Chapter Twenty. “The Gobbo.”

Saturday night in South London is a particularly busy time for the wives of the working classes. The chief thoroughfares in that great district lying between Waterloo Bridge and Camberwell Green are rendered bright by the flare of the naphtha-lamps of hoarse-voiced costermongers, whose strident cries call attention to their rather unwholesome-looking wares, and the crowds of honest housewives with ponderous baskets on their arms are marketing in couples and threes, taking their weekly outing, which is never to be missed. In the Walworth Road on a Saturday evening one can perhaps obtain a better glimpse of London lower-class life than in any other thoroughfare. The great broad road extending from that junction of thoroughfares, the Elephant and Castle, straight away to the site of old Camberwell Gate, and thence to the once rural but now sadly deteriorated Camberwell Green, is ablaze with gas and petroleum, and agog with movement. The honest, hard-working costermongers, with their barrows drawn into the gutters, vie with the shops in prices and quality; hawkers of all sorts importune passers-by on the congested pavements; the hatless and oleaginous butchers implore the crowd to “Buy, buy, buy,” and the whole thoroughfare presents a scene of animation unequalled in the whole metropolis—a striking panorama of poverty, pinched faces, shabby clothes, and enforced economy. The district between the Elephant and Camberwell Green has fallen upon evil days. Those who knew the Walworth Road twenty years ago, and know it now, will have marked its decadence with regret; how the lower life of East Street, known locally as Eas’ Lane, has overflowed; how fine old houses, once tenanted by merchants and people of independent means, are now let out in tenements; how model “flats” have reared their ugly heads; how the jerry-builder has swallowed up Walworth Common, across which Dickens once loved to wander; how all has changed, and Walworth has become the Whitechapel of the south.

Life in Walworth is the lower life of modern Cockneydom. There are streets in the district which, highly respectable thoroughfares twenty years ago, now harbour some of the worst characters in London; streets which, although a stone’s throw from the noisy, squalid bustle of the Walworth Road, a policeman hardly cares to venture down without a companion; sunless streets where poverty and crime are hand in hand, where filth has bred disease, and where stunted, pale-faced children wallow in the gutter mire. The wreckage of London life now no longer drifts towards the east, as it used to do, but crosses the Thames, and, after struggling in Lambeth, is swallowed in the debasing vortex of wretched, wonderful Walworth.

Those who pass up the great broad thoroughfare from Camberwell citywards see little of Walworth life. Only when one turns into one or other of its hundred side-streets, which spread out like arms towards the Kennington or Kent Road, can one observe how the poor exist. Among these many streets, one which has perhaps not deteriorated to such an extent as its neighbours, is the Boyson Road. The long thoroughfare of smoke-begrimed, jerry-built houses of monotonous exactness in architecture, two stories, and deep areas, is indeed a very depressing place of residence; but there is not a shop in the whole of it, and it is therefore quiet and secluded from the eternal turmoil of Camberwell Gate.

Halfway down this street, in one of the drab, mournful-looking houses, lived a man and his wife who held themselves aloof from all their neighbours. The man was an Italian, whose vocation was that of waiter in a restaurant in Moorgate Street, and he had taken up his residence in Boyson Road only a few months before. His name was Lionello Nenci, the man who had earned such unenviable reputation among the hucksters’ shops in Hammersmith, and whom Gemma, on her arrival in London, had tried vainly to find.

An air of poverty pervaded the interior of the house. The hall floor was devoid of any covering save for a sack flung down in place of a mat; the sitting-room was furnished in the cheapest manner possible; and, by the hollow sound which rang through the place, it was apparent that few of the other ten or twelve rooms contained any furniture at all.

Before the fire in the rusted grate of the sitting-room, on this cold, damp Saturday night early in December, Nenci himself, a dark-faced, surly-looking man with scrubby black beard, aged about thirty-five, was seated smoking a cheap cigar, while near him was a younger man, ugly, hump-backed, pale-faced, also an Italian. They were speaking in Tuscan.

“Yes,” Nenci said. “I had to clear out of Hammersmith suddenly and come down here, because I thought the Embassy knew too much. She only discovered me a fortnight ago.”

“And she is actually living here?”

“Certainly. This house is the safest place. She lies quite low, and never goes out. Here she comes.”

And at that moment the door opened, and Gemma entered. She was dressed in shabby black; her fair hair was twisted carelessly, and her small white hands bore no rings, yet, even slatternly and unkempt, she looked strikingly beautiful.

“So you are hiding with us?” the hump-backed man exclaimed, after he had greeted her.

“Yes,” she laughed.

“Where is your lover, Armytage?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “He may be abroad again, for all I know. I’ve neither seen nor heard from him since we parted nearly a month ago,” she said, drawing a chair close to the fire and seating herself, her feet placed coquettishly on the rusted fender.

“He knows nothing, I suppose?” Nenci growled, still smoking.

“Not a word. I’m not a fool, even though I may be in love.”

Both men laughed. They knew well the character of this beautiful woman before them, and placed the most implicit confidence in her.

“You really love him—eh?” Nenci inquired.

“I’ve already told you so a dozen times,” she answered impatiently.

“But you won’t desert us?” the younger man—whom they addressed as “The Gobbo,” Italian for hunchback—said earnestly.

“I am still with you,” she answered. “It is impossible for me to serve two masters. What time is the consultation to-night?”

“At ten,” answered Nenci, glancing up at the cheap metal timepiece on the mantel. “Arnoldo should be here in five minutes.”

The door again opened, and Nenci’s wife, a dark-haired Tuscan woman of about thirty, entered. The nasal twang of her speech stamped her at once as Livornese. She was good-looking, and, although ill-dressed, her drab skirt hung well, and her carriage had all the grace and suppleness of the South. For a moment she stood chatting to her husband, her visitor, and their companion, then turning down the smoking lamp, placed several chairs around the plain deal-topped table.

“Gemma hasn’t yet got used to London,” she laughed, as she busied herself preparing for the mysterious consultation which had been arranged. “She pines for her lover, and thinks this place a trifle poor after the big hotel at Charing Cross.”

“No, no,” Gemma protested. “I don’t complain. I’m quite safe here. And I can wait.”

“For your lover?” the Gobbo laughed, in a dry, supercilious tone. “It is a new sensation for you to love. L’amore è la gioia, il reposo la félicita—eh?”

Her clear eyes flashed upon him for an instant, but she did not reply. His words cut her to the quick. In that instant she thought of the man she adored, the man who was held aloof from her by reason of her secret.

Presently, after some further conversation, the door-bell rang, and Nenci’s wife, who promptly answered the summons, admitted two well-dressed men, Romanelli and Malvano.

The appearance of the latter was the signal for congratulations, Gemma alone holding aloof from them. She exchanged a glance with the Doctor, but he in an instant noticed its swift maliciousness, and remained silent.

After some conventional chatter, in which the Gobbo cracked many grim jokes, all six took seats around the table. Nenci had previously assured himself that the shutters were closed, and that the doors both back and front were securely barred, when Malvano was the first to speak.

“There are two of us absent,” he observed. “I received a telegram from one an hour ago. He is in Berlin, and could not be back in time. He apologises.”

“It is accepted,” they all exclaimed.

“And the other cannot come for reasons you all know.”

Then Nenci, a stern, striking figure, rather wild-looking, with his black, bushy hair slightly curled, bent forward earnestly, and said—

“Since last we held a consultation in Livorno some months ago, much has occurred, and it is necessary for us once again to review the situation. Most of us have had severe trials; more than one has fallen beneath the vengeance of our enemies; and more than one is now in penal servitude on Gorgona, that rocky island which lies within sight of the land we all of us love. Well, our ranks are thinner, indeed. Of our twenty-one brothers and sisters who met for the first time in Livorno three years ago only eight now remain. Yet we may accomplish much, for not one of us knows fear; all have been already tried and found staunch and true.”

“Are you sure there is no traitor among us?” Gemma asked, in a clear intense voice, her pointed chin resting upon her white palm as she listened to his speech.

“Whom do you suspect?” Nenci demanded, darting a quick look at her.

“I suspect no one,” she answered. “But in this desperate crisis we must, if we would successfully accomplish our object, have perfect faith in one another.”

“So we have,” Malvano said. “Here in London we are in absolute security. We have sacrificed enough, Heaven knows! Thirteen of us are already either in prison, or dead.”

Gemma sighed. She herself had been compelled to sacrifice a man’s passionate love, her own happiness and all that made life worth living, because of her connexion with this mysterious band which had its headquarters among the working class in London, and whose ramifications were felt in every part of Italy. She lifted her beautiful face once again. She was pale and desperate.

“Thirteen is an unlucky number,” remarked the Gobbo grimly.

“For the dead, yes. But eight of us are still living,” Malvano said.

“By the holy Virgin! it’s a desperate game we are playing,” Nenci’s wife exclaimed.

“Shut your mouth,” growled her husband roughly. “When your opinion is required, we’ll ask for it.” She was a slim, fragile woman, with a pale face full of romance, black eyes that flashed like gems, and a profusion of dark, frizzy hair, worn with those three thin spiral curls falling over the brow, in the manner of all the Livornesi. Even though she existed in squalid Walworth, she still preserved in the mode of dressing her hair the fashion she had been used to since a child. In that drab, mournful street, she sighed often for her own home in gay, happy, far-off Livorno, with its great Piazza, where she loved to gossip; its fine old cathedral, where she had so often knelt to the Madonna; its leafy Passeggio where, with her friends, she would stroll and watch the summer sun sinking into the Mediterranean behind the grey distant islands. When her husband spoke thus roughly she exchanged glances across the table with Gemma, and her dark, sad eyes became filled with tears.

“No,” protested Malvano quickly, “that’s scarcely the language to use towards one who has risked all that your wife has risked. I entirely agree with her that the game’s desperate enough. We must allow no discord.”

“Exactly,” Nenci admitted. “The reason why I have summoned you here is because the time is past for mere words. We must now act swiftly and with precision. There is only one person we have to fear.”

“What is his name?” they all cried, almost with one accord.

“The man whom Gemma loves—Charles Armytage,” the black-haired man answered, his eyes still fixed maliciously upon the woman before him.

In an instant Gemma sprang up, her tiny hands clenched, an unnatural fire in her eyes.

“You would denounce him?” she cried wildly. “You who have held me bound and silent for so long, now seek to destroy the one single hope to which I cling; to snatch from me for ever all chance of peace and happiness!” The eyes of the five persons at the table were upon her as she, strikingly beautiful, stood erect and statuesque before them. They all saw how deeply in earnest and how desperate she was.

But Nenci laughed. The sound of his harsh voice stung her. She turned upon him fiercely, with a dangerous glint in her clear blue eyes, a look that none of that assembly had ever before witnessed.

“In the past,” she said, “I have served you. I have been your catspaw. I have risked love, life, everything, for the one object so near my heart: the desire for a vengeance complete and terrible. Because of my association with you”—and she gazed around at them as she spoke—“I have been debarred marriage with the man I love. In order that he should leave me, that his daily presence should no longer fill me with regret and vain longing for happiness, I was compelled to resort to self-accusation, and to denounce myself as an adventuress.”

“Then you actually spoke the truth for once in your life!” Nenci observed superciliously, a fierce expression in his black eyes.

“Enough!” Malvano protested. “We didn’t come here to discuss Gemma’s love affairs.”

“But this man, who for the last three years has sought my ruin, has made a false denunciation against the young Englishman. I know only too well what passes in his mind. He declares to you that the only person we need fear is Charles Armytage, and the natural conclusion occurs that he must be silenced. I know full well that at this moment our position is one of desperation. Well, you know my past full well, each one of you, and have, I think, recognised that I’m not a woman to be trifled with. You may stir up the past and cast its mud into my face. Good! But, however wrongly I’ve acted, it is because this man has held me within his merciless grip, and I have been compelled to do his bidding blindly, without daring to protest. You may tell me that I am an adventuress,” she cried vehemently; “that my reputation is evil and unenviable; that my friends in Italian society have cast me adrift because of the libellous stories you have so ingeniously circulated about me; but I tell you that I love Charles Armytage, and I swear on the tomb of my dead mother he shall never suffer because of his true, honest love for me.”

She had used the oath which the Italian always holds most sacred, and then a dead silence followed. Except the dark wild-looking visage of Nenci, every face betrayed surprise at this fierce and unexpected outburst.

But Nenci again laughed, stroking his scrubby beard with his thin sallow hand.

“I suppose you wish to desert us, eh?” he asked meaningly.

“While you keep faith with me I am, against my will, still your tool. Break faith with me, and the bond which has held me to you will at once be severed.”

“How?” inquired Malvano seriously; for he saw that at this crisis-time Gemma held their future in her hands. Nenci’s wild words had, alas! been ill-timed, and could not now be retracted.

“Simply this,” she answered. “I love; for the first time in my life, honestly and passionately. Through my association with you, my life is wrecked, and my lover lost to me. Yet I still have hope; and if you destroy that hope, then all desire for life will leave me. I care absolutely nothing for the future.”

“Well?” the Doctor observed mechanically.

“Cannot you understand?” she cried, turning upon him fiercely. “This man Lionello, has suggested that my lover’s life should be taken; that he should be silenced merely because he fears that my love may lead me to desert you, or turn traitor. I know well how easily such suggestions can be carried out; but remember, if a hand is lifted against him it is to me, the woman who loves him, that you shall answer; to me you shall beg for mercy, and, by the Virgin, I will give you none!” And her panting breast heaved and fell violently as she clutched the back of her chair for support.

For a few minutes there was again silence, deep and complete. Then Nenci laughed the same harsh supercilious laugh as before.

“Bah?” he cried, with curling lip. “Your foolish infatuation is of no account to us. Your lover holds knowledge which can ruin us. He must therefore be silenced!” Then glancing swiftly around the table with his black eyes, he asked, “Is that agreed?”

With one accord there was a bold, clear response. All gave an answer in the affirmative.