The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly. Lever Charles James

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СКАЧАТЬ many others, equally aggrieved as yourself, resolve to risk something to change it; and this is remote enough, for there is nothing that men – I mean educated and cultivated men – are more averse to, than any open confession of feeling a social disqualification. I may tell it to you here, as we sit over the fire, but I ‘ll not go out and proclaim it, I promise you. These are confessions one keeps for the fireside.”

      “And will not these people visit you?”

      “Nothing less likely.”

      “Nor you call upon them?”

      “Certainly not.”

      “And will you continue to live within an hour’s drive of each other without acquaintance or recognition?”

      “Probably – at least we may salute when we meet.”

      “Then I say the guillotine has done more for civilization than the schoolmaster,” cried the other. “And all this because you are a Papist?”

      “Just so. I belong to a faith so deeply associated with a bygone inferiority that I am not to be permitted to emerge from it – there’s the secret of it all.”

      “I ‘d rebel. I ‘d descend into the streets!”

      “And you’d get hanged for your pains.”

      A shrug of the shoulders was all the reply, and Longworth went on: —

      “Some one once said, ‘It was better economy in a state to teach people not to steal than to build jails for the thieves;’ and so I would say to our rulers it would be cheaper to give us some of the things we ask for than to enact all the expensive measures that are taken to repress us.”

      “What chance have I, then, of justice in such a country?” cried the foreigner, passionately.

      “Better than in any land of Europe. Indeed I will go further, and say it is the one land in Europe where corruption is impossible on the seat of judgment. If you make out your claim, as fully as you detailed it to me, if evidence will sustain your allegations, your flag will as certainly wave over that high tower yonder as that decanter stands there.”

      “Here’s to la bonne chance,” said the other, filling a bumper and drinking it off.

      “You will need to be very prudent, very circumspect: two things which I suspect will cost you some trouble,” said Longworth. “The very name you will have to go by will be a difficulty. To call yourself Bramleigh will be an open declaration of war; to write yourself Pracontal is an admission that you have no claim to the other appellation.”

      “It was my mother’s name. She was of a Provençal family, and the Pracontals were people of good blood.”

      “But your father was always called Bramleigh?”

      “My father, mon cher, had fifty aliases; he was Louis Lagrange under the Empire, Victor Cassagnac at the Restoration, Carlo Salvi when sentenced to the galleys at Naples, Niccolo Baldassare when he shot the Austrian colonel at Capua, and I believe when he was last heard of, the captain of a slaver, he was called, for shortness’ sake, ‘Brutto,’ for he was not personally attractive.”

      “Then when and where was he known as Bramieigh?”

      “Whenever he wrote to England. Whenever he asked for money, which, on the whole, was pretty often, he was Montagu Bramieigh.”

      “To whom were these letters addressed?”

      “To his father, Montagu Bramieigh, Portland Place, London. I have it all in my note-book.”

      “And these appeals were responded to?”

      “Not so satisfactorily as one might wish. The replies were flat refusals to give money, and rather unpleasant menaces as to police measures if the insistence were continued.

      “You have some of these letters?”

      “The lawyer has, I think, four of them. The last contained a bank order for five hundred francs, payable to Giacomo Lami, or order.”

      “Who was Lami?”

      “Lami was the name of my grandmother; her father was Giacomo. He was the old fresco-painter who came over from Rome to paint the walls of that great house yonder, and it was his daughter that Bramleigh married.”

      “Which Bramleigh was the father of the present possessor of Castello?”

      “Precisely. Montagu Bramleigh married my grandmother here in Ireland, and when the troubles broke out, either to save her father from the laws or to get rid of him, managed to smuggle him out of the country over to Holland – the last supposition, and the more likely, is that he sent his wife off with her father.”

      “What evidence is there of this marriage?”

      “It was registered in some parish authority; at least so old Giacomo’s journal records, for we have the journal, and without it we might never have known of our claim; but besides that, there are two letters of Montagu Bramleigh’s to my grandmother, written when he had occasion to leave her about ten days after their marriage, and they begin, ‘My dearest wife.’ and are signed, ‘Your affectionate husband, M. Bramleigh.’ The lawyer has all these.”

      “How did it come about that a rich London banker, as Bramleigh was, should ally himself with the daughter of a working Italian tradesman?”

      “Here’s the story as conveyed by old Giacomo’s notes. Bramleigh came over here to look after the progress of the works for a great man, a bishop and a lord marquis too, who was the owner of the place; he made the acquaintance of Lami and his daughters: there were two; the younger only a child, however. The eldest, Enrichetta, was very beautiful, so beautiful indeed, that Giacomo was eternally introducing her head into all his frescos; she was a blonde Italian, and made a most lovely Madonna. Old Giacomo’s journal mentions no less than eight altar-pieces where she figures, not to say that she takes her place pretty frequently in heathen society also, and if I be rightly informed, she is the centre figure of a ‘fresco’ in this very house of Castello, in a small octagon tower, the whole of which Lami painted with his own hand. Bramleigh fell in love with this girl and married her.”

      “But she was a Catholic.”

      “No. Lami was originally a Waldensian, and held some sort of faith, I don’t exactly know what, that claimed affinity with the English Church; at all events, the vicar here, a certain Robert Mathews – his name is in the precious journal – married them, and man and wife they were.”

      “When and how did all these facts come to your knowledge?”

      “As to the when and the how, the same answer will suffice. I was serving as sous-lieutenant of cavalry in Africa when news reached me that the ‘Astradella,’ the ship in which my father sailed, was lost off the Cape Verde islands, with all on board. I hastened off to Naples, where a Mr. Bolton lived, who was chief owner of the vessel, to hear what tidings had reached him of the disaster, and to learn something of my father’s affairs, for he had been, if I might employ so fine a word for so small a function, his banker for years. Indeed, but for Bolton’s friendship and protection – how earned I never knew – my father would have come to grief years before, for he was a thorough Italian, and always up to the neck in conspiracies; he had been in that Bonapartist affair at Home; was a Carbonaro and a Camorrist, and Heaven knows what besides. And though Bolton was a СКАЧАТЬ