In Direst Peril Part 2

"I should prefer," I answered, "to start to-night. I have ample funds for my immediate purposes, and I shall make my way, in the first place, to Vienna. Tell me your banker's name, and I will find out his agents there. And now good-bye, Miss Rossano. I cannot promise success, but I will do what I can."

She answered that she was sure of that; and when she had given me the name of her bankers and I had made a note of it, we shook hands and parted. For my own part I was glad that Lady Rollinson's presence made our parting commonplace.

I hailed the first hackney carriage I met and drove to my rooms. There I found my pa.s.sport, and went with it to the Foreign Office, where, through the good offices of an old schoolfellow, I had it _vised_ without loss of time, and then home again to pack. Travelling was slower then than it is to-day, but we thought it mighty rapid, and scarcely to be improved upon, it differed so from the post-chaise and stage-coach crawl of a few years before. There was no direct correspondence between Hamburgh and Vienna, but the journey was shorter by a day than it had been when I had last made it. I reached the Austrian capital after an entirely adventureless journey, and felt that my enterprise was begun.

I called at the Emba.s.sy, and had my papers finally put in order. I called on the Viennese agents of Miss Rossano's bankers, and found that no less a sum than one thousand pounds had been placed to my credit. Not only was this liberal provision made for contingencies, but I received a letter from Miss Rossano telling me that anything within her means was fully at my disposal. I thought it not unlikely that with so persuasive a sum behind me I might be able to win over the kindly jailer to our side. My thoughts were very often with this man, and I spent a good deal of useless time in speculating about him. Was he married or single? That was a point on which much depended, and I was half inclined to pray that he might prove to be a bachelor. Marital responsibilities were all against my hopes. Marital confidences might well upset the best-laid plans I could devise.

I was thinking thus as I paced the Ring Stra.s.se on the third day after my arrival in Vienna. I lingered in the capital against the grain, for I was eager to be at work, but it was part of a policy which I had already settled. Itzia was not the sort of place for which one would make a straight road, unless one had special business there, and it was the merest seeming of having any special business there which I was profoundly anxious to avoid. So I lingered in Vienna, and on this third day, pacing the chief street, I felt a sudden hand clapped upon my shoulder, and, turning, faced Brunow.

"Here you are," he cried, still keeping his hand upon my shoulder as I turned. "I have been to the bank and to your hotel. I have been hunting you, in point of fact, all day, and here at last I come upon you by chance."

"What brings you in Vienna?" I asked him. I did my best to be cordial, but I was sorry for his intrusion, and would willingly have known him to be a thousand miles away.

He glanced swiftly and warily about him, and, seeing n.o.body within ear-shot, answered in an easy tone:

"I have come to a.s.sist in your enterprise, Fyffe, and I mean to see you through it."

"I think," I told him, "that I prefer to go through my enterprise alone."

"My dear fellow," said Brunow, "I couldn't dream of allowing you to run any risk alone in such a cause. And besides that, I have a little selfish reason of my own. In addition, you don't speak the language, and will be in a thousand corners. I was bred here, and speak the language like a native. I have already the _entree_ to the place you desire to get into, and I can introduce you. My sympathetic friend--" He broke off suddenly because a foot-pa.s.senger drew near. "It is, as you say, a beastly journey, but, as you say again, it's done with, and when you know Vienna as well as I do, you will say it pays for the trouble ten times over. Vienna, my dear fellow, is the jolliest and the handsomest city in the world." The pa.s.senger went by, and he resumed at the dropped word. "My sympathetic friend will recognize me, and at my return will be immediately on the _qui vive_. Negotiations will be as good as opened the very minute of my arrival. You'll want an interpreter, and here am I sworn to the cause, and secret as the tomb. In effect, I'm going, and I don't see how the deuce you expected to get on without me."

"I suppose," I asked him, "you know what to expect if we fail and are caught?"

He took me by the arm and walked with me along the road, sinking his voice to a confidential murmur.

"You're a son of Mars, Fyffe, and you ought to be able to understand my feelings. You've met Miss Rossano, and I dare say you can understand the possibility of a man actually losing his head over a creature so charming and so well provided for." I could have struck him for the cynicism of his final words, but I restrained myself. "Now I don't mind telling you, Fyffe, that I've a little bit of a tendresse in that direction, and, between ourselves, I'm not at all sure that it isn't returned. Miss Rossano is convinced that this is a service of especial and particular danger. So it might be for a headstrong old warrior like yourself if you were in it alone; but as I shall manage it there won't be a hint of danger, and we shall get the credit without the risk. And so, my dear Fyffe, I'm with you. My motives I believe are as purely selfish as I should always wish them to be. Yours of course are as purely unselfish as you would always desire."

Of course I knew already the man's complete want of responsibility. Here almost in his first breath he couldn't dream of allowing me to run the risk alone, and here in almost his last breath there was to be no risk at all. I dreaded his companions.h.i.+p; and when I had taken time to think the matter over I told him so quite plainly.

"My dear Fyffe," he answered, "you don't know me. You haven't seen me under circ.u.mstances demanding discretion. You tell me I'm a feather-head, and I've not the slightest doubt in the world that if you asked any of our common acquaintances you'd find the epithet endorsed.

It's my way, my boy, but it's only a little outside trick of mine, and it has nothing to do with the real man inside. And besides that, Fyffe, you know you can't prevent my going, and so--why argue about it?"

"There is risk in this business," I said, "and grave risk. Let us have no further folly on that theme. I could prevent you from going, and I would if it were not for the fact that I think it more dangerous to leave you behind than to take you with me. You would be hinting this to this man, and that to the other, and I should have a noose about my neck through that slack tongue of yours before I had been away a fortnight.

You shall go, but I warn you of the risk beforehand."

"There's no risk at all," he said, pettishly. "I've told you so already."

"Pardon me," I answered. "I am going to show you the risk. If this enterprise should fail by any folly of yours, if I am sacrificed by any indiscretion or stupidity on your part, I will shoot you. I am going out with my life in my hand, and I mean to take care of it. You can be useful to me, and I will use you. But please understand the conditions, for so truly as you and I stand here, I mean to keep them."

I knew enough of Brunow to be sure that he would treat this plain statement as if it were a jest, and I knew that he read me well enough to be sure that it was nothing of the sort. The threat made him safe. In an hour he was talking as if he had forgotten all about it, but I knew better.

CHAPTER III

We travelled at apparent random for nearly three weeks, and when at last we reached Itzia, no man could possibly have guessed that we had set out with that little place as our serious destination. It was Brunow who suggested this lingering method of approach, and it was he also who gave a semblance of nature to our proceedings by pausing here and there to set up his camp-stool and easel in some picturesque defile, or in the streets of some quaint village. Twice this innocent blind brought us into collision with the military police, who were in a condition of perpetual disquiet, and suspected everybody. Our papers, however, were in perfect order, and Brunow in particular was so well provided with credentials that we were easily set going again, and so by a circuitous road we approached Itzia, and finally pounced down upon it from the hills.

I found it a village of not more than four or five hundred inhabitants, set in the midst of a green plateau surrounded by gaunt hills, and watered by a fair, broad stream. The fortress in which the Conte di Rossano was confined stood on the lowest slope of the nearest hill, and frowned down upon the village with a threatening aspect, dwarfed as it was almost into nothing by the surrounding majesties of nature. It was a building of modern date--not more than fifty years of age I should be inclined to say--and it boasted nothing in the way of architectural beauty. It was built of an ugly dark stone, was strongly fortified, and was flanked by outlying batteries which surrounded the mouth of the defile which led from Zetta on the frontier. The artillery of to-day would reduce the fortress of Itzia to a rubbish heap in less than an hour; but it was a strong place for the date of its erection, and even now the difficulty of bringing siege guns along the broken and difficult mountain pathways makes it worth calculating as a point of resistance against invasion.

I saw it first at the close of a dull day when a storm was brewing. The sky was overcast, and the clouds were mustering fast from the south in black battalions. Every now and then a hoa.r.s.e echoing rumble of sound went wandering about in the hollows of the hills with a deep cavernous tone, which sounded astonis.h.i.+ngly threatening and foreboding. I suppose that everybody knows more or less the feeling which a.s.sociates itself with the first view of any memorable place, and fixes itself as it were upon his recollection of it. After all these years I can hardly think of the fortress at Itzia without some return of the depression and half-dismay which fell upon me when I first looked at it, with the black clouds gathering thickly over it, the mountain on which it stood looking as if it would topple over and bury fortress and valley, and one spear-like gleam of bleak suns.h.i.+ne lighting up a few of its windows and a few square yards of its western wall. Of course I had never been guilty of such a madness as to think of approaching the place by anything but wile and stratagem; and its bulk and blackness and the thickness of its walls had nothing in the world to do with the success or failure of my enterprise, and yet I could not resist a feeling of discouragement which almost amounted to a sense of superst.i.tion.

We had engaged a guide from some little village, the name of which I forget, at which we had rested on the previous night; and the castle was the first object to which he had called our attention.

"There!" he cried, pausing at a sudden bend in the road, and turning half round upon us with his right hand pointing forward. "There is the fortress of Itzia. The end of your journey, gentlemen."

I spoke the language very feebly, but I happened to understand every word he said, and his speech gave me a nervous chill. It was not altogether unlikely that the end of our journey lay in that forbidding heap of dark stone, and the thought was not an agreeable one. Brunow caught the fancy too, and turning on me with a smile which I thought not quite natural, said:

"_A bad omen!_"

We trudged along pretty wearily, for we had made on foot a good five-and-twenty miles that day, and the country had been extremely difficult. The mountain road had scarcely been worthy to be called a road at all, and in the course of it we had had a score or so of break-back climbs. Brunow had held out with an unexpected stoutness, but I think another mile of such a road would have left him helpless; and though I was more innured to personal fatigue than he, I gave half a grunt and half a groan of comfort at the thought of stretching my legs in an arm-chair at the village inn. We were both as hungry as we had a right to be, and finding our feet set upon turf instead of insecure stones with points all over them, we mustered our forces for a brief run downhill. The guide, who had done the journey with a stolid indifference, set up a whoop and raced after us speedily, getting the better of us, and so we entered the village racing like a trio of school-boys, Brunow and I shouting to each other and laughing. Some of the villagers came to their doors and looked with an ox-like kind of wonder after us, but just then the first open growl of the tempest sounded, the premature blackness of the evening was split wide open by a sudden flash, and the rain began to fall as it can only fall in mountain countries and in the tropics, I suppose the inhabitants simply thought we were flying from the storm, and, anyway, at the first sign of it they slammed and fastened their doors, and we raced on, drenched almost to the skin in the first minute.

Brunow knew the inn, of course, and was recognized immediately on his arrival. The fat hostess, stolid as she looked, seemed glad to see him; and her pretty daughter, who looked in the characteristic costume of the country as if she had just stepped off the stage or was just ready to step on to it, received him with demure smiles and blushes. He was quite a lion among the ladies, was Brunow, and I had no doubt he had been doing some little execution here. In a minute or two, at the landlady's bidding, we had stripped off our soaked coats and were sitting by a wood-fire, each in a brief Tyrolean jacket, with lace and silver b.u.t.tons all about it--the property, as we found out afterwards, of our host and his son, who were out just then shooting on the hills, and likely, as we learned, to be away all night.

We had an excellent meal: fish from the river, fowl from the poultry-yard--we heard the clucking of the doomed hen, and the indignant remonstrances of her companions--a capital omelette, and country cheese and b.u.t.ter. With these comfortable things we had a bottle of honest wine of unknown vintage, but palatable and generous; and when the meal was over we sat and smoked in a kind of animal ease begotten of the past labor and present comfort. The storm lashed the panes, and though the time of year was but late August, and the hour not beyond six of the afternoon, it was so dark we could scarce see across the road. Yet every flash of lightning that hung with its blue, quivering light in the skies for two or three seconds at a time showed the fortress to either of us who chose to look out of window; and tired and bodily contented as I was, I never saw its gloomy form thus gloomily illuminated; but my first feeling on beholding it came back to me, and with it the guide's phrase: "The end of your journey, gentlemen!" The Austrian government would have seen to that if any merest guess of our purpose had occurred to the stupidest of its officials. I speak of Austria as she was, not as she is. She has learned something in the universal struggle for freedom which has shaken Europe since I first opened my eyes upon the world. But in those days--I speak it calmly, and with something, at least I hope, of the judgment which should belong to old age--Austria was a power to be loathed and warred against by all good men, a stronghold of tyranny and cruelty, a dark land within whose darkness dark deeds were done, a country where the oppressed found no helper. I am heaping up words in vain, which is a thing outside my habits. Every student of history knows what Austria was at that time, and there are thousands still living who are old enough to remember.

We went to bed early that night in spite of thunder and lightning, rain and wind, and slept as we deserved to do after the heavy marching of the day. When I got up in the morning the mountains were smiling in a sun-bath, the river wound s.h.i.+ning through fields of delightful green, and the fortress, ugly as it was in itself, took from its surroundings, and helped to give them back again a picturesque and pleasing look. The feeling I had first had in respect to it never came back again in its first force; and when I looked at it with the refreshment of rest in my own heart, and the brightness of the clean-washed earth and heaven about it and above it, I could afford to smile at the womanish foreboding and chill of the night before.

Brunow was still sleeping, and I was loath to disturb him; so dressing myself carelessly but without noise, I went down-stairs, and there munched a fragment of black bread and drank a draught of milk. Then having tried in vain to say that I wanted a towel, I contrived to express myself to the landlord's pretty daughter by signs. I pointed out-of-doors, made a pantomime of undressing, diving, and swimming, and then a further pantomime of rubbing myself down. At this she understood, supplied me with what I wanted, and led me to the door, whence she pointed to the left, and then seemed by a sweeping motion of the hand to indicate a turning to the right. I took the way thus signalled, and in a very little time found myself in a sequestered spot by the water-side, which looked as if it might have been made for my purpose. A great boulder as big as a moderate-sized house protected the place from view on the village side, and the place was bowered in trees. A short, soft gra.s.s made a delightful footing, and on the opposite side of the river a fallen tree had been trimmed into convenient shape for diving from.

A narrow track worn through the gra.s.s showed that this place was frequently approached. I was seated and in the act of unlacing my heavy mountain boots, when I heard a cheery and melodious voice singing; and, looking up, I saw at a little distance through the trees a young Austrian officer in undress, strolling at an easy pace towards me. He, too, had evidently come out for a morning dip, for he was swinging a towel in his right hand, and was lounging straight towards the river.

As he came nearer I saw that he was handsome in an effeminate sort of way, with a slight lady-like sort of figure, a blond mustache, so light in color as to be almost invisible at a distance, and fine girlish eyes of a light blue. As he saw me in turn he gave me a good-morning in a cheery tone, and I returned his salutation. He noticed my accent at once and said,

"Ah! An Englishman?" I answered, "Yes;" and having disembarra.s.sed myself of the heavy boots, stood up to throw off my jacket. "And a soldier?" he said. Then speaking in English this time, but with a very laughable and halting accent--an accent, I should be inclined to say, almost as laughable and halting as mine sounded to him. "I mak yeeoo velkom at my place."

At this I asked him if the place were private and I an intruder, but this little bit of English, took him altogether out of his depth.

"I speak English abominably," he said in fluent and accurate French; "properly speaking, I do not know it at all. May I ask if you speak French?"

French and Spanish are the only two foreign languages of which I know anything, but I speak them both with ease, though I dare say with little elegance. I repeated my question, and he, with great good-humor, responded that he had no claim upon the place, and was delighted to find a companion of similar tastes; I went on undressing without more ado, and in a minute more was ploughing about in the water, the first nip of which had an icy and almost maddening delight in it. I found out later on that the stream came almost straight from the mountain-tops of ice and snow.

"You would not have bathed here five or six hours ago," said my companion, as he swam beside me. "The storm lasted but two hours, yet the river was raging here until long after midnight. It falls, however, as soon as it rises, and now, except for the wet banks, you would hardly guess that it had been in flood."

I had reason to remember what he said not very much later on, at a moment perhaps as anxious as any I have ever had to face in my life. But that will come in its place, and I only notice it here because it was one of those odd things in life that we all notice at one time or another, that at our first accidental meeting the man whose business it was to guard the prisoner I had come to rescue should give me a bit of comforting knowledge in this way. For my companion turned out to be none other than that Lieutenant Breschia of whom Brunow had spoken. When my swim was finished he gathered up his clothes in a neat bundle, and holding them in the air in one hand, paddled himself easily across with the other, and dressed beside me.

"It is ambition of mine," he said, in a laughing, boyish way, which made his manner very charming and natural, "to learn your English tongue.

But I am stupid with it, and whenever I meet an Englishman I waste my chances and converse with him in one of the tongues I know already. You are great masters of language, you Englishmen."

I told him that we bore a very indifferent reputation in that respect, and that next to the French, who in that one regard are the most intractable people in the world, we were probably less acquainted with foreign languages than any people in Europe. He looked surprised.

"I think, sir, you rate yourselves too low. May I offer you a cigar? I can a.s.sure you of its quality, for I import my own. It is true that I have not met many Englishmen in my time, but I have met none who have not been admirable linguists. A friend of mine, an Englishman, who was in this neighborhood but a few weeks ago, is one of the finest I have known. He may perhaps be known to you. Have you ever met, may I ask, the honorable Brunow?"

This gave me a little inward start, and I had begun to guess already at the ident.i.ty of my companion. I bit the end from the cigar I had accepted from him a moment before, and asked,

"The Honorable George Brunow?"

"That is he," cried the young fellow, delightedly. "You know him?"