The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this extraordinary warning, carried with it, to my mind, the conviction that he spoke the truth.

“Mind this!” he went on, shaking his hands at me in the vehemence of his agitation.  “I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that man Fosco, and the past time which I call back to me for your sake.  If you find the thread, keep it to yourself—­tell me nothing—­on my knees I beg and pray, let me be ignorant, let me be innocent, let me be blind to all the future as I am now!”

He said a few words more, hesitatingly and disconnectedly, then stopped again.

I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English, on an occasion too serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and phrases of his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the difficulty he had felt from the first in speaking to me at all.  Having learnt to read and understand his native language (though not to speak it), in the earlier days of our intimate companionship, I now suggested to him that he should express himself in Italian, while I used English in putting any questions which might be necessary to my enlightenment.  He accepted the proposal.  In his smooth-flowing language, spoken with a vehement agitation which betrayed itself in the perpetual working of his features, in the wildness and the suddenness of his foreign gesticulations, but never in the raising of his voice, I now heard the words which armed me to meet the last struggle, that is left for this story to record.[3]

[3] It is only right to mention here, that I repeat Pesco’s statement to me with the careful suppressions and alterations which the serious nature of the subject and my own sense of duty to my friend demand.  My first and last concealments from the reader are those which caution renders absolutely necessary in this portion of the narrative.

“You know nothing of my motive for leaving Italy,” he began, “except that it was for political reasons.  If I had been driven to this country by the persecution of my government, I should not have kept those reasons a secret from you or from any one.  I have concealed them because no government authority has pronounced the sentence of my exile.  You have heard, Walter, of the political societies that are hidden in every great city on the continent of Europe?  To one of those societies I belonged in Italy—­and belong still in England.  When I came to this country, I came by the direction of my chief.  I was over-zealous in my younger time—­I ran the risk of compromising myself and others.  For those reasons I was ordered to emigrate to England and to wait.  I emigrated—­I have waited—­I wait still.  To-morrow I may be called away—­ten years hence I may be called away.  It is all one to me—­I am here, I support myself by teaching, and I wait.  I violate no oath (you shall hear why presently) in making my confidence complete by telling you the name of the society to which I belong.  All I do is to put my life in your hands.  If what I say to you now is ever known by others to have passed my lips, as certainly as we two sit here, I am a dead man.”