So the professor continued to talk until they reached the shore. Frank was not called upon to speak. The professor was talking to himself rather than to him, continuing the habit of which the officer of the prison had spoken. As yet his brain was working in its old groove. Once on the strand, he stood silently gazing for two or three minutes, then he passed his hand across his forehead, and with an evident effort broke the chain of his thoughts and turned to Frank.
“Strange talk, no doubt you are thinking, Frank, for a man so suddenly and unexpectedly released from a living grave; but you see, lad, that the body can be emancipated more quickly than the mind from its bonds, and I am as one awaking from a deep sleep and still wondering whether it is I myself, and how I came to be here, and what has happened to me. I fear that it will be some time before I can quite shake off my dreams. Now, lad, once more tell me about my wife and your mother. But no, you have told me that they are well. You have said naught of your father, save that he is not here. Where is he? and how is he?”
“I can answer neither question, grandfather. He, like you, has been lost to us; he disappeared a few months after you did, and we were led to believe that he was killed.”
The professor was himself again in an instant. The mood that had dominated him was shaken off, and he was keen, sharp, and alert again, as Frank remembered him.
“He is lost?” he repeated: “you heard that he was killed? How was it? tell me everything. In the early days of my imprisonment, when I thought of many things outside the walls of my gaol, one thing troubled me more than others. My wife had her daughter; no harm would come to her, save the first grief at my loss and the slow process of hope dying out. My daughter had everything that a woman could wish to make her happy; but your father, I knew him so well, he would not rest when the days passed and no news of me came—he would move heaven and earth to find me; and a man in this country who dares to enquire after a political prisoner incurs no small danger. Is it so that he was missing? Tell me all, and spare no detail; we have the rest of the day before us. We will sit down on this seat. Now begin.”
Frank told, at length, how, on the news of the professor’s disappearance, his father had interested the English government in the matter, and how to all enquiries made the government of Naples had replied that they knew nothing whatever concerning his disappearance; and how, at last, he himself started with an order obtained from Naples for him to search all the prisons of southern Italy.
“It was just like him; it was noble and chivalrous,” the professor said; “but he should have known better. An Englishman unacquainted with Italy might have believed that with such an order he might safely search for one who he suspected was lying in a Neapolitan prison, but your father should have known better. Notice would assuredly be sent before he arrived; and had he come here, for example, I should a week before have been carried away up into the mountains, till he had gone. He would have been shown the register of prisoners, he would not have found my name among them, he would have been told that no such person as he described had ever been confined here,—it was hopeless. But go on with your story.”
Frank told how his father had visited several prisons, and how he wrote letters, exposing their horrors, that had appeared in the English papers, and had created an immense impression throughout the country.
“It was mad of him,” the professor murmured; “noble, but mad.”
Then Frank told how the news came of his being carried off by brigands, of the steps that had been taken, of the evidence of the courier who saw him fall, and of some of his effects being found in the hut on the mountain when this was captured and the brigand chief killed, of the report given by one of the prisoners that his father had died and been buried shortly after he was taken there, and of the vain search that had been made for his body.