He had become intimate at the house of a widow lady, who lived in the Campo San Luca, one Signora Pepé, whose son had first become acquainted with Captain von Vincke at Verona.
Carlo Pepé was a young advocate, living and earning his bread at Venice, but business had taken him for a time to Verona; and when leaving that city he had asked his Austrian friend to come and see him in his mother’s house.
Both Madame Pepé and her daughter Nina, Carlo’s only sister, had somewhat found fault with the young advocate’s rashness in thus seeking the close intimacy of home-life with one whom, whatever might be his own peculiar virtues, they could not but recognise as an enemy of their country.
“That would be all very fine if it were put into a book,” said the Signora to her son, who had been striving to show that an Austrian, if good in himself, might be as worthy a friend as an Italian; “but it is always well to live on the safe side of the wall. It is not convenient that the sheep and the wolves should drink at the same stream.”
This she said with all that caution which everywhere forms so marked a trait in the Italian character. “Who goes softly goes soundly.” Half of the Italian nature is told in that proverb, though it is not the half which was becoming most apparent in the doings of the nation in these days. And the Signorina was quite of one mind with her mother.
“Carlo,” she said, “how is it that one never sees one of these Austrians in the house of any friend? Why is it that I have never yet found myself in a room with one of them?”
“Because men and women are generally so pigheaded and unreasonable,” Carlo had replied. “How am I, for instance, ever to learn what a German is at the core, or a Frenchman, or an Englishman, if I refuse to speak to one?”
It ended by Captain von Vincke being brought to the house in the Campo San Luca, and there becoming as intimate with the Signora and the Signorina as he was with the advocate.
Our story must be necessarily too short to permit us to see how the affair grew in all its soft and delicate growth; but by the beginning of April Nina Pepé had confessed her love to Hubert von Vincke, and both the captain and Nina had had a few words with the Signora on the subject of their projected marriage.
“Carlo will never allow it,” the old lady had said, trembling as she thought of the danger that was coming upon the family.
“He should not have brought Captain von Vincke to the house, unless he was prepared to regard such a thing as possible,” said Nina proudly.
“I think he is too good a fellow to object to anything that you will ask him,” said the captain, holding by the hand the lady whom he hoped to call his mother-in-law.
Throughout January and February Captain von Vincke had been an invalid. In March he had been hardly more than convalescent, and had then had time and all that opportunity which convalescence gives for the sweet business of lovemaking.
During this time, through March and in the first weeks of April, Carlo Pepé had been backwards and forwards to Verona, and had in truth had more business on hand than that which simply belonged to him as a lawyer. Those were the days in which the Italians were beginning to prepare for the great attack which was to be made, and in which correspondence was busily carried on between Italy and Venetia as to the enrolment of Venetian volunteers.
It will be understood that no Venetian was allowed to go into Italy without an Austrian passport, and that at this time the Austrians were becoming doubly strict in seeing that the order was not evaded. Of course it was evaded daily, and twice in that April did young Pepé travel between Verona and Bologna in spite of all that Austria could say to the contrary.
When at Venice he and Von Vincke discussed very freely the position of the country, nothing of course being said as to those journeys to Bologna. Indeed, of them no one in the Campo San Luca knew aught. They were such journeys that a man says nothing of them to his mother or his sister, or even to his wife, unless he has as much confidence in her courage as he has in her love. But of politics he would talk freely, as would also the German; and though each of them would speak of the cause as though they two were simply philosophical lookers-on, and were not and could not become actors, and though each had in his mind a settled resolve to bear with the political opinion of the other, yet it came to pass that they now and again were on the verge of quarrelling.
The fault, I think, was wholly with Carlo Pepé, whose enthusiasm of course was growing as those journeys to Bologna were made successfully, and who was beginning to feel assured that Italy at last would certainly do something for herself. But there had not come any open quarrel—not as yet, when Nina, in her lover’s presence, was arguing as to the impropriety of bringing Captain von
