Vittoria — Volume 4 by George Meredith (best beach reads of all time txt) 📖

five. Quick! I must eat. Have you a lover?'

'Yes.'

'Fancy you are waiting on him.'

'He's only a middling lover, signore. He lives at Cles, over Val Pejo, in Val di Non, a long way, and courts me twice a year, when he comes over to do carpentering. He cuts very pretty Madonnas. He is a German.'

'Ha! you kneel to the Madonna, and give your lips to a German? Go.'

'But I don't like him much, signore; it's my father who wishes me to have him; he can make money.'

Angelo motioned to her to be gone, saying to himself, 'That father of hers would betray the Saints for a handful of florins.'

He dressed, and wrenched his knife from the door. Hearing the clatter of a horse at the porch, he stopped as he was descending the stairs. A German voice said, 'Sure enough, my jolly landlord, she's there, in Worms —your Bormio. Found her at the big hotel: spoke not a syllable; stole away, stole away. One chopin of wine! I'm off on four legs to the captain. Those lads who are after her by Roveredo and Trent have bad noses. "Poor nose—empty belly." Says the captain, "I stick at the point of the cross-roads." Says I, "Herr Captain, I'm back to you first of the lot." My business is to find the runaway lady-pretty Fraulein! pretty Fraulein! lai-ai! There's money on her servant, too; he's a disguised Excellency—a handsome boy; but he has cut himself loose, and he go hang. Two birds for the pride of the thing; one for satisfaction— I 'm satisfied. I've killed chamois in my time. Jacob, I am; Baumwalder, I am; Feckelwitz, likewise; and the very devil for following a track. Ach! the wine is good. You know the song?

              "He who drinks wine, he may cry with a will,
               Fortune is mine, may she stick to me still."

'I give it you in German—the language of song! my own, my native 'lai-ai- lai-ai-la-la-lai-ai-i-ie!

                   "While stars still sit
                    On mountain tops,
                    I take my gun,
                    Kiss little one
                         On mother's breast.
                              Ai-iu-e!

                    My pipe is lit,
                    I climb the slopes,
                    I meet the dawn
                    A little one
                         On mother's breast.
                         Ai-aie: ta-ta-tai: iu-iu-iu-e!"

'Another chopin, my jolly landlord. What's that you're mumbling? About the servant of my runaway young lady? He go hang! What——?'

Angelo struck his foot heavily on the stairs; the innkeeper coughed and ran back, bowing to his guest. The chasseur cried, 'I 'll drink farther on-wine between gaps!' A coin chinked on the steps in accompaniment to the chasseur's departing gallop. 'Beast of a Tedesco,' the landlord exclaimed as he picked up the money; 'they do the reckoning—not we. If I had served him with the worth of this, I should have had the bottle at my head. What a country ours is! We're ridden over, ridden over!' Angelo compelled the landlord to sit with him while he ate like five mountaineers. He left mere bones on the table. 'It's wonderful,' said the innkeeper; 'you can't know what fear is.'

'I think I don't,' Angelo replied; 'you do; cowards have to serve every party in turn. Up, and follow at my heels till I dismiss you. You know the pass into the Val Pejo and the Val di Sole.' The innkeeper stood entrenched behind a sturdy negative. Angelo eased him to submission by telling him that he only wanted the way to be pointed out. 'Bring tobacco; you're going to have an idle day,' said Angelo: 'I pay you when we separate.' He was deaf to entreaties and refusals, and began to look mad about the eyes; his poor coward plied him with expostulations, offered his wife, his daughter, half the village, for the service: he had to follow, but would take no cigars. Angelo made his daughter fetch bread and cigars, and put a handful in his pocket, upon which, after two hours of inactivity at the foot of the little chapel, where Angelo waited for the coming of Vittoria's messenger, the innkeeper was glad to close his fist. About noon Lorenzo came, and at once acted a play of eyes for Angelo to perceive his distrust of the man and a multitude of bad things about him he was reluctant, notwithstanding Angelo's ready nod, to bring out a letter; and frowned again, for emphasis to the expressive comedy. The letter said:

'I have fallen upon English friends. They lend me money. Fly to Lugano by the help of these notes: I inclose them, and will not ask pardon for it. The Valtellina is dangerous; the Stelvio we know to be watched. Retrace your way, and then try the Engadine. I should stop on a breaking bridge if I thought my companion, my Carlo's cousin, was near capture. I am well taken care of: one of my dearest friends, a captain in the English army, bears me company across. I have a maid from one of the villages, a willing girl. We ride up to the mountains; to-morrow we cross the pass; there is a glacier. Val di Non sounds Italian, but I am going into the enemy's land. You see I am well guarded. My immediate anxiety concerns you; for what will our Carlo ask of me? Lose not one moment. Away, and do not detain Lorenzo. He has orders to meet us up high in the mountain this evening. He is the best of servants but I always meet the best everywhere—that is, in Italy. Leaving it, I grieve. No news from Milan, except of great confusion there. I judge by the quiet of my sleep that we have come to no harm there.

'Your faithfullest

'VITTORIA.'

Lorenzo and the innkeeper had arrived at an altercation before Angelo finished reading. Angelo checked it, and told Lorenzo to make speed: he sent no message.

'My humanity,' Angelo then addressed his craven associate, 'counsels me that it's better to drag you some distance on than to kill you. You 're a man of intelligence, and you know why I have to consider the matter. I give you guide's pay up to the glacier, and ten florins buon'mano. Would you rather earn it with the blood of a countryman? I can't let that tongue of yours be on the high-road of running Tedeschi: you know it.

'Illustrious signore, obedience oils necessity,' quoth the innkeeper.
'If we had but a few more of my cigars!'

'Step on,' said Angelo sternly.

They walked till dark and they were in keen air. A hut full of recent grass-cuttings, on the border of a sloping wood, sheltered them. The innkeeper moaned for food at night and in the morning, and Angelo tossed him pieces of bread. Beyond the wood they came upon bare crag and commenced a sharper ascent, reached the height, and roused an eagle. The great bird went up with a sharp yelp, hanging over them with knotted claws. Its shadow stretched across sweeps of fresh snow. The innkeeper sent a mocking yelp after the eagle.

'Up here, one forgets one is a father—what's more, a husband,' he said, striking a finger on the side of his nose.

'And a cur, a traitor, carrion,' said Angelo.

'Ah, signore, one might know you were a noble. You can't understand our troubles, who carry a house on our heads, and have to fill mouths agape.'

'Speak when you have better to say,' Angelo replied.

'Padrone, one would really like to have your good opinion; and I'm lean as a wolf for a morsel of flesh. I could part with my buon'mano for a sight of red meat—oh! red meat dripping.'

'If,' cried Angelo, bringing his eyebrows down black on the man, 'if I knew that you had ever in your life betrayed one of us look below; there you should lie to be pecked and gnawed at.'

'Ah, Jacopo Cruchi, what an end for you when you are full of good meanings!' the innkeeper moaned. 'I see your ribs, my poor soul!'

Angelo quitted him. The tremendous excitement of the Alpine solitudes was like a stringent wine to his surcharged spirit. He was one to whom life and death had become as the yes and no of ordinary men: not more than a turning to the right or to the left. It surprised him that this fellow, knowing his own cowardice and his conscience, should consent to live, and care to eat to live.

When he returned to his companion, he found the fellow drinking from the flask of an Austrian soldier. Another whitecoat was lying near. They pressed Angelo to drink, and began to play lubberly pranks. One clapped hands, while another rammed the flask at the reluctant mouth, till Angelo tripped him and made him a subject for derision; whereupon they were all good friends. Musket on shoulder, the soldiers descended, blowing at their finger-nails and puffing at their tobacco—lauter kaiserlicher (rank Imperial), as with a sad enforcement of resignation they had, while lighting, characterized the universally detested Government issue of the leaf.

'They are after her,' said Jacopo, and he shot out his thumb and twisted an eyelid. His looks became insolent, and he added: 'I let them go on; but now, for my part, I must tell you, my worthy gentleman, I've had enough of it. You go your way, I go mine. Pay me, and we part. With the utmost reverence, I quit you. Climbing mountains at my time of life is out of all reason. If you want companions, I 'll signal to that pair of Tedeschi; they're within hail. Would you like it? Say the word, if you would—hey!'

Angelo smiled at the visible effect of the liquor.

'Barto Rizzo would be the man to take you in hand,' he remarked.

The innkeeper flung his head back to ejaculate, and murmured, 'Barto Rizzo! defend me from him! Why, he levies contribution upon us in the Valtellina for the good of Milan; and if we don't pay, we're all of us down in a black book. Disobey, and it's worse than swearing you won't pay taxes to the legitimate—perdition to it!—Government. Do you know Barto Rizzo, padrone? You don't know him, I hope? I'm sure you wouldn't know such a fellow.'

'I am his favourite pupil,' said Angelo.

'I'd have sworn it,' groaned the innkeeper, and cursed the day and hour when Angelo crossed his threshold. That done, he begged permission to be allowed to return, crying with tears of entreaty for mercy: 'Barto Rizzo's pupils are always out upon bloody business!' Angelo told him that he had now an opportunity of earning the approval of Barto Rizzo, and then said, 'On,' and they went in the track of the two whitecoats; the innkeeper murmuring all the while that he wanted the approval of Barto Rizzo as little as his enmity; he wanted neither frost nor fire. The glacier being traversed, they skirted a young stream, and arrived at an inn, where they found the soldiers regaling. Jacopo was informed by them that the lady whom they were pursuing had not passed. They pushed their wine for Angelo to drink: he declined, saying that he had sworn not to drink before he had shot the chamois with the white cross on his back.

'Come: we're two to one,' they said, 'and drink you shall this time!'

'Two to two,' returned Angelo: 'here is my Jacopo, and if he doesn't count for one, I won't call him father-in-law, and the fellow living at Cles may have his daughter without fighting for her.'

'Right so,' said one of the soldiers, 'and you don't speak bad German already.'

'Haven't I served in the ranks?' said Angelo, giving a bugle-call of the reveille of the cavalry.

He got on with them so well