“They mean to strike a blow at me?”
“Yes, by criticising the army, and by bringing forward some curious story about the plans of the fortress of Tresenta in the Alps being sold to France. Do you know anything about it?”
“Yes. The plans have unfortunately been given to France by a captain named Solaro, who has been dismissed the army and sent to prison. So they intend to make political capital out of that, do they?”
“It seems so,” was the other’s answer.
Morini slowly repaced the room, his chin upon his breast, deep in thought, the dead silence being broken only by his footsteps upon the marble floor.
“Borselli has formed a plot against me—a deep, dastardly plot!” he exclaimed in a desperate tone, halting again suddenly, a determined look upon his grey features. “He intends that I shall fall. But you, Vito, can save me, if you will—you know you can. With a little of this,” and he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, “you can unite the groups as you did before, and show the country that the Minister of War still possesses the confidence of the kingdom.”
“I doubt it,” answered Ricci dubiously.
“But you will not desert me now?” implored His Excellency, laying his hand firmly upon the deputy’s shoulder. “Recollect the past, Vito. Remember the day when you, a lieutenant, prevented my horse throwing me at the manoeuvres in the Chianti. That was long ago, but both of us have had cause to congratulate ourselves upon that meeting.”
Ricci nodded. He recollected well how the Minister, then only a few months in office, had allowed him to resign from the army and complete his studies as an advocate, and how, by a clever stroke of political jobbery, he had been elected deputy for Asti, in order that he should serve the Minister as his secret agent in the Camera. He had become rich in a few years, owing to the various grants and concessions His Excellency had made to him, yet somehow his personal extravagance kept him always poor, always in want of money. He feared to calculate how much of the secret service funds had already found its way into his pocket, and yet with wily ingenuity he was there again for a grant, not from the secret service fund—for he knew well that the sum voted for the present year was already exhausted—but from Camillo Morini’s own private purse.
Vito Ricci, with all the outward appearance of a gentleman, was utterly unscrupulous. He worked in the Camera for the master who paid him best—a fact which Morini knew too well. If the Socialists were prepared to pay his price, then the man whom he had trained so cleverly and promoted to place and power would calmly throw him over, and hound him down with just as great an enthusiasm as he now supported him.