A MEETING OF THE ORDER
A man in a fur-lined overcoat--thin, shrunken, and worn--stood on the
pavement in a little street in Camberwell, looking about him in evident
disgust. Before him stretched a long row of six-roomed houses,
smoke-begrimed, hideously similar, hideously commonplace. The street was
empty save for the four-wheeled cab from which he had just alighted, and
which was now vanishing in a slight fog, a milkman and a greengrocer's
boy in amicable converse, and a few dirty children playing in the
gutter. Nothing could be more depressing, or more calculated to
unfavorably impress a stranger from a southern land visiting the great
city for the first time. It was a picture of suburban desolation, the
home of poverty-stricken philistinism, uncaring and uncared for. In
Swinburne's words, though with a different meaning, one saw there,
without the necessity of further travel, "a land that was lonelier than
ruin."
The little old man who had alighted from the cab, stood for a moment or
two looking helplessly around, half surprised at what he saw, half
disgusted. Such monotonous and undeviating ugliness was a thing which he
had never dreamed of--certainly he had never encountered anything like
it. Was it possible that he had made a mistake in the address? He drew a
scrap of paper from his pocket and consulted it again. The address was
written there plainly enough--85, Eden Street, Camberwell. He was
certainly in Eden Street, Camberwell, and the figures on the gate-post
opposite him, worn and black with dirt, were unmistakably an eight and a
five. With a little shudder he pushed open the gate, and walked through
the narrow strip of untidy garden to the front door. The bell he found
broken and useless, so he knocked softly at first, and then louder
against the worn panels.
It was some time before an answer came. Several of the neighbors
appeared upon their doorsteps, and took bold and somewhat ribald stock
of the visitor. A young person of eighty-one, who was considered the wit
of the neighborhood, made several very audible remarks, which produced a
chorus of gigglings, on the subject of his clothes and foreign
appearance. But he stood there as though he had been deaf, his hands
thrust down into the loose pockets of his overcoat and his deep-sunken
eyes fixed wistfully but not impatiently upon the closed door. He was a
mute picture of resignation.
At last, after his third summons, the door was slowly and cautiously
opened, and the astonished visitor beheld, for the first time in his
life, a London maid-of-all-work. The astonishment seemed perfectly
mutual. He, with his parchment dried face, white hair and eyebrows, and
piercing black eyes only a little dimmed by time, muffled up to the
throat in furs, and unmistakably a foreigner, was as strange to her as
her appearance was to him. He looked at her black hands, her face
besmeared with dirt, and with her uncombed hair hanging loose around it,
at the tattered and soiled print gown looped up on one side and held
together on the other by pins, and at the white-stockinged feet showing
through the holes in her boots. What an object it was! It was fortunate
for him that the twilight and fog concealed, partially at any rate, the
disgust in his face.
"Is--Mr. Bartlezzi in?" he inquired, as soon as he could find words to
speak at all.
"Lawk-a-mussy! I dunno," the girl answered in blank bewilderment. "He
don't have no visitors, he don't. You ain't taxes, are you?"
"No!" he answered, somewhat at a venture, for he did not catch her
meaning.
"Nor water rate? No, you ain't the water rate," she continued,
meditatively. "I knows him. He wears a brown billycock and glasses, 'e
does, and I see him walking with Mary Ann Stubbins on a Sunday."
He admitted doubtfully that she was correct He was not the water rate.
It began to dawn upon her that it would be safe to admit him into the
house.
"Just yer come hinside, will yer," she said. "I dunno who yer are, but I
guess you ain't nothink to be afraid of. Come hinside."
She opened the door and admitted him into a dark, narrow passage. He had
to squeeze himself against the wall to allow her to pass him. Then she
surveyed him critically again, with her arms akimbo and her head a
little on one side.
"I reckon you've got a name," she surmised. "What is it?"
"You can tell Mr. Bartlezzi that a gentleman from abroad desires to
speak with him," he answered. "My name is immaterial. Will you accept
this?" he added, holding out a half-crown timidly toward her.
She grabbed it from him, and turned it over incredulously in the
semi-darkness. There was no deception about it; it was indeed a
half-crown--the first she had ever been given in her life.
She dropped a rude sort of curtsey, and, opening the door of a room,
half ushered, half pushed him in. Then she went to the foot of the
stairs, the coin tightly clinched in her hand, and he heard her call
out----
"Master! There's a gent here from furrin parts has wants you, which 'is
name his immaterial. 'E's in the parlor."
There was a growl in reply, and then silence. The handmaiden, her duty
discharged, shuffled off to the lower regions. The visitor was left
alone.
He looked around him in deep and increasing disgust. The walls of the
little room into which he had been shown were bare, save for a few cheap
chromos and glaring oleographs of the sort distributed by grocers and
petty tradespeople at Christmas. A cracked looking-glass, with a dirty
gilt frame, tottered upon the mantelpiece. The furniture was scanty, and
of the public-house pattern, and there was a strong nauseous odor of
stale tobacco smoke and beer. A small piano stood in one corner, the
cheapest of its kind, and maintaining an upright position only by means
of numerous props. One leg tilted in the air was supported by two old
and coverless volumes of a novel, and another was casterless. The carpet
was worn into shreds, and there was no attempt to conceal or mend the
huge ravages which time had made in it. The ceiling was cracked and
black with smoke, and the faded paper was hanging down from the top of
the wall. There was not a single article or spot in the room on which
the eye could rest with pleasure. It was an interior which matched the
exterior. Nothing worse could be said about it.
The visitor took it all in, and raising his hand to his head closed his
eyes. Ah! what a relief it was to blot it all out of sight, if only for
a moment. He had known evil times, but at their worst, such surroundings
as these he had never met with. A strange nervousness was creeping
slowly over him, the presage of disappointment. He dropped his hands,
and walked restlessly up and down, striving to banish his fears. Might
not all this be necessary--a form of disguise--a clever mode of
concealment? Poverty alone could not have brought things to this strait.
Poverty! There had been no poverty in his day. Yet he was full of
forebodings. He remembered the wonder, the evasions, almost the pity
with which his first inquiries in Rome had been met. He could not expect
to find things exactly the same. Twenty years is a long time, and there
must be many changes. Why had he not stayed in Rome a little longer, and
learned more. He could easily have obtained the knowledge which he
desired there. It would have been wiser, surely it would have been
wiser.
The door opened in the midst of his meditations, and he looked eagerly
up. Again his heart fell. It was not such a man as this that he had
expected to see. Ah! what a day of disappointments it was!
The figure which, after a moment's pause in the doorway, now advanced
somewhat hesitatingly toward him, was that of a man a little past middle
age. He was of medium height, but stout even to corpulency, and his
cheeks were fat and puffy. His hair was gray, and his thick, stubbly
mustaches, which had evidently once been black, were also changing
color. His dark, shiny coat was ridiculously short for him, and his
trousers terminated above his ankles. He wore no necktie, and his collar
was ragged and soiled. In short, his whole appearance was not only
untidy but dirty. His gait, too, was slouching and undignified.
"You wished to speak to me," he said in a thick tone and with a foreign
accent. "My name is Bartlezzi--Signor Alfonso Bartlezzi."
"Yes, I wished to speak with you."
Signor Bartlezzi began to feel uncomfortable under his visitor's fixed
gaze. Why should he look at him so intently? He had never set eyes upon
him before--and what an odd, shrunken little figure it was. He coughed
and shifted his position.
"Ah! yes. I am ready, as you see. Is it anything to do with my
profession?"
"I do not know what your profession is."
Signor Bartlezzi made an effort to draw himself up, and assumed a
military air.
"I am a master of fencing," he announced, "also a professor of
Italian--Professor Alfonso Bartlezzi, at your service. I am fairly
well-known in this neighborhood. If you have pupils to recommend, sir,
or if you are thinking of taking lessons yourself, I should be most
happy. My services are sometimes made use of as interpreter, both in the
police court and privately. I should be happy to serve you in that
capacity, sir."
Signor Bartlezzi, having declared himself, folded his arms and waited.
He felt certain that his visitor must now divulge his name and mission.
That, however, he seemed in no hurry to do.
"You are an Italian?" he asked presently.
"Certainly, sir."
"May I ask, have you still correspondents or friends in that country?"
The Professor was a little uneasy. He looked steadfastly at his visitor
for a moment, however, and seemed to regain his composure.
"I have neither," he answered sorrowfully. "The friends of former days
are silent; they have forgotten me."
"You have lived in England for long, then?"
"Since I was a boy, sir."
"And you are content?"
The Professor shrugged his shoulders and looked round. The gesture was
significant.
"Scarcely so," he answered. "But what would you have? May I now ask you
a question, sir?" he continued.
"Yes."
"Your name?"
His visitor looked around him mournfully.
"The day for secrecy is past, I suppose," he said sadly. "I am the Count
Leonardo di Marioni."
"What!" shrieked the Professor.
"Count Leonardo di Marioni--that is my name. I am better known as Signor
di Cortegi, perhaps, in the history of our society."
"My God!"
If a thunderbolt had burst through the ceiling of the little sitting
room, the Professor could not have been more agitated. He had sunk down
upon a chair, pale and shaking all over with the effect of the surprise.
"He was a young man?" he faltered.
His visitor sighed.
"It was five-and-twenty years ago," he answered slowly. "Five-and-twenty
years rotting in a Roman prison. That has been my fate. I was a young
man then. You see me now."
He held up his arms, and let them drop again heavily to his side. It was
a gesture full of sad dramatic pathos, but in that little room there was
no one to observe it, no one to pity him for those white hairs and
deep-drawn lines. But that was nothing. It was not pity that he wanted.
There was silence. Both men were absorbed in their own thoughts. Signor
Bartlezzi was thunderstruck and completely unnerved. The perspiration
stood out upon his forehead, and he could feel his hands and legs
shaking. This was a terrible and altogether unexpected blow to him. It
was not the thought of that twenty-five years' lonely captivity which
was oppressing him, so much as the fact that it was over--that the day
of release had come, and that it was indeed Count Marioni who stood
before him, alive and a free man. That was the serious part of it. Had
it not been proclaimed that the imprisonment was for life? That had
certainly been the sentence. A gleam of hope flashed in upon him.
Perhaps he had escaped from prison. If so, the sooner he was back there
the better.
"Was not the sentence for life?" he gasped.
The Count assented, shaking his head slowly.
"Yes, for life," he answered bitterly. "That was the sentence,
imprisonment for life."
"Then you have escaped?"
The same slow shake of the head. The Professor was bitterly
disappointed.
"No. At five-and-twenty years a prisoner with a good-conduct sheet is
restored to liberty. My time came at last. It was a weary while."
"What evil fate kept him alive all that time?" the Professor muttered
under his breath. "Men are buried deep who pass within the walls of an
Italian prison. What had kept this frail old man alive?" Before the
night was over, he knew!
The Professor sat on the edge of his chair, limp and dejected. He was
quite powerless to frame any speech of welcome or congratulation.
Fortunately, it was not expected. His visitor was deep in thought, and
some time passed before he appeared even to notice the presence of
Signor Bartlezzi. At last, however, he looked up and spoke.
"I fear that all things have not gone well with us!" he said sadly. "On
my release, I visited the old home of our society in the Piazza di
Spiola at Rome. It was broken up. I met with no one who could tell me
anything about it. It was doubtless because I knew not where to go; but
I had fancied--I had hoped--that there might have been some one whose
memory would not have been altogether dulled by time, who would have
come to meet me at the prison gates, and welcome me back into the living
world once more. But that is nothing. Doubtless the day of my release
was unknown. It was the hot season at Rome, and I wandered wearily
about, seeing no familiar face, and unable to hear anything of our
friends. I might have had patience and lingered, but it seemed to me
that I had been patient so long--it was all exhausted. From there I went
to Florence, with the same result. At last I came to London, and by
making cautious inquiries through my bank, I discovered your address. So
I have come here."
"Ah, yes, yes," answered the Professor, with blinking eyes, and still
completely bewildered. "You have come here. Just so. Just so."
"The numbers have fallen off, I suppose? Yet you still have meetings?"
"Oh, yes; certainly. We still have meetings," the Professor assented
spasmodically.
The little old man nodded his head gravely. He had never doubted it.
"When is the next?" he asked, with the first touch of eagerness creeping
into his voice.
Signor Bartlezzi felt a cold perspiration on his forehead, and slowly
mopped it with a red cotton handkerchief. The calmness of despair was
settling down upon him. "He must know," he thought. "Better get it
over."
"To-night," he answered, "in an hour--perhaps before. They'll be
dropping in directly."
"Ah!" It was a long-drawn and significant monosyllable. The Count rose
to his feet, and commenced pacing the room. Already its meanness was
forgotten, its narrow walls had expanded. The day of his desire had
come. "What are your numbers now?" he asked.
The Professor drew a long breath, and kept his eyes fixed upon his
visitor. The thing was narrowing down.
"Four," he answered; "four besides myself."
The Count started and appeared perplexed.
"Four on the acting committee, you mean, I suppose?" he suggested. "Four
is the old number."
The Professor shook his head doggedly.
"Four altogether," he repeated.
The old man's eyes flashed, but the angry light died almost immediately
away. After all, there might be grave reasons, of which he was ignorant,
for restricting the number.
"Four desperate and brave men may be much," he mused, half aloud. "One
will do enough for my purpose."
There was a ghastly humor in that speech which was nearly too much for
Signor Bartlezzi. He was within an ace of collapsing, but he saved
himself by a quick glance at that worn old man. His visitor was living
in the light of five-and-twenty years ago. The awakening would come. It
was at hand.
"Signor Bartlezzi," the Count said, pausing suddenly in his restless
walk, "I have a confession to make."
"So had he," Signor Bartlezzi mused, though his would keep.
"Proceed," he begged, with a wave of his hand and a touch of his old
bombast, which had collapsed so suddenly. "Proceed, I am all attention."
The Count stood in the middle of the room, with his left hand thrust
into the bosom of his coat, and the right stretched out toward the
Professor. It was his old attitude of bygone days into which he had
unconsciously fallen, but his expression was no longer threatening, and
his voice, though indeed it quivered, was free from the passion and fire
of his youth. He was apologetic now, rather than denunciatory. It was a
great change.
"You will doubtless imagine, Signor Bartlezzi," he said, "from my
presence here, from my seeking you out immediately upon my release, that
the old fires burn still in my heart; that my enthusiasm for the cause
still survives the chill of five-and-twenty years. Alas! that I should
confess it, but it is not so!"
"Then what the mischief does he want here?" mused the Professor. "An
account of his money, I suppose. Oh, damn those meddlesome Italians who
set him free."
"I am sorry, but it is natural," he remarked aloud, wagging his head
sagely. "Five-and-twenty years is a devil of a time!"
"You will not misunderstand me, Professor," he went on almost
pleadingly. "You will not imagine for one moment that the 'Order of the
White Hyacinth' and everything connected with it, is not still dear to
me, very dear. I am an old man, and my time for usefulness is past. Yet
there is one demand which I have to make of the association which I have
faithfully served and suffered for. Doubtless you know full well what I
mean. Will you hear it now, or shall I wait and lay it before the
meeting to-night?"
"The latter, by all means," begged the Professor hastily. "They wouldn't
like it if you told me first. They'd feel hurt, I'm sure."
The Count bowed his head.
"So be it, then," he said gravely.
There was a short silence. The Professor, with his thumbs in his
waistcoat, gazed fixedly down the street.
"I don't see why they shouldn't share the storm," he mused. "He's small,
but he looks as though he might be awkward. I would very much rather
Martello and the others were here; Martello is a strong man."
There was a knock at the outside door, and Signor Bartlezzi peered
through the window.
"There they are!" he exclaimed. "I'll go and let them in myself. It
would be better to prepare them for your presence. Excuse me."
His visitor bowed, and resumed his seat.
"I await the pleasure of the Council," he said with dignity.