Читать книгу In Direst Peril - David Christie Murray - Страница 10

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When I saw the lady face to face I perceived that she was older than I had fancied her to be, and I saw that she adopted certain devices to hide the ravages of time which had, as they always have, the effect of emphasizing them. I wonder if women will ever learn the perfect folly and uselessness of that sort of trickery.

The Baroness Bonnar was very gracious in her manners, but she seemed to me much less like a real great lady than like an actress who played at being a great lady. I am not very penetrating in that respect, and, as I have said already, I knew next to nothing of women and their ways, and so I was not disposed to trust my own judgment, but put it on one side with a certain contempt and impatience of myself. As a matter of fact, as I found out not so long afterwards, the Baroness Bonnar was no more a baroness than I was a baron, but simply and merely an adventuress who had spent some time on the Vienna stage, where she had secured no great success. She was now one of that almost innumerable band of spies who lived at that time in the service of the Austrian government. She was not a very clever woman, I am inclined to think, but she had been clever enough to induce a high official to fall in love with her, and by keeping this high official hanging off and on she had contrived to obtain promotion in her abominable calling far beyond her intellectual deserts. Brunow, it seemed, had known her for a year or two, but I learned afterwards that he had made no guess as to her real business in life.

The foolish fellow was so delighted at the unexpected opportunity for a flirtation that the whole purpose of our journey seemed to be forgotten by him. The baroness, with her maid and her coachman—. who were both on the same pay with herself (without her having the least guess of it), and reported all her doings to her superiors—stayed only one night in Itzia, and then went on to a village some dozen miles away, where she put up with some friends of hers who had a country-house there. Then nothing would please Brunow but that he must hire a horse and ride off to this country-house, and spend hours in the society of the sham baroness, while our scheme for the release of Miss Rossano's father hung in the wind, without making even a sign of progress.

The young lieutenant was almost my only companion, and once or twice he dined with me at the inn, and twice I had breakfast with him in the fortress; but these interviews with him brought me no nearer to my purpose. A third invitation brought something in its train, however, and, to tell the truth, I asked nothing much better than to have Brunow out of my scheme. The matter came about in this wise: Breschia and I were seated in his private room, when a non-commissioned officer entered with his report for the day, and stood, forage-cap in hand, at attention while his superior read it over. Some conversation ensued between them, which my ignorance of the language prevented me from following; but I understood the phrase with which Breschia brought it to a close.

“Send him here,” he said. “Send him at once.”

The non-commissioned officer saluted and retired, and Breschia turned laughingly on me.

“We have here an original who is always getting into trouble. A good fellow, and an honest servant, but so incorrigibly kind-hearted that he is always breaking our rules. I shall have to be serious with him in spite of myself.”

He poured out a cup of black coffee as he spoke, and set it with a bottle of maraschino and an open box of cigars at my elbow. I had scarcely selected and lit ray cigar, when there came a tap at the door; and at the lieutenant's call to enter a man in uniform came in, and, having closed the door behind him, stood rigidly at attention. Breschia addressed him in a tone of anger, which sounded real enough, and the man stood like a statue to receive his reproof. There was nothing in the least degree remarkable about the fellow, who was just a mere simple, common soldier. He was attired in a sort of fatigue costume, and looked and smelled as if he had just been sent away from stable duty. His short cropped hair was of a fiery auburn, and his rough features, with a prodigious mustache and the most ponderous over-beetling eyebrows I had ever seen, gave him a look rather of ferocity than of good-nature. But when in answer to the lieutenant's rating he began to excuse himself, it was evident even to an ear so untrained and ignorant as mine that he spoke in a language which was not his own. He spoke haltingly and stammeringly; and at last, despairing of making himself understood, he made a little motion of his hands without moving them from his sides, and so stood as if to receive sentence. Again Breschia spoke to him, and again the man responded. The lieutenant broke into a fit of laughter, and the man stood there immovable, with his little fingers at the seams of his canvas trousers, and his rugged visage frowning straight before him.

“Go!” said the lieutenant, speaking, to my surprise, in his own halting English. “You are too much a silly fellow. Go; and do it not again. … Eh? Will you?”

“Well, sir,” the man answered, speaking, to my astonishment, in good native-sounding English, “I'm sorry to displease, and I try to do my duty—”

“Hold your tongue,” cried Breschia, and the man obeyed at once. “Behold a man,” cried the lieutenant, turning upon me and speaking in his customary French, “who has been in the English army, and who is as incapable of an idea of discipline as if he were a popular prima donna.”

“Oh,” said I, turning round on the man and addressing him in English, “you have been in the army at home, I hear?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, saluting me as he had done the lieutenant on his entrance. “Two-and-twenty years, sir.”

“You don't mind my talking to the fellow?” I asked the lieutenant, reverting to French again.

“Pas du tout,” said the lieutenant. “Vous le trouverez bien bête, je vous promis.”

“How long have you been in the Austrian service?”

“Not in the service at all, sir. General's groom, sir.”

“You're in fatigue dress?”

“Yes, sir. Old custom, sir. Like the feel of it, sir.”

“Been here long?”

“Ten years, sir.”

“Why, how's this? You don't look a day over forty.”

“Forty-two, sir. Joined the band at home as a boy. Sixteenth Lancers, sir.”

“What's your name?”

“Hinge, sir. Robert Hinge, sir. Son of Bob Hinge, sir. Tattenham Fancy. Champion of the light-weights years back, sir.”

“Oh! What have you been getting into trouble about?”

“Beg your pardon, sir. Mustn't talk about that, sir. Discipline, sir. Can see as you're an officer. That ought to be enough, sir.”

“Quite enough. Drink my health, if there's anything fit to drink it in. You don't object, Breschia?”

“Not at all,” the lieutenant answered. “You have done with him? Very good. Go. And let me hear of you no more, or I shall report you. To your general. Do you hear?”

The man saluted and went out.

“He is so good, and so stupid—that individual there,” said Breschia, gladly plunging back into a more familiar language than English, though I could see he was proud of having acquitted himself so well in that tongue. “He is so stupid and so good, but I do nothing but laugh at him. But Rodetzsky is a martinet, and if he were here just now the man would be in trouble.”

“What has he been doing?” I asked.

“He has been smuggling tobacco to the prisoners,” Breschia answered, and all of a sudden I found my heart beating like a hammer. Was this the man, I wondered, who had shown compassion to Miss Ros-sano's hapless father? And was he therefore the man of all others whom I needed to lay hands on? If that were so it seemed nothing less than a providence that the man should be English, for my ignorance of all the patois dialects of the country, and even of its main language, made the speech of the Austrian soldiers a sealed book to me.

Did it ever happen to you that you have met a person whom you have never heard of and never thought of before—a person who was destined to affect your fate in some way—and that from the first moment of your encounter you seemed fated to renew acquaintance with him? It has happened more than once to me, and it happened so in this case. That very afternoon, when I returned from a lonely tramp upon the hills, I found the man Hinge in the kitchen of the inn. He bore a note from Breschia to Brunow, and was awaiting the return of that gentleman, who was once again away in pursuit of the soi-disant baroness, but had promised to be back in time for dinner. When I entered the kitchen to demand a draught of milk, the man rose up and saluted me, and explained his errand. In the course of my ramble I had had hardly anything but this man in mind, and I had been planning to make use of him. When I met him all my plans seemed to go to pieces. I shall have to confess before I have done with it that I am the poorest plotter in the world. Give me something downright to do, and I will try to do it; but in dodges and evasions and pretences I have little skill indeed. I took the note from the man's hand and promised that Brunow should receive it. Then I drank the milk which the landlady's daughter had already set before me, and stood there tongue-tied and bewildered, not knowing how to begin. The man himself relieved me.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, taking his glass in his left hand, and saluting again with the right. “Your health, sir.”

“That's poor tack,” I said, nodding towards the glass. He had made a grimace over the wine.

“Well, so it is, sir,” he replied; “but it's better than nothing, and it's about all we poor folks can afford, sir.”

“Did you ever taste Scotch whiskey?” I asked him. He smiled a slow smile as if he remembered something pleasing.

“Why, yes, sir, I have, sir, and I won't deceive you.”

“Come to my room,” I said, “and I'll give you as good a glass as you ever tasted in your life.”

He set down his glass of sour wine on the table with an emphatic quickness, and his soldierly tread sounded behind me in the uncarpeted passage and up the bare deal steps. When he came to my room I bade him sit down, but he remained standing, and I had to give the invitation as an order before he would obey it. Then he sat like a figure carved in wood, with his shoulders back, his head well up, a hand on either knee, and a face as expressionless as the back of his head. I got my flask out of my knapsack, and with it a little collapsible cup of silver, found the water-bottle, and set everything before him.

“Help yourself!” He took a thimbleful. “Help yourself, man!” He took another thimbleful. I seized the flask from his hand and poured him enough for a good tumbler. “Now, there's the water; help yourself to that.”

He obeyed, and tasted the mixture with a solemn satisfaction.

“My friend, Lieutenant Breschia, tells me,” I said then, for by this time I had made up my mind how to begin with him, “that you are constantly breaking the rules of the fortress. He tells me that you have been giving the prisoners tobacco.”

“That's a fact, sir,” he admitted.

“Give them some more,” I said, “first chance you get.” I laid a gold coin on the table before him, and sat down in front of him. “I'd give some of the poor beggars something better than tobacco if I had my way.”

“And so would I, sir,” he answered. “And the Lord knows it. It needn't all go in tobacco, I suppose, sir?” He had taken up the coin and was holding it in his thumb and finger by this time. “Any kind o' little comfort 'l do as well, sir?”

“Any kind of little comfort, as you say,” I answered.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, pocketing the coin. “You're an Englishman and you're a gentleman, sir, and I'm very much obliged to you.”

I made no answer, for I wanted to see if my man would talk. I thought he looked as if he would like to ease his mind.

“You haven't been over the fortress, have you, sir?” I shook my head. “Miserable kind of an 'ole it is, sir, for a man to live in. I think I should go stark, starin', ravin' mad if I was to live there long, sir.”

“So bad as that?” I asked.

“You may well say that, sir,” he rejoined. “I've got a nice, easy, comfortable place along with the general, and I don't want to lose it. So long as we're in Vienna or anywhere else but here, I'm satisfied. But here! Why, good Lord, sir, it's simply sickening.”

I supposed it was pretty dull.

“Oh, it's dull enough, sir, but it ain't that. It's what you may call such a miserable hole, sir. There's nothing like it in old England, thank God, sir!”

“Have they many prisoners here?” I asked.

“Prisoners, sir? There's a regular rookery of 'em. The place swarms with 'em. I should think there's a matter o' five hundred, as near as I can guess.”

I ejaculated “Nonsense!”

“Don't you believe it's nonsense, sir,” he answered. “They're as thick on the ground as rats in an old rick, sir. P'litical prisoners most of 'em is, sir; Eyetalians, mainly. Of course one doesn't value that kind o' rubbish much. They're foreigners, sir, every man Jack of 'em. But then, sir, these damned Austrians ain't no better, and they treat their prisoners like they was so much dirt beneath 'em.”

“You look like an honest fellow,” I said, “but you're not very discreet. Suppose I repeated what you have told me to the general?”

“Why, sir,” he answered, with a twinkle in his eye, “I don't suppose you'll do that, sir; but if you did, sir, the general's got a good groom, sir, and he knows it. He's a judge of a horse, sir, and he knows when a horse is in condition. And, besides that, he knows my opinion about these here Austrians, sir.”

No, I thought to myself. Robert Hinge sounds very plausible, looks very honest, and is undeniably an Englishman. But supposing Robert Hinge to have been put purposely in my way this morning as a very good-natured and very stupid fellow, and supposing Robert Hinge to have been sent over to me on purpose to draw me out? Quite possible, quite likely, indeed—quite in the Austrian manner, as all the world knew well.

“Don't get yourself into more mischief, anyway,” I said, rising from my seat. He took the hint, finished his glass standing, and left me with a military salute. I sat for a full hour smoking and thinking, occupied mainly in wondering whether I had thrown a chance away. There was nothing to be got by wasting time, and I worried myself into a state of feverish nervousness by thinking that this man Hinge was probably a true and genuine fellow, and that I had missed my chance with him. It was the clattering of a horse's hoof in the back yard of the inn that awoke me from my reverie, and looking out I saw Brunow in the act of dismounting. He waved his hand to me, and surrendering his horse to a hostler, entered the house. I heard Hinge address him in English, and then he came tearing upstairs. The note Breschia had sent to him lay upon the table, and when he had read it he shouted from the stair-head, “Certainly. My compliments to the lieutenant, and we will come with pleasure.”

“Here's Breschia suddenly left almost alone,” he explained when he re-entered the room. “He writes apologizing for troubling us with his poor hospitality so often, but will I go over and take you with me? He declares it will be a charity, and in the great hereafter will be remembered in our favor.”

I was willing enough to go; and the hour being already near, we made some slight change in our attire and strolled across to the fortress. Breschia met us gayly and entertained us well, but nothing of note happened at the dinner. We sat late over our wine, and it was pitch dark when at last we rose to go. Breschia at first insisted on accompanying us, but, to tell the plain truth about the matter, he had taken more than was altogether good for him, and was not to be trusted to return alone. We compromised for a man with a lantern, and on that shook hands and took our leave. A man in uniform met us at the gate of the grim place, and was about to set out with us when Hinge appeared, and, without a word, took the lantern from his hand. As we made our way along the dark and stony road, with the little circle of light dancing and waving in front of us, Hinge stumbled against me twice or thrice. At first it crossed me that he had been making free with the gift of that afternoon, and that he had spent a portion of it for his own benefit, rather than that of the prisoners, in whom he professed to take so great an interest; but at the third or fourth lurch he gave it dawned upon me that with his left hand he was groping for my right. Brunow was just a step in front of us, and I held my hand out openly. The man slipped into it a twisted scrap of paper, which I transferred carefully to my waistcoat pocket.

“Here's the bridge, gentlemen,” said Hinge, “and that's the inn right before you, where the lights are.”

“All right,” I answered. “We can find the way now quite easily. Good-night!”

“Good-night, gentlemen,” he answered, and so turned away, while Brunow and I footed it home in silence.

We occupied the same room, and I did not care to read whatever message I might have received in his presence. He had proved so lukewarm in the enterprise on which we had both embarked, and had now so apparently forgotten all about it in dancing attendance on the Baroness Bonnar, that I should have made no scruple of leaving him out of my councils altogether. When he had half undressed I made some pretence of wanting something from below, and read my missive in the kitchen. It was late, and the room was empty.

I was not surprised to find I knew the handwriting, and that it was the same that Brunow had shown me in his rooms on the night on which I had first seen Miss Rossano.

This is what I read:

“The wretched prisoner, the Conte di Rossano, who has languished for years in this fortress, asks, for the love of Heaven, that the Englishman for whose hands this is meant will send a line to the Contessa di Rossano, daughter of General Sir Arthur Rollinson, to assure her that her husband still lives. If she should still live, and have remarried, for pity find some means to let the writer know it.”

I went to bed saying nothing of this, but held sleepless by it all the night. With the idea which had come to me that afternoon of the possibility of Hinge being set upon me to act as a spy and to discover my intent so strong upon me that I could not shake it off, I tossed and tumbled in a very sea of doubt and trouble. I was more than half persuaded all along that this fancy was a mere chimera, and yet it took such force in my mind. It was past two o'clock when the moon rose. I got up noiselessly, filled and lit my pipe, and sat staring at the great solemn bulk of the fortress, as it stood for the time being almost white in the moonlight against the monstrous shadow of the bills. My mind was in a miserable whirl, and I knew not what to make of anything. This wretched state lasted until broad dawn, and I was still troubled by it when I walked into the keen morning air, towel in hand, for my customary swim. I undressed slowly by the river-side and stood thinking, until I was so nipped by the keen breath of the wind which blew clear down from the mountain-tops that I plunged into the stream for refuge from it. I remember as distinctly as if it had happened a minute ago, that at the very second when I dived an impulse came into my mind. I thought as I struck the water, “I'll trust that fellow!” I dived far, and swam under water until I was forced to rise for air. “I'll trust that fellow!” I thought again; and as I passed my hand across my forehead to squeeze the water from my hair, I saw “that fellow” on the very top of a little rise of land which lay between me and the fortress, and hid it entirely from my sight.

I swam back to the place from which I had originally dived, towelled myself hastily, dressed, and set out at a round pace towards the bridge. I reached it when he was within a hundred yards, and with a signal to him to follow, sauntered on towards the pine wood.

A backward glance assured me that he had seen my signal and was coming.