It is with the utmost pleasure that I am able to communicate to the English-speaking world a literary document of capital importance which my readers had only too great reason to mourn as lost. It will be remembered that my poor friend the Hack, recently deceased in the neighbourhood of the King's road, suffered in his last hours from the fear that the world might never receive his two masterpieces which he had so long promised them, "The Story of the Hungry Student" and "The Brigand of Radicofani." It will also be remembered that on reaching his humble lodgings after the publication of the first, I discovered him to be dead, and feared, therefore, that the second of these two classics would never be discovered. I am delighted to say that a Rag and Bottle Merchant and Dealer in Kitchen Stuff near The World's End (which is a landmark in that neighbourhood) has been found in possession of the precious paper, which by a providential accident is still legible, although it had been used to wrap up two boot-brushes and a second-hand[Pg 184] pot of blacking. Such coincidences are not unknown in the history of English Letters.
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A young Colonial journalist, full of a great determination to succeed in life, but insufficiently equipped for that ambition, had occasion to visit the country north of Rome in the year 1903. He had been sent by his proprietors to gather information upon the customs of the peasantry for a series of articles which they designed to publish; he had orders to photograph these natives with or without their leave, and to acquire such a knowledge of the local dialects as would permit him to converse with them.
With his numerous adventures in the extinct volcanoes of that district I need not detain you, nor tell you of how he was imprisoned in Ronciglione, fined by a magistrate in Viterbo, nor how he was soundly beaten by a drunken mason in the town of Bolsena, whose lovely lake he still remembers with associated feelings of admiration and regret. It is more to my purpose to retail how in each of these towns as he wandered northwards, and at every intervening house of call, he was perpetually reminded of the Brigand of Radicofani. Some, when he would ask them questions upon their local habits, would reply, "Oh, go and discuss it with the Brigand of Radicofani"; others, when he attempted to stammer his experiences of the road, would tell him that the Brigand would make a better audience than they. The magistrate who fined him at Viterbo[Pg 185] made an allusion to the Brigand of Radicofani which he caught but ill, but which provoked, to his annoyance, considerable laughter in court. The policeman who locked him up in Ronciglione turned the key with an allusion to the same individual, and even the drunken mason in the very act of beating him in Bolsena bade him begone to the Brigand of Radicofani. As for Acquapendente, the town was full of rumours about this strange man, the children in the streets, who should have known better, took the young Colonial twice for the Brigand and followed him in chorus, calling him by that name; while a little brown man who was pushing a barrow assured him with great solemnity that he was taking its contents of private refreshment for the Brigand of Radicofani.
It may be imagined with what eagerness the journalist left the town next morning by the northern road and with what curiosity of attention he marked the little town of Radicofani perched upon its distant conical hill and glaring white under the hot morning. "There," said he to himself, as he laboriously panted up the last slope, "I shall find a character indeed worthy of so many pains, and discover something perhaps of permanent value for the history of this ancient land."
He seated himself in the principal room of the first inn he came to within the gate and boldly asked whether it were possible at that hour to interview the Brigand. The young woman who was the[Pg 186] mistress of the house looked at him for a moment in a sort of stupor, then bursting into wild cries not unmixed with laughter, she fled from him and left him for quite a quarter of an hour alone; she returned with a little crowd of Radicofanian burgesses who stood round, hats in hand, looking at him lugubriously. At last the oldest of them, a man with a noble head, handsome and grey, said to him solemnly—
"Do we understand, Excellence, that you desire to see the well-known Brigand of Radicofani?"
"That is so," replied the journalist manfully. "I am indeed sorry if my pursuit of such an audience seems impertinent, for I recognise the high position held by this gentleman in your community; and I am equally sorry if I have given you any trouble by my request. But as I am deputed by a foreign newspaper of high standing to discover what I can of the customs of an ancient land, I could hardly proceed onward to the notable town of Sienna and leave behind me uninterviewed the principal personage of your countryside."
"Not a word," said the grave leader of that band, "it is a pleasure to serve one who takes so flattering an interest in our poor affairs. If your Excellency will but wait a moment and read the local newspapers, one of which he will discover to be religious, the other of contrary tone, the Brigand shall shortly be introduced to you."
Heartened by this promise, the young journalist[Pg 187] read with some care the leading articles of the greasy rags before him, and maintained his dignity and his apparent attention to the text in spite of occasional openings of the door accompanied by the giggling and elbowing of the curious who, in out-of-the-way places, infest a stranger.
At last the door opened wide before the sweeping gesture and the advancing stride of one accustomed to command, and the Brigand of Radicofani stood before the traveller.
His dress was picturesque in the extreme: he had on knee breeches ornamented with parti-coloured ribbons, his calves were swathed round with crisscross bands, a rustic pipe hung from his belt, which also sheathed four knives of different dimensions with variegated and curious carved handles. Aslant across these he wore a naked dagger quite eighteen inches long; a gloomy cloak depended from one shoulder; upon his head was a steeple-crowned hat, very tall and pointed, and adorned, like the rest of his person, with ribbons of gay hue. In either ear he wore an enormous ring of gold, and black ringlets which shone with some oily substance depended in profusion from either side of his head. This extraordinary figure was completed by a gigantic blunderbuss with a bore about the size of a duck gun and ending in a huge bell mouth quite nine inches across.
The Brigand (for it was he) startled the journalist by asking in a terrible voice what he wanted with[Pg 188] him, and bidding him be brief and to the point in his interrogations or demands. As he so spoke he tapped with his left hand the curious handle of his dagger, keeping his fist clenched upon his haunch and his right arm akimbo, while his left leg and foot were advanced in a martial and even in a threatening manner. The young Colonial, who was acquainted—by his reading—with many situations of danger, summoned all his firmness, begged the Brigand to share the wine which stood before him, and assured him that he had only disturbed his leisure in order to hear from the lips of one so justly prominent in the ancient and noble town of Radicofani memories of its great past intermingled, as he hoped, with records of the Brigand's individual career.
Mollified by such an address, the great man sank into the rickety chair opposite the journalist, assumed the attitude of the warrior at ease, and began with plentiful and dramatic gesture the recital of many things.
Brigandage, he assured his companion, was now by no means the trade it had been; he had himself taken to the road at the early age of fifteen, having been persuaded to that industry by an uncle of his, a Canon of Viterbo. "For in the old days" (he was careful to add) "this country was very easily administered, and the clergy in especial defended and encouraged the picturesque customs which such an ease of administration bred. Often after a hard[Pg 189] night upon the highway, or after some successful business in the brushwood above the city, I would make it my business to call upon my revered uncle to press upon him some trinket as a mark of my esteem, or if the day had been exceptionally lucky, some piece of foreign gold which a tourist (for they were even then numerous in these parts) might have left in my possession. The old man died," continued the Brigand with a sigh, "in the year '68, during the reign of the late Pope Pius IX, and it was perhaps as well, for great changes were impending which, had he lived to see them, would have broken his heart. For myself," the Brigand went on thoughtfully, "I am too much of a patriot to complain of the unification of my c............