Part 23 (1/2)
”Then,” said Wilfrid, ”I am his debtor. I owe him as much as my life is worth.”
”Think, think,” she urged; and promised affection, devotion, veneration, vague things, that were too like his own sentiments to prompt him pointedly. Yet he so pledged himself to her by word, and prepared his own mind to conceive the act of service, that (as he did not reflect) circ.u.mstance might at any moment plunge him into a gulf. Conduct of this sort is a challenge sure to be answered.
One morning Vittoria was gladdened by a letter from Rocco Ricci, who had fled to Turin. He told her that the king had promised to give her a warm welcome in his capital, where her name was famous. She consulted with Laura, and they resolved to go as soon as Angelo could stand on his feet. Turin was cold-Italy, but it was Italy; and from Turin the Italian army was to flow, like the Mincio from the Garda lake. ”And there, too, is a stage,” Vittoria thought, in a suddenly revived thirst for the stage and a field for work. She determined to run down to Meran and see Angelo. Laura walked a little way with her, till Wilfrid, alert for these occasions, joined them. On the commencement of the zig-zag below, there were soldiers, the sight of whom was not confusing. Military messengers frequently came up to the castle where Count Lenkenstein, a.s.sisted by Count Serabiglione, examined their depositions, the Italian in the manner of a winding lawyer, the German of a gruff judge. Half-way down the zig-zag Vittoria cast a preconcerted signal back to Laura. The soldiers had a pair of prisoners between their ranks; Vittoria recognized the men who had carried Captain Weisspriess from the ground where the duel was fought. A quick divination told her that they held Angelo's life on their tongues. They must have found him in the mountain-pa.s.s while hurrying to their homes, and it was they who had led him to Meran. On the Pa.s.seyr bridge, she turned and said to Wilfrid, ”Help me now. Send instantly the doctor in a carriage to the place where he is lying.”
Wilfrid was intent on her flushed beauty and the half-compressed quiver of her lip.
She quitted him and hurried to Angelo. Her joy broke out in a cry of thankfulness at sight of Angelo; he had risen from his bed; he could stand, and he smiled.
”That Jacopo is just now the nearest link to me,” he said, when she related her having seen the two men guarded by soldiers; he felt helpless, and spoke in resignation. She followed his eye about the room till it rested on the stilet. This she handed to him. ”If they think of having me alive!” he said softly. The Italian and his wife who had given him shelter and nursed him came in, and approved his going, though they did not complain of what they might chance to have incurred. He offered them his purse, and they took it. Minutes of grievous expectation went by; Vittoria could endure them no longer; she ran out to the hotel, near which, in the shade of a poplar, Wilfrid was smoking quietly. He informed her that his sister and the doctor had driven out to meet Captain Gambier; his brother-in-law was alone upstairs. Her look of amazement touched him more shrewdly than scorn, and he said, ”What on earth can I do?”
”Order out a carriage. Send your brother-in-law in it. If you tell him 'for your health,' he will go.”
”On my honour, I don't know where those three words would not send him,” said Wilfrid; but he did not move, and was for protesting that he really could not guess what was the matter, and the ground for all this urgency.
Vittoria compelled her angry lips to speak out her suspicions explicitly, whereupon he glanced at the sun-glare in a meditation, occasionally blinking his eyes. She thought, ”Oh, heaven! can he be waiting for me to coax him?” It was the truth, though it would have been strange to him to have heard it. She grew sure that it was the truth; never had she despised living creature so utterly as when she murmured, ”My best friend! my brother! my n.o.ble Wilfrid! my old beloved! help me now, without loss of a minute.”
It caused his breath to come and go unevenly.
”Repeat that-once, only once,” he said.
She looked at him with the sorrowful earnestness which, as its meaning was shut from him, was so sweet.
”You will repeat it by-and-by?-another time? Trust me to do my utmost. Old beloved! What is the meaning of 'old beloved'? One word in explanation. If it means anything, I would die for you! Emilia, do you hear?-die for you! To me you are nothing old or by-gone, whatever I may be to you. To me-yes, I will order the carriage you are the Emilia-listen! listen! Ah! you have shut your ears against me. I am bound in all seeming, but I-you drive me mad; you know your power. Speak one word, that I may feel-that I may be convinced,... or not a single word; I will obey you without. I have said that you command my life.”
In a block of carriages on the bridge, Vittoria perceived a lifted hand. It was Laura's; Beppo was in attendance on her. Laura drove up and said: ”You guessed right; where is he?” The communications between them were more indicated than spoken. Beppo had heard Jacopo confess to his having conducted a wounded Italian gentleman into Meran. ”That means that the houses will be searched within an hour,” said Laura; ”my brother-in-law Bear is radiant.” She mimicked the Lenkenstein physiognomy spontaneously in the run of her speech. ”If Angelo can help himself ever so little, he has a fair start.” A look was cast on Wilfrid; Vittoria nodded-Wilfrid was entrapped.
”Englishmen we can trust,” said Laura, and requested him to step into her carriage. He glanced round the open s.p.a.ce. Beppo did the same, and beheld the cha.s.seur Jacob Baumwalder f.e.c.kelwitz crossing the bridge on foot, but he said nothing. Wilfrid was on the step of the carriage, for what positive object neither he nor the others knew, when his sister and the doctor joined them. Captain Gambier was still missing.
”He would have done anything for us,” Vittoria said in Wilfrid's hearing.
”Tell us what plan you have,” the latter replied fretfully.
She whispered: ”Persuade Adela to make her husband drive out. The doctor will go too, and Beppo. They shall take Angelo. Our carriage will follow empty, and bring Mr. Sedley back.”
Wilfrid cast his eyes up in the air, at the monstrous impudence of the project. ”A storm is coming on,” he suggested, to divert her reading of his grimace; but she was speaking to the doctor, who readily answered her aloud: ”If you are certain of what you say.” The remark incited Wilfrid to be no subordinate in devotion; handing Adela from the carriage, while the doctor ran up to Mr. Sedley, he drew her away. Laura and Vittoria watched the motion of their eyes and lips.
”Will he tell her the purpose?” said Laura.
Vittoria smiled nervously: ”He is fibbing.”
Marking the energy expended by Wilfrid in this art, the wiser woman said: ”Be on your guard the next two minutes he gets you alone.”
”You see his devotion.”
”Does he see his compensation? But he must help us at any hazard.”
Adela broke away from her brother twice, and each time he fixed her to the spot more imperiously. At last she ran into the hotel; she was crying. ”A bad economy of tears,” said Laura, commenting on the dumb scene, to soothe her savage impatience. ”In another twenty minutes we shall have the city gates locked.”
They heard a window thrown up; Mr. Sedley's head came out, and peered at the sky. Wilfrid said to Vittoria: ”I can do nothing beyond what I have done, I fear.”
She thought it was a pet.i.tion for thanks, but Laura knew better; she said: ”I see Count Lenkenstein on his way to the barracks.”
Wilfrid bowed: ”I may be able to serve you in that quarter.”
He retired: whereupon Laura inquired how her friend could reasonably suppose that a man would ever endure being thanked in public.
”I shall never understand and never care to understand them,” said Vittoria.
”It is a knowledge that is forced on us, my dear. May heaven make the minds of our enemies stupid for the next five hours!-Apropos of what I was saying, women and men are in two hostile camps. We have a sort of general armistice and everlasting strife of individuals-Ah!” she clapped hands on her knees, ”here comes your doctor; I could fancy I see a pointed light on his head. Men of science, my Sandra, are always the humanest.”
The chill air of wind preceding thunder was driving round the head of the vale, and Mr. Sedley, wrapped in furs, and feebly remonstrating with his medical adviser, stepped into his carriage. The doctor followed him, giving a grave recognition of Vittoria's gaze. Both gentlemen raised their hats to the ladies, who alighted as soon as they had gone in the direction of the Vintschgau road.
”One has only to furnish you with money, my Beppo,” said Vittoria, complimenting his quick apprehensiveness. ”Buy bread and cakes at one of the shops, and buy wine. You will find me where you can, when you have seen him safe. I have no idea of where my home will be. Perhaps England.”
”Italy, Italy! faint heart,” said Laura.
Furnished with money, Beppo rolled away gaily.
The doubt was in Laura whether an Englishman's wits were to be relied on in such an emergency; but she admitted that the doctor had looked full enough of serious meaning, and that the Englishman named Merthyr Powys was keen and ready. They sat a long half-hour, that thumped itself out like an alarm-bell, under the poplars, by the clamouring Pa.s.seyr, watching the roll and spring of the waters, and the radiant foam, while band-music played to a great company of visitors, and sounds of thunder drew near. Over the mountains above the Adige, the leaden fingers of an advance of the thunder-cloud pushed slowly, and on a sudden a mighty gale sat heaped blank on the mountain-top and blew. Down went the heads of the poplars, the river staggered in its leap, the vale was shuddering grey. It was like the transformation in a fairy tale; Beauty had taken her old cloak about her, and bent to calamity. The poplars streamed their length sideways, and in the pauses of the strenuous wind nodded and dashed wildly and white over the dead black water, that waxed in foam and hissed, showing its teeth like a beast enraged. Laura and Vittoria joined hands and struggled for shelter. The tent of a travelling circus from the South, newly-pitched on a gra.s.splot near the river, was caught up and whirled in the air and flung in the face of a marching guard of soldiery, whom it swathed and bore sheer to earth, while on them and around them a line of poplars fell flat, the wind whistling over them. Laura directed Vittoria's eyes to the sight. ”See,” she said, and her face was set hard with cold and excitement, so that she looked a witch in the uproar; ”would you not say the devil is loose now Angelo is abroad?” Thunder and lightning possessed the vale, and then a vertical rain. At the first gleam of sunlight, Laura and Vittoria walked up to the Laubenga.s.se-the street of the arcades, where they made purchases of numerous needless articles, not daring to enter the Italian's shop. A woman at a fruitstall opposite to it told them that no carriage could have driven up there. During their great perplexity, mud and rain-stained soldiers, the same whom they had seen borne to earth by the flying curtain, marched before the shop; the shop and the house were searched; the Italian and his old liming wife were carried away.
”Tell me now, that storm was not Angelo's friend!” Laura muttered.
”Can he have escaped?” said Vittoria.
”He is 'on horseback.'” Laura quoted the Italian proverb to signify that he had flown; how, she could not say, and none could inform her. The joy of their hearts rose in one fountain.
”I shall feel better blood in my body from this moment,” Laura said; and Vittoria, ”Oh! we can be strong, if we only resolve.”
”You want to sing?”
”I do.”
”I shall find pleasure in your voice now.”
”The wicked voice!”
”Yes, the very wicked voice! But I shall be glad to hear it. You can sing to-night, and drown those Lenkensteins.”
”If my Carlo could hear me!”
”Ah!” sighed the signora, musing. ”He is in prison now. I remember him, the dearest little lad, fencing with my husband for exercise after they had been writing all day. When Giacomo was imprisoned, Carlo sat outside the prison walls till it was time for him to enter; his chin and upper lip were smooth as a girl's. Giacomo said to him, 'May you always have the power of going out, or not have a wife waiting for you.' Here they come.” (She spoke of tears.) ”It's because I am joyful. The channel for them has grown so dry that they p.r.i.c.k and sting. Oh, Sandra! it would be pleasant to me if we might both be buried for seven days, and have one long howl of weakness together. A little bite of satisfaction makes me so tired. I believe there's something very bad for us in our always being at war, and never, never gaining ground. Just one spark of triumph intoxicates us. Look at all those people pouring out again. They are the children of fair weather. I hope the state of their health does not trouble them too much. Vienna sends consumptive patients here. If you regard them attentively, you will observe that they have an anxious air. Their const.i.tutions are not sound; they fear they may die.”
Laura's irony was unforced; it was no more than a subtle discord naturally struck from the scene by a soul in contrast with it.