Vestigia Volume I Part 6

'You will leave Leghorn on the 11th or 12th of next month. On the 13th of April His Majesty, King Humbert, will hold a grand review of his troops in the new quarter of the Macao, near the railway station. The Queen will be present at the ceremony with the court and the young Prince. The King will appear riding at the head of his staff. You will take up your place in the crowd at the corner nearest the Royal carnages. His Majesty will pa.s.s you twice--coming and going; the second time he pa.s.ses----'

They had all drawn nearer the small table as he went on speaking in lower and lower tones; and now the four faces were very close together.

'And then?' Dino tried to say, but his lips only moved. He had no voice in which to frame the words.

'Signor Valdez is nearest to you. Tell him, Valdez,' the German said peremptorily, and threw himself back in his chair.

And then Dino felt Valdez's warm breath in his ear. He heard certain words which, for a moment, seemed to convey no meaning. He looked straight across the room at the foolish painted door through which he had entered. He felt thirsty again--that intolerable thirst! and the gas flickered and made a curious sound--like a whistle; and--and----

He stood up suddenly in his place, and stared at the three impa.s.sive faces before him. They were all watching him.

'My G.o.d!' he said in a broken whisper; 'great G.o.d! _you want me to a.s.sa.s.sinate the King!_'

CHAPTER V.

RETROSPECTIVE.

In less than half an hour he had left the place. Valdez accompanied him as far as the cafe door, but there, with scarcely the exchange of a word, they parted.

'Are you not going home, lad? Go home and get some sleep,' the elder man said, speaking in a tone of great kindness and friendliness. And yes, Dino admitted, he was tired. And with that they separated: but he would not go home yet. With the instinct of one born and brought up by the sea, it was to the sea he turned, naturally and unconsciously, as another man might have turned to an open window. He walked fast until he reached the low parapet which runs along the embankment of the public walk; but, once there, his pace slackened. The night was growing quiet; the wind had fallen perceptibly with the setting of the moon. There were many clouds still, but broken and moving; and clear dark s.p.a.ces of the sky where the stars sparkled frostily. Below, the water was still restlessly leaping and falling beneath the low sea-wall, a dark unquiet surface crossed with long pale streaks of foam. He walked up and down, slowly, by the edge of a clump of ilex trees, his hands in his pockets, his head a little bent, in the att.i.tude of a man who is thinking intently. Now and then, at the louder splash of some wave which broke higher than its fellows, he lifted up his face automatically and looked about him with a blank, confused stare. In truth he was feeling little more than an overwhelming sense of confusion; nothing seemed real, within or without; he was only conscious that all was changed around him, and he could not realise the blow.

Dino's strongest personal impressions, all his most treasured boyish remembrances, were in some way connected with his father, who had died young, and when the boy was not more than twelve or thirteen years of age. Any one else remembering Olinto de Rossi--had there indeed been any one left in the very least likely to speak of him--any other person would, in all probability, have summed him up briefly as a handsome, fickle, enthusiastic young man, who--having begun life with a tolerable fortune, a persuasive tongue, a singularly equable and lovable temper, and an absolute incapacity for denying himself the smallest satisfaction--had ended by dying miserably of consumption at thirty-five; having in the interval married; spent all his money; and earned for himself some measure of local notoriety as a sort of popular demagogue, a speaker and leader at democratic meetings.

Chance having thrown him, while very young, among men of determined political sympathies, he had insensibly acquired so many of their opinions, which he afterwards retailed and amplified with so much natural ingenuity and eloquence, as to have earned no slight fame for himself as a radical patriot of extreme views. In point of fact, he had taken to speech-making in the first place, almost by accident, and as he would have taken to drink, or to gambling, or to any other form of excitement which appealed to his pleasure-giving, pleasure-loving, nature. And having once begun to taste the sweets of popularity, he was fascinated by them; he required no especial convictions, the applause and admiration he received were quite enough to determine his vocation.

But it was not to be supposed that a reputation obtained in this manner could last for ever, or indeed for very long. Before many years had pa.s.sed there had come a sensible diminution in the number and the fervour of De Rossi's political adherents. The elder men of his party had long since ceased to take serious notice of his impa.s.sioned prophecies; and now even the editors of the fiercest socialistic papers--the compiler of _Il Lucifero_ of Ancona, and the gentleman who was responsible for the appearance of the Leghorn _Thief_--even they had begun to fight shy of their old and brilliant contributor. By the time little Dino was old enough to become his father's companion, following him about from meeting to meeting with undoubting, enthusiastic admiration and love, it is probable that the faith and awe the elder De Rossi excited in his little listener was very nearly the sum total of the credence he received.

On the whole, this defection did not depress him seriously. Perhaps he never thoroughly believed in it, or that he had in any way deserved it; one's own account of one's motives, and the way they strike a friend, often bearing much the same relation to each other as a photograph does to a portrait. Each represents the same individual; but one is fact; the other may be a poem. And from first to last Dino saw nothing but the poem; his father treating him throughout with a gentleness, a pride in his clever boy, and an amount of expansive affection, which cost him nothing, and which bound the lad to him with a more than common reverence and love. As for his wife, for Dino's mother, she was by nature a silent woman, who did not need to express all that she thought; and this, Olinto sometimes reflected, was perhaps fortunate: the view other people take of the less admirable consequences of our actions being apt to strike one as morbid. After all, her husband was never positively unkind to her. He had never purposely deceived her.

He was simply an ordinary man; selfish, good-humoured, eager for any new amus.e.m.e.nt; a creature of fine moments and detestable habits. And, after all, when his wife had married him it was because she wanted to do so; because nothing else could or would satisfy her. If she had made a mistake, well! perhaps he too had had his illusions. And it is the law of life--a woman loves what she can evoke, but what she _marries_ in a man is not his best, but his average, self.

Being gifted with a perfect, an unalterable good humour, De Rossi accepted his wife's altered opinion of him as he accepted the reduced circ.u.mstances of his material life: both were more or less of his own making, and between them they troubled him but very little. His experience of life was a succession of easy contentments. He enjoyed his own emotions. He liked sinning as he liked repenting, and in both phases he was alike sincere--and unreliable. He was capable of the deepest enthusiasms--the tenderest emotions--but he was unable to master his own shifting moods for a week. His facile nature lapsed away from the highest points it reached with the inevitableness of water which seeks its level. He was attractive; he was weak; he was untrustworthy;--and yet he was always attractive. 'The sort of man,'

Valdez said of him, 'the sort of man who orders his dog "to come here,"

and when the beast lies down in a corner,--"Ah, the clever dog! he knew I was going to tell him to do that next!" says my amiable gentleman.'

Before her marriage---she was five years older than her husband--Catarina had been the confidential maid of the Marchesa Balbi.

She had never wholly lost her place at the Villa. When the young heir was born, a month or two after the birth of Dino, she was, at her own earnest entreaty, made the _balia_ of the little Marchese. Whenever the family came to Leghorn she was always going up to the Villa; the Marchesa was perpetually sending for her. There was no great mental barrier between the Italian lady and her old servant: both were convent bred, with much the same sort of education--and what hopes and fears had they not shared since then in common! Catarina would stand for hours at the foot of her old mistress' sofa, talking to her in undertones of things which every one else had forgotten. The two women were bound to one another by a whole world of recollected emotions--the night young Gasparo was ill; his first steps; the day he had first moved alone from the arms of his nurse to the arms of his mother,--to each of them these had been events in life.

As the years went by Olinto objected less and less to his wife's frequent absences. 'She is a good woman, my Dino, but hard--hard,' he would say sometimes to his boy--and by the very pa.s.sion with which the child loved him he could see how much he had inherited of his mother's loyal and serious nature. He began to fear vaguely lest, his boy growing older, he should begin to learn to judge him--and he had grown strangely dependent on that one unhesitating faith.

Things were then in this condition, when one day, Dino being at the time some twelve years old, he was taken by his father to a political banquet, a sort of subscription supper given by one of the clubs to which Olinto had at some time belonged.

Dino never forgot that supper. There had been some objection made to his own presence when he was first taken in; high words exchanged between some of the men present and his father; sneering references, which the child only half understood, to other debts, and former feasts unpaid for. In the midst of the confusion Dino saw his father rise suddenly from his place at the table; he looked about him, waving his hand to command silence: his face was very white.

There was a general outcry of 'Sit down! sit down!'--'It's too early yet!'--'We don't want any more speeches;' and then Dino saw the man who was sitting on his other side lean well forward and put his hand upon his father's shoulder. 'Don't try and talk to them now. Wait till after supper. And--sit down, De Rossi, do. There's a good fellow,' he said. And then, as Olinto yielded mechanically to the pressure, his neighbour drew back, looking kindly enough into Dino's terrified face.

'Don't be frightened, my little fellow. They often make a noise at these suppers. It means--nothing,' he said, with a half contemptuous smile.

Dino looked at him for a moment in silence. Then the boy's face flushed scarlet, and his eyes filled with tears.

'It can't mean anything,' he said desperately. 'My--my father would never have brought me here if he did not mean to pay for it.' But he did not look at his father, who was arguing eagerly across the table with his opposite neighbour, and there was a lump in his throat which seemed to choke him as he spoke.

'What, are you Olinto's little chap? Is De Rossi your father? And what's your name, then? What do you call yourself, my little lad?' the stranger asked good-naturedly.

'My name is Bernardo. But they call me Dino at home,' the boy said, rather huskily.

'Well, then, Dino, my boy, eat your supper, and don't trouble your head about what doesn't concern you. Your share of it shall be paid for, never fear. Now then, what's the matter now? Don't sit and stare at your father. He won't notice you. He's--busy. If you are wise you'll tell _me_ what you want,' he repeated, with the same equivocal smile.

There was something in his kind and melancholy face which had won the boy's entire confidence. 'I am afraid, sir---- I don't think my father has got enough money with him,' he said hastily, with burning cheeks and downcast eyes. When he ventured to look up he met his neighbour's glance fixed full upon him with a certain friendly amus.e.m.e.nt.

'So you are Olinto de Rossi's son,' he said slowly; and Dino wondered to hear him say it, for surely he knew that already. 'Well, well.

_Per Bacco!_ if the evolutionists are to be trusted, why, here's a curious experiment of Dame Nature's. Well, look here, my boy, did you ever see me before?'

'No, sir.'

'Did you ever hear your father speak of Pietro Valdez?'

'No, sir.'

'H--m. Well! that's my name. And I spend my time teaching people how to play the guitar, and tuning pianos: that's my trade. So now you know who I am. And I've known your father a good many years now, first and last, a good many years. Just tell him to turn around for a moment. I say, De Rossi---- You look out for yourself; I don't want to crush you, my boy.'

He leaned well forward, and spoke in a low voice to Olinto. Dino was crouching back in his chair: he could not hear what pa.s.sed between the two men; but half an hour later, and having in the meantime, and at the instigation of his new friend, partaken heartily of his supper, he had the satisfaction of seeing his father carelessly fling a gold piece into the subscription plate, where it lay and glittered obtrusively among the pile of meaner silver coins.

The boy's eyes sparkled with triumph at the sight. He looked up with a frank laugh into the face of his new companion. 'Did you see that, sir?' he asked eagerly, his face all aglow.

'Ay,' Valdez answered almost indifferently. He leaned back on his chair and contemplated the row of faces before him. 'Presently they will begin their fine speechifying. Look here, my boy, I see signs--never mind what they are--but I see symptoms of a coming row.

It will be nothing to speak of, I daresay, but all the same I want you to promise me this: If I send you home, I want you to cut away at once without stopping to ask questions, do you see? Now promise me you'll do that, like a good little chap.'

'I'll stay with my father, sir. I must stay with my father. And if you please, sir, I'd rather stay, really. I'm not afraid.'

'Now, who ever supposed you were afraid, my little man? But that is not the question. Now, look here--ah!----'

He stopped short. A sudden silence had fallen upon the room. A man near him roared out 'Hush!' and smote the table before him with his clenched fist. For the last time in his life Olinto de Rossi had risen to make a speech.

He had been very quiet all the previous part of the evening; sitting most of the time with his head leaning upon his hand, hardly speaking to any one, not even to his boy. As he rose slowly to his feet a wild burst of ironical applause greeted him from every part of the room, only Valdez sat silent and motionless, staring down at his plate with a moody troubled face. De Rossi stood leaning a little forward; his thin cheeks, which had grown so deadly pale of late, were burning now with vivid spots of red. 'Friends,' he began, 'Gentlemen----' He hesitated for an instant, then burst into wild invective against Church and King and State. 'The State--the State, I tell you, is the very negation of liberty,' he cried, 'and no matter who command, they make all serve.

You talk, some of you, of changing the political _regime_. How will you change it? For what good? If a man among you has a thorn in his foot, will it help him if he change his boots? I tell you, it is the thorn, the thorn itself, that you must get out, wrench out, cut out, if need be. We, the people, how often have we asked our rulers for bread and they have given us a stone? Yet this is scarcely prudent, friends, for a stone is a fair missile. What! will they live on in their princely palaces and offer to us, to the people, the bare right and privilege of labour? Labour! I tell you that G.o.d Himself has set His curse upon labour. I--tell--you----'

His voice had failed him suddenly. He put his hand up to his head, staring wildly about him.

'Go on, go on. That's the right sort of stuff. Down with everything.

A general mess and scrimmage, and myself dancing on the top of it; that's your real radical programme. That's what you call reform!' a man in the crowd at the foot of the table cried out derisively. There was a general laugh; some indication of a wish to hustle him into silence; some shouts of '_Viva_ De Rossi!' The men had all been drinking freely, and were ripe for any mischief.

'I say, De Rossi, get up on your chair, man. We can't hear you,' some one called out again; the suggestion was received with another hoa.r.s.e roar of approval. Two or three men moved towards the orator as if with the intention of forcing him to adopt this new position.

'For G.o.d's sake, can't you let the man alone? Don't you see that he is ill?' cried Valdez, suddenly starting forward.

Some one, more humane than his fellows, had poured De Rossi out a gla.s.s of wine. He lifted it to his lips now, facing them all, with flushed face and wild glittering eyes, 'I drink to your health, gentlemen!'