It was a strange and memorable journey home with the escaped prisoner,
and men have been rarely more embarrassed than Brunow and myself. We
had to deal with the strangest creature, a thing alternately beast and
gentleman, sensitive in every fibre of his nature, and so animalized by
that awful life of imprisonment that he was a constant dread and terror
to himself. To see him slinking in his corner of the railway carriage
or any room at our one or two halting-places, dull, blear-eyed, with
his fingers tapping at his teeth, was pitiable and dreadful, but not so
pitiable and dreadful as to see him grow suddenly conscious of his state
and aspect and awake to some shamefaced effort to arouse himself and
reassert the manhood that had once been in him.
The most astonishing thing in him was the way in which, through all
these silent and horrible years, he had possessed his faculty of
speech. He had been an exceptional linguist in his youth, and he was
an exceptional linguist still. He was most companionable and least
embarrassed with us when he was in the dark, and it was in the dark on
the deck of the steam-packet which carried us to Dover that he gave me
the secret of his retention of this faculty.
He sat with one arm thrown over the vessel's rail and with his face half
averted.
“Do you know, sir,” I said, after trying in a dozen ways to draw him
out, and after having failed in all of them--“do you know, sir, that I
am quite sure of one thing about you?”
“What is that?” he asked.
“During all those years of cruel solitude you never abandoned the hope
of freedom.”
“How should you know that?” he demanded, with a strange and vivid
manner. I had never known him so roused and interested, even when I bad
told him of the existence of his daughter.
“You have carefully preserved your power over language,” I answered.
“You would never have cared to do that if you had not had some hope of
future freedom.”
“I had no hope of freedom,” he returned. “But everything else had gone
that held me from the beasts, and that I determined should not go. I am
no poet, but I have occupied myself in making verses. I have done into
verse every incident of my life, and the character and aspect of every
person I have known. I have translated every line into every language of
which I am master. I have hundreds of thousands of lines in my head--how
can I tell how many? They are poor enough, I dare say, but I could talk
every working day for weeks and not exhaust them. They are in French,
Italian, German, English, Spanish, in Greek and Latin, in the patois
of a half-dozen districts of my native country. How many hundreds of
thousands of hours have had no other occupation. But for that I had gone
mad, my friend.”
He rose and began to pace the deck, and I watched him. The night was
calm, and the sea was like a mill-pond. Sometimes he forgot himself,
and prowled with bent shoulders and clasped hands in a limited space,
walking to and fro, with a sharp check at the end of such brief
promenade, as if an invisible world had put a limit to the space he
moved in; that was the jail-bird's gait, and the prison limits were
about him again to his unconscious memory. Then, at other times he would
assert himself with an effort only too visible. He would lift his head,
throw out his chest, and march the full length of the deck with an
assurance of freedom and manhood. But the slouching gait was always back
in a minute, and his unconscious fancy began to confine his footsteps
once more. On a sudden he paused in his walk and stretched out his right
hand.
“That light?” he said.
“Dover,” I answered. “We shall land in half an hour.”
We were fortunately alone, for I would not have had it happen in the
presence of a stranger for a thousand pounds. I had scarcely spoken when
he dropped his face into both his hands and broke into an hysteric fit
of crying. His limbs failed him; and in the passion of his emotion he
would certainly have fallen to the deck if I had not put an arm about
him. His poor body was all crate and basket, ribs and spine; and the
wretched man's skeleton figure shook in my arms as if each sob were an
explosion. He laid his head on my shoulder at last, and I put my other
arm round him and held him to my breast. I love my country, and I thank
God for her daily that she is free, and has taught the world the lessons
of freedom, for that is the great and just pride of all Englishmen; but
I never blessed her in my heart as I did then.
“God bless the dear old land,” I said. “There is freedom there at
least.”
I did not know that I had spoken until he answered me.
“There is freedom there,” he said, in his foreign voice, broken with
sobs. “Thank God for freedom.”
The town lights were almost blotted out for me; but I hugged him and
patted him with less shame than I should have felt if he had been an
Englishman. He disengaged himself at last and shook me by the hand, and
began his promenade again. Before we had exchanged another word we were
slowing alongside the pier, and men were bustling along the deck
and racing beside us on the land. Brunow came on deck, and Hinge got
together our simple baggage.
We had but just landed when I saw two ladies, whom I recognized at once.
Miss Rossano and Lady Rollinson were waiting to meet us. Miss Rossano
came to me and took my hand in both hers.
“Thank you, Captain Fyffe,” she said. “My father is here?”
“You are my daughter?” said the count.
She bent and kissed him on the forehead gravely, and with perfect
self-possession. An onlooker, who had known nothing of the story, would
have guessed little from their meeting. They had a carriage in waiting,
and Miss Rossano led the count towards it.
“You will join us at the Lord Warden?” she said. And at that minute
Brunow approached her. She took his hand in both of her own, precisely
as she had taken mine; but entered the carriage without a word to him.
Now, I have said nothing lately of my feeling for Miss Rossano; but
anybody who reads this record may be sure that what had happened since I
had last seen her had not tended to put her out of my mind. I knew that
I was going to be very happy, or very unhappy, about her. I knew that
the power lay in her hands to make my life mainly cloud or mainly
sunshine. That was quite settled in my own mind by this time, and my
wife and I have laughed a thousand times and more about it. Yes; I knew
scarcely anything about her, and yet I was prepared to fight in the
assurance that she possessed every virtue and every grace of character
which I have since proved in her. This is the folly of love; but it is
at the same time that which makes it so beautiful. Most young men, and
most young women, live to be disillusioned. But I fell in love with
better fortune, if with no more discretion, than the average man
displays, and after many years of trial and happiness I know my wife to
be a better woman than I had power to guess all those years ago. And I
know, as every husband of a good wife knows, that I was a much better
man than I could ever have been without her influence.
All this leads me away from what I meant to say, which was simply that
Miss Rossano's wordless reception of Brunow made me furiously jealous of
him, and altogether dashed my happiness. She had spoken to me--_ergo_,
she could speak. She had not spoken to him--_ergo_, the emotion of
encountering him was too great for her. We had been six years married
when I told her of this.
I saw her with both hands reached out to help her father into the
carriage. I saw her beautiful face, so soft and serious and lofty in its
look that I have no words to say how it touched me. The carriage drove
away. Hinge shouldered our bit of luggage easily, and Brunow and I
walked up to the hotel side by side. We were met in the hall by a waiter
who asked us if we would go to Lady Rollinson's sitting-room in half an
hour, and then Brunow and I went to a private room of our own, and drank
each a pint of English ale, as every Englishman did on reaching the
Lord Warden in those days. It was a libation to liberty, the health of
welcome home which the loneliest traveller poured when he felt himself
upon his native land again after an absence however temporary.
When we had got through this ceremony we sat glum and silent enough,
and I have since thought it likely that Brunow was as much hurt at the
difference in our greetings as I had been. For Miss Rossano had thanked
me in words and had not spoken to him, and he was probably reading the
thing the other way about. But he was much more at home within himself
than I was, and at any time I don't think he was capable of any very
deep feeling. Perhaps I do him less than justice, and we are all apt to
think our sensations more striking and real than those of other people.
At the appointed time we went out into the corridor and walked to the
room which bore the number the waiter had already given us. I tapped
at the door, and Lady Rollinson admitted us. The count sat in a
plush-covered arm-chair and his daughter leaned above him with a hand on
either shoulder. The scene looked purely domestic, and if a stranger had
seen it he would have discovered nothing unusual in it. At the moment at
which I entered the count's hand strayed to his shoulder, and for a mere
instant touched the hand which rested there. His daughter's hand closed
upon it and held it, and she looked up with her beautiful face bright
with feeling.
“Be seated, gentlemen,” said the count, and we obeyed him. “I have tried
to thank you often, but I have never succeeded. I shall succeed less
than ever now, but I thank you.”
Lady Rollinson sat in one corner of the room with some trifle of woman's
work in her hand, pretending to be busy over it. She looked up at Miss
Rossano once or twice, and it was plain to see that she had been crying.
As for the girl herself, her eyes shone, her beautiful lips were apart,
her color came and went, and it would have been evident to the dullest
sight that she was deeply moved; but she showed no sign of having shed
tears, and looked altogether brave and exultant. It was a beautiful
thing to notice the caressing and protecting air with which she leaned
above the count; and it was strange to read the likeness which existed
between her bright young face and his worn lineaments.
We had paused more than once upon our journey, and he was in all
respects trimmed and dressed as became a gentleman. As he sat there with
his face alight and his whole manner animated, there was no trace of
the jail-bird period about him. I remembered the man I had first seen
at Pollia--the man with the colorless face, the sunken eyes, the matted
hair and beard--and was puzzled to identify him with the polished
gentleman who sat before me. And yet, in spite of the disguise, the
jail-bird was back again in as little time as it would take to snap your
thumb and finger. The cloud lowered upon him in a second, and he sat
biting his nails with an air altogether lost and furtive. I think his
daughter first read the change in him from my own look, for after one
swift glance at me she bent over him and gazed into his face. He seemed
unconscious of her presence or of ours.
“You were saying, dear--” she said, and there halted.
He looked up with an undecided half-return to his former brightness.
“I was saying--” he began, and then stopped, as if searching in his own
mind for the clew to what had passed a moment earlier.
“You were thanking Captain Fyffe and Mr. Brunow.”
“Gentlemen,” said the count, with a complete momentary repossession of
himself, “I know not how to thank you. You have seen enough already to
know that the life I have led this many year's has left its mark upon
me. I fail in words--sometimes, to tell you the whole truth, I fail in
feelings. There are moments when I have not even the heart to be glad
that I am free again. But you will understand, and you will forgive
because you understand. If words of gratitude do not come easily to my
tongue, it is not because you have not deserved them.”
“The man who really deserves the thanks of all of us,” I answered, “is
Corporal Hinge. Without him we should have been nonplussed; with
him everything fell out in the simplest way. We have encountered no
difficulty, and run no dangers.”
“But,” said Brunow, in his lightest and airiest fashion, as if he
disclaimed credit in the very act of claiming it, “I need hardly tell
Miss Rossano that in fulfilling the commission we accepted at her hands
we should have been delighted to encounter either. As it was we had the
most extraordinary good-fortune in the world. The whole thing has been a
chapter of happy accidents.”
“It pleases you to say so,” said the count; “but my daughter and I enjoy
no less the privilege of gratitude.”
The position was embarrassing; for the more I thought about it the more
I saw how little we had done, and how plain and simple a piece of duty
it had been to do that little.
“Your father is tired, Miss Rossano,” I said, taking the shortest way
out of the difficulty. “You and he, besides, will have a thousand
things to say to each other with which nobody else will have a right to
interfere.” I rose and held out my hand, and she came from behind her
father's chair to meet me with an exquisite frankness.
“You shall have my thanks, Captain Fyffe,” she said, “all my life long,
whether you disclaim them or not. And you too, Mr. Brunow. I suppose we
all go to town together?”
The count had risen from his seat while she spoke, and stood before us
with one hand stretched out to Brunow and the other to myself. “I am
poor in words,” he said, with a shaking voice; “I am poor in everything.
But believe me, gentlemen, I thank you, and shall thank you always. For
whatever of life is left to me I am yours.”
Two or three tears rolled over from his bright, sunken eyes, ran down
the deep-channelled line in his cheeks, which misery and solitude had
bitten there, and rested in his white mustache. He gripped our hands
hard, and, turning away from us, sat down again.
We said good-night in hushed voices, as if we were speaking in a church
or a sick-chamber, and came away.
Even at this, distance of time I am ashamed of my own sensations;
but when I got away to my own room my whole feeling was one of
disappointment and dissatisfaction. I had meant to do everything by
myself--to have had no rival, to have brought back Miss Rossano's father
unaided, and to have taken whatever gratitude was due for that service
entirely to myself. As it turned out, I had done nothing. The original
discovery of the count's whereabouts was entirely due to Brunow. Without
him the expedition would have been fruitless, and but for the pure
accident of Hinge's presence we should both have been helpless.
My bedroom window overlooked the sea, and I sat at it for three or four
hours, smoking and staring across the motionless waste of water before
the truth about myself occurred to me. When it came it brought as little
comfort as the truth is apt to bring. I saw that my whole purpose had
been to do something that should make me look noble and exceptional in
Miss Rossano's eyes, and that the recovery of a living man from that
infernal dungeon meant almost nothing in contrast with my own selfish
wishes.
It took a long time to swallow that pill, and it took a longer time yet
to digest it; but it had a wholesome effect upon me, and I was all the
better for it in the end.
When I got down into the public breakfast-room I found Brunow there in
the act of making inquiry of a waiter as to the hour of the arrival of
the London papers. I attached no particular importance to the fact at
the moment, but a few minutes later I passed him in the corridor and
found him repeating the same inquiry to another waiter; and a little
later, when we were seated at table together, he propounded the same
question to a third.
“You're in a hurry for news,” I said.
“I want to see what they've made of it,” he answered, smilingly. “The
local man down here seems to be a smartish sort of fellow, and I was
careful to see that he had the facts all right before he went away.”
“What local man? What facts?” I asked.
“My dear fellow,” said Brunow, smiling and waving his table-napkin in
the air, “we are people of distinction, and under the circumstances our
comings and goings are naturally chronicled. We shall have a reception
in town, I promise you.”
I understood by then what he had been doing, and I was almost as much
ashamed as if I had done it myself. He had taken the trouble to blaze
the whole affair in the newspapers; and when, an hour later, the train
which brought the London journals down to Dover arrived at the station,
I was there with him to meet it. He was so obviously satisfied with his
own action that it would have been useless to say a word to him. And yet
I fairly boiled over when I saw the travesty of the whole adventure with
which he had duped the _Times_. One would have supposed from the story
with which he had primed the representative of that journal that we
had run every conceivable kind of risk, and had, by our own courage and
cunning, surmounted every obstacle the wit of man could compass. All
this was absurd enough and annoying enough, but the introduction of
Miss Rossano's name into the narrative looked altogether wanton and
unwarranted, and, I dare say, now that I can recall the whole thing in
cool blood, that I was more disturbed and angry than I need have been.
Brunow took what I had to say with imperturbable good-humor, and was
altogether satisfied with himself.
“We shall have a crowd to meet us,” he prophesied. “There are thousands
of Italian refugees in London at this minute, and they will all be there
to cheer the illustrious Fyffe, and the no less illustrious Brunow. All
the exiled noblemen who live in Hatton Garden, and make London stand and
deliver at the barrel-organ's mouth, all the dukes and counts who shave
and teach dancing, and sell penny ices, and keep cheap restaurants, will
be there to welcome their delivered compatriot. The railway terminus
will be odorous with garlic and the humanity of Italy. Fyffe, my dear
fellow, we shall have a glorious day.”
When I told him, as I did, that he was a thick-skinned idiot and
braggart, he looked amazed. But I left him to his surprise, and took
what precautions I could against the newspaper falling into the hands of
Miss Rossano. We all travelled to London together at her request, and
I had some difficulty in persuading Brunow that I was in earnest in
insisting that she should see nothing of the nonsense he had caused to
be written and printed about our expedition.
“My dear fellow,” he declared, “the man was eager to get the news, and
would have printed three times as much if I had felt inclined to give it
him. You can't expect,” he went on, “to do a thing of this kind at this
time of day and not have it talked about. And of course it's best to let
these press fellows come to the fountain-head and get the plain, simple,
unadulterated truth.”
This, in face of the story he had told, was so monstrous, and, when I
came to think about it, so astonishingly like him, that I forbore to say
another word, except to warn him that the newspapers should not reach
Miss Rossano with my good-will.
He gave in at last, though he grumbled a great deal, and was evidently
as far from understanding me as I was from comprehending him.
We made a dull party on the whole, for nobody could help feeling that
the count and his daughter were absolute strangers to each other, or
that our presence was a little awkward at the time. It was ridiculous
to try to talk commonplace. It felt brutal and unsympathetic to sit in
silence, and almost equally brutal and unsympathetic to say a word of
what was nearest to all our hearts. But if we had been embarrassed on
the journey, all our memory of it vanished for the moment in the deeper
embarrassment of the reception which Brunow's babble had prepared for
us. His prophecy of what would happen was fulfilled, and more than
fulfilled. The platform of the terminus swarmed with people of every
nationality known to London, and everybody there present seemed crazy
with excitement. How, or by whom, our little party was singled out was
beyond my power to guess. But we were recognized in a moment, and in
another moment were swept asunder from each other amid such a polyglot
babel of voices as I had never heard before. People were laughing and
crying and cheering and fighting all at once, and I had a glimpse of
the count in the arms of a score of mustachioed, sallow-featured men who
were weeping and shouting, and hugging and kissing him and each other
like a pack of lunatics inspired with the instinct of welcome. I was
faring little better at the hands of the populace, though I cooled the
enthusiasm of more than one patriot, I am afraid, as I fought my way out
of the railway station. I escaped to a hackney carriage and found my way
to my own lodgings, accompanied by Hinge, who was as delighted at the
scene as I was angry at it. Before I had driven away from the terminus
I had seen from no great distance that the count, Miss Rossano, and Lady
Rollinson had safely reached her ladyship's carriage, which had been
telegraphed for before our leaving Dover. I had interfered to prevent
the taking out of the horses, and had seen the carriage start for home
amid a roar of “vivas” and “bravas” and “hurrahs.” The last I had seen
of Brunow was in the middle of a crowd, with whom he was exchanging
polyglot congratulations in the height of good spirits and enjoyment.
Hinge had not been three minutes in my room before he had made himself
master of the place. He installed himself without engagement or
invitation as my body-servant, and I found him in my bedroom hunting the
wardrobe and chest of drawers for a change of clothes.
“You'll find me 'andier when I gets to know my way about, sir,” he
said. “I was the colonel's batman for three years, and I can valley a
gentleman as well here as there, sir. You'll feel more like London when
you've got into these, sir.”
He pointed to the garments laid out symmetrically on the bed, and,
motioning to me to be seated, knelt down before me and began to unlace
my boots.
I was still in the act of dressing when a knock sounded at the
outer door; Hinge marched off to answer it, returning with a large
visiting-card edged with a line of mourning. He presented this to me,
and I read the words “Count Ruffiano,” printed very badly in blunt
script type.
I told Hinge to ask the visitor his business, and I learned that he came
direct from Miss Rossano with a message. I excused myself for a minute,
and hastily finished dressing.
The Count Ruffiano, a head and shoulders taller than myself, stood in
the middle of the room and bowed with surprising courtliness when I
entered. He was six feet seven or eight in stature, had an eagle beak, a
huge gray mustache, and a head of stiff, upstanding hair, close cropped
and mottled in jet black and snow white. His cheeks and chin had been
strange to the razor for a week; his linen was limp and discolored;
and his clothes, which were of foreign cut, had once been shapely and
fashionable, but were now seedy beyond belief. The hat he held in one
hand was a monument of shabbiness; but his habitual stoop had the air of
having been acquired by a constant courtly condescension. He was as lean
as his own walking-cane, and his air of condescending gentility put
a strange emphasis on his shabby clothes, and made them ten times as
noticeable as they would have been without it. And yet at the very first
sight of him I was persuaded that he was a gentleman.
“You are Captain Fyffe?” he said, with a marked Italian accent.
“That is my name,” I responded.
“You are possessed of mine,” he answered. “Permit me that I shake hands.
I read in your English _Times_ this morning of the arrival of the Conte
di Rossano. I have seen my friend, and, so far as I know, I am the
only survivor of the enterprise in which he lost his liberty. I lose no
moment in coming here to pay my homage to the disinterested valor which
gave my compatriot his freedom, I am, sir,” he bowed and extended his
hands with a smiling humility--“I am, sir, this many years a pensioner
on the bounty of Miss Rossano. She knows me as a comrade of the father
whom she has always until now thought of as lost to her. She has
pencilled for me a line or two on the back of my card.”
I held the card still, and, turning it over, I read: “This brave and
loyal gentleman is my father's one surviving friend. He wishes to know
you. V. R.”
I looked up after reading this brief but expressive message, and the
face of the gaunt spectre who stood before me was flushed, and his
head was in the air, as if he had read it with me, and was proud of the
testimony it conveyed on his behalf.
I asked him to be seated, and gave him to understand that anybody
carrying such a recommendation was welcome. He held out a long, lean
hand, and when I gave him my own stooped over it and kissed it.
“Sir,” he said, “you have done more than restore an individual to
liberty. You have reanimated a cause: you have inspired a people. There
are a thousand of us at this hour in London to whom the name of the
Conte di Rossano is a legend and an inspiration. Twenty years ago he
was our leader--a spirit of the subtlest and most indomitable. A soul
without fear, and of resource astonishingly varied. 'You have restored
him to us, and before a month is over his name will ring through Italy.
We are preparing for such a rising as we have never made. For years our
names have been written on the sands of failure. We shall write them
to-morrow on the lasting granite of success.”
He talked with any amount of fire and vigor, and in a voice pitched so
high that he might have been haranguing a multitude. He gesticulated
with the shabby old hat and the slim walking-stick as if he had been
wielding sword and buckler in an opera, and his narrow chest swelled
under the tight buttons of his ragged old frock-coat. Every English word
he spoke was supplemented by an Italian vowel, so that his language,
though it was perfectly fluent and correct, sounded quite foreign. His
extraordinary height and leanness made him grotesque to look at, but
neither the comicality of his figure nor his theatrical voice and
gesture could kill the fact that he was in earnest, and I felt an
immediate liking for him.
“I am not here,” he said, “on a visit of impertinence. I have an actual
object. I am charged by the Conte di Rossano to tell you that a meeting
has been already arranged to welcome him to London. It will be held
to-night, and he beseeches you through me to be present at it.”
I demurred at first, for I had no mind to be publicly embraced by the
tatterdemalion patriots I had seen in the crowd that morning. But when
my visitor incidentally mentioned the fact that Miss Rossano would
accompany her father, I gave him my promise at once.
The ragged nobleman promised to call and conduct me to the place of
meeting, and so went his way with a torrent of thanks and a rage of
gesticulation.