he having confessed to the existence of a plot in the
city. Pericles came fuming to Wilfrid’s
quarters. Wilfrid gathered from him that Sarpo’s
general confession had been retracted: it was
too foolish to snare the credulity of Austrian officials.
Sarpo stated that he had fabricated the story of a
plot, in order to escape the persecutions of a terrible
man, and find safety in prison lodgings vender Government.
The short confinement for a civic offence was not
his idea of safety; he desired to be sheltered by
Austrian soldiers and a fortress, and said that his
torments were insupportable while Barto Rizzo was at
large. This infamous Republican had latterly
been living in his house, eating his bread, and threatening
death to him unless he obeyed every command. Sarpo
had undertaken his last mission for the purpose of
supplying his lack of resolution to release himself
from his horrible servitude by any other means; not
from personal animosity toward the Countess Alessandra
Ammiani, known as la Vittoria. When seized, fear
had urged him to escape. Such was his second
story. The points seemed irreconcilable to those
who were not in the habit of taking human nature into
their calculations of a possible course of conduct;
even Wilfrid, though he was aware that Barto Rizzo
hated Vittoria inveterately, imagined Sarpo’s
first lie to have necessarily fathered a second.
But the second story was true: and the something
like lover’s wrath with which the outrage to
Vittoria fired Pericles, prompted him to act on it
as truth. He told Wilfrid that he should summon
Barto Rizzo to his presence. As the Government
was unable to exhibit so much power, Wilfrid looked
sarcastic; whereupon Pericles threw up his chin crying:
“Oh! you shall know my resources. Now, my
friend, one bit of paper, and a messenger, and zen
home to my house, to Tokay and cigarettes, and wait
to see.” He remarked after pencilling a
few lines, “Countess d’Isorella is her
enemy? hein!”
“Why, you wouldn’t listen to me when I
told you,” said Wilfrid.
“No,” Pericles replied while writing and
humming over his pencil; “my ear is a pelican-pouch,
my friend; it—and Irma is her enemy also?—it
takes and keeps, but does not swallow till it wants.
I shall hear you, and I shall hear my Sandra Vittoria,
and I shall not know you have spoken, when by-and-by
I tinkle, tinkle, a bell of my brain, and your word
walks in,—’quite well?’—’very
well! ’—sit down’—’if
it is ze same to you, I prefer to stand’—’good;
zen I examine you.’ My motto:—’Time
opens ze gates: my system: ’it is
your doctor of regiment’s system when your twelve,
fifteen, forty recruits strip to him:—’Ah!
you, my man, have varicose vein: no soldier in
our regiment, you!’ So on. Perhaps I am
not intelligible; but, hear zis. I speak not
often of my money; but I say—it is in your
ear—a man of millions, he is a king!”
The Greek jumped up and folded a couple of notes.
“I will not have her disturbed. Let her