CHAPTER IV
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