Hinge had not been three minutes in my room before he had made himself master of the place. He installed himself without engagement or invitation as my body-servant, and I found him in my bedroom hunting the wardrobe and chest of drawers for a change of clothes.
“You'll find me 'andier when I gets to know my way about, sir,” he said. “I was the colonel's batman for three years, and I can valley a gentleman as well here as there, sir. You'll feel more like London when you've got into these, sir.”
He pointed to the garments laid out symmetrically on the bed, and, motioning to me to be seated, knelt down before me and began to unlace my boots.
I was still in the act of dressing when a knock sounded at the outer door; Hinge marched off to answer it, returning with a large visiting-card edged with a line of mourning. He presented this to me, and I read the words “Count Ruffiano,” printed very badly in blunt script type.
I told Hinge to ask the visitor his business, and I learned that he came direct from Miss Rossano with a message. I excused myself for a minute, and hastily finished dressing.
The Count Ruffiano, a head and shoulders taller than myself, stood in the middle of the room and bowed with surprising courtliness when I entered. He was six feet seven or eight in stature, had an eagle beak, a huge gray mustache, and a head of stiff, upstanding hair, close cropped and mottled in jet black and snow white. His cheeks and chin had been strange to the razor for a week; his linen was limp and discolored; and his clothes, which were of foreign cut, had once been shapely and fashionable, but were now seedy beyond belief. The hat he held in one hand was a monument of shabbiness; but his habitual stoop had the air of having been acquired by a constant courtly condescension. He was as lean as his own walking-cane, and his air of condescending gentility put a strange emphasis on his shabby clothes, and made them ten times as noticeable as they would have been without it. And yet at the very first sight of him I was persuaded that he was a gentleman.
“You are Captain Fyffe?” he said, with a marked Italian accent.
“That is my name,” I responded.
“You are possessed of mine,” he answered. “Permit me that I shake hands. I read in your English Times this morning of the arrival of the Conte di Rossano. I have seen my friend, and, so far as I know, I am the only survivor of the enterprise in which he lost his liberty. I lose no moment in coming here to pay my homage to the disinterested valor which gave my compatriot his freedom, I am, sir,” he bowed and extended his hands with a smiling humility—“I am, sir, this many years a pensioner on the bounty of Miss Rossano. She knows me as a comrade of the father whom she has always until now thought of as lost to her. She has pencilled for me a line or two on the back of my card.”
I held the card still, and, turning it over, I read: “This brave and loyal gentleman is my father's one surviving friend. He wishes to know you. V. R.”