In Direst Peril Part 3

"He is my companion," I replied. "I left him asleep at the auberge less than an hour ago."

"You are the friend of my friend Brunow!" he exclaimed. "Sir, I am delighted to meet you. And Brunow is here again? What news! And do you stay long? Oh, once again life will be bearable. In this dull hole, sir, I pledge you my most sacred word of honor, a man has but one contemplation; his thoughts are all towards suicide. Figure for yourself the life we lead here: the commandant a bachelor of sixty, and "--he lowered his voice and bent laughingly to my ear--"a bore the most intense, the most rigid, the most unbending, conceivable by the mind of man. But pardon me--that is my name. You have not travelled in this direction with Brunow without hearing it?"

"No, indeed," I answered. "Brunow has spoken of you hundreds of times.

I have no card, but my name is Fyffe. Brunow shall give us a formal introduction by-and-by."

I did my best to carry off the situation, but I doubt if I achieved any very great measure of success. I can say honestly that if there is one thing in this world I abhor with all my heart and soul it is treachery.

And there was no escape from the fact that I was here for the express purpose of playing the traitor with this amiable and friendly young fellow, and there is no escape from the fact that I was bound to go on playing the traitor with him, to receive his friendly advances, to accept his welcome, and all the while to plot and plan to work away from him the prisoner it was his duty to guard, and for whose safe-keeping his reputation at least, and perhaps his life, was responsible. This reflection kept me awkward and constrained, but luckily for me he took no notice of my clumsiness, but rattled on as if he took an actual delight in the sound of his own voice.

"Brunow," he declared, "is the most delightful man I have ever known.

The common complaint I hear against your delightful countrymen, Monsieur Fiff, is that they are devoid of _esprit of verve_--that they are too alive to their responsibilities, that they live in a cave of depression of spirits. As I say, I have not known many; but I have not found them so, and Brunow least of all. Brunow in his gayety, in his wit, is French of the French. An astonishing man. Though, even here--in that infernal fortress yonder where I suffer incredibly from _le spleen_--I laugh when I am by myself, and when the face and voice of Brunow present themselves to my memory. What conversation, eh? What inventions! What a n.o.ble _farceur!_ Let us go and see him."

He set off at an impetuous pace, which he moderated almost immediately; and gayly chattering all the way, led me--feeling like a villain at every step, yet not in the least relaxing from my purpose--to the hostel, where we found Brunow chaffing the landlady, who was already busy in the preparation of our breakfast. The impetuous Lieutenant Breschia fell upon his neck and kissed him on both cheeks, and Brunow returned the salute with heartiness. I may as well let the fact out at once and have the declaration over: I was beginning to have a serious dislike for Brunow, though I strove to subdue it, trying to reflect how much our rivalry, of which he knew nothing, might possibly warp my judgment of him. At that minute I felt a downright twinge of hatred and contempt for him; and his kisses made him seem like a sort of Judas in my eyes. I did not pause to reflect that the kiss meant no more to him than a shake of the hand means to a man who has been bred in England, and it is a form of salute which--though I have been familiar with the sight of it for years together--I cordially hate. Those beastly South American Spaniards, among whom I fought, were always at it, with their beards scented with garlic and tobacco! It was a form of salute I had hard work to avoid at times; but I should always have been ready to astonish the man who had succeeded in getting at me in that fashion. I loathed Brunow for his acceptance and return of that caress; and yet the man-was doing no more than his breeding demanded of him; and if he had recoiled from his friend he would have insulted him. I loathed myself because this duplicity was necessary to our plan, but I never proposed to myself for a moment to go back from the plan itself. I stood pledged to Miss Rossano to rescue her father from that horrible long-drawn imprisonment if the courage, or the wit, of man could compa.s.s it; and I meant, with all my heart and soul, to keep my word. In spite of that I had no stomach for the means it was necessary to employ; and at last it came to this: in place of hating and despising myself for using the means, I took to hating and despising the Austrians for making the means necessary.

In less than a minute Brunow was justifying his friend's opinion of him by an extravagantly farcical story of our adventures by the way, and the young Austrian was laughing at him as if he would burst his stays.

I knew, of course, that he wore those feminine additions to the toilet, because within the last hour I had seen him take them off and put them on again; and the effeminacy of that trick, which was of course merely national and professional, and not in the least to be charged against him personally, added to the disgust I felt at him and at Brunow, and at the whole Austrian nation, and at myself, and at our joint treachery--Brunow's and mine.

So I carried my own moodiness out into the village street, and suddenly remembering that I was smoking a cigar the harmless, merry-hearted youngster had given me, I hurled it away and walked hotly along the road in a state of mind altogether unenviable. I brought myself to reason in a quarter of an hour, and got back to the inn in time for breakfast; but I know that I made poor company, and sat there glum and silent while my two companions shouted with boisterous laughter, and drank more wine than was good for them at so early an hour in the morning.

At last Brunow shook hands with the lieutenant, and embraced him into the bargain, and kissed him, and was kissed on both cheeks again, the young officer having to go back to his duty. I escaped the kisses and was let off with a hand-shake, with which also I would gladly have dispensed if I could.

Then Brunow and I were left alone; but he was so full of his conspirator's caution--developed in a minute when there was no need for it, and likely as soon to be forgotten when it was wanted--that though not a soul in the house could understand a word of English, he would not speak to me until he had led me into a deep pine wood at the back of the house, and on the first slope of the mountain, and even there he went peering about and beating the bushes and undergrowth with a stick, as if he had been a stage-spy, until I lost temper with him, and shouted to him to begin. He came and sat mysteriously at my side.

"You see," he said, "how I stand with Breschia. I can have the run of the fortress at any time, and so, if you play your cards properly, can you."

"Was there any need," I asked, ill-humoredly, "to bring me here to say that?" I admit that I was in a quite unreasonable temper, and that an angel would have been tempted to quarrel with me. I called Bru-now "a melodramatic a.s.s" I remember very well, and I told him that if we fell into a habit of getting in the corners to conspire we should only draw suspicion upon ourselves. I spoke with a roughness altogether unnecessary, but then it must be remembered that Brunow, whom I was fast learning to dislike and despise, bade so far to be of more service than myself, and it is always bitter to be beaten by an inferior. I stung him, and he replied angrily, and the result of it was that we separated for the day. I went uphill, and by-and-by lost myself and came quite unexpectedly upon a highway, from which I could look down upon the fortress. Being a.s.sured by this that I could not easily lose myself again, I walked for a considerable distance, until from the top of a hill I could look down the straight road into a broad and fertile plain, with a city far and far away shining on the limit of it.

"This," I said, "is the road we shall have to travel if ever we get the Conte di Rossano out of prison."

And following the mental road pointed out by this finger-post of thought, I sat down and allowed my fancy to carry me into all manner of worthless and impracticable plans of rescue in which I could dispense with Brunow's aid. I was engaged in this unprofitable exercise, when I suddenly discerned a carriage near the hill-top. It came on with difficulty, and the two horses that drew it were dead blown when they reached the level, and stood trembling with their late exertion. A strikingly handsome woman put her head round the front of the carriage as if to look at the road before her. Catching sight of me she smiled and addressed me in the language of the country. I responded in French, and in that tongue she asked me how far it still was to Itzia. I told her as nearly as I could guess; she thanked me, and then leaned back in her carriage, waiting until the horses should have rested. In due time she drove on, with a little inclination of the head so regal and condescending that she might have been a princess at the least. When she was two or three hundred yards away I arose and followed. The carriage went out of sight in a little while, and I thought no more about it or its occupant until I saw the vehicle itself standing empty at the door of the inn.

The lady was seated in her rich dress in the common room, and she and Brunow were talking like old friends. Brunow's anger was no more lasting than a child's, and by this time he had quite recovered his good-humor.

"Oh, here you are, old fellow," he cried, genially. "Baroness, permit me to introduce to you Captain Fyffe. Fyffe, this is the Baroness Bonnar."

CHAPTER IV

When I saw the lady face to face I perceived that she was older than I had fancied her to be, and I saw that she adopted certain devices to hide the ravages of time which had, as they always have, the effect of emphasizing them. I wonder if women will ever learn the perfect folly and uselessness of that sort of trickery.

The Baroness Bonnar was very gracious in her manners, but she seemed to me much less like a real great lady than like an actress who played at being a great lady. I am not very penetrating in that respect, and, as I have said already, I knew next to nothing of women and their ways, and so I was not disposed to trust my own judgment, but put it on one side with a certain contempt and impatience of myself. As a matter of fact, as I found out not so long afterwards, the Baroness Bonnar was no more a baroness than I was a baron, but simply and merely an adventuress who had spent some time on the Vienna stage, where she had secured no great success. She was now one of that almost innumerable band of spies who lived at that time in the service of the Austrian government. She was not a very clever woman, I am inclined to think, but she had been clever enough to induce a high official to fall in love with her, and by keeping this high official hanging off and on she had contrived to obtain promotion in her abominable calling far beyond her intellectual deserts. Brunow, it seemed, had known her for a year or two, but I learned afterwards that he had made no guess as to her real business in life.

The foolish fellow was so delighted at the unexpected opportunity for a flirtation that the whole purpose of our journey seemed to be forgotten by him. The baroness, with her maid and her coachman--. who were both on the same pay with herself (without her having the least guess of it), and reported all her doings to her superiors--stayed only one night in Itzia, and then went on to a village some dozen miles away, where she put up with some friends of hers who had a country-house there. Then nothing would please Brunow but that he must hire a horse and ride off to this country-house, and spend hours in the society of the sham baroness, while our scheme for the release of Miss Rossano's father hung in the wind, without making even a sign of progress.

The young lieutenant was almost my only companion, and once or twice he dined with me at the inn, and twice I had breakfast with him in the fortress; but these interviews with him brought me no nearer to my purpose. A third invitation brought something in its train, however, and, to tell the truth, I asked nothing much better than to have Brunow out of my scheme. The matter came about in this wise: Breschia and I were seated in his private room, when a non-commissioned officer entered with his report for the day, and stood, forage-cap in hand, at attention while his superior read it over. Some conversation ensued between them, which my ignorance of the language prevented me from following; but I understood the phrase with which Breschia brought it to a close.

"Send him here," he said. "Send him at once."

The non-commissioned officer saluted and retired, and Breschia turned laughingly on me.

"We have here an original who is always getting into trouble. A good fellow, and an honest servant, but so incorrigibly kind-hearted that he is always breaking our rules. I shall have to be serious with him in spite of myself."

He poured out a cup of black coffee as he spoke, and set it with a bottle of maraschino and an open box of cigars at my elbow. I had scarcely selected and lit ray cigar, when there came a tap at the door; and at the lieutenant's call to enter a man in uniform came in, and, having closed the door behind him, stood rigidly at attention. Breschia addressed him in a tone of anger, which sounded real enough, and the man stood like a statue to receive his reproof. There was nothing in the least degree remarkable about the fellow, who was just a mere simple, common soldier. He was attired in a sort of fatigue costume, and looked and smelled as if he had just been sent away from stable duty. His short cropped hair was of a fiery auburn, and his rough features, with a prodigious mustache and the most ponderous over-beetling eyebrows I had ever seen, gave him a look rather of ferocity than of good-nature. But when in answer to the lieutenant's rating he began to excuse himself, it was evident even to an ear so untrained and ignorant as mine that he spoke in a language which was not his own. He spoke haltingly and stammeringly; and at last, despairing of making himself understood, he made a little motion of his hands without moving them from his sides, and so stood as if to receive sentence. Again Breschia spoke to him, and again the man responded. The lieutenant broke into a fit of laughter, and the man stood there immovable, with his little fingers at the seams of his canvas trousers, and his rugged visage frowning straight before him.

"Go!" said the lieutenant, speaking, to my surprise, in his own halting English. "You are too much a silly fellow. Go; and do it not again....

Eh? Will you?"

"Well, sir," the man answered, speaking, to my astonishment, in good native-sounding English, "I'm sorry to displease, and I try to do my duty--"

"Hold your tongue," cried Breschia, and the man obeyed at once. "Behold a man," cried the lieutenant, turning upon me and speaking in his customary French, "who has been in the English army, and who is as incapable of an idea of discipline as if he were a popular prima donna."

"Oh," said I, turning round on the man and addressing him in English, "you have been in the army at home, I hear?"

"Yes, sir," he answered, saluting me as he had done the lieutenant on his entrance. "Two-and-twenty years, sir."

"You don't mind my talking to the fellow?" I asked the lieutenant, reverting to French again.

"Pas du tout," said the lieutenant. "Vous le trouverez bien bete, je vous promis."

"How long have you been in the Austrian service?"

"Not in the service at all, sir. General's groom, sir."

"You're in fatigue dress?"

"Yes, sir. Old custom, sir. Like the feel of it, sir."

"Been here long?"

"Ten years, sir."

"Why, how's this? You don't look a day over forty."

"Forty-two, sir. Joined the band at home as a boy. Sixteenth Lancers, sir."

"What's your name?"

"Hinge, sir. Robert Hinge, sir. Son of Bob Hinge, sir. Tattenham Fancy.

Champion of the light-weights years back, sir."

"Oh! What have you been getting into trouble about?"

"Beg your pardon, sir. Mustn't talk about that, sir. Discipline, sir.

Can see as you're an officer. That ought to be enough, sir."

"Quite enough. Drink my health, _if_ there's anything fit to drink it in. You don't object, Breschia?"