“Yes, all right,” said he, taking it. It was in these few words.
“They find it can be done—make tracks.
“Drayton”
“They find it can be done,” muttered he. “Which means it is legal to apprehend me. Well, I supposed as much. I never reckoned on immunity; and as to getting away, I’m readier for it, and better provided too, than you think for, Master Algernon. Indeed, I can’t well say what infatuation binds me to this spot, apart from the peril that attends it. I don’t know that I am very much what is called in love with Florence, though I’d certainly marry her if she’d have me; but for that there are, what the lady novelists call, ‘mixed motives,’ and I rather suspect it is not with any especial or exclusive regard for her happiness that I’d enter into the holy bonds. I should like to consult some competent authority on the physiology of hatred—why it is that, though scores of fellows have injured me deeply in life, I never bore any, no, nor the whole of them collectively, the ill will that I feel for that man. He has taken towards me a tone that none have ever dared to take. He menaces me! Fifty have wronged, none have ever threatened me. He who threatens, assumes to be your master, to dictate the terms of his forbearance, and to declare under what conditions he will spare you. Now, Master Loyd, I can’t say if this be a part to suit your powers, but I know well, the other is one which in no way is adapted to mine. Nature has endowed me with a variety of excellent qualities, but, somehow, in the hurry of her benevolence, she forgot patience! I suppose one can’t have everything!”
While he thus mused and speculated, the boat swept smoothly over the lake, and Onofrio, not remarking the little attention Calvert vouchsafed to him, went on talking of “I Grangeri” as the most interesting subject he could think of. At last Calvert’s notice was drawn to his words by hearing how the old lady had agreed to take the villa for a year, with the power of continuing to reside there longer if she were so minded.
The compact had been made only the day before, after Calvert had started for Milan, evidently—to his thinking—showing that it had been done with reference to something in Loyd’s last letter. “Strange that she did not consult me upon it,” thought he; “I who have been her chief counsellor on everything. Perhaps the lease of my confidence has expired. But how does it matter? A few hours more, and all these people shall be no more to me than the lazy cloud that is hanging about the mountain-top. They may live or die, or marry or mourn, and all be as nothing to me—as if I had never met them. And what shall I be to them, I wonder?” cried he, with a bitter laugh; “a very dreadful dream, I suppose; something like the memory of a shipwreck, or a fire from which they escaped without any consciousness of the means that rescued them! A horrid nightmare whose terrors always come back in days of depression and illness. At all events, I shall not be ‘poor Calvert,’ ‘that much to be pitied creature, who really had some good in him.’ No, I shall certainly be spared all commiseration of that kind, and they’ll no more recur willingly to my memory than they’ll celebrate the anniversary of some day that brought them shame and misfortune.
“Now then, for my positively last appearance in my present line of character! And yonder I see the old dame on the look-out for me; she certainly has some object in meeting me before her nieces shall know it—Land me in that nook there, Onofrio, and wait for me.”
“I have been very impatient for your coming,” said she, as he stepped on shore; “I have so much to say to you; but, first of all, read this. It is from the vicar.”
The letter was not more than a few lines, and to this purport: he was about to quit the home he had lived in for more than thirty years, and was so overwhelmed with sorrow and distress, that he really could not address his thoughts to any case but the sad one before him. “‘All these calamities have fallen upon us together; for although,’ he wrote, ‘Joe’s departure is the first step on the road to future fortune, it is still separation, and at our age who is to say if we shall ever see him again?’”
“Skip the pathetic bit, and come to this. What have we here about the P. and O. steamers?” cried Calvert.
“‘Through the great kindness of the Secretary of State, Joe has obtained a free passage out—a favour as I hear very rarely granted—and he means to pay you a flying visit; leaving this on Tuesday, to be with you on Saturday, and, by repairing to Leghorn on the following Wednesday, to catch the packet at Malta. This will give him three entire days with you, which, though they be stolen from us, neither his mother nor myself have the heart to refuse him. Poor fellow, he tries to believe—perhaps he does believe—that we are all to meet again in happiness and comfort, and I do my best not to discourage him; but I am now verging on seventy—‘”