Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Orsino grasped his outstretched hand.

  ‘I knew you would come,’ said Ippolito, with a glad intonation. ‘Who called you? They all hate us here. You should have heard how they cursed me and all of us, in the street. Somebody threw a rotten orange at me, and hit my shoulder, but the carabineers kept them in order after that.’

  Orsino said something under his breath, and looked steadily into his brother’s eyes. At last he spoke, and asked one question, quietly, coaxingly, as though only half hoping for an answer:

  ‘Did Tebaldo kill him, or did he not?’

  Ippolito’s eyelids quivered at the suddenness of the question. His soul abhorred a lie, and most of all one to proclaim the innocence of such a man. To answer the truth was to betray the confession and to break his solemn vow before God, as a priest. Silence, perhaps, was equivalent to casting suspicion on the murderer.

  But he kept silent, for he could do nothing else.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  IPPOLITO WAS SILENT, and he turned away from his brother, half fearing lest even his eyes should assent to the accusation against Tebaldo. He went towards the window, through which the afterglow of the sunset was still faintly visible, and then, as though changing his mind, he came back to the table and sat down, keeping his face from the lamp as much as possible. Orsino took another chair.

  ‘It is not right to accuse anyone of such a crime without evidence,’ said Ippolito, slowly.

  Orsino did not answer at once. He took two cigars from his pocket and silently offered one to his brother, and both began to smoke, without speaking. They were so much in sympathy, as a rule, that there would have been nothing surprising in their silence on any ordinary occasion. But the elder man now felt that there was a mystery of which Ippolito was making a secret; he knew his brother’s extraordinary but perfectly quiet tenacity when he chose not to speak of anything, and he turned the whole situation over in his mind. He was in possession of all the details known to the carabineers, and of another piece of information which had not reached them, but which he was keeping to himself until it might be of use.

  For one of his men had seen from a long way off how a man riding bareback had chased a man on a saddled horse up the long straight hill to the cemetery, and he had told Orsino of the fact before the lame boy had arrived, though he admitted that he had not been able to recognise the riders. Orsino himself had found Taddeo’s horse lying dead in the road just beyond the gate of the graveyard, and his own horse had shied at it. He recognised the dead beast, which was well known as one of the best horses in the country, and he had seen in a flash that it was not injured, and had not been shot, whereat he had concluded that it had probably been ridden to death in the race his man had described. Ippolito had told him, after the scuffle on the previous evening, that Concetta had directed the peasants to take Francesco to Taddeo’s house. Distrusting Tebaldo altogether, as Orsino did, it was not extraordinary that he should hit on something very near the truth, by a single guess founded on what he knew. He was in total ignorance of Aliandra’s connexion with the story, and he had no idea why the one brother should have been chasing the other. But he had often heard of Tebaldo’s fits of ungovernable fury. Vittoria herself had told Orsino that, at such times, Tebaldo was more dangerous than a wild beast, and she had also told him that her brothers often quarrelled.

  Orsino guessed that such a quarrel had taken place to-day, somewhere on the road, and that it had ended in Francesco’s killing his horse, reaching the church on foot, and being overtaken by his brother and stabbed a few seconds later, as had really happened.

  Orsino was not very clever in the ordinary sense of the word, but his mind was direct and logical, when he exerted it. He went a step farther in his guessing, and concluded that Ippolito had not seen the murder, nor perhaps Tebaldo himself, but that Tebaldo had seen him. The priest had come down from the organ loft, had found the body lying on the steps, and had moved it, while Tebaldo had conceived the idea of accusing him of the deed. He explained Ippolito’s silence by attributing to him, as a very conscientious man, the most extreme fear of bringing an accusation for which he had no ocular evidence. Though the train of thought is not easily expressed in words, it was a sufficiently reasonable one.

  When had followed it out, he knocked the ashes from his cigar, and looked at his brother.

  ‘I am going to tell you what I think,’ he said, ‘for you are making a mystery of the truth out of some scruple of conscience.’

  Ippolito shaded his eyes with his hand, resting his elbow on the table. He felt his brow moisten suddenly with anxiety, lest Orsino should somehow have guessed the secret, and his fears increased as his brother told him of the race, of the dead horse, and of the conclusions he had drawn.

  In his painful position the young priest might have been forgiven for wishing that, altogether without his agency, Orsino might find out the truth. But he did not. As Orsino had once said of him, he had in him the stuff that sent martyrs to the stake in old days. He honestly hoped, with all his heart, that Orsino might not hit on the true story, and he was relieved when he heard the end of his brother’s deductions. As a man, he was most anxious for his own immediate release, and he was willing that the murderer should be brought to justice. But as a priest, he felt horror at the thought that he, who had received the confession, might in anyway whatever help to bring about such a result.

  At that moment he wished that Orsino would go away, since he had not, at the first attempt, fathomed the secret. He might succeed the second time.

  ‘I partly understand why you are silent,’ said Orsino. ‘It is not good to accuse a man who may be innocent. Neither you nor I should care to do that. But I am not the Attorney-General. You can surely speak freely to me. You know that anything you say is safe with me, and it is not as though you should be suggesting to me a suspicion which I had not already formed by myself. Do you not trust me? It is hardly even a case of trust! What could I say? That you, the accused, have the same impression which I have. But I will not even say that. The point is this: You were on the spot, in the church. Your guess at the truth must be incomparably more valuable than mine. That is what I am trying to make you understand.’

  He gently patted the table with his hand, emphasising the last words, while he leaned forward to see his brother’s face. But the latter turned away and smoked towards the window.

  ‘Is that all true, or not?’ Orsino asked, in a tone of insistence.

  ‘What?’ asked Ippolito, fearing to commit himself.

  ‘That you can trust me not to put you in the position of accusing an innocent man.’

  ‘Yes; of course it is true.’

  Orsino looked at him thoughtfully for a few seconds.

  ‘When you asked me what was true, just now, before you answered me, you asked the question because you were afraid that your answer might include my guess as to what happened. I suppose my guess was not altogether right, since you were afraid of assenting to it. I wish you would look at me, Ippolito! What is all this? Is there to be no more confidence between us, because a mere look might mean that you suspect Tebaldo Pagliuca?’

  Ippolito faced him, and smiled affectionately.

  ‘If you, or our father, or any man like us, were in my position, you would act exactly as I am acting,’ he said slowly.

  ‘You are perfectly innocent, and yet you act like a man who is afraid of incriminating himself?’ said Orsino, growing impatient at last.

  ‘I am perfectly innocent, at all events,’ answered Ippolito, with something like a laugh.

  ‘I am glad that you are so light-hearted about it all. I am not. If we cannot catch the man who really killed Francesco before to-morrow morning, you will be taken down to Messina and imprisoned until we can bail you out, if bail is accepted at all, which I doubt. You run a good chance of being tried for murder. Do you realise that?’

  ‘I cannot help it, if it comes to that,’ said Ippolito, quietly puffing at his cigar.

  ‘You can
at all events say something to help me in proving your innocence—’

  ‘I am sorry to say that I cannot.’

  Orsino made an impatient movement, uncrossing and recrossing one knee over the other.

  ‘You could if you chose,’ he said. ‘But there is no more terrible obstacle to common sense than a morbidly scrupulous conscience. What do you suppose our people will think, in Rome?’

  ‘They will not think me guilty, at all events,’ answered the priest. His manner changed. ‘I tell you frankly, Orsino,’ he said, his face growing square, as it sometimes did, ‘if I knew that I was to be sent to penal servitude for this, I would not say one word more than I have said already. It is quite useless to question me. Do your best to save me, — I know you will, — but do not count on me for one word more. Consider me to be a lay figure, deaf and dumb, if you please, mad, if you choose, an idiot, if it serves to save me, but do not expect me to say anything. I will not.’

  Orsino knew his brother well, and knew the manner and the tone. There was unchangeable resolution in every distinct syllable and in every quiet intonation. His own irritation disappeared, for he realised that Ippolito must have some great and honourable reason for keeping silence.

  ‘So long as you are here, unless we find the murderer to-night, you will be shut up in this room,’ said Orsino, after a pause. ‘No preliminary examination can take place here, where there is not even an office of the Prefecture. They would naturally take you to Randazzo, but Messina would be better. We should have more chance of getting you out on bail at once if we went to headquarters.’

  ‘Randazzo is a cooler place,’ observed Ippolito thoughtfully.

  ‘What in the world has that to do with it?’ asked Orsino, in surprise.

  ‘Only that if I am to be kept in prison all summer, I should prefer a cool climate.’

  ‘Really—’ Orsino almost laughed at his calmness. ‘That is absurd,’ he said. ‘We shall certainly have the power to get you out provisionally.’

  ‘I hope so. Let them take me to Messina, if you think it best.’

  ‘I will make the corporal telegraph for authority at once. It would be well if we could get off before morning and avoid the rabble in the street. Have you had supper?’

  ‘No. They brought me some wine. There it is — but I do not want anything. Shall you telegraph to our people? It would be better. They might see it in the papers.’

  ‘Of course. I shall send them a full account, and shall send the same telegram to the Minister of Justice. I know him very well, and so does our father.’

  ‘Send me up some clothes and my dressing things by a trooper, will you?’ said Ippolito.

  They made a few more arrangements, but Orsino abstained from asking any more questions, and presently he left his brother alone, and after speaking with the corporal he mounted his horse and rode slowly out of the court into the street, towards the telegraph office. Half an hour later he was on his way down to Camaldoli. The people of the village had mostly gone into their houses, and the streets were almost deserted, for the short twilight was over, and it was already night.

  He tried to see ahead of him in the gloom as he came near the cemetery, for he expected to find the grocer’s horse still lying in the road. But it had been taken away already.

  He had hesitated, at first, as to whether he should seek out Tebaldo and try to force the truth from him by sheer violence, but he had given up the idea at once as being absurd. If he failed, as he might fail, — for Tebaldo was desperately brave, — he should simply be creating fresh evidence of the hatred which existed between the two families, not to mention the fact that any such encounter might easily end in more bloodshed. Even to his unimaginative mind there seemed to be a strange fatality in the whole story. He had killed one brother in self-defence, or in what the law considered to be that, and now Ippolito was accused of murdering another of the brothers. It was wiser to leave the third alone, and to trust to the law to prove Ippolito’s innocence. Orsino was not a man who instinctively loved violence and fighting, as some men do. He felt that if San Giacinto had been present he would somehow have managed to set Ippolito free and get Tebaldo imprisoned in his place, by sheer strength and the power of terror which he exerted over so many people, but which, to do him justice, he did not abuse. The giant was an extraordinary man, mentally and physically, and always put action before logic, and logic before sentiment. Orsino, on the contrary, generally wished to think out every matter to the end before acting, though he was neither slow nor timid when he had ultimately made up his mind.

  So far as he could do so, he had decided and acted; and his thoughts reverted to the situation itself, and most directly, now, to his love for Vittoria. He had been looking forward to seeing her before long, for he had begun to understand that his presence in Camaldoli was not often necessary for many days at a time; and of late, during his lonely rides, he had given himself up to planning some means of meeting her during his next visit to Rome.

  She was the principal and central being in his whole daily life. The separation was not one of distance only, for there were other and almost insuperable obstacles to his marriage. After Ferdinando’s death, after Maria Carolina d’Oriani’s terrible imprecations, after his own father’s absolute refusal to listen to the proposal, it seemed almost impossible that he should ever really marry Vittoria. And now, as though to crush the last possibility out of existence, this new and terrible disaster had fallen like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.

  Orsino was not very easily roused, but persistent opposition had the effect of slowly increasing the tension of his nature. Events had this effect upon him in a cumulative way. And his moral force slowly rose, as water in a huge embanked reservoir, into which, being empty, the little stream trickles idly, as though it had no force at all; but ever quietly flowing in from the source, it covers the bottom little by little, and still flows in, day by day, week by week; and the water rises slowly and very surely, gathering its terrible, incompressible weight into itself from the streamlet, till the body of it is deep and broad, and its weight is millions of tons, calm and still and ever rising; and then, one day, the freshet comes hissing down the bed of the stream, and the last rise in the reservoir is sudden and awful. The huge embankment quivers and rocks, and bursts at last; and the pent-up strength of the water is let loose in one moment, and sweeps howling and roaring down the valley, carrying death in its bosom and leaving utter desolation behind.

  As he rode down through the silent night, the man wondered when he thought of the emptiness in which his life had once moved, of how little he had cared for anything, of the imperturbable indifference with which he had thought of all the world. For he was beginning to feel his strength in him, matched against the resistance of events.

  A girl had wrought the change; and even in his great perplexity and trouble, his face softened in the dark as he thought of her. Yet he knew, as grown men do, that only half the secret was in her, and that the other half was in himself. For the strength of love is that it is the source of all existing life, and is a law which men and women obey, as atoms are subject to gravitation. That is the strength of it. But the beauty of love, and the happiness, and the nobility, are of a higher and finer essence, not suddenly to be seen, grasped, and taken, but distilled in life’s alembic of that which was before life, and shall be afterwards, for ever.

  Orsino was not imaginative, and his nature was not of that kind which is commonly called spiritual, which is given to contemplation, and delights in the beautiful traceries of the soul’s guesswork. He vaguely understood that there was more between his father and mother and in their happiness than he would have called love, though there was nothing for which he might not hope. At present his love was that great natural law, from which, if one comes within the sphere of its attraction, there is no more escape than there is from hunger and thirst. He dignified it in his own person, by his inheritance of high manliness and honour. It did not dignify him. Vittoria lent it, by her be
ing, the purity and loveliness of something half divine while wholly human, but it gave her nothing in return. Love can be coarse, brutal, violent, and yet still be love. According to the being it moves, we say that it is ennobled or debased.

  Orsino saw the monster of impossibility rising between him and Vittoria, and though he said nothing to himself and formed no resolutions, he felt something within him rising to meet the impossible, and put it down. And beyond the obstacles he saw Vittoria’s face clearly, with the light on it, watching him, and her eyes expecting him, and her lips moving to form words that should bid him come.

  He rode slowly on through the blackness, for the road descended rapidly, and it was not safe to urge his horse. A deep, resentful melancholy settled upon him in the damp night air. There was nothing hopeless in it, for it was really the sensation of a new strength; and as the Greeks knew long ago, all great strength is grave and melancholic as Melancholia herself.

  He thought of his brother sitting alone in the room where he was confined. He thought of Francesco’s body lying in the little church, waiting to be buried, as Ferdinando’s had lain, barely a month ago. He thought of the widowed mother, twice bereaved, half crazed with suffering already, destined to waken on the morrow to meet another death-wound. He thought of Vittoria, alone with that mother, cut off from himself as he was cut off from her, mourning with horror, if not with grief, for the brother who had been nothing to her while he lived. Then he was glad that he had not sought out Tebaldo and tried to force the truth from him. Things were bad enough, without more violence to make them worse.

  But most of all he wondered at Ippolito’s silence, and afterwards when he had tasted his lonely supper he sat long in his place, staring at the empty chair opposite, and trying to force his intelligence to penetrate the mystery by sheer determination.