It was a time and situation which induced many burning thoughts and sad reflections to chase each other through the youth’s brain, as he awaited impatiently the clouding of the moon. From the elevated point on which he stood nearly the whole city lay spread out at his feet, its white terraces, domes, and minarets shining like silver in the pale light, and contrasting vividly with the dark blue bay lying between it and the distant range of the Jurjura mountains. Everything was profoundly calm, quiet, and peaceful, so that he found it difficult to believe in the fierce passions, black villainy, horrible cruelty, and intolerable suffering which seethed below. For some time his eyes rested on the palace of the Dey, and he thought of his father and Lucien with deep anxiety.
Then they wandered to the hated Bagnio, and he thought with pity of the miserable victims confined there, and of the hundreds of other Christian men and women who toiled in hopeless slavery in and around the pirate city. Passing onward, his eyes rested on the light-house and fortifications of the port, and he wondered whether any of the powerful nations of the earth would ever have the common-sense to send a fleet to blow such a wasps’ nest into unimaginable atoms!
At this point his thoughts were interrupted by the darkening of the moon by a thick cloud, and the sudden descent of deep shadow on the town—as if all hope in such a blessed consummation were forbidden.
Turning at once to the parapet of the terrace, he mounted, but paused a moment, as he endeavoured to gauge the distance of the opposite wall, and gazed into the black gulf below. Bacri had told him that the space was six feet. In the darkness that now prevailed it appeared twenty. He would have ventured it in the circumstances had it been sixty!
Collecting all his energies and courage, he made a bound forward that might have roused the envy of an acrobat, and cleared not only the space between but the parapet beyond, coming down with an awful crash into the midst of a certain box-garden, which was the special pride of the owner of the mansion.
Poor Mariano leaped up in horror, and listened with dread, but suddenly remembering that he now stood on what Bacri had termed friendly ground, he recovered self-possession and sought for the door on the roof. Finding it after some trouble, he knocked gently.
It was opened much sooner and more violently than he had anticipated, and a tall man springing out seized him by the throat in a grasp like a vice, and held a gleaming dagger to his breast.
In other circumstances Mariano would certainly have engaged in a struggle for the dagger, but remembering Angela and the Jew’s warning, he gave back, and said in French, as well as the vice-like grip would allow—
“A friend.”
“Truly,” replied the man gruffly, in Lingua Franca, “thy knock might imply friendship, but thine appearance here at such an hour requires more explanation than a mere assurance.”