Ercole’s confidence in the good intentions of his fellow-men was not great; he was quite lacking in the sort of charity which believeth all things, and had a large capacity for suspicion of everybody and everything; he held all men to be liars and most women to be something worse.
“Men are at least Christians,” he would say to Nino, “but a female is always a female.”
If he took a liking for any one, as for Marcello, he excused himself for the weakness on the ground that he was only human after all, and in his heart he respected his dog for snarling at everybody without discrimination. There was no doubt, however, that he felt a sort of attachment for the boy, and he admitted the failing while he deplored it. Besides, he detested Corbario, and had felt that his own common sense was insulted by the fact that Folco seemed devoted to Marcello. The suspicion that Folco had got rid of his stepson in order to get his fortune was therefore positively delightful, accompanied as it was by the conviction that he should one day prove his enemy a murderer. Perhaps if he could have known what Folco Corbario was suffering, he might have been almost satisfied, but he had no means of guessing that. In his opinion the man knew what had become of Marcello, and could be made to tell if proper means were used. At night Ercole put himself to sleep by devising the most horrible tortures for his master, such as no fortitude could resist, and by trying to guess what the wretched man would say when his agony forced him to confess the truth.
He was almost sure by this time that Marcello was dead, though how Folco could have killed him, carried off his body to a great distance and buried him, without ever absenting himself from the cottage, was more than Ercole could imagine. He paid Corbario’s skill the compliment of believing that he had not employed any accomplice, but had done the deed alone.
How? That was the question. Ercole knew his dog well enough, and was perfectly sure that if the body had been concealed anywhere within a mile of the cottage Nino would have found it out, for the dog and his master had quartered every foot of the ground within three days after Marcello had been lost. It was utterly, entirely impossible that Folco, without help, could have dragged the dead boy farther. When he had gone on his pretended search he had not been alone; one of the men had ridden with him, and had never lost sight of him, as Ercole easily ascertained without seeming to ask questions. Ercole had obtained a pretty fair knowledge of Corbario’s movements on that day, and it appeared that he had not been absent from the cottage more than half an hour at any time before he went to look for Marcello.
“If Corbario himself had disappeared in that way,” said Ercole to himself and Nino, “it would be easy to understand. We should know that the devil had carried him off.”
But no such supernatural intervention of the infernal powers could be supposed in Marcello’s case, and Ercole racked his brains to no purpose, and pondered mad schemes for carrying Corbario off out of Rome to a quiet place where he would extract the truth from him, and he growled at the impossibility of such a thing, and fell to guessing again.
In the magnificent library of the villa on the Janiculum, Folco was guessing, too, and with no better result. But because he could not guess right, and could get no news of Marcello, his eyes were growing hollow and his cheeks wan.
The lawyers came and talked about the will, and explained to him that all the great property was his, unless Marcello came back, and that in any case he was to administer it. They said that if no news of the boy were obtained within a limited time, the law must take it for granted that he had perished in some unaccountable way. Folco shook his head.
“He must be found,” he said. “I have good nerves, but if I do not find out what has become of him I shall go mad.”
The lawyers spoke of courage and patience, but a sickly smile twisted Folco’s lips.
“Put yourself in my place, if you can,” he answered.
The lawyers, who knew the value of the property to a farthing, wished they could, though if they had known also what was passing in his mind they might have hesitated to exchange their lot for his.
“He was like your own son,” they said sympathetically. “A wife and a son gone on the same day! It is a tragedy. It is more than a man can bear.”
“It is indeed!” answered Corbario in a low voice and looking away.
Almost the same phrases were exchanged each time that the two men came to the villa about the business, and when they left they never failed to look at each other gravely and to remark that Folco was a person of the deepest feeling, to whom such an awful trial was almost worse than death; and the elder lawyer, who was of a religious turn of mind, said that if such a calamity befell him he would retire from the world, but the younger answered that, for his part, he would travel and see the world and try to divert his thoughts. In their different ways they were hard-headed, experienced men; yet neither of them suspected for a moment that there was anything wrong. Both were honestly convinced that Folco had been a model husband to his dead wife, and a model father to her lost son. What they could not understand was that he should not find consolation in possessing their millions, and they could only account for the fact by calling him a person of the deepest feeling — a feeling, indeed, quite past their comprehension.
Even the Contessa dell’ Armi was impressed by the unmistakable signs of suffering in his face. She went twice to see him within three weeks after her friend’s death, and she came away convinced that she had misjudged him. Aurora did not go with her, and Corbario barely asked after her. He led Maddalena to his dead wife’s room and begged her to take some object that had belonged to the Signora, in memory of their long friendship. He pressed her to accept a necklace, or a bracelet, or some other valuable ornament, but Maddalena would only take a simple little gold chain which she herself had given long ago.
Her own sorrow for her friend was profound but undemonstrative, as her nature had grown to be. Aurora saw it, and never referred to it, speaking only now and then of Marcello, to ask if there were any news of him.
“He is not dead,” the girl said one day. “I know he will come back. He went away because I called him a baby.”
Her mother smiled sadly and shook her head.
“Did you love him, dear?” she asked softly.
“We were children then,” Aurora answered. “How do I know? I shall know when he comes back.”
It was true that the girl had changed within a few weeks, and her mother saw it. Her smile was not the same, and her eyes were deeper. She had begun to gather her hair in a knot, closer to her head, and that altered her expression a little and made her look much older; but there was more than that, there was something very hard to describe, something one might call conviction — the conviction that the world is real, which comes upon girlhood as suddenly as waking on sleep, or sleep on waking. She had crossed the narrow borderland between play and earnest, and she had crossed it very soon.
“He will come back,” she said. “He went away on that little ship that was tossing in the storm. I know it, though I cannot tell how he got out to it through the breaking waves.”
“That is perfectly impossible, child,” said Maddalena with certainty.
“Never mind. If we knew what ship that was, and where she is now, we could find Marcello. I am as sure of it as I am sure of seeing you at this moment. You know you often say that my presentiments come true. As soon as we knew he was gone I thought of the little ship.”
It was natural, perhaps. The picture of the small brigantine, fighting for existence, had graved itself in her memory. With its crew so near death, it had been the only thing within sight that suggested human life after Marcello was gone. The utter impossibility of a man’s swimming out through the raging sea that broke upon the bar was nothing compared with Aurora’s inward conviction that the little vessel had borne away the secret of his disappearance. And she had not been wrecked: Aurora knew that, for a wreck anywhere on the Roman shore would have been spoken of at once. They are unfortunately common enough, and since her childhood A
urora had more than once seen a schooner’s masts sticking up out of the treacherous water a cable’s length from the shore. The brigantine had got away, for the gale had moderated very suddenly, as spring gales do in the Mediterranean, just when the captain was making up his mind to let go both anchors and make a desperate attempt to save his vessel by riding out the storm — a forlorn hope with such ground tackle as he had in his chain lockers. And then he had stood out, and had sailed away, one danger more behind him in his hard life, and one less ahead. He had sailed away — whither? No one could tell. Those little vessels, built in the south of Italy, often enough take salt to South America, and are sold there, cargo and all; and some of the crew stay there, and some get other ships, but almost all are dispersed. The keeper of the San Lorenzo tower, who had been a deep-water man, had told Aurora about it. He himself had once gone out in a Sicilian brigantine from Trapani, and had stayed away three years, knocking about the world in all sorts of craft.
Yet this one might have been on a coastwise trip to Genoa and Marseilles. That was quite possible. If one could only find out her name. And yet, if she had put into a near port Marcello would have come back; for Aurora was quite sure that he had got on board her somehow. It was all a mystery, all but the certainty she felt that he was still alive, and which nothing could shake, even when every one else had given him up. Aurora begged her mother to speak to Corbario about it. With his experience and knowledge of things he would know what to do; he could find some way of tracing the vessel, wherever she might be.
The Contessa was convinced that the girl’s theory was utterly untenable, and it was only to please her that she promised to speak of it if she saw Corbario again. Soon afterward she decided to leave Rome for the summer, and before going away she went once more to the villa. It was now late in June, and she found Folco in the garden late in the afternoon.
He looked ill and tired, but she thought him a little less thin than when she had seen him last. He said that he, too, meant to leave Rome within a few days, that he intended to go northward first to see an old friend of his who had recently returned from South America, and that he should afterwards go down to Calabria, to San Domenico, and spend the autumn there. He had no news of Marcello. He looked thoughtfully down at his hands as he said this in a tone of profound sorrow.
“Aurora has a fixed idea,” said Maddalena. “While she was talking with Marcello at the gap in the bank there was a small ship tossing about not far from the shore.”
“Well?” asked Corbario. “What of it?”
As he looked up from the contemplation of his hands Maddalena was struck by his extreme pallor and the terrible hollowness of his eyes.
“How ill you look!” she exclaimed, almost involuntarily. “The sooner you go away the better.”
“What did Aurora say about the brigantine?” he asked earnestly, by way of answer.
Maddalena knew too little about the sea to understand that he must have noticed the vessel’s rig to name it correctly, as he did, and without hesitation.
“She is convinced that Marcello got on board of her,” she answered.
Corbario’s face relaxed a little, and he laughed harshly.
“That is utterly absurd!” he answered. “No swimmer that ever lived could have got to her, nor any boat either! There was a terrific surf on the bar.”
“Of course not,” assented Maddalena. “But you saw the ship, too?”
“Yes. Aurora was looking at her when I reached the gap. That is why I noticed the vessel,” Corbario added, as if by an afterthought. “She was a Sicilian brigantine, and was carrying hardly any sail. If the gale had lasted she would probably have been driven ashore. Her only chance would have been to drop anchor.”
“You know all about ships and the sea, don’t you?” asked Maddalena, with a very little curiosity, but without any particular intention.
“Oh, no!” cried Corbario, as if he were protesting against something. “I have made several long voyages, and I have a knack of remembering the names of things, nothing more.”
“I did not mean to suggest that you had been a sailor,” Maddalena answered.
“What an idea! I, a sailor!”
He seemed vaguely amused at the idea. The Contessa took leave of him, after giving him her address in the north of Italy, and begging him to write if he found any clue to Marcello’s disappearance. He promised this, and they parted, not expecting to meet again until the autumn.
In a few days they had left Rome for different destinations. The little apartment near the Forum of Trajan where the Contessa and her daughter lived was shut up, and at the great villa on the Janiculum the solemn porter put off his mourning livery and dressed himself in brown linen, and smoked endless pipes within the closed gates when it was not too hot to be out of doors. The horses were turned out to grass, and the coachman and grooms departed to the country. The servants opened the windows in the early morning, shut them at ten o’clock against the heat, and dozed the rest of the time, or went down into the city to gossip with their friends in the afternoon. It was high summer, and Rome went to sleep.
CHAPTER VI
“WHAT DO WE eat to-day?” asked Paoluccio, the innkeeper on the Frascati road, as he came in from the glare and the dust and sat down in his own black kitchen.
“Beans and oil,” answered his wife.
“An apoplexy take you!” observed the man, by way of mild comment.
“It is Friday,” said the woman, unmoved, though she was of a distinctly apoplectic habit.
The kitchen was also the eating-room where meals were served to the wine-carters on their way to Rome and back. The beams and walls were black with the smoke of thirty years, for no whitewash had come near them since the innkeeper had married Nanna. It was a rich, crusty black, lightened here and there to chocolate brown, and shaded off again to the tint of strong coffee. High overhead three hams and half a dozen huge sausages hung slowly curing in the acrid wood smoke. There was an open hearth, waist high, for roasting, and having three square holes sunk in it for cooking with charcoal. An enormous bunch of green ferns had been hung by a long string from the highest beam to attract the flies, which swarmed on it like bees on a branch. The floor was of beaten cement, well swept and watered. Along three of the walls there were heavy tables of rough-hewn oak, with benches, polished by long and constant use. A trap-door covered the steps that led down to the deep cellar, which was nothing but a branch of those unexplored catacombs that undermine the Campagna in all directions. The place was dim, smoky, and old, but it was not really dirty, for in his primitive way the Roman wine-carter is fastidious. It is not long since he used to bring his own solid silver spoon and fork with him, and he will generally rinse a glass out two or three times before he will drink out of it.
The kitchen of the inn was cool compared with the road outside, and though it smelt chiefly of the stale smoke of green wood, this was pervaded and tempered by odours of fern, fresh cabbages, goats’-milk cheese, and sour red wine. The brown earthen pot simmered over one of the holes in the hearth, emitting little clouds of steam; but boiling beans have no particular smell, as everybody knows.
Paoluccio had pushed his weather-beaten soft hat back on his head, and sat drumming on the oak table with his knotty fingers. He was a strong man, thickset and healthy, with grizzled hair and an intensely black beard. His wife was fat, and purple about the jaws and under the ears. She stood with her back to the hearth, looking at him, with a wooden spoon in her hand.
“Beans,” she said slowly, and she looked up at the rafters and down again at her husband.
“You have told me so,” he growled, “and may the devil fly away with you!”
“Beans are not good for people who have the fever,” observed Nanna.
“Beans are rather heavy food,” assented the innkeeper, apparently understanding. “Bread and water are better. Pour a little oil on the bread.”
“A man who has the fever may die of eating beans,” said Nanna thoughtfully.
“This is also to be considered.”
“It is true.” Paoluccio looked at his wife in silence for a moment. “But a person who is dead must be buried,” he continued, as if he had discovered something. “When a person is dead, he is dead, whether he dies of eating beans or—”
He broke off significantly, and his right hand, as it lay before him, straightened itself and made a very slight vibrating motion, with the fingers all close together. It is the gesture that means the knife among the southern people. Nanna instantly looked round, to be sure that no one else was in the room.
“When you have given that medicine, you cannot send for the doctor,” she observed, lowering her voice. “But if he eats, and dies, what can any one say? We have fed him for charity; it is Friday and we have given him beans. What can we know? Are not beans good food? We have nothing else, and it is for charity, and we give what we have. I don’t think they could expect us to give him chickens and French wine, could they?”
Paoluccio growled approval.
“It is forty-seven days,” continued Nanna. “You can make the account. Chickens and milk and fresh meat for forty-seven days! Even the bread comes to something in that time, at least two soldi a day — two forties eighty, two sevens fourteen, ninety-four — nearly five francs. Who will give us the five francs? Are we princes?”
“There is the cow,” observed Paoluccio with a grin.
“Imbecile,” retorted his wife. “It has been a good year; we bought the wine cheap, we sell it dear, without counting what we get for nothing from the carters; we buy a cow with our earnings, and where is the miracle?”
The innkeeper looked towards the door and the small window suspiciously before he answered in a low voice.
“If I had not been sure that he would die, I would not have sold the watch and chain,” he said. “In the house of my father we have always been honest people.”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1080
