Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  She now made up her mind that unless she could ruin him in Laura’s estimation, the marriage could not be prevented, and she began to revolve the chances for accomplishing her purpose. Her intelligence was not what it had been, for it was subject now to fits of abnormal activity and to a subsequent reaction, in which she was not always perfectly well aware of what was going on around her. In the one state she was rash, over-excited, nervous; in the other she was dull and apathetic, and lost herself in hazy dreams of a rather disconnected character. The consequence was that she found it very hard to hit upon any consecutive plan which presented even the faintest hope of success. Several times she was on the point of doing something very foolish, when she had almost lost control of herself, and she was only saved by the long habit of worldly tact which would probably survive all her other faculties if they were wrecked by the habit which was killing her. But she grew distrustful of herself and of her powers, and a new suffering was added to the many she already had to bear, as she gradually became conscious of the terrible change in herself. She tried to find out all she could about Pietro Ghisleri. At that time all Rome was going mad about making money by speculation, and all sorts of dishonest transactions necessarily went on under cover of greater ones honest in themselves. Adele did her best to ascertain whether Ghisleri were connected with any of them, or with any affair whatever of a nature which could be criticised. But she failed altogether. He looked on at the general rush for money with perfect indifference, and was quite content with the little he already possessed. It struck Adele that a card scandal would do him as much harm as anything, and she made inquiries as to his fondness for play, but was informed that he rarely played at all, and generally lost a little if he did.

  He was hard to catch. So far as she could learn, he had changed his mode of life very considerably during the past two years. It was quite certain that he had definitely broken with Maddalena dell’ Armi, though no one was really sure of the exact date at which the rupture had taken place. They were both clever people who kept their secrets to themselves on the simple plan that, if a thing is not to be known, it should not be told. Laura was the only other woman whom he visited regularly, and his doings were far too well known to make it possible to float a scandal about him in connexion with some one else, which should reach Laura’s ears. Besides, Laura would not care. She was quite capable of not taking the slightest notice, just as in former times she had not cared whether he saw Maddalena every day or not. All she wanted, thought Adele, was that Ghisleri should be at her feet — and there he was.

  At last she hit upon the rather wild plan of asking Ghisleri himself what she had better do. There was something diabolical in the idea of taking his own advice in order to ruin him, which appealed to her in the present state of her brain and nerves. They often met in society, and she caught sight of him that very night at a Lenten party in Casa Montevarchi — one of the last ever given in that house, by the by, for the family was ruined soon afterwards. She followed him in the crowd and touched his shoulder with her fan.

  “Will you give me your arm?” she asked. “Thanks. I want to sit down somewhere. There is a sofa over there.”

  “You still come to these talking matches, I see,” said Ghisleri, as they sat down. “It must be for the sake of saying something interesting, for it can certainly not be in the hope of hearing anything of the kind.”

  “You can still make sharp speeches,” laughed Adele. “I thought my step-sister had converted you, and that you were turning into a sort of Saint Propriety.”

  “Oh, you thought so,” said Pietro, coolly. “Well, you see you were mistaken. There is as little of propriety about me as usual, or of saintship either.”

  He looked at the worn and dilapidated features of the woman beside him, at her hollow cheeks and lustreless eyes, and he almost pitied her. He wondered how she had the courage to keep up the comedy and to face the world as she did, night after night, old before her youth was half over, ugly when she had been pretty but two years earlier, weary always, and haunted by the shadow of the poison to which she was a slave.

  “You need not be angry,” she answered. “I did not mean anything disagreeable. I wish you would say more sharp things, it is refreshing to hear a man talk after listening to a pack of little boys.”

  “Why do you listen to them?”

  “They amuse me for five minutes, and when I have tolerated them as long as that I cannot get rid of them. Then I begin to long for a little serious talk with a man like you — a man one can ask a question of with the hope of getting a reasonable answer.”

  “You are very good to put it in that way,” said Ghisleri. “Have you any particular question to ask me now? I will be as intensely reasonable as I can in my reply, on condition that it is a thing of which I know nothing whatever.”

  “What an extraordinary restriction!” exclaimed Adele.

  “Not at all. If I should know anything about the matter in hand it would be sure to be so little that it would confuse me and hamper the free working of my imagination, which might otherwise produce interesting and even startling effects. You may have heard that a little knowledge is dangerous. That is the meaning of the proverb.”

  “I knew I should get something original from you. You always say something which no one else would.”

  “And you always discover in me some new and beautiful quality which had escaped my notice,” answered Ghisleri. “Is it with a view to getting some particular sort of answer to the question you meditate, that you flatter me so nicely before asking it?”

  “Of course,” laughed Adele. “What did you expect? But I do not think you would answer the question at all. You would give me a dissertation on something else and then go away and leave me to be torn to pieces by the little boys again.”

  “What an awful death!” laughed Ghisleri. “I will not leave you. I will protect you against whole legions of little boys.”

  “You look as if you could. You are quite as strong as ever now, are you not? You never feel any pain from your wound?”

  “Never,” answered Pietro, indifferently. “Was that the grave question to which you wanted a serious and well-considered reply?”

  “Do not be absurd!” cried Adele, with a laugh. “One has to make civil inquiries of that kind sometimes. It is a social duty. Even if I hated you I should ask if you were well.”

  “Of course. The old-fashioned poisoners in the middle ages did that. It was of no use to waste expensive poison on a man who was ill and might die without it. They practised economy.”

  “What a horrible idea!” exclaimed Adele, shuddering.

  “Horrible ideas were the fashion then,” pursued Ghisleri. “I have thought a great deal about those times since you showed me those interesting places at Gerano, nearly two years ago. The modern publisher of primers would have made his fortune under the Borgia domination. Fancy the titles: ‘Every man his own executioner, a practical guide for headsmen, torturers and poisoners, by a member of the profession (diploma) with notes, diagrams, and a special table of measurements and instructions for using the patent German rack, etc.’ Does not that sound wildly interesting? They would have had it on the drawing-room table in every castle. It would have been a splendid book for hawkers. Gerano made me think of it.”

  Adele laughed in rather a forced way, and her eyes moved uneasily, glancing quickly in one direction and another.

  “You would have been a dreadful person in those times, I am quite sure,” she said. “You would have been a monster of cruelty.”

  “Of course I should. So should we all. But we manage those little things so easily now, and so much more tastefully.”

  “Exactly,” said Adele, who saw her chance and an opportunity of turning the conversation at the same time. “I would like your views upon modern social warfare. If you wished to ruin your enemy, how would you go about it?”

  “A man or a woman?” asked Ghisleri, calmly.

  “Oh, both. A man first. It is always harde
r to injure a man than a woman, is it not?”

  “So they say. Do you wish to kill the man or to ruin him altogether, or only to injure him in the eyes of the world?”

  “Take the three in the other order,” suggested Adele. “A mere injury first — and the rest afterwards.”

  “Very well. I have something very neat in the killing line — to use the shopkeeper style. I will keep it to the end. Let me see. You wish to do a man a great injury — enough, say, to make a woman who loves him turn upon him. Is that it?”

  “Yes, that would do very well,” said Adele, as though she were discussing the fashion of a new frock.

  “If you happen to be a good hand at forgery,” answered Ghisleri, with perfect equanimity, “write a number of letters purporting to be from him to another woman. Put anything you like into them, take them to the woman who loves him, and ask a large sum for them. She will probably pay it and leave him. You will accomplish your object and earn money at the same time. If you cannot forge his handwriting, forge that of an imaginary woman — that is easy enough — and follow the same course as before. It is almost sure to succeed.”

  “What a surpassingly diabolical scheme!” exclaimed Adele, with a laugh.

  “Yes, I flatter myself it is not bad. Of course you can make the matter public if only you are sure of the forgery being good, or of an imaginary woman being forthcoming at the right moment. But, on the whole, the finest way of ruining a man before the world is to steal his money. No reputation can stand poverty and slander at the same time.”

  “But it is not always easy to steal a man’s money,” objected Adele.

  “Oh, yes, unless a man is very rich. Bring a suit against his title, and if he fights it, the lawyers will eat up all he has. Then you can play the magnanimous part and say that you give up the suit out of pity for him. That is very pretty, too. But the prettiest of all is the new way of killing people, because nobody can possibly find you out.”

  “What do you make them die of?” asked Adele nervously.

  “Cholera — typhus — fever, almost anything you please. It is a convenient way because the epidemic of the day is generally the most ready to hand. What did you say? I beg your pardon, I thought you spoke. Yes, it is delightful, and in most cases I believe it is almost sure to succeed. I dined with Gouache last night, and Professor Wüsterschinder, the great German authority on cutting up live rabbits, you know, was there. A charming man — speaks French like a human being, and understands Italian well. I liked him very much. The conversation turned upon murder. You know Gouache has a taste for horrors, being the gentlest and kindest of men. The professor told a long story of a doctor who murdered the father, mother, and aunt of a girl whom none of the three would let him marry. He did it in the course of medical treatment, with three different vegetable poisons — masterly, the professor said. There was an inquiry and they dug everybody up again, and all that sort of thing, but no one could positively prove anything and the doctor married the girl after all.”

  “You seem full of horrors this evening,” said Adele, moving one shoulder in a restless, jerking way which was becoming a habit.

  “I always am,” answered Ghisleri, turning his cold blue eyes on her. “I know the most horrible things and am always just on the point of saying them.”

  “Please do not!” exclaimed Adele, shrinking away from him into the corner of the sofa, almost in physical fear of him now.

  “I was telling you about the cholera trick, or I was going to tell you. The other story was only the prelude. After giving it to us with a number of details I have forgotten, Professor Wüsterschinder launched out about the wonders of science, as those men always do, and positively made me uncomfortable with the numbers of unfortunate rabbits and puppies he cut to shreds in his conversation. Then he came to the point and began to explain how easy it is to murder people by natural means like typhus. It is done by taking the — good Heavens, Donna Adele, what is the matter!”

  Adele had uttered a short, low cry, and her face had turned very white. Her lips were contorted in an expression of anguish such as Pietro had never seen, and her fingers were twisting together as though they would break.

  “Can I do anything?” he asked, anxiously. He feared she was going to be seized by some kind of convulsion, but the woman’s strong will helped her even then.

  “Hold my fan before my arm,” she managed to say, and she felt for something in her pocket with her right hand.

  In a moment she produced a tiny syringe with a point like a needle, and a little bottle. With incredible quickness and skill she filled the syringe, pricked the skin on her left arm, and ran the point into it, and then pressed the tiny piston slowly till it would go no further. In little more than one minute she had put everything into her pocket again, and taking her fan from Ghisleri’s hand, leaned back in the corner of the sofa, with a sigh of relief.

  “I am afraid I made you nervous,” he said, in a tone of apology.

  “Not at all,” she answered. “I had forgotten to take my morphia before coming — that was all. I suffer terribly with pains in my head when I do not take it.”

  “And is the pain gone already?” asked Ghisleri, in some surprise, and wondering how she would answer.

  “Oh, no! But it will be gone very soon. I am quieter when I know I have taken the morphia. Of course,” she said, with a forced laugh, “you must not suppose that I take it often, not even every day. I believe it is very bad in large quantities.”

  “Of course.” Ghisleri could hardly help smiling at the poor attempt to disclaim any slavery to the fatal drug, contradicting, as it did, what she had said but a moment before.

  For the third time since Arden’s death the conviction came upon him that Adele had been the responsible cause of it, and this time it was destined to be permanent. The theory of coincidence was exhausted, and he abandoned it. The stories he had told her about Professor Wüsterschinder, the great German authority, were quite true, and Ghisleri’s eyes had been opened on the previous evening to the possibilities of evil disclosed by modern science. He was not yet sure of what Adele had done, but he was convinced that the general nature of the process she had employed to communicate the fever to Arden was similar to those which the professor had described, and that she must, in all probability, have got the necessary information from a scientific book or article on the subject, which she had either procured expressly, or which had perhaps fallen under her eyes by chance.

  She, on her part, had been desperately frightened, as she had good cause to be, for it was almost inconceivable to her that he could have accidentally gone so near the mark as he was going when her cry had stopped him. She felt that if he had pronounced the next half a dozen words, she must have gone mad there and then in the drawing-room where she sat, and she had instinctively prevented him proceeding any further. Then in the convulsion of terror she felt, she had resorted to her sole comforter, the morphia, and it had not played her false. In a short time its influence was at work and indeed the mere act of taking it was in itself soothing in the extreme. She felt herself growing calm again and more able to face the new difficulties and terrors that had arisen in her path. And they were many. She had no doubt now that Ghisleri had either read the lost confession or had spoken with some one who had. It was appalling to think that in that very room there might be a score of persons who knew what that letter contained as well as he. The morphia helped her wonderfully. But it was clear that Ghisleri had her in his power. An idea flashed across her mind. It was so simple that she wondered how she had not thought of it before. The letter had really fallen to the bottom of the shaft. Ghisleri, interested perhaps in the story of Paolo Braccio, had strolled down to the dungeon again by himself and had seen the paper lying there. In that case he alone knew of its existence or of its contents, besides herself and Lucia. The thought was so agreeable, compared with the alternative of supposing that all society knew the details of her evil deeds, that she clung to it. Then she looked at the ma
n who, as she supposed, had power to dispose of her existence at his pleasure, and she wondered whether he had a price. All men had, she had heard. But as it seemed to her now, this particular man would not be like the generality, or else the price he would set on her letter would be of the kind which she could not possibly pay, because she would never be able to obtain for him what he might want. The feeling she had known in the first months of her torment returned upon her now, and very strongly — the awful feeling of degradation compared even with the worst of the people she knew. In her eyes, Ghisleri, with all his misdeeds, seemed a being of superior purity and goodness. He had never done what she had done, nor anything approaching to it in the most distant way. He had faced men in fair fight, and hurt them, and been almost mortally hurt himself, but he had never stabbed an enemy in the back nor dealt a blow in the dark. He had loved more than one woman, and had been loved in return, but no one had ever hinted that a woman’s confidence had passed his lips, nor that he had ever spoken lightly of any woman’s good name. If he had done evil, he had done it fairly, defiantly, above board, and in the light of day. Adele envied him with all her heart as he sat there beside her, confident in his own honourable reputation — as honour is reckoned in the world — and free to go and to come and to do what seemed good in his own eyes without a second thought of the consequences or the least fear of betraying himself. There was not at that moment one person in the room with whom she would not have been only too glad to exchange places, station, fortune, name, reputation — everything. And she fancied Ghisleri knew it, as indeed he almost did, and she feared to meet his eyes.