful but somehow missing the tone of playfulness so
completely that he was struck by his failure himself.

"If you were as wise as myself you would never come to this house again
and I don't want you to stay away," was the answer, delivered in a
hostile tone.

Cosmo said, "You don't! Well, at any rate it can't be because of
kindness, so I don't thank you for it." He said this with extreme
amiability. Becoming aware that people were beginning to leave, he
observed, out of the corner of his eye, that nobody went away without
glancing in their direction. Then the departure of Lady William caused a
general stir and gave Cosmo the occasion to get up and move away. Lady
William gave him a gracious nod, and the Marquis, coming up to him,
introduced him at the last moment to General Count Bubna just as that
distinguished person was making ready to take his wife away. Everybody
was standing up and for the first time Cosmo felt himself completely
unobserved. Obeying a discreet sign of the Countess Montevesso, he moved
unaffectedly in the direction of a closed door, the white and gold door
he remembered well from his morning visit. When he had got near to it
and within reach of the handle he turned about. He had the view of the
guests' backs as they moved slowly out. Adèle looked over her shoulder
for a moment with an affirmative nod. He understood it, hesitated no
longer, opened the door, and slipped through without, so far as he could
judge, being seen by anybody.

It was as he had thought. He found himself in Madame de Montevesso's
boudoir in which he had been received that morning.




IV


He shut the door behind him gently and remained between it and the
screen. He had expected to be followed at once by Adèle. What could be
detaining her? But he remembered the remarkable proportions of that
suite of reception rooms. He had seen some apartments in Paris, but
nothing quite so long as that. The old Marquis would no doubt conduct
the little Madame Bubna to the very door of the anteroom. The ambassador
of The Most Christian King owed that attention to the representative of
His Apostolic Majesty and Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian troops.
This was the exact form which his thought took. The Christian King, the
Apostolic Majesty--all those submerged heads were bobbing up out of the
subsiding flood.

He pictured them to himself in their mental simplicity and with their
grand air; the Marquis magnificent and ageing, and the dutiful daughter
by his side with her radiant head and her divine form. It was impossible
to believe that these two had also been submerged at one time.

All those people were mere playthings, reflected Cosmo without a pang.
But who or what was playing with them? he thought further, boldly, and
remained for a moment as if amused by the marvellousness of it, in the
manner of people watching the changes on the stage. But what could have
become of them?

She might next moment be opening the door. Could she have made him stay
behind because she wanted to speak with him alone? Why, yes, obviously.
Cosmo did not ask himself what she wanted to talk to him about. It was
no wonder that he felt, it was a subtle emotion resembling impatience
for the arrival of a promised felicity of an indefinite kind. All this
was by no means poignant. It was merely delightfully disturbing.

"I shall have a tête-à-tête; that's clear," he thought, as he
advanced into the room. The air all around him was delightfully warm.
Whatever she would have to say would be wonderful because of her voice.
He would look her in the face. She did not intimidate him and it was
impossible to have too much of that. After all, he thought, immensely
amused, it was only Adèle, Ad----

His mental monologue was cut short by the shock of perceiving, seated on
the painted sofa, a man who was looking at him in perfect silence and
immobility. The fact was that Count Helion, having come into the boudoir
sooner than his wife had expected him to do, had directed his eyes to
the screen ever since he had heard the opening and the shutting of the
door. One of his hands was resting on his thigh, the other hung down
holding negligently a number of some gazette which was partly resting on
the floor. Though not very big, that piece of paper attracted Cosmo's
eyes; and it was in this way that he became aware of the brown fingers
covered with rings, of the gaunt legs encased in silk stockings, and of
the crossed feet in dress shoes with gold buckles, almost before he took
in the impression of the broad but lean face which seemed to have been
stained with walnut juice long enough for the stain to have worn down
thin, letting the native pallor come through. The same tint extended to
the bald top of the head. But what was really extraordinary was the
hair: two patches of black behind each temple, obviously dyed. The man,
as to whose identity Cosmo could have no doubt, got up, displaying the
full length of his bony frame, in a tense and soldierly stiffness
associated with cross-belts and a cowhide knapsack on the back. "A
grenadier," thought Cosmo, startled by this unexpected meeting, which
also caused him profound annoyance, as though he had been induced to
walk into a trap. What he could not understand was why the man should
make that grimace at him. It convulsed his whole physiognomy, involving
his lips, his cheeks, and his very eyes in a sort of spasm. The most
awful thing was that it stayed there. . . . "Why, it's a smile," thought
Cosmo, with sudden relief. It was so sudden that it broke into a smile
without any particular volition of his own. Thereupon the face of Count
Helion recovered its normal aspect and Cosmo heard his voice for the
first time. It proceeded from the depths of his chest. It was resonant
and blurred and portentous with an effect of stiffness somehow in accord
with the man's bearing. It informed Cosmo that Count Helion had been
waiting in the Countess's boudoir on purpose to make his acquaintance,
while in the man's eyes there was a watchfulness as though he had been
uttering a momentous disclosure and was anxious as to its effect. A
perfectly horizontal, jet-black moustache underlining the nose of Count
Helion, which was broad at the base and thin at the end, suggested comic
possibilities in that head, which had too much individuality to be
looked upon by Cosmo simply as the head of Adèle's husband; and Cosmo
hardly looked at it in that light. His hold on that fact was slippery.
He preserved his equanimity perfectly and said that he himself had
wondered whether he would have the pleasure of making the Count's
acquaintance that evening. Both men sat down.

"My occupations kept me late to-night," said the Count. "The courier
came in."

He pointed with his fingers to the gazette lying on the floor, and Cosmo
asked if there were any news.

"In the gazette, no. At least nothing interesting. The world is full of
vanities and scandals, rumours of conspiracies. Very poor stuff. I don't
know any of those people the papers mention every day. That's more my
wife's affair. For years now she has spent about ten months of every
year in Paris or near Paris. I am a provincial. My interests are in the
orphanage I have founded in my native country. I am also building an
asylum for . . ."

He got up suddenly, approached the mantelpiece in three strides, and
turned round exactly like a soldier in the ranks of a company changing
front. He was wearing a blue coat cut away in front and having a long
skirt, something recalling the cut of a uniform, though the material was
fine and there was a good deal of gold lace about it, as also on his
white satin waistcoat. Cosmo recalled the vague story he had heard about
Count de Montevesso having served in more than one army before being
given the rank of general by the King of Piedmont. The man had been
drilled. Cosmo wondered whether he had ever been caned. He was a
military adventurer of the commonest type. Some of them have been known
to return with a fortune got by pillage and intrigue and possibly even
by real talents of a sort in the service of oriental courts full of
splendours and crimes, tyrannies and treacheries and dark drama of
ambition, or love.

"He is the very thing," Cosmo exclaimed mentally, gating at the stiff
figure leaning against the mantelpiece. Of course he got his fortune in
India. What was remarkable about him was that he had managed to get away
with his plunder, or at any rate a part of it, considerable enough to
enable him to make a figure in the world and marry Adèle d'Armand in
England. That was only because of the Revolution. In royal France he
would not have had the ghost of a chance; and even as it was, only the
odious laxity of London society in accepting rich strangers had given
him his opportunity. Cosmo, forcing himself to envisage this dubious
person as the husband of Adèle, felt very angry with the light-minded
tolerance extended to foreigners characteristic of a certain part of
London society. It was perfectly outrageous.

"Where the devil can my wife be?"

Those words made Cosmo start, though they had not been uttered very
loudly. Almost mechanically he answered: "I don't know," and noticed
that Count Helion was staring at him in a curiously unintelligent
manner.

"I was really asking myself," muttered the latter and stirred uneasily,
without however taking his elbow off the mantelpiece. "It's a natural
thought since we are, God knows why, kept waiting for her here. I wasn't
aware I had spoken. Living for many years amongst people who didn't
understand any European language--I had hundreds of them in my palace in
Sindh--I got into the habit of talking aloud, strange as it may appear
to you."

"Yes," said Cosmo, with an air of innocence. "I suppose one acquires all
sorts of strange habits in those distant countries. We in England have a
class of men who return from India enriched. They are called nabobs.
Some of them have most objectionable habits. Unluckily their mere wealth
. . ."

"There is nothing to compare with wealth," interrupted the other in a
soldierly voice and paused, then continued in the same tone of making a
verbal report: "When I was in England I had the privilege to know many
people of position. They were very kind to me. They didn't seem to think
lightly of wealth."

Each phrase came curt, detached, but it was evident that the man did not
mean to be offensive. Those statements originated obviously in sincere
conviction; and after the Count had uttered them there appeared on his
forehead the horizontal wrinkles of unintelligent worry. Cosmo asked
himself whether the man before him was not really very stupid. Under the
elevated eyebrows his eyes looked worn and empty of all thought.

"Lots of money, I mean," M. de Montevesso began again. "Not your savings
and scrapings. Money that one acquires boldly and enough of it to be
profuse with."

"Is he going to treat me to vulgar boasting?" thought Cosmo. He wished
that Adèle would come in and interrupt this tête-à-tête which was so
very different from the one he had been expecting.

"I daresay money is very useful," he assented, with airy scorn which he
thought might put an end to the subject. But his interlocutor persisted.

"You can't know anything about it," he affirmed, then added
unexpectedly: "Money will give you even ideas. Lots of ideas. The worst
of it is that any one of them may turn out damnable. Well, yes. There is
of course danger in money, but what of that?"

"It can scarcely be if it is used for good works, as you seem to use
it," said Cosmo with polite indifference. He meant it to be final, but
Count de Montevesso was not to be suppressed.

"It leads one into worries," he said. "For instance, that orphanage of
mine, it is really a very large place. I am trying to be a benefactor to
my native province, but I want it to be in my own way. Well, since the
Restoration, the priests are trying to get hold of it. They want to turn
it to the glory of God and to the service of religion. I have seen
enough of all sorts of religions not to know what that means. No sooner
had the King entered Paris than the Bishop wrote to me pointing out that
there was no chapel and suggesting that I should build one and appoint a
chaplain. That Bishop is . . ."

He threw up his head suddenly and Cosmo became aware of the presence of
Adèle without having heard even the rustle of her dress. He stood up
hastily. There was a short silence.

"I see the acquaintance is made," said Adèle, looking from one to the
other. Her eyes lingered on Cosmo and then turned to her husband. "I
didn't know you would be already here. I had to help my father to his
room. I would have come at once here but he detained me." Again she
turned to Cosmo. "You will pardon me."

"I found Count Helion here. I have not been alone for a minute," said
Cosmo. "You owe me no apologies. I was delighted to make your husband's
acquaintance, even if you were not here to introduce us to each other."

This was said in English and Count Helion by the mantelpiece waited till
Cosmo had finished before he asked, "Where's Clelia?"

"I have sent her to bed," said Countess de Montevesso. "Helion, my
father would like to see you this evening."

"I am at the orders of M. le Marquis."

The grenadier-like figure at the mantelpiece did not stir, and those
words were followed only by a slight twitch in the muscles of the face
which might have had a sardonic intention. "To-night, at once," he
repeated. "But with Mr. Latham here?"

"Pray don't mind me, I am going away directly," said Cosmo. "It is
getting late."

"In Italy it is never late. I hope to find you here when I return. As
the husband of a daughter of the house of D'Armand I know what is due to
the name of Latham. Am I really expected at once?"

Adèle moved forward a step or two, speaking rapidly. "There has been
some news from Elba, or about Elba, which gives a certain concern to my
father. As you have been to the public knowledge in direct touch with
people from Elba my father would like to have your opinion."

Count Helion changed his attitude, and leaning his shoulders against the
mantelpiece addressed himself to Cosmo.

"It was the most innocent thing in the world. It was something about the
project for the exploitation of the Island of Pianosa. Napoleon sent his
treasurer here to get in touch with a banker. I am a man of affairs. The
banker consulted me--as a man who knew the spot. It's true I know the
spot, but if you hear it said that it is because of my relations with
the Dey of Algiers, pray don't believe it. I am in no way in touch with
the Barbary States."

He made a step forward, and then another, and stood still. "You two had
better sit down and talk. Yes, sit down and talk. Renew the acquaintance
of your early youth . . . your early youth," he repeated in a faint
voice. "Those youthful friendships . . ." he made a convulsive grimace
which Cosmo had discovered to be the effect of a smile. "There is
something so charming in those youthful friendships. As to myself I
don't remember ever being youthful." He stepped out towards the door
through which Cosmo had seen Clelia enter that morning. "Let me find you
when I return, enjoying yourselves most sentimentally. Most delightful."

His long stiff back swayed in the doorway and the door came to with a
crash.

Cosmo and Adèle looked at each other with a smile. Cosmo, hat in hand,
asked just audibly, "I suppose I had better stay?" She made an
affirmative sign and, moving away from him, put her foot on the marble
fender of the fireplace where nothing was left but hot ashes hiding a
reddish glow.




V


Cosmo, ill at ease, remained looking at her. He was in doubt what the
sign she had made meant, a nervous and imperious gesture, which might
have been a command for him to go or to stay. In his irresolution he
gazed at her, thinking that she was lovely to an incredible degree and
that the word "radiant" applied to her extraordinary aptness. Light
entered into her composition. And it was not the cold light of marble.
"She actually glows," he said to himself, amazed, "like ripe fruit in
the foliage, like a big flower in the shade."

"Don't gaze at my blushes," said Madame de Montevesso in an even tone
tinged with a little mockery and a little bitterness. "Would you believe
that when I was a girl I was so shy that I used to blush crimson
whenever anybody looked at me or spoke to me? It's a failing which does
not meet with much sympathy. And yet my suffering was very real. It
would reach such a pitch at times that I was ready to cry."

"Shall I go away?" asked Cosmo in a deadened voice. He waited for a
moment while she seemed to debate in her mind the answer to the
question. In his fear of being sent away he went on: "God knows I don't
want to leave you. And after all the Count is coming back and . . ."

"Oh, yes, he is coming back. Sit down. Yes. It would be better. Sit
down. . . ." Cosmo sat down where he could see her admirable shoulders,
the roundness of her averted head, _coiffée en boucles_ and girt with a
gold circlet, the shadowy retreating view of her profile. The long
drapery of her train flowed to the ground in a dark blue shimmer. . . .
"He is inevitable. He has always been inevitable," came further from her
lips which he couldn't see, for the mirror above the mantelpiece
reflected nothing but her forehead with the gold mist of her hair above.

Cosmo remained silent. For nothing in the world would he have made a
sound. He held his breath with expectation; and in the extreme tension
of his whole being the lights grew dim around him, while her white
shoulders, the thick clustering curls, the arm on which she leaned, and
the other bare arm hanging inert by her side, seemed the only source of
light in the room.

"You don't know me at all," began the Countess de Montevesso. "I don't
charge you with forgetting; but the little you may remember of me cannot
be of any use. It is only natural that I should be a stranger to you.
But you cannot be a stranger to me. For one thing you were a boy and
then you were not a child of outcasts without a country, of refugees
with a ruined past and with no future. You were a young Latham, as
rooted in your native soil as the old trees of your park. Even then
there seemed to me something enviable about you."

She turned her head a little to glance at him. "You had no idea what it
was like after we had gone to London. My ignorance of the world was so
profound that I felt ill at ease in it. I hoped I had an attractive
face, but I only discovered that I was pretty from the remarks of the
people in the street I overheard. I spent my life by the side of my
mother's couch. I never went out except attended by my father or by
Aglae. My only amusement was to play a game of chess now and then with
an old doctor, also a refugee, who looked after my mother, or listen to
the conversation of the people who came to see us. Amongst them there
were all the prominent men and women of the old régime. Refugees. They
seldom spoke the truth to each other, and yet they were no more stupid
than the rest of the world. Nobody could be more good-natured and better
company, more frivolous or more inconsiderate. I have seen women of the
highest rank work ten hours a day to get bread for their children, but
they also slandered one another, told falsehoods about their conduct and
their work, and quarrelled among themselves in the style of washerwomen.
Morals were even looser than in the times before the Revolution. Manners
were forgotten. Every transgression was excused in those who were
regarded as good royalists. I don't mean this to apply to the great body
of the refugees. Some of them led irreproachable lives. Round our
Princes there were some most absurd intrigues. I didn't know much of all
this, but I remember my poor father's helpless indignations and my own
appalled disgust at the things I could not help hearing and seeing."

She turned her head to look at Cosmo. "I am telling you all this to give
you some idea of the air I had to breathe," she said in a changed tone.
"I don't think it contaminated me. I felt its odiousness; but all this
seemed without remedy. I didn't even suffer much from it. What I
suffered most from was our domestic anxieties; my mother's fears lest
the small resources we had to live on should fail us altogether. Our
daily crust of bread seemed to depend on political events in Europe, and
they were going against us. Battles, negotiations, everything. A blight
seemed to have fallen on the royalist cause. My mother didn't conceal
her distress. What touched me more still was the careworn, silent
anxiety of my poor father."

She paused, looking at Cosmo intently, meeting his eyes fixed on her
face. "I was getting on for sixteen," she continued. "No one ever paid
the slightest attention to me. The only genuine passion in my heart was
filial love. . . . But is it any good in going on? And then I can't tell
what you may have heard already."

"All I have heard," said Cosmo in a tone of profound respect, "is that
Adèle de Montevesso's life has been irreproachable."

"I remember the time when all the world was doing its best to make it
impossible. Would it shock you very much if I told you that I don't care
at all about its good opinion now? There was a time when it would put
the worst construction possible on my distress, on my bewilderment, on
my very innocence."

"Why should the world do that to you?" asked Cosmo.

"Why? But I see you know nothing. I met my husband first at a select
concert that was given by the music-master of the late Queen of France.
My mother was feeling a little better and insisted on my going out a
little. Those were small fashionable affairs. I had a good voice myself,
and that evening I sang with Madame Seppio. An English gentleman--his
name doesn't matter--presented M. de Montevesso to me as a friend of his
just returned from India and anxious to be introduced to the best
society. What with my usual shyness and the unattractive appearance of
the man, I don't think I received his attentions very well. There was
really no reason I should notice him particularly. It wasn't difficult
to see that he had not the manners of a man of the world. Where could he
have acquired them? He had left his village at seventeen, he enlisted in
the Irish Regiment which served in France, then he deserted, perhaps. I
only know that some years afterwards he was a captain in the service of
Russia. From there he made his way to India. I believe the
governor-general used him as a sort of unofficial agent amongst native
princes, but he got into some scrape with the company. By what steps he
managed to get on to the back of an elephant and command the army of a
native prince I really don't know. And even if I had known then it would
not have made him more interesting in my eyes. I was relieved when he
made me a deep bow with his hand on his heart and went away. He left a
most fugitive impression, but the very next morning he sent his English
friend to ask my parents for my hand. That friend was a nobleman, a man
of honour, and the offers he was empowered to make were so generous that
my parents thought they must tell me of them. I was so astonished that
at first I couldn't speak. I simply went away and shut myself up in my
room. They were not people to press me for an answer. The poor worried
dears thought that I wouldn't even consent to contemplate this marriage;
while I, shut up in my room--I was afraid, remembering the way they had
spoken to me of that offer, that they would reject it without consulting
me any further. I sent word by Aglae that I would give my answer next
day and that I begged to be left to myself. Then I escaped from the
house, followed by Aglae, who was never so frightened in her life, and
went to see the wife of that friend of my present husband. I begged her
to send at once for General de Montevesso--at that time he called
himself General. The King of Sardinia had given him this rank in
acknowledgment of some service that his great wealth had enabled him to
render to the Court of Turin. That lady of course had many scruples
about doing something so highly unconventional, but at last, overcome by
the exaltation of my feelings, she consented."

"She did that?" murmured Cosmo. "What an extraordinary thing!"

"Yes. She did that, instead of taking me home. People will do
extraordinary things to please a man of fabulous wealth. She sent out
two or three messengers to look for him all over the town. They were
some time in finding him. I waited. I was perfectly calm. I was calmer
than I am now, telling you my story. I was possessed by the spirit of
self-sacrifice. I had no misgivings. I remember even how cold I was in
that small drawing room with a big coal fire. He arrived out of breath.
He was splendidly dressed and behaved very ceremoniously. I felt his
emotion without sharing it. I, who used to blush violently at the
smallest provocation, didn't feel the slightest embarrassment in
addressing that big stiff man so much older than myself. I could not
appreciate what a fatal mistake I was committing by telling him that I
didn't care for him in the least and probably never should; but that if
he would secure my parents' future comfort my gratitude would be so
great that I could marry him, without reluctance and be his loyal friend
and wife for life. He stood there stiff and ominous and told me that he
didn't flatter himself with the possibility of inspiring any deeper
feeling.

"We stood there facing each other for a bit. I felt nothing but an
inward glow of satisfaction at having, as I thought, acted honourably.
As to him I think he was simply made dumb with rage. At last he bowed
with his hands on his heart and said that he would not even ask now for
the favour of kissing my hand. I appreciated his delicacy at that
moment. It would have been an immense trial to my shyness. I think now
that he was simply afraid of putting my hand to his lips lest he should
lose his self-control and bite it. He told me later, in one of those
moments when people don't care what they say, that at that moment he
positively hated me, not the sight of me, you understand, but my
aristocratic insolence."

She paused, and in the youthful sincerity of his sympathy Cosmo uttered
a subdued exclamation of distress. Madame de Montevesso looked at him
again and then averted her face.

"I heard afterwards some gossip to the effect that he had been jilted by
a girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of some captain on half-pay,
and that he proposed to me simply to show her that he could find a girl
prettier, of higher rank, and in every way more distinguished that would
consent to be his wife. I believe that it was this that prevented him
from drawing back before my frankness. As to me, I went home, seeing
nothing, hearing nothing, caring for nothing, as though I had done with
the world, as though I had taken the veil. I can find no other
comparison for the peace that was in me. I faced my mother's reproaches
calmly. She was of course very much hurt at my not confiding in her at
this crisis of my life. My father, too. But how could I have confided in
them in this matter on which their security and welfare depended? How
could I have confided in any of the men and women around me who seemed
to me as if mad, whose conduct and opinions I despised with youthful
severity as foolish and immoral? There was one human being in the world
in whom I might perhaps have confided, that perhaps would have
understood me. That was your father, Cosmo. But he was three hundred
miles away. There was no time. Tell me, did he understand? Has he cast
me out of his thoughts for ever?"

"My father," said Cosmo, "has lived like a hermit for years. There was
nothing to make him forget you. Yes, he was a man in whom you could have
confided. He would have understood you. That doesn't mean to say that he
would have approved. I wish he had been by your side. He would have
brought pressure on your parents with the authority of an old and tried
friend."

"And benefactor," struck in the Countess de Montevesso. "My father, I
believe, had an inkling of the truth. He begged me again and again to
think well of what I was doing. I told him that I was perfectly
satisfied with what I had done. It was perfectly true then. I had
satisfied my conscience by telling my suitor that I could never love
him. I felt strangely confident that I could fulfil the duties of my new
position, and I was absorbed by the happiness of having saved my parents
from all anxiety for the future. I was not aware of having made any
sacrifice. Probably if I had been twenty or more I would have been less
confident; perhaps I wouldn't have had the courage! But at that age I
didn't know that my whole life was at stake. Three weeks afterwards I
was married.

"As you see, there was no time lost. During that period our intercourse
was of the most formal kind only I never even attempted to observe him
with any attention. He was very stiff and ceremonious, but he was in a
hurry, because I believe he was afraid from his previous experience that
I would change my mind. His usual answer to the expression of all my
wishes and to most of my speeches was a profound bow--and, sometimes, I
was amused. In the lightness of my heart a thought would come to me that
a lifetime on such terms would be a funny affair. I don't say he
deceived me in anything. He had brought an immense fortune out of India
and the world took him at its face value. With no more falsehood than
holding his tongue and watching his behaviour he kept me in the dark
about his character, his family, his antecedents, his very name. When we
first were married he was ostentatious and rather mean at the same time.
His long life in India added the force of oriental jealousy to that
which would be in a sense natural to a man of his age. Moreover, his
character was naturally disagreeable. The only way he could make the
power of his great fortune felt was by hurting the feelings of other
people, of his servants, of his dependents, of his friends. His wife
came in for her share. An older and cleverer woman with a certain power
of deception and caring for the material pleasures of life could have
done better for herself and for him in the situation in which I was
placed, but I, almost a child, with an honest and proud character and
caring nothing for what wealth could give, I was perfectly helpless. I
was being constantly surprised and shocked by the displays of evil
passions and his fits of ridiculous jealousy which were expressed in
such a coarse manner that they could only arouse my resentment and
contempt.

"Meantime we lived in great style--dinner parties, concerts. I had a
very good voice. I daresay he was anxious enough to show off his latest
acquisition, but at the same time he could not bear me being looked at
or even spoken to. A fit of oriental jealousy would come over him,
especially when I had been much applauded. He would express his feelings
to me in barrack-room language. At last, one evening he made a most
scandalous scene before about two hundred guests, and then went out of
the house, leaving me to make the best of it before all those people. It
caused the greatest possible scandal. The party of course broke up. I
spent the rest of the night sitting in my bedroom, too overcome to take
off my splendid dress and those jewels with which he always insisted I
should bedeck myself. With the first signs of dawn he returned, and
coming up into my room found me sitting there. He told me then that
living with me was too much of a torture for him and proposed I should
go back to my parents for a time.

"We had been married for a little over a year then. For the first time
since the wedding I felt really happy. They, poor dears, were delighted.
We were all so innocent together that we thought this would be the end
of all our troubles, that the man was chivalrous enough to have seen his
mistake in the proper light, and to bear the consequences nobly. Hadn't
I told him I could never love him, exactly in so many words?

"I ought to have known that he was incapable of any generosity. As a
matter of fact I didn't think much about it. I, who had overcome my
shyness enough to become, young as I was, a perfect hostess in a world
which I knew so little--because after all that sort of thing was in my
tradition--I was really too stupid, too unsophisticated for those ten
months to have been a lesson to me. I had learned nothing, any more than
one learns from a nightmare or from a period of painful illness. I
simply breathed freely. I became again the old Adèle. I dismissed M. de
Montevesso from my thoughts as though he had never lived. Can you
believe this, Cosmo? It is astonishing how facts can fail to impress
one; brutalities, abuse, scenes of passion, mad exhibitions of jealousy,
as long as they do not attack your conception of your moral personality.
All this fell off me like a poisoned robe, leaving hardly a smart
behind. I raised my head like a flower after a thunderstorm. Don't think
my character is shallow, Cosmo. There were depths in me that could be
reached, but till then I had been only tormented, shocked, surprised,
but hardly even frightened. It was he who had suffered. But my turn was
to come."

"I don't think you were ever a person of shallow feelings."

"One's feelings must mature like everything else, and I assure you I had
not yet stopped growing. The next six months were to finish my
education. For by that time I had lost all my illusions. While I was
breathing freely between my father and mother, forgetting the world
around us, Montevesso was going about the town with his complaints and
his suspicions; regretting he had let me go and enraged that I should
have gone from him so easily. And you may be sure he found sympathizers.
A rich man, you understand! Who could refuse sympathy to so much wealth?
He was obviously a much ill-used man, all the faults of course were on
my side; in less than a month I found myself the centre of underhand
intrigues and the victim of a hateful persecution. Friends, relatives,
mere acquaintances in the world of emigration entered M. de Montevesso's
service. They spied on my conduct and tampered with the servants. There
were assemblies in his house where my character was torn to shreds. Some
of those good friends offered him their influence in Rome for the
annulation of the marriage, for a consideration of course. Others
discovered flaws in the marriage contract. They invented atrocious
tales. There were even horrid verses made about that scandal; till at
last he himself became disgusted with the wretches and closed his house
and his purse to them. Years later he showed me a note of their names
and the amounts paid for all those manifestations of sympathy. He must
have been impressed and disgusted by the retrospect, because it was a
big lot of money. As to the names, they were aristocratic enough to
flatter his plebeian pride. He showed the list to me just to hurt my
feelings.

"Some sinners have been stoned, but I, an innocent girl of seventeen,
had been pelted with mud beyond endurance. It was impossible to induce
him to come to any sort of arrangement that would leave me in peace. All
the world, influenced by his paid friends, was against me. What could I
do? Calumnies are hard to bear. Harder than truth. Even my parents
weakened. He promised to make amends. Of course I went back to him, as
one would crawl out of the mud amongst clean thorns that can but tear
one's flesh. He received me back with apologies that were as nearly
public as such things can be. It was a vindication of my character. But
directly he had me with him again he gave way to his fits of hatred as
before, such hatred as only black jealousy can inspire. It was terrible.
For even jealousy has its gradations, coloured by doubts and hopes, and
his was the worst, the hopeless kind, since he could never forget my
honest declaration."

The Countess of Montevesso's voice died out and then Cosmo looked up.
She was a little pale, which made her eyes appear darker than ever he
had seen them before. Cosmo was too young yet to understand the full
meaning of this confession, but his very youth invested the facts with a
sort of romantic grandeur, while the woman before him felt crushed by
the feelings of their squalid littleness. Without looking at him she
said:

"We went travelling for a year and a half, stayed for a time in Paris,
where he began to make me scenes again, and then we went oh to Italy.
The pretext was to make me known to some of his relations. I don't
believe he could remember his mother, and his father, an old dealer in
rabbit skins, I believe, had died some time before. As to the rest, I
think his heart failed him notwithstanding the brutal pride he used at
times to display to me. He took me to see some decayed people living in
old ruined houses whom I verily believe he bribed to pass for his more
distant connections. It was a pilgrimage amongst the most squalid shams,
something that you cannot conceive, yet I didn't rebel against the
horrible humiliation of it. It was part of the bargain. Sometimes I
thought that he would kill me in one of those wild places in some lost
valley where the people, only a degree removed from peasants in their
dress and speech, fawned upon him as the wealthy cousin and benefactor.
I am certain that during those wanderings he was half distracted. It was
I who went through all this unmoved. But I don't suppose my life was
ever in any danger. At that time none of his moods lasted long enough to
let him carry out any definite purpose. And then he is not a man of
criminal instincts. After all, he is perhaps a great adventurer. He has
commanded armies of a hundred thousand men. He has in a sense faced the
power of England in India. The very fact that he had managed to get out
of it with so much wealth and with quite a genuine reputation shows that
there is something in him. I don't know whether it's that obtained for
him a very gracious reception from Bonaparte when he dragged me back to
Paris."




VI


Madame de Montevesso paused, looking at the white ashes in which the
sparks had not died out yet. "Yes," she went on, "I lived near Paris
through the whole time of the Empire. I had a charming house in the
country. Monsieur de Montevesso had established me in a style which he
considered worthy of himself if not of me. He could never forgive me for
being what I am. He was tolerated by the returned emigration for my
sake, but he grew weary of his own unhappiness and resolved to live by
himself in his own province where he could be a great personage. Perhaps
he is not altogether a bad man. He consented eagerly to my parents, who
had obtained permission to return to France, joining me in the country.
I tasted again some happiness in the peace of our semi-retired life and
in their affection. Our world was that of old society, the world of
returned nobles. They hated and despised the imperial power, but most of
them were ready to cringe before it. Yes, even the best were overawed by
the real might under the tinsel of that greatness. Our circle was very
small and composed of convinced royalists, but I could not share their
hatreds and their contempts. I felt myself a Frenchwoman. I had liberal
ideas. . . ."

She noticed Cosmo's eyes fixed on her with eager and friendly curiosity,
and paused with a faint smile.

"You understand me, Cosmo?" she asked. The latter gave a little nod
without detaching his eyes from the face which seemed to him to glow
with the light of generous feelings, but already Madame de Montevesso
was going on.

"I did not want to be patronized by all those returned duchesses who
wanted to teach me how to feel and how to behave. Their own behaviour
was a mixture of insolence and self-seeking before that government which
they feared and despised. I didn't fear it but neither could I despise
it. My heart was heavy during all those years but it was not downcast.
All Europe was aflame and the blaze scorched and dazzled and filled one
with awe and with forebodings; but then one always heard that fire
purifies all which it cannot destroy. The world would perhaps come out
better from it."

"Well, it's all over," said Cosmo, "and what has it done? The smoke
hangs about yet and I cannot see, but how do you feel?"

Madame de Montevesso, leaning on her elbow on the mantelpiece, with one
foot on the fender, looked down at the ashes in which a spark gleamed
here and there.

"I feel a little cold," she said, "and dazed perhaps. One doesn't know
where to look."

Cosmo got up and made a step forward. His voice, however, was subdued.
"Formerly there was a man."

"A man, yes. One couldn't help looking towards him. There was something
unnatural in that uniqueness, but do you know, Cosmo, the man was
nothing. You smile, you think you hear a royalist speaking, a woman full
of silly aristocratic prejudice; a woman who sees only a small Corsican
squire who hadn't even the sense to catch the opportunity by the hair as
it flew by and be the restorer of the Bourbon dynasty. You imagine all
that of me! . . . Of me!"

She kept her pose, desolate, as if looking down at the ashes of a
burnt-up world.

"I don't think you could be stupid if you tried," he said. "But if the
man was nothing, then what has done it?"

Madame de Montevesso remained silent for a while before murmuring the
word "Destiny," and only then turned her head slightly towards Cosmo.
"What are you staring at in that corner?" she asked, after another
period of silence.

"Was I staring?" he said with a little start. "I didn't know. Your words
evoked a draped figure with an averted head."

"Then it wasn't that," she said, looking at him with friendly eyes.
"Whatever your fancy might have seen it was not Destiny. One must live a
very long time to see even the hem of her robe. Live a very, very long
time," she repeated in a tone of such weariness, tinged by fear, that
Cosmo felt impelled to step forward, take up the hand that hung by her
side, and press it to his lips. When released, it fell slowly to its
previous position. But Madame de Montevesso did not move.

"That's very nice," she said. "It was a movement of sympathy. I have had
very little of that in my life. There is something in me that does not
appeal to the people with whom I live. My father, of course, loves me;
but that is not quite the same thing. Your father, I believe,
sympathized with the child and I am touched to see that the son seems to
understand something of the woman; of an almost old woman."

Cosmo would have been amused at the tone of unaffected conviction in
which she called herself an old woman had it not been for the profound
trouble on that young face bent downwards, and at the melancholy grace
of the whole attitude of that woman who had once been the child Adèle;
a foreign, homeless child, sheltered for a moment by the old walls of
his ancestral home, and the sharer of its life's stately intimacies.

"No," he said, marvelling that so much bitter experience should have
been the lot of such a resplendent figure. "No. Destiny works quickly
enough. We are both still young, and yet think of what we have already
seen."

He fancied she had shuddered a little. He felt ashamed at the thought of
what she had lived through, how she had been affected in her daily life
by what to him had been only a spectacle after all, though his country
had played its part, the impressive part of a rock upraising its head
above the flood. But he continued: "Why, the Man of Destiny himself is
young yet. You must have seen him many times."

"No. Once or twice a year I went to the Tuileries in the company of some
reconciled royalist ladies and very much against my wish. It was
expected from Madame de Montevesso and I always came away thankful to
think that it was over for a time. You could hardly imagine how dull
that Empire time was. All hopes were crushed. It was like a dreadful
overdressed masquerade with the everlasting sound of the guns in the
distance. Every year I spent a month with my husband to save
appearances. That was in the bond. He used then to invite all the
provincial grandees for a series of dinners. But even in the provinces
one felt the sinister moral constraint of that imperial glory. No doubt
all my movements were noticed and recorded by the proper people.
Naturally I saw the Emperor several times. I saw him also in theatres,
in his carriage driving about, but he spoke to me only once."

"Only once!" exclaimed Cosmo under his breath.

"You may imagine I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible,
and I did not belong to the Court. It was on the occasion of a ball
given to the Princess of Baden. There was an enormous crowd. Early in
the evening I found myself standing in the front row in the Galerie de
Diane between two women who were perfect strangers to me. By and by the
Court came in, the Empress, the Princess, the Chamberlains in full
dress, and took their place on a platform at the end. In the intervals
of dancing the Emperor came down alone, speaking only to the women. He
wore his imperial dress of red velvet, laced in all the seams, with
white satin breeches, with diamonds on the hilt of his sword and the
buckles of his shoes and on his cap with white plumes. It was a
well-designed costume but with his short thick figure and the clumsiness
of his movements he looked to me frightful and like a mock king. When he
came opposite me he stopped. I am certain he knew who I was, but he
asked me my name. I told him.

"'Your husband lives in his province?'

"'Yes, sire.'

"'Your husband employs much labour, I hear. I am grateful to him for
giving work to the people. This is the proper use of wealth. Hasn't he
served in the English army in India?'

"His tone was friendly. I said I didn't know that, but I did know that
he had fought against them there.

"He smiled in a fascinating manner and said, 'That's very possible. A
soldier of fortune. He is a native of Piedmont, is he not?'

"'Yes, sire.'

"'But you are French, entirely French. We have a claim on you. How old
are you?'

"I told him. He said, 'You look younger.' Then he came nearer to me and,
speaking in a confidential tone, said, 'You have no children. I know. I
know. It isn't your fault, but you should try to make some other
arrangement. Believe me, I am giving you good advice.'

"I was dumb with astonishment. He gave me again a very gracious smile
and went on. That is the only conversation I ever had with the Emperor."

She fell silent with downcast eyes, then she added: "It was very
characteristic of him." Cosmo was mainly struck by the fact that he knew
so little of her, that this was the first intimation he had of the
Montevessos being childless. He had never asked himself the question
before, but this positive if indirect statement was agreeable to him.

"I did not make any other arrangements," began Madame de Montevesso with
a slightly ironic intonation. "I was only too thankful to be left alone.
At the time the Russian campaign began I paid my annual visit to
Monsieur de Montevesso. Except for the usual entertainments to local
people I was alone with Count Helion, and as usual when we were quite
alone he behaved in a tolerable way. There was nobody and nothing that
could arouse his jealousy and the dormant hatred he nurses for me deep
down in his heart. We had only the slight discussion, at the end of
which he admitted, gnashing his teeth, that he had nothing to reproach
me with except that I was what I was. I told him I could not help it and
that as things were he ought rather to congratulate himself on that
fact. He gave me only a black look. He can restrain himself wonderfully
when he likes. Upon the whole I had a quiet time. I played and sang to
myself, I read a little, I took long walks, I rode almost every day,
attended by Bernard. That wasn't so agreeable. You remember Bernard?"

Cosmo nodded.

"For years he had been a very devoted and faithful servant to us but I
suppose he, too, like so many of his betters, fell under the spell of
Monsieur de Montevesso's wealth. When my parents rejoined me in France
he had his wish at last and married Aglae, my mulatto maid. He was quite
infatuated with her and now he makes her terribly wretched. She is
really devoted to me, and there cannot be any doubt that Bernard has
been bribed by my husband to play the part of a spy. It seems incredible
but I have had it from the Count in so many words. Bernard let himself
be corrupted years ago, when M. de Montevesso first sent me back to my
parents in a rage and next day was nearly out of his mind with agony at
having done so. Yes, it dates as far back as that. That man so faithful
to us in our misfortunes allowed himself to be bought with the greatest
ease. Everybody, from the highest to the lowest, was in a conspiracy
against a poor girl whose only sin was her perfect frankness. When
Bernard came over to France with my parents I was already aware of this,
but Aglae wanted to marry him and so I said nothing. She probably would
not have believed me then."

"And could you bear that wretch near you all those years?" exclaimed
Cosmo, full of indignation. She smiled sadly. She had borne the
disclosure and had kept the secret of greater infamies. She had all her
illusions about rectitude destroyed so early that it did not matter to
her now what she knew of the people about her.

"Oh, Cosmo," she exclaimed suddenly, "I am a hardened woman now, but I
assure you that sometimes when I remember the girl of sixteen I was,
without an evil thought in her head and in her ignorance surrounded by
the basest slanderers and intrigues, tears come into my eyes. And since
the baseness of selfish passions I have seen seething round the
detestable glory of that man in Elba, it seems to me that there is
nowhere any honesty on earth--nowhere!" The energy of that outburst,
contrasted with the immobility of the pose, gave to Cosmo the sensation
of a chill.

"I will not mention us two," said Cosmo, "herein this room. But I know
of at least two honest men on earth. They are your father and mine. Why
didn't you write to Father, Adèle?"

"I tell you I was a child. What could I write to him? Hasn't he retired
out of the world for so many years only not to see and not to hear?
That's one of your honest men. And as to my poor father, who is the soul
of honour, such is the effect of long misfortune on the best characters
and of temptations associated with his restored rank, that there have
been moments when I watched his conduct with dread. Caste prejudices are
an awful thing, but thank God he had never a thought of vengeance in his
mind. He is not a courtier."

"I have heard about it," interrupted Cosmo, "from the Marquis himself.
He is a dear old man."

The two by the mantelpiece exchanged dim smiles.

"I had to come here with him," said Adèle. "He cannot do without me. I
too was glad to get away from the evil passions and the hopeless
stupidities of all the people that had come back without a single
patriotic feeling, without a single new idea in their heads, like
merciless spectres out of a grave, hating the world to which they had
returned. They had forgotten nothing and learned nothing."

"I have seen something of that myself," murmured Cosmo. "But the world
can't be put back where it was before you and I were born."

"No! But to see them trying to do it was intolerable. Then my husband
appeared on the scene, hired this Palazzo, and insisted on us all living
here. It was impossible to raise a rational objection to that. Father
was never aware of half I went through in my life. I learned early to
suppress every expression of feeling. But in the main we understand each
other without talking. When he received Count Helion's letter offering
us this house he just looked at me and said, 'I suppose we must.' For my
part, I go through life without raising any objections to anything. One
has to preserve one's dignity in some way; and is there another way open
to me? Yes, I have made up my mind; but I must tell you, Cosmo, that
notwithstanding that amazing tour we made ten years ago amongst M. de
Montevesso's problematic relations, those two sisters and that niece
have been a perfect novelty to me. I only hope I never betrayed my
surprise or any feeling at all about it." The Countess raised her eyes
to Cosmo's face. "I have spoken of it to you as I have never spoken to
anybody in my life, because of old memories which are so much to me and
because I could not mistrust anybody of your name. Have you been wearied
by this long tale?"

"No," said Cosmo. "But have you thought how it is going to end?"

"To end?" she said in a startled tone which affected Cosmo profoundly.
"To end? What do you mean? Everything is ended already."

"I was thinking of your endurance," said Cosmo.

"Do I look worn out?" she asked.

Cosmo raised his head and looked at her steadily. The impression of her
grace and her strength filled his breast with an admiring and almost
oppressive emotion. He could find nothing to say, not knowing what was
uppermost in his mind, pity or admiration, mingled with a vague anger.

"Well, what do you see in my face?"

"I never have seen such serenity on any face," said Cosmo. "How sure of
itself your soul must be!"

Her colour became heightened for a moment, her eyes darkened as she said
in a grateful tone, "You are right, Cosmo. My face is not a mask."

But he hardly heard her. He was lost in wonder at the sudden disorder of
his thoughts. When he regained his mental composure he noticed that
Madame de Montevesso seemed to be listening.

"I wonder whether the Count is still with my father," she said. "Ring
that bell on the table at your hand, Cosmo."

Cosmo did so and they waited, looking at each other. Presently the door
swung open, and at the same time the cartel above it began to strike the
hour. Cosmo counted eleven and then Madame de Montevesso spoke to
Bernard, who waited in silence.

"Is M. le Comte still with my father?"

"I haven't seen him come out yet, Madame la Comtesse."

"Tell your wife not to wait for me, Bernard."

"Yes, Madame la Comtesse." Bernard backed out respectfully through the
door.

"How fat he is, and what sleek hair," marvelled Cosmo. "And what a
solemn manner. No wonder I did not recognize him at once. He showed me
into your father's room, you know. He looks a Special Envoy's
confidential man all over. And to think that he is your household spy! I
wonder at your patience."

"Perhaps if I had anything to conceal I would have had less patience
with the spy," she said, equably. "I believe that when we lived in Paris
he wrote every week to M. de Montevesso, because, you know, he can write
quite well. I wonder what he found to write about. Lists of names, I
suppose. Or perhaps his own views of the people who called with bits of
overheard conversations."

"It's incredible," murmured Cosmo. "It's fantastic. What contempt he
must have for your husband."

"The most remarkable thing," said Madame de Montevesso, "is that I am
convinced that he doesn't write any lies."

"Yes," said Cosmo, "I assume that. And do you mean that the Count is
paying him every week for that sort of thing. It's an ugly farce."

"Don't you think," said the Countess, "that something serious may come
of it some day?" Cosmo made a hopeless gesture.

"The man you married is mad," he said with intense conviction.

"There have been times when I felt as if I were mad myself," murmured
Madame de Montevesso. "Take up your hat," she added quickly.

She had heard footsteps outside the door. A moment after, Count Helion
came in and fixed his black glance on his wife and Cosmo. He did not
open his lips and remained ominously by the door for a time. The strain
of the silence was made sinister by the stiff bearing of the man, the
immobility of the carven brown face, crossed by the inky-black moustache
in harsh contrast with the powdered head. He might have been a sergeant
come at the stroke of the hour to tell those two people that the firing
squad was waiting for them outside the door. Madame de Montevesso broke
the dumb spell.

"I did my best to entertain Mr. Latham, but we had given you up. He was
just going."

She glanced serenely at Cosmo, whom the sweetness of her tone, her easy
self-possession before that barrack-room figure, stung to the heart. At
that moment no words could have expressed the intensity of his hatred
for the Count of Montevesso, at whom he was looking with a smile of the
utmost banality. The latter moved forward stiffly.

"Your father hopes you will see him for a moment presently," he said to
his wife. "He has not gone to bed yet."

"Then I will go to him at once."

Madame de Montevesso extended her hand to Cosmo, who raised the tips of
her fingers to his lips ceremoniously.

"I will see Mr. Latham out," said the Count, bowing to his wife, who
went out of the room without looking at him. Cosmo, following her with
his eyes, forgot Count Helion's existence. He forgot it so thoroughly
that it was with a perceptible start that he perceived the Count's eyes
fixed on him in an odd way. "He will never look at ease anywhere,"
thought Cosmo scornfully. A great part of his hatred had evaporated. "I
suppose he means to be pilot. I wonder how he looked on the back of an
elephant."

"It was very good of you to wait so long for my return," said Count
Helion. "I have been detained by an absurd discussion arising out of
probably false reports."

"The time passed quickly," said truthful Cosmo; but, before the black
weary glance of the other, hastened to add with assumed care, "We talked
of old times."

"Old times," repeated Count Helion without any particular accent. "My
wife is very young yet, though she must be older than you are. Isn't she
older?"

Cosmo said curtly that he really did not know. When they were running
about as children together she was the tallest of the three.

"And now," took up the inexpressive voice of Count de Montevesso,
"without her high heels she would be a little shorter than you. As you
stood together you looked to me exactly the same height. And so you
renewed the memories of your youth. They must have been delightful."

"They were no doubt more delightful for me than they could have been for
Mme. la Comtesse," said Cosmo, making a motion towards taking leave.

"A moment. Let me have the honour to see you out." Count Helion walked
round the room blowing out the candles in three candelabras in
succession and taking up the fourth in his hand.

"Why take this trouble?" protested Cosmo. "I know my way."

"Every light has been extinguished in the reception rooms; or at least
ought to have been. I detest waste of all kinds. It is perhaps because I
have made my own fortune, and by God's favour it is so considerable in
its power for good that it requires the most careful management. It is
perhaps a peculiar point of view, but I have explained it to Mme. de
Montevesso."

"She must have been interested," muttered Cosmo between his teeth,
following across the room and round the screen the possessor of these
immensely important riches, who, candelabra in hand, preceded him by a
pace or two and threw open the door behind the screen. Cosmo, crossing
in the wake of Count Helion the room of the evening reception, saw dimly
the disarranged furniture about the mantelpiece, the armchair in which
Lady William had sat, the great sofa in which little Countess Bubna had
been shyly ensconced, the card table with the chairs pushed back and all
the cards in a heap in the middle. The swaying flames of the candles,
leaping from one long strip of mirror to another, preceded him into the
next salon where all the furniture stood ranged expectantly against the
walls. The next two salons were exactly alike except for the colour of
the hangings and the size of the pictures on the walls. As to their
subjects, Cosmo could not make them out.

Not a single lackey was to be seen in the anteroom of white walls and
red benches; but Cosmo was surprised at the presence of a peasant-like
woman, who must have been sitting there in the dark for some time. The
light of the candelabra fell on the gnarled hands lying in her lap. The
edge of a dark shawl shaded her features with the exception of her
ancient chin. She never stirred. Count Helion, disregarding her as
though she had been invisible, put down the candelabra on a little table
and wished Cosmo good-night with a formal bow. At the same time he
expressed harshly the hope of seeing Cosmo often during his stay in
Genoa. Then with an unexpected attempt to soften his tone he muttered
something about his wife--"the friend of your childhood."

The allusions exasperated Cosmo. The more he saw of the grown woman, the
less connection she seemed to have with the early Adèle. The contrast
was too strong. He felt tempted to tell M. de Montevesso that he by no
means cherished that old memory. The nearest he came to it was the
statement that he had the privilege to hear much of Madame de Montevesso
in Paris. M. de Montevesso, contemplating now the dark peasant-like
figure huddled up on the crimson seat against a white wall, hastened to
turn towards Cosmo the black weariness of his eyes.

"Mme. de Montevesso has led a very retired life during the Empire. Her
conduct was marked by the greatest circumspection. But she is a person
of rank. God knows what gossip you may have heard. The world is
censorious."

Brusquely Cosmo stepped out into the outer gallery. Listening to M. de
Montevesso was no pleasure. The Count accompanied him as far as the head
of the great staircase and stayed to watch his descent with a face that
expressed no more than the face of a soldier on parade, till, all at
once, his eyes started to roll about wildly as if looking for some
object he could snatch up and throw down the stairs at Cosmo's head. But
this lasted only for a moment. He reëntered the anteroom quietly and
busied himself in closing and locking the door with care. After doing
this he approached the figure on the bench and stood over it silently.




VII


The old woman pushed back her shawl and raised her wrinkled soft face
without much expression to say:

"The child has been calling for you for the last hour or more."

Helion de Montevesso walked all the length of the anteroom and back
again; then stood over the old woman as before.

"You know what she is," she began directly the Count had stopped. "She
won't give us any rest. When she was little one could always give her a
beating but now there is no doing anything with her. You had better come
and see for yourself."

"Very unruly?" asked the Count de Montevesso.

"She is sixteen," said the old woman crisply, getting up and moving
towards the stairs leading to the upper floor. A stick that had been
lying concealed in the folds of her dress was now in her hand. She
ascended the stairs more nimbly than her appearance would have led one
to expect, and the Count of Montevesso followed her down a long
corridor, where at last the shuffle of her slippers and the tapping of
her stick ceased in front of a closed door. A profound silence reigned
in this remote part of the old palace which the enormous vanity of the
upstart had hired for the entertainment of his wife and his
father-in-law in the face of the restored monarchies of Europe. The old
peasant woman turned to the stiff figure which, holding the candelabra
and in its laced coat, recalled a gorgeous lackey.

"We have put her to bed," she said, "but as to holding her down in it,
that was another matter. Maria is strong but she got weary of it at
last. We had to send for Father Paul. Shameless as she is she would not
attempt to get out of her bed in her nightdress before a priest. The
Father promised to stay till we could fetch you to her, so I came down,
but I dared not go further than the anteroom. A valet told me you had
still a guest with you, so I sent him away and sat down to wait. The
wretch to revenge himself on me put out the lights before he went."

"He shall be flung out to-morrow," said M. de Montevesso in a low tone.

"I hope I have done nothing wrong, Helion."

"No," said M. de Montevesso in the same subdued tone. He lent his ear to
catch some slight sound on the other side of the door. But the stillness
behind it was like the stillness of a sick room to which people listen
with apprehension. The old woman laid her hand lightly on the sleeve of
the gorgeous coat. "You are a great man . . ."

"I am," said Count Helion without exultation.

The old woman, dragged out at the age of seventy from the depths of her
native valley by the irresistible will of the great man, tried to find
utterance for a few simple thoughts. Old age with its blunted feelings
had alone preserved her from utter bewilderment at the sudden change;
but she was overpowered by its greatness. She lived inside that palace
as if enchanted into a state of resignation. Ever since she had arrived
in Genoa, which was just five weeks ago, she had kept to the upper
floor. Only the extreme necessity of the case had induced her to come so
far downstairs as the white anteroom. She was conscious of not having
neglected her duty.

"I did beat her faithfully," she declared with the calmness of old age
and conscious rectitude. The lips of M. de Montevesso twitched slightly.
"I did really, though often feeling too weary to raise my arm. Then I
would throw a shawl over my head and go in the rain to speak to Father
Paul. He had taught her to read and write. He is full of charity. He
would shrug his shoulders and tell me to put my trust in God. It was all
very well for him to talk like that. True that on your account I was the
greatest person for miles around. I had the first place everywhere. But
now that you made us come out here just because of your fancy to turn
the child into a Contessa, all my poor senses leave my old body. For,
you know, if I did beat her, being entrusted with your authority,
everybody else in the village waited on a turn of her finger. She was
full of pride and wilfulness then. Now since you have introduced her
amongst all these _grandissimi signori_ of whom she had only heard as
one hears of angels in heaven, she seems to have lost her head with the
excess of pride and obstinacy. What is one to do? The other day on
account of something I said she fastened her ten fingers into my gray
hair. . . ." She threw her shawl off and raised her creased eyelids. . . .
"This gray hair, on the oldest head of your family, Helion. If it
hadn't been for Maria she would have left me a corpse on the floor." The
mild bearing of the old woman had a dignity of its own, but at this
point it broke down and she became agitated.

"Many a time I sat up in my bed thinking half the night. I am an old
woman. I can read the signs. This is a matter for priests. When I was a
big girl in our village they had to exorcise a comely youth, a herdsman.
I am not fit to talk of such matters. But you, Helion, could say a word
or two to Father Paul. He would know what to do . . . or get the Bishop
. . ."

"Amazing superstition," Count Helion exclaimed in a rasping growl. "The
days of priests and devils are gone," he went on angrily, but paused as
if struck with a sudden doubt or a new idea. The old woman shook her
head slightly. In the depths of her native valley all the days were
alike in their hopes and fears as far back as she could remember. She
did not know how she had offended her brother and emitted a sigh of
resignation.

"What's the trouble now?" Count Helion asked brusquely.

The old woman shrugged her shoulders expressively. Count Helion
insisted. "There must be some cause."

"The cause, as I am a sinner, can be no other but that young signore
that came out with you and to whom you bowed so low. I didn't know you
had to bow to anybody unless perhaps to the King who has come back
lately. But then a king is anointed with holy oils! I couldn't believe
my eyes. What kind of prince was that?" She waited, screwing her eyes up
at Count Helion, who looked down at her inscrutably and at last
condescended to say:

"That was an Englishman."

She moaned with astonishment and alarm. A heretic! She thought no
heretic could be good-looking. Didn't they have their wickedness written
on their faces?

"No," said Count Helion. "No man has that, and no woman, either."

Again he paused to think. "Let us go in now," he added.

The big room (all the rooms in that Palazzo were big unless they
happened to be mere dark and airless cupboards), which they entered as
quietly as if a sick person had been lying in there at the point of
death, contained amongst its gilt furniture also a few wooden stools and
a dark walnut table brought down from the farmhouse for the convenience
of its rustic occupants. A priest sitting in a gorgeous armchair held to
the light of a common brass oil lamp an open book, the shadow of which
darkened a whole corner of the vast space between the high walls
decorated with rare marbles, long mirrors, and heavy hangings. A few
small pieces of washing were hung out to dry on a string stretched from
a window latch to the back of a chair. A common brazier stood in the
fireplace and, near it, a gaunt, bony woman dressed in black with a
white handkerchief on her head was stirring something in a little
earthen pot. Ranged at the foot of a dais bearing a magnificent but
dismantled couch of state were two small wooden bedsteads, on one of
which lay the girl whom Cosmo knew only as "Clelia, my husband's niece,"
with a hand under her cheek. The other cheek was much flushed; a tangle
of loose black hair covered the pillow. Whether from respect for the
priest or from mere exhaustion she was keeping perfectly still under her
bedclothes pulled up to her very neck so that only her head remained
uncovered.

At the entrance of the Count the priest closed his book and stood up,
but the woman by the mantelpiece went on stirring her pot. Count Helion
returned a "_Bonsoir, Abbé_" to the priest's silent bow, put down the
candelabra on a console, and walked straight to the bedstead. The other
three people, the gaunt woman still with her pot in her hand, approached
it too but kept their distance.

The girl Clelia remained perfectly still under the downward thoughtful
gaze of Count Helion. In that face half buried in the pillow one eye
glittered full of tears. She refused to make the slightest sound in
reply to Count Helion's questions, orders, and remonstrances. Even his
coaxings, addressed to her in the same low, harsh tone, were received in
obstinate silence. Whenever he paused he could hear at his back the old
woman whispering to the priest. At last even that stopped. Count Helion
resisted the temptation to grab all that hair on the pillow and pull the
child out of bed by it. He waited a little longer and then said in his
harsh tone:

"I thought you loved me."

For the first time there was a movement under the blanket. But that was
all. Count Helion turned his back on the bed and met three pairs of eyes
fixed on him with different expressions. He avoided meeting any of them.
"Perhaps if you were to leave us alone," he said.

They obeyed in silence, but at the last moment he called the priest back
and took him aside to a distant part of the room where the brass oil
lamp stood on the walnut-wood table. The full physiognomy of Father Paul
Carpi with its thin eyebrows and pouting mouth was overspread by a
self-conscious professional placidity that seemed ready to see or hear
anything without surprise. Count de Montevesso was always impressed by
it. "Abbé," he said brusquely, "you know that my sister thinks that the
child is possessed. I suppose she means by a devil."

He looked with impatience at the priest, who remained silent, and burst
out in a subdued voice:

"I believe you people are hoping now to bring him back into the world
again, that old friend of yours." He waited for a moment. "Sit down,
Abbé."

Father Carpi sank into the armchair with some dignity while Count Helion
snatched a three-legged stool and planted himself on it on the other
side of the table. "Now, wouldn't you?"

Something not bitter, not mocking, but as if disillusioned seemed to
touch the lips of Father Carpi at the very moment he opened them to say
quietly:

"Only as a witness to the reign of God."

"Which of course would be your reign. Never mind, a man like me can be
master under any reign." He jerked his head slightly towards the bed.
"Now what sort of devil would it be in that child?"

The deprecatory gesture of Father Carpi did not detract from his
dignity. "I should call it dumb myself," continued Count Helion. "We
will leave it alone for a time. What hurts me often is the difficulty of
getting at your thoughts, Abbé. Haven't I been a good enough friend to
you?" To this, too, Father Carpi answered by a deferential gesture and
deprecatory murmur. Count Helion had restored the church, rebuilt the
presbytery, and had behaved generally with great munificence. Father
Carpi, sprung from shopkeeping stock in the town of Novi, had lived
through times difficult for the clergy. He had been contented to exist.
Now, at the age of forty or more, the downfall of the Empire, which
seemed to carry with it the ruin of the impious forces of the
Revolution, had awakened in him the first stirrings of ambition. Its
immediate object was the chaplaincy to the Count of Montevesso's various
charitable foundations.

There was a man, one of the great of this world, whom, without
understanding him in any deeper sense or ever trying to judge his
nature, he could see plainly enough to be unhappy. And that was a great
point.

For the unhappy are more amenable to obscure influences, religious and
others. But Father Carpi was too intelligent to intrude upon the griefs
of that man with the mysterious past either religious consolation or
secular advice. For a long time now he had watched and waited, keeping
his thoughts so secret that they seemed even hidden from himself. To the
outbreaks of that rough, arrogant, contemptuous, and oppressive temper
he could oppose only the gravity of his sacerdotal character as Adèle
did her lofty serenity, that detachment, both scornful and inaccessible,
which seemed to place her on another plane.

Father Carpi had never been before confronted so directly by the
difficulties of his position as at that very moment and on the occasion
of that intolerable and hopeless girl. To gain time he smiled, a slight,
non-committal smile.

"We priests, M. le Comte, are recommended not to enter into discussion
of theological matters with people who, whatever their accomplishments
and wisdom, are not properly instructed in them. As to anything else I
am always at Monseigneur's service."

He gave this qualification to Count Helion because it was not beyond the
bounds of respect due from a poor, parish priest to a titled great man
of his province.

"Have you been much about amongst the town people?" asked Count Helion.

"I go out every morning about seven to say mass in that church you may
have noticed near by. I have visited also once or twice an old friend
from my seminary days, a priest of a poor parish here. We rejoice
together at the return of the Holy Father to Rome. For the rest I had an
idea. Monseigneur, that you did not wish me to make myself prominent in
any way in this town."

"Perhaps I didn't. It may be convenient, though, to know what are the
rumours current amongst the populace. That class has its own thoughts. I
suppose your friend would know something of that."

"No doubt. But I can tell you, Monseigneur, what the people think. They
think that if they can't be Genoese as before, they would rather be
French than Piedmontese. That, Monseigneur, is a general feeling even
amongst the better class of citizens."

"Much would they gain by it," mumbled Count de Montevesso. "Unless the
Other were to come back. Abbé," he added sharply, "is there any talk of
him coming back?"

"That indeed would be a misfortune." Father Carpi's tone betrayed a
certain emotion which Count Helion noticed, faint as it was.

"Whatever happens you will have always a friend in me," he said, and
Father Carpi acknowledged the assurance by a slight inclination of his
body.

"Surely God would not allow it," he murmured uneasily. But the stare of
his interlocutor augmented his alarm. He was still more startled when he
heard Count de Montevesso make the remark that the only thing which
seemed to put a limit to the power of God was the folly of men. He had
too poor an opinion of Count de Montevesso to be shocked by the
blasphemy. To him it was only the proof that the Count had been very
much upset by something, some fact or some news.

"And people are very foolish just now both in Paris and in Vienna,"
added Count de Montevesso after a long pause.

It was news then. Father Carpi betrayed nothing of his anxious
curiosity. The inward unrest which pervaded the whole basin of the
Western Mediterranean was strongest in Italy perhaps and was very strong
in the heart of Father Carpi, who was both an Italian and a priest.
Perhaps he would be told something! He almost held his breath, but Count
de Montevesso took his head between his hands and said only:

"One is pestered by folly of all sorts. Abbé, see whether you can bring
that child to reason."

However low in the scale of humanity Father Carpi placed the Count de
Montevesso, he never questioned his social position. Father Carpi was
made furious by the request, but he obeyed. He approached the rustic
bedstead and looked at the occupant with sombre disgust. Nothing was
obscure to him in the situation. If he couldn't tell exactly what devil
possessed that creature he remembered perfectly her mother, a rash sort
of girl who was found drowned years ago in a remarkably shallow pond
amongst some rocks not quite a mile away from the presbytery. It might
have been an accident. He had consented to bury her in consecrated
ground not from any compassion, but because of the revolutionary spirit
which had penetrated even the thick skulls of his parishioners and
probably would have caused a riot and shaken the precarious power of the
Church in his obscure valley. He stood erect by the head of the couch,
looking down at the girl's uncovered eye whose sombre iris swam on the
glistening white. He could have laughed with contempt and fury. He
regulated his deep voice so that it reached Count de Montevesso at the
other side of the room only as a solemn admonishing murmur.

"You miserable little wretch," he said, "can't you behave yourself? You
have been a torment to me for years."

The sense of his own powerlessness overcame him so completely that he
felt tempted for a moment to throw everything up, walk out of the room,
seek refuge amongst sinners that would believe either in God or in the
devil.

"You are a scourge to us all," he continued in the same equable murmur.
"If you don't speak out, you little beast, and put an end to this scene
soon I will exorcise you."

The only effect of that threat was the sudden immobility of the rolling
eye. Father Carpi turned towards the Count.

"It is probably some sort of malady," he said coldly. "Perhaps a doctor
could prescribe some remedy."

Count Helion came out of his listless attitude. A moment ago a doctor
was in the house in conference with M. le Marquis. Perhaps he was still
there. Count Helion got up impetuously and asked the Abbé to go along
to the other side and find out.

"Take a light with you. All the lights are out down there. Knock at the
Marquis's door and inquire from Bernard, and if the doctor is still
there bring him along."

Father Carpi went out hastily and Count de Montevesso, keeping the women
outside, paced the whole length of the room. The fellow called himself a
doctor whatever else he might have been. Whether he did any good to the
child or not--Count de Montevesso stopped and looked fixedly at the
bed--this was an extremely favourable opportunity to get in touch with
him personally. Who could tell what use could be made of him in his
other capacities, apart from the fact that he probably could really
prescribe some remedy? Count de Montevesso's heart was softened
paternally. His progress from European barrack-rooms to an Eastern
palace left on his mind a sort of bewilderment. He even thought the girl
attractive. There she was, a prey of some sort of illness. He bent over
her face and instantly a pair of thin bare arms darted from under the
blankets and clasped him round the neck with a force that really
surprised him. "That one loves me," he thought. He did not know that she
would have hung round anybody's neck in the passion of obtaining what
she wanted. He thought with a sort of dull insight that everybody was a
little bit against her. He abandoned his neck to the passionate clasp
for a little time, then disengaged himself gently.

"What makes you behave like this?" he asked. "Do you feel a pain
anywhere?"

No emotion could change the harshness of his voice, but it was very low
and there was an accent in it which the girl could not mistake. She sat
up suddenly with her long wild hair covering her shoulders. With her
round eyes, the predatory character of her face, the ruffled fury of her
aspect, she looked like an angry bird; and there was something bird-like
in the screech of her voice.

"Pain? No. But if I didn't hate them so I would like to die. I would . . ."

Count de Montevesso put one hand at the back of her head and clapped the
other broad palm over her mouth. This action surprised her so much that
she didn't even struggle. When the Count took his hands away she
remained silent without looking at him.

"Don't scream like this," he murmured harshly but with obvious
indulgence. "Your aunts are outside and they will tell the priest all
about it."

Clelia drew up her knees, clasped her hands round them outside the
blanket, and stared.

"It is just your temper!" suggested Count Helion reproachfully.

"All those dressed-up witches despise me. I am not frightened. And the
worst of them is that yellow-haired witch, your wife. If I had gone in
there in my bare feet they could not have stared more down on me. . . .
I shall fly at their faces. I can read their thoughts as they put their
glasses to their eyes. 'What animal is this?' they seem to ask
themselves. I am a brute beast to them."

A shadow seemed to fall on Count de Montevesso's face for the moment.
Clelia unclasped her fingers, shook her fists at the empty space, then
clasped her legs again. These movements, full of sombre energy, were
observed silently by the Count of Montevesso. He uttered the word
"_Patienza_," which in its humility is the word of the ambitious, of the
unforgiving who keep a strict account with the world; a word of
indomitable hope. "You wait till you are a little older. You will have
plenty of people at your feet; and then you will be able to spurn
anybody you like."

"You mean when I am married," said Clelia in a faraway voice and staring
straight over her knees.

"Yes," said the Count de Montevesso, "but you will first have to learn
to be gentle."

This recommendation apparently missed the ear for which it was destined.
For a whole minute Clelia seemed to contemplate some sort of vision with
her predatory and pathetic stare. One side of her nightgown had slipped
off her shoulder. Suddenly she pushed her scattered hair back, and
extending her arm towards Count Helion patted him caressingly on the
cheek.

When she had done patting him he asked, unmoved: "Now, what is it you
want?"

She was careful not to turn her face his way while she whispered: "I
want that young signor that came to-day to make eyes at my aunt."

"Impossible."

"Why impossible? I was with them in the morning. They did nothing but
look at each other. But I went for him myself."

"That Englishman! You can't have an Englishman like this. I am thinking
of something better for you, a marquis or a count."

This was the exact truth, not a sudden idea to meet a hopeless case.

"You have hardly had time to have a good look at him," added Count
Helion.

"I looked at him this evening with all my eyes, with all my soul. I
would have sat up all night to look at him. But he got up and turned his
back on me. He has no eyes for anybody but my aunt."

"Did you speak together, you two?"

"Yes," she said, "he sat down by me and all those witches stared as if
he had been making up to a monster. Am I a monster? He too looked at me
as if I had been one."

"Was he rude to you?" asked the Count de Montevesso.

"He was as insolent as all the people I have seen since we came to this
town. His heart was black as of all the rest of them. He was gentle to
me as one is gentle to an old beggar for the sake of charity. Oh, how I
hated him."

"Well, then," said Count de Montevesso in a harsh unsympathetic tone,
"you may safely despise him."

Clelia threw herself half out of bed on the neck of Count Helion, who
preserved an unsympathetic rigidity though he did not actually repulse
her wild and vehement caress.

"Oh, dearest uncle of mine," she whispered ardently! into his ear, "he
is handsome! I must have him for myself."

There was a knocking at the door. Count Helion tore the bare arms from
his neck and pushed the girl back into bed.

"Cover yourself up," he commanded hurriedly. He arranged the blanket at
her back. "Lie still and say nothing of all this, and then you need have
no fear. But if you breathe a word of this to anybody, then . . . Come
in," he shouted to the renewed knocking and had just time to shake his
finger at Clelia menacingly before the Abbé and the doctor entered the
room.




PART III


I


Cosmo walked away with no more than one look back, just before turning
the corner, at the tensely alert griffins guarding the portals of the
Palazzo. At the entrance of his inn a small knot of men on the pavement
paused in their low conversation to look at him. After he had passed he
heard a voice say, "This is the English milord." He found the dimly lit
hall empty and he went up the empty staircase into the upper regions of
silence. His face, which to the men on the pavement had appeared
passionless and pale as marble, looked at him suddenly out of the mirror
over the fireplace, and he was startled as though he had seen a ghost.

Spire had been told not to wait for his return. His empty room had
welcomed him with a bright flame on the hearth and with lighted candles.
He turned away from his own image and stood with his back to the fire
looking downwards and vaguely oppressed by the profound as if expectant
silence around him. The strength and novelty of the impressions received
during that day, the intimacy of their appeal, had affected his
fortitude. He felt mortally weary and began to undress; but after he got
into bed he remained for a time in a sitting posture. For the first time
in his life he tasted of loneliness. His father was at least thirty-five
years his senior. An age! His sister was just a young girl. Clever, of
course. He was very fond of her, but the mere fact of her being a girl
raised a wall between them. He had never made any real friends. He had
nothing to do; and he did not seem to know what to think of anything in
the world. Now, for instance there was that vanquished fat figure in a
little cocked hat. . . . Still an emperor.

Cosmo came with a start out of a deep sleep that seemed to have lasted
only a moment. But he knew at once where he was, though at first he had
to argue himself out of the conviction of having parted from Count
Helion at the top of a staircase less than five minutes ago. Meantime he
watched Spire flooding the room with brilliant sunshine, for the three
windows of the room faced east.

"Very fine morning, sir," said Spire over his shoulder. "Quite a spring
day."

A delicious freshness flowed over Cosmo. It did not bring joy to him,
but dismay. Daylight already! It had come too soon. He had had no time
yet to decide what to do. He had gone to sleep. A most extraordinary
thing! His distress was appeased by the simple thought that there was no
need for him to do anything. After drinking his chocolate, which Spire
received on a tray from some woman on the other side of the door, he
informed him that he intended to devote the whole day to his
correspondence. A table having been arranged to that end close to an
open window, he started writing at once. On retiring without a sound
Spire left the goose-quill flying over the paper. It was past noon
before Cosmo, hearing him come in again on some pretence or other,
raised his head for the first time and dropped the pen to say: "Give me
my coat, I will go down to the dining room."

By that time the murmur of voices in the piazza had died out. The good
Genoese had gone indoors to eat. Coming out of his light-filled room
Cosmo found the corridors cold and dark like subterranean passages cut
in rock, and the hall downstairs gloomy like a burial vault. In contrast
with it the long dining room had a festive air, a brilliancy that was
almost crude. In a corner where the man who called himself Doctor Martel
had his table this glare was toned down by half-closed shutters and
Cosmo made his way there. Cantelucci's benefactor, seated sideways with
one arm thrown over the chair's back, took Cosmo's arrival as a matter
of course, greeted him with an amiable growl, and declared himself very
sharp set. Presently laying down his knife and fork he enquired what
Cosmo had been doing that morning. Writing? Really? Thought that perhaps
Cosmo had been doing the churches. One could see very pretty girls in
the morning, waiting for their turn at the confessional.

Cosmo, raising suddenly his eyes from his plate, caught his companion
examining him keenly. The doctor burst into a loud laugh till Cosmo's
grave face recalled him to himself.

"I beg your pardon. I remembered suddenly a very funny thing that
happened to me last night. I am afraid you think me very impolite. It
was extremely funny."

"Won't you tell me of it?" asked Cosmo coldly.

"No, my dear sir. You are not in the mood. I prefer to apologize. There
is a secret in it which is not mine. But as to the girls I was perfectly
serious. If you seek female beauty you must look to the people for it
and in Genoa you will not look in vain. The women of the upper classes
are alike everywhere. You must have remarked that."

"I have hardly had time to look about me as yet," said Cosmo. He was no
longer annoyed with the doctor, not even after he heard him say:

"Surely yesterday evening you must have had an opportunity. You came
home late."

"I wonder who takes the trouble to watch my movements?" remarked Cosmo
carelessly.

"Town-police spies, of course," said the doctor grimly; "and perhaps one
or two of the most enterprising thieves. You must make up your mind to
that. After all, why should you care?"

"Yes, why should I?" repeated Cosmo nonchalantly. "Do they report to
you?"

The doctor laughed again. "I see you haven't forgiven me my untimely
merriment; but I will answer your question. No doubt I could hear a lot
if I wanted to, both from the police and the thieves. But as a matter of
fact it was my courier who told me. He was talking with some friends
outside this inn when you came home. You know, you are a noticeable
figure."

"Oh, your courier. I suppose he hasn't got much else to do!"

"I see you are bent on quarrelling, Mr. Latham," said the other, while
two unexpected dimples appeared on his round cheeks. "All right. Only
hadn't we better wait for some other opportunity? Don't you allow your
man to talk while he is assisting you to dress? I must confess I let my
fellow run on while he is shaving me in the morning. But then I am an
easy-going sort of tramp. For I am just a tramp. I have no Latham Hall
to go back to."

He pushed his chair away from the table, stretched his legs, plunged his
hands in his pockets complacently. How long was it he had been a tramp?
he mused aloud. Twenty years? Or a little more. From one end of Europe
to the other. From Madrid to Moscow, as one might say. Exactly like that
Corsican fellow. Only he hadn't dragged a tail of two hundred thousand
men behind him, and had done no more blood-letting than his lancet was
equal to.

He looked up at Cosmo suddenly.

"The lancet's my weapon, you know. Not bayonet or sabre. Cold steel
anyhow. Of course I found occasion to fire off my pistols more than
once, in the course of my travels, and I must say for myself that
whenever I fired them it settled the business. One evening, I remember,
in Transylvania, stepping out of a wretched inn to take a look round, I
ran against a coalition of three powerful Haiduks in tarry breeches,
with moustaches a foot long. The moonlight was bright as day. I took in
the situation at a glance and I assure you two of them never made a
sound as they fell, while the third just grunted once. I fancy they had
designs on my poor horse. He was inside the inn, you know. A custom of
the country. Men and animals under the same roof. I used to be sorry for
the animals. When I came in again the Jew had just finished frying the
eggs. He had been very surly before but when he served me I noticed that
he was shaking like a leaf. He tried to propitiate me by the offer of a
sausage. I was simply ravenous. It made me ill for two days. That's why
I haven't forgotten the occurrence. He nearly managed to avenge those
bandits. Luckily I had the right kind of drugs in my valise, and my iron
constitution helped me to pull through. But I should like to have seen
Bonaparte in that predicament. He wouldn't have known what to do. And,
anyhow, the sausage would have finished him. His constitution is not
like mine. He's unhealthy, sir, unhealthy."

"You had occasion to observe him often?" asked Cosmo, simply because he
was reluctant to go back to his writing.

"Our paths seldom crossed," stated the other simply. "But some time
after the abdication I was passing through Valence--it's a tramp's
business, you know, to keep moving--and I just had a good look at him
outside the post-house. You may take it from me, he won't reach the term
of the Psalmist. Well, Mr. Latham, when I take a survey of the past,
here we are, the Corsican and I, within, say, a hundred miles of each
other, at the end of twenty years of tramping, and, frankly, which of us
is the better off when all's said and done?"

"That's a point of view," murmured Cosmo wearily. He added, however,
that there were various ways of appreciating the careers of the world's
great men.

"There are," assented the other. "For instance, you would say that
nothing short of the whole of Europe was needed to crush that fellow.
But Pozzo di Borgo thinks that he has done it all by himself."

At the name of the Emperor's Corsican enemy Cosmo raised his head. He
had caught sight in Paris of that personage at one or other of those
great receptions from which he used to come away disgusted with the
world and dissatisfied with himself. The doctor seemed inwardly amused
by his recollection of Pozzo di Borgo.

"He said to me," he continued, "'Ah! If Bonaparte had had the sense not
to quarrel with me he wouldn't be in Elba now.' What do you think of
that, Mr. Latham? Is that a point of view?"

"I should call it mad egotism."

"Yes. But the most amusing thing is that there is some truth in it. The
private enmity of one man may be more dangerous and more effective than
the hatred of millions on public grounds. Pozzo has the ear of the
Russian Emperor. The fate of the Bourbons hung on a hair. Alexander's
word was law--and who knows!"

Cosmo, plunged in abstraction, was repeating to himself mechanically,
"The fate of the Bourbons hung on a hair--the fate of the Bourbons." . . .
Those words seemed meaningless. He tried to rouse himself. "Yes,
Alexander," he murmured vaguely. The doctor raised his voice suddenly in
a peevish tone.

"I am not talking of Alexander of Macedon, Mr. Latham." His vanity had
been hurt by Cosmo's attitude. The young man's faint smile placated him,
and the incongruous dimples reappeared on the doctor's cheeks while he
continued: "Here you are. For Pozzo, Napoleon has always been a
starveling squireen. For the Prince, he has been principally the born
enemy of good taste. . . ."

"The Prince?" repeated Cosmo, struggling to keep his head above the
black waters of melancholia which seemed to lap about his very lips.
"You have said the Prince, haven't you? What Prince?"

"Why, Talleyrand, of course. He did once tell him so, too. Pretty
audacious! What? . . . Well, I don't know. Suppose you were master of
the world, and somebody were to tell you something of the sort to your
face--what could you do? Nothing. You would have to gulp it, feeling
pretty small. A private gentleman of good position could resent such a
remark from an equal, but a master of the world couldn't. A master of
the world, Mr. Latham, is very small potatoes; and I will tell you why:
it's because he is alone of his kind, stuck up like a thief in the
pillory, for dead cats and cabbage stalks to be thrown at him. A devil
of a position to be in unless for a moment. But no man born of woman is
a monster. There never was such a thing. A man who would really be a
monster would arouse nothing but loathing and hatred. But this man has
been loved by an army, by a people. For years his soldiers died for him
with joy. Now, didn't they?"

Cosmo perceived that he had managed to forget himself. "Yes," he said,
"that cannot be denied."

"No," continued the doctor. "And now, within twenty yards of us, on the
other side of the wall there are millions of people who still love him.
Hey! Cantelucci!" he called across the now empty length of the room.
"Come here."

The innkeeper, who had been noiselessly busy about a distant sideboard,
approached with deference, in his shirt-sleeves, girt with a long apron
of which one corner was turned up, and with a white cap on his head.
Being asked whether it was true that Italians loved Napoleon, he
answered by a bow and "Excellency."

"You think yourself that he is a great man, don't you?" pursued the
doctor, and obtained another bow and another murmured "Excellency."

The doctor turned to Cosmo triumphantly. "You see! And Bonaparte has
been stealing from them all he could lay his hands on for years. All
their works of art. I am surprised he didn't take away the wall on which
_The Last Supper_ is painted. It makes my blood boil. I love Italy, you
know." He addressed again the motionless Cantelucci.

"But what is it that makes you people love this man?"

This time Cantelucci did not bow. He seemed to make an effort: "Signore,
it is the idea."

The doctor directed his eyes again to Cosmo in silence. At last the
innkeeper stepped back three paces before turning away from his English
clients. The dimples had vanished from the doctor's full cheeks. There
was something contemptuous in the peevishness of his thin lips and the
extreme hardness of his eyes. They softened somewhat before he addressed
Cosmo.

"Here is another point of view for you. Devil only knows what that idea
is, but I suspect it's vague enough to include every illusion that ever
fooled mankind. There must be some charm in that gray coat and that old
three-cornered hat of his, for the man himself has betrayed every hatred
and every hope that have helped him on his way."

"What I am wondering at," Cosmo said at last, "is whether you have ever
talked like this to anybody before."

The doctor seemed taken aback a little.

"Oh. You mean about Bonaparte," he said. "If you had gone to that other
inn, Pollegrini's, more suitable to your nationality and social
position, you would have heard nothing of that kind. I am not very
communicative really, but to sit at meals like two mutes would have been
impossible. What could we have conversed about? One must have some
subject other than the weather and, frankly, what other subject would we
have had here in Genoa, or for that matter in any other spot of the
civilized world? I know there are amongst us in England a good many
young men who call themselves revolutionists and even republicans.
Charming young men, generous and all that. Friends of Boney. You might
be one of them."

As he paused markedly Cosmo murmured that he was hardly prepared to
state what he was. That other inn, the Pollegrini, was full when he
arrived.

"Well, there had been three departures this morning," the doctor
informed him. "You can have your things packed up this afternoon and
carried across the Place. You know, by staying here you make yourself
conspicuous to the spies, not to speak of the thieves; they ask
themselves: 'What sort of inferior Englishman is that?' With me it is
different. I am known for a man who has his own work to do. People are
curious. And as my work is confidential I prefer to keep out of the way
rather than have to be rude. But for you it would be more amusing to
live over there. New faces all the time; endless gossip about all sorts
of people."

"I do not think it is worth while to change now," said Cosmo coldly.

"Of course not, if you are not going to prolong your stay. If you
project a visit to Elba, Livorno is the port for that. And if you are
anxious to hear about Napoleon you will hear plenty of gossip about him
there. Here you have nothing but my talk."

"I have found it very interesting," said Cosmo, rising to go away. The
doctor smiled without amiability. He was determined never to let Cosmo
guess that he knew of his acquaintance with the people occupying the
palace guarded by the symbolic griffins. Of that fact he had been made
aware by the Count de Montevesso who, once, he had got the doctor into
Clelia's room, decided to take him into his confidence--on the ground
that one must be frank with a medical man. The real reason was, however,
that knowing Doctor Martel to be employed on secret political work by
the statesmen of the Alliance, and having a very great idea of his
occult influences in all sorts of spheres, he hoped to get from him
another sort of assistance. His last words were, "You see yourself the
state the child is in. I want that popinjay moved out of Genoa."

The only answer of the doctor to this, and the last sound during that
professional visit that Count de Montevesso heard from him, was a short
wooden laugh. That man of political intrigues, confidential missions
(often he had more than one at a time on his hands), inordinately vain
of his backstairs importance, was not mercenary. He had always preserved
a most independent attitude towards his employers. To him the Count de
Montevesso was but a common stupid soldier of fortune of no importance
and of no position except as the son-in-law of the Marquis d'Armand. He
had never seen him before, but his marital life was known to him as it
was known to the rest of the world. To be waylaid by a strange priest
just as he was leaving the Marquis's room was annoying enough, but he
could not very well refuse the request since it seemed to be a case of
sudden illness. He was soon enlightened as to its nature by Clelia, who
had treated him and the Count to another of her indescribable
performances. Characteristically enough the doctor had never been for a
moment irritated with the girl. He behaved by her tempestuous bedside
like a man of science, calm, attentive, impenetrable. But it was
afterwards, when he had been drawn aside by the Count for a confidential
talk, that he had asked himself whether he were dreaming or awake. His
scorn for the man helped him to preserve his self-command, and to the
end the Count was not intelligent enough to perceive its character.

The doctor left the Palazzo about an hour after Cosmo (but not by the
same staircase) and on his way to his inn gave rein to his indignation.
Did the stupid brute imagine that he had any sort of claim on his
services? Ah, he wanted that popinjay removed from Genoa! Indeed! And
what the devil did he care for it? Was he expected to arrange a neat
little assassination to please that solemn wooden imbecile? The doctor's
sense of self-importance was grievously hurt. Even in the morning after
a good-night's rest he had not shaken off the impression. However, he
was reasonable enough not to make Cosmo in any way responsible for what
he defined to himself as the most incredibly offensive experience of his
life. He only looked at him when he came to lunch with a sort of acid
amusement as the being who had had the power to arouse a passion of love
in the primitive soul of that curious little savage. As the meal
proceeded, the doctor seemed to notice that his young countryman was
somehow changed. He watched him covertly. What had happened to him since
last evening? Surely he hadn't been smitten himself by the little savage
that under no circumstances could have been made fit to be a housemaid
in an English family.

After he had been left by Cosmo alone in the dining room, the doctor's
body continued to loll in the chair while his thoughts continued to
circle around that funny affair, of which you couldn't say whether it
was love at first sight or a manifestation of some inherited lunacy.
Quite a good-looking young man. Out of the common too, in a
distinguished way. Altogether a specimen of one's countrymen one could
well be proud of, mused further the doctor, whose tastes had been formed
by much intercourse with all kinds of people. Characteristically enough,
too, he felt for a moment sorry in his grumpy contemptuous way for the
little dishevelled savage with a hooked nose and burning cheeks and her
thin sticks of bare arms. The doctor was humane. The origin of his
reputation sprang from his humanity. But his thought, as soon as it left
Clelia, stopped short as it were before another image that replaced it
in his mind. He had remembered the Countess of Montevesso. He knew her
of old, by sight and reputation. He had seen her no further back than
last night by the side of the old Marquis's chair. Now he had seen the
Count de Montevesso himself, he could well believe all the stories of a
lifelong jealousy. The doctor's hard, active eyes stared fixedly at the
truth. It was not because of that little savage that gloomy
self-tormenting ass of a drill sergeant to an Indian prince wanted young
Latham removed from Genoa. Oh, dear no. That wasn't it at all. It was
much more serious.

Before he walked out of the empty dining room Doctor Martel concluded
that it would be perhaps just as well for young Latham not to linger too
long in Genoa.




II


Cosmo, having returned to his room, sat down again at the writing table:
for was not this day to be devoted to correspondence? Long after the
shade had invaded the greater part of the square below he went on, while
the faint shuffle of footsteps and the faint murmur of voices reached
him from the pavement like the composite sound of agitated insect life
that can be heard in the depths of a forest. It required all his courage
to keep on, piling up words which dealt exclusively with towns, roads,
rivers, mountains, the colours of the sky. It was like labouring the
description of the scenery of a stage after a great play had come to an
end. A vain thing. And still he travelled on. Having at last descended
into the Italian plain (for the benefit of Henrietta), he dropped his
pen and thought: "At this rate I will never arrive in Genoa." He fell
back in his chair like a weary traveller. He was suddenly overcome by
that weary distaste a frank nature feels after an effort at concealing
an overpowering sentiment.

But had he really anything to conceal? he asked himself.

Suddenly the door flew open and Spire marched in with four lighted
candles on a tray. It was only then that Cosmo became aware how late it
was. "Had I not better tear all this up?" he thought, looking down at
the sheets before him.

Spire put two candlesticks on the table, disposed the two others, one
each side of the mantelpiece, and was going out.

"Wait!" cried Cosmo.

It was like a cry of distress. Spire shut the door quietly and turned
about, betraying no emotion. Cosmo seized the pen again and concluded
hastily:


I have been in Genoa for the last two days. I have seen Adèle and the
Marquis. They send their love. You shall have lots about them in my
next. I have no time now to tell you what a wonderful person she has
become. But perhaps you would not think so.


After he had signed it the thought struck him that there was nothing
about Napoleon in his letter. He must put in something about Napoleon.
He added a P.S.:


You can form no idea of the state of suspense in which all classes live
here from the highest to the lowest, as to what may happen next. All
their thoughts are concentrated on Bonaparte. Rumours are flying about
of some sort of violence that may be offered to him, assassination,
kidnapping. It's difficult to credit it all, though I do believe that
the Congress in Vienna is capable of any atrocity. A person I met here
suggested that I should go to Livorno. Perhaps I will. But I have lost,
I don't know why, all desire to travel. Should I find a ship ready to
sail for England in Livorno, I may take passage in her and come home at
once by sea.


Cosmo collected the pages, and while closing the packet asked himself
whether he ought to tell her that. Was it the fact that he had lost all
wish to travel? However, he let Spire take the packet to the post and
during the man's absence took a turn or two in the room. He had got
through the day. Now there was the evening to get through somehow. But
when it occurred to him that the evening would be followed by the hours
of an endless night, filled by the conflict of shadowy thoughts that
haunt the birth of a passion, the desolation of the prospect was so
overpowering that he could only meet it with a bitter laugh. Spire,
returning, stood thunderstruck at the door.

"What's the matter with you? Have you seen a ghost?" asked Cosmo, who
ceased laughing suddenly and fixed the valet with distracted eyes.

"No, sir, certainly not. I was wondering whether you hadn't better dine
in your room."

"What do you mean? Am I not fit to be seen?" asked Cosmo captiously,
glancing at himself in the mirror as though the crisis through which he
had passed in the last three or four minutes could have distorted his
face. Spire made no answer. The sound of that laugh had made him lose
his conventional bearing; while Cosmo wondered what had happened to that
imbecile and glared at him suspiciously.

"Give me my coat," he said at last. "I am going downstairs."

This broke the spell and Spire, getting into motion, regained his
composure.

"Noisy company down there, sir. I thought you might not like it."

Cosmo felt a sudden longing to hear noise, lots of it, senseless, loud,
common, absurd noise; noise loud enough to prevent one from thinking,
the sort of noise that would cause one to become, as it were,
insensible.

"What do you want?" he asked savagely of Spire, who was hovering at his
back.

"I am ready to help you with your coat, sir," said Spire, in an
apathetic voice. He had been profoundly shocked. After his master had
gone out, slamming the door behind him, he busied himself with a stony
face in putting the room to rights, before he blew out the candles and
left it to get his supper.

"Didn't you advise me this morning to go to Livorno?" asked Cosmo,
falling heavily into the chair. Doctor Martel was already at table, and,
except that he had changed his boots for silk stockings and shoes, he
might not have moved from there all the afternoon.

"Livorno," repeated that strange man. "Did I? Yes. The road along the
Riviera di Levante is delightful for any person sensible to the beauties
of Italian landscapes." He paused with a sour expression in the noise of
voices filling the room, and muttered that no doubt Cantelucci found
that sort of thing pay but that the place was becoming impossible.

Cosmo was just thinking that there was not half enough uproar there. The
naval officers seemed strangely subdued that evening. The same old
lieutenant with sunken cheeks and a sharp nose, in the same shabby
uniform, was at the head of the table. Cantelucci, wearing a
long-skirted maroon coat, now glided about the room, unobtrusive and
vigilant. His benefactor beckoned to him.

"You would know where to find a man with four good horses for the
signore's carriage?" he asked; and accepting Cantelucci's low bow as an
affirmative, addressed himself to Cosmo. "The road's perfectly safe. The
country's full of Austrian troops."

"I think I would prefer to go by sea," said Cosmo, who had not thought
of making any arrangements for the journey. Instantly Cantelucci glided
away, while the doctor emitted a grunt and applied himself to his
dinner. Cosmo thought desperately, "Oh, yes, the sea, why not by sea,
away from everybody?" He had been rolling and bumping on the roads,
good, bad, and indifferent, in dust or mud, meeting in inns ladies and
gentlemen for days and days between Paris and Genoa, and for a moment he
was fascinated by the notion of a steady gliding progress in company of
three or four bronzed sailors over a blue sea in sight of a picturesque
coast of rocks and hills crowded with pines, with opening valleys, with
white villages, and purple promontories of lovely shape. It was like a
dream which lasted till the doctor was heard suddenly saying, "I think I
could find somebody that would take your travelling carriage off your
hands"--and the awakening came with an inward recoil of all Cosmo's
being, as if before a vision of irrevocable consequences.

The doctor lowered his eyelids. "He is changed," he said to himself. "Oh
yes, he is changed." This, however, did not prevent him from feeling
irritated by Cosmo's lack of response to the offer to dispose of his
travelling carriage.

"There are many people that would consider themselves lucky to have such
an offer made to them," he remarked, after a period of silence. "It is
not so easy at this time to get rid of a travelling carriage. Nor yet to
have an opportunity to hire a dependable man with four good horses if
you want to go by land. I mean at a time like this when anything may
happen any day."

"I am sure I am very much obliged to you," said Cosmo, "but I am really
in no hurry."

The doctor took notice of Cosmo's languid attitude and the untouched
plate before him.

"The trouble is that you don't seem to have any aim at all. Isn't that
it?"

"Yes. I confess," said Cosmo carelessly. "I think I want a rest."

"Well, Mr. Latham, you had better see that you get it, then. This place
isn't restful, it is merely dull. And then suppose you were suddenly to
perceive an aim, such for instance as a visit to Elba--you may be too
late if you linger unduly. You know, you are not likely to see a
specimen like that one over there again in your lifetime. And even he
may not be with us very long."

"You seem very positive about that," said Cosmo, looking at his
interlocutor searchingly. "This is the third or fourth time that I hear
that sort of allusion from you. Have you any special information?"

"Yes, of a sort. It has been my lot to hear much of what is said in high
places, and the nature of my occupation has given me much practice in
appreciating what is said."

"In high places!" interjected Cosmo.

"And in low, too," retorted the doctor a little impatiently, "if that is
the distinction you have in your mind, Mr. Latham. However, I told you I
have been in Vienna quite recently, and I have heard something there."

"From Prince Talleyrand?" was Cosmo's stolid suggestion.

The doctor smiled acidly. "Not a bad guess. I did hear something at
Prince Talleyrand's. I heard it from Montrond. You know whom I mean?"

"Never heard of him. Who is he?"

"Never heard of Montrond? Oh, I forgot, you have been shut up in that
tight island of ours. Monsieur Montrond has the advantage to live near
the rose. You understand me? He is the intimate companion to the Prince.
Has been for many years. The Prince told somebody once that he liked
Montrond because he was not 'excessively' scrupulous. That just paints
the man for you. I was talking with Monsieur Montrond about Bonaparte's
future--and I was not trying to be unkind, either. I pointed out that
one could hardly expect him to settle down if the French Government were
not made to pay him the money guaranteed under the Treaty. He could see
the moment when he would find himself without a penny. That's enough to
make any human being restive. He was bound to try and do something. A
man must live, I said. And Montrond looks at me, sideways, and says
deliberately: 'Oh, here we don't see the necessity.' You understand that
after a hint like this I dropped the subject. It's a point of view like
another, eh, Mr. Latham?"

Cosmo was impressed. "I heard last night," he said, "that he is taking
precautions for his personal safety."

"He remembered perhaps what happened to a certain Duc d'Enghien, a young
man who obviously didn't take precautions. So you heard that story?
Well, in Livorno you will hear many sorts of stories. Livorno is an
exciting place, and an excellent point to start from for a visit to
Elba, which would be a great memory for your old age. And if you happen
to observe anything remarkable there I would thank you to drop me a
line, care of Cantelucci. You see, I have put some money into a deal of
oil, and I don't know how it is, everything in the world, even a little
twopenny affair like that, is affected by this feeling of suspense that
man's presence gives rise to: hopes, plans, affections, love affairs. If
I were you, Mr. Latham, I would certainly go to Livorno." He waited a
little before he got up, muttering something about having a lot of pen
work to do, and went out, Cantelucci hastening to open the door for him.

Cosmo remained passive in his chair. The room emptied itself gradually,
and there was not even a servant left in it when Cosmo rose in his turn.
He went back to his room, threw a few pieces of wood on the fire, and
sat down. He felt as if lost in a strange world.

He doubted whether he ought not to have called that day at the Palace,
if only to say good-bye. And suddenly all the occurrences and even words
of the day before assailed his memory. The morning call, the mulatto
girl, the sunshine in Madame de Montevesso's boudoir, the seduction of
her voice, the emotional appeal of her story, had stirred him to the
depths of his soul. Where was the man who could have imagined the
existence of a being of such splendid humanity, with such a voice, with
such amazing harmony of aspect, expression, gesture--with such a face in
this gross world of mortals in which Lady Jane and Mrs. R.'s daughters
counted for the most exquisite products offered to the love of men? And
yet Cosmo remembered now that even while all his senses had been thrown
into confusion by the first sight of Madame de Montevesso he had felt
dimly that she was no stranger, that he had seen her glory before: the
presence, the glance, the lips. He did not connect that dim recognition
with the child Adèle. No child could have promised a woman like this.
It was rather like the awed recollection of a prophetic vision. And it
had been in Latham Hallbut not in a dream; he was certain no man ever
found the premonition of such a marvel in the obscure promptings of
slumbering flesh. And it was not in a vision of his own; such visions
were for artists, for inspired seers. She must have been foretold to him
in some picture he had seen in Latham Hall, where one came on pictures
(mostly of the Italian school) in unexpected places, on landings, at the
end of dark corridors, in spare bedrooms. A luminous oval face on the
dark background--the noble full-length woman, stepping out of the narrow
frame with long draperies held by jewelled clasps and girdle, with
pearls on head and bosom, carrying a book and a pen (or was it a palm?)
and--yes! he saw it plainly with terror--with her left breast pierced by
a dagger. He saw it there plainly as if the blow had been struck before
his eyes. The released hilt seemed to vibrate yet, while the eyes looked
straight at him, profound, unconscious in miraculous tranquillity.

Terror-struck as if at the discovery of a crime, he jumped up, trembling
in every limb. He had a horror of the room, of being alone within its
four bare walls on which there were no pictures except that awful one
which seemed to hang in the air before his eyes. Cosmo felt that he must
get away from it. He snatched up his cloak and hat and fled into the
corridor. The hour was late and everything was very still. He did not
see as much as a flitting shadow on the bare rough walls of the
unfinished palace awaiting the decoration of marbles and bronzes that
would never cover its nakedness now. The dwelling of the Grazianis stood
as dumb and cold in all its lofty depths as at that desolate hour of the
dreadful siege, when its owner lay dead of hunger at the foot of the
great flight of stairs. It was only in the hall below that Cosmo caught
from behind one of the closed doors faint, almost ghostly, murmurs of
disputing voices. The two hanging lanterns could not light up that
grandly planned cavern in all its extent, but Cosmo made out a dim shape
of the elderly lieutenant sitting all alone and perfectly still against
the wall, with a bottle of wine before him. By the time he had reached
the pavement Cosmo had mastered his trembling and had steadied his
thoughts. He wanted to keep away from that house for hours, for hours.
He glanced right and left, hesitating. In the whole town he knew only
the way to the Palazzo and the way to the port. He took the latter
direction. He walked by the faint starlight falling into the narrow
streets resembling lofty unroofed corridors as if the whole town had
been one palace, recognizing on his way the massive shape of one or two
jutting balconies he remembered seeing before, and also a remarkable
doorway, the arch of which was held up by bowed giants with flowing
beards, like two captive sons of the god of the sea.




III


At the moment when Cosmo was leaving his room to escape the haunting
vision of an old picture representing a beautiful martyr with a dagger
in her breast. Doctor Martel was at work finishing what he called a
confidential memorandum which he proposed to hand over to the Marquis
d'Armand. The doctor applied very high standards of honour and fidelity
to his appreciation of men's character. He had a very great respect for
the old Marquis. He was anxious to make him the recipient of that crop
of valuable out-of-the-way information interesting to the French
Bourbons which he had gathered lately.

Having sat up half the night, he slept late and was just finishing
shaving when, a little before eleven o'clock, there was a knock at his
door and Cantelucci entered. The innkeeper offered no apology for this
intrusion, but announced without preliminaries that the young English
gentleman had vanished during the night from the inn. The woman who took
the chocolate in the morning upstairs found no servant ready to receive
it as usual. The bedroom door was ajar. After much hesitation she had
ventured to put her head through. The shutters being open, she had seen
that the bed had not been slept in. . . . The doctor left off dabbing
his cheeks with eau de cologne and turned to stare at the innkeeper. At
last he shrugged his shoulders slightly.

Cantelucci took the point immediately. Yes. But in this case it was
impossible to dismiss the affair lightly. The young English signore had
not been much more than forty-eight hours in Genoa. He had no time to
make many acquaintances. And in any case, Cantelucci thought, he ought
to have been back by this time.

The doctor picked up his wig and adjusted it on his head thoughtfully,
like a considering cap. That simple action altered his physiognomy so
completely that Cantelucci was secretly affected. He made one of his
austerely deferential bows, which seemed to put the whole matter into
the doctor's hands at once.

"You seem very much upset," said the doctor. "Have you seen his servant?
He must know something."

"I doubt it. Excellency. He has been upstairs to open the shutters, of
course. He is now at the front door, looking out. I did speak to him. He
had too much wine last evening and fell asleep with his head on the
table. I saw him myself before I retired."

The doctor preserving a sort of watchful silence, Cantelucci added that
he, himself, had retired early on account of one of those periodical
headaches he had suffered from since the days of his youth when he had
been chained up in the dungeons of St. Elmo for months.

The doctor thought the fellow did look as though he had had a bad night.
"Why didn't you come to see me? You know I can cure worse ailments."

The innkeeper raised his hands in horror at the mere idea. He would
never have dared to disturb His Excellency for such a trifle as a
headache. But the cause of his trouble was quite other. A partisan of
the revolutionary French from his early youth, Cantelucci had been an
active conspirator against the old order of things. Now that kings and
priests were raising their heads out of the dust he had again become
very busy. The latest matter in hand had been the sending of some
important documents to the conspirators in the South. He had found the
messenger, had taken steps for getting him away secretly, had given him
full instructions the last thing before going to bed. The young fellow
was brave, intelligent, and resourceful, beyond the common. But somehow
the very perfection of his arrangements kept the old conspirator awake.
He reviewed them again and again. He could not have done better. At last
he fell asleep, but almost immediately, it seemed to him, he was roused
by the old crone whose task it was to light the fires in the morning.
Sordid and witchlike, she conveyed to him in a toothless mumble the
intelligence that Checca was in the kitchen, all in tears and demanding
to see him at once.

This Checca was primarily and principally a pretty girl, an orphan left
to his care by his late sister. She was not consulted when her uncle, of
whom she stood in awe, married her to the middle-aged owner of a
wine-shop in the low quarter of the town extending along the shore near
the harbour. He was good-natured, slow-witted, and heavy-handed at
times. But Checca was much less afraid of him than of her austere uncle.
It amused her to be the padrona of an osteria which in the days of
Empire was a notable resort for the officers of French privateers. But
on the peace that clientèle had disappeared and Checca's husband,
leaving the wine-casks to her management, employed his leisure in petty
smuggling operations which kept him away from home.

Cantelucci connected his niece's irruption with some trouble that men
might have got into. He was vexed. He had other matters to think of. He
was astonished by the violence of her grief. When she could speak at
last her tale turned out to be more in the nature of a confession. The
old conspirator could hardly believe his ears when he heard that the man
whom he had trusted had committed the crime of betraying the secrecy of
his mission by going to the osteria late at night to say good-bye to
Checca. She assured him that he had been there only a very few moments.

"What, in a wine-shop! Before all the people! With spies swarming
everywhere!"

"No," she said. It was much later. Everybody was gone. He had scratched
at the barred door.

"And you were on the other side waiting to let him in--miserable girl,"
Cantelucci hissed ferociously.

She stared at her terrible uncle with streaming eyes. "Yes, I was." She
had not the heart to refuse him. He stayed only a little moment. . . .
(Cantelucci ground his teeth with rage. It was the first he had heard of
this affair. Here was a most promising plot endangered by this
_bestialita._) . . . Only one little hug, and then she pushed him out
herself. Before she had finished putting up the bar she heard a tumult
in the street. Shots, too. Perhaps she would have rushed out but her
husband was home for a few days. He came down to the wine-shop very
cross and boxed her ears, she did not know why. Perhaps for being in the
shop at that late hour. That did not matter; but he drove her before him
up the stairs and she had to sham sleep for hours till he began to snore
regularly. She had grown so desperate that she took the risk of running
out and telling her uncle all about it. She thought he ought to know.
What brought her to the inn really was a faint hope that Attilio, having
eluded the assassins (she was sure they were assassins), had taken
refuge there unscathed--or wounded perhaps. She said nothing of this,
however. Before Cantelucci's stony bearing she broke down. "He is
dead--_poverino._ My own hands pushed him to his death," she moaned to
herself crazily, standing in front of her silent uncle before the
blazing kitchen fire in the yet slumbering house.

Rage kept Cantelucci dumb. He was as shocked by what he had heard as the
most rigid moralist could desire. But he was a conspirator, and all he
could see in this was the criminal conduct of those young people who
ought to have thought of nothing but the liberation of Italy. For
Attilio had taken the oath of the Carbonari; and Checca belonged to the
women's organization of that secret society. She was an _ortolana_, as
they called themselves. He had initiated her and was responsible for her
conduct. The baseness--the stupidity--the frivolity--the selfishness!

By severe exercise of self-restraint he refrained from throwing her out
into the street all in tears as she was. He only muttered awfully at
her, "Get out of my sight, you little fool," with a menacing gesture;
but she stood her ground; she never flinched before his raised hand. And
as it fell harmless by his side she seized it in both her own, pressing
it to her lips and breast in turn, whispering the while all sorts of
endearing names at the infuriated Cantelucci. He heard the sounds of his
staff beginning the work of the day, their voices, their footsteps. They
would wonder--but his niece did not care. She clung to his hand, and he
did not get rid of her till he had actually promised to send her news
directly he had heard something himself. And she even thought of the
means. There was that fine sailor with black whiskers in attendance on
the English officers frequenting the hotel. He was a good-natured man.
He knew the way to the wine-shop.

This reminded her of her husband. What if he should wake in her absence?
And still distracted, she ran off at last, leaving Cantelucci to face
the situation.

He was dismayed. He did not really know what had happened--not to his
messenger but to the documents. The old conspirator, battling with his
thoughts, moved so silent and stern amongst his people that nobody dared
approach him for a couple of hours. And when they did at last come to
him with the news of the young "milord's" disappearance he simply swore
at them. But as the morning advanced he came to the conclusion that for
various reasons it would be best for him to seek his old benefactor. He
did so with a harassed face which caused the doctor to believe in the
story of a sleepless night. Of course he spoke only of Cosmo's absence.

The doctor, leaning back against the edge of his dressing table, gazed
silently at the innkeeper. He was profoundly disturbed by the
intelligence. "Got your snuffbox on you?" he asked.

The alacrity of Cantelucci in producing his snuffbox was equalled by the
deferential flourish with which he held it out to his benefactor.

"The young English signore," he remarked, "visited the Palazzo of the
Griffins the evening before."

The doctor helped himself to a pinch. "He didn't spend the night there,
though," he observed. "You know who lives in the Palazzo, don't you,
Cantelucci?"

"Some Piedmontese general, I understand, Your Excellency," said
Cantelucci, who had been in touch with Count Helion ever since the
Austrian occupation, and had even forwarded secretly one or two letters
for the Count to Elba. But these were addressed to a grain merchant in
Porto Ferraio. "I will open all my mind to Your Excellency," continued
Cantelucci. "An English milord is a person of consequence. If I were to
report his disappearance the police would be coming here to make
investigation. I don't want any police in my house."

The doctor lost his meditative air. "I daresay you don't," he said
grimly.

"I recommend myself to Your Excellency's protective influence," murmured
Cantelucci insinuatingly.

The doctor let drop the pinch of snuff between his thumb and finger.
"And he may have come back while we are talking here," he said
hopefully. "Go down, Cantelucci, and send me my courier."

But the doctor's man was already at the door, bringing the brushed
clothes over his arm. While dressing, the doctor speculated on the
mystery. It baffled all his conjectures. A man may go out in the evening
for a breath of fresh air and get knocked on the head. But how unlikely!
He spoke casually to his man who was ministering to him in gloomy
silence.

"You will have to step over to the police presently and find out whether
anything has happened last night. Do it quietly."

"I understand," said the courier surlily. The thought that the fellow
had been drunk recently crossed the doctor's mind.

"Whom were you drinking with last night?" he asked sharply.

"The English servant," confessed the courier-valet grumpily. "His master
let him off his services last night."

"Yes. And you made him pay the shot." With these words the doctor left
the room. While crossing the great hall downstairs he had the view of
Spire's back framed in the entrance doorway. The valet had not
apparently budged from there since seven. So Mr. Latham had not
returned. In the dining room there were only two naval officers at the
table reserved for them: the elderly gentleman in his usual place at the
head, and a round-faced florid person in a bobbed wig, who might have
been the ship's surgeon. During their meal the doctor did not hear them
exchange a single remark. They went away together, and after the last of
the town customers had left the room, too, the doctor sat alone before
his table, toying with a half-empty glass thoughtfully. His grave face
was startlingly at variance with the short abrupt laugh which he emitted
as he rose, pushing his chair back. It was provoked by the thought that
only last evening he had been urging half jestingly his young countryman
to leave Genoa in one of the conventional ways, by road or sea, and now
he was gone with a vengeance--spirited away, by Jove! The doctor was
startled at the profound change of his own feelings. Count Helion's
venomous, "I don't want that popinjay here" did not sound so funny in
his recollection now. Very extraordinary things could and did happen
under the run of everyday life. Was it possible that the word of the
riddle could be found there? he asked himself.

This investigator of the secret discontents and aspirations of his time
had never shut his ears to the mere social gossip that came in his way.
He had lived long, he remembered much. For instance, he could remember
things that were said about Sir Charles Latham long before Cosmo was
born. As to the story of the Montevesso marriage, that had made noise
enough in its time in society and also amongst the French émigrés. Its
celebration, the subsequent differences, reconciliations,
recriminations, and final arrangement had kept idle tongues wagging for
years. Of course it was that match which had given that dubious
Montevesso his social standing; and what followed had invested that
absurd individual with the celebrity of a character out of a Molière
comedy: "Le Jaloux." The elderly jealous husband. Comic enough. But that
was the sort of comedy that soon takes a tragic turn. A special
provocation, a sudden opportunity are enough. What puzzled the doctor
was the suddenness of the problem. Yet one could not tell what an
orientalized brute, no stranger probably to palace murders, had not the
means of doing. He might have been harbouring in that barn of a palace
some retainers of a deadly kind. A Corsican desperado, or a couple of
rascals from his own native mountains. Had he not two unattractive old
peasant women concealed there?

The doctor believed that unlikely things happened every day. This view
was not the result of inborn credulity but of much acquired knowledge of
a secret sort. A serious, fastidious, and obviously earnest-minded young
man, like Latham, was particularly liable to get into trouble of a grave
kind. A manifestation of perfectly innocent sympathy could do it, and
even less. An unguarded glance. An unconscious warmth of tone. Confound
it! Yet he could not let a young countryman of his, a nice, likable
young gentleman, vanish from under his nose without taking some steps.

The doctor stepped out into the hall, attractively dim and cool in the
middle of the day. Spire had disappeared, but the doctor had given up
the hope of Cosmo's return. In a dark corner he perceived the shadowy
shape of a cocked hat, and made out the old lieutenant leaning back
against the wall with his arms crossed and his chin on his breast. He
had a bottle of wine and a glass standing in front of him.

"I suppose," thought the doctor, "this is what he comes ashore for."

The product of twenty years of war. The reeking loom that converted such
as he into food for guns had stopped suddenly. There would be no demand
for heroes for a long, long time, and somehow the fact that the fellow
had all his limbs about him made him even more pathetic. The doctor had
almost forgotten Cosmo. He did not notice Spire coming down the stairs,
and he started at the sound of the words, "I beg your pardon, sir,"
uttered almost in his ears. The elderly valet was very much shaken. He
said in a low murmur, "I am nearly out of my mind, sir. My master . . ."

"I know," interrupted the doctor. He pounced upon Spire like a bird of
prey. "Come, what do you know about it?"

This reception roused Spire's dislike of that sour and off-hand person
like no medical man he had ever seen and certainly no gentleman. On the
principle, "like master like man," Spire was more sensitive to manner
than to any trait of personality. He pulled himself together and
steadied his voice. "I know nothing, sir, except that you were the last
person seen speaking to Mr. Latham."

"You don't think I have got him in my pocket, do you?" asked Doctor
Martel, noting the hostile stare. "Don't you attend your master when he
retires for the night?"

"I got dismissed early last night. I am sorry to say I sat downstairs
after supper very late, listening to tales about one thing and another.
I . . . I went to sleep there," added Spire with a sort of desperation.

"Listening to tales," repeated the doctor jeeringly. "Pretty tales they
must have been, too. Zillers is no company for a respectable English
servant. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Well, and then?"

"I went up, sir, and . . ."

"In the middle of the night," suggested the doctor.

"It was pretty late. I . . ."

He faltered at the remembrance. The waking up in the cold dark kitchen,
the cold dark staircase, the light shining through the keyhole of Mr.
Cosmo's bedroom, the first vague feeling that there was something wrong,
the empty room. And most awful of all, the bed not slept in, and the
candles in the candelabras burning low. He remembered his horror,
incredulity, his collapse into an armchair where he sat till broad
daylight in a pitiable state of mental agitation.

A slight tremor passed through his portly frame before he forced himself
to speak.

"Mr. Latham had emptied his pockets, sir, as if he were making ready to
go to bed. All the change and the keys were lying on the mantelpiece.
One would think he had been kidnapped. Of course it can't be," he added
in a low, intense tone.

"Do you mean to say he disappeared without his hat?" asked the doctor.

"No, sir, hat and cloak aren't there." And to the doctor's further
questions Spire confessed that he had spoken to no one in the house that
morning. He would only have been told lies. He did not think much of the
people in the inn.

"So I took the liberty of speaking to you, sir. Mr. Latham may turn up
any moment and I don't know that he would like to find that I have been
to the police already."

"No, perhaps he wouldn't," assented the doctor reflectively.

"That's just it, sir," murmured Spire. "Mr. Cosmo is a very peculiar
young gentleman. He doesn't like notice to be taken."

"Doesn't he? Well then, you had better wait before you go to the police.
We had better give him till four o'clock."

"Very well, sir," said Spire, fighting down his feeling that nothing in
the world would be worse than this waiting. The doctor nodded dismissal,
then at the last moment:

"By the by, hadn't you better look up all the papers that may be lying
about?"

Spire was favourably impressed by the suggestion.

"Yes, sir, we have a small strong box with us. I will go and do it at
once."

During that colloquy, conducted in low tones at the foot of the grand
staircase, nobody had appeared in the hall. Not even the vigilant
Cantelucci. But the elderly lieutenant had raised his head, and his dull
uninterested eyes followed the doctor across the hall and out through
the door into the sunshine of the square. In all its vast and paved
extent only very few figures were moving. The doctor's tastes and even
his destiny had made of him a nocturnal visitor to the abodes of the
great. At this time of the day, however, there was almost as little risk
of being seen entering the Palace of the Griffins as in the middle of
the night. The populace, the shopkeepers, the Austrian garrison, the
gendarmes, the _sbirri_, the spies, and even the conspirators were
indulging in midday repose. The very team of dapple-gray horses,
harnessed to an enormous two-wheeled cart drawn up in the shade, dozed
over their empty nosebags. Dogs slumbered in the doorways in utter
abandonment; and only the bronze griffins seated on their narrow
pedestals of granite before the doorway of the Palace preserved their
alert wide-awake pose of everlasting watchfulness. They were really very
fine. And the doctor gave them an appreciative glance before crossing
the empty quadrangle. He felt the only wide-awake person in a slumbering
world. He wondered if he would succeed in getting admitted to the
Palace. If not, he confessed to himself, he would be at a loss what to
do next. Very disagreeable. He had, however, the memorandum for the
Marquis in his pocket as a pretext for his visit.

All was still without and within; but in the noble anteroom at the foot
of the marble staircase he was met by a sight characteristic of the easy
Italian ways. Extended face downward on one of the red and gold benches,
one of the footmen in shirt-sleeves and with his breeches untied at the
knees was sleeping profoundly. His dishevelled head rested on his
forearm. At an unceremonious poke in the ribs he jumped up to his feet,
looking scared and wild. But Doctor Martel was ready for him.

"What's the matter, my friend?" he asked softly. "Is there a price set
on your head?"

The man remained open-mouthed as if paralysed by the caustic enquiry.

"Fetch the major-domo here," commanded the doctor, thinking that he had
seldom seen a more bandit-like figure. While waiting, the doctor
reflected that a livery coat was a good disguise. It occurred to him
also that in the house of a man having such retainers all sorts of
things might happen. This was Italy. The silence as of a tomb, which
pervaded the whole house, though nothing extraordinary in the hour of
siesta, produced the effect of sinister mystery. The arrival of the
sleek Bernard did not destroy that bad impression. The doctor, who had
never seen him before by daylight, said to himself that this was no
doubt only another kind of villain. On learning that the Marquis had
been very ill during the night and that Bernard could not think of
taking in his name, the doctor inquired whether Madame de Montevesso
would see him on most important business. To his great relief (because
he had been asking himself all along how he could contrive to get
private speech with the Countess) Bernard raised no objections. He
simply went away. And again the dumbness around him grew oppressive to
Doctor Martel. He fell into a brown study. This palace, famed for the
treasures of art, for the splendours of its marbles and paintings and
gildings, was no better than a gorgeous tomb. Men's vanity erected these
magnificent abodes only to receive in them the unavoidable guest. Death,
with all the ceremonies of superstitious fear. The sense of human
mortality evoked by this dumb palazzo was very disagreeable. He was
relieved by the return of the noiseless Bernard, all in black and grave
like a sleek caretaker of that particular tomb, who stood before him
saying in a low voice: "Follow me, please."

Bernard introduced the doctor into a comparatively small, well-lighted
boudoir. At the same moment Madame de Montevesso entered it from her
bedroom by another door. The doctor had an impression of a gown with a
train, trimmed with ribbons and lace, surmounted by a radiant fair head.
The face was pale. Madame de Montevesso had been up most of the night
with her father. The Marquis was too ill to see anybody.

The doctor expressed his regret in a formal tone. Meantime he took out
of his pocket the memoir and begged Madame la Comtesse to keep it under
lock and key till she could hand it over to her father. He was also in
possession of information which, he said, would be of the greatest
interest to the French court; but he could disclose it only to the
French King or to Monsieur de Jaucourt. He was ready to proceed to Paris
should the Marquis be impressed sufficiently by the memoir to procure
for him a private audience from the King or the minister.

This curt, businesslike declaration called out a smile on that charming
face--just a flicker--a suspicion of it. He could not be offended with
that glorious being. He felt only that he must assert himself.

"I cannot deal with lesser people," he said simply. "This must be
understood in Paris. I make my own conditions. I am not a hireling. Your
father has known me for years. Monsieur le Marquis and I met in other,
dangerous times, in various parts of Europe. Each of us was risking his
life."

The Marquis had often talked with his daughter of his past. She had
heard from him of a certain agent Martel, a singular personage. Her
curiosity was aroused. She said:

"I know. I believe he was indebted to you for his safety on one
occasion. I can understand my father's motives. But you will forgive me
for saying that as to yours . . ."

"Oh! It was not the love of absolutism. The fact is, I discovered early
in life that I was not made for a country practice. I started on my
travels with no definite purpose, except to do a little good--here and
there. I arrived in Italy while it was being revolutionized by Jacobins.
I was not in love with them either. Humane impulses, circumstances, and
so on, did the rest."

He looked straight at her. This tête-à-tête was a unique experience.
She was a marvellous being somehow and a very great lady. And yet she
was as simple as a village maid--a glorified village maid. The trials of
a life of exile and poverty had stripped her of the faintest trace of
affectation or artificiality of any kind. The doctor was lost in wonder.
What humanizing force there was in the beauty of that face to make him
talk like that the first time he saw her! And suddenly the thought, "her
face has been her fortune," came to him with great force, evoking by the
side of her noble unconscious grace the stiff wooden figure of Count de
Montevesso. The effect was horrible, but the doctor's hard gray eyes
betrayed neither his horror nor his indignation. He only asked Madame de
Montevesso, who was locking up his memoir in the drawer of a little
writing table, if it would be safe there, and was told that nobody ever
came into the room but a confidential mulatto maid who had been with the
Countess for years.

"Yes, as far as you know," the doctor ventured significantly. With this
beginning he found no difficulty in discovering that Madame de
Montevesso knew nothing of the composition of the household. She did not
know how many servants there were. She had not been interested enough to
look over the Palazzo. Apart from the private apartments and the suite
of rooms for small receptions she had seen nothing of it, she confessed,
looking a little surprised. It was clear that she knew nothing,
suspected nothing, had lived in that enormous and magnificent building
like a lost child in a forest. The doctor felt himself at the end of his
resources, till it occurred to him to say that he hoped that she was not
specially anxious about her father. No, Madame de Montevesso was not
specially anxious. He seemed better this morning. Doctor Martel was very
much gratified; and then, by a sudden inspiration, added that it would
be a pleasure to give the good news to Mr. Latham whom he hoped to see
this evening.

Madame de Montevesso turned rigid with surprise for a moment at the
sound of that name. "You have met Mr. Latham . . ." she faltered out.

"Oh! By the merest chance. We are staying at the same inn. He shares my
table. He is very attractive."

Madame de Montevesso looked no longer as though she expected her visitor
to go away. The doctor had just time to note the change before he was
asked point-blank:

"Did Mr. Latham tell you that he was a friend of ours?"

He answered evasively that he knew very little about Mr. Latham, except
what he could see for himself--that Mr. Latham was very superior to the
young men of fashion coming over in such numbers from England since the
end of the war. That generation struck him as very crude and utterly
uninteresting. It was different, as far as Mr. Latham was concerned. A
situation had arisen which would make a little information as to his
affairs very desirable.

"Desirable?" repeated Madame de Montevesso in a whisper.

"Yes, helpful. . . ."

The deliberate stress which he put on that word augmented Madame de
Montevesso's bewilderment.

"I don't quite understand. In what way? Helpful for you--or helpful for
Mr. Latham?"

"You see," said the doctor slowly, "though our acquaintance was short my
interest was aroused. I am a useful person to know for those who travel
in Italy."

Madame de Montevesso sank into a _bergère_, pointing at the same time
to a chair which faced it. But the doctor, after a slight bow, only
rested his hand on its high back. At the end of five minutes Adèle was
in possession of all the doctor knew about Cosmo's disappearance. She
sat silent, her head drooped, her eyes cast down. The doctor was
beginning to feel restive when she spoke, without looking up.

"And this is the real motive for your visit here."

The doctor was moved by the hopeless tone. It might have been an attempt
to appear indifferent, but, only in a moment, she seemed to have become
lifeless.

"Well," he said, "on the spur of the moment it seemed the only thing to
do. . . . There is somebody in the next room. May I shut the door?"

"It's only my maid," said Madame de Montevesso. "She couldn't hear us
from there."

"Well, then perhaps we had better leave the door as it is. It's best to
avoid all appearance of secrecy." The doctor was thinking of Count
Helion, but Madame de Montevesso made no sign. The doctor lowered his
voice still more.

"I wanted to ask you if you had seen him yesterday--last night. No? But
he may have called without your knowledge."

She admitted that it was possible. People had been sent away from the
door on account of her father's illness. There had been no reception in
the evening. But Mr. Latham would have asked for her. She thought she
would have been told. The doctor suggested that Mr. Latham might have
asked for the Count. Madame de Montevesso had only seen her husband for
a moment in her father's bedroom the day before, and not at all yet this
day. For all she knew he may have been away for the day on a visit in
the country. "But I know nothing of his interests, really," she said in
a little less deadened voice.

She could not explain to the doctor that she was a stranger in that
house; an unwilling visitor with an unsympathetic host whose motives one
cannot help suspecting. Beyond the time she spent by arrangement every
year at Count de Montevesso's country house she knew nothing of his
life. What could have been the motives which brought him to Genoa, she
had and could have not the slightest idea. She only felt that she ought
not to have accepted his pressing invitation to this hired palazzo. But
then she could not have come with her father to Genoa. And yet he could
not have done without her. And indeed it seemed but a small thing. The
alarming thought crossed her mind that, all unwittingly, she had taken a
fatal step.

The doctor, who had quite an accurate notion of the state of affairs,
hastened to say:

"After all, I don't know that this is of any importance. I have heard
that Mr. Latham was busy writing all yesterday. If he had come to Italy
with some sort of purpose," he continued as if arguing with himself,
"one could . . ." Then sharply: "You couldn't tell me anything, could
you?" he asked Adèle.

"This is the first time I have seen him for ten years." Madame de
Montevesso raised her eyes, full of trouble, to the doctor's face.
"Since we were children together in Yorkshire. We talked of old times.
Only of old times," she repeated.

"Of course--very natural," mumbled the doctor. He made the mental remark
that one did not disappear like this after talking of old times. And
aloud he said, "I suppose Mr. Latham made the acquaintance of Count de
Montevesso."

"Certainly."

"I presume that they had an opportunity to have a conversation
together."

"I don't think that Cosmo--that Mr. Latham made any confidences to Count
de Montevesso." While saying those words Adèle looked the doctor
straight in the face.

He was asking himself whether she could read his thoughts, when she got
up suddenly and walked away to the window, without haste and with a
grace of movement which aroused the doctor's admiration. He could not
tell her what he had in his mind. He looked irresolutely at the figure
in the window. It was growing enigmatic in its immobility. He began to
feel some little awe, when he heard unexpectedly the words:

"You suspect a crime?"

The doctor could not guess the effort which went to the uttering of
those few words. It was the stunning force of the shock which enabled
Adèle de Montevesso to appear so calm. It was the general humanity of
Doctor Martel's disposition which dictated his answer.

"I suspect some imprudence," he admitted in an easy tone. At that moment
he drew the gloomiest view of Cosmo's disappearance, from the sinister
conviction that twenty-four hours was enough to arrange an
assassination. "The difficulty is to imagine a cause for it. To find the
motive. . . ."

Madame de Montevesso continued to face the window as if lost in the
contemplation of a vast landscape. "And you came to look for it here,"
she said.

"I don't think I need to apologize," he said, with a movement of
annoyance like a man who has received a home thrust. "Of course I might
have simply gone about my own affairs, which are of some importance to a
good many people. My advice to Mr. Latham was to leave Genoa, since he
did not seem to have any object in remaining and seemed to have a
half-formed wish to visit Elba. I suggested Leghorn as the best port for
crossing over."

It was impossible to say whether the woman at the window was listening
to him at all. She did not stir, she seemed to have forgotten his
existence. But that immobility might have been also the effect of
concentrated attention. He made up his mind to go on speaking.

"His mind, his imagination seemed very busy wit! Napoleon. It seemed to
me the only reason for his travels." He paused.

"I believe the only reason for Mr. Latham coming to Genoa was to see
us." Madame de Montevesso turned round and moved back towards the
_bergère._ She was extremely pale. "I mean Father and myself," she
explained. "He came to see me the day before yesterday in the morning. I
invited him to our usual evening reception. He stayed after everybody
else was gone. I asked him to. But my father needed me and I had to
leave Mr. Latham with Monsieur de Montevesso."

The doctor interrupted her gently. "I know, Madame. I was in the Palazzo
with the Marquis, in the very room, when he sent for your husband."

"I forgot," confessed Madame de Montevesso simply. "But Mr. Latham got
back to his inn safely."

"Yes. He was writing letters next day till late in the evening, and
seems to have been spirited away in the middle of that occupation. But
people like Mr. Latham are not spirited out of their bedrooms by main
force. I advised the servant to wait till four o'clock, then I came
straight here."

"Till four o'clock," repeated Madame de Montevesso under her breath.

The doctor, a man of special capacity in confronting enigmatical
situations, showed himself as perplexed before this one as the most
innocent of mortals.

"I don't know. It seems to me that a man who puts on his hat and cloak
before vanishing like this must turn up again. He ought to be given a
chance to do so at any rate. He left all his money behind, too. I mean
even to the small change."

The glimpse of helpless concern in that man affected Adèle with a
feeling of actual bodily anguish. She got brusquely out of the
_bergère_ and moved into the middle of the room. The doctor, letting go
the back of the chair, turned to face her.

"I am appalled," she murmured.

This came out as if extracted from her by torture. It moved the doctor
more than anything he had heard for years. His voice sank into a
soothing murmur.

"I do believe, Madame, that if there had been a murder committed last
night anywhere in this town I would have heard something about it this
morning. My inn is just the place for such news. I will go back there
now. I shall question his servant again. He may give us a gleam of
light."

Her intent, distressed gaze was unbearable, yet held him bound to the
spot. It was difficult to abandon a woman in that state! He became aware
of the sound of voices outside the door. Some sort of dispute. He
hastened to make his bow, and Madame de Montevesso, moving after him,
whispered eagerly: "Yes! A gleam of light! Do let me know. I won't draw
a free breath till I hear something."

Her extended arms dropped by her side a moment before the door flew open
and Bernard was heard announcing with calm formality:

"Signorina Clelia."

The doctor, turning away from Madame de Montevesso, saw "that little
wretch" standing just within the room, evidently very much taken aback
by the unexpected meeting. He guessed that she had snatched at some
opportunity to escape from the old women. It had given her no time to
pull on her stockings, a fact made evident by the shortness of the dark
petticoat which, with a white jacket, comprised all her costume. She had
managed to thrust her bare feet into a pair of old slippers, and her
loose hair, tied with a blue ribbon at the back of her head, produced a
most incongruous effect of neatness. Her invasion was alarming and
inexplicable. The doctor, as he passed out, compressed his lips and
stared fiercely with some idea of scaring her into good behaviour. She
met this demonstration with a round stupid stare of astonishment. The
next moment he found himself outside in the corridor alone with Bernard,
who had shut the door quietly and remained with his back to it. The
exasperated doctor looked him up and down coolly.

"How long have you been in the habit of hanging about your lady's door,
my friend?" he asked with ominous familiarity.

The simple-minded factotum of the London days, the love-lorn naïve
swain of the mulatto maid, was a figure of the past now. The doctor was
confronted by a calm unmoved servant of much experience, somewhat
inclining to stoutness, made respectable by the black well-fitting
clothes. He did not flinch at the question, but he took his time. At
last he said with the utmost placidity:

"Many years now. Pretty near all my life."

The tone was well calculated to surprise the doctor. Taking advantage of
the latter's silence, Bernard paused before he continued reasonably:
"Was I to let her rush in unannounced on Madame la Comtesse while you
were there? I tried to send her away but she would think nothing of
filling the air with her screams. I kept her back as long as it was
prudent. . ." He raised his open hand, palm outwards, warning the doctor
to remain silent, while with conscientious gravity he applied his big
ear to the door. When he came away he did not apparently intend to take
any further notice of the doctor, but stood there with an air of perfect
rectitude.

"Is that your constant practice?" asked the astonished doctor, with
curiosity rather than indignation. "Suppose I told on you," he added
with a glance at the door. "Suppose somebody else gave you away. . . ."

"You would not be thanked," was the unexpected answer.

"I wouldn't be believed--is that it? Well, I confess that I can hardly
believe my own eyes."

"Oh, you would be believed," was the ready but dispassionate admission.
Bernard's trust in his interlocutor's acuteness was not deceived.

"Do you mean that you have been found out already?" said the doctor in a
changed tone. "Whew! You don't say! Well, stranger things have happened.
Whose old retainer are you?"

"I have always belonged to Madame la Comtesse," said the old retainer
without looking at the doctor, who, after some meditation, accepted the
statement at its face value.

"I am staying at Cantelucci's inn," he said in an ordinary
conversational tone. "And I would be glad to see you there any time you
like to call. Especially if you had anything to tell me of Mr. Latham."
Bernard not responding in any way to that invitation, the doctor added,
"You know what I mean?"

"Oh, yes, I know what you mean." That answer came coldly from the lips
of the respectable servant, who said nothing more while conscientiously
escorting the doctor to the anteroom at the foot of the grand staircase.
A little bowed old woman in black clothes clung to the balustrade half
way down the marble steps, in the act of descending, while another,
taller and upright, hovered anxiously on the landing above. Bernard's
scandalized, "Go away! Go back!" sounded irresistibly authoritative. The
doctor had no doubt that it would send the two crones back to their
lair, but he did not stop to see.

Bernard went up the staircase slowly to the first landing, where he
watched the retreat of the two weird apparitions down a long and dim
corridor. They were very much intimidated by this man in black and with
a priestly aspect. One of them, however, made a stand, and screamed in
an angry cracked voice, "Where's the child? The child! We are looking
for her."

"Why don't you take her back to your village and keep her there?" he
cried out sternly. "I have seen her. She won't get lost."

A distant door slammed. They had vanished as if blown away by his voice;
and Bernard with a muttered afterthought, "More's the pity," continued
up one flight of stairs after another till he reached the wilderness of
the garrets that once upon a time had been inhabited by a multitude of
servants and retainers. The room he entered was low and sombre, with
rough walls and a vast bare floor. His wife Aglae sat on the edge of the
bed, with her hands in her lap and downcast eyes which she did not raise
at his entrance. He looked at her with a serious and friendly expression
before he sat down by her side. And even then she did not move. He took
her tragic immobility in silence as a matter of course. His face, which
had never been very mobile, had acquired with years a sort of blank
dignity. It had been the work of years, of those married years which had
crushed the last vestiges of pertness out of the more emotional Aglae.
When she whispered to him, "Bernard, this thing kill me a little every
day," he felt moved to put his arm round his wife's waist and made a
mental remark which always occurred to him poignantly on such occasions,
that she had grown very thin. In the trials of a life which had not kept
its promise of contented bliss, he had been most impressed by the loss
of that plumpness which years ago was so much appreciated by him. It
seemed to give to that plaint which he had heard before more than once
an awful sort of reality, a dreadful precision. . . . A little. . . .
Every day.

He took his arm away brusquely and got up.

"I thought I would find you here," he remarked in an indifferent marital
tone. "That man has gone now," he added.

With a deep sigh the maid of Madame de Montevesso struggled out of the
depths of despondency, only to fall a prey to anxiety.

"Oh, Bernard, what did that man want with Miss Adèle?"

Bernard knew enough to have formed a conjecture that English fellow must
have either left some papers or a message for the Marquis with Madame de
Montevesso.




PART IV


I


In what seemed to him a very short time Cosmo found himself under the
colonnade separating the town piled upon the hills from the flat ground
of the waterside. A profound quietness reigned on the darkly polished
surface of the harbour and the long, incurved range of the quays. This
quietness that surrounded him on all sides through which, beyond the
spars of clustered coasters, he could look at the night-horizon of the
open sea, relieved that fantastic feeling of confinement within his own
body with its intolerable tremors and shrinkings and imperious
suggestions. Mere weaknesses all. His desire, however, to climb to the
top of the tower, as if only there complete relief could be found for
his captive spirit, was as strong as ever.

The only light on shore he could see issued in a dim streak from the
door of the guardhouse which he had passed on his return from the tower
on his first evening in Genoa. As he did not wish to pass near the
Austrian sentry at the head of the landing-steps, Cosmo, instead of
following the quay, kept under the portico at the back of the
guardhouse. When he came to its end he had a view of the squat bulk of
the tower across a considerable space of flat waste ground extending to
the low rocks of the seashore. He made for it with the directness of a
man possessed by a fixed idea. When he reached the iron-studded low door
within the deep dark archway at the foot of the tower he found it
immovable. Locked! How stupid! As if those heavy ship guns up there
could be stolen! Disappointed, he leaned his shoulders against the side
of the deep arch, lingering as people will before the finality of a
closed door or of a situation without issue.

His superstitious mood had left him. An old picture was an old picture;
and probably the face of that noble saint copied from an old triptych
and of Madame de Montevesso were not at all alike. At most, a suggestion
which may have been the doing of the copyist and so without meaning. A
copyist is not an inspired person; not a seer of visions. He felt
critical, almost ironic, towards the Cosmo of the morning, the Cosmo of
the day, the Cosmo rushing away like a scared child from a fanciful
resemblance, that probably did not even exist. What was he doing there?
He might have asked the way to the public gardens. Lurking within the
dark archway, muffled up in his blue cloak, he was a suspect figure like
an ambushed spadassin waiting for his victim, or a conspirator hiding
from the minions of a tyrant. "I am perfectly ridiculous," he thought.
"I had better go back as soon as I can." This was his sudden conclusion,
but he did not move. It struck him that he was not anxious to face his
empty room. Was he ready to get into another panic? he asked himself
scornfully. . . . At that moment he heard distinctly the sound of
whispering as if through the wall, or from above or from the ground. He
held his breath. The whispering went on, loquacious. When it stopped,
another voice, as low but deeper and more distinct, muttered the words:
"The hour is past."

Ha! Whispers in the air, sounds wandering without bodies, as mysterious
as though they had come across a hundred miles, for he had heard no
footsteps, no rustle, no sound of any sort. Nothing but the two voices.
They were so weirdly disembodied and unbelievable that he had to clothe
them in attributes: the excitable--the morose. They were quite near. But
he did not know on which side of the arch within which he was hiding.
For he was frankly hiding now--no doubt about it. He had remembered that
he had left his pistols by his bedside. And he was certain he would hear
the voices again. The wait seemed long before the fluent-loquacious came
back through space and was punctually followed by the deep voice which
this time emitted only an unintelligible grunt.

The disagreeable sense of having no means of defence in case of
necessity prevented Cosmo from leaving the shelter of the deep arch. Two
men, the excitable and the morose, were within a foot of him.
Remembering that the tower was accessible on its seaward face, Cosmo
surmised that they had just landed from a boat and had crept round
barefooted, secret and, no doubt, ready to use their knives. Smugglers
probably. That they should ply their trade within three hundred yards of
the guardroom with a sentry outside did not surprise him very much.
These were Austrian soldiers, ignorant of local conditions and certainly
not concerned with the prevention of smuggling. Why didn't these men go
about their business, then? The road was clear. But perhaps they had
gone? It seemed to him he had been there glued to that door for an hour.
As a matter of fact it was not ten minutes. Cosmo, who had no mind to be
stabbed through a mere mistake as to his character, was just thinking of
making a dash in the direction of the guardhouse when the morose but
cautiously lowered voice began, close to the arch, abruptly: "Where did
the beast get to? I thought a moment ago he was coming. Didn't you think
too that there were footsteps--just as we landed?"

Cosmo's uplifted foot came down to the ground. Of the excitable
whisperer's long rigmarole not a word could be made out. Cosmo imagined
him short and thick. The other, whom Cosmo pictured to himself as lean
and tall, uttered the word, "Why?" The excitable man hissed fiercely:
"To say good-bye."--"Devil take all these women," commented the morose
voice dispassionately. The whisper, now raised to the pitch of a
strangled wheeze, remarked with some feeling: "He may never see her
again."

It was clear they had never even dreamt of any human being besides
themselves having anything to do on this part of the shore at this hour
of the night. "Won't they be frightened when I rush out," thought Cosmo
taking off his cloak and throwing it over his left forearm. If it came
to an encounter he could always drop it. But he did not seriously think
that he would be reduced to using his fists.

He judged it prudent to leave the archway with a bound which would get
him well clear of the tower, and on alighting faced about quickly. He
heard an exclamation but he saw no one. They had bolted! He would have
laughed had he not been startled himself by a shot fired somewhere in
the distance behind his back--the most brutally impressive sound that
can break the silence of the night. Instantly, as if it had been a
signal, a lot of shouting broke on his ear, yells of warning and
encouragement, a savage clamour which made him think of a lot of people
pursuing a mad dog. He advanced, however, in the direction of the
portico, wishing himself out of the way of this odious commotion, when
the flash of a musket shot showed him for a moment the tilted head in a
shako and the white cross-belts of an Austrian soldier standing erect in
the middle of the open ground. Cosmo stopped short, then inclined to the
left, moving cautiously and staring into the darkness. The yelling had
died out gradually away from the seashore, where he remembered a cluster
of the poorer sort of houses nestled under the cliffs. He could not
believe that the shot could have been fired at him, till another flash
and report of a musket followed by the whizz of the bullet very near his
hand persuaded him to the contrary. Thinking of nothing but getting out
of the line of fire, he stooped low and ran on blindly till his shoulder
came in contact with some obstacle extremely hard and perfectly
immovable.

He put his hand on it, felt it rough and cold, and discovered it was a
stone, an enormous square block such as are used in building
breakwaters. Several others were lying about in a cluster like a
miniature village on a miniature plain. He crept amongst them, spread
his cloak on the ground, and sat down with his back against one of the
blocks. He wondered at the marvellous eyesight of that confounded
soldier. He was not aware that his dark figure had the starry sky for a
background. "He nearly had me," he thought. His whole being recoiled
with disgust from the risk of getting a musket ball through his body. He
resolved to remain where he was till all that incomprehensible
excitement had quietened down and that brute with wonderful powers of
vision had gone away. Then his road would be clear. He would give him
plenty of time.

The stillness all around continued, becoming more convincing, as the
time passed, inits suggestion of everything being over, convincing
enough to shame timidity itself. Why this reluctance to go back to his
room? What was a room in an inn, in any house? A small portion of space
forced off with bricks or stones in which innumerable individuals had
been alone with their good and evil thoughts, temptations, fears,
troubles of all sorts, and had gone out without leaving a trace. This
train of thought led him to the reflection that no man could leave his
troubles behind . . . never . . . never. . . . "It's no use trying," he
thought with despair. Why should he go to Livorno? What would be the
good of going home? Lengthening the distance would be like lengthening a
chain. What use would it be to get out of sight? . . . "If I were to be
struck blind to-morrow it wouldn't help me." He forgot where he was till
the convincing silence round him crumbled to pieces before a faint and
distant shout which recalled him to the sense of his position. Presently
he heard more shouting, still distant but much nearer. This took his
mind from himself and started his imagination on another track. The man
hunt was not over, then! The fellow had broken cover again and had been
headed towards the tower. He depicted the hunted man to himself as
long-legged, spare, agile, for no other reason than because he wished
him to escape. He wondered whether the soldier with the sharp eyes would
give him a shot. But no shot broke the silence which had succeeded the
distant shouts. Got away perhaps? At least for a time. Very possibly he
had stabbed somebody and . . . by heaven! here he was!

Cosmo had caught the faint sound of running feet on the hard ground. And
even before he had decided that it was no illusion it stopped short and
a bulky object fell hurtling from the sky so near to him that Cosmo
instinctively drew in his legs with a general start of his body which
caused him to knock his hat off against the stone. He became aware of a
man's back almost within reach of his arm. There could be no doubt he
had taken a leap over the stone and had landed squatting on his heels.
Cosmo expected him to rebound and vanish, but he only extended his arm
to seize the hat as it rolled past him and at the same moment pivoted on
his toes, preserving his squatting posture.

"If he happens to have a knife in his hand he will plunge it into me,"
thought Cosmo. So without moving a limb he hastened to say in a loud
whisper: "Run to the tower. Your friends are waiting for you." It was a
sudden inspiration. The man without rising flung himself forward full
length and, propped on his arms, brought his face close to Cosmo. His
white eyeballs seemed to be starting out of his head. In this position
the silence between them lasted for several seconds.

"My friends, but who are you?" muttered the man.

And then the recognition came, instantaneous and mutual. Cosmo simply
said, "Hallo!" while the man, letting himself fall to the ground,
uttered in a voice faint with emotion, "My Englishman!"

"There were two of them," said Cosmo.

"Two? Did they see you?"

Cosmo assured him that they had not. The other, still agitated by the
unexpectedness of that meeting, asked, incredulous and even a little
suspicious: "What am I to think, then? How could you know that they were
my friends?"

Cosmo disregarded the question. "You will be caught if you linger here,"
he whispered.

The other, as though he had not heard the warning, insisted: "How could
they have mentioned my name to you?"

"They mentioned no names. . . . Run."

"I don't think they are there now," said the fugitive.

"Yes. There was noise enough to scare anybody away," commented Cosmo.
"What have you done?"

The other made no answer, and in the pause both men listened intently.
The night remained dark. Cosmo thought: "Some smuggling affair," and the
other muttered to himself, "I have misled them." He sat up by the side
of Cosmo and put Cosmo's hat, which he had been apparently holding all
the time, on the ground between them.

"You are a cool hand," said Cosmo. "The soldiers . . ."

"Who cares for the soldiers? They can't run."

"They have muskets, though."

"Oh, yes. I heard the shots and wondered at whom they were fired."

"At me. That's why I have got in here. There is one of them who can see
in the dark," explained Cosmo, who had been very much impressed. His
friend of the tower emitted a little chuckle.

"And so you have hidden yourself in here. Soldiers, water, and fire soon
make room for themselves. But they did not know who they were after.
They got the alarm from that beast."

He paused suddenly, and Cosmo asked: "Who was after you?"

"One traitor and God knows how many _sbirri._ If they had been only ten
minutes later they would have never set eyes on me."

"I wonder they didn't manage to cut you off, if they were so many," said
Cosmo.

"They didn't know. Look! Even now I have deceived them by doubling back.
You see I was in a house." He seemed to hesitate.

"Oh, yes," said Cosmo. "Saying good-bye."

The man by his side made a slight movement and preserved a profound
silence for a time.

"As I have no demon," he began slowly, "to keep me informed about other
people's affairs, I must ask you what you were doing here?"

"Why, taking the air like that other evening. But why don't you try to
get away while there is time?"

"Yes, but where?"

"You were going to leave Genoa," said Cosmo. "Either on a very long or a
very deadly journey."

Again the man by his side made a movement, of surprise and remained
silent for a while. This was very extraordinary, as though some devil
having his own means to obtain knowledge had taken on himself for a
disguise the body of an Englishman of the kind that travels and stays in
inns. The acquaintance of Cosmo's almost first horn in Genoa was very
much puzzled and a little suspicious, not as before something dangerous
but as before something inexplicable, obscure to his mind like the
instruments that fate makes use of sometimes in the affairs of men.

"So you did see two men a little while ago waiting for me?"

"I did not see them. They seemed to think you were late," was the
surprising answer.

"And how do you know they were waiting for me?"

"I didn't," said Cosmo naturally. And the other muttered a remark that
he was glad to hear of something that Cosmo did not know. But Cosmo
continued: "Of course I didn't, not till you jumped in here."

The other made a gesture requesting silence and lent his ear to the
unbroken stillness of the surroundings.

"Signore," he said suddenly in a very quiet and distinct whisper, "it
may be true that I was about to leave this town, but I never thought of
leaving it by swimming. No doubt the noise was enough to frighten
anybody away, but it has been quiet enough now for a long time and I
think that I will crawl on as far as the tower to see whether perchance
they didn't think it worth while to bring their boat back to the foot of
the tower. I have put my enemies off the track and I fancy they are
looking for me in very distant places from here. The treachery, signore,
was not in the telling them where I was. Anybody with eyes could have
seen me walking about Genoa. No, it was in the telling them who I was."

He paused again to listen and suddenly changed his position, drawing in
his legs.

"Well," said Cosmo, "I myself wonder who you are." He noticed the
other's eyes rolling, and the whisper came out of his lips much faster
and, as it were, more confidential.

"Attilio, at your service," the mocking whisper fell into Cosmo's ear.
"I see the signore is not so much of a wizard as I thought." Then with
great rapidity: "Should the signore find something, one never knows,
Cantelucci would be the man to give it to."

And suddenly with a half turn he ran off on all fours, looking for an
instant monstrous and vanishing so suddenly that Cosmo remained
confounded. He was trying to think what all this might mean, when his
ears were invaded by the sound of many footsteps and before he could
make a move to get up he found himself surrounded by quite a number of
men. As a matter of fact there were only four; but they stood close over
him as he sat on the ground, their dark figures blotting all view, with
an overpowering effect. Very prudently Cosmo did not attempt to rise; he
only picked up his hat, and as he did so it seemed to him that there was
something strange about the feel of it. When he put it on his head some
object neither very hard nor very heavy fell on the top of his head. He
repressed the impulse to have a look at once. "What on earth can it be?"
he thought. It felt like a parcel of papers. It was certainly flat. An
awestruck voice said, "That's a foreigner." Another muttered, "What's
this deviltry?" As Cosmo made an attempt to rise with what dignity he
might, the nearest of the band stooped with alacrity and caught hold of
his arm above the elbow as if to help him up, with a muttered,
"_Permesso, signore._" And as soon as he regained his feet his other arm
was seized from behind by someone else without any ceremony. A slight
attempt to shake himself free convinced Cosmo that they meant to stick
on.

"Would it be an accomplice?" wondered a voice.

"No. Look at his hat. That's an Englishman."

"So much the worse. They are very troublesome. Authority is nothing to
them."

All this time one or another would take a turn to peer closely into
Cosmo's face, in a way which struck him as offensive. Cosmo had not the
slightest doubt that he was in the hands of the municipal _sbirri._ That
strange Attilio had detected their approach from afar. "He might have
given me a warning," he thought. His annoyance with the fugitive did not
last long; but he began to be angry with his captors, of which every
one, he noticed, carried a cudgel.

"What authority have you to interfere with me?" he asked haughtily. The
wretch who was holding his right arm murmured judicially: "An Inglese,
without a doubt." A stout man in a wide-brimmed hat, who was standing in
front of him, grunted: "The authority of four against one," then
addressed his companions to the general effect that he didn't know what
the world was coming to if foreigners were allowed to mix themselves up
with conspirators. It looked as if they had been at a loss what to do
with their captive. One of them insinuated: "I don't know. Those
foreigners have plenty of money and are impatient of restraint. A poor
man may get a chance."

Cosmo thought that probably each of them was provided with a stiletto.
Nothing prevented them from stabbing him in several places, weighting
his body with some stones from the seashore, and throwing it into the
water. What an unlucky reputation to have! He remembered that he had no
money with him. The few coins he used to carry in his pocket were lying
on his mantelpiece in the bedroom at the inn. This would have made no
difference if those men had been bandits, since they would not be aware
of the emptiness of his pockets. "I could have probably bribed them to
let me go," he thought, after he had heard the same man add with a
little laugh, "I mean obliging poor men. Those English _signori_ are
rich and harmless."

Cosmo regretted more than ever not being able to make them an offer. It
would have been probably successful, as they seemed to be in doubt what
to do next. He mentioned he was living at the Casa Graziani. "If one of
you will go with me there you shall be recompensed for your trouble." No
answer was made to that proposal except that one of the men coughed
slightly. Their chief in a hat with an enormous brim seemed lost in deep
thought, and his immobility in front of Cosmo appeared to the latter
amusingly mysterious and sinister. A sort of nervous impatience came
over Cosmo, an absurd longing to tear himself away and make a dash for
liberty, and then an absurd discouragement as though he were a criminal
with no hiding-place to make for. The man in the big hat jerked up his
head suddenly and disclosed the irritable state of his feelings at the
failure of getting hold of that _furfante._ "As to that Englishman," he
continued in his rasping voice not corresponding to his physical bulk,
"let him be taken to the guardroom. He will have to show his papers."

Cosmo was provoked to say: "Do you expect a gentleman to carry his
papers with him when he goes out for a walk?"

He was disconcerted by an outburst of laughter on three sides of him.
The leader in the hat did not laugh; he only said bitterly; "We expect
papers from a man we find hiding."

"Well, I have no papers on me," said Cosmo, and immediately in a sort of
mental illumination thought, "Except in my hat." Of course that object
reposing on the top of his head was a bundle of papers, dangerous
documents. Attilio was a conspirator. Obviously! The mysterious allusion
to something he was to find and hand over to Cantelucci became clear to
Cosmo. He felt very indignant with his mysterious acquaintance. "Of
course he couldn't foresee I was going to get into this predicament," he
thought, as if trying to find an excuse for him already.

"_Avanti_," commanded the man in front of him.

The grip on his arm of the two others tightened, resistance was no use
though he felt sorely tempted again to engage in a struggle. If only he
could free himself for a moment, dash off into the darkness, and throw
that absurd packet away somewhere before they caught him again. It was a
sort of solution; but he discovered in himself an unsuspected and
unreasoning loyalty. "No! Somebody would find it and take it to the
police," he thought. "If we come near the quay I may manage to fling it
on the water."

He said with lofty negligence: "You needn't hold my arms."

This suggestion was met by a profound silence. Neither of the men
holding him relaxed his grasp. Another was treading close on his heels,
while the police-hound in the big hat marched a couple of paces in front
of him, importantly.

Before long they approached the guardhouse close enough for Cosmo to see
the sentry at the foot of the steps, who challenged them militarily. The
shim in the hat advanced alone and made himself known in the light
streaming through the door. It was too late to attempt anything. As he
was impelled by his two captors inside the guardroom, which was lighted
by a smoky lamp and also full of tobacco smoke, Cosmo thought, "I am in
for it. What a horrible nuisance! I wonder whether they will search me?"

At Cosmo's entrance with his escort several soldiers reclining on the
floor raised their heads. It was a small place which may have been used
as a store for sails or cordage. The furniture consisted of one long
bench, a rack of muskets, a table, and one chair. A sergeant sitting on
that chair rose and talked with the head _sbirro_ for a time in a
familiar and interested manner about the incidents of the chase, before
he even looked at Cosmo. Cosmo could not hear the words. The sergeant
was a fine man with long black moustaches and a great scar on his cheek.
He nodded from time to time in an understanding manner to the man in the
hat, whom the light of the guardroom disclosed as the possessor of very
small eyes, a short thick beard, and a pear-shaped yellow physiognomy
which had a pained expression. At the suggestion of the _sbirri_ (they
had let him go) Cosmo sat down on a bench running along the wall. Part
of it was occupied by a soldier stretched at full length with his head
on his knapsack and with his shako hung above him on the wall. He was
profoundly asleep. "Perhaps that's the fellow who took those shots at
me," thought Cosmo. Another of the _sbirri_ approached Cosmo and with a
propitiatory smile handed him his cloak. Cosmo had forgotten all about
it.

"I carried it behind the signore all the way," he murmured with an air
of secrecy; and Cosmo was moved to say: "You ought to have brought it to
me at Cantelucci's inn," in a significant tone. The man made a
deprecatory gesture and said in a low voice: "The signore may want it
to-night."

He was young. His eyes met Cosmo's without flinching.

"I see," whispered Cosmo. "What is going to be done with me?" The man
looked away indifferently and said: "I am new at this work; but there is
a post of royal gendarmerie on the other side of the harbour."

He threw himself on the bench by Cosmo's side, stretched his legs out,
folded his arms across his breast, and yawned unconcernedly.

"Can I trust him?" Cosmo asked himself. Nobody seemed to pay any
attention to him. The _sbirro_ in the hat bustled out of the guardroom
in great haste; the other two remained on guard; the sergeant sitting
astride the chair folded his arms on the back of it and stared at the
night through the open door. The _sbirro_ by Cosmo's side muttered,
looking up at the ceiling: "I think Barbone is gone to find a boatman."
From this Cosmo understood that he was going to be taken across the
harbour and given up to the gendarmes. He thought, "If they insist upon
searching me I would have to submit and in any case a hat is not a
hiding-place. I may just as well hand the packet over without a
struggle." A bright idea struck him. "If those fellows take me over
there in a boat to save themselves the trouble of walking round the
harbour I will simply contrive to drop my hat overboard--even if they do
hold my arms during the passage." He was now convinced that Attilio
belonged to some secret society. He certainly was no common fellow. He
wondered what had happened to him. Was he slinking and dodging about the
low parts of the town on his way to some refuge; or had he really found
the excitable man and the grumpy man still waiting under the tower with
a boat? Most unlikely after such an alarming commotion of yells and
shots. He feared that Attilio, unable to get away, could hardly avoid
being caught to-morrow, or at the furthest next day. He himself
obviously did not expect anything better; or else he would not have been
so anxious to get rid of those papers. Cosmo concluded that conspirators
were perfectly absurd with their passion for documents, which were
invariably found at a critical time and sent them all to the gallows.

He noticed the eyes of the sergeant, a Croat, with pendent black
moustaches, fixed on his hat, and at once felt uneasy as if he had
belonged to a secret society himself. His hat was the latest thing in
men's round hats which he had bought in Paris. But, almost directly, the
sergeant's eyes wandered off to the doorway and resumed their stare.
Cosmo was relieved. He decided, however, to attempt no communication
with the young police fellow whose lounging attitude, abandoned and
drowsy, and almost touching elbows with him, seemed to Cosmo too
suggestive to be trustworthy. And indeed, he reflected, what could he do
for him?

His excitement about this adventure was combined in a strange way with a
state of inward peace which he had not known for hours. He wondered at
his loyalty to the astute Attilio. He would have been justified in
regarding the transaction as a scurvy trick; whereas he found that he
could not help contemplating it as a matter of trust. He went on
exercising his wits upon the problem of those documents (he was sure
those were papers of some kind) which he had been asked to give to
Cantelucci (how surprised he would be), since apparently the innkeeper
was a conspirator too. Yet, he thought, it would be better to destroy
them than to let them fall into the hands of the Piedmontese justice, or
the Austrian military command. "I must contrive," he thought, "to get
rid of them in the boat. I can always shake my hat overboard
accidentally." But the packet would float and some boatman would be sure
to find it during the day. On the other hand, by the time daylight came
the handwriting would probably have become illegible. Or perhaps not?
Fire, not water, was what he needed. If there had been a fire in that
inexpressibly dirty guardroom he would have made use of it at once under
the very noses of those wild-looking Croats. But would that have been
the proper thing to do in such a hurry?

He had not come to any conclusion before Barbone returned, accompanied
by a silver-haired, meek old fellow, with a nut-brown face, bare-footed
and bare-armed, and carrying a pair of sculls over his shoulder, whom
Barbone pushed in front of the sergeant. The latter took his short pipe
out of his mouth, spat on one side, looked at the old man with a fixed
savage stare, and finally nodded. At Cosmo he did not look at all, but
to Barbone he handed a key with the words, "Bring it back." The _sbirri_
closed round Cosmo and Barbone uttered a growl with a gesture towards
the door. Why Barbone should require a key to take him out of doors
Cosmo could not understand. Unless it were the key of liberty. But it
was not likely that the fierce Croat and the gloomy Barbone should have
indulged in symbolic actions. The mariner with the sculls on his
shoulder followed the group patiently to where, on the very edge of the
quay, the Austrian soldier with his musket shouldered paced to and fro
across the streak of reddish light from the garrison door. He swung
round and stood, very martial, in front of the group, but at the sight
of the key exhibited to him by Barbone moved out of the way. The air was
calm but chilly. Below the level of the quay there was the clinking of
metal and the rattling of small chains, and Cosmo then discovered that
the key belonged to a padlock securing the chain to which quite a lot of
small rowing boats were moored. The young policeman said from behind
into Cosmo's ear, "The signore is always forgetting his cloak," and
threw it lightly on Cosmo's shoulders. He explained also that every
night all the small boats in the port were collected and secured like
this on both sides of the port and the Austrians furnished the sentry to
look after them on this side. The object was that there should be no
boats moving after ten o'clock, except the galley of the _dogana_ and of
course the boat of the English man-of-war.

"Come and see me at noon at Cantelucci's inn," whispered Cosmo, to which
the other breathed out a "Certainly, Excellency," feelingly before going
up the steps.

Cosmo found himself presently sitting in a boat between two _sbirri._
The ancient fellow shoved off and shipped his oars. From the quay, high
above, Barbone's voice shouted to him, "The gendarmes will take charge
of your boat for the rest of the night." The old boatman's only answer
was a deep sigh, and in a very few strokes the quay with the sentry
receded into the darkness. One of the _sbirri_ remarked in a tone of
satisfaction, "Our service will be over after we have given up the
signore there." The other said, "I hope the signore will consider we
have been kept late on his account." Cosmo, who was contemplating with
immense distaste the prospect of being delivered up to the gendarmes,
emitted a mirthless laugh, and after a while said in a cold tone: "Why
waste your time in pulling to the other side of the harbour? Put me on
board the nearest vessel. I'll soon find my way to the quay from one
_tartane_ to another, and your service would be over at once."

The fellow on his left assumed an astonishing seriousness: "Most of
those _tartanes_ have a dog on board. We could not expose an illustrious
stranger to get bitten by one of these ugly brutes."

But the other had no mind for grave mockery. In a harsh and overbearing
tone he ordered the boatman to pull well into the middle of the harbour
away from the moored craft.

It was like crossing a lake overshadowed by the hills with the
breakwaters prolonging the shore to seaward. The old man raised and
dipped his oars slowly, without a sound, and the long trails of
starlight trembled on the ripples on each side of the boat. When they
had progressed far enough to open the harbour entrance Cosmo detected
between the end of the jetties far away--he was glancing casually
about--a dark speck about the size of a man's head, which ought not to
have been there. The air was perfectly still and the stars thick on the
horizon. It struck him at once that it could be nothing than either the
English man-of-war's boat or the boat of the _dogana_, since no others
were allowed to move at night. His thoughts were, however, so busy with
speculating as to what he had better do that he paid no more attention
to that remarkable speck. He looked absently at the silver-haired
boatman pulling an easy stroke and asked himself: Was it or was it not
time to lose his hat overboard? How could he contrive to make it look
plausible in this absurd calm? Then he reproached himself for reasoning
as if those two low fellows (whose proximity had grown extremely irksome
to him) had wits of preternatural sharpness. If he were to snatch it and
fling it away they would probably conclude that he was trying to make
himself troublesome, or simply mad, or anything in the world rather than
guess that he had in his hat something which he wanted to destroy. He
undid quietly the clasp of his cloak and rested his hands on his knees.
His guardians did not think it necessary now to hold his arms. In fact
they did not seem to pay much attention to him. Cosmo asked himself for
a moment whether he would island up suddenly and jump into the water. Of
course he knew that fully clothed and in his boots they would very soon
get hold of him, but the object would have been attained. However, the
prospect of being towed behind a boat to the custom-house quay by the
collar of his coat and being led into the presence of the gendarmes
looking like a drowned rat was so disagreeable that he rejected that
plan.

By that time the boat had reached little more than half way across the
harbour. The great body of the shipping was merged with the shore. The
nearest vessels were a polacca brig and xebec lying at anchor. Both were
shadowy, and the last, with her low spars, a mere low smudge on the dim
sheen of the water. From time to time the aged boatman emitted a moan.
The boat seemed hardly to move. Everything afloat was silent and dark.
The crews of the coasters were ashore or asleep; and if there were any
dogs on board any of them they too seemed plunged in the same slumber
that lay over all things of the earth, and by contrast with which the
stars of heaven looked intensely wakeful. In the midst of his
perplexities Cosmo enjoyed the feeling of peace that had come to him
directly his trouble had begun.

"We will be all night getting across," growled suddenly the man on his
left. ". . . I don't know what Barbone was thinking of to get this
antiquity out of his bed."

"I told him there was hardly any breath in my old body," declared the
boatman's tranquil voice.

Apparently in order to speak he had to cease rowing, for he rested on
his oars while he went on in the grave-like silence. "But he raged like
a devil; and rather than let him wake up all the neighbours I came out.
I may just as well die in the boat as in bed."

Both _sbirri_ exclaimed indignantly against Barbone, but neither offered
to take the sculls. With a painful groan the old man began to pull
again. Cosmo asked: "What's that dark thing between the heads of the
jetties?" One of his captors, turning his head to look, said, "That must
be the galley. I wish she would come this way. We would ask her for a
tow." The other man remarked sarcastically, "No fear, they are all
snoozing in her except one perhaps to keep a lookout. It's an easy life.
. . . _Voga, vecchio, yoga._"

Cosmo thought suddenly that if by any chance the man-of-war boat
happened to be pulling that way he would hail her without hesitation,
and, surely, the officer in charge would not leave him in the hands of
those villains without at least listening to his tale. Unluckily their
way across the harbour did not take them near the man-of-war. The light
at her mizzen peak seemed to Cosmo very far away; so that if it had not
burned against the dark background of the land it would have seemed more
distant than any star, and not half as brightly vigilant. He took his
eyes from it and let them rest idly on the water ahead. The _sbirro_ on
his right hand emitted an immense yawn. This provided the other to
mutter curses on the tediousness of all this affair. Cosmo had been too
perplexed to feel bored. Just then as if in antagonism to those
offensive manifestations he felt very alert. Moreover, the moment when
something would have to be done was approaching, a tension of all his
senses accumulating in a sort of all-over impatience. While in that
state, staring into the night, he caught sight of the man-of-war's boat.

But was it?--well, it was something dark on the water, and as there was
no other boat about . . . It was small--well, far off and probably end
on. . . . He had heard no sound of rowing . . . lying on her oars . . .
He could see nothing now . . . well, here goes, on the chance.

Without stirring a limb he took a long breath and let out the shout of
"Boat ahoy" with all the force of his lungs. The volume of tone
astonished himself. It seemed to fill the whole of the harbour so
effectually that he felt he needn't shout again and he remained as still
as a statue. The effect on his neighbours was that both gave a violent
start, which set the boat rolling slightly, and in their bewilderment
they bent forward to peer into his face with immense eyes. After a time
one of them asked in an awestruck murmur, "What's the matter, signore?"
and seized his cloak. The other, Cosmo heard distinctly whisper to
himself, "That was a war cry," while he also grabbed the cloak. The
clasp being undone, it slipped off Cosmo's shoulders and then they clung
to his arms. It struck Cosmo as remarkable that the old boatman, had not
ceased his feeble rowing for a moment.

The shout had done Cosmo good. It reestablished his self-respect somehow
and it sent the blood moving through his veins as if indeed it had been
a war cry. He had shaken their nerves. If they had not remained
perfectly motionless holding his arms there would have started a
scrimmage in that boat which would certainly have ended in the water.
But their grip was feeble. They did nothing, but, bending towards each
other in front of Cosmo till their heads almost touched, watched his
lips from which such an extraordinary shout had come. Cosmo stared
stonily ahead as if unconscious of their existence, and again he had
that strange illusion of a dark spot ahead of the boat. He thought,
"That's no illusion. What a fool I was. It must be a mooring buoy." A
couple of minutes elapsed before he thought again, "That old fellow will
be right into it, presently."

He didn't consider it his business to utter a warning because the bump
he expected happened almost immediately. He had misjudged the distance.
Owing to the slow pace the impact was very slight, slighter even than
Cosmo expected against such a heavy body as a mooring buoy would be. It
was really more like a feeble hollow sound than a shock. Cosmo, who was
prepared for it, was really the one that felt it at once, and the
ancient boatman looked sharply over his shoulder. He uttered no sound
and did not even attempt to rise from the thwart. He simply, as it
seemed to Cosmo, let go the oars. The _sbirri_ only became aware of
something having happened after the hollow bump was repeated, and Cosmo
had become aware that the object on the water was not a buoy but another
boat not much bigger than theirs. Then they both exclaimed and in their
surprise their grip relaxed. One of them cried in astonishment, "An
empty boat." It was indeed a surprising occurrence. With no particular
purpose in his mind Cosmo stood up while one of the _sbirri_ stood up
either to catch hold of the boat or push it away, for the two boats were
alongside each other by that time. A strange voice in the dark said very
loud: "The man in the hat," and as if by enchantment three figures
appeared standing in a row. Cosmo had not even time to feel surprised.
The two boats started knocking about considerably, and he felt himself
seized by the collar and one arm and dragged away violently from between
the two _sbirri_ by the power of irresistible arms which as suddenly let
him go as if he were an inanimate object, and he fell heavily in the
bottom of the second boat almost before his legs were altogether clear
of the other. During this violent translation his hat fell off his head
without any scheming on his part.

He was not exactly frightened but he was excusably flustered. One is not
kidnapped like this without any preliminaries every day. He was
painfully aware of being in the way of his new captors. He was kicked in
the ribs and his legs were trodden upon. He heard blows being struck
against hard substances which he knew were human skulls because of the
abortive yells ending in groans. There was a determination and ferocity
in this attack combined with the least possible amount of noise. All he
could hear were the heavy blows and the hard breathing of the
assailants. Then came a sort of helpless splash. "Somebody will get
drowned," he thought.

He made haste to pull himself forward from under the feet of the
combatants. Luckily for his ribs they were bare, which also added to the
quietness of that astonishing development. Once in the bows he sat up,
and by that time everything was over. Three shadowy forms were standing
in! a row in the boat, motionless, like labourers who had accomplished a
notable task. The boat out of which he had been dragged was floating
within a yard or two, apparently empty. The whole affair, which could
not have lasted more than a minute, seemed to Cosmo to have been
absolutely instantaneous. Not a sound came from the shipping along the
quays, not even from the brig and the xebec which were the nearest. A
sense of final stillness such as follows, for instance, the explosion of
a mine and resembles the annihilation of all one's perceptive faculties
took possession of Cosmo for a moment. Presently he heard a very earnest
but low voice cautioning the silent world: "If you dare make a noise I
will come back and kill you." It was perfectly impersonal; it had no
direction, no particular destination. Cosmo, who heard the words
distinctly, could connect no image of a human being with them. He was
roused at last when, dropping his hand on the gunwale, he felt human
fingers under it. He snatched his hand away as if burnt and only then
looked over. The white hair of the old boatman seemed to rest on the
water right against the boat's side. He was holding on silently, even in
this position displaying the meek patience of his venerable age--and
Cosmo contemplated him in silence. A voice, not at all impersonal this
time, said from the stem sheets, "Get out your oars."

"There is a man in the water here," said Cosmo, wondering at his own
voice being heard in those fantastic conditions. It produced, however,
the desired effect, and almost as soon as he had spoken Cosmo had to
help a bearded sailor, who was a complete stranger to him, to haul the
old man inside the boat. He was no great weight to get over the gunwale,
but they had to handle him as if he had been drowned. He never attempted
to help himself. The other men in the boat took an interest in the
proceedings.

"Is he dead?" came a subdued inquiry from aft.

"He is very old and feeble," explained Cosmo in an undertone. Somebody
swore long but softly, ending with the remark: "Here's a complication."

"That scoundrel Barbone dragged out a dying man," began Cosmo
impulsively.

"_Va bene, va bene_ . . . Bundle him in and come aft, signore."

Cosmo, obeying this injunction, found himself sitting in the stem sheets
by the side of a man whose first act was to put his hand lightly upon
his shoulder in a way that conveyed a sort of gentle exultation. The
discovery that the man was Attilio was too startling for comment at the
first moment. The next it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

"It seems as if nothing could keep us apart," said that extraordinary
man in a low voice. He took his hand off Cosmo's shoulder and directed
the two rowers--who, Cosmo surmised, were the whisperers of the
tower--to pull under the bows of the brig. "We must hide from those
custom-house fellows," he said. "I fancy the galley is coming along."

No other word was uttered till one of the men got hold of the brig's
cable and the boat came to a rest with her side against the stem of that
vessel, when Cosmo, who now could himself hear the faint noise of
rowing, asked Attilio in a whisper: "Are they after you?"

"If they are after anything," answered the other coolly, "they are after
a very fine voice. What made you give that shout?"

"I had to behave like a frightened mouse before those _sbirri_, on
account of those papers you left with me, and I felt that I must assert
myself." Cosmo gave this psychological explanation grimly. He changed
his tone to add that, fancying he had seen the shape of the English
man-of-war's boat, the temptation to hail her had been irresistible.

"Possibly that's what started them. They know nothing of us. Luck was on
our side. We slipped in unseen." The sound of rowing meantime had grown
loud enough to take away from them all desire for further conversation,
for the noise of heavy oars working in their rowlocks has a purposeful
relentless character on a still night, and the big twelve-oared galley,
pulled with a short quick stroke, seemed to hold an unerring way in its
hollow thundering progress. For those in the boat concealed under the
bows of the brig the strain of having to listen without being able to
see was growing intolerable. Cosmo asked himself anxiously whether he
was going to be captured once more before this night of surprises was
out, but at the last moment the galley swerved and passed under the stem
of the polacca as if bent on taking merely a sweep round the harbour.
Everybody in the boat drew a long breath. But almost immediately
afterwards the sound of rowing stopped short and everyone in the boat
seemed turned again into stone.

At last Attilio breathed into Cosmo's ear, "_Per Dio!_ They have found
the other boat."

Cosmo was almost ashamed at the swift eagerness of his fearfully
whispered inquiry:

"Are the men in her dead?"

"All I know is that if either of them is able to talk we are lost,"
Attilio whispered back.

"These _sbirri_ were going to deliver me to the gendarmes," Cosmo began
under his breath, when all at once the noise of the oars burst again on
their ears abruptly; but soon all apprehension was at an end, because it
became clear that the sound was receding towards the east side of the
harbour. In fact the custom-house people who had started to row round
because of a vague impression that there had been some shouting in the
harbour had to their immense surprise come upon a boat which at first
seemed empty but which, they soon discovered, contained two human forms
huddled up on the bottom boards, apparently dead, but at any rate
insensible if they were still breathing. Attilio's surmise that as the
quickest way of dealing with this mystery the custom-house officer had
decided to tow the boat at once to the police station on the east side
was perfectly right; and also his conviction that now or never was his
chance to slip out of that harbour where he and his companions felt
themselves in a trap the door of which might snap to at any time. At the
best it was a desperate situation, he felt. Cosmo felt it, too, if in a
more detached way--like a rather unwilling spectator. Yet his anxiety
for the safety of his companions was as great as though he had known
them all his life. Though he had in a way lost sight of his personal
connection he could not help forming his own view, which he poured into
Attilio's ear while the two rowers put all their strength into their
work.

Tensely rigid at the tiller, Attilio had listened, keeping his eyes
fixed on the gap of dark gleaming water between the black heads of the
two breakwaters.

"The signore is right," he assented. "We could not hope to escape from
that galley once she caught sight of us. Our only chance is to slip out
of the port before she gets back to her station outside the jetties.
This affair will be a great puzzle to them. They will lose some time
talking it over with the gendarmes. Unless one or another of those
_sbirri_ comes to himself."

"Yes. Those _sbirri_ . . ." murmured Cosmo.

"What would you have? We did our best with the boat-stretchers, I can
assure you."

Cosmo had no doubt of that. The sound of crashing blows rained on those
wretches' heads had been sickening, but the memory comforted him now. So
did the return of the profound stillness after the noise of the galley's
oars had died out in the distance. Cosmo took heart till it came upon
him suddenly that there never had been a starry sky that gave so much
light, no night so amazingly clear, no harbour of such an enormous
extent. He felt he must not lose a minute. He jumped up and began to
tear off his coat madly. Attilio exclaimed in dismay, "Stay! Don't!" It
looked as though his Englishman had made up his mind to swim for it. But
Cosmo with a muttered, "I must lend a hand," stepped lightly forward
past the rowers, and began to feel under thwarts for a spare oar. Before
he found it his hand came in contact with a naked foot. This recalled to
him the existence of the ancient boatman. The poor old fellow who had
taken no part in the fray had fallen overboard from mere weakness and
had had a long soaking in chilly water. He lay curled up in the bows,
shivering violently like a dog. For the moment Cosmo was simply vexed at
this additional dead weight in the boat. He could think of nothing but
of the custom-house galley. He imagined her long, slim, cleaving the
glassy water, as if endowed with life, while the clumsy tub in which he
sat felt to him a dead thing which had to be tugged along by main force
every inch of the way. He set his teeth hard and pulled doggedly as if
rowing in a losing race, without turning his head once. Suddenly he
became aware of the end of the old Mole gliding past the boat, and that
Attilio instead of holding on this way had taken a sweep and was
following the outer side of the breakwater towards the shore. Presently,
at his word, the oars were taken in, and the boat floated arrested in
shallow water amongst the boulders strewn along the base of the Mole.
The men panted after their exertions. Not a breath of wind stirred the
chilly air. Cosmo returned aft and sat down by Attilio after putting on
his coat.

It seemed as though Attilio, while steering with one hand, had managed
with the other to go through the pockets of Cosmo's coat, for his first
words murmured in an anxious tone were "Signore, where are those
papers?"

Cosmo had forgotten all about them. The shock was severe. "The papers,"
he exclaimed faintly. "In my hat."

"Yes, I put them there. You had it on your head in the boat. I
recognized you by it."

"Of course I had it on. Where is it?"

"God knows," said Attilio bitterly. "I was asking you for the papers."

"I only discovered that the packet was in my hat after I put it on,"
protested Cosmo. "Four were standing over me already."

"Is it possible?" exclaimed Attilio, very low.

"Afterwards I was watched all the time."

While they were exchanging those words in the extremity of their
consternation, the man nearest to them went down suddenly on his knees
and began to grope under the thwarts industriously. Having heard the
word "hat" he had remembered that while battling with the _sbirri_ he
had trodden on some round object which had given way under his foot. He
assured the signore that it was a thing that could not be helped while
he tendered to him apologetically the rim with one hand and the crown
with the other. It was crushed flat like an empty bag, but it was seized
with avidity and presently Cosmo's feelings were relieved by the
discovery that it still contained the parcel of papers. Attilio took
possession of it with a low nervous laugh. It was an emotional sound
which, coming from that man, gave Cosmo food for wonder during the few
moments the silence lasted before Attilio announced in a whisper, "Here
she is."

Cosmo, looking seaward, saw on the black and gleaming water, polished
like a mirror for the stars, an opaque hummock resembling the head of a
rock; and he thought that the race had been won by a very narrow margin.
The galley in fact had reached the heads of the jetties a very few
minutes only after the boat. On getting back to his station the officer
in the galley pulled about fifty yards clear of the end of the old Mole
and ordered his men to lay oars in. He had left the solution of the
mystery to the police. It was not his concern; and as he knew nothing of
the existence of an outside boat, it never occurred to him to
investigate along the coast. Attilio's boat lurking close inshore was
invisible from seaward. The distance between the two was great enough to
cause the considerable clatter which is made when several oars are laid
in together at the word of command to reach Cosmo only as a very faint,
almost mysterious, sound. It was the last he was to hear for a very long
time. He surrendered to the soft and invincible stillness of air and sea
and stars enveloping the active desires and the secret fears of men who
have the sombre earth for their stage. At every momentary pause in his
long and fantastic adventure it returned with its splendid charm and
glorious serenity, resembling the power of a great and unfathomable love
whose tenderness like a sacred spell lays to rest all the vividities and
all the violences of passionate desire.

Dreamily Cosmo had lost control of the trend of his thoughts, as one
does on the verge of sleep. He regained it with a slight start and
looked up at the round tower looming up, bulky, at the water's edge. He
was back again, having completed the cycle of his adventures and not
knowing what would happen next. Everybody was silent. The two men at the
thwarts had folded their arms and had let their chins sink on their
breasts; while Attilio, sitting in the stern sheets, held his head up in
an immobility to which his open eyes lent an air of extreme vigilance.
The waste of waters seemed to extend from the shores of Italy to the
very confines of the universe, with nothing on it but the black spot of
the galley which moved no more than the head of a rock. "We can't stay
here till daylight," thought Cosmo.

That same thought was in Attilio's mind. The race between his boat and
the galley had been very close. It was very probable that had it not
been for Cosmo volunteering to pull the third oar it would have resulted
in a dead heat, which of course would have meant capture. As it was,
Attilio had just escaped being seen by pulling short round the jetty
instead of holding on into the open sea. It was a risky thing to do, but
then, since he had jeopardized the success of his escape through his
desire to get hold of Cosmo again, there was nothing before him but a
choice of risks.

Attilio was a native of a tiny white townlet on the eastern shore of the
Gulf of Genoa. His people were all small cultivators and fishermen.
Their name was Pieschi, from whose blood came the well-known conspirator
against the power of the Dorias and in the days of the Republic. Of this
fact Attilio had heard only lately (Cantelucci had told him) with a
certain satisfaction. In his early youth, spent on the coast of the
South American continent, he had heard much talk of a subversive kind
and had become familiar with the idea of revolt looked upon as an
assertion of manly dignity and the spiritual aim of life. He had come
back to his country about six months before and, beholding the aged
faces of some of his people in the unchanged surroundings, it seemed to
him that it was his own life that had been very long, though he was only
about thirty. Being a relation of Cantelucci he found himself very soon
in touch with the humbler members of secret societies, survivals of the
revolutionary epoch, stirred up by the downfall of the Empire and
inspired by grandiose ideas, by the hatred of the Austrian invaders
bringing back with them the old tyrannical superstitions of religion and
the oppression of privileged classes. Like the polite innkeeper he
believed in the absolute equality of all men. He respected all religions
but despised the priests who preached submission and perceived nothing
extravagant in the formation of an Italian empire (of which he had the
first hint from the irritable old cobbler, the uncle of Cecchina) since
there was a great man--a great Emperor--to put at its head, very close
at hand. The great thing was to keep him safe from the attempts of all
these kings and princes now engaged in plotting against his life in
Vienna--till the hour of action came. No small task, for the world
outside the ranks of the people was full of his enemies.

Attilio, still and silent by Cosmo's side, was not reproaching himself
for having gone in the evening to say good-bye to Cecchina. The girl
herself had been surprised to see him, for they had said good-bye
already in the afternoon. But this love affair was not quite two months
old and he could not have been satisfied with a hurried wordless
good-bye, snatched behind a half-closed door, with several people
drinking at the long table in Cantelucci's kitchen on one side and a
crabbed old woman rummaging noisily in a storeroom at the end of the
dark passage. Cecchina had, of course, reproached him for coming, but
not very much. Neither of them dreamed of there being any danger in it.
Then, straight out of her arms, as it were, he had stepped into that
ambush! His presence of mind and his agility proved too much for the
party of the stupid Barbone. It was only after he had given them the
slip in the maze of small garden plots at the back of the houses that he
had time, while lying behind a low wall, to think over this unexpected
trouble. He knew that the fellows who were after him belonged to the
police, because they had called on the soldiers for assistance; but he
concluded that he owed this surprise to some jealous admirer of
Cecchina. It was easy enough for any base scoundrel to set the police
after a man in these troubled times. It may even have been one of
Cantelucci's affiliated friends. His suspicions rested on the small
employees who took their meals at the inn, and especially on a lanky
scribe with a pointed nose like a rat who had the habit of going in and
out through the courier's room, only, Attilio believed, in order to make
eyes at Cecchina. That the ambush had been laid on the evening fixed for
his departure was a mere coincidence.

The real danger of the position was in having the papers on him, but,
anxious that his friends at the tower should not give him up, he came
out of his hiding-place too soon. The soldiers had gone away, but the
_sbirri_ were still half-heartedly poking about in dark corners and
caught sight of him. Another rush saved him for the moment. The position
he felt was growing desperate. He dared not throw away the papers. The
discovery of Cosmo sitting amongst the stones was an event so
extraordinary in itself that it revolutionized his rational view of life
as a whole in the way a miracle might have done. He felt suddenly an
awed and confiding love for that marvellous person fate had thrown in
his way. The pursuit was close. There was no time to explain. There was
no need.

But directly he found himself safe in the boat Attilio began to regret
having parted with the papers. It was not much use proceeding on his
mission without these documents entrusted to him by Cantelucci, acting
on behalf of superior powers.

He asked himself what could have happened to Cosmo? Did the fellows
arrest him on suspicion? That was not very likely, and at worst it would
not mean more than a short detention. They would not dare to search him,
surely. But even if they found the packet Cosmo would declare it his own
property and object to its being opened. He had a complete confidence in
Cosmo's loyalty and, what was more, in that young Englishman's power to
have his own way. He had the manner for that and the face for that. The
face and bearing of a man with whom it was lucky to be associated in
anything.

The galley being just then at the other end of her beat, Attilio saw his
way clear to slip into the harbour. The state of perfect quietness over
the whole extent of the harbour encouraged his native audacity. He began
by pulling to the east side where the gendarmerie office was near the
quay. Everything was quiet there. He made his men lay their oars amongst
the shadows of the anchored shipping and waited. Sleep, breathless
sleep, reigned on shore and afloat. Attilio began to think that Cosmo
could not have been discovered. If so, then he must be nearing
Cantelucci's inn by this time. He resolved then to board one of the
empty coasters moored to the quay, wait for the morning there, and then
go himself to the inn, where he could remain concealed till another
departure could be arranged. He told his men to pull gently to the
darkest part of the quay. And then he heard Cosmo's mighty shout. He was
nearly as confounded by it as the _sbirri_ in the boat. That voice
bursting out on the profound stillness seemed loud enough to wake up
every sleeper in the town, to bring the stones rolling down the
hillsides. And almost at once he thought, "What luck!" The luck of the
Englishman's amazing impudence; for what other man would have thought of
doing that thing? He told his rowers to lay their oars in quietly and
get hold of the boat-stretchers. The extremely, feeble pulling of the
old boatman gave the time for these preparations. He whispered his
instructions: "We've got to get a foreign signore out of that boat. The
others in her will be _sbirri._ Hit them hard." Just before the boats
came into contact he recognized Cosmo's form standing up. It was then
that he pronounced the words, "the man in the hat," which were heard by
Cosmo. Attilio ascribed it all to luck that attended those who had
anything to do with that Englishman. Even the very escape unseen from
the harbour he ascribed, not to Cosmo's extra oar, but to Cosmo's
peculiar personality.

Without departing from his immobility he broke silence by a "signore,"
pronounced in a distinct but restrained voice. Cosmo was glad to learn
the story before the moment came for them to part. But the theory of
luck which Attilio tacked on to the facts did not seem to him
convincing. He remarked that if Attilio had not come for him at all he
would have been far on the way in his mysterious affairs, whereas now he
was only in another trap.

For all answer the other murmured, "_Si_, but I wonder if it would have
been the same. Signore, isn't it strange that we should have been drawn
together from the first moment you put foot in Genoa?"

"It is," said Cosmo, with an emphasis that encouraged the other to
continue, but with a less assured voice.

"Some people of old believed that stars have something to do with
meetings and partings by their disposition and that some if not all men
have each a star allotted to them."

"Perhaps," said Cosmo in the same subdued voice. "But I believe there is
a man greater than you or I who believes he has a star of his own."

"Napoleon, perhaps."

"So I have heard," said Cosmo, and thought, "Here he is, whenever two
men meet he is a third, one can't get rid of him."

"I wonder where it is," said Attilio, as if to himself, looking up at
the sky. "Or yours, or mine," he added in a still lower tone. "They must
be pretty close together."

Cosmo humoured the superstitious strain absently, for he felt a secret
sympathy for that man. "Yes, it looks as if yours and mine had been
fated to draw together."

"No, I mean all three together."

"Do you? Then you must know more than I do. Though indeed as a matter of
fact he is not very far from us where we sit. But don't you think, my
friend, that there are men and women, too, whose stars mark them for
loneliness no man can approach?"

"You mean because they are great."

"Because they are incomparable," said Cosmo after a short pause, in
which Attilio seemed to ponder.

"I like that what you said," Attilio was heard at last. "Their stars may
be lonely. Look how still they are. But men are more like ships that
come suddenly upon each other without a warning. And yet they, too, are
guided by the stars. I can't get over the wonder of our meeting
to-night."

"If you hadn't been so long in saying good-bye we wouldn't have met,"
said Cosmo, looking at the two men dozing on the thwarts, the whisperers
of the tower. They were not at all like what he had imagined them to be.

Attilio gazed at his Englishman for a time closely. He seemed to see a
smile on Cosmo's lips. Wonder at his omniscience prevented him from
making a reply. He preferred not to ask, and yet he was incapable of
forming a guess, for there are certain kinds of obviousness that escape
speculation.

"You may be right," he said. "It's the first time in my life that I
found it hard to say good-bye. I begin to believe," he went on
murmuring, "that there are people it would be better for one not to
know. There are women . . ."

"Yes," said Cosmo, very low and as if unconscious of what he was saying.
"I have seen your faces very close together."

The other made a slight movement away from Cosmo and then bent towards
him. "You have seen," he said slowly and stopped short. He was thinking
of something that had happened only two hours before. "Oh well," he said
with composure, "you know everything, you see everything that happens.
Do you know what will happen to us two?"

"It's very likely that when we part we will never see each other again,"
Cosmo said, resting his elbows on his knees and taking his head between
his hands. He did not look like a man preparing to go ashore.

There were no material difficulties absolutely to prevent him from
landing. The foot of the tower with the narrow strip of ground which a
boat could approach was not sixty yards off, and all this was in the
shadow of its own reflection, the high side of the breakwater, the bulk
of the tower, making the glassy water dark in that corner of the shore.
And besides, the water in which the boat floated was so shallow that
Cosmo could have got to land by wading from where the boat lay without
wetting himself much above the knees, should Attilio refuse to come out
from under the shelter of the rock. But probably Attilio would not have
objected. The difficulty was not there.

Attilio must have been thinking on the same subject, as became evident
when he asked Cosmo whether those _sbirri_ knew where he lived. After
some reflection Cosmo said that he was quite certain they knew nothing
about it. The _sbirri_ had put no questions to him. They had not, he
said, displayed any particular curiosity about what he was. "But why do
you ask?"

"Don't you know?" said Attilio, with only half-affected surprise. "There
might have been a dozen of them waiting for you in the neighbourhood on
the chance of your returning, and you have no other place to go to."

"No, I haven't," said Cosmo in a tone as though he regretted that
circumstance. He thought, however, that there might have been some of
them out between the port and the town, and he knew only one way and
that not very well, he added.

As a matter of fact that danger was altogether imaginary, because
Barbone, who certainly was in the pay of the police for work of that
sort, was not imaginative enough to do things without orders, and after
sending his prisoner off left the rest of the gendarmes and went home to
bed, while his young acolyte went about his own affairs. The other two
_sbirri_ were being medically attended to, one of them especially being
very nearly half killed by an unlucky blow on the temple. All the other
_sbirro_ could say in a feeble voice was that there were four in the
boat, that they were attacked by an inexplicable murderous gang, and
that he imagined that the other two, the prisoner and the boatman, were
now dead and very likely at the bottom of the harbour. The brigadier of
the gendarmerie could not get any more out of him, and, knowing
absolutely nothing of the affair, thought it would be time to make his
report to the superior authorities in the morning. All he did was to go
round to the places where the boats were chained, which were under his
particular charge, and count the boats. Not one was wanting. His
responsibility was not engaged.

Thus there was nothing between Cosmo and Cantelucci's inn except his own
distaste. There was a strange tameness in that proceeding, a lack of
finality, something almost degrading. He imagined himself slinking like
a criminal at the back of the beastly guardhouse, starting at shadows,
creeping under the colonnade, getting lost in those dreadful deep lanes
between palaces, with the constant dread of having suddenly the paws of
those vile fellows laid on him and being dragged to some police post
with an absurd tale on his lips and without a hat on his head and what
for? Simply to get back to that abominable bedroom. However, he would
have to go through it.

"Pity you don't know the town," Attilio's cautious voice was heard
again, "or else I could tell you of a place where you could spend the
remainder of the night and send word to your servant to-morrow. But you
could not find it by yourself. And that's a pity. I assure Your
Excellency that she is a real good woman. To have a secret place is not
such a bad thing. One never knows what one may need, and she is a
creature to be trusted. She has an Italian heart and she is a
_giardiniera_ too. What more could I tell you?"

Cosmo thought to himself vaguely that the girl he had seen in
Cantelucci's kitchen did not look like a woman gardener, though of
course if Attilio had a love affair it would be naturally amongst people
of that sort. But it occurred to him that perhaps it was some other
woman Attilio was talking about. He made no movement. Attilio's murmurs
took on a tone of resignation. "Your luck, signore, will depart with
you, and perhaps ours will follow after." Cosmo protested against that
unreasonable assumption, which was of course an absurdity but
nevertheless touched him in one of those sensitive spots which are like
a _défaut d'armure_ in the battle-harness of various conceits which one
wears against one's kind. He considered luck less in a sudden
overwhelming conviction of it, in the manner of a man who had crossed
the path of a radiating influence, or who had awakened a sleeping and
destructive power which would now pursue him to the end of his life. He
was young, farouche, mistrustful and austere, not like a stoic, but in
the more human way like a man who has been born fastidious. In a sense
altogether unworldly. Attilio emitted an audible sigh.

"You won't call it your luck," he pursued. "Well, let us leave it
without a name. It is something in you. Your carelessness in following
your fantasy, signore, as when you forced your presence on me only two
days ago," he insisted, as if carelessness and fantasy were the
compelling instruments of success. His voice was at its lowest as he
added: "Your genius makes you true to your will."

No human being could have been insensible to such words uttered
unexpectedly in a tone of secret earnestness. But Cosmo's inward
response was a feeling of profound despondency. He was crushed by their
appalling unfitness. For the last twenty-four hours he had been asking
himself whether he had a will of his own, and it had seemed to him that
he had lost the notion of the real nature of courage. At that very
moment while listening to the mysteriously low pitch of Attilio's voice
the thought flashed through his mind that there was something within him
that made of him a predestined victim of remorse.

"You can't possibly know anything about me, Attilio," he said, "and
whatever you like to imagine about me, you will have to put me on shore
presently. I can't stay here till the morning, and neither can you," he
added. "What are you thinking of doing? What can you do?"

"Is it possible that it is of any interest to the signore? Only the
other evening I could not induce you to leave me to myself, and now you
are impatient to leave me to my fate. What can I do? I can always take a
desperate chance," he paused, and added through his clenched teeth, "and
when I think what little I need to make it almost safe . . ." The
piously uttered exclamation, "_Ah, Dio!_" was accompanied by a shake of
a clenched fist apparently addressed to the universe, but made as it
were discreetly, in keeping with the low and forcible tones.

"And what is that?" asked Cosmo, raising his head.

"Two pairs of stout arms, nothing more. With four oars and this boat and
using a little judgment in getting away I would defy that fellow there."
He jerked his head towards the galley which in this tideless sea had not
shifted her position a yard. "Yes," he went on, "I could even hope to
remain unseen on account of a quick dash."

And he explained to Cosmo further that in an hour or so a little nearer
the break of day, when men get heavy and sleepy, the watchfulness of
those custom-house people would be relaxed and give him a better chance.
But if he was seen then he could still hope to out-row them, though he
would have preferred it the other way because with a boat making for the
open sea they would very soon guess that there must be some vessel
waiting for her, and by telling the tale on shore, that government xebec
lying in the harbour would soon be out in chase. She was fast, and in
twenty-four hours she would soon manage to overhaul all the craft she
would sight between this and the place he was going to.

"And where is that?" asked Cosmo, letting his head rest on his hands
again.

"In the direction of Livorno," said the other, and checked himself. "But
perhaps I had better not tell you, for should you happen to be
interrogated by all those magistrates, or perhaps by the Austrians, you
would of course want to speak the truth as becomes a gentleman--a
_nobilissimo signore_--unless you manage to forget what I have already
told you or perchance elect to come with us."

"Come with you," repeated Cosmo, before something peculiar in the tone
made him sit up and face Attilio. "I believe you are capable of carrying
me off."

"_Dio ne voglio_," was Attilio's answer, "God forbid. The noise you
would make would bring no end of trouble. But for that perhaps it would
have been better for me," he added reflectively. "Whereas I have made up
my mind that there should be nothing but good from our association. Yet,
signore, you very nearly went away with us without any question at all,
for our head pointed to seaward and you could have had no idea that I
was coming in here. Confess, signore, you didn't think of return then. I
had only to hold the tiller straight another five minutes and I would
have had you in my power."

"You were afraid of the _dogana_ galley, my friend," said Cosmo as if
arguing a point.

"Signore, this minute," said Attilio with the utmost seriousness. "Wake
up there," he said in a raised undertone to his two men. "Take an oar,
Pietro, and pull the boat to the foot of the tower."

"There is also that old boatman," said Cosmo.

"Hold," said Attilio. "Him I will not land. They will be at his place in
the morning, and then he tells his tale . . . unless he is dead. See
forward there."

A very subdued murmur arose in the bows and Attilio muttered, "Pietro
would not talk to a dead man."

"He is extremely feeble," said Cosmo.

It appeared on Attilio's enquiry that this encumbrance as he called him
was just strong enough to be helped over the thwarts. Presently,
sustained under the elbows, he joined Cosmo in the stem sheets, where
they made him sit between them. He let his big hands lie in his lap.
From time to time he shivered patiently.

"That wretch Barbone knows no pity," observed Cosmo.

"I suppose he was the nearest he could get. What tyranny! The helpless
are at the mercy of those fellows. He saved himself the trouble of going
three doors farther."

They both looked at the ancient frame that age had not shrivelled.

"A fine man once," said Attilio in a low voice. "Can you hear me,
_vecchio?_"

"_Si_, and see you too, but I don't know your voice," was the answer in
a voice stronger than either of them expected, but betraying no sort of
interest.

"They will certainly throw him into prison." And to Cosmo's indignant
exclamation Attilio pointed out that the old man would be the only
person they would be able to get hold of and he would have to pay for
all the rest.

Cosmo expressed the opinion that he would not stay there long.

"Better for him to die under the open sky than in prison," murmured
Attilio in a gloomy voice. "Listen, old man, could you keep the boat
straight at a star if I were to point you one?"

"I was at home in a boat before I could speak plainly," was the answer,
while the boatman raised his arm and let it rest on the tiller as if to
prove that he had strength enough for that at least.

"I have my boat's crew, signore. Let him do something for all Italy if
it is with his last breath, that old Genoese. And now if you were only
to take that bow oar you have been using so well only a few moments ago,
I will pull stroke and we will make this boat fly."

Cosmo felt the subdued vibration of this appeal without having paid any
attention to the words. They required no answer. Attilio pressed him as
though he had been arguing against objections. Surely he was no friend
of tyranny or of Austrian oppressors and he wouldn't refuse to serve a
man whom some hidden power had thrown in his way. He, Attilio, had not
sought him. He would have been content never to have seen him. He surely
had nothing that could call him back on shore this very night, since he
had not been more than three days in Genoa. No time for him to have
affairs. The words poured out of his lips into Cosmo's ear while the
white-headed boatman sat still above the torrent of whispered speech,
appearing to listen like a venerable judge. What could stand in the way
of him lending his luck and the strength of his arm? Surely it couldn't
be love, since he was travelling alone.

"Enough," said Cosmo, as if the word had been extorted from him by pain,
but Attilio felt that his cause had been gained, though he hastened to
apologize for the impropriety of the argument, and assure the milord
Inglese that nothing would be easier than to put him ashore in the
course of the next day.

"What do you think. Excellency, there is my own native village not very
far from Genoa on the Riviera di Ponente, and you will be amongst
friends to carry out such orders as you may give, or pass you from one
to another back to Genoa as fast as mules can climb or horses trot. And
it would be the same from any point in Italy. They would get you into
Genoa in disguise, or without disguise, and into the very home of
Cantelucci, so that you could appear there without a soul knowing how
you entered or how you came back."

Cosmo, feeling a sudden relief, wondered that he should have found it in
the mere resolution to go off secretly with only the clothes he stood up
in, absolutely without money or anything of value on him, not even a
watch, and without a hat, at the mere bidding of a man bound on some
secret work, God knows where and for what object, and who had
volunteered to him no statement except that he had cousins in every spot
in Italy and a love affair with an _ortolana._ The enormous absurdity of
it made him impatient to be doing, and upon his expressed desire to make
a start Attilio, with the words, "You command here, signore," told his
men it was time to be moving.

In less than half an hour the boat, with all her crew crouching at the
bottom and using the oars for poling in the shallow water along the
coast with infinite precaution to avoid knocks and bangs as though the
boat, the oars, and everything in her were made of glass, had been moved
far enough from the tower to have her nose put to the open sea. After
the first few strokes Cosmo felt himself draw back again to the receding
shore. But it was too late. He seemed to feel profoundly that he was
not--perhaps no man was--a free agent. He felt a sort of fear, a
faltering of all his limbs, as he swung back to his oar. Then his eyes
caught the galley, indeed everybody's eyes in the boat were turned that
way except the eyes of the ancient steersman, the white-headed figure in
an unexpectedly erect attitude who, with hardly any breath left in his
body and a mere helpless victim of other men's will, had a strange
appearance of the man in command.

In less than ten minutes the galley became invisible, and even the long
shadows of the jetties had sunk to the level of the sea. There was a
moment when one of the men observed without excitement, "She's after
us," but this remark provoked no answer and turned out to be mistaken,
and for an hour longer Attilio, pulling stroke, watched the faint
phosphorescent wake, the evanescent fire under the black smoothness of
the sea, elusive like the tail of a comet amongst the dim reflections of
the stars. Its straightness was the only proof of the silent helmsman
with his arm resting along the tiller being still alive. Then he began
to look about him, and presently, laying in his oar, relieved the old
man at the tiller. He had to take his arm off it. The other never said a
word.

The boat moved slowly now. The problem was to discover the awaiting
felucca without lights and with her sails lowered. Several times Attilio
stood up to have a look without being able to make out anything. He was
growing uneasy. He spoke to Cosmo.

"I hope we haven't passed her by. If we once get her between us and the
land it will be hopeless to catch sight of her till the day breaks.
Better rest on your oars."

He remained standing himself. His eyes roamed to and fro patiently and
suddenly he emitted a short laugh.

"Why, there she is."

He steered, still standing, while the others pulled gently. The old man,
who had not emitted a sound, had slipped off the seat on to the stem
sheets. Attilio said quietly, "Take your oars in," and suddenly Cosmo
felt the boat bump against the low side of the felucca, which he had
never tinned his head to see. No had or even murmur came from her. She
had no lights. Attilio's voice said, "You first, signore," and Cosmo,
looking up, saw three motionless heads above the bulwarks. No word was
spoken to him. He was not even looked at by those silent and shadowy
men. The first sound he heard were the words, "Take care," pronounced by
Attilio in connection with getting the old boatman on board. Cosmo,
standing aside, saw a group carry him over to the other side of the
deck. While the sails were being hoisted he sat on the hatch and came to
the very verge of believing himself invisible till suddenly Attilio
stood by his side.

"Like this we will catch the very first breath of day-break, and may a
breeze follow it to take us out of sight of that town defiled by the
Austrians and soon to be the prey of the nobles and the priests." He
paused. "So at least Cantelucci says. There are bed places below, if you
want to take some rest, signore."

"I am not sleepy," said Cosmo. If no longer invisible, he could still
feel disembodied, as it were. He was neither sleepy nor tired, nor
hungry, nor even curious, as if altogether freed from the weaknesses of
the body, and not indifferent but without apprehensions or speculations
of any sort to disturb his composure as if of a fully informed wisdom.
He did not seem to himself to weigh more than a feather. He was
suffering the reaction of the upheaval of all his feelings and the
endless contest of his thoughts and that sort of mental agony which had
taken possession of him while he was descending the great staircase of
the Palazzo under the eye of the Count of Montevesso. It was as though
one of those fevers in which the victim watches his own delirium had
left him irresponsible, like a sick man in his bed. Attilio went on:

"Cantelucci's an experienced conspirator. He thinks that the force of
the people is such that it would be like an uprising of the ground
itself. May be, but where is the man that would know how to use it?"

Cosmo let it go by like a problem that could await solution or as a
matter of mere vain words. The night air did not stir, and Attilio
changed his tone.

"They had their lines out ever since the calm began. We will have fish
to eat in the morning. You will have to be one of ourselves for a time
and observe the customs of the common people."

"Tell me, Attilio," Cosmo questioned, not widely but in a quiet, almost
confidential tone, and laying his hand for the first time on the
shoulder of that man only a little older than himself. "Tell me, what am
I doing here?"

Attilio, the wanderer of the seas along the southern shores of the earth
and the pupil of the hermit of the plains that lie under the
constellation of the southern sky, smiled in the dark, a faint friendly
gleam of white teeth in an over-shadowed face. But all the answer he
made was:

"Who would dare say now that our stars have not come together? Come to
sit at the stem, signore. I can find a rug to throw over a coil of rope
for a seat. I am now the padrone of that felucca, but of course barring
her appointed work you are entirely the master of her."

These words were said with a marked accent of politeness such as one
uses for a courtesy formula. But he stopped for a moment on his way aft
to point his finger on the deck.

"We have thrown a bit of canvas over him. Yes, that is the old man whose
last bit of work was to steer a boat, and strange to think perhaps it
had been done for Italy."

"Where is his star now?" said Cosmo, after looking down in silence for a
time.

"Signore, it should be out," said Attilio with studied intonation. "But
who will miss it out of the sky?"



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