The Letter

I

For many years he had lived withdrawn from the world in which he had
once played so active and even turbulent a part. The study of Tuscan
art was his only pursuit, and it was to help him in the
classification of his notes and documents that I was first called to
his villa. 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. But for this dusky redness it would have been
hard to reconstruct from the shrunken recluse, with his low
fastidious voice and carefully tended hands, an image of that young
knight of adventure whose sword had been at the service of every
uprising which stirred the uneasy soil of Italy in the first half of
the nineteenth century.

Though I was more of a proficient in Colonel Alingdon's later than
his earlier pursuits, the thought of his soldiering days was always
coming between me and the pacific work of his old age. As we sat
collating papers and comparing photographs, I had the feeling that
this dry and quiet old man had seen even stranger things than people
said: that he knew more of the inner history of Europe than half the
diplomatists of his day.

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.

It was perhaps because I recognized this silence and respected it
that it afterward came to be broken for me. Or it was perhaps merely
because, as the failure of Colonel Alingdon's sight cut him off from
his work, he felt the natural inclination of age to revert from the
empty present to the crowded past. For one cause or another he _did_
talk to me in the last year of his life; and I felt myself mingled,
to an extent inconceivable to the mere reader of history, with the
passionate scenes of the Italian struggle for liberty. 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_.

"They say the Italians didn't know how to fight," he said one day,
musingly--"that the French had to come down and do their work for
them. People forget how long it was since they had had any fighting
to do. But they