Then little Paolo stood forth, with a courage which was not his own, and addressed the sailors. He took off his hat with the utmost politeness and remonstrated. Harry, beginning, by dint of hearing them repeated, to distinguish the words, at last understood that “Questo Signor” must mean himself; but the sailors treated the remonstrance with contempt. The other one took hold of the girl by the other arm, while she screamed, and her companion raved and scolded at them, pushing and struggling with all her might. Harry stepped forward into the moonlight. He lifted up his clenched fist and his big bass voice. “Let go that girl,” he shouted in good English, with a voice that roused all the echoes. The men did not know a word he said; but they understood him, which was more to the purpose. They let go their hold in a minute, and stood staring at the intruder as sheepishly as any Englishmen could have done, and perhaps also with a touch of shame. Little Paolo, trembling yet triumphant, kept close to the champion, while he stood and faced them, ready for whatever might happen. It was not for nothing that Harry was a Joscelyn. He stood well up to them with a watchful eye and a ready arm. The women had escaped under cover of this unexpected interposition from their first assailants, but another pursuer by this time had got upon their track. “Let’s have a look at your face, my pretty lass,” this lout said, as he rolled along. Harry’s blood was up in a moment. “Oh, by Jove!” he cried, as if the sound of his native tongue had been the last aggravation, “this is too much. I know what to say to you, at least, my fine fellow,” and he turned upon his countryman like lightning, and promptly knocked him down. “I am not going to stand any nonsense from you,” he said.
It was the affair of a moment—no more. The women flew along the street, disappearing up the nearest opening. Harry strode on after them with his blood up, but walking with the most dignified tranquillity. He would not even turn round to see what had happened. “If he thought I was going to stand him,” he said, as he went along, “that fellow, by Jove! but he was in the wrong box.” As for little Paolo, between fright and admiration, he was at his wit’s end. He danced along, now hurrying Harry on, now facing the other way, walking backwards to keep the other party in sight, and uttering alarmed entreaties. “Run! run! What if you ’ave kill him?” he cried. “Vergene Santissima! they are coming. You ’ave done it now, you ’ave done it, and no one to help. Per Bacco! and he goes as if it were a festa. Run, Mister, run!”
“I told you not to call me Mister,” said Harry, walking on with perfect coolness and at his ordinary pace. Paolo was half beside himself. “Perhaps you have kill a man,” he cried, “and you stop to set right my English—at such a moment——”
“Pooh!” said Harry; he would not have quickened his steps for a fortune. “Don’t you know the beggar is an Englishman? A broken head won’t hurt him. Let’s keep the women in sight, they might get into more trouble.” Paolo followed him, trembling and hurried as they got further off; but the noisy sailors were busy about their fallen comrade, and made no attempt to follow. They were too much startled by the summary proceedings of the stranger, and kept back by a certain sense of justice which seldom fails in such an affray. The little Italian kept close to Harry like a dog, rushing about him, now a little in advance, now a little behind. “He ’ave pick himself up,” he said, looking back. “Dio! how the English understand each other! He is not kill.”
“Killed!” cried Harry, contemptuously. “It takes more than that to kill an Englishman, even a beast like that fellow. You may palaver with your own kind, but I know what to do with mine. Come along, Thompson. Where have those women gone?”
Here Paolo caught him by the arm, dragging him into the narrow street by which the flying figures had disappeared. One side of it was in almost perfect darkness, while the other was white and brilliant in the moonlight. “You like to know who it was,” he said. “Per Bacco! I know.”
“It does not matter to me who it was,” said Harry, “so long as they are safe, that is all I care for. Women have no business to be out so late at night.”
At this Paolo nodded his head a great many times in assent. “But that is English too,” he said. “How you are strange! You let a young lady go in the street, and you kill a man, and never think more of it! and the man when he is kill, get up and walk away instead of to avenge himself! You are strange, very strange. I understand you very well, for I am an English too.”
After this somewhat startling incident, however, they did not linger long on their way. It had stirred the blood in Harry’s veins and given him the new start he wanted. There is nothing like a new incident for familiarising the mind with any great change in this life. Hitherto he had thought of nothing but his own transmogrification. Now he had something else to think of. He got back to his inn unmolested and uninterrupted, and he found his dreary little room not so dreary when it became a shelter for his fatigue, and a refuge in which to think over the strange excitement of this first new day.