that wrenched the hills of San Martino from the Austrians; the humiliations and the rage of Villafranca—­of all these had this wasted graybeard made a part.  And he talked of them with the Latin eloquence and facility, as no veteran of the north could have talked; he was in a moment the equal of these great affairs in which he had mingled; so that one felt in him the son of a race which had been rolled and polished—­a pebble, as it were, from rocks which had made the primeval frame-work of the world—­in the main course and stream of history.

Then from the campaign of ’59 he fell back on the Five Days of Milan in ’48—­the immortal days, when a populace drove out an army, and what began almost in jest ended in a delirium, a stupefaction of victory.  His language was hot, broken, confused, like the street fighting it chronicled.  Afterwards—­a further sharpening and blanching of the old face—­and he had carried them deep into the black years of Italy’s patience and Austria’s revenge.  Throwing out a thin arm, he pointed towards town after town on the lake shores, now in the brilliance of sunset, now in the shadow of the northern slope—­Gravedona, Varenna, Argegno—­towns which had each of them given their sons to the Austrian bullet and the Austrian lash for the ransom of Italy.

He ran through the sacred names—­Stazzonelli, Riccini, Crescieri, Ronchetti, Ceresa, Previtali—­young men, almost all of them, shot for the possession of a gun or a knife, for helping their comrades in the Austrian army to desert, for “insulting conduct” towards an Austrian soldier or officer.

Of one of these executions, which he had himself witnessed at Varese—­the shooting of a young fellow of six-and-twenty, his own friend and kinsman—­he gave an account which blanched the Duchess’s cheeks and brought the big tears into her eyes.  Then, when he saw the effect he had produced, the old man trembled.

“Ah, eccellenza,” he cried, “but it had to be!  The Italians had to show they knew how to die; then God let them live.  Ecco, eccellenza!”

And he drew from his breast-pocket, with shaking hands, an old envelope tied round with string.  When he had untied it, a piece of paper emerged, brown with age and worn with much reading.  It was a rudely printed broadsheet containing an account of the last words and sufferings of the martyrs of Mantua—­those conspirators of 1852—­from whose graves and dungeons sprang, tenfold renewed, the regenerating and liberating forces which, but a few years later, drove out the Austrian with the Bourbon, together.

“See here, eccellenza,” he said, as he tenderly spread out its tattered folds and gave it into the Duchess’s hand.  “Have the goodness to look where is that black mark.  There you will find the last words of Don Enrico Tazzoli, the half-brother of my father.  He was a priest, eccellenza.  Ah, it was not then as it is now!  The priests were then for Italy.  They hanged three of them at Mantua alone.  As for Don Enrico, first they stripped him of his priesthood, and then they hanged him.  And those were his last words, and the last words of Scarsellini also, who suffered with him. Veda eccellenza!  As for me, I know them from a boy.”