United States or Georgia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I was not alone in this conviction; and the friend who had engaged me for Colonel Alingdon had appended to his instructions the injunction to "get him to talk." But this was what no one could do. Colonel Alingdon was ready to discuss by the hour the date of a Giottesque triptych, or the attribution of a disputed master; but on the history of his early life he was habitually silent.
"Captain Alingdon," she said, "does any one else know of this letter?" "No. I was alone in the archives when I found it." "And you spoke of it to no one?" "To no one." "Then no one must know." I bowed. "It is for you to decide." She paused. "Not even my mother," she continued, with a painful blush. I looked at her in amazement. "Not even ?" She shook her head sadly. "You think me a cruel daughter?
She died years ago, and so did the Jack Alingdon she knew, and in telling you the story I am no more than the mouthpiece of an old tradition which some ancestor might have handed down to me." He leaned back, his clear blind gaze fixed smilingly on me, and I had the feeling that, in groping through the labyrinth of his young adventures, I had come unawares upon their central point.
"Colonel Alingdon," she said, "you have been a good friend of mine, though I think you have not liked me lately. But whether you like me or not, I know you will not deceive me. On your honor, do you think this memorandum may have been written later than the letter?" I hesitated. If she had cried out once against Briga I should have wished myself out of the business; but she was too sure of him.
Colonel Alingdon had been mixed with it in all its phases: he had known the last Carbonari and the Young Italy of Mazzini; he had been in Perugia when the mercenaries of a liberal Pope slaughtered women and children in the streets; he had been in Sicily with the Thousand, and in Milan during the Cinque Giornate.
Colonel Alingdon had then the look of a very old man, though his age can hardly have exceeded seventy. He was small and bent, with a finely wrinkled face which still wore the tan of youthful exposure.
I saw that her mind had flashed back to our last talk, and that she charged me with something too nearly true to be endurable. "My brother's letter? Given to the prison warder by Fernando Briga? My dear Captain Alingdon on what authority do you expect me to believe such a tale?" Her incredulity had in it an evident implication of bad faith, and I was stung to a quick reply.
Word Of The Day