“When you pass into Italy you must not fail to see my old friend the Marquis d’Armand. The French King has appointed him as ambassador in Turin. It’s a sign of high favour, I believe. He will be either in Turin or Genoa. …” Sir Charles paused, then after a perfectly audible sigh added with an effort: “The Marquise is dead. I knew her in her youth. She was a marvellous woman. …” Sir Charles checked himself, and then with another effort, “But the daughter of my old friend is I believe with her father now, a married daughter, the Countess of Montevesso.”
“You mean little Adèle, sir,” said Cosmo, with interest, but on Sir Charles’s face there passed a distinct shade of distress.
“Oh, you remember the child,” he said, and his tone was tender but it changed to contempt as he went on. “I don’t know whether the fellow, I mean the man she married, is staying with them or whether they are living with him, or whether … I know nothing!”
The word “upstart,” heard many years ago from his sister Henrietta, crossed Cosmo’s mind. He thought to himself, “There is something wrong there,” and to his father he said, “I will be able to tell you all about it.”
“I don’t want to know,” Sir Charles replied with a surprising solemnity of tone and manner which hid some deeper feeling. “But give the Marquis my love and tell him that when he gets tired of all his grandeurs he may remember that there is a large place for him in this house as long as I live.”
Late that evening Cosmo, saying goodbye to his sister, took her in his arms, kissed her forehead, and holding her out at arm’s length said:
“You have grown into a charming girl, Henrietta.”
“I am glad you think so,” she said. “Alas, I am too dark. I can never be as charming as Adèle must have been at my age. You seem to have forgotten her.”
“Oh no,” protested Cosmo carelessly. “A marvel of fairness, wasn’t she? I remember you telling me years ago that she married an upstart.”
“That was Father’s expression. You know what that means, Cosmo.”
“I do know what it means, exactly,” he said, laughing. “But from what Father said this afternoon it seems as if he were a rather nasty upstart. What made Adèle do it?”
“I am awed,” confessed Henrietta. “I don’t know what made her do it. I was never told. Father never talked much about the D’Armands afterwards. I was with him in the yellow drawing room the evening he got the letter from the Marquis. After he read it he said something very extraordinary. You know it’s full nine years ago and I was yet a child, yet I could not have dreamed it. I heard it distinctly. He dropped his hands and said, ‘Austerlitz has done it.’ What could he have meant?”
“It would be hard to guess the connection,” said Cosmo, smiling at his sister’s puzzled face. “Father must have been thinking of something else.”
“Father was thinking of nothing else for days,” affirmed Henrietta positively.
“You must have been a very observant child,” remarked her brother. “But I believe you were always a clever girl, Henrietta. Well, I am going to see Adèle.”
“Oh yes, you start in the morning to travel ever so far and for ever so long,” said Miss Latham enviously. “Oh Cosmo, you are going to write to me—lots?”
He looked at her appreciatively and gave her another brotherly hug.
“Certainly I will write, whole reams,” he said.
IV
On his way from the harbour to the upper part of the town where his inn was situated Cosmo Latham met very few people. He had to pass through a sort of covered way; its arch yawned in front of him very black with only a feeble glimmer of a light in its depths. It did not occur to him that it was a place where one could very well be knocked on the head by evil-intentioned men if there were any prowling about in that early part of the evening, for it was early yet, though the last gleams of sunset had gone out completely off the earth and out of the sky. On issuing from the dark passage a maze of narrow streets presented itself to his choice, but he knew that as long as he kept walking uphill he could not fail to reach the middle of the town. Projecting at long intervals from the continuous mass of thick walls, wrought-iron arms held lanterns containing dim gleams of light. The enormous doors of the lofty gateways he passed were closed, and the only sound he could hear was that of his own deliberate footsteps. At a wider spot where several of those lanes met he stopped, and looking about him asked himself whether all those enormous and palatial houses were empty, or whether it was the thickness of walls that killed all the signs of life within; for as to the population being already asleep he could not believe it for a moment. All at once he caught sight of a muffled feminine form. In the heavy shadow she seemed to emerge out of one wall and gliding on seemed to disappear into another. It was undoubtedly a woman. Cosmo was startled by this noiseless apparition and had a momentary feeling of being lost in an enchanted city. Presently the enchanted silence was broken by the increasing sound of an iron-shod stick tapping the flagstones, till there walked out of one of the dark and tortuous lanes a man who by his rolling gait, general outline, and the characteristic shape of the hat, Cosmo could not doubt, was a seaman belonging to the English man-of-war in the harbour. The tapping of his stick ceased suddenly and Cosmo hailed him in English, asking for the way.
The sturdy figure in the tarpaulin hat put its cudgel under its arm
