"How!--Do you not call it a miracle, Signor Andrea, that two such men as you and I should be deceived, as we were beyond all doubt, by this knave of a French corsair? I look upon it as so great a miracle myself, that it ought to follow instead of going before its companion."
To this Andrea made an answer suitable to his greater information, and the discourse took its usual direction toward the means of doing something to relieve the two functionaries from the stigma that they mutually felt now rested on their sagacity, and that, too, as this sagacity might be considered conjointly or individually.
It was probably owing to this fever of the mind that the vice-governatore, a man usually so simple and confiding, was now so suspicious and keen-sighted. The presence of Carlo Giuntotardi and Ghita had at first struck him as a little out of the common way; and though he could not distinguish their faces by the light of the moon and at the distance at which they were placed in the yawl, he fancied from the first that his old acquaintances were in the boat the ship was towing. Now Andrea Barrofaldi certainly had never before that day connected Ghita or her uncle in any manner with Raoul Yvard; but it was beyond dispute that the mysterious manner in which they disappeared from the island had excited some remarks; and in his present state of mind it was not an extraordinary circumstance that he had some distant and vague glimmerings of the truth. But for Raoul's indiscreet exclamations, however, nothing probably would have come of these indistinct fancies; and we are to refer all that followed to those unguarded outbreakings of the Frenchman's humor, rather than to any very clear process of ratiocination on the part of the vice-governatore.
Just as Cuffe made the declaration last recorded, Andrea stepped up to the spot where he and Griffin were conversing apart and whispered a few words in the ear of the latter.
"The d--l!" exclaimed the lieutenant, in English. "If what the vice-governatore tells me be true, Captain Cuffe, the work is half done to our hands!"
"Aye, the veechy is a good fellow at the bottom, Griffin; though he'll never burn the bay of Naples. What has he to say now?"
Griffin led his captain a little aside and conferred a moment with him alone. Orders were then passed to the officer of the watch, when Cuffe and his companions went below like men in a hurry.
CHAPTER XVI.
"What countryman, I pray?"
"Of Mantua."
"Of Mantua, Sir?--marry, God forbid
And come to Papua, careless of your life?"
Taming of the Shrew.