[Original]
‘I have it on the witnessing of these two madmen,’ said Monsieur Blandois, otherwise Lagnier, otherwise Rigaud, ‘that you want me, brother-bird. Here I am!’
Glancing round contemptuously at the bedstead, which was turned up by day, he leaned his back against it as a resting-place, without removing his hat from his head, and stood defiantly lounging with his hands in his pockets.
‘You villain of ill-omen!’ said Arthur. ‘You have purposely cast a dreadful suspicion upon my mother’s house. Why have you done it? What prompted you to the devilish invention?’
Monsieur Rigaud, after frowning at him for a moment, laughed. ‘Hear this noble gentleman! Listen, all the world, to this creature of Virtue! But take care, take care. It is possible, my friend, that your ardour is a little compromising. Holy Blue! It is possible.’
‘Signore!’ interposed Cavalletto, also addressing Arthur: ‘for to commence, hear me! I received your instructions to find him, Rigaud; is it not?’
‘It is the truth.’
‘I go, consequentementally,’—it would have given Mrs Plornish great concern if she could have been persuaded that his occasional lengthening of an adverb in this way, was the chief fault of his English,—‘first among my countrymen. I ask them what news in Londra, of foreigners arrived. Then I go among the French. Then I go among the Germans. They all tell me. The great part of us know well the other, and they all tell me. But!—no person can tell me nothing of him, Rigaud. Fifteen times,’ said Cavalletto, thrice throwing out his left hand with all its fingers spread, and doing it so rapidly that the sense of sight could hardly follow the action, ‘I ask of him in every place where go the foreigners; and fifteen times,’ repeating the same swift performance, ‘they know nothing. But!—’
At this significant Italian rest on the word ‘But,’ his backhanded shake of his right forefinger came into play; a very little, and very cautiously.
‘But!—After a long time when I have not been able to find that he is here in Londra, some one tells me of a soldier with white hair—hey?—not hair like this that he carries—white—who lives retired secrettementally, in a certain place. But!—’ with another rest upon the word, ‘who sometimes in the after-dinner, walks, and smokes. It is necessary, as they say in Italy (and as they know, poor people), to have patience. I have patience. I ask where is this certain place. One. believes it is here, one believes it is there. Eh well! It is not here, it is not there. I wait patientissamentally. At last I find it. Then I watch; then I hide, until he walks and smokes. He is a soldier with grey hair—But!—’ a very decided rest indeed, and a very vigorous play from side to side of the back-handed forefinger—‘he is also this man that you see.’