In Direst Peril Part 9

When I got down into the public breakfast-room I found Brunow there in the act of making inquiry of a waiter as to the hour of the arrival of the London papers. I attached no particular importance to the fact at the moment, but a few minutes later I pa.s.sed him in the corridor and found him repeating the same inquiry to another waiter; and a little later, when we were seated at table together, he propounded the same question to a third.

"You're in a hurry for news," I said.

"I want to see what they've made of it," he answered, smilingly. "The local man down here seems to be a smartish sort of fellow, and I was careful to see that he had the facts all right before he went away."

"What local man? What facts?" I asked.

"My dear fellow," said Brunow, smiling and waving his table-napkin in the air, "we are people of distinction, and under the circ.u.mstances our comings and goings are naturally chronicled. We shall have a reception in town, I promise you."

I understood by then what he had been doing, and I was almost as much ashamed as if I had done it myself. He had taken the trouble to blaze the whole affair in the newspapers; and when, an hour later, the train which brought the London journals down to Dover arrived at the station, I was there with him to meet it. He was so obviously satisfied with his own action that it would have been useless to say a word to him. And yet I fairly boiled over when I saw the travesty of the whole adventure with which he had duped the _Times_. One would have supposed from the story with which he had primed the representative of that journal that we had run every conceivable kind of risk, and had, by our own courage and cunning, surmounted every obstacle the wit of man could compa.s.s. All this was absurd enough and annoying enough, but the introduction of Miss Rossano's name into the narrative looked altogether wanton and unwarranted, and, I dare say, now that I can recall the whole thing in cool blood, that I was more disturbed and angry than I need have been.

Brunow took what I had to say with imperturbable good-humor, and was altogether satisfied with himself.

"We shall have a crowd to meet us," he prophesied. "There are thousands of Italian refugees in London at this minute, and they will all be there to cheer the ill.u.s.trious Fyffe, and the no less ill.u.s.trious Brunow. All the exiled n.o.blemen who live in Hatton Garden, and make London stand and deliver at the barrel-organ's mouth, all the dukes and counts who shave and teach dancing, and sell penny ices, and keep cheap restaurants, will be there to welcome their delivered compatriot. The railway terminus will be odorous with garlic and the humanity of Italy. Fyffe, my dear fellow, we shall have a glorious day."

When I told him, as I did, that he was a thick-skinned idiot and braggart, he looked amazed. But I left him to his surprise, and took what precautions I could against the newspaper falling into the hands of Miss Rossano. We all travelled to London together at her request, and I had some difficulty in persuading Brunow that I was in earnest in insisting that she should see nothing of the nonsense he had caused to be written and printed about our expedition.

"My dear fellow," he declared, "the man was eager to get the news, and would have printed three times as much if I had felt inclined to give it him. You can't expect," he went on, "to do a thing of this kind at this time of day and not have it talked about. And of course it's best to let these press fellows come to the fountain-head and get the plain, simple, unadulterated truth."

This, in face of the story he had told, was so monstrous, and, when I came to think about it, so astonishingly like him, that I forbore to say another word, except to warn him that the newspapers should not reach Miss Rossano with my good-will.

He gave in at last, though he grumbled a great deal, and was evidently as far from understanding me as I was from comprehending him.

We made a dull party on the whole, for n.o.body could help feeling that the count and his daughter were absolute strangers to each other, or that our presence was a little awkward at the time. It was ridiculous to try to talk commonplace. It felt brutal and unsympathetic to sit in silence, and almost equally brutal and unsympathetic to say a word of what was nearest to all our hearts. But if we had been embarra.s.sed on the journey, all our memory of it vanished for the moment in the deeper embarra.s.sment of the reception which Brunow's babble had prepared for us. His prophecy of what would happen was fulfilled, and more than fulfilled. The platform of the terminus swarmed with people of every nationality known to London, and everybody there present seemed crazy with excitement. How, or by whom, our little party was singled out was beyond my power to guess. But we were recognized in a moment, and in another moment were swept asunder from each other amid such a polyglot babel of voices as I had never heard before. People were laughing and crying and cheering and fighting all at once, and I had a glimpse of the count in the arms of a score of mustachioed, sallow-featured men who were weeping and shouting, and hugging and kissing him and each other like a pack of lunatics inspired with the instinct of welcome. I was faring little better at the hands of the populace, though I cooled the enthusiasm of more than one patriot, I am afraid, as I fought my way out of the railway station. I escaped to a hackney carriage and found my way to my own lodgings, accompanied by Hinge, who was as delighted at the scene as I was angry at it. Before I had driven away from the terminus I had seen from no great distance that the count, Miss Rossano, and Lady Rollinson had safely reached her ladyship's carriage, which had been telegraphed for before our leaving Dover. I had interfered to prevent the taking out of the horses, and had seen the carriage start for home amid a roar of "vivas" and "bravas" and "hurrahs." The last I had seen of Brunow was in the middle of a crowd, with whom he was exchanging polyglot congratulations in the height of good spirits and enjoyment.

Hinge had not been three minutes in my room before he had made himself master of the place. He installed himself without engagement or invitation as my body-servant, and I found him in my bedroom hunting the wardrobe and chest of drawers for a change of clothes.

"You'll find me 'andier when I gets to know my way about, sir," he said. "I was the colonel's batman for three years, and I can valley a gentleman as well here as there, sir. You'll feel more like London when you've got into these, sir."

He pointed to the garments laid out symmetrically on the bed, and, motioning to me to be seated, knelt down before me and began to unlace my boots.

I was still in the act of dressing when a knock sounded at the outer door; Hinge marched off to answer it, returning with a large visiting-card edged with a line of mourning. He presented this to me, and I read the words "Count Ruffiano," printed very badly in blunt script type.

I told Hinge to ask the visitor his business, and I learned that he came direct from Miss Rossano with a message. I excused myself for a minute, and hastily finished dressing.

The Count Ruffiano, a head and shoulders taller than myself, stood in the middle of the room and bowed with surprising courtliness when I entered. He was six feet seven or eight in stature, had an eagle beak, a huge gray mustache, and a head of stiff, upstanding hair, close cropped and mottled in jet black and snow white. His cheeks and chin had been strange to the razor for a week; his linen was limp and discolored; and his clothes, which were of foreign cut, had once been shapely and fashionable, but were now seedy beyond belief. The hat he held in one hand was a monument of shabbiness; but his habitual stoop had the air of having been acquired by a constant courtly condescension. He was as lean as his own walking-cane, and his air of condescending gentility put a strange emphasis on his shabby clothes, and made them ten times as noticeable as they would have been without it. And yet at the very first sight of him I was persuaded that he was a gentleman.

"You are Captain Fyffe?" he said, with a marked Italian accent.

"That is my name," I responded.

"You are possessed of mine," he answered. "Permit me that I shake hands.

I read in your English _Times_ this morning of the arrival of the Conte di Rossano. I have seen my friend, and, so far as I know, I am the only survivor of the enterprise in which he lost his liberty. I lose no moment in coming here to pay my homage to the disinterested valor which gave my compatriot his freedom, I am, sir," he bowed and extended his hands with a smiling humility--"I am, sir, this many years a pensioner on the bounty of Miss Rossano. She knows me as a comrade of the father whom she has always until now thought of as lost to her. She has pencilled for me a line or two on the back of my card."

I held the card still, and, turning it over, I read: "This brave and loyal gentleman is my father's one surviving friend. He wishes to know you. V. R."

I looked up after reading this brief but expressive message, and the face of the gaunt spectre who stood before me was flushed, and his head was in the air, as if he had read it with me, and was proud of the testimony it conveyed on his behalf.

I asked him to be seated, and gave him to understand that anybody carrying such a recommendation was welcome. He held out a long, lean hand, and when I gave him my own stooped over it and kissed it.

"Sir," he said, "you have done more than restore an individual to liberty. You have reanimated a cause: you have inspired a people. There are a thousand of us at this hour in London to whom the name of the Conte di Rossano is a legend and an inspiration. Twenty years ago he was our leader--a spirit of the subtlest and most indomitable. A soul without fear, and of resource astonishingly varied. 'You have restored him to us, and before a month is over his name will ring through Italy.

We are preparing for such a rising as we have never made. For years our names have been written on the sands of failure. We shall write them to-morrow on the lasting granite of success."

He talked with any amount of fire and vigor, and in a voice pitched so high that he might have been haranguing a mult.i.tude. He gesticulated with the shabby old hat and the slim walking-stick as if he had been wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled under the tight b.u.t.tons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language, though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and gesture could kill the fact that he was in earnest, and I felt an immediate liking for him.

"I am not here," he said, "on a visit of impertinence. I have an actual object. I am charged by the Conte di Rossano to tell you that a meeting has been already arranged to welcome him to London. It will be held to-night, and he beseeches you through me to be present at it."

I demurred at first, for I had no mind to be publicly embraced by the tatterdemalion patriots I had seen in the crowd that morning. But when my visitor incidentally mentioned the fact that Miss Rossano would accompany her father, I gave him my promise at once.

The ragged n.o.bleman promised to call and conduct me to the place of meeting, and so went his way with a torrent of thanks and a rage of gesticulation.

CHAPTER VIII

I found Miss Rossano and her father in the vestry of a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. The room was crammed almost to suffocation, and there was such a crowd outside that it took us ten minutes' hard fighting to reach the neighboring school-room in which the public meeting was to be held. The way was cleared at last, and a score or so of us filed on to the platform, which was erected at one end of the crowded hall. My visitor of that afternoon immediately preceded Miss Rossano and the count, and I followed on their heels.

As we reached the platform the gaunt phantom swung round upon us, and in a voice like the call of a trumpet announced "The Exile."

I had already had a taste of the patriotic enthusiasm of the crowd that morning, but I had never seen anything which did more than approach the delirious excitement which set in at this announcement.

There was not a seat in the body of the room, and the men who occupied the floor were packed like herrings in a barrel. One could see nothing but a great wave of swarthy, eager faces, and could hear nothing but a tumult like the roaring of the sea. There was hardly a man in the whole a.s.semblage who was not weeping with excitement; and though I have rather a knack of keeping a cool head under such circ.u.mstances, I have to own that I was deeply moved.

It seemed impossible to stop the cheering. Ruffiano, who had const.i.tuted himself chairman, gesticulated like a windmill, and roared till he was hoa.r.s.e in the vain effort to secure silence. It took a full quarter of an hour to wear out this prodigious welcome, and even then it broke out anew in scattered bursts and spurts, as if the people could never have enough of it.

All this while Miss Rossano stood at her father's side, holding one of his hands in both her own. The tears were streaming down her face without cessation, but I had never seen her look so radiant--not even on the night when I first saw her, and the happy brightness of her beauty made me her life-long servant.

The count, poor man, was shaken altogether out of self-control. He hid his eyes with his frail hand, and his tears ran like rain through his wasted fingers. I have tried many and many a time to realize in my own mind what he must have felt, but I have always known the futility of the effort.

Twenty years of solitary imprisonment, a martyrdom of physical degradation quite unspeakable, and sickening even to think of for a moment, darkness, torture, utter despair, and then freedom and human tears, and this astounding roar of triumph, sympathy, and welcome! It was no wonder the scene unmanned him. The wonder was that he had not sunk into an unquestioning animalism--a mere brute state of idiocy--years ago.

There was speech-making enough and to spare when the cheering at last was over. The count himself spoke a few broken words of thanks, which elicited another roar of sympathy and welcome scarcely inferior in volume to the first and only less prolonged. To tell the truth, I felt the whole business rather trying, and I got heartily sick of the name of the courageous, ill.u.s.trious, magnanimous, and altogether n.o.ble and magnificent Signor Fyfa. I knew perfectly well, though I could not understand a tenth part of what was said, that Brunow's shameless exaggerations were accepted here as solid truth, and that I was being lauded for a number of splendid qualities which, to say the least, I had had no chance of displaying. The ill.u.s.trious, courageous, magnanimous, and altogether n.o.ble Brunow came in for his share of the praise, and bowed solemnly, with his hand upon his heart, whenever the crowd cheered him. He made a speech in Italian, and achieved an overwhelming success.

Finally, the whole business was over. We had got back to the vestry, and all but a few of the chieftains had gone away, when I first became aware of the presence of the Baroness Bonnar. A light hand touched my sleeve, and a foreign voice spoke to me in English.

"This is a n.o.ble occasion. I have never been so moved in my life. I have cried until I am not fit to be seen."

Turning and looking at the speaker, I failed for a mere instant to recognize her. I had seen her but twice before, and then only for a moment at a time, and under circ.u.mstances of no especial interest. She saw the doubt in my face, and reintroduced herself. She looked extremely pretty, and even fascinating, in a coquettish little bonnet of the fashion of that time.

When her face was in repose one could judge of her age, but when she smiled all her wrinkles--and there were a good many of them--melted into the smile, and her face looked almost girlishly young and innocent. She owned that look of youth and freshness in spite of the fact that she was rouged and powdered and painted as if she had been ready for the stage.

It was pretty easy to see that she had not been quite as much affected by the "n.o.ble occasion" as she pretended to have been, for the slightest shower of tears would have ruined that admirable and artistic make-up.

"I pa.s.s for Austrian," said the baroness; "but I am Hungarian all over, and I hate, I hate, I hate the Austrians! If I had my way I would kill them every one."

She spoke with a pretty enough pretence of vindictiveness, but her manner was not very convincing.

Supposing I had been aware of this little person's purpose, what should I have done, I wonder? What should I have been justified in doing? I had rather not answer that question, even to myself. But if I had known for a certainty what was in her heart, and what lay in the future, there are not many things at which I should have hesitated to spoil her plans.