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.’”
I called Gogo, and hurriedly instructed him—