“Wait,” he said. “You have shaken me from head to foot. You don’t
know how I left my country, and why I left my country. Let me compose
myself, let me think, if I can.”
I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the room, talking to
himself incoherently in his own language. After several turns backwards
and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his little hands with
a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast.
“On your heart and soul, Walter,” he said, “is there no other way to
get to that man but the chance-way through ME?”
“There is no other way,” I answered.
He left me again, opened the door of the room and looked out cautiously
into the passage, closed it once more, and came back.
“You won your right over me, Walter,” he said, “on the day when you
saved my life. It was yours from that moment, when you pleased to take
it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My next words, as true as the
good God is above us, will put my life into your hands.”
The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this extraordinary
warning, carried with it, to my mind, the conviction that he spoke the
truth.
“Mind this!” he went on, shaking his hands at me in the vehemence of
his agitation. “I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that man
Fosco, and the past time which I call back to me for your sake. If you
find the thread, keep it to yourself—tell me nothing—on my knees I beg
and pray, let me be ignorant, let me be innocent, let me be blind to
all the future as I am now!”
He said a few words more, hesitatingly and disconnectedly, then stopped
again.
I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English, on an occasion
too serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and phrases of
his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the difficulty he
had felt from the first in speaking to me at all. Having learnt to
read and understand his native language (though not to speak it), in
the earlier days of our intimate companionship, I now suggested to him
that he should express himself in Italian, while I used English in
putting any questions which might be necessary to my enlightenment.
He accepted the proposal. In his smooth-flowing language, spoken with
a vehement agitation which betrayed itself in the perpetual working
of his features, in the wildness and the suddenness of his foreign
gesticulations, but never in the raising of his voice, I now heard the
words which armed me to meet the last struggle, that is left for this
story to record.[3]
[3] It is only right to mention here, that I repeat Pesco’s statement
to me with the careful suppressions and alterations which the serious
nature of the subject and my own sense of duty to my friend demand. My
first and last concealments from the reader are those which caution
renders absolutely necessary in this portion of the narrative.
“You know nothing of my motive for leaving Italy,” he began, “except
that it was for political reasons. If I had been driven to this
country by the persecution of my government, I should not have kept
those reasons a secret from you or from any one. I have concealed
them because no government authority has pronounced the sentence of
my exile. You have heard, Walter, of the political societies that
are hidden in every great city on the continent of Europe? To one of
those societies I belonged in Italy—and belong still in England. When
I came to this country, I came by the direction of my chief. I was
over-zealous in my younger time—I ran the risk of compromising myself
and others. For those reasons I was ordered to emigrate to England
and to wait. I emigrated—I have waited—I wait still. To-morrow I may
be called away—ten years hence I may be called away. It is all one to
me—I am here, I support myself by teaching, and I wait. I violate no
oath (you shall hear why presently) in making my confidence complete by
telling you the name of the society to which I belong. All I do is to
put my life in your hands. If what I say to you now is ever known by
others to have passed my lips, as certainly as we two sit here, I am a
dead man.”
He whispered the next words in my ear. I keep the secret which he thus
communicated. The society to which he belonged will be sufficiently
individualised for the purpose of these pages, if I call it “The
Brotherhood,” on the few occasions when any reference to the subject
will be needed in this place.
“The object of the Brotherhood,” Pesca went on, “is, briefly, the
object of other political societies of the same sort—the destruction of
tyranny and the assertion of the rights of the people. The principles
of the Brotherhood are two. So long as a man’s life is useful, or
even harmless only, he has the right to enjoy it. But, if his life
inflicts injury on the well-being of his fellow-men, from that moment
he forfeits the right, and it is not only no crime, but a positive
merit, to deprive him of it. It is not for me to say in what frightful
circumstances of oppression and suffering this society took its rise.
It is not for you to say—you Englishmen, who have conquered your
freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood
you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering—it is
not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may
not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has
entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the
refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at
that secret self which smoulders in him, sometimes under the everyday
respectability and tranquillity of a man like me—sometimes under the
grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable,
less patient than I am—but judge us not! In the time of your first
Charles you might have done us justice—the long luxury of your own
freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.”
All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to force themselves to
the surface in those words—all his heart was poured out to me for the
first time in our lives—but still his voice never rose, still his dread
of the terrible revelation he was making to me never left him.
“So far,” he resumed, “you think the society like other societies. Its
object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution. It takes
the life of a bad king or a bad minister, as if the one and the other
were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first opportunity. I grant
you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other
political society on the face of the earth. The members are not known
to one another. There is a president in Italy; there are presidents
abroad. Each of these has his secretary. The presidents and the
secretaries know the members, but the members, among themselves, are
all strangers, until their chiefs see fit, in the political necessity
of the time, or in the private necessity of the society, to make them
known to each other. With such a safeguard as this there is no oath
among us on admittance. We are identified with the Brotherhood by a
secret mark, which we all bear, which lasts while our lives last. We
are told to go about our ordinary business, and to report ourselves to
the president, or the secretary, four times a year, in the event of our
services being required. We are warned, if we betray the Brotherhood,
or if we injure it by serving other interests, that we die by the
principles of the Brotherhood—die by the hand of a stranger who may
be sent from the other end of the world to strike the blow—or by the
hand of our own bosom-friend, who may have been a member unknown to
us through all the years of our intimacy. Sometimes the death is
delayed—sometimes it follows close on the treachery. It is our first
business to know how to wait—our second business to know how to obey
when the word is spoken. Some of us may wait our lives through, and
may not be wanted. Some of us may be called to the work, or to the
preparation for the work, the very day of our admission. I myself—the
little, easy, cheerful man you know, who, of his own accord, would
hardly lift up his handkerchief to strike down the fly that buzzes
about his face—I, in my younger time, under provocation so dreadful
that I will not tell you of it, entered the Brotherhood by an impulse,
as I might have killed myself by an impulse. I must remain in it now—it
has got me, whatever I may think of it in my better circumstances and
my cooler manhood, to my dying day. While I was still in Italy I was
chosen secretary, and all the members of that time, who were brought
face to face with my president, were brought face to face also with me.”
I began to understand him—I saw the end towards which his extraordinary
disclosure was now tending. He waited a moment, watching me
earnestly—watching till he had evidently guessed what was passing in my
mind before he resumed.
“You have drawn your own conclusion already,” he said. “I see it in
your face. Tell me nothing—keep me out of the secret of your thoughts.
Let me make my one last sacrifice of myself, for your sake, and then
have done with this subject, never to return to it again.”
He signed to me not to answer him—rose—removed his coat—and rolled up
the shirt-sleeve on his left arm.
“I promised you that this confidence should be complete,” he whispered,
speaking close at my ear, with his eyes looking watchfully at the door.
“Whatever comes of it you shall not reproach me with having hidden
anything from you which it was necessary to your interests to know. I
have said that the Brotherhood identifies its members by a mark that
lasts for life. See the place, and the mark on it for yourself.”
He raised his bare arm, and showed me, high on the upper part of it and
in the inner side, a brand deeply burnt in the flesh and stained of a
bright blood-red colour. I abstain from describing the device which the
brand represented. It will be sufficient to say that it was circular
in form, and so small that it would have been completely covered by a
shilling coin.
“A man who has this mark, branded in this place,” he said, covering his
arm again, “is a member of the Brotherhood. A man who has been false to
the Brotherhood is discovered sooner or later by the chiefs who know
him—presidents or secretaries, as the case may be. And a man discovered
by the chiefs is dead. NO HUMAN LAWS CAN PROTECT HIM. Remember what you
have seen and heard—draw what conclusions YOU like—act as you please.
But, in the name of God, whatever you discover, whatever you do, tell
me nothing! Let me remain free from a responsibility which it horrifies
me to think of—which I know, in my conscience, is not my responsibility
now. For the last time I say it—on my honour as a gentleman, on my oath
as a Christian, if the man you pointed out at the Opera knows ME, he
is so altered, or so disguised, that I do not know him. I am ignorant
of his proceedings or his purposes in England. I never saw him, I
never heard the name he goes by, to my knowledge, before to-night. I
say no more. Leave me a little, Walter. I am overpowered by what has
happened—I am shaken by what I have said. Let me try to be like myself
again when we meet next.”
He dropped into a chair, and turning away from me, hid his face in his
hands. I gently opened the door so as not to disturb him, and spoke
my few parting words in low tones, which he might hear or not, as he
pleased.
“I will keep the memory of to-night in my heart of hearts,” I said.
“You shall never repent the trust you have reposed in me. May I come to
you to-morrow? May I come as early as nine o’clock?”
“Yes, Walter,” he replied, looking up at me kindly, and speaking
in English once more, as if his one anxiety now was to get back to
our former relations towards each other. “Come to my little bit of
breakfast before I go my ways among the pupils that I teach.”
“Good-night, Pesca.”
“Good-night, my friend.”