He was a romantic-looking fellow, for all the character he gave himself—slender, shapely, with dusk mournful eyes and well-knit features. His mouth was peculiarly expressive, whether in smile or sobriety, and the voice, whose freedom he so coveted, was low-toned and caressing. He wore the nondescript military harness of his day, scarcely to be called a uniform, consisting prominently of a dark blue coat with white facings, high jack-boots, and a heavy sword at his side. His natural hair, of a deep brown and slightly grizzled with powder, was tied into a knot at the nape with a broad black ribbon, and on his head was a hat like his companion’s, but adorned with a pert black cockade.
“I am your friend, Tiretta,” said the prince. “That is why I will not let you talk too much. You will profit by it some day, when I have inured you to a wise reticence. The man of many words empties his heart of thoughts.”
“I could plead,” answered Tiretta, with a little curious amused glance at his companion, “that thoughts, like pea-blossom, throng the thicker being culled; only I fear——”
“Fear what?”
“That you would wish to think it over.”
Joseph laughed. “Well,” said he, “deliver yourself.”
“I can be reticent,” said Tiretta. “I will talk your Highness an hour by the clock to prove it; and all the time you will never guess the secret I am keeping from you.”
“What is that?”
“That you have a smut on your nose.”
The prince instinctively rubbed that august feature; then, his lips a little stiff, sat looking out of the window. Certainly his indulgence had brought this on himself. He had met and attached this Tiretta to his interests in Rome, where the stranger was known socially as il Trovatore. Already and always a student of humanity, there was something about the man, a mystery, a charm, which had curiously puzzled and attracted the royal young metaphysician. Not that Tiretta had made any mystery about himself. If he was a soldier of fortune, he was still a soldier and a gentleman. He had fought with distinction, on the Spanish side, in the wars of the Austrian succession; he had been present at the battle of Piacenza. It was nothing, in that “general post” of kingdoms and dynasties, that he should find himself presently hobnobbing on friendly terms with a scion of the house whose claims he had helped to contest. The European arena was all a welter of Habsburgs and Bourbons, crossing, interlacing, intermarrying, and having no particular aim in common but, like a litter of pigs, to empty among them the Continental trough. It did not seem much to matter which sat on what throne, so long as all available seats were occupied by themselves. A martial spirit, with no genius for genealogy, might very well, under such conditions, fight for the sake of his sword rather than his cause; and likely that had been the case with Tiretta. He was a mercenary, of the noble and romantic sort; a free-lance, whose independence of mind shone through all his undertakings. There is no permanence in the attachments of princes; but, for the moment at least, it was this very quality of “self-possession” in his friend which interested Joseph; and because it seemed the antithesis of his own. Tiretta possessed his own soul apart, not by philosophy, but by some secret bestowal of it in a dreamy Rosamund’s bower, to which only he knew the clue. When his eyes looked fixed and misty, one might surmise that he was far away in that enchanted spot, the spirit of which always appeared to speak in his voice and manner. There was something magnetic about the man, which, in the philosopher’s view, invited scientific analysis.