“That will be a splendid gift, mother. I suppose I shall not go back to school before I start?”
“No, Frank. Since you are to go on this expedition, the sooner you start the better. I shall write to your headmaster, and tell him that I am most reluctantly obliged to take you away from school for a few months; but that it is a matter of the greatest importance, and that I hope he will retain your name on the books and permit you to return when you come back to England.”
“If he won’t, mother, it will not matter very much. Of course I should like to go back again; but if they won’t let me, I shall only have to go to a coach for a year or two.”
“That is of little consequence,” his mother agreed; “and perhaps, after going through such an exciting time, you will not yourself care about returning to school again. You must not look upon this matter as a mere adventure, Frank; it is a very, very perilous enterprise, in which your life will be risked daily. Were we differently situated, I should not have dreamt of allowing you to go out; but we have identified ourselves with the cause of freedom in Italy. Your grandfather lost everything – his home, his country, and maybe his life; and your father, living as he did in Rome, and married to the daughter of an Italian, felt as burning a hatred for the oppression he saw everywhere round him as did the Italians themselves; perhaps more so, for being accustomed to the freedom Englishmen enjoy, these things appeared to him a good deal more monstrous than they did to those who had been used to them all their lives. He risked death a score of times in the defence of Rome; and he finally lost his life while endeavouring to discover whether my father was a prisoner in one of the tyrants’ dungeons. Thus, although in all other respects an English boy – or Italian only through your grandfather – you have been constantly hearing of Italy and its wrongs, and on that point feel as keenly and strongly as the son of an Italian patriot would do. I consider that it is a holy war in which you are about to take part – a war that, if successful, will open the doors of dungeons in which thousands, among whom may be my father, are lingering out their lives for no other cause than that they dared to think, and will free a noble people who have for centuries been under the yoke of foreigners. Therefore, as, if this country were in danger, I should not baulk your desire to enter the army, so now I say to you, join Garibaldi; and even should you be taken from me, I shall at least have the consolation of feeling that it was in a noble cause you fell, and that I sent you, knowing that my happiness as well as your life hung upon the issue. I want you to view the matter then, my boy, not in the light of an exciting adventure, but in the spirit in which the Crusaders went out to free the Holy Sepulchre, in which the Huguenots of France fought and died for their religion.”
“I will try to do so, mother,” Frank said gravely; “at any rate, if the cause was good enough for my father and grandfather to risk their lives for, it is good enough for me. But you know, mother,” he went on, in a changed voice, “you can’t put an old head on to young shoulders; and though I shall try to regard it as you say, I am afraid that I shan’t be able to help enjoying it as a splendid adventure.”
His mother smiled faintly. “I suppose that is boy nature. At any rate, I am sure that you will do your duty, and there is certainly no occasion for your doing it with a sad face; and bear in mind always, Frank, that you are going out not so much to fight, as to search every prison and fortress that may be captured, to question every prisoner whether he has heard or known any one answering the description of your grandfather, or – or – ” and her lip quivered, and her voice broke.
“Or, mother?” – and he stood surprised as Mrs. Percival burst suddenly into tears, and the signora, rising from her seat, went hastily to her, and put her arm round her neck. It was a minute or two before Mrs. Percival took her hands from her face, and went on, —
“I was going to say, Frank, or of your father.”
Frank started, as if he had been suddenly struck. “My father,” he repeated, in a low tone. “Do you think, mother – do you think it possible? I thought there was no doubt as to how he was killed.”
“I have never let myself doubt,” Mrs. Percival went on. “Whenever the thought has come into my mind during the past two years I have resolutely put it aside. It would have been an agony more than I could bear to think it possible that he could be alive and lingering in a dungeon beyond human aid. Never have I spoken on the subject, except to my mother, when she first suggested the possibility; but now that there is a chance of the prison doors being opened, I may let myself not hope – it can hardly be that – but pray that in God’s mercy I may yet see him again.” And as she again broke down altogether, Frank, with a sudden cry, threw himself on his knees beside her, and buried his face in his arms on her lap, his whole figure shaken by deep sobs.
Mrs. Percival was the first to recover her composure, and gently stroked his hair, saying: “You must not permit yourself to hope, my boy; you must shut that out from your mind as I have done, thinking of it only as a vague, a very vague and distant possibility.”
“But how, mother, could it be?” he asked presently, raising his head. “Did we not hear all about his being killed, how Beppo saw him shot, and how one of the band testified that he was dead and buried?”
“So it seemed to me, Frank, when my mother first pointed out to me that all this might be false, and that just as the government of Naples declared they were absolutely ignorant as to your grandfather’s disappearance when it appeared to us a certainty that it was due to their own act, so they would not hesitate a moment to get rid of your father, whose letters as to the state of their prisons were exciting an intense feeling against them in every free country. She said it would be easy for them to bribe or threaten his servant into telling any tale they thought fit; he or some other agent might have informed the banditti that a rich Englishman would be passing along the road at a certain time, and that the government would be ready to pay for his capture and delivery to them. The prisoner taken may have been promised a large sum to repeat the story of the Englishman having died and been buried. It was all possible, and though I was determined not to think of him as a prisoner, my mother, who knew more of these things than I did, and how matters like this were managed in Italy, thought that it was so. Still to my mind there were, and still are, reasons against hope, for surely the Neapolitan government would have preferred that the brigands should kill him, rather than that they themselves should have the trouble of keeping him in prison.”
“Possibly they would have preferred that,” Signora Forli said, speaking for the first time. “They knew that he was an Englishman, and doubtless learned that he carried loaded pistols, and may have reckoned confidently upon his resisting and being killed, and may have been disappointed because the brigands, hoping for a large ransom, carried him off wounded.”
“But even then,” Mrs. Percival said, “they could have sent up their agents to the brigands and paid them to finish their work.”
“Yes, possibly that is what they did do; but though I have never spoken to you on the subject since you told me not to, I have thought it over many and many times, and it seems to me that they would scarcely do so, for they might thus put themselves into the power of these bandits. Any one of the band might make his way to Naples, go to the British legation, and under the promise of a large sum of money and protection denounce the whole plot. It seems to me more likely that they would send an agent to the chief brigand, and pay him a sum of money to deliver the captive up to men who would meet him at a certain place. It is probable that the chief would, on some excuse or other, get rid of all his band but two or three, hand over the prisoner, and share the money only with those with him, and when the others returned, tell them that the prisoner had died and that they had buried him. Then the carabinieri would use every effort to kill those who were in the secret, and being in earnest for once, they probably did kill the chief and those with him.
“Probably the man who gave his evidence was not one of the party at all, but some prisoner charged with a minor offence, who was promised his liberty as the price of telling