He smoked on in silence, standing at the window and pretending to be interested in the people passing in the street below.
“My dear signorina,” he exclaimed at last, turning his thin, unprepossessing face to her, and looking straight at her with his dark, crafty eyes, “I quite admit that to leave your home and friends is not a pleasant outlook. But you see it is imperative—absolutely imperative. You can render us most valuable assistance. Indeed, we are relying entirely upon you.”
“My mother will never consent to it,” she assured him.
“Leave the signora to me,” he laughed drily. “She will believe that you have become companion to an English lady. I will arrange it all. You know what entire confidence the signora has in me!”
Filoména smiled. This man, who held such a high office in the Ministry, had always been a friend of her family. Indeed, the colonel’s widow was greatly indebted to him, for, through him, the War Office now paid her a small sum annually in recognition of her late husband’s services to the kingdom, a payment which was not legal, but which had been ordered by Borselli and made law by decree of the Minister Morini himself.
“You will have a very pleasant time of it in England, I assure you,” he went on. “As governess you will, of course, be treated as an underling, but remain patient, watchful, and attentive always to your instructions. Remember that upon you depends much, that you may render greater service to Italy than even her ambassadors. Knowledge is power, is an old and trite saying—and knowledge is in no place more powerful than the Ministry of War.”
He treated her with a certain fatherly solicitude and confidence which impressed her. Four years ago, when she left the convent school at Ravenna and resumed the acquaintance formed in her childhood, he had gradually taken her into his confidence. He required certain information regarding certain officers in the Bologna garrison which with her woman’s subtle way of learning secrets she could obtain, while on his part he was ready to further her interests, to obtain that very necessary income for her mother—to act, in fact, as her friend, and to place her, in secret, under the protection of the Ministry of War. But secrecy was to be observed—secrecy in everything. To him alone was she to report, by letter or verbally. She was to act the spy on his behalf with cunning, care, and caution.
In the various tasks he had set her she had acquitted herself well, more especially in the mysterious affair of Captain Solaro, the man who, to his cost, had fallen in love with her. At heart she hated herself for the despicable part she had been compelled to play, yet she had become Borselli’s spy in order that she and her mother should receive that small but very necessary pension from the War Department.
In character she was one of those silent, watchful women whom nothing escapes, and who note every look and every gesture—one of the few women, indeed, who can keep a secret. Borselli, the man who used the Minister Morini as his cat’s-paw, and was as cunning an adventurer as there was in all the length of Italy, had recognised these qualities as those of a secret agent of the most successful type, and therefore had resolved to turn to account his ascendency over her.
She had taken up her little fan and was fanning herself with quick nervousness. The evening was a stifling one in September, for in that month Bologna, with its long streets of stucco porticos, is a veritable oven.