Luigi was rocked forward and back, while Barto spoke in level tones, till the voice dropped into its vast hollow, when Barto held him fast a moment, and hurled him away by the simple lifting of his hand.

The woman appeared and bound Luigi’s eyes.  Barto did not utter another word.  On his journey back to daylight, Luigi comforted himself by muttering oaths that he would never again enter into this trap.  As soon as his eyes were unbandaged, he laughed, and sang, and tossed a compliment from his finger-tips to the savage-browed beauty; pretended that he had got an armful, and that his heart was touched by the ecstasy; and sang again:  “Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn.  The toe is seen,” etc., half-way down the stanzas.  Without his knowing it, and before he had quitted the court, he had sunk into songless gloom, brooding on the scenes of the night.  However free he might be in body, his imagination was captive to Barto Rizzo.  He was no luckier than a bird, for whom the cage is open that it may feel the more keenly with its little taste of liberty that it is tied by the leg.

CHAPTER VIII

The importance of the matters extracted from Luigi does not lie on the surface; it will have to be seen through Barto Rizzo’s mind.  This man regarded himself as the mainspring of the conspiracy; specially its guardian, its wakeful Argus.  He had conspired sleeplessly for thirty years; so long, that having no ideal reserve in his nature, conspiracy had become his professional occupation,—­the wheel which it was his business to roll.  He was above jealousy; he was above vanity.  No one outstripping him cast a bad colour on him; nor did he object to bow to another as his superior.  But he was prepared to suspect every one of insincerity and of faithlessness; and, being the master of the machinery of the plots, he was ready, upon a whispered justification, to despise the orders of his leader, and act by his own light in blunt disobedience.  For it was his belief that while others speculated he knew all.  He knew where the plots had failed; he knew the man who had bent and doubled.  In the patriotic cause, perfect arrangements are crowned with perfect success, unless there is an imperfection of the instruments; for the cause is blessed by all superior agencies.  Such was his governing idea.  His arrangements had always been perfect; hence the deduction was a denunciation of some one particular person.  He pointed out the traitor here, the traitor there; and in one or two cases he did so with a mildness that made those fret at their beards vaguely who understood his character.  Barto Rizzo was, it was said, born in a village near Forli, in the dominions of the Pope; according to the rumour, he was the child of a veiled woman and a cowled paternity.  If not an offender against Government, he was at least a wanderer early in life.  None could accuse him of personal ambition.  He boasted that he