Their eyes met in a sudden shock of comprehension: a veil seemed to be lifted between them. Arment’s lip trembled.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t understand.”
She gave a little cry, almost of triumph. “I knew it! I knew it! You wondered—you tried to tell me—but no words came… You saw your life falling in ruins…the world slipping from you…and you couldn’t speak or move!”
She sank down on the chair against which she had been leaning. “Now I know—now I know,” she repeated.
“I am very sorry for you,” she heard Arment stammer.
She looked up quickly. “That’s not what I came for. I don’t want you to be sorry. I came to ask you to forgive me…for not understanding that you didn’t understand… That’s all I wanted to say.” She rose with a vague sense that the end had come, and put out a groping hand toward the door.
Arment stood motionless. She turned to him with a faint smile.
“You forgive me?”
“There is nothing to forgive—”
“Then will you shake hands for good-by?” She felt his hand in hers: it was nerveless, reluctant.
“Good-by,” she repeated. “I understand now.”
She opened the door and passed out into the hall. As she did so, Arment took an impulsive step forward; but just then the footman, who was evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the background to let her out. She heard Arment fall back. The footman threw open the door, and she found herself outside in the darkness.
THE LETTER
I
For many years he had lived withdrawn from the world in which he had once played so active and even turbulent a part. The study of Tuscan art was his only pursuit, and it was to help him in the classification of his notes and documents that I was first called to his villa. Colonel Alingdon had then the look of a very old man, though his age can hardly have exceeded seventy. He was small and bent, with a finely wrinkled face which still wore the tan of youthful exposure. But for this dusky redness it would have been hard to reconstruct from the shrunken recluse, with his low fastidious voice and carefully tended hands, an image of that young knight of adventure whose sword had been at the service of every uprising which stirred the uneasy soil of Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Though I was more of a proficient in Colonel Alingdon’s later than his earlier pursuits, the thought of his soldiering days was always coming between me and the pacific work of his old age. As we sat collating papers and comparing photographs, I had the feeling that this dry and quiet old man had seen even stranger things than people said: that he knew more of the inner history of Europe than half the diplomatists of his day.
I was not alone in this conviction; and the friend who had engaged me for Colonel Alingdon had appended to his instructions the injunction to “get him to talk.” But this was what no one could do. Colonel Alingdon was ready to discuss by the hour the date of a Giottesque triptych, or the attribution of a disputed master; but on the history of his early life he was habitually silent.
It was perhaps because I recognized this silence and respected it that it afterward came to be broken for me. Or it was perhaps merely because, as the failure of Colonel Alingdon’s sight cut him off from his work, he felt the natural inclination of age to revert from the empty present to the crowded past. For one cause or another he did talk to me in the last year of his life; and I felt myself mingled, to an extent inconceivable to the mere reader of history, with the passionate scenes of the Italian struggle for liberty. Colonel Alingdon had been mixed with it in all its phases: he had known the last Carbonari and the Young Italy of Mazzini; he had been in Perugia when the mercenaries of a liberal Pope slaughtered women and children in the streets; he had been in Sicily with the Thousand, and in Milan during the Cinque Giornate.
“They say the Italians didn’t know how to fight,” he said one day, musingly—“that the French had to come down and do their work for them. People forget how long it was since they had had any fighting to do. But they hadn’t forgotten how to suffer and hold their tongues; how to die and take their secrets with them. The Italian war of independence was really carried on underground: it was one of those awful silent struggles which are so much more terrible than the roar of a battle. It’s a deuced sight easier to charge with your regiment than to lie rotting in an Austrian prison and know that if you give up the name of a friend or two you can go back scot-free to your wife and children. And thousands and thousands of Italians had the choice given them—and hardly one went back.”
He sat silent, his meditative fingertips laid together, his eyes fixed on the past which was the now only thing clearly visible to them.
“And the women?” I said. “Were they as brave as the men?”
I had not spoken quite at random. I had always heard that there had been as much of love as of war in Colonel Alingdon’s early career, and I hoped that my question might give a personal turn to his reminiscences.
“The women?” he repeated. “They were braver—for they had more to bear and less to do. Italy could never have been saved without them.”
His eye had kindled and I detected in it the reflection of some vivid memory. It was then that I asked him what was the bravest thing he had ever known of a woman’s doing.
The question was such a vague one that I hardly knew why I had put it, but to my surprise he answered almost at once, as though I had touched on a subject of frequent meditation.
“The bravest thing I ever saw done by a woman,” he said, “was brought about by an act of my own—and one of which I am not particularly proud. For that reason I have never spoken of it before—there was a time when I didn’t even care to think of it—but all that is past now. She died years ago, and so did the Jack Alingdon she knew, and in telling you the story I am no more than the mouthpiece of an old tradition which some ancestor might have handed down to me.”
He leaned back, his clear blind gaze fixed smilingly on me, and I had the feeling that, in groping through the labyrinth of his young adventures, I had come unawares upon their central point.
II
When I was in Milan in ‘forty-seven an unlucky thing happened to me.
I had been sent there to look over the ground by some of my Italian friends in England. As an English officer I had no difficulty in getting into Milanese society, for England had for years been the refuge of the Italian fugitives, and I was known to be working in their interests. It was just the kind of job I liked, and I never enjoyed life more than I did in those days. There was a great deal going on—good music, balls and theatres. Milan kept up her gayety to the last. The English were shocked by the insouciance of a race who could dance under the very nose of the usurper; but those who understood the situation knew that Milan was playing Brutus, and playing it uncommonly well.
I was in the thick of it all—it was just the atmosphere to suit a young fellow of nine-and-twenty, with a healthy passion for waltzing and fighting. But, as I said, an unlucky thing happened to me. I was fool enough to fall in love with Donna Candida Falco. You have heard of her, of course: you know the share she had in the great work. In a different way she was what the terrible Princess Belgioioso had been to an earlier generation. But Donna Candida was not terrible. She was quiet, discreet and charming. When I knew her she was a widow of thirty, her husband, Andrea Falco, having died ten years previously, soon after their marriage. The marriage had been notoriously unhappy, and his death was a release to Donna Candida. Her family were of Modena, but they had come to live in Milan soon after the execution of Ciro Menotti and his companions. You remember the details of that business? The Duke of Modena, one of the most adroit villains in Europe, had been bitten with the hope of uniting the Italian states under his rule. It was a vision of Italian liberation—of a sort. A few madmen were dazzled by it, and Ciro Menotti was one of them. You know the end. The Duke of Modena, who had counted on Louis Philippe’s backing, found that that astute sovereign had betrayed him to Austria. Instantly, he saw that his first business was to get rid of the conspirators he had created. There was nothing easier than for a Hapsburg Este to turn on a friend. Ciro Menotti had staked his life for the Duke—and the Duke took it. You may remember that, on the night when seven hundred men and a cannon attacked Menotti’s house, the Duke was seen looking on at the slaughter from an arcade across the square.