CXIV. Peppino.

CXIV

Peppino.

At the very moment when the count's steamboat disappeared behind Cape Morgiou, a man, traveling by post along the road from Florence to Rome, had just passed the small town of Aquapendente. He walked briskly enough to cover a good deal of ground, without, however, becoming suspicious.

Clad in a redingote, or rather a greatcoat, much the worse for traveling, but still showing bright and fresh a repeated Legion of Honor ribbon on his coat, this man, not only by this double mark, but also by the accent with which he spoke to the postilion, was to be recognized as a Frenchman. A further proof that he was born in the land of the universal language was that he knew no other Italian words than those musical terms which, like Figaro's _goddam_, can replace all the niceties of a particular tongue.

"_Allegro!_" he would say to the postilions at every ascent.

"_Moderato!_" he would call at every descent.

And Heaven knows there are ascents and descents on the road from Florence to Rome by way of Aquapendente!

These two words, moreover, greatly amused the worthy fellows to whom they were addressed.

In the presence of the eternal city, that is to say on arriving at the Storta, the point from which Rome is visible, the traveler felt none of that enthusiastic curiosity which impels every foreigner to rise from the depths of his carriage in an attempt to catch sight of the famous dome of St. Peter's, which can be seen long before anything else is distinguished. No, he merely drew a portfolio from his pocket, and from his portfolio a paper folded in four, which he unfolded and refolded with an attention that resembled respect, and he contented himself with saying:

"Good, I still have it."

The carriage passed through the Porta del Popolo, turned to the left, and stopped at the Hotel de España.

Master Pastrini, our former acquaintance, received the traveler on the threshold, hat in hand.

The traveler alighted, ordered a good dinner, and inquired the address of the house of Thomson and French, which was given him at once, that house being one of the best known in Rome.

It was situated on the Via dei Banchi, near St. Peter's.

In Rome, as everywhere, the arrival of a post-chaise is an event. Ten young descendants of Marius and the Gracchi, barefoot, with holes in their elbows, but hand on hip and arm picturesquely curved above the head, were looking at the traveler, the post-chaise, and the horses; to these street urchins par excellence had joined some fifty idlers from the States of His Holiness, of those who make circles by spitting into the Tiber from the height of the Bridge of St. Angelo, when the Tiber has water.

Now, as the urchins and idlers of Rome, happier than those of Paris, understand all languages, and especially the French language, they heard the traveler ask for an apartment, ask for dinner, and finally ask the address of the house of Thomson and French.

The result was that, when the new arrival left the hotel with the obligatory cicerone, a man detached himself from the group of curious onlookers, and, without being noticed by the traveler, without seeming to be noticed by his guide, walked at a short distance from the foreigner, following him with as much skill as a Parisian police agent might have done.

The Frenchman was in such haste to pay his visit to the house of Thomson and French that he had not taken the time to wait until the horses were harnessed; the carriage was to rejoin him on the road or await him at the banker's door.

He arrived without the carriage having rejoined.

The Frenchman entered, leaving his guide in the anteroom, who at once fell into conversation with two or three of those industrious men without industry, or rather with a thousand industries, who linger in Rome at the doors of bankers, churches, ruins, museums, or theaters.

At the same time as the Frenchman, the man who had detached himself from the group of curious onlookers also entered; the Frenchman rang at the office wicket and penetrated into the first room; his shadow did the same.

"Messrs. Thomson and French?" asked the stranger.

A sort of lackey rose at a sign from a confidential clerk, solemn guardian of the first office.

"Whom shall I announce?" said the lackey, preparing to walk ahead of the stranger.

"Baron Danglars," replied the traveler.

"Come," said the lackey.

A door opened, the lackey and the baron disappeared through it. The man who had entered behind Danglars sat down on a waiting bench.

The clerk continued writing for some five minutes or so; during those five minutes, the seated man maintained the deepest silence and the strictest immobility.

Then the clerk's pen ceased to scratch upon the paper; he raised his head, looked attentively around him, and, having assured himself of the tête-à-tête:

"Ah! ah!" said he, "so it's you, Peppino?"

"Yes," laconically answered the latter.

"Have you scented something good in that fat man?"

"There's not much credit due for this one, we were warned."

"So you know what he comes here for, curious fellow."

"Of course, he comes to draw money; only, it remains to be known what sum."

"They'll tell you that presently, friend."

"Very well; but don't go, as the other day, and give me false information."

"What do you mean, and of whom are you speaking? Would it be that Englishman who carried off three thousand crowns from here the other day?"

"No, he indeed had the three thousand crowns, and we found them. I mean that Russian prince."

"Well?"

"Well, you had charged us thirty thousand livres, and we found only twenty-two."

"You must have searched badly."

"It was Luigi Vampa who made the search in person."

"In that case, he had either paid his debts..."

"A Russian?"

"Or spent his money."

"That is possible, after all."

"That is certain; but let me go to my observatory, the Frenchman would do his business without my being able to know the positive figure."

Peppino made an affirmative sign, and, drawing a rosary from his pocket, began to mumble some prayer, while the clerk disappeared through the same door that had given passage to the lackey and the baron.

At the end of some ten minutes, the clerk reappeared radiant.

"Well?" asked Peppino of his friend.

"Look alive, look alive!" said the clerk; "the sum is round."

"Five or six millions, isn't it?"

"Yes; do you know the figure?"

"From a receipt of His Excellency the Count of Monte Cristo."

"You know the count?"

"And who has been credited on Rome, Venice, and Vienna."

"That's it!" cried the clerk; "how are you so well informed?"

"I told you we had been warned in advance."

"Then why do you apply to me?"

"To be sure it is indeed the man we have to deal with."

"It is indeed he... Five millions. A pretty sum, eh, Peppino?"

"Yes."

"We shall never have as much."

"At least," answered Peppino philosophically, "we shall have some scraps of it."

"Hush! Here is our man."

The clerk took up his pen, and Peppino his rosary; one wrote, the other prayed when the door reopened. Danglars appeared radiant, accompanied by the banker, who saw him to the door.

Behind Danglars descended Peppino.

According to agreement, the carriage that was to rejoin Danglars awaited before the house of Thomson and French. The cicerone held the door open: the cicerone is a very complaisant being whom one may employ for anything.

Danglars jumped into the carriage, light as a young man of twenty. The cicerone closed the door and mounted beside the coachman. Peppino mounted on the back seat.

"Does Your Excellency wish to see St. Peter's?" asked the cicerone.

"What for?" answered the baron.

"Why! to see it."

"I did not come to Rome to see," said Danglars aloud; then he added in a low voice, with his covetous smile: "I came to draw money."

And he did indeed touch his portfolio, in which he had just locked a letter.

"Then Your Excellency is going..."

"To the hotel."

"Casa Pastrini," said the cicerone to the coachman.

And the carriage departed swift as a gentleman's carriage.

Ten minutes later, the baron was back in his apartment, and Peppino installed himself on the bench against the shopfront of the hotel, after having whispered a few words in the ear of one of those descendants of Marius and the Gracchi whom we signaled at the beginning of this chapter, which descendant took the road to the Capitol at the full speed of his legs.

Danglars was tired, satisfied, and sleepy. He went to bed, put his portfolio under his pillow, and fell asleep.

Peppino had time to spare; he played _morra_ with some facchino, lost three crowns, and to console himself drank a flask of Orvietto wine.

The next day, Danglars awoke late, though he had gone to bed early; it was five or six nights since he had slept very badly, when indeed he slept at all.

He breakfasted copiously, and little concerned, as he had said, to see the beauties of the Eternal City, he asked for his post-horses for noon.

But Danglars had reckoned without the formalities of the police and without the laziness of the postmaster.

The horses arrived only at two o'clock, and the cicerone brought back the visaed passport only at three.

All these preparations had brought before Master Pastrini's door a good number of idlers.

The descendants of the Gracchi and of Marius were not wanting either.

The baron crossed triumphally through these groups, who called him Excellency in hopes of a bajocco.

As Danglars, a very popular man, as we know, had been content to be called baron hitherto and had not yet been treated as Excellency, this title flattered him, and he distributed a dozen pauls to all that rabble, quite ready, for a dozen more pauls, to treat him as Highness.

"Which road?" asked the postilion in Italian.

"Road to Ancona," answered the baron.

Master Pastrini translated the question and the answer, and the carriage departed at a gallop.

Danglars indeed wished to pass through Venice and there take a part of his fortune, then from Venice go to Vienna, where he would realize the rest.

His intention was to settle in that last city, which he had been assured was a city of pleasures.

He had scarcely traveled three leagues into the Roman countryside when night began to fall; Danglars had not thought to depart so late, otherwise he would have stayed; he asked the postilion how far it was before arriving at the next town.

"_Non capisco_," answered the postilion.

Danglars made a movement of the head that meant:

"Very well!"

The carriage continued its route.

"At the first post," said Danglars to himself, "I will stop."

Danglars still felt a remnant of the well-being he had experienced the evening before, which had procured him so good a night. He was loosely stretched in a good English calash with double springs; he felt himself borne along by the gallop of two good horses; the relay was seven leagues, he knew it. What is there to do when one is a banker and has happily gone bankrupt?

Danglars thought for ten minutes of his wife left in Paris, for ten other minutes of his daughter running about the world with Mlle d'Armilly, he gave ten other minutes to his creditors and to the manner in which he would employ their money; then, having nothing more to think of, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Sometimes, however, shaken by a jolt stronger than the others, Danglars reopened his eyes for a moment; then he always felt himself borne with the same speed through that same Roman countryside all strewn with broken aqueducts, which seem like granite giants petrified in the midst of their course. But the night was cold, dark, rainy, and it was much better for a half-dozing man to remain at the bottom of his seat with closed eyes than to put his head out the door to ask where he was of a postilion who knew no other answer than: _Non capisco._

Danglars therefore continued to sleep, saying to himself that it would always be time to wake at the relay.

The carriage stopped; Danglars thought he was at last touching the long-desired goal.

He reopened his eyes, looked through the glass, expecting to find himself in the middle of some town, or at least some village; but he saw nothing but a sort of isolated hovel, and three or four men who went and came like shadows.

Danglars waited a moment for the postilion who had finished his relay to come claim the post-money; he counted on profiting by the occasion to ask some information of his new driver, but the horses were unharnessed and replaced without anyone coming to ask money of the traveler. Danglars, astonished, opened the door; but a vigorous hand immediately pushed it shut, and the chaise rolled on.

The baron, stupefied, awoke completely.

"Eh!" said he to the postilion, "eh! _mio caro!_"

It was again the romance Italian that Danglars had retained when his daughter sang duets with Prince Cavalcanti.

But _mio caro_ answered not.

Danglars then contented himself with opening the window.

"Ho, friend! where are we going, then?" said he, passing his head through the opening.

"_Dentro la testa!_" cried a grave and imperious voice, accompanied by a gesture of menace.

Danglars understood that _dentro la testa_ meant: Put your head back in. He was, as one sees, making rapid progress in Italian.

He obeyed, not without uneasiness; and as this uneasiness increased minute by minute, after a few instants his mind, instead of the void that we signaled at the moment he set out, and which had brought on sleep, his mind, we say, found itself filled with a quantity of thoughts more fitted than others to keep awake the interest of a traveler, and above all of a traveler in Danglars's situation.

His eyes took in the darkness that degree of keenness which strong emotions communicate in the first moment, and which is blunted later by having been too exercised. Before being afraid, one sees clearly; while afraid, one sees double; and after having been afraid, one sees dimly.

Danglars saw a man wrapped in a mantle, who was galloping at the right door.

"Some gendarme," said he. "Would I have been signaled by the French telegraphs to the pontifical authorities?"

He resolved to emerge from this anxiety.

"Where are you taking me?" asked he.

"_Dentro la testa!_" repeated the same voice, with the same accent of menace.

Danglars turned toward the left door.

Another man on horseback was galloping at the left door.

"Decidedly," said Danglars, brow beaded with sweat, "decidedly I am taken."

And he threw himself back to the bottom of his calash, this time not to sleep, but to think.

A moment later, the moon rose.

From the depths of the calash, he plunged his gaze into the countryside; he again saw those great aqueducts, stone phantoms, which he had noticed in passing; only, instead of having them on his right, he now had them on his left.

He understood that they had turned the carriage around, and that they were bringing him back to Rome.

"Oh! unhappy man," he murmured, "extradition must have been obtained!"

The carriage continued to run with frightful velocity. An hour passed terribly, for at each new sign thrown upon his path the fugitive recognized, beyond doubt, that they were bringing him back over his steps. At length, he saw again a dark mass against which it seemed to him the carriage was about to dash. But the carriage turned aside, skirting this dark mass, which was none other than the belt of ramparts that envelopes Rome.

"Oh! oh!" murmured Danglars, "we are not re-entering the city, therefore it is not justice that stops me. Good God! another idea, could it be..."

His hair stood on end.

He recalled those interesting stories of Roman bandits, so little credited in Paris, which Albert de Morcerf had related to Mme Danglars and Eugénie when it was a question, for the young viscount, of becoming the son of the one and the husband of the other.

"Thieves, perhaps!" murmured he.

Suddenly the carriage rolled over something harder than the soil of a sandy path. Danglars hazarded a glance to the two sides of the road; he perceived monuments of strange form, and his mind, preoccupied with Morcerf's tale, which now presented itself to him in all its details, his mind told him he must be on the Appian Way.

To the left of the carriage, in a sort of valley, could be seen a circular excavation.

It was the circus of Caracalla.

At a word from the man who was galloping at the right door, the carriage stopped.

At the same time, the left door opened.

"_Scendi!_" commanded a voice.

Danglars descended at once; he did not yet speak Italian, but he already understood it.

More dead than alive, the baron looked around him.

Four men surrounded him, not counting the postilion.

"_Di quà_," said one of the four men, descending a little path that led from the Appian Way to the midst of those uneven hatchings of the Roman countryside.

Danglars followed his guide without discussion, and had no need to turn around to know he was followed by the three other men.

However, it seemed to him that these men stopped like sentinels at roughly equal distances.

After some ten minutes of walking, during which Danglars exchanged not a single word with his guide, he found himself between a knoll and a bush of tall grasses; three men standing and mute formed a triangle of which he was the center.

He wished to speak; his tongue faltered.

"_Avanti_," said the same voice with its brief and imperative accent.

This time Danglars understood doubly: he understood by the word and by the gesture, for the man walking behind him pushed him so roughly forward that he went to strike his guide.

This guide was our friend Peppino, who plunged into the tall grasses by a sinuosity that only ferrets and lizards could recognize as a beaten path.

Peppino stopped before a rock surmounted by a thick bush; this rock, half-open like an eyelid, gave passage to the young man, who disappeared into it as the devils of our fairy plays disappear into their traps.

The voice and gesture of him who followed Danglars engaged the banker to do likewise. There was no longer room to doubt, the French bankrupt had to do with Roman bandits.

Danglars executed like a man placed between two terrible dangers, and whom fear renders brave. Despite his belly rather ill-disposed to penetrate the crevices of the Roman countryside, he infiltrated himself behind Peppino, and, letting himself slide with closed eyes, he fell on his feet.

On touching the earth, he reopened his eyes.

The path was wide, but black. Peppino, little concerned to hide himself now that he was at home, struck his flint, and lit a torch.

Two other men descended behind Danglars, forming the rear guard, and, pushing Danglars when by chance he stopped, made him arrive by a gentle slope at the center of a crossroads of sinister aspect.

Indeed, the walls, hollowed into coffins superimposed one upon another, seemed, amid the white stones, to open those black and deep eyes one remarks in skulls.

A sentinel made the caps of his carbine ring against his left hand.

"Who goes?" said the sentinel.

"Friend, friend!" said Peppino. "Where is the captain?"

"There," said the sentinel, showing over his shoulder a sort of great hall hollowed in the rock, the light of which was reflected in the corridor by large arched openings.

"Good prey, captain, good prey," said Peppino in Italian.

And taking Danglars by the collar of his redingote, he conducted him toward an opening resembling a door, and through which one penetrated into the hall of which the captain seemed to have made his lodging.

"Is it the man?" asked the latter, who was reading very attentively the _Life of Alexander_ in Plutarch.

"Himself, captain, himself."

"Very well, show him to me."

At this rather impertinent order, Peppino brought his torch so abruptly near Danglars's face that the latter recoiled sharply so as not to have his eyebrows burned. This distraught face offered all the symptoms of a pale and hideous terror.

"The man is tired," said the captain; "let him be taken to his bed."

"Oh!" murmured Danglars, "that bed is probably one of the coffins that dig into the wall; that sleep is the death which one of the poignards I see gleaming in the shadow will procure me."

Indeed, in the dark depths of the immense hall, one could see rise, upon their couches of dry herbs or wolf skins, the companions of that man whom Albert de Morcerf had found reading the _Commentaries of Caesar_, and whom Danglars rediscovered reading the _Life of Alexander_.

The banker uttered a hollow groan and followed his guide: he tried neither to pray nor to cry out. He had no longer either strength, or will, or power, or feeling; he went because he was dragged.

He struck against a step, and, understanding that he had a staircase before him, he bent down instinctively so as not to break his forehead, and found himself in a cell cut clean out of the rock.

This cell was clean, though bare, dry, though situated under the earth at an immeasurable depth.

A bed of dry herbs, covered with goat skins, was, not raised, but stretched in a corner of this cell. Danglars, on perceiving it, thought he saw the radiant symbol of his salvation.

"Oh! praised be God!" murmured he; "it is a real bed!"

It was the second time, in an hour, that he had invoked the name of God; that had not happened to him for ten years.

"_Ecco_," said the guide.

And pushing Danglars into the cell, he closed the door upon him.

A bolt grated; Danglars was prisoner.

Besides, had there been no bolt, it would have required being St. Peter and having an angel of heaven for guide, to pass through the midst of the garrison that held the catacombs of St. Sebastian, and that camped around its chief, in whom our readers have certainly recognized the famous Luigi Vampa.

Danglars also had recognized this bandit, whose existence he had not wished to believe when Morcerf tried to naturalize him in France. Not only had he recognized him, but also the cell in which Morcerf had been confined, and which, according to all probability, was the lodging of strangers.

These memories, upon which moreover Danglars dwelt with a certain joy, restored him his tranquillity. From the moment they had not killed him at once, the bandits had no intention of killing him at all.

He had been arrested to be robbed, and as he had on him only some few louis, they would ransom him.

He recalled that Morcerf had been taxed at something like four thousand crowns; as he accorded himself an appearance much more important than Morcerf, he fixed himself in his mind his ransom at eight thousand crowns.

Eight thousand crowns made forty-eight thousand livres.

There still remained to him some five millions fifty thousand francs.

With that one gets out of any scrape.

Thus, almost certain of getting out of the scrape, seeing there is no example of a man ever having been taxed five millions fifty thousand livres, Danglars stretched upon his bed, where, after turning two or three times, he fell asleep with the tranquillity of the hero whose history Luigi Vampa was studying.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”