“Excuse me,” he said to Bixio and the syndic: “I must shake Signor Forli by the hand before I go farther into this.”
As he hurried out, Frank said,—“I have not told him about my father yet, sir. He suggested himself that we should go down together to the sea-shore, where we could talk matters over quietly; and I came in partly to ask you if you would require my services for the next hour or two?”
“Certainly not, Percival. Yes, I will be careful; it would be a shock to him to be told suddenly that your father had lost his life in his search for him.”
Led by Frank, he hurried to the spot where the professor was standing, quietly regarding the Garibaldians laughing and chatting, and the groups of the Neapolitan troops, who, now disarmed, were standing talking together with disheartened and sombre faces.
“Ah, professor,” he exclaimed, as he came up to him; “glad indeed am I that you have been found and rescued. Your friends were right in not despairing of you. It seems an age since we parted twelve years ago at Rome. You are little changed. I feared that if found you would be like so many of the others whose prison doors we have opened—mere wrecks of themselves.”
“Nor have you changed much,” Signor Forli said, as he stood holding the general’s hand; “a line or two on the forehead, but that is all. And so you have taken up again the work that seemed postponed for another century at Rome?”
“Yes; and this time I hope that all Italy will be freed. Now, old friend, you must excuse me for the present—I am full of business; this evening we must have a long talk together; much has happened in the three years that have passed since you disappeared. You can keep this youngster with you. He has well earned a day’s holiday.” So saying, Garibaldi hurried off.
CHAPTER XV.
THE ADVANCE FROM REGGIO.
PROFESSOR FORLI was silent until he and Frank had passed out through the gate of the castle, then he took a long breath.
“The air of freedom,” he said, “is no different from that I have breathed daily on the walls there, for well-nigh three years, and yet it seems different. It is a comfort that my prison lay in this fair spot, and not in some place where I could see but little beyond the walls. Often and often have I thanked God that it was so, and that, even as a free man and with the world before me, I could see no more lovely scene than this. There was change, too: there was the passage of the ships; I used to wonder where each was sailing; and about the passengers, and how hopefully many of these were going abroad to strange countries in search of fortunes, and how few were returning with their hopes fully satisfied. I smiled sometimes to think of the struggle for wealth and advancement going on in the world round me, while I had no need to think of the future; but my needs, always, as you know, few and simple, were ministered to; and though cut off from converse with all around me, I had the best company in the world in my cell. How thankful I was that my memory was so good—that I could discourse with the great men of the world, could talk with Plato and argue with Demosthenes; could discuss old age with Cicero, or travel with either Homer or Virgil; visit the Inferno with Dante, or the Heavens with Milton; knew by heart many of the masterpieces of Shakespeare and Goethe, and could laugh over the fun of Terence and Plutarch: it was a grand company.”