With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in making Pesca understand what I wanted.  As soon as we two were alone in his room, I increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling him what my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly as I have acknowledged it here.

“My friend, what can I do?” cried the Professor, piteously appealing to me with both hands.  “Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I help you, Walter, when I don’t know the man?”

“He knows you—­he is afraid of you—­he has left the theatre to escape you.  Pesca! there must be a reason for this.  Look back into your own life before you came to England.  You left Italy, as you have told me yourself, for political reasons.  You have never mentioned those reasons to me, and I don’t inquire into them now.  I only ask you to consult your own recollections, and to say if they suggest no past cause for the terror which the first sight of you produced in that man.”

To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as they appeared to me, produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of Pesca had produced on the Count.  The rosy face of my little friend whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me slowly, trembling from head to foot.

“Walter!” he said.  “You don’t know what you ask.”

He spoke in a whisper—­he looked at me as if I had suddenly revealed to him some hidden danger to both of us.  In less than one minute of time he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man of all my past experience, that if I had met him in the street, changed as I saw him now, I should most certainly not have known him again.

“Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and shocked you,” I replied.  “Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count Fosco’s hands.  Remember that the wrong can never be redressed, unless the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice.  I spoke in her interests, Pesca—­I ask you again to forgive me—­I can say no more.”

I rose to go.  He stopped me before I reached the door.

“Wait,” he said.  “You have shaken me from head to foot.  You don’t know how I left my country, and why I left my country.  Let me compose myself, let me think, if I can.”

I returned to my chair.  He walked up and down the room, talking to himself incoherently in his own language.  After several turns backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his little hands with a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast.

“On your heart and soul, Walter,” he said, “is there no other way to get to that man but the chance-way through me?”

“There is no other way,” I answered.

He left me again, opened the door of the room and looked out cautiously into the passage, closed it once more, and came back.

“You won your right over me, Walter,” he said, “on the day when you saved my life.  It was yours from that moment, when you pleased to take it.  Take it now.  Yes!  I mean what I say.  My next words, as true as the good God is above us, will put my life into your hands.”