The moment he showed himself to be thus engaged the Count turned round, slipped past the persons who occupied seats on the farther side of him from where he stood, and disappeared in the middle passage down the centre of the pit. I caught Pesca by the arm, and to his inexpressible astonishment, hurried him round with me to the back of the pit to intercept the Count before he could get to the door. Somewhat to my surprise, the slim man hastened out before us, avoiding a stoppage caused by some people on our side of the pit leaving their places, by which Pesca and myself were delayed.
When we reached the lobby the Count had disappeared, and the foreigner with the scar was gone too.
‘Come home,' I said; ‘come home, Pesca, to your lodgings. I must speak to you in private -- I must speak directly.'
‘My-soul-bless-my-soul!' cried the Professor, in a state of the extremest bewilderment. ‘What on earth is the matter?'
I walked on rapidly without answering. The circumstances under which the Count had left the theatre suggested to me that his extraordinary anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further extremities still. He might escape me , too, by leaving London. I doubted the future if I allowed him so much as a day's freedom to act as he pleased. And I doubted that foreign stranger, who had got the start of us, and whom I suspected of intentionally following him out.
With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in making Pesca understand what I wanted. As soon as we two were alone in his room, I increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling him what my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly as I have acknowledged it here.
‘My friend, what can I do?' cried the Professor, piteously appealing to me with both hands. ‘Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I help you, Walter, when I don't know the man?'
‘He knows you -- he is afraid of you -- he has left the theatre to escape you. Pesca! there must be a reason for this. Look back into your own life before you came to England. You left Italy, as you have told me yourself, for political reasons. You have never mentioned those reasons to me, and I don't inquire into them now. I only ask you to consult your own recollections, and to say if they suggest no past cause for the terror which the first sight of you produced in that man.'
To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as they appeared to me , produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy face of my little friend whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me slowly, trembling from head to foot.
‘Walter I' he said. ‘You don't know what you ask.'
He spoke in a whisper -- he looked at me as if I had suddenly revealed to him some hidden danger to both of us. In less than one minute of time he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man of all my past experience, that if I had met him in the street, changed as I saw him now, I should most certainly not have known him again.
‘Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and shocked you,' I replied.
‘Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count Fosco's hands.
Remember that the wrong can never be redressed, unless the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice. I spoke in her interests, Pesca -- I ask you again to forgive me -- I can say no more.'
I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached the door.
‘Wait,' he said. ‘You have shaken me from head to foot You don't know how I left my country, and why I left my country. Let me compose myself, let me think, if I can.'
I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the room, talking to himself incoherently in his own language. After several turns backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his little hands with a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast.
‘On your heart and soul, Walter,' he said, ‘is there no other way to get to that man but the chance-way through me ?'
‘There is no other way,' I answered.
He left me again, opened the door of the room and looked out cautiously into the passage, closed it once more, and came back.
‘You won your right over me, Walter,' he said, ‘on the day when you saved my life. It was yours from that moment, when you pleased to take it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My next words, as true as the good God is above us, will put my life into your hands.'
The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this extraordinary warning, carried with it, to my mind, the conviction that he spoke the truth.
‘Mind this!' he went on, shaking his hands at me in the vehemence of his agitation. ‘I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that man Fosco, and the pact time which I call back to me for your sake. If you find the thread, keep it to yourself -- tell me nothing -- on my knees I beg and pray, let me be ignorant, let me be innocent, let me be blind to all the future as I am now!'
He said a few words more, hesitatingly and disconnectedly, then stopped again.
I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English, on an occasion ton serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and phrases of his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the difficulty he had felt from the first in speaking to me at all. Having learnt to read and understand his native language (though not to speak it), in the earlier days of our intimate companionship, I now suggested to him that he should express himself in Italian, while I used English in putting any questions which might be necessary to my enlightenment. He accepted the proposal. In his smooth-flowing language, spoken with a vehement agitation which betrayed itself in the perpetual working of his features, in the wildness and the suddenness of his foreign gesticulations, but never in the raising of his voice, I now heard the words which armed me to meet the last struggle, that is left for this story to record.*