On his way from the harbour to the upper part of the town where his inn was situated, Cosmo Latham met very few people. He had to pass through a sort of covered way; its arch yawned in front of him very black with only a feeble glimmer of a light in its depths. It did not occur to him that it was a place where one could very well be knocked on the head by evil-intentioned men if there were any prowling about in that early part of the evening, for it was early yet, though the last gleams of sunset had gone completely off the earth and out of the sky. On issuing from the dark passage a maze of narrow streets presented itself to his choice, but he knew that as long as he kept walking uphill he could not fail to reach the middle of the town. Projecting at long intervals from the continuous mass of thick walls, wrought-iron arms held lanterns containing dim gleams of light. The enormous doors of the lofty gateways he passed were closed, and the only sound he could hear was that of his own deliberate footsteps. At a wider spot, where several of those lanes met, he stopped, and looking about him asked himself whether all those enormous and palatial houses were empty, or whether it was the thickness of walls that killed all the signs of life within; for as to the population being already asleep, he could not believe it for a moment. All at once he caught sight of a muffled feminine form. In the heavy shadow she seemed to emerge out of one wall, and gliding on seemed to disappear into another. It was undoubtedly a woman. Cosmo was startled by this noiseless apparition, and had a momentary feeling of being lost in an enchanted city. Presently the enchanted silence was broken by the increasing sound of an iron-shod stick tapping the flagstones, till there walked out of one of the dark and tortuous lanes a man who by his rolling gait, general outline, and the characteristic shape of the hat, Cosmo could not doubt was a seaman belonging to the English man-of-war in the harbour. The tapping of his stick ceased suddenly, and Cosmo hailed him in English, asking for the way.

The sturdy figure in the tarpaulin hat put his cudgel under his arm, and answered him in a deep pleasant voice. Yes, he knew the inn. He was just coming from there. If his honour followed the street before him, he would come to a large open space, and his honour’s inn would be across the square. In the deep shadows Cosmo could make out of the seaman’s face nothing but the bushy whiskers and the gleam of the eyes. He was pleased at meeting the very day he had reached the Mediterranean shore (he had come down to Genoa from Turin) such a fine specimen of a man-of-war’s man. He thanked him for the direction, and the sailor touching his hat went off at his slightly rolling gait. Cosmo observed that he took a turning very near the spot where the muffled woman had a moment before vanished from his sight. It was a very dark and a very narrow passage between two towering buildings. Cosmo continuing on his way arrived at a broad thoroughfare badly lighted, but full of people. He knew where he was then. In a very few moments he found himself at the door of his inn, in a great square which, in comparison with the rest of the town, might have been said to blaze with lights.

Under an iron lantern swung above a flight of three broad steps Cosmo recognised his servant gazing into the square with a worried expression, which changed at once into one of relief on perceiving his master. He touched his cap and followed Cosmo into a large hall with several doors opening into it, and furnished with many wooden chairs and tables. At one of them bearing four candlesticks several British naval officers sat talking and laughing in subdued tones. A compactly built clean-shaved person with slightly sunken cheeks, wearing black breeches and a maroon waistcoat with sleeves, but displaying a very elaborate frill to his white shirt, stood in the middle of the floor, glancing about with vigilance, and bowed hurriedly to his latest client. Cosmo returned the greeting of Signor Cantelucci, who snatching up the nearest candlestick began to ascend a broad stone staircase with an air of performing a solemn duty. Cosmo followed him, and Cosmo’s servant followed his master. They went up and up. At every flight broad archways gave a view of dark perspective in which nothing but a few drops of dim fire were forlornly visible. At last Signor Cantelucci threw open a door on a landing, and bowing again:

“See, Milor! There is a fire. I know the customs and habits of the English.”

Cosmo stepped into a large and lofty room where in the play of bright flames under a heavy and tall mantel-piece the shadows seemed very much disturbed by his entrance. Cosmo approached the blaze with satisfaction.

“I had enough trouble to get them to light it,” remarked the valet in a resentful tone. “If it hadn’t been for a jack-tar with big whiskers I found down in the hall it wouldn’t be done yet. He came up from the ship with one of these sea officers downstairs. He drove the fellows with the wood in fine style up here for me. He knows the people here. He cursed them each separately by their Christian names, and then had a glass of wine in the kitchen with me.”

Meantime Signor Cantelucci, wearing the aspect of a deaf man, had lighted, on two separate tables, two clusters of candles which drove the restless gloom of the large apartment half-way up to the ceiling, and retired with noiseless footsteps. He stopped in the doorway to cast a keen glance at the master and the man standing by the fire. Those two turned their heads only at the sound of the closing door.

“I couldn’t think what became of you, sir. I was getting quite worried about you. You disappeared without saying anything to me.”

“I went for a walk down to the sea,” said Cosmo, while the man moved off to where several cowhide trunks were ranged against the wall. “I like to take a look round on arriving at a new place.”

“Yes, sir; but when it got dark I wondered.”

“I tarried on a tower to watch the sunset,” murmured Cosmo.

“I have been doing some unpacking,” said the servant, “but not knowing how long you mean to stay . . .”

“It may be a long stay.”

“Then I will go on, sir; that is if you are going to keep this room.”

“Yes. The room will do, Spire. It’s big enough.”

Spire took up one of the two candelabras and retired into the neighbourhood of a sort of state bed, heavily draped, at the other end of the room. There throwing open the trunks and the doors of closets he busied himself systematically, without noise, till he heard the quiet voice of his young master:

“Spire.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, standing still with a pile of shirts on his arm.

“Is this inn very full?”

“Yes, very,” said Spire. “The whole town is full of travellers and people from the country. A lot of our nobility and gentry are passing this way.”

He deposited the shirts on a shelf in the depths of the wall, and turned round again.

“Have you heard any names, Spire?”

Spire stooped over a trunk and lifted up from it carefully a lot of white neck-cloths folded neatly one within the other.

“I haven’t had much time yet, sir. I heard a few.”

He laid down the neck-cloths by the side of the shirts while Cosmo, with his elbow on the mantel-piece, asked down the whole length of the room:

“Anybody I know?”

“Not in this place, sir. There is generally a party of officers from the man-of-war staying here. They come and go. I have seen some Italian gentlemen in square-cut coats and powdered hair. Very old-fashioned, sir. There are some Austrians too, I think; but I haven’t seen any ladies. . . . I am afraid, sir, this isn’t the right sort of inn. There is another about a hundred yards from here on the other side of the square.”

“I don’t want to meet anybody I know,” said Cosmo Latham, in a low voice.

Spire thought that this would make his stay in Genoa very dull. At the same time he was convinced that his young master would alter his mind before very long, and change to that other inn, patronised by travellers of fashion. For himself he was not averse to a little quiet time. Spire was no longer young. Thirty years ago, before the war and before the Revolution, he had travelled with Sir Charles in France and Italy. He was then only eighteen, but being a steady and trustworthy lad, was taken abroad to look after the horses. Sir Charles kept four horses in Florence, and Spire had often ridden on Tuscan roads behind Sir Charles and the two Misses Aston, of whom one later became Lady Latham. After the family settled in Yorkshire he passed from the stables to the house, acquired a confidential position, and whenever Lady Latham took a journey, he sat in the rumble with a pair of double-barrelled pistols in the pockets of his greatcoat and ordered all things on the road. Later he became intermediary between Sir Charles and the stables, the gardens, and in all out-of-door things about the house. He attended Lady Latham on her very last drive, all the details for that lady’s funeral having been left to his management. He was also a very good valet. He had been called one evening into the library where Sir Charles, very gouty that day, leaning with one hand on a thick stick and with the other on the edge of a table, had said to him: “I am lending you to Mr. Cosmo for his travels in France and Italy. You will know your way about. And mind you draw the charges of the pistols in the carriage every morning and load them afresh.”

Spire was then requested to help Sir Charles up the stairs and had a few more words said to him when Sir Charles stopped at the door of his bedroom.

“Mr. Cosmo has plenty of sense. You are not to make yourself a nuisance to him.”

“No, Sir Charles,” said the imperturbable Spire. “I will know how to look after Mr. Cosmo.”

And if he had been asked, Spire would have been able to say that during the stay in Paris, and all through France and Switzerland on the way to Genoa, Mr. Cosmo had given him no trouble at all.

Spire, still busy unpacking, glanced at his young master. He certainly looked very quiet now leaning on his elbow with the firelight playing from below on his young thoughtful face with its smooth and pale complexion. “Very good-looking indeed,” thought Spire. In that thoughtful mood he recalled very much the Sir Charles of thirty or thirty-five years ago. Would he too find his wife abroad? There had been women enough in Paris of every kind and degree, English and French, and all sorts. But it was a fact that Mr. Cosmo sought most of his company amongst men of whom also there had been no lack and of every degree. In that too the young man resembled very much his father. Men’s company. But were he to get caught he would get caught properly; at any rate for a time, reflected Spire, remembering Sir Charles Latham’s rush back to Italy, the inwardness of which had been no more revealed to him than to the rest of the world.

Spire approaching the candelabra, unfolded partly a very fine coat, then refolded it before putting it away on a convenient shelf. He had a moment of regret for his own young days. He had never married, not because there had been any lack of women to set their caps at him, but from a sort of half-conscious prudence. Moreover, he had a notion somehow or other that Sir Charles would not have liked it. Perhaps it was just as well. Now he was care-free attending on Mr. Cosmo, without troubling his head about who had remained at home.

Spire arranging the contents of a dressing-case on the table cast another sidelong look at the figure by the fire. Very handsome. Something like Sir Charles and yet not like. There was a touch of something unusual, perhaps foreign, and yet no one with a pair of eyes in his head could mistake Mr. Cosmo for anything but an English gentleman.

Spire’s memories of his tour with Sir Charles had been growing dim. But he remembered enough of the old-time atmosphere to have become aware of a feeling of tension, of a suggestion of restlessness which certainly was new to him.

The silence had lasted very long. Cosmo before the fire had not moved. Spire ventured on a remark.

“I noticed people are excited about one thing and another hereabouts, sir.”

“Excited. I don’t wonder at it. In what way?”

“Sort of discontented, sir. They don’t like the Austrians, sir. You may have noticed as we came along. . . .”

“Did they like us when we held the town?”

“I can hardly say that, sir. I have been sitting for an hour or more in the courier’s room, with all sorts of people coming in and out, and heard very wild sort of talk.”

“What can you know about its wildness?”

“To look at their faces was enough. It’s a funny place, that room downstairs,” went on Spire, rubbing with a piece of silk a travelling looking-glass mounted cunningly in a silver case, which when opened made a stand for it. He placed it exactly in the middle of a little table, and turned round to look at his master. Seeing that Cosmo seemed disposed to listen he continued. “It is vaulted like a cellar, and has a little door giving on to a side street. People come in and out as they like. All sorts of low people, sir, facchini, and carters, and boatmen, and suchlike. There was an old fellow came in, a grey-headed man, a cobbler, I suppose, as he brought a bagful of mended shoes for the servants of the house. He emptied the lot on the stone floor, sir, and instead of trying to collect his money from the people that were scrambling for them, he made them a speech. He spouted, sir, without drawing breath. The courier-valet of an English doctor staying here, a Swiss I think he is, says to me in his broken English: ‘He would cut every Austrian throat in this town.’ We were having a glass of wine together and I asked him, ‘And what do you think of that?’ And he says to me after thinking a bit, ‘I agree with him. . . .’ Very dreadful, sir,” concluded Spire with a perfectly unmoved face.

Cosmo looked at him in silence for a time. “It is very bold talk, if that is what the man really said,” he remarked. “Especially as the place is so public as you say it is.”

“Absolutely open to the street, sir; and that same Swiss fellow had told me just before that the town was full of spies and what they call sbirri that came from Turin with the king. The king is staying at the palace, sir. They are expecting the Queen of Sardinia to arrive any day. You didn’t know, sir? They say she will come in an English man-of-war. That old cobbler was very abusive about the King of Piedmont, too. Surely talk like that can’t be safe anywhere.”

Spire paused suddenly, and Cosmo Latham turned his back to the fire.

“Well, and what happened?” he asked with a smile.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” said Spire, in equable tones, “till that Signor Cantelucci—that’s the padrone of this inn, sir . . .”

“The man who lighted me up?” said Cosmo.

“Yes, sir. . . . I didn’t know he was in the room, till suddenly he spoke behind my back telling one of the scullions that was there to give the man a glass of wine. And what the old fellow must do but raise it above his head, and shout a toast to the Destructor of the Austrians before he tossed it down his throat. I was quite astonished, but Signor Cantelucci never turned a hair. He offered his snuff-box to that doctor’s courier and myself, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was only Pietro,’ he said, ‘a little mad,’ he tapped his forehead, you know, sir. The doctor’s courier sat there grinning. I got suddenly uneasy about you, sir, and went out to the front door to see whether you were coming. It’s very different from what it was thirty years ago. There was no talk in Italy of cutting foreigners’ throats when Sir Charles and I were here. It was quite a startling experience.”

Cosmo nodded. “You seem impressed, Spire. Well, I too had an experience, just as the sun was setting.”

“I am sorry to hear that, sir.”

“What do you mean? Why should you be sorry?”

“I beg your pardon, sir, I thought it was something unpleasant.”

Cosmo had a little laugh. “Unpleasant? No! not exactly, though I think it was more dangerous than yours, but if there was any madness connected with it, it had a very visible method. It was not all talk, either. Yes, Spire, it was exciting.”

“I don’t know what’s come to them all. Everybody seems excited. There was no excitement in Italy thirty years ago when I was with Sir Charles and took four horses with only one helper from this very town to Florence, sir.”

Cosmo with fixed eyes did not seem to hear Spire’s complaining remark. He exclaimed: “Really it was very extraordinary,” so suddenly that Spire gave a perceptible start. He pulled himself together and asked in a purely business tone:

“Are you going to dine in your room, sir? Time is getting on.”

Cosmo’s mood too seemed to have changed completely.

“I don’t know. I am not hungry. I want you to move one of those screens here near the fire, and place a table and chair there. I will do some correspondence to-night. Yes, I will have my dinner here, I think.”

“I will go down and order it, sir,” said Spire. “The cook here is a Frenchman who married a native and . . .”

“Who on earth is swearing like this outside?” exclaimed Cosmo, while Spire’s face also expressed astonishment at the loud burst of voices coming along the corridor, one angry, the other argumentative, in a crescendo of scolding and expostulation which passing the door at its highest died away into a confused murmur in the distance of the long corridor.

“That was an English voice,” said Cosmo. “I mean the angry one.”

“I should think it’s that English doctor from Tuscany that has been three or four days here already. He has been put on this floor.”

“From what I have been able to catch,” said Cosmo, “he seems very angry at having a neighbour on it. That must be me. Have you heard his name?”

“It’s Marvel or some such name. He seems to be known here; he orders people about as if he were at home. The other was Cantelucci, sir.”

“Very likely. Look here, Spire, I will dine in the public room downstairs. I want to see that angry gentleman. Did you see him, Spire?”

“Only his back, sir. Very broad, sir. Tall man. In boots and a riding-coat. Are you going down now, sir? The dinner must be on already.”

“Yes,” said Cosmo, preparing to go out. “And by the by, Spire if you ever see in the street or in that room downstairs where everyone comes in and out, as you say, a long fellow wearing a peculiar cap with a tassel, just try to find out something about him; or at any rate let me know when you have seen him. You could perhaps follow him for a bit, and try to see where he goes.”

After saying those words Cosmo left the room before Spire could make any answer. Spire’s astonishment expressed itself by a low exclamation, “Well, I never!”