“You pity everyone but me,” I cried, “and my heart is broken.”
“What, in the old place?” said he.
But I was too miserable to retort; and half the night afterwards he
held me, fallen fast asleep, in his arms.
XXVI.
I RENEW AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
For three days I remained shut into my rooms at the “Orient,” not
daring to go out, a prey to the utmost nervousness and agitation. Do
not suppose that on that account I was the less determined in my plans
for vengeance. But revenge that lays itself open to retribution misses
the better half of itself. I remembered my old friend Mr. Roper’s
dictum, and beat my brains only for the means to strike with impunity.
I was not from the first without a design. The difficulty was to give
it practical effect; because for the moment I could not use Gogo. For
myself, under my assumed name, I might lie secure in this hiding. To
make _him_ my carrier to the English Embassy would be to mark a sure
track to my retreat with every punch of his wooden legs. I dared not
let him out; I dared not even temporarily part with him in my peril; I
dared not come to a decision, while knowing that my life depended on a
wise one. For I was a renegade revolutionary--I could not blink the
fact. Though I had never hitherto actually set foot in Naples itself,
there must be many to know me by report for that apostle of the new
creed of equality who, but a few years before, had stumped their
country, winning converts. And now! the safety of many men--and women
too--was in my hands; and not Pissani, nor those others when they came
to learn, would have forgotten the nature of my secession, or the
significance of the threats which had accompanied it. If passion had
given me away, caution must redeem me. I had no faith in Patty’s power
to protect me. The occasion was too desperate; the interests involved
were too many. Pissani was a reformer before he was a lover. I _must_
be sacrificed, if possible, to the cause I had the means to betray.
All day, peeping from behind the curtains of our windows, we saw the
piazza below like a seething cauldron of unrest. As significant of
that as anything were the out-at-elbows letter-writers under the
arcades of the old theatre of San Carlo, who, at a time when every man
feared to commit his simplest thoughts to paper, did less than enough
business to keep themselves in macaroni. They served to exhibit the
popular bankruptcy as well as the briefless advocates, who, from
thriving on the countless abuses of the law, found themselves
abandoned to the lawlessness they had created; as well as the
journalists, who, having been brought under a strict moral censorship,
starved as vampires might on a diet of milk; as well as the professors
and _savants_, who were hampered, it must be confessed, by a thousand
childish restrictions in their efforts to make life beautiful by
turning it inside out, and to teach men to follow in themselves, while
eating an omelet, the whole process of absorption and digestion; as
well as the bolder demagogues, who, mounted on steps or tubs, screamed
denunciations of their misgoverning sovereigns, under the transparent
veil of Claudius and Messalina, and called upon their hearers, by many
classical examples, to strike for liberty and political cleanliness.
At which the Lazzari laughed, understanding just so much that, if they
were to be no longer flea-bitten, they would be deprived of the
traditional luxury of scratching; and shaking their heads over that
new idea of equality, which was in fact so old an idea as to be
embodied in a popular proverb: “_Tu rubbi a me, io rubbo a te_,” which
one might expound: “‘If Taffy robs me, I rob Taffy’--so what the
devil’s all this fuss about?” Naples was rich in charitable
institutions for the encouragement of indolent beggary; and what sort
of a reform was it that sought to deprive an honest loafer of his
soup? And so to a man _they_ held out for dirt, moral and material,
and for the king who assured them a continuance in both--a condition
of things which made revolution a very different affair from what it
had been in starving Paris.
Since the date of my first visit in ’94 this ferment had been rising,
in spite of all efforts of the authorities to check it. As well try to
stop the decomposition of a dead body--for such was the national
credit. The foolish, vile queen, panic-sick that she was destined to
the fate of her better-meaning but as foolish sister in Paris,
persuaded her weak, common husband into a counter-blast to the
Terror--with as much effect as King James the First’s against smoking.
It is bad policy to try to suppress an evil by advertising it.
Self-martyrdom is the most popular of all notorieties. They
inaugurated a system of espionage, which in itself was an education to
conspirators; they read Jacobinism across the forehead of all
learning, and so alienated the intelligence which might have saved the
land; they crammed the filthy prisons with suspects, and broke the
hearts and fortunes of those who were the best leaven to corruption;
they made it criminal to wear scarlet waistcoats and long trousers;
finally, for some such dereliction, or one less momentous, they hung
up two or three respectable boys in a public square, varying the
entertainment by shooting down some scores of spectators who had
fallen into a panic at the noise of a distant musket-shot. And then,
having thrown their sacrifice on the flames of discontent, and so
lowered them, they settled down with an affectation of the strong arm,
and a blindness to the embers smouldering underneath.
These had not ceased to smoulder, nevertheless, feeding on their new
fuel; and by and by the blaze was to come.
_Eh bien! la voix du peuple est la voix de Dieu!_ So they say; only,
unfortunately, here the Lazzari were the crack in it. It was a pretty
Naples I had come to.
One afternoon, while looking out of the window, I saw a magnificent
equipage cross the square, and, turning the corner towards the palace,
disappear. I had been waiting during these long days for some such
vision, the nature of which now, if, indeed, the plaudits of the
loafers had not confirmed it in my mind, was established in the
glimpse of a bold, beautiful face which I obtained in its passing. On
the instant my resolution was made, and I ran to the table and hastily
scribbled off a note:--
“_One whom you formerly befriended seeks your help and protection. She
is in possession of important secrets, which you cannot afford to
discard. Ask for her, under the name of Madame Lavasse, at the_
‘_Orient_.’”