Sunrise by William Black (online e book reader TXT) 📖

picturesque squalor and lazy life of the place were lit up by the glare reflected from a wild and stormy sunset. The tall, pink-fronted houses; the mules and oxen with their brazen yokes and tinkling bells; the fruit-sellers, and fish-sellers, and water-carriers, in costumes of many hues; the mendicant friars with their cloak and hood of russet-brown; the priests black and clean-shaven; the groups of women, swarthy of face, with head-dresses of red or yellow, clustered round the stalls; the children, in rags of brown, and scarlet, and olive-green, lying about the pavement as if artists had posed them there--all these formed a picture which was almost bewildering in its richness of color, and was no doubt rendered all the more brilliant because of the powerful contrast with the dark and driven sea. For the waters out there were racing in before a stiff breeze, and springing high on the fortresses and rocks; and the clouds overhead were seething and twisting, with many a sudden flash of orange; and then, far away beyond all this color and motion and change, rose the vast and gloomy bulk of Vesuvius, overshadowed and thunderous, as if the mountain were charged with a coming storm.

Calabressa grew impatient, despite his careless song.


"--Me seras tu fidele....
--Comme une tourterelle.
--Eh bieu, ca va....
Ca va!
--Ca me va!
--Comme ca, ca me va!


--Diable, Monsieur Edouarts! You are very silent. You do not know where we are going, perhaps?"

Edwards started, as if he were waking from a reverie.

"Oh yes, Signor Calabressa," said he, "I am not likely to forget that. Perhaps I think more seriously about it than you. To you it is nothing. But I cannot forget, you see, that you and I are practically conniving at a murder."

"Hush, hush, my dear friend!" said Calabressa, glancing round. "Be discreet! And what a foolish phrase, too! You--you whose business is merely to translate; to preach; to educate a poor devil of a Russian--what have you to do with it? And to speak of murder! Bah! You do not understand the difference, then, between killing a man as an act of private anger and revenge, and executing a man for crimes against society? My good friend Edouarts, you have lived all your life among books, but you have not learned any logic--no!"

Edwards was not inclined to go into any abstract argument

"I will do what I have been appointed to do," he said, curtly; "but that cannot prevent my wishing that it had not to be done at all."

"And who knows?" said Calabressa, lightly. "Perhaps, if you are so fearful about your small share, your very little share--it is no more than that of the garcon who helps one on with his coat: is he accessary, too, if a rogue has to be punished?--is he responsible for the sentence, also, if he brushes the boots of the judge?--or the servant of the court who sweeps out the room, is he guilty if there is a miscarriage of justice? No, no; my dear friend Edouarts, do not alarm yourself. Then, I was saying, perhaps it may not be necessary, after all. You perceived, my friend, that when the proposal of his eminence the Cardinal was mentioned, the Secretary Granaglia smiled, and I, thoughtless, laughed. You perceived it, did you not?"

By this time they were in the Chiaja, beyond the Villa Reale; and there were fewer people about. Calabressa stopped and confronted his companion. For the purposes of greater emphasis, he rested his right elbow in the palm of his left hand, while his forefinger was at the point of his nose.

"What?" said he, in this striking attitude, "what if we were both fools--ha? The Secretary Granaglia and myself--what if we were both fools?"

Calabressa abandoned his pose, linked his arm within that of his companion, and walked on with him.

"Come, I will implant something in your mind. I will throw out a fancy; it may take root and flourish; if not, who is the worse? Now, if the Council were really to entertain that proposal of Zaccatelli?"

He regarded his friend Edouarts.

"You observed, I say, that Granaglia smiled: to him it was ludicrous. I laughed: to me it was farcical--the chatter of a bavard. The Pope become the patron of a secret society! The priests become our friends and allies! Very well, my friend; but listen. The little minds see what is absurd; the great minds are serious. Granaglia is a little devil of courage; but he is narrow; he is practical; he has no imagination. I: what am I?--careless, useless, also a bavard, if you will. But it occurred to me, after all, when I began to think--what a great man, a great mind, might say to this proposal. Take a man like Lind: see what he could make of it! 'Do not laugh at it any more, Calabressa,' said I to myself, 'until you hear the opinion of wiser men than yourself.'"

He gripped Edwards's arm tight.

"Listen. To become the allies of the priests it is not necessary to believe everything the priests say. On the other hand, they need not approve all that we are doing, if only they withdraw their opposition. Do you perceive the possibility now? Do you think of the force of that combination? The multitudes of the Catholics encouraged to join!--the Vatican the friend and ally of the Council of the Seven Stars!"

He spoke the last words in a low voice, but he were a proud look.

"And if this proposal were entertained," said Edwards, meditatively, "of course, they would abandon this other business."

"My good friend," said Calabressa, confidentially, "I know that Lind, who sees things with a large vision, is against it. He consents--as you consent to do your little outside part--against his own opinion. More; if he had been on the Council the decree would never have been granted, though De Bedros and a dozen of his daughters had demanded it. 'Calabressa,' he said to me, 'it will do great mischief in England if it is known that we are connected with it.' Well, you see, all this would be avoided if they closed with the Cardinal's offer."

"You are sanguine, Signor Calabressa," said the other.

"Besides, the thirty thousand lire!"' said Calabressa, eagerly. "Do you know what that is? Ah, you English have always too much money!"

"No doubt," said Edwards, with a smile. "We are all up to the neck in gold."

"Thirty thousand lire a year, and the favor of the Vatican; what fools Granaglia and I were to laugh! But perhaps we will find that the Council were wiser."

They had now got out to Posilipo, and the stormy sunset had waned, leaving the sky overclouded and dusk. Calabressa, having first looked up and down the road, stopped by the side of a high wall, over which projected a number of the broken, gray-green, spiny leaves of the cactus--a hedge at the foot of the terrace above.

"Peste!" said he. "How the devil is one to find it out in the dark?"

"Find what out?"

"My good friend," said he, in a whisper, "you are not able by chance to see a bit of thread--a bit of red thread--tied round one of those big leaves?"

Edwards glanced up.

"Not I."

"Ah, well, we must run the risk. Perhaps by accident there may be a meeting."

They walked on for some time, Calabressa becoming more and more watchful. They paused to let a man driving a wagon and a pair of oxen go by; and then Calabressa, enjoining his companion to remain where he was, went on alone.

The changing sky had opened somewhat overhead, and there was a wan twilight shining through the parted clouds. Edwards, looking after Calabressa, could have fancied that the dark figure had disappeared like a ghost; but the old albino had merely crossed the road, opened the one half of a huge gate, and entered a garden.

It was precisely like the gardens of the other villas along the highway--cut in terraces along the steep side of the hill, with winding pathways, and marble lions here and there, and little groves of orange and olive and fig trees; while on one side the sheer descent was guarded by an enormous cactus hedge. The ground was very unequal: on one small plateau a fountain was playing--the trickling of the water the only sound audible in the silence.

Calabressa took out his pocket-book, and tore a leaf from it.

"The devil!" he muttered to himself. "How is one to write in the dark?"

But he managed to scrawl the word "Barsanti;" then he wrapped the paper round a small pebble and approached the fountain. By putting one foot on the edge of the stone basin beneath he could reach over to the curved top, and there he managed to drop the missive into some aperture concealed under the lip. He stepped back, dried his hand with his handkerchief, and then went down one of the pathways to a lower level of the garden.

Here he easily found the entrance to an ordinary sort of grotto--a narrow cave winding inward and ending in a piece of fancy rockwork down which the water was heard to trickle. But he did not go to the end--he stopped about half-way and listened. There was no sound whatever in the dark, except the plash of the tiny water-fall.

Then there was a heavy grating noise, and in the black wall before him appeared a vertical line of orange light. This sudden gleam was so bewildering to the eyes that Calabressa could not see who it was that come out to him; he only knew that the stranger waited for him to pass on into the outer air.

"It is cooler here. To your business, friend Calabressa."

The moment Calabressa recognized this tall, military-looking man, with the closely cropped bullet-head and long silver-white mustache, he whipped off his cap, and said, anxiously,

"A thousand pardons, Excellency! a thousand pardons! Do I interrupt? May not I see Fossati?"

"It is unnecessary. There is much business to-night. One must breathe the air sometimes."

Calabressa for once had completely lost his sang-froid. He could not speak for stammering.

"I assure you, your Excellency, it is death to me to think that I interrupt you."

"But why did you come, then, my friend? To the point."

"Zaccatelli," the other managed to get out.

"Well?"

"There was a proposal. Some days ago I saw Granaglia."

"Well?"

"Pardon me, Excellency. If I had known, not for worlds would I have called you--"

"Come, come my Calabressa," said the other, good-naturedly. "No more apologies. What is it you have to say?--the proposal made by the Cardinal? Yes; we know about that."

"And it has not been accepted?--the decree remains?"

"You waste your breath, my friend. The decree remains, certainly. We are not children; we do not play. What more, my Calabressa?"

But Calabressa had to collect his thoughts. Then he said, slowly,

"It occurred to me when I was in England--there was a poor devil there who would have thrown away his life in a useless act of revenge--well--"

"Well, you brought him over here," said the other, interrupting him. "Your object? Ah, Lind and you being old comrades; and Lind appearing to you to be in a difficulty. But did Lind approve?"

"Not quite," said Calabressa, still hesitating.