THE NIGHT OF THE FIFTEENTH
We quit the Piazza d'Armi. Rumour had its home in Milan. On their way
to the caffe La Scala, Luciano and Carlo (who held together, determined
to be taken together if the arrest should come) heard it said that the
Chief was in Milan. A man passed by and uttered it, going. They stopped
a second man, who was known to them, and he confirmed the rumour. Glad
as sunlight once more, they hurried to Count Medole forgivingly. The
count's servant assured them that his master had left the city for Monza.
'Is Medole a coward?' cried Luciano, almost in the servant's hearing.
The fleeing of so important a man looked vile, now that they were
sharpened by new eagerness. Forthwith they were off to Agostino,
believing that he would know the truth. They found him in bed. 'Well,
and what?' said Agostino, replying to their laughter. 'I am old; too old
to stride across a day and night, like you giants of youth. I take my
rest when I can, for I must have it.'
'But, you know, O conscript father,' said Carlo, willing to fall a little
into his mood, 'you know that nothing will be done to-night.'
'Do I know so much?' Agostino murmured at full length.
'Do you know that the Chief is in the city?' said Luciano.
'A man who is lying in bed knows this,' returned Agostino, 'that he knows
less than those who are up, though what he does know he perhaps digests
better. 'Tis you who are the fountains, my boys, while I am the pool
into which you play. Say on.'
They spoke of the rumour. He smiled at it. They saw at once that the
rumour was false, for the Chief trusted Agostino.
'Proceed to Barto, the mole,' he said, 'Barto the miner; he is the father
of daylight in the city: of the daylight of knowledge, you understand,
for which men must dig deep. Proceed to him;--if you can find him.'
But Carlo brought flame into Agostino's eyes.
'The accursed beast! he has pinned the black butterfly to the signorina's
dress.'
Agostino rose on his elbow. He gazed at them. 'We are followers of a
blind mole,' he uttered with an inner voices while still gazing
wrathfully, and then burst out in grief, '"Patria o mea creatrix, patria
o mea genetrix!"'
'The signorina takes none of his warnings, nor do we. She escaped a plot
last night, and to-night she sings.'
'She must not,' said Agostino imperiously.
'She does.'
'I must stop that.' Agostino jumped out of bed.
The young men beset him with entreaties to leave the option to her.
'Fools!' he cried, plunging a rageing leg into his garments. 'Here,
Iris! Mercury! fly to Jupiter and say we are all old men and boys in
Italy, and are ready to accept a few middleaged mortals as Gods, if they
will come and help us. Young fools! Do you know that when you conspire
you are in harness, and yoke-fellows, every one?'
'Yoked to that Barto Rizzo!'
'Yes; and the worse horse of the two. Listen, you pair of Nuremberg
puppet-heads! If the Chief were here, I would lie still in my bed.
Medole has stopped the outbreak. Right or wrong, he moves a mass;
we are subordinates--particles. The Chief can't be everywhere. Milan
is too hot for him. Two men are here, concealed--Rinaldo and Angelo
Guidascarpi. The rumour springs from that. They have slain Count Paul
Lenkenstein, and rushed to old Milan for work, with the blood on their
swords. Oh, the tragedy!--when I have time to write it. Let me now go
to my girl, to my daughter! The blood of the Lenkenstein must rust on
the steel. Angelo slew him: Rinaldo gave him the cross to kiss. You
shall have the whole story by-and-by; but this will be a lesson to
Germans not to court our Italian damsels. Lift not that curtain, you
Pannonian burglars! Much do we pardon; but bow and viol meet not, save
that they be of one wood; especially not when signor bow is from
yonderside the Rhoetian Alps, and donzella Viol is a growth of warm
Lombardy. Witness to it, Angelo and Rinaldo Guidascarpi! bravo! You
boys there--you stand like two Tyrolese salad-spoons! I say that my
girl, my daughter, shall never help to fire blank shot. I sent my
paternal commands to her yesterday evening. Does the wanton disobey her
father and look up to a pair of rocket-headed rascals like you? Apes!
if she sings that song to-night, the ear of Italy will be deaf to her for
ever after. There's no engine to stir to-night; all the locks are on it;
she will send half-a-dozen milkings like you to perdition, and there will
be a circle of black blood about her name in the traditions of the
insurrection--do you hear? Have I cherished her for that purpose? to
have her dedicated to a brawl!'
Agostino fumed up and down the room in a confusion of apparel, savouring
his epithets and imaginative peeps while he stormed, to get a relish out
of something, as beseems the poetic temperament. The youths were
silenced by him; Carlo gladly.
'Troop!' said the old man, affecting to contrast his attire with theirs;
'two graces and a satyr never yet went together, and we'll not frighten
the classic Government of Milan. I go out alone. No, Signor Luciano, I
am not sworn to Count Medole. I see your sneer contain it. Ah! what a
thing is hurry to a mind like mine. It tears up the trees by the roots,
floods the land, darkens utterly my poor quiet universe. I was composing
a pastoral when you came in. Observe what you have done with my "Lovely
Age of Gold!"'
Agostino's transfigurement from lymphatic poet to fiery man of action,
lasted till his breath was short, when the necessity for taking a deep
draught of air induced him to fall back upon his idle irony. 'Heads,
you illustrious young gentlemen!--heads, not legs and arms, move a
conspiracy. Now, you--think what you will of it--are only legs and arms
in this business. And if you are insubordinate, you present the shocking
fabular spirit of the members of the body in revolt; which is not the
revolt we desire to see. I go to my daughter immediately, and we shall
all have a fat sleep for a week, while the Tedeschi hunt and stew and
exhaust their naughty suspicions. Do you know that the Pope's Mouth is
closed? We made it tell a big lie before it shut tight on its teeth--a
bad omen, I admit; but the idea was rapturously neat. Barto, the sinner
--be sure I throttle him for putting that blot on my swan; only, not yet,
not yet: he's a blind mole, a mad patriot; but, as I say, our beast Barto
drew an Austrian to the Mouth last night, and led the dog to take a
letter out of it, detailing the whole plot of tonight, and how men will
be stationed at the vicolo here, ready to burst out on the Corso, and at
the vicolo there, and elsewhere, all over the city, carrying fire and
sword; a systematic map of the plot. It was addressed to Count
Serabiglione--my boys! my boys! what do you think of it? Bravo! though
Barto is a deadly beast if he--'Agostino paused. 'Yes, he went too far!
too far!'
'Has he only gone too far, do you say?'
Carlo spoke sternly. His elder was provoked enough by his deadness of
enthusiasm, and that the boy should dare to stalk on a bare egoistical
lover's sentiment to be critical of him, Agostino, struck him as
monstrous. With the treachery of controlled rage, Agostino drew near
him, and whispered some sentences in his ear.
Agostino then called him his good Spartan boy for keeping brave
countenance. 'Wait till you comprehend women philosophically. All's
trouble with them till then. At La Scala tonight, my sons! We have
rehearsed the fiasco; the Tedeschi perform it. Off with you, that I may
go out alone!'
He seemed to think it an indubitable matter that he would find Vittoria
and bend her will.
Agostino had betrayed his weakness to the young men, who read him with
the keen eyes of a particular disapprobation. He delighted in the dark
web of intrigue, and believed himself to be no ordinary weaver of that
sunless work. It captured his imagination, filling his pride with a
mounting gas. Thus he had become allied to Medole on the one hand, and
to Barto Rizzo on the other. The young men read him shrewdly, but
speaking was useless.
Before Carlo parted from Luciano, he told him the burden of the whisper,
which had confirmed what he had heard on the Piazzi d'Armi. It was this:
Barto Rizzo, aware that Lieutenant Pierson was the bearer of despatches
from the Archduke in Milan to the marshal, then in Verona, had followed,
and by extraordinary effort reached Verona in advance; had there tricked
and waylaid him, and obtained, instead of despatches, a letter of recent
date, addressed to him by Vittoria, which compromised the insurrectionary
project.
'If that's the case, my Carlo!' said his friend, and shrugged, and spoke
in a very worldly fashion of the fair sex.
Carlo shook him off. For the rest of the day he was alone, shut up with
his journalistic pen. The pen traversed seas and continents like an old
hack to whom his master has thrown the reins. Apart from the desperate
perturbation of his soul, he thought of the Guidascarpi, whom he knew,
and was allied to, and of the Lenkensteins, whom he knew likewise, or had
known in the days when Giacomo Piaveni lived, and Bianca von Lenkenstein,
Laura's sister, visited among the people of her country. Countess Anna
and Countess Lena von Lenkenstein were the German beauties of Milan,
lively little women, and sweet. Between himself and Countess Lena there
had been tender dealings about the age when sweetmeats have lost their
attraction, and the charm has to be supplied. She was rich, passionate
for Austria, romantic concerning Italy, a vixen in temper, but with a
pearly light about her temples that kept her picture in his memory. And
besides, during those days when women are bountiful to us as Goddesses,
give they never so little, she had deigned to fondle hands with him; had
set the universe rocking with a visible heave of her bosom; jingled all
the keys of mystery; and had once (as to embalm herself in his
recollection), once had surrendered her lips to him. Countess Lena would
have espoused Ammiani, believing in her power to make an Austrian out of
such Italian material. The Piaveni revolt had stopped that and all their
intercourse by the division of the White Hand, as it was called;
otherwise, the hand of the corpse. Ammiani had known also Count Paul von
Lenkenstein. To his mind, death did not mean much, however pleasant life
might be: his father and his friend had gone to it gaily; and he himself
stood ready for the summons: but the contemplation of a domestic judicial
execution, which the Guidascarpi seemed to have done upon Count Paul,
affrighted him, and put an end to his temporary capacity for labour. He
felt as if a spent shot were striking on his ribs; it was the unknown
sensation of fear. Changeing, it became pity. 'Horrible deaths these
Austrians die!' he said.
For a while he regarded their lot as the hardest. A shaft of sunlight
like blazing brass warned him that the day dropped. He sent to his
mother's stables, and rode at a gallop round Milan, dining alone in one
of the common hotel gardens, where he was a stranger. A man may have
good nerve to face the scene which he is certain will be enacted, who
shrinks from an hour that is suspended in doubt. He was aware of the
pallor and chill of his looks, and it was no marvel to him when two
sbirri in mufti, foreign to Milan, set their eyes on him as they passed
by to a vacant table on the farther side of the pattering gold-fish pool,
where he sat. He divined that they might be in pursuit of the
Guidascarpi, and alive to read a troubled visage. 'Yet neither Rinaldo
nor Angelo would look as I do now,' he thought, perceiving that these men
were judging by such signs, and had their ideas. Democrat as he imagined
himself to be, he despised with a nobleman's contempt creatures who were
so dead to the character of men of birth as to suppose that they were
pale and remorseful after dealing a righteous blow, and that they
trembled! Ammiani looked at his hand: no force of his will could arrest
its palsy. The Guidascarpi were sons of Bologna. The stupidity of
Italian sbirri is proverbial, or a Milanese cavalier would have been
astonished to conceive himself mistaken for a Bolognese. He beckoned to
the waiter, and said, 'Tell me what place has bred those two fellows on
the other side of the fountain.' After a side-glance of scrutiny, the
reply was, 'Neapolitans.' The waiter was ready to make an additional
remark, but Ammiani nodded and communed with a toothpick. He was sure
that those Neapolitans were recruits of the Bolognese Polizia; on the
track of the Guidascarpi, possibly. As he was not unlike Angelo
Guidascarpi in figure, he became uneasy lest they should blunder 'twixt
him and La Scala; and the notion of any human power stopping him short
of that destination, made Ammiani's hand perfectly firm. He drew on his
gloves, and named the place whither he was going, aloud. 'Excellency,'
said the waiter, while taking up and pretending to reckon the money for
the bill: 'they have asked me whether there are two Counts Ammiani in
Milan.' Carlo's eyebrows started. 'Can they be after me?' he thought,
and said: 'Certainly; there is twice anything in this world, and Milan is
the epitome of it.'
Acting a part gave him Agostino's catching manner of speech. The waiter,
who knew him now, took this for an order to say 'Yes.' He had evidently a
respect for Ammiani's name: Carlo supposed that he was one of Milan's
fighting men. A sort of answer leading to 'Yes' by a circuit and the
assistance of the hearer, was conveyed to the, sbirri. They were true
Neapolitans quick to suspect, irresolute upon their suspicions. He was
soon aware that they were not to be feared more than are the general race
of bunglers, whom the Gods sometimes strangely favour. They perplexed
him: for why were they after him? and what had made them ask whether he
had a brother? He was followed, but not molested, on his way to La
Scala.
Ammiani's heart was in full play as he looked at the curtain of the
stage. The Night of the Fifteenth had come. For the first few moments
his strong excitement fronting the curtain, amid a great host of hearts
thumping and quivering up in the smaller measures like his own, together
with the predisposing belief that this was to be a night of events,
stopped his consciousness that all had been thwarted; that there was
nothing but plot, plot, counterplot and tangle, disunion, silly subtlety,
jealousy, vanity, a direful congregation of antagonistic elements;
threads all loose, tongues wagging, pressure here, pressure there, like
an uncertain rage in the entrails of the undirected earth, and no master
hand on the spot to fuse and point the intense distracted forces.
The curtain, therefore, hung like any common opera-screen; big only with
the fate of the new prima donna. He was robbed even of the certainty
that Vittoria would appear. From the blank aspect of the curtain he
turned to the house, which was crowding fast, and was not like listless
Milan about to criticize an untried voice. The commonly empty boxes of
the aristocracy were full of occupants, and for a wonder the white
uniforms were not in excess, though they were to be seen. The first
person whom Ammiani met was Agostino, who spoke gruffly. Vittoria had
been invisible to him. Neither the maestro, nor the impresario, nor the
waiting-woman had heard of her. Uncertainty was behind the curtain, as
well as in front; but in front it was the uncertainty which is tipped
with expectation, hushing the usual noisy chatter, and setting a daylight
of eyes forward. Ammiani spied about the house, and caught sight of
Laura Piaveni with Colonel Corte by her side. The Lenkensteins were in
the Archduke's box. Antonio-Pericles, and the English lady and Captain
Gambier, were next to them. The appearance of a white uniform in his
mother's box over the stage caused Ammiani to shut up his glass. He was
making his way thither for the purpose of commencing the hostilities of
the night, when Countess Ammiani entered the lobby, and took her son's
arm with a grave face and a trembling touch.