The Dodd Family Abroad Volume Ii Part 9

"But had n't you better let us concert--"

"Send Cary to me, my Lord, and leave me!" and I said the words in a way that he could n't misunderstand. He had scarcely quitted the room when Cary entered it.

"There, dearest papa," said she, caressingly, "don't fret. It's a mere trifle; and if he was n't a wretchedly cowardly creature, he 'd think nothing of it!"

"Are you in the conspiracy against me too?" cried I; "have _you_ also joined the enemy?"

"That I haven't," said she, putting an arm round my neck; "and I know well, if the fellow had not grossly outraged, or perhaps menaced you, you 'd never have done it! I 'm certain of that, pappy!"

Egad, Tom, I don't like to own it, but the truth is--I burst out a-crying; that's what all this bleeding and lowering has brought me to, that I have n't the nerve of a kitten! It was the inability to rebut all this balderdash--to show that it was a lie from beginning to end--confounded me; and when I saw my poor Cary, that never believed ill of me before, that, no matter what I said or did, always took my part, and, if she could n't defend at least excused me,--when, I say, I saw that _she_ gave in to this infernal delusion, I just felt as if my heart was going to break, and I sincerely wished it might.

I tried very hard to summon strength to set her right; I suppose that a drowning man never struggled harder to reach a plank than did I to grasp one thought well and vigorously; but to no use. My ideas danced about like the phantoms in a magic lantern, and none would remain long enough to be recognized.

"I think I 'll take a sleep, my dear," said I.

"The very wisest thing you could do, pappy," said she, closing the shutters noiselessly, and sitting down in her old place beside my bed.

Though I pretended slumber, I never slept a wink. I went over all this affair in my mind, and, summing up the evidence against me, I began to wonder if a man ever committed a homicide without knowing it,--I mean, if, when his thoughts were very much occupied, he could stick a fellow-creature and not be aware of it. I could n't exactly call any case in point to mind, but I did n't see why it might not be possible.

If stabbing people was a common and daily habit of an individual, doubtless he might do it, just as he would wind his watch or wipe his spectacles, while thinking of something else; but as it was not a customary process, at least where I came from, there was the difficulty.

I would have given more than I had to give, just to ask Cary a few questions,--as, for instance, how did it happen? where is the wound? how deep is it? and so on,--but I was so terrified lest I should compromise my innocence that I would not venture on a syllable. One sees constantly in the police reports how the prisoner, when driving off to jail with Inspector Potts, invariably betrays himself by some expression of anxiety or uneasiness, such as "Well, n.o.body can say I did it! I was in Houndsditch till eleven o'clock;" or, "Poor Molly, I did n't mean her any harm, but it was she begun it." Warned by these indiscreet admissions, I was guarded not to utter a word. I preserved my resolution with such firmness that I fell into a sound sleep, and never awoke till the next morning.

Before I acknowledged myself to be awake,--don't you know that state, Tom, in which a man vibrates between consciousness and indolence, and when he has not fully made up his mind whether he 'll not skulk his load of daily cares a little longer?--I could perceive that there was a certain stir and movement about me that betokened extraordinary preparation, and I could overhear little sc.r.a.ps of discussions as to whether "he ought to be awakened," and "what he should wear," Cary's voice being strongly marked in opposition to everything that portended any disturbance of me. Patience, I believe, is not my forte, though long-suffering may be my fortune, for I sharply asked, "What the------ was in the wind now?"

"We'll leave him to Cary," said Mrs. D., retiring precipitately, followed by the rest, while Cary came up to my bedside, and kindly began her inquiries about my health; but I stopped her, by a very abrupt repet.i.tion of my former question.

"Oh! it's a mere nothing, pappy,--a formality, and nothing more. That creature, Giacomo, has been making a fuss over the affair of last night; and though Lord George endeavored to settle it, he refused, and went off to the Tribunal to lodge a complaint."

"Well, go on."

"The Judge, or Prefect, or whatever he is, took his depositions, and issued a warrant--"

"To apprehend me?"

"Don't flurry yourself, dearest pappy; these are simply formalities, for the Brigadier has just told me--"

"He is here, then,--in the house?"

"Why will you excite yourself in this way, when I tell you that all will most easily be arranged? The Brigadier only asks to see you,--to ascertain, in fact, that you are really ill, and unable to be removed--"

"To jail--to the common prison, eh?"

"Oh, I must not talk to you, if it irritates you in this fashion; indeed, there is now little more to say, and if you will just permit the Brigadier to come in for a second, everything is done."

"I 'm ready for him," said I, in a tone that showed I needed no further information; and Cary left the room.

After about five minutes' waiting, in an almost intolerable impatience, the Brigadier, stooping his enormous bearskin to fully three feet, entered with four others, armed cap--pic, who drew up in a line behind him, and grounded their carbines with a clank that made the room shake.

The Brigadier, I must tell you, was a very fine soldier-like fellow, and with fully half a dozen decorations hanging to his coat. It struck me that he was rather disappointed; he probably expected to see a man of colossal proportions and herculean strength, instead of the poor remnant of humanity that chicken broth and the lancet have left me. The room, too, seemed to fall below his expectations; for he threw his eyes around him without detecting any armory or offensive weapons, or, indeed, any means of resistance whatever.

"This is his Excellency?" said he at last, addressing Cary; and she nodded.

"Ask him his own name, Cary," said I. "I'm curious about it."

"My name," said he, sonorously, to her question,--"my name is Alessandro Lamporeccho;" and with that he gave the word to his people to face about, and away they marched with all the solemnity of a military movement. As the door closed behind them, however, I heard a few words uttered in whispers, and immediately afterwards the measured tread of a sentry slowly parading the lobby outside my room.

"That's another _formality_, Cary," said I, "is n't it?" She nodded for reply. "Tell them I detest ceremony, my dear," said I; "and--and "--I could n't keep down my pa.s.sion--"and if they don't take that fellow away, I'll pitch him head and crop over the banisters." I tried to spring up, but back I fell, weak, and almost fainting. The sad truth came home to me at once that I had n't strength to face a baby; so I just turned my face to the wall, and sulked away to my heart's content.

If I tell you how I spent that day, the same story will do for the rest of the week. I saw that they were all watching and waiting for some outbreak, of either my temper or my curiosity. They tried every means to tempt me into an inquiry of one kind or other. They dropped hints, in half-whispers, before me. They said twenty things to arouse anxiety, and even alarm, in me; but I resolved that if I pa.s.sed my days there, I 'd starve them out: and so I did.

On the ninth day, when I was eating my breakfast, just as I had finished my mutton-chop, and was going to attack the eggs, Cary, in a half-laughing way, said, "Well, pappy, do you never intend to take the air again? The weather is now delightful,--that second season they call the summer of St. Joseph."

"Ain't I a prisoner?" said I. "I thought I had murdered somebody, and was sentenced for life to this chamber."

"How can you be so silly!" said she. "You know perfectly well how these foreigners make a fuss about everything, and exaggerate every trifle into a mock importance. Now, we are not in Ireland--"

"No," said I, "would to Heaven we were!"

"Well, perhaps I might echo the prayer without doing any great violence to my sincerity; but as we are not there, nor can we change the venue--is n't that the phrase?--to our own country, what if we just were to make the best of it, and suffer this matter to take its course here?"

"As how, Cary?"

"Simply by dressing yourself, and driving into Como. Your case will be heard on any morning you present yourself; and I am so convinced that the whole affair will be settled in five minutes that I am quite impatient it should be over."

I will not repeat all her arguments, some good and some bad, but every one of them dictated by that kind and affectionate spirit which, however her judgment incline, never deserts her. The end of it was, I got up, shaved, and dressed, and within an hour was skimming over the calm clear water towards the little city of Como.

Cary was with me,--she would come,--she said she knew she did me good; and it was true: but the scene itself--those grand, great mountains; those leafy glens, opening to the gla.s.sy lake, waveless and still; that glorious reach of blue sky, spanning from peak to peak of those Alpine ridges--all soothed and calmed me; and in the midst of such gigantic elements, I could not help feeling shame that such a reptile as I should mar the influence of this picture on my heart by petty pa.s.sions and little fractious discontents an worthy of a sick schoolboy.

"Is n't it enough for you, K. I.," says I, "ay, and more than you deserve, just to live, and breathe, and have your being in such a bright and glorious world? If you were a poet, with what images would not these swooping mists, these fleeting shadows, people your imagination? What voices would you hear in the wind sighing through the olive groves, and dying in many a soft cadence along the grottoed sh.o.r.e? If a painter, what effects of sunlight and shadow are there to study? what tints of color, that, without nature to guarantee, you would never dare to venture on? But being neither, having neither gift nor talent, being simply one of those 4 fruit consumers,' who bring back nothing to the common stock of mankind, and who can no more make my fellow-man wiser or better than I make myself taller or younger, is it not a matter of deep thankfulness that, in all my common-place of mind and thought, I too--even K. I. that I am--have an intense feeling of enjoyment in the contemplation of this scene? I could n't describe it like Sh.e.l.ley, nor paint it like Stan field, but I 'll back myself for a five-pound note to feel it with either of them." And there, let me tell you, Tom, is the real superiority of Nature over all her counterfeits. You need no study, no cultivation, no connoisseurship to appreciate her: her glorious works come home to the heart of the peasant, as, mist-begirt, he waits for sunrise on some highland waste, as well as to the Prince, who gazes on the swelling landscape of his own dominions. I could n't tell a Claude from a Ca.n.a.letti,--I 'm not sure that I don't like H. B. better than Albert Durer,--but I 'd not surrender the heartfelt delight, the calm, intense, deep-souled grat.i.tude I experience from the contemplation of a lovely landscape, to possess the Stafford gallery.

I was, then, in a far more peaceful and practicable frame of mind as we entered Como than when I quitted the villa.

I should like to have lingered a little in the old town itself, with its quaint little arched pa.s.sages and curious architecture; but Cary advised me to nurse all my strength for the "Tribunal." I suppose it must be with some moral hope of discountenancing litigation that foreign Governments always make the Law Courts as dirty and disgusting as possible, pitch them in a filthy quarter, and surround them with every squalor. This one was a paragon of its kind, and for rags and ruffianly looks I never saw the equal of the company there a.s.sembled. I am not yet quite sure that the fellow who showed us the way did n't purposely mislead us; for we traversed a dozen dark corridors, and went up and went down more staircases than I have accomplished for the last six months. Now and then we stopped for a minute to interrogate somebody through a sliding pane in a kind of gla.s.s cage, and off we went again.

At last we came to a densely crowded pa.s.sage, making way through which, we entered a large hall with a vaulted roof, crammed with people, but who made room at the instance of a red-eyed, red-bearded little man in a black gown, that I now, to my horror and disgust, found out was my counsel, being already engaged by Lord George to defend me.

"This is treachery, Cary," whispered I, angrily.

"I know it is," said she, "and I 'm one of the traitors; but anything is better than to see you pine away your life in a sick-room."

This was neither the time nor place for much colloquy, as we now had to fight our way vigorously through the mob till we reached a row of seats where the bar were placed, and where we were politely told to be seated.

Directly in front of us sat three ill-favored old fellows in black gowns and square black caps, modelled after those brown-paper helmets so popular with plasterers and stucco men in our country. I found it a great trial not to laugh every time I looked at them!

There was no case "on" at the moment, but a kind of wrangle was going forward about whose was to be the next hearing, in which I could hear my own name mingled. My lawyer, Signor Mastuccio, seemed to make a successful appeal in my favor; for the three old "plasterers" put up their eyegla.s.ses, and stared earnestly at Cary, after which the chief of them nodded benignly, and said that the case of Giacomo Lamporeccho might be called; and accordingly, with a voice that might have raised the echoes of the Alps, a fellow screamed out that the "homicidio"--I have no need to translate the word--was then before the Court If I only were to tell you, Tom, of the tiresome, tedious, and unmeaning formalities that followed, your case in listening would be scarcely more enviable than was my own while enduring them. All the preliminary proceedings were in writing, and a dirty little dog, with a vile odor of garlic about him, read some seventy pages of a ma.n.u.script which I was informed was the accusation against me. Then appeared another creature,--his twin brother in meanness and poverty,--who proved to be a doctor, the same who had professionally attended the wounded man, and who also read a memoir of the patient's sufferings and peril.

These occupied the Court till it was nigh three o'clock, when, being concluded, Giacomo himself was called. I a.s.sure you, Tom, I gave a start when, instead of the large, fine, burly, well-bearded rascal with the Lablache voice, I beheld a pale, thin, weakly creature, with a miserable treble, inform the Court that he was Giacomo Lamporeccho.

Cary, who translated for me as he spoke, told me that he gave an account of our interview together, in which it would appear that my conduct was that of an outrageous maniac. He described me as accusing everybody of roguery and cheating,--calling the whole country a den of thieves, and the authorities their accomplices. He detailed his own mild remonstrances against my hasty judgment, and his calm appeals to my better reason. He dwelt long upon his wounded honor, and, what he felt still more deeply, the wounded honor of his nation; and at last he actually began to cry when his feelings got too much for him, at which the Court sobbed, and the bar sobbed, and the general audience, in a mixture of grief and menace, muttered the most signal vengeance against your humble servant.

I happened to be--a rare thing for me, latterly--in one of my old moods, when the ludicrous and absurd carry away all my sympathies; and faith, Tom, I laughed as heartily as ever I did in my life at the whole scene.

"Are we coming to the wound yet, Cary," said I, "tell me that," for the fellow had now begun again.

"Yes, papa, he is describing it, and, by his account, it ought to have killed him."