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СКАЧАТЬ at me steadily. “I am not aware that we have met before,” he said.

      For a moment I thought the fever was on him; but a second glance convinced me that he was master of himself.

      “Roberto!” I cried, trembling.

      “You have the advantage of me,” he said civilly. “But my name is Roberti, not Roberto.”

      The floor swam under me and I had to lean against the wall.

      “You are not Count Roberto Siviano of Milan?”

      “I am Tommaso de Roberti, professor of Italian, from Modena.”

      “And you have never seen me before?”

      “Never that I know of.”

      “Were you never at Siviano, on the lake of Iseo?” I faltered.

      He said calmly: “I am unacquainted with that part of Italy.”

      My heart grew cold and I was silent.

      “You mistook me for a friend, I suppose?” he added.

      “Yes,” I cried, “I mistook you for a friend;” and with that I fell on my knees by his bed and cried like a child.

      Suddenly I felt a touch on my shoulder. “Egidio,” said he in a broken voice, “look up.”

      I raised my eyes, and there was his old smile above me, and we clung to each other without a word. Presently, however, he drew back, and put me quietly aside.

      “Sit over there, Egidio. My bones are like water and I am not good for much talking yet.”

      “Let us wait, Roberto. Sleep now—we can talk tomorrow.”

      “No. What I have to say must be said at once.” He examined me thoughtfully. “You have a parish here in New York?”

      I assented.

      “And my work keeps me here. I have pupils. It is too late to make a change.”

      “A change?”

      He continued to look at me calmly. “It would be difficult for me,” he explained, “to find employment in a new place.”

      “But why should you leave here?”

      “I shall have to,” he returned deliberately, “if you persist in recognizing in me your former friend Count Siviano.”

      “Roberto!”

      He lifted his hand. “Egidio,” he said, “I am alone here, and without friends. The companionship, the sympathy of my parish priest would be a consolation in this strange city; but it must not be the companionship of the parocco of Siviano. You understand?”

      “Roberto,” I cried, “it is too dreadful to understand!”

      “Be a man, Egidio,” said he with a touch of impatience. “The choice lies with you, and you must make it now. If you are willing to ask no questions, to name no names, to make no allusions to the past, let us live as friends together, in God’s name! If not, as soon as my legs can carry me I must be off again. The world is wide, luckily—but why should we be parted?”

      I was on my knees at his side in an instant. “We must never be parted!” I cried. “Do as you will with me. Give me your orders and I obey—have I not always obeyed you?”

      I felt his hand close sharply on mine. “Egidio!” he admonished me.

      “No—no—I shall remember. I shall say nothing—”

      “Think nothing?”

      “Think nothing,” I said with a last effort.

      “God bless you!” he answered.

      My son, for eight years I kept my word to him. We met daily almost, we ate and walked and talked together, we lived like David and Jonathan—but without so much as a glance at the past. How he had escaped from Milan—how he had reached New York—I never knew. We talked often of Italy’s liberation—as what Italians would not?—but never touched on his share in the work. Once only a word slipped from him; and that was when one day he asked me how it was that I had been sent to America. The blood rushed to my face, and before I could answer he had raised a silencing hand.

      “I see,” he said; “it was your penance too.”

      During the first years he had plenty of work to do, but he lived so frugally that I guessed he had some secret use for his earnings. It was easy to conjecture what it was. All over the world Italian exiles were toiling and saving to further the great cause. He had political friends in New York, and sometimes he went to other cities to attend meetings and make addresses. His zeal never slackened; and but for me he would often have gone hungry that some shivering patriot might dine. I was with him heart and soul, but I had the parish on my shoulders, and perhaps my long experience of men had made me a little less credulous than Christian charity requires; for I could have sworn that some of the heroes who hung on him had never had a whiff of Austrian blood, and would have fed out of the same trough with the white-coats if there had been polenta enough to go round. Happily my friend had no such doubts. He believed in the patriots as devoutly as in the cause; and if some of his hard-earned dollars travelled no farther than the nearest wine-cellar or cigar-shop, he never suspected the course they took.

      His health was never the same after the fever; and by and by he began to lose his pupils, and the patriots cooled off as his pockets fell in. Toward the end I took him to live in my shabby attic. He had grown weak and had a troublesome cough, and he spent the greater part of his days indoors. Cruel days they must have been to him, but he made no sign, and always welcomed me with a cheerful word. When his pupils dropped off, and his health made it difficult for him to pick up work outside, he set up a letter-writer’s sign, and used to earn a few pennies by serving as amanuensis to my poor parishioners; but it went against him to take their money, and half the time he did the work for nothing. I knew it was hard for him to live on charity, as he called it, and I used to find what jobs I could for him among my friends the negozianti, who would send him letters to copy, accounts to make up and what not; but we were all poor together, and the master had licked the platter before the dog got it.

      So lived that just man, my son; and so, after eight years of exile, he died one day in my arms. God had let him live long enough to see Solferino and Villa-franca; and was perhaps never more merciful than in sparing him Monte Rotondo and Mentana. But these are things of which it does not become me to speak. The new Italy does not wear the face of our visions; but it is written that God shall know His own, and it cannot be that He shall misread the hearts of those who dreamed of fashioning her in His image.

      As for my friend, he is at peace, I doubt not; and his just life and holy death intercede for me, who sinned for his sake alone.

      The Custom of the Country

       Table of Contents

      I

      “Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a СКАЧАТЬ