Therewithin lies the whole tragedy of Pissani and a little English maid. Early in the February of that year the man had written, hurried and agitated, to Mrs. Please, to announce that the moment was ripe, the tree of despotism tottering to its fall, to be replaced by the more fruitful one of Liberty; and to urge her to come at once, if she would see consummated the glorious work for which they had both laboured so long and so self-sacrificially. No doubt that he believed in her single-heartedness, as she, in another way, in his. He assured her that she might be, if she would, a second Pucelle. He fired her vanity: he rekindled her passion. With characteristic impetuosity, she broke up her household, and (here figures either her blindness or her imperious self-confidence) prepared to transport it, stock and block, to the scene of her anticipated triumphs. She had no difficulty in procuring passports. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that she was intrusted with despatches for General Berthier, then occupying Rome. At any rate she, in company with Mademoiselle Grant and her inseparable Gogo, embarked at Marseilles for Civita Vecchia; were in the Eternal City before the end of the month; and had thence, travelling again by sea, reached Naples without accident by the middle of March. Here, by preconcerted arrangement (as regarded only herself and the Neapolitan, however) they were met by Pissani, who conducted them in the first instance to a little cabaret in the dark quarters near the Arsenal. And here, from the glooms of that dingy rendezvous, Mrs. Please is pleased to enter again upon her own story.
B. C.
[Note.—To the curious in matters of personal appearance, the following extract from the Roper Correspondence (Hicks & Beach, London, 1832) may be of interest. The passage occurs in a letter—dated Paris, January 1798—from the Hon. Robert Roper to his cousin Lord Carillon, and runs as follows:—
“I have renewed my acquaintance with the Please, who is twenty-seven, and nothing if not the ripe fruit of her promise. Dost remember, Dick, how she was your ‘Long-legged Hebe’? I tell you, sir, she is by Jove out of Leda, a very Helen. She moults her years, like the swan her father its feathers, and is always ready with a virgin bosom of down for the next quilt. The same sprightly insolence; the same perfect irregularity of feature—and conduct; the same zeal in making the interests of others her own—and the profits thereof. Her face retains its pretty moue; her hair has only ripened a little, like corn. She is still slender, as we remember her—in everything now but the essentials; still as pale, with the flawless eyebrows and bob-cherry lips. I would be sentimental; but, alack! she tells me our past is put away in a little bag like lavender. ‘Would you wish the gift of it, sir,’ she says, ‘to lay among your bed-linen? ’Tis grown too scentless for my use. Il n’y a si bonne compagnie qu’on ne quitte.’ O, Dick, to be rebuked for one’s years, and by an immortal! O, Dick, for the time ‘when wheat is green and hawthorn buds appear’! Why may not our feet continue to dance with our hearts? I have a débutante always within my breast, and because I am forty, she must be a wallflower forsooth!
“She has realised at last la grande passion, she tells me. She is perfectly frank. He is gone elsewhere, and she only waits for his whistle to follow. This to me! She has her little salon, as pretty as a bonbon box, and a dozen of powdered ministers at her feet. The morning after our meeting I breakfasted with her and her friend. You recall the little soft brunette, with the motherly eyes and the caressing bashfulness? She is still with her, the foil, as of old, to her ladyship, and virgin soil to this day, I believe.... Madam took her tea laced with a little eau de vie. There was a curious legless monster in waiting: something between a dumb-waiter and a Covent Garden porter. She defers to him in everything; and he growls.”]
XXV.
I DECLARE FOR THE KING
We were landed upon the Mole, not far from the Castel Nuovo, a vast, sullen pile like the Bastille, on whose ruins I had danced. It was a dark and rainy night. Pissani, who had been squatted amongst some boats down by the water, rose, came forward in two or three swift strides, and exclaimed, in an eager, agitated undertone, “Mother of God! You are accompanied?”
I could not see his face, but my heart responded unerringly to the dear remembered tones. I went quickly to him, and put up my hands to his breast.
“Nicola mio—my brother, my comrade!” I whispered, “by all that, next to you, I hold most dear.”
“What? Whom?” he asked, in a low voice of amazement. “Not—?”