“Your father is tired, Miss Rossano,” I said, taking the shortest way out of the difficulty. “You and he, besides, will have a thousand things to say to each other with which nobody else will have a right to interfere.” I rose and held out my hand, and she came from behind her father's chair to meet me with an exquisite frankness.
“You shall have my thanks, Captain Fyffe,” she said, “all my life long, whether you disclaim them or not. And you too, Mr. Brunow. I suppose we all go to town together?”
The count had risen from his seat while she spoke, and stood before us with one hand stretched out to Brunow and the other to myself. “I am poor in words,” he said, with a shaking voice; “I am poor in everything. But believe me, gentlemen, I thank you, and shall thank you always. For whatever of life is left to me I am yours.”
Two or three tears rolled over from his bright, sunken eyes, ran down the deep-channelled line in his cheeks, which misery and solitude had bitten there, and rested in his white mustache. He gripped our hands hard, and, turning away from us, sat down again.
We said good-night in hushed voices, as if we were speaking in a church or a sick-chamber, and came away.
Even at this, distance of time I am ashamed of my own sensations; but when I got away to my own room my whole feeling was one of disappointment and dissatisfaction. I had meant to do everything by myself—to have had no rival, to have brought back Miss Rossano's father unaided, and to have taken whatever gratitude was due for that service entirely to myself. As it turned out, I had done nothing. The original discovery of the count's whereabouts was entirely due to Brunow. Without him the expedition would have been fruitless, and but for the pure accident of Hinge's presence we should both have been helpless.
My bedroom window overlooked the sea, and I sat at it for three or four hours, smoking and staring across the motionless waste of water before the truth about myself occurred to me. When it came it brought as little comfort as the truth is apt to bring. I saw that my whole purpose had been to do something that should make me look noble and exceptional in Miss Rossano's eyes, and that the recovery of a living man from that infernal dungeon meant almost nothing in contrast with my own selfish wishes.
It took a long time to swallow that pill, and it took a longer time yet to digest it; but it had a wholesome effect upon me, and I was all the better for it in the end.
When I got down into the public breakfast-room I found Brunow there in the act of making inquiry of a waiter as to the hour of the arrival of the London papers. I attached no particular importance to the fact at the moment, but a few minutes later I passed him in the corridor and found him repeating the same inquiry to another waiter; and a little later, when we were seated at table together, he propounded the same question to a third.
“You're in a hurry for news,” I said.