If a thunderbolt had burst through the ceiling of the little sitting room, the Professor could not have been more agitated. He had sunk down upon a chair, pale and shaking all over with the effect of the surprise.
"He was a young man?" he faltered.
His visitor sighed.
"It was five-and-twenty years ago," he answered slowly. "Five-and-twenty years rotting in a Roman prison. That has been my fate. I was a young man then. You see me now."
He held up his arms, and let them drop again heavily to his side. It was a gesture full of sad dramatic pathos, but in that little room there was no one to observe it, no one to pity him for those white hairs and deep-drawn lines. But that was nothing. It was not pity that he wanted.
There was silence. Both men were absorbed in their own thoughts. Signor Bartlezzi was thunderstruck and completely unnerved. The perspiration stood out upon his forehead, and he could feel his hands and legs shaking. This was a terrible and altogether unexpected blow to him. It was not the thought of that twenty-five years' lonely captivity which was oppressing him, so much as the fact that it was over—that the day of release had come, and that it was indeed Count Marioni who stood before him, alive and a free man. That was the serious part of it. Had it not been proclaimed that the imprisonment was for life? That had certainly been the sentence. A gleam of hope flashed in upon him. Perhaps he had escaped from prison. If so, the sooner he was back there the better.
"Was not the sentence for life?" he gasped.
The Count assented, shaking his head slowly.
"Yes, for life," he answered bitterly. "That was the sentence, imprisonment for life."
"Then you have escaped?"