“Si, signor; surely you know that? Don’t everybody know that he was killed in the outbreak—the very first day; knocked down, and then taken up again, and then hanged upon a lamp, because they said he was one of the—Oh, signor, I can’t tell you what they said about him. I only know they killed him; and he’s dead; and I’ve been put here to keep the house. That’s all I know about it.”
The young Lincoln’s Inn lawyer let his bag of gold drop heavily upon the doorstep. He felt that he had come to Rome upon an idle errand.
And an idle errand it proved. All he could learn of the Signor Jacopi was, that this individual was an Algerine Jew, who had settled in the Holy City and embraced the Holy Faith; that he had practised law—that department of it which in London would have entitled him to the appellation of a “thieves’ lawyer;” that, furthermore, he was accustomed to long and mysterious absences from his office; but where, or wherefore, there was none to tell, since no one could be found who professed intimacy with him.
In consequence of some unexplained act, he had made himself obnoxious to the mob—during the first hours of the revolutionary outbreak—and had fallen a victim to their fury. These, and a few other like facts, were all that the London lawyer could learn about his professional brother of Rome. But not one item of information to assist him in the errand upon which he had been sent to the Eternal City.
Chapter Fifty Seven.
A Fruitless Search.
What was the next thing to be done? This was the inquiry which Lawson junior put to himself, as he sat reflecting in his locanda.