HOLE AND CORNER LONDON. CAPTAIN MONTANARI'S STORY.

Tuapeka Times, Volume III, Issue 115, 21 April 1870, Page 7

HOLE AND CORNER LONDON. CAPTAIN MONTANARI'S STORY.

(From the "Sportsman.") I more than once, in my " Hole and Corner" papers published in this journal some two or three years ago, had occasion to refer to the sayings and doings of the motley crew of foreigners who live Leicester-square way. At a place, which for private reasons I then chose to nickname the Cafe* de Kamschatka, in Soho, I first met the gentleman to whom I am indebted for the story which follows. As it embodies some curious experiences of queer scenes and stirring times, perhaps you will excuse what some readers may contemptuously call the "spoony" part of it. You might not think, perhaps, that the humble elderly tobacconist — for that is the present social status of my worthy friend — who, within a few yards of Leicester-square, will be very glad to sell you a bundle of cigarettes with many thanks, has in his time taken part in wild work enough to fill many a novel. As, among other things, Captain Montanari for some years acted as an usher in a large London school, he can speak English fluently, and not the dullest evenings I pass are those which find me sitting as a privileged acquaintance in the cosy little shop-parlour of the old ci-devant militaire. But to my — or rather Captain Montanari's — story. I think I had better let him light a Cavour cigar, and tell it over a cup of chocolate in his own way. Tour attention, then, if you please, to that tall, hawk-eyed, well-set-up Italian, with a closelycropped head of iron-grey hair and shaven cheeks, across which sweeps a long silvery moustache, which breaks the hard lines of a face as brown and as wrinkled in places as a walnutshell. " I am not about to tell you my own history, save as regards so much of it as is connected with a story told me by one of the dearest, bravest, truesthearted friends I ever had in my many wanderings. From the time when we first fought side by side together in South America, under the noble Graribaldi, in the days when he drew a sword for freedom against Brazil on behalf of the Eepublic of Rio Grande, to a later date when I got this scar from one of G-omez's dragoons in '46, at the battle of Salto San Antonio, when I was one of Garibaldi's emigrant Italian legionaries in the service of the Republic of Monte Video, "Walter Etheridge (an Englishman) and I were almost inseparable. We swam the same rivers, shared the same blankets, divided each other's last junk of sun-dried meat when it was short, and would any time have risked our lives freely the- one for the other. He had originally come out to farm, but the wild life of a "■free fighter" had too great a charm for him, and till he left me in 1846 to go to his native land he had compressed more dare-devil adventures into a few years than most men. I have met with. I mourned his going then, little thinking how soon and under what strange circumstances we two should wear the now historical red shirt as comrades once more. For all our intimacy, all I knew of his private history in our South American campaigns was what I have told you. I was to hear more of that life in a broken story but three years afterwards. The story haunts me still. I think — though twenty years haye passed since then — I can tell it almost as he told it to me, word for word. "I was staying in Eome in the month of March, 1849, ostensibly as an o-rdinary visitor, in reality as an agent of the Eepublican party. Wild •work was soon to take place in the Eternal City.. Of that you shall hear presently. " It was in Borne, then, while sitting one balmy spring day amongst the time-worn ruins of the Coliseum, sadly "musing on what my country might be were Some only once more her capital .and Italy a nation free and united, that I saw-r-as he lay lolling at full length under the shadow cast by a broken column — the bronzed', bold face and sinewy figure of the man I had loved so brotherly. It was he for whom, on account of his desperate gallantry and the charmed life he seemed to bear, some of his Montevidean acquaintances could find no better- name that that of ' the mad bullet-proof Englishman.' — - Walter Etheridge. "After a hearty greeting, he told me that he had not very long left Paris, and that hearing a G-aribaldian uprising wa» shortly expected in Eome, he had come out to- see what the end would be. " 'Of course,' said he, ' Montanari,. you're heart and soul is with our old Red-shirt (a pet name of ours for -Garibaldi)?' " ' To the death,' said I. And I wrung his hand hard, and we both swore solemnly there, under the bright -blue sky which deepened the green of the wild' weeds which cling around the vast columns of that sublime collection, of magnificence and devastation, grandeur and creeping decay, that we would sit side by side for the good -cause of 'Eome for Italy, and the. Boman Republic,' to -the bitter- end.. ' " And there that day, as the- slanting sunbeams gilded. the glorious ruins, we sat side by side together, and' poor Walter^ heart, as it were,, came out toym as. a friend,, Me had sugared.

much, he owned in a broken voice, since we parted.

" c Listen, caro mio, 1 said he, ' and say whether such memories as mine are not bad to bear.' As for me, I sat in silence, for I knew his heart was full. And he told me this :

" ' I was not always the mere daredevil Englishman you Italians thought me in Monte Video. But my heart has grown old long before trouble touched a hair of my head, and I almost feel I long for death to-day as a tired child longs for sleep. My father was a clergyman down in Devonshire. My mother died in giving me birth. I was an only son, and but for something that crossed my life — first like a dream to make it bright, and then like a black cloud to make me wish I had died with my mother — I might have been a humdrum, happy country parson now. Perhaps it is all for the best, as things have turned out, after all. Wasn't it Tippoo Sultan who said he'd " rather be a tiger for a day than a sheep for a thousand years ? " And I fancy, even if I died to-morrow, that in feeling I have already lived longer than my father.

" ' My cousin, Mary Leigh, a little fair-haired girl of six, when I was about four years old, came to live with us. She was an orphan, and my mother's sister — a gentle, soft-voiced, silly old maid — took care of her. As a child, Mary was something more and less than what is commonly called pretty. Your dark Eoman beauties out here, with their glorious flashing eyes, all passion and gesture, and Heaven knows what besides, would have thought little of the quiet, elvish little girl, with her broad, low forehead, and deep> trusting, twilight-grey eyes. But to me she was the dearest thing on God's earth, even from my earliest boyhood.

" ' When I was a strapping boy of sixteen, and home for the holidays, I would beat all the young fellows in the neighbourhood at anything which taxed a boy's strength and daring. But I never knew the time when I would not gladly leave off play or sport, merely to sit with the quiet, shy little thing, long hours on the banks of our old river, now watching the feathered clouds floating overhead, and now looking down into her clear eyes, which sent many-coloured feelings rushing through my foolish boy's heart — feelings that were all the more sweet because I could never put them into words.

" ' Call it the calf-love of a boy. Say that I was but a weak-hearted fool to think so much of a fair face that smiled on me, just, perhaps, as it may have smiled on you, me, anybody or anything else in the world, from a new picture to a new bonnet. It was those eyes of hers which drew me to that little girl. The charm might have been only in my fancy, but it formed my fate. And yet to hear her I was but a kind cousin and no more. She liked me, I know. And so she liked onr big water-dog Neptune, when she used to send me to the river to fetch out ' forget-me-nots " and water-lilies, and when the dog brought them out, all fluttering with spray, she would clap her hands and; make flower-chains :as delightedly as if she were still only seven years old, instead of being nearly a woman. And then she would smile at the dog with just the same strange smile as that with which she would honour me for risking my life in climbfg an old ivy -grown ruin near us after nest, to get her for a pet a blackeyed, snappish, downy little white owl.

"'All this angered me sometimes. At others it set me thinking how I had overheard my aunt say long ago that Mary's mother died in a lunatic asylum, and when that thought came over me I remember something rose in my throat and half choked me, and I would kiss Mary on her forehead wildly to hide my tears, till my " little lady," as I loved to call her, used to look up at me wonderingly with her deep gray eyes. " What is the matter, cousin dear-?" she would ask. And I would answer, " Nothing ; only the hot weather." The weather! God help me! He knew, and she didn't; that's all.

"■ I never shaped out my love into words, however. I was content to- go on dreaming out my fool's dream till I went up to Oxford, read hard> took honours, made up. my mind to- be a parson and settle down- and marry Mary, and "live happy ever afterwards," Ac, &c. Imagine what I felt when, on coming down home I found a neighbouring squire's son, one Capt. LoveH, a guest of my father's,, and Mary's forcer, according to my maiden aunt, who had never once guessed at my real feelings. "It would be a good match," simpered my aunt over her house-keeping book ; " papt. Lovell was a very nice fellow, with great expectations, and dear M ary, you know, has not a penny. And then Capt. LoyeU' belongs to such an e-x-cel-lent family, my dear." They were married within a year. My poor little Mary was put up to auction and knockedr down to a doll-faced lisping profligate for the sake of a fine estate in reversion-, and the connection of a penniless girl with "such an ex-cel-lent family, my dear;"' as my aunt, who would haye advised marriage with Beelzebub himself, if his name and genealogy were in "Burkes Landed Gentry," observed. And 1 I— well, I came to grief, got "cut off' with a shilling " by my father — who, by the bye-, .&rgo.i to pay even that shilling

in advance — enlisted in the Blues, and stayed there tilt my father relented, and the " fatted call' " was killed for me, not very long, by Jove, before it would have been time for it to turn from veal into beef ! ha ! ha ! and I was bought out, and by good luck emigrated to South America, when I m§t the best friend I ever had in my ' life. You, old fellow. You know the rest, at least as far as our adventures out there were concerned. • c ' I went back to England, found my old aunt had died and left me a good round sum, which might have set me up perhaps, but I suppose my heart, as usual, got into my head. Mary married, and wretched — as 1 soon learned why — that thought drove me mad. Scandal flies fast. What if my reverend father prosed and twaddled away about the world being given to impertinent interference with other people's business; adding that Christian charity should incline rather to a belief in what was good than in what was bad, and so forth. In vain I urged that Mary's husband's own uncle had kicked up a row about his hound of a nephew's profligate brutality, and that I feared the poor girl had anly now to smile and smile, and look pretty, till her heart should break at last. (To be concluded in our next).