“Very well. Until another time.”
“Until very soon.”
The two conspirators shook hands by way of a farewell, and wrapping themselves to their eyes in their cloaks, they glided along the narrow alleyways.
CHAPTER XXIX
A CONFERENCE
A FEW days later, at nine-thirty in the evening, Quentin climbed the stairs of a house on the Calle del Cister.
He entered the second floor, traversed the lay-brother’s school—a large room with tables in rows and placards on the walls—and passed into the Lodge, which was a garret with a table at one end and an oil lamp that provided the only light.
Quentin could not tell whether the honourable Masons there assembled were in a white meeting or coloured meeting; the session must have been over, for the President, Don Paco, was perorating—though now deprived of his presidential dignity—among the rabble of the Aventine Hill.
Don Paco was a veritable river of words. All of the stock revolutionary phrases came fluently to his lips. “The rights of a citizen,”—“the ominous yoke of reaction” ... “the heroic efforts of our fathers” ..., “a just punishment for his perversity”....
Don Paco pronounced all these phrases as though by the mere act of saying them, they were realized.
If they charged one of the Masonic brothers with a dangerous mission, and he made the excuse of having a family, Don Paco said, as Cato would have remarked: