“I have been told that Miss Lovelace is fond of music. I should be delighted if, during my residence by the lake to which I am condemned by my doctor’s orders, she would allow me to join her.”
“They receive no one, and will not see anybody,” said the old gardener.
Rodolphe bit his lips and went away, without having been invited into the house, or taken into the part of the garden that lay between the front of the house and the shore of the little promontory. On that side the house had a balcony above the first floor, made of wood, and covered by the roof, which projected deeply like the roof of a chalet on all four sides of the building, in the Swiss fashion. Rodolphe had loudly praised the elegance of this arrangement, and talked of the view from that balcony, but all in vain. When he had taken leave of the Bergmanns it struck him that he was a simpleton, like any man of spirit and imagination disappointed of the results of a plan which he had believed would succeed.
In the evening he, of course, went out in a boat on the lake, round and about the spit of land, to Brunnen and to Schwytz, and came in at nightfall. From afar he saw the window open and brightly lighted; he heard the sound of a piano and the tones of an exquisite voice. He made the boatman stop, and gave himself up to the pleasure of listening to an Italian air delightfully sung. When the singing ceased, Rodolphe landed and sent away the boat and rowers. At the cost of wetting his feet, he went to sit down under the water-worn granite shelf crowned by a thick hedge of thorny acacia, by the side of which ran a long lime avenue in the Bergmanns’ garden. By the end of an hour he heard steps and voices just above him, but the words that reached his ears were all Italian, and spoken by two women.
He took advantage of the moment when the two speakers were at one end of the walk to slip noiselessly to the other. After half an hour of struggling he got to the end of the avenue, and there took up a position whence, without being seen or heard, he could watch the two women without being observed by them as they came towards him. What was Rodolphe’s amazement on recognizing the deaf-mute as one of them; she was talking to Miss Lovelace in Italian.
It was now eleven o’clock at night. The stillness was so perfect on the lake and around the dwelling, that the two women must have thought themselves safe; in all Gersau there could be no eyes open but theirs. Rodolphe supposed that the girl’s dumbness must be a necessary deception. From the way in which they both spoke Italian, Rodolphe suspected that it was the mother tongue of both girls, and concluded that the name of English also hid some disguise.
“They are Italian refugees,” said he to himself, “outlaws in fear of the Austrian or Sardinian police. The young lady waits till it is dark to walk and talk in security.”
He lay down by the side of the hedge, and crawled like a snake to find a way between two acacia shrubs. At the risk of leaving his coat behind him, or tearing deep scratches in his back, he got through the hedge when the so-called Miss Fanny and her pretended deaf-and-dumb maid were at the other end of the path; then, when they had come within twenty yards of him without seeing him, for he was in the shadow of the hedge, and the moon was shining brightly, he suddenly rose.
“Fear nothing,” said he in French to the Italian girl, “I am not a spy. You are refugees, I have guessed that. I am a Frenchman whom one look from you has fixed at Gersau.”
Rodolphe, startled by the acute pain caused by some steel instrument piercing his side, fell like a log.
“Nel lago con pietra!” said the terrible dumb girl.
“Oh, Gina!” exclaimed the Italian.
“She has missed me,” said Rodolphe, pulling from his wound a stiletto, which had been turned by one of the false ribs. “But a little higher up it would have been deep in my heart.—I was wrong, Francesca,” he went on, remembering the name he had heard little Gina repeat several times; “I owe her no grudge, do not scold her. The happiness of speaking to you is well worth the prick of a stiletto. Only show me the way out; I must get back to the Stopfers’ house. Be easy; I shall tell nothing.”
Francesca, recovering from her astonishment, helped Rodolphe to rise, and said a few words to Gina, whose eyes filled with tears. The two girls made him sit down on a bench and take off his coat, his waistcoat and cravat. Then Gina opened his shirt and sucked the wound strongly. Francesca, who had left them, returned with a large piece of sticking-plaster, which she applied to the wound.
“You can now walk as far as your house,” she said.
Each took an arm, and Rodolphe was conducted to a side gate, of which the key was in Francesca’s apron pocket.
“Does Gina speak French?” said Rodolphe to Francesca.
“No. But do not excite yourself,” replied Francesca with some impatience.
“Let me look at you,” said Rodolphe pathetically, “for it may be long before I am able to come again—”
He leaned against one of the gateposts contemplating the beautiful Italian, who allowed him to gaze at her for a moment under the sweetest silence and the sweetest night which ever, perhaps, shone on this lake, the king of Swiss lakes.
Francesca was quite of the Italian type, and such as imagination supposes or pictures, or, if you will, dreams, that Italian women are. What first struck Rodolphe was the grace and elegance of a figure evidently powerful, though so slender
