“Lola and Madame will go with you in order to allay any suspicions,” he added. “I place this matter entirely in your hands to act as you think fit.”
A week later, with Lola and Madame, I left Charing Cross and duly arrived in the old marble-built city of Pisa, with its Leaning Tower and its magnificent cathedral, and while my companions stayed at the Hôtel Victoria I went up the picturesque Valley of the Arno on the first stage of my quest.
At last, having climbed the steep hill among the olives and vines which leads from the station of Signa—that ancient little town of the long-ago Guelfs—I came to the old Convent of San Domenico, a row of big sun-blanched buildings with a church and crumbling tower set upon the conical hill which overlooked the red roofs of Florence deep below.
The ancient bell of the monastery clanged out the hour of evening prayer, as it had done for centuries, sounding loud and far through the dry, clear evening atmosphere.
Five minutes after ringing the clanging bell at the monastery door and being inspected by a brother through the small iron grill, I found myself with Fra Pacifico in his scrupulously clean narrow cell, with its truckle bed and its praying stool set before the crucifix, but on hearing hurried footsteps in the stone corridor outside I rose, and my strange friend exclaimed in Italian:
“No, Signor Hargreave! Remain seated. I am excused from attendance in the chapel. I had to meet you.”
The narrow little cubicle was bare and whitewashed. Fra Pacifico, of the Capuchin Order, with his shaven head, his brown habit tied around the waist with a hempen rope, and his well-worn sandals, had long been my friend. Of his past I could never ascertain anything. He had called humbly upon my father when we first went to live at old-world Signa, years before, and he had asked his charity for the poor down in the Val d’Arno.
“You will always have beggars around you, signore,” I remembered he said. “We up at the monastery keep open house for the needy—soup, bread, and other things—to all who come from eight to ten o’clock in the morning. If you grant us alms we will see that those who beg of you never go empty away. Send them to us.”
My father saw instantly an easy way out of the great beggar problem, hence he promised him a fixed subscription each month, which Fra Pacifico regularly collected.
So though I had returned to live in London and afterwards played my part in the war, we had still been friends.