Passage Illustrated: THe Wounded Frank returns a Hero of the Italian Campaign after all

“Who comes there?”

No answer was returned; and, after a pause of a few seconds, the same sound recurred.

“Who's there?” cried the old man, louder; and a faint, inaudible attempt at reply followed.

And now, provoked by the interruption, he arose to see the cause; when the door slowly opened, and Frank stood before him, pale and bloodless, with one arm in a sling, and supporting himself on a stick with the other. His wasted limbs but half filled his clothes; while in his lustreless eye and quivering lip there seemed the signs of coming death.

With an instinct of kindness, the old General drew out a chair and pressed the poor boy down upon it. The youth kissed the hand as it touched him, and then heaved a heavy sigh.

“This exertion was unfit for you, my poor boy,” said the Count, kindly. “They should not have permitted you to leave your bed.”

“It was my fault, not theirs, General. I heard that you were about to leave the village without coming to the hospital, and I thought, as perhaps ——,” here his voice faltered, and a gulping fulness of the throat seemed almost to choke him—“that as, perhaps, we might never meet again in this world, I ought to make one effort to see you, and tell you that I am not, nor ever was, a traitor!” [Chapter LXVI, "Valeggio," 598; Chapter XXV in Vol. 2, pp. 236-237]

Commentary: And what has become of Kate Dalton?

The last chapter, set at The Villa Moskva on Fiesole, introduces the issue of the apparent disappearance of Kate Dalton, who is not with her fiancé in northern Italy. The present chapter also addresses the fate of Lieutenant Frank Dalton, imprisoned for dereliction of duty after "The Skirmish" in Chapter LIII, which Phiz realised as The Barricade. The restoration of Frank to his uncle, the Count's good graces occurs at the old soldier's residence in the northern Italian village of Valeggio, near Lago di Guarda, where the Piedmontese and the Austrian governments have agreed to exchange prisoners of war. The region of the commune Valeggio sul Mincio today is a favourite Veneto vacation spot in the Province of Verona, about 120 kilometres west of Venice and about 25 kilometres southwest of Verona, an area particularly well known to Lever after his 1858 appointment as Vice-Consul at Spezzia, in the vicinity of Venice, and therefore not far from the scene of the action of this chapter. His first Italian diplomatic post, to Florence in 1845, made him highly familiar with both the Northern Italian states and the First War of Italian Unification (23 March 1848 to 22 August 1849). The present scene of that war occurred in early July 1849.

Lever explains Frank's being a prisoner of war by having the Italian officer note that his forces have captured "a young fellow who . . . broke his arrest to join the struggle at Goito" (II: 229). Frank (for Frank it is) has been brought to the village for the prisoner exchange, but is presently receiving medical treatment in a nearby field-hospital. Phiz thus renders Frank a member of the walking wounded as he is reunited with his uncle, now the General Count von Auersberg, in charge of Austrian forces at the front. His interlocutor, the Piedmontese general, turns out (improbably) to be Prince Alexis Midchekoff, Kate's fiancé. He explains that he has not followed through with the marriage to the General's niece because her interest in him was strictly pecuniary. In compensation for cancelling the marriage he has attempted to compensate her with eighty thousand roubles, but she has rejected the offer. Even now, the Russian is transferring the girl to her uncle's home in Vienna. At this juncture, a letter arrives from Nelly, announcing her father's sudden death in Baden. She also intercedes at length for the forgiveness of the "reckless" but noble-minded Frank, and for her uncle to adopt the orphaned Kate as his daughter. Significantly, Lever describes the insurrection in which the four Daltons are caught up by "the headlong force of popular enthusiasm" and many an aristocratic Hungarian's "specious dreams of nationality" (II; 235).

With a softened appreciation of his nephew's plight, the General now meets Frank in the conference room at Valeggio. The young officer cuts a poor figure when we compare the image here with that of the confidant but fool-hardy commander in Phiz's The Barricade earlier. The old soldier forgives his impetuous nephew as he offers the gaunt, pale youth a chair. Frank insists that he is not now, nor ever was, a "traitor."

Bibliography

Browne, John Buchanan. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1978.

Downey, Edmund. Charles Lever: His Life in Letters. 2 vols. London: William Blackwood, 1906.

Fitzpatrick, W. J. The Life of Charles Lever. London: Downey, 1901.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Lever, Charles. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1852, rpt. 1859, and 1872. [Two volumes as one, with separate page numbers in the 1859 volume, after I: 362.]

_______. The Daltons and A Day's Ride. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). Vol VI of Lever's Works. New York: P. F. Collier, 1882. [This large-format American edition reproduces only six of the original forthy-eight Phiz illustrations.]

Lever, Charles James. The Daltons, or, Three Roads in Life. Vol. 2. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32062/32062-h/32062-h.htm

Skinner, Anne Maria. Charles Lever and Ireland. University of Liverpool. PhD dissertation. May 2019.

Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939, rpt. 1969.

_______. "The Domestic Scene." The English Novel: A Panorama. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin and Riverside, 1960.

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Created 31 May 2022