CHAPTER VII. MALTA
And so it was the son of the Rovigno fisherman who had just told his name to Dr. Antekirtt. By a providential chance it was Luiga Ferrato whose courage and ability had saved the yacht and her passengers and crew from certain destruction.
The doctor was going to seize Luigi and clasp him in his arms. He checked himself. It would have been Count Sandorf who would have thus shown his gratitude; and Count Sandorf was dead to everybody, even to the son of Andrea Ferrato.
But if Pierre Bathory was obliged keep the same reserve, and for the same reasons, he was about to forget it when the doctor stopped him by a look. The two went into the saloon, and Luigi was asked to follow.
“My friend,” asked the doctor, “are you the son of an Istrian fisherman, whose name was Andrea Ferrato?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you not a sister?”
“Yes, and we live together at Valetta; but—” he added, with a certain amount of hesitation—“did you know my father?”
“Your father!” answered the doctor. “Your father fifteen years ago gave shelter to two fugitives in his house at Rovigno. Those fugitives were friends of mine whom his devotion was unable to save. But that devotion cost Andrea Ferrato his liberty and his life, for on account of it he was sent to Stein, where he died.”
“Yes, died, but he did not regret what he had done,” said Luigi.
The doctor took the young man’s hand.
“Luigi,” said he, “it was to me that my friends gave the task of paying the debt of gratitude they owed your father. For many years I have been seeking to find what had become of your sister and you, but all trace had been lost when you left Rovigno. Thank Heaven you were sent to our assistance! The ship you have saved I named the ‘Ferrato,’ in remembrance of your father, Andrea! Come to my arms, my child!”
While the doctor clasped him to his breast Luigi felt the tears start into his eyes. At this affecting scene Pierre could not remain unmoved. He felt his whole soul go forth toward this young man of his own age, the brave son of the fisherman of Rovigno.
“And I! I!” exclaimed he, with outstretched arms.
“You, sir?”
“I! The son of Stephen Bathory!”
Did the doctor regret the avowal? No! Luigi Ferrato could keep the secret as well as Pescade and Matifou.
Luigi was then informed how matters stood, and learned Dr. Antekirtt’s objects. One thing he was not told, and that was that he was in the presence of Count Mathias Sandorf.
The doctor wished to be taken at once to Maria Ferrato. He was impatient to see her again, impatient, above all, to hear how she had lived a life of work and misery since Andrea’s death had left her alone, with her brother to look after.
“Yes, doctor,” answered Luigi, “let us go ashore at once! Maria will be very anxious about me! It is forty-eight hours since I left her to go fishing in Melleah Creek, and during last night’s storm she will be afraid I have got drowned!”
“You are fond of your sister?” asked the doctor.
“She is my mother and my sister combined,” answered Luigi.
Does the isle of Malta, situated about sixty-two miles from Sicily, belong to Europe or to Africa, from which it is separated by one hundred and sixty miles? This is a question which has much exercised geographers; but, in any case, having been given by Charles V. to the Hospitalers whom Solyman drove out of Rhodes, and who then took the name of Knights of Malta, it now belongs to England—and it would take some trouble to get it away from her. It is about eighteen miles long and ten across. It has Valetta and its suburbs for its capital, besides other towns and villages, such as Citta Vecchia—a sort of sacred town, which was the seat of the bishop at the time of the Knights—Dingzi, Zebbug, Birchircara, etc. Rather fertile in its eastern half, and very barren in its western half, the density of its population toward the east is in striking contrast to that toward the west. In all it contains about a hundred thousand inhabitants. What Nature has done for this island in cutting out of its coast its four or five harbors, the most beautiful in the world, surpasses all that can be imagined. Everywhere water; everywhere points, capes and heights ready to receive fortifications and batteries. The Knights had already made it a difficult place to take, and the English have made it impregnable. No ironclad could hope to force her way in against such an array of guns, which, among others, include two at the water’s edge, each of a hundred tons, fully equipped with hydraulic apparatus, and capable of sending a shot weighing seventeen and a half hundredweight a distance of nine and a half miles. A piece of information that may be profitably noted by the powers who regret to see in England’s hands this admirable station, commanding the Central Mediterranean, and which could hold the whole British fleet.
Assuredly there are English at Malta. There is a governor lodged in the ancient palace of the Grand Master, there is an admiral to look after the fleet and the harbors, and a garrison of from four to five thousand men; but there are Italians who wish to be considered at home, a floating cosmopolitan population as at Gibraltar, and there are, of course, Maltese.
The Maltese are Africans. In the harbors they work their brightly colored boats, in the streets they drive their vehicles down the wildest slopes, in the markets they deal in fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, making a deafening uproar under the lamp of some small sacred daub. It is said that all the men are alike, copper in color, with black, slightly woolly, hair, with piercing eyes, robust, and of medium height. It seems as though all the women were of the same family, with large eyes and long lashes, dark hair, charming hands, supple figures and skin of a whiteness that the sun cannot touch beneath the “falzetta,” a sort of black silk mantle worn in Tunisian fashion, common to all classes, and which answers at the same time for head-dress, mantle, and even fan.
The Maltese have the mercantile instinct. Everywhere they are found doing a trade. Hard-working, thrifty, economic, industrious, sober, but violent, vindictive and jealous, it is among the lower classes that they are best worth studying. They speak a dialect of which the base is Arabic, the result of the conquest which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, a language animated and picturesque, lending itself easily to metaphor and to poetry. They are good sailors when you can keep them, and bold fishermen familiarized with danger by their frequent storms.
It was in this island that Luigi pursued his calling with as much audacity as if he had been a Maltese, and here he had lived for nearly fifteen years with his sister Maria.
Valetta and its suburbs, we said. There are really six towns on the Grand and Quarantine harbors—Floriana Senglea, Bighi, Burmola, Vittoriosa, Sliema, are hardly suburbs, nor even mere assemblages of houses inhabited by the poorer classes; they are regular cities with sumptuous mansions, hotels and churches, worthy of a capital which boasts some 25,000 inhabitants.
It was at Valetta that the brother and sister lived. It would perhaps be more correct to say “under Valetta,” for it was in a kind of subterranean quarter known as the Manderaggio, the entrance to which is on the Strada San Marco, that they had found a lodging suitable for their slender means; and it was into this hypogeum that Luigi led the doctor as soon as the yacht was moored.
After declining the services of the hundreds of boats that surrounded them, they landed on the quay. Entering by the Marine Gate, and deafened by the pealing and ringing of the bells which hover like a sonorous atmosphere over the Maltese capital, they passed beneath the double-casemated fort, and mounted first a steep slope and then a narrow staircase. Between the high houses with their greenish miradores and niches with lighted lamps they arrived before the Cathedral of St. John, and mingled with a crowd of the noisiest people in the world.
When they had reached the back of this hill, a little lower than the cathedral, they began their descent toward the Quarantine harbor; there in the Strada San Marco they stopped midway before a staircase which went off to the right down into the depths.
The Manderaggio runs along under the ramparts with narrow streets where the sun never shines, high yellow walls irregularly pierced with innumerable holes, which do duty as windows, some of them grated and most of them free. Everywhere round about are flights of steps; leading to veritable sewers, low gate-ways, humid, sordid, like the houses of a Kasbah, miserable court-yards, and gloomy tunnels, hardly worthy of the name of lanes. And at every opening, every breathing-place, on the ruined landings and crumbling footpaths, there gathers a repulsive crowd of old women with faces like sorceresses, mothers dirty and pallid and worn, daughters of all ages in rags and tatters, boys half naked, sickly, wallowing in the filth; beggars with every variety of disease and deformity; men, porters or fisher folk of savage look capable of everything evil, and among this human swarm a phlegmatic policeman, accustomed to the hopeless throng, and not only familiarized, but familiar with it! A true court of miracles, but transported into a strange underwork, the last ramifications of which open on to the curtain walls on the level of the Quarantine harbor, and are swept by the sun and sea breeze.
It was in one of the houses in this Manderaggio, but in the upper portion of it, that Maria and Luigi Ferrato lived in two rooms. The doctor was struck with the poverty of the miserable lodging and also with its neatness. The hand of the careful housekeeper again showed itself, as it had done in the house of the fisherman of Rovigno.
As the doctor entered Maria rose, saying to her brother, “My child! my Luigi!”
Luigi embraced his sister, and introduced his friends.
The doctor related in a few words how Luigi had risked his life to save a ship in distress, and at the same time he mentioned Pierre as the son of Stephen Bathory.
While he spoke Maria looked at him with so much attention and even emotion that he feared for a moment she had recognized him. But it was only a flash that vanished from her eyes almost immediately. After fifteen years how was it possible for her to recognize a man who had only been in her father’s house for a few hours?
Andrea Ferrato’s daughter was then thirty-three years old. She had always been beautiful, owing to the purity of her features and the bright look of her splendid eyes. The white streaks here and there in her raven hair showed that she had suffered less from the length than from the severity of her life. Age had nothing to do with this precocious grayness, which was due entirely to the fatigues and troubles and griefs she had been through since the death of the fisherman of Rovigno.
“Your future and that of Luigi now belong to us,” said Dr. Antekirtt as he finished his story. “Were not my friends deeply indebted to Andrea Ferrato? You will not object, Maria, to Luigi remaining with us?”
“Sirs!” said Maria, “my brother has only acted as he should have done in going to your help last night, and I thank Heaven that he was inspired with the thought to do so. He is the son of a man who never knew but one thins and that was his duty.”
“And we know only one,” replied the doctor, “and that is to pay a debt of gratitude to the children of him—”
He stopped. Maria looked at him again, and the look seemed to pierce through him. He was afraid he had said too much.
“Maria,” broke in Pierre, “you will not prevent Luigi from being my brother?”
“And you will not refuse to be my daughter?” added the doctor, holding out his hand.
And then Maria told the story of her life since she left Rovigno: how the espionage of the Austrian police rendered her existence insupportable, and how they had come to Malta for Luigi to perfect himself in his trade of a seaman by continuing that of a fisherman; and how for many years they had struggled against misery, their feeble resources being soon exhausted.
But Luigi soon equaled the Maltese in boldness and ability. A wonderful swimmer like them he could almost be compared to that famous Nicolo Pescei, a native of Valetta, who carried dispatches from Naples to Palermo by swimming across the Æolian sea. He was an adept at hunting the curlews and wild pigeons, whose nests have to be sought for among the almost inaccessible caves that border on the sea. He was the boldest of fishermen, and never had the wind kept him ashore when it had been necessary for him to go out to his nets and lines. And it was owing to this that he had been in Melleah Creek when he heard the signals of the yacht in distress.
But at Malta the sea-birds, the fish, the mollusks are so abundant that the moderation of their price makes fishing anything but a lucrative trade. Do all he could, Luigi could hardly manage to supply the wants of the humble home, although Maria contributed something toward it by what she earned from her needle-work. And so they had been obliged to reduce their expenses and take this lodging in the Manderaggio. While Maria was telling her story Luigi went into the other room and came back with a letter in his hand. It was the one Andrea Ferrato had written just before he died:
“Maria,” he said, “take care of your brother. He will soon have only you in the world! For what I have done, my children, I have no regret, unless it is for not having succeeded in saving those who trusted in me, even at the sacrifice of my liberty and my life. What I did I would do again! Never forget your father, who is dying as he sends you this—his last love. “Andrea Ferrato.”
As he read this Pierre Bathory made no attempt to conceal his emotion, and Dr. Antekirtt turned away his head to avoid Maria’s searching look.
“Luigi,” said he, abruptly, “your boat was smashed last night against my yacht—”
“She was an old one, doctor,” answered Luigi, “and for any one but me the loss would not be much.”
“Perhaps so, but you will allow me to give you another for her. I will give you the boat you saved.”
“What?”
“Will you be the mate of the Ferrato? I want a man who is young, active and a good sailor.”
“Accept, Luigi,” said Pierre, “accept!”
“But my sister?”
“Your sister shall become one of the family that lives on my island, of Antekirtta!” replied the doctor. “Your lives henceforth belong to me, and I will do all I can to make them happy, and that the only regret for your past life shall be that of having lost your father.”
Luigi seized the doctor’s hands; he clasped them; he kissed them, while Maria could find no other way of showing her gratitude than by bursting into tears.
“To-morrow I expect you on board!” said the doctor.
And if he could no longer master his emotion he hurriedly left, after beckoning Pierre to follow him.
“Ah!” he said, “it is good—it is good to make ammends—”
“Yes, better than to punish!” answered Pierre.
“But it is necessary to punish!”