The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly. Lever Charles James
the other. “And all this because you are a Papist?”
“Just so. I belong to a faith so deeply associated with a bygone inferiority that I am not to be permitted to emerge from it – there’s the secret of it all.”
“I ‘d rebel. I ‘d descend into the streets!”
“And you’d get hanged for your pains.”
A shrug of the shoulders was all the reply, and Longworth went on: —
“Some one once said, ‘It was better economy in a state to teach people not to steal than to build jails for the thieves;’ and so I would say to our rulers it would be cheaper to give us some of the things we ask for than to enact all the expensive measures that are taken to repress us.”
“What chance have I, then, of justice in such a country?” cried the foreigner, passionately.
“Better than in any land of Europe. Indeed I will go further, and say it is the one land in Europe where corruption is impossible on the seat of judgment. If you make out your claim, as fully as you detailed it to me, if evidence will sustain your allegations, your flag will as certainly wave over that high tower yonder as that decanter stands there.”
“Here’s to la bonne chance,” said the other, filling a bumper and drinking it off.
“You will need to be very prudent, very circumspect: two things which I suspect will cost you some trouble,” said Longworth. “The very name you will have to go by will be a difficulty. To call yourself Bramleigh will be an open declaration of war; to write yourself Pracontal is an admission that you have no claim to the other appellation.”
“It was my mother’s name. She was of a Provençal family, and the Pracontals were people of good blood.”
“But your father was always called Bramleigh?”
“My father, mon cher, had fifty aliases; he was Louis Lagrange under the Empire, Victor Cassagnac at the Restoration, Carlo Salvi when sentenced to the galleys at Naples, Niccolo Baldassare when he shot the Austrian colonel at Capua, and I believe when he was last heard of, the captain of a slaver, he was called, for shortness’ sake, ‘Brutto,’ for he was not personally attractive.”
“Then when and where was he known as Bramieigh?”
“Whenever he wrote to England. Whenever he asked for money, which, on the whole, was pretty often, he was Montagu Bramieigh.”
“To whom were these letters addressed?”
“To his father, Montagu Bramieigh, Portland Place, London. I have it all in my note-book.”
“And these appeals were responded to?”
“Not so satisfactorily as one might wish. The replies were flat refusals to give money, and rather unpleasant menaces as to police measures if the insistence were continued.
“You have some of these letters?”
“The lawyer has, I think, four of them. The last contained a bank order for five hundred francs, payable to Giacomo Lami, or order.”
“Who was Lami?”
“Lami was the name of my grandmother; her father was Giacomo. He was the old fresco-painter who came over from Rome to paint the walls of that great house yonder, and it was his daughter that Bramleigh married.”
“Which Bramleigh was the father of the present possessor of Castello?”
“Precisely. Montagu Bramleigh married my grandmother here in Ireland, and when the troubles broke out, either to save her father from the laws or to get rid of him, managed to smuggle him out of the country over to Holland – the last supposition, and the more likely, is that he sent his wife off with her father.”
“What evidence is there of this marriage?”
“It was registered in some parish authority; at least so old Giacomo’s journal records, for we have the journal, and without it we might never have known of our claim; but besides that, there are two letters of Montagu Bramleigh’s to my grandmother, written when he had occasion to leave her about ten days after their marriage, and they begin, ‘My dearest wife.’ and are signed, ‘Your affectionate husband, M. Bramleigh.’ The lawyer has all these.”
“How did it come about that a rich London banker, as Bramleigh was, should ally himself with the daughter of a working Italian tradesman?”
“Here’s the story as conveyed by old Giacomo’s notes. Bramleigh came over here to look after the progress of the works for a great man, a bishop and a lord marquis too, who was the owner of the place; he made the acquaintance of Lami and his daughters: there were two; the younger only a child, however. The eldest, Enrichetta, was very beautiful, so beautiful indeed, that Giacomo was eternally introducing her head into all his frescos; she was a blonde Italian, and made a most lovely Madonna. Old Giacomo’s journal mentions no less than eight altar-pieces where she figures, not to say that she takes her place pretty frequently in heathen society also, and if I be rightly informed, she is the centre figure of a ‘fresco’ in this very house of Castello, in a small octagon tower, the whole of which Lami painted with his own hand. Bramleigh fell in love with this girl and married her.”
“But she was a Catholic.”
“No. Lami was originally a Waldensian, and held some sort of faith, I don’t exactly know what, that claimed affinity with the English Church; at all events, the vicar here, a certain Robert Mathews – his name is in the precious journal – married them, and man and wife they were.”
“When and how did all these facts come to your knowledge?”
“As to the when and the how, the same answer will suffice. I was serving as sous-lieutenant of cavalry in Africa when news reached me that the ‘Astradella,’ the ship in which my father sailed, was lost off the Cape Verde islands, with all on board. I hastened off to Naples, where a Mr. Bolton lived, who was chief owner of the vessel, to hear what tidings had reached him of the disaster, and to learn something of my father’s affairs, for he had been, if I might employ so fine a word for so small a function, his banker for years. Indeed, but for Bolton’s friendship and protection – how earned I never knew – my father would have come to grief years before, for he was a thorough Italian, and always up to the neck in conspiracies; he had been in that Bonapartist affair at Home; was a Carbonaro and a Camorrist, and Heaven knows what besides. And though Bolton was a man very unlikely to sympathize with these opinions, I take it my respected parent must have been a bon diable that men who knew him would not willingly see wrecked and ruined. Bolton was most kind to myself personally. He received me with many signs of friendship, and without troubling me with any more details of law than were positively unavoidable, put me in possession of the little my father had left behind him, which consisted of a few hundred francs of savings and an old chest, with some older clothes and a mass of papers and letters – dangerous enough, as I discovered, to have compromised scores of people – and a strange old manuscript book, clasped and locked, called the ‘Diary of Giacomo Lami,’ with matter in it for half a dozen romances; for Giacomo, too, had the conspirator’s taste, had known Danton intimately, and was deep in the confidence of all the Irish republicans who were affiliated with the French revolutionary party. But besides this the book contained a quantity of original letters; and when mention was made in the text of this or that event, the letter which related to it, or replied to some communication about it, was appended in the original. I made this curious volume my study for weeks, till, in fact, I came to know far more about old Giacomo and his times than I ever knew about my father and his epoch. There was not a country in Europe in which he had not lived, nor, I believe, one in which he had not involved himself in some trouble. He loved his art, but he loved political plotting and conspiracy even more, and was ever ready to resign his most profitable engagement for a scheme that promised to overturn a government or unthrone a sovereign. My first thought on reading his curious reminiscences was to make them the basis of a memoir for publication. Of course they were fearfully indiscreet, and involved reputations that no one had ever thought of assailing; but they were chiefly of persons dead and gone, and it was only their memory that could suffer. I spoke to Bolton about this. He approved