“Beg your pardon, sir. Mustn't talk about that, sir. Discipline, sir. Can see as you're an officer. That ought to be enough, sir.”
“Quite enough. Drink my health, if there's anything fit to drink it in. You don't object, Breschia?”
“Not at all,” the lieutenant answered. “You have done with him? Very good. Go. And let me hear of you no more, or I shall report you. To your general. Do you hear?”
The man saluted and went out.
“He is so good, and so stupid—that individual there,” said Breschia, gladly plunging back into a more familiar language than English, though I could see he was proud of having acquitted himself so well in that tongue. “He is so stupid and so good, but I do nothing but laugh at him. But Rodetzsky is a martinet, and if he were here just now the man would be in trouble.”
“What has he been doing?” I asked.
“He has been smuggling tobacco to the prisoners,” Breschia answered, and all of a sudden I found my heart beating like a hammer. Was this the man, I wondered, who had shown compassion to Miss Ros-sano's hapless father? And was he therefore the man of all others whom I needed to lay hands on? If that were so it seemed nothing less than a providence that the man should be English, for my ignorance of all the patois dialects of the country, and even of its main language, made the speech of the Austrian soldiers a sealed book to me.
Did it ever happen to you that you have met a person whom you have never heard of and never thought of before—a person who was destined to affect your fate in some way—and that from the first moment of your encounter you seemed fated to renew acquaintance with him? It has happened more than once to me, and it happened so in this case. That very afternoon, when I returned from a lonely tramp upon the hills, I found the man Hinge in the kitchen of the inn. He bore a note from Breschia to Brunow, and was awaiting the return of that gentleman, who was once again away in pursuit of the soi-disant baroness, but had promised to be back in time for dinner. When I entered the kitchen to demand a draught of milk, the man rose up and saluted me, and explained his errand. In the course of my ramble I had had hardly anything but this man in mind, and I had been planning to make use of him. When I met him all my plans seemed to go to pieces. I shall have to confess before I have done with it that I am the poorest plotter in the world. Give me something downright to do, and I will try to do it; but in dodges and evasions and pretences I have little skill indeed. I took the note from the man's hand and promised that Brunow should receive it. Then I drank the milk which the landlady's daughter had already set before me, and stood there tongue-tied and bewildered, not knowing how to begin. The man himself relieved me.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, taking his glass in his left hand, and saluting again with the right. “Your health, sir.”
“That's poor tack,” I said, nodding towards the glass. He had made a grimace over the wine.