Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  ‘You mean that you don’t quite trust him,’ said Maria, ‘and you wish me to form a judgment of him.’

  ‘I want your opinion,’ answered Montalto, who was at odds with his over-sensitive conscience. ‘I should be very unjust to Schmidt if I were to say that he may not be quite honest. It would be very wrong to assume such a thing of any one, would it not?’

  ‘If you had no grounds for suspicion, yes. But even an instinctive distrust of a man of business is enough reason for not giving him the entire control of a large estate.’

  ‘Do you really think so, my dear? You see, the men of his family have been our stewards for some little time.’

  ‘He told me they had served you two hundred years.’

  ‘Yes, yes — for some time, as you say, and I have always understood that they were honest people.’

  He was so excessively scrupulous that Maria guessed he must have some serious ground for his slight suspicion of the man he was trusting. The question began to interest her, if only as a study of her husband’s character.

  ‘Really, Diego,’ she said, ‘if you wish me to form any reasonable judgment you must tell me something more than this. What has the man done to make you doubt him?’

  Montalto looked at his wife thoughtfully before he answered.

  ‘I will tell you, but you must not repeat the story to any one, please.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘He once got into some scrape, four or five years ago, and he took a small sum of money to help himself out of trouble.’

  ‘Oh!’ For the second time Maria was surprised. ‘But that is called — —’

  ‘He confessed it to me,’ Montalto hastened to say before Maria could finish her sentence. ‘He threw himself upon my mercy by a voluntary confession, promising to make up the sum as soon as he could. I thought the matter over for two days and then I forgave him.’

  ‘That was like you,’ Maria said gently.

  Had he not forgiven her a far greater debt?

  ‘It was only just,’ Montalto answered. ‘I meant never to think of the matter again unless he repeated the offence.’

  ‘Has he done anything of the kind since then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you think he might.’

  ‘N — no. But he could if he wished to, and I don’t think I should ever know it!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My dear, he paid back the money very soon; so soon that I was surprised. Then I sent him to Spain on an errand, and while he was away I got a confidential accountant here and we examined his books very carefully.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It was impossible to find any trace of what he had done. Unless a man has actually taken money dishonestly, he does not confess and pay it back. But there is something very strange about the matter if you cannot find some proof of his own confession in his own accounts.’

  ‘Was it much?’ asked Maria.

  ‘Only five thousand francs. But in that year the books showed no change in the rent-roll of the estate — he might have made out that the rents had fallen, so as to pocket the difference, you understand. On the contrary, it was a good year, and the tenants paid punctually; and there were the banker’s receipts for the corresponding deposits, exact to a fraction. Five thousand is not a large sum, but it is a very noticeable one in a matter of business.’

  ‘I should think so!’ assented Maria, thinking of the limited income on which she had lived for years, and in which a deficit of five thousand francs would have been a serious matter.

  ‘It is very strange that a man whose business it is to detect frauds in accounts should not be able to find a trace of one that has been confessed by its author, is it not?’

  ‘Very!’

  ‘That is my reason for saying that Schmidt may be too intelligent. I hope I am not doing him an injustice in saying so. That is the reason why I want your opinion about him. I really could not ask him how he did it, after forgiving him, and it would have been still more unjust to reveal his secret by asking my banker to compare the receipts purporting to come from him with his own books. I had forgiven him freely; I could not accuse him to another man of having done what he had voluntarily confessed. It would not have been honourable, for my banker would have known at once that I distrusted my steward and suspected him of forging banker’s receipts.’

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  ‘Precisely. But the most honourable man in the world may confide matters to his wife which it would be base in him to lay before any one else.’

  ‘Except a confessor,’ Maria said; but she was not thinking of Schmidt.

  ‘My confessor was not a man of any business capacity,’ answered Montalto without a smile. ‘Nor is my friend Ippolito Saracinesca either; and I would certainly not consult any one else except my wife.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He had taken a long time to tell his story about the poor steward, hampered as he was at every step by a conscientious fear of injuring the man. What Maria saw was that he had been unboundedly generous to Schmidt, as he had been to her in a matter much nearer to life and death; and by a sort of unconscious analogical reasoning she felt, rather than concluded, that the steward must be as grateful as she was, and as resolved to be faithful at any cost. Moreover, he had made a favourable impression on her from the first; and though she was a little shocked at what she now learned about him, her ultimate verdict as to his present honesty was a foregone judgment.

  After this long talk with Montalto she saw Schmidt often. He showed her the old plans, the position of the former garden, and the fragments of the well and the cloistered walk, and after much consultation with her husband and several evenings spent in the study of Viollet-le-Duc, they determined that the old construction should be restored as far as possible, a conclusion which has no bearing upon this story beyond the fact that it was the means of bringing Maria and the steward together almost daily, and that the execution of the work and his careful economy in the whole affair raised him in the Countess’s estimation; or rather, they confirmed that preconceived good opinion of him which she had formed in the beginning, and on which such grave matters afterwards turned.

  Before they left Montalto her husband inquired as to the result of her observation of the man.

  ‘I cannot help believing that he is now perfectly honest and devoted to your interests,’ she said. ‘That is the impression he makes on me, and I do not think it will change.’

  ‘Then I shall take him to Rome,’ Montalto answered without hesitation. ‘Our property there is in a disgraceful state and is not yielding much more than the half of what it should. Schmidt is the only man I have under my hand who can set matters right, and he shall go to work at once.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ Maria said quietly. ‘I thought so last spring when I first saw him.’

  The life at Montalto went on a little longer after that, and the work on the garden made it a little less monotonous. Not that Maria disliked that side of it. Since she was to live her married life again, it was a little easier to live it in that deep retirement, where she could so often be left to herself for half the day while Montalto and Leone were out shooting, or riding, or visiting some distant part of the estate. To be alone as much as possible was her chief aim in the arrangement of her day. There had been a time when she had been happy to have Leone always by her side; but now he talked to her so incessantly of her husband and of what they had done and were going to do together, that she often wished he would be silent or go away.

  The time had come when the boy began to turn to the man for what he wanted, even more readily than to his mother; and there is nothing quite like a mother’s loneliness of heart when she sees that she can no longer compete with the manly influence in amusing and interesting her only boy. How can pretty stories and sugar-plums stand against horse, and dog, and gun, and a day’s sport? And what is motherly love to a healthy boy, compared with the qualities of a father who can give him such things and sha
re in his enjoyment of them? Also, the smaller the boy the greater his delight in any grown-up sport, and Leone had begun to ride and shoot at an age when most Roman boys are scarcely out of the nursery. It is true that he looked two or three years older than his age, and had fought with boys bigger than himself, like Mario Campodonico, and had ‘hammered’ them, as he called it.

  This was the situation between Montalto, his wife and the boy, when they all came back to Rome towards the end of October; and Orlando Schmidt went before them to see that everything was ready and to take the place of the old steward, who had at last died, leaving the estate in a confusion worthy of his well-meaning stupidity. Schmidt was to set matters right, and find a proper man to manage the Roman lands under his general direction, while he himself administered the Montalto estate as heretofore. He had, in fact, been promoted to be the agent for all the property owned by the Count in Italy.

  In October, too, six months after the Dowager Countess’s death, Maria and her husband put on half mourning, according to the strict rule that prevails in Rome in those matters; and though they would not go to balls and big dinners yet, they were permitted to see something of their friends — and even of their acquaintances.

  That was really the end of the quiet life they had led together for five months. Maria was to go back, take her place in society as a Roman lady, and be a great personage once more in that old-fashioned, ceremonious life which has survived in scarcely any other city in the world, and is fast disappearing in Rome itself.

  So far had Maria dragged herself on the thorny path of her expiation without much help from without, and with little hope within.

  CHAPTER XIV

  MONSIEUR JULES DE Maurienne gambled, and, like most rich men who do, he generally won more than he lost. He did not gamble for the sake of winning money, however, for he was a gentleman and avarice was not among his faults, though he was not extravagant in his way of living, and knew very nearly to a penny what he spent from month to month. What he enjoyed was the excitement of fearing that he was going to lose, as he occasionally did, though with no serious damage to his fortune. Some people do daring things when there is a good reason for doing them, and they are like cats at bay; others are incapable of physical fear and never believe in danger, and they are likely healthy puppies; but one meets men now and then who fully realise every risk, and take a real pleasure in trying how far they can go without breaking their necks. None of the lower animals will do this; it is a characteristic of the born gambler.

  De Maurienne did not play much in drawing-rooms or at the clubs. The stakes were rarely high enough to give him an emotion, and the sensation of winning much from friends who could not always afford to lose made him uncomfortable. He therefore frequented one of those quiet little establishments in the neighbourhood of the Piazza di Spagna where baccara, roulette, and rouge et noir go on from three in the afternoon till three in the morning, or later. He was far too refined in his taste for pleasure to waste a whole evening at such a place, and he frequented it at odd moments late in the afternoon. A man is rarely missed at that hour, and if he occasionally finds an acquaintance in a gambling den, the encounter is not mentioned afterwards, any more than those who meet there would think of calling each other by their names. For the society in the haunts of vice is extremely mixed, to say the least of it, though the owners of the establishments take infinite trouble to make it select.

  Teresa Crescenzi had not succeeded in marrying de Maurienne during the summer, though they had gone together all the way from Rome to Paris in his big motor car, and nobody happened to remember who had made up the party. On some points the Italians and the French never seem to understand each other. Monsieur de Maurienne appeared to think it quite unnecessary to marry Donna Teresa Crescenzi, whereas she was equally convinced that marriage was indispensable. With the arguments and stratagems used on each side this story is not concerned; it is a cowardly thing to spy upon a lady’s secret doings, and the novelist should sometimes imitate Falstaff in judging discretion to be the better part of valour. He may, however, remind his forgetful readers that when Teresa met Maria Montalto in a quiet street and said that she had been to confession, she was wilfully misstating a fact.

  It came to pass, towards Christmas, that she noticed how often her friend disappeared late in the afternoon. It is easier and more amusing to make a long story short than to make a short story long. Here, therefore, are the facts in the case. She expected to meet de Maurienne somewhere at tea, but he did not come; the next time she saw him she asked where he had been, and he named the house of another friend. Tactful inquiry soon ascertained that he had not been there either. The same thing happened three times within ten days, and Teresa made up her mind that there was another woman in the case. Being anxious not to lose time, which, at her age, still had some value, and having no scruples of any sort, she employed a private detective, who ran the truant de Maurienne to earth on the third day at the door of a gambling den in Via Belsiana. It is odd that all detectives should know just where such wicked places are, whereas the police can hardly ever find them. Why do the police not employ the detectives, as other people do? But these things are a mystery.

  Teresa was so much relieved that she gave her informant a handsome present; for, like many people who have nothing, she often gave lavishly; and having noted the address of the gambling establishment and the hour at which de Maurienne had twice been seen entering it, she completed the detective’s work by watching the door herself. With a veil and a quiet-looking frock she could walk in the almost deserted street without attracting attention, and her bearing was not calculated to invite enterprise on the part of any stray dandy who might pass that way. Indeed, only one man made the mistake of speaking to her.

  She only wanted to be sure that de Maurienne really went to that house on the days when he could not be found anywhere else; when she was certain of this her jealousy sank peacefully to rest. She knew that he would never ruin himself. As for the likelihood of being recognised by him, she was indifferent to that. She would have told him that she had been to confession, and would have asked him to find her a cab.

  But in the course of several half-hours spent in this way in Via Belsiana, about dusk, she saw a surprising number of men enter the modest door, and now and then she recognised an acquaintance. She also saw a few come out, who must have gone there early in the afternoon. It was one of these who made the mistake of speaking to her as he met her, half a dozen steps from the threshold. She held her head in the air and quickened her pace, and he did not try to follow her; but she had seen his face clearly, and remembered it afterwards, and thought he must have been a foreigner, for he was fair, with a fresh complexion, and wore grey clothes that had not an Italian look.

  She made her annual round of visits before Christmas, as Romans generally do, and, like a sensible woman, she did not merely leave cards everywhere without so much as asking whether people were in; on the contrary, she was conscientious, and tried to find them at home.

  It was quite natural that she should call on the Countess of Montalto, but when she did, she was told that Maria was out. This might happen to anybody, of course, so she wrote a line on her card to say that she would come again very soon, and drove away. Two days later she asked for Maria again. Her Excellency was out. This also might happen, with no intention. Three days after that she stopped a third time at the entrance of the palace. The tall porter lifted his black cocked hat with imperturbable serenity and respect. Her Excellency was not at home.

  Then Teresa began to suspect something, and took a card with the intention of writing a few words to ask when Maria would see her; and while she was hesitating about the phrase, which the porter would certainly read before sending it upstairs, she sat in her little hired phaeton and unconsciously looked in under the great archway, past the porter, who was waiting at her elbow. Just at that moment she saw a man coming towards her from within, a fair man with a fresh complexion, dressed in grey. He glanced at her
and lifted his hat a little, and the porter moved to let him pass, because the carriage was very near the pillars that stood on each side of the entrance. Teresa was not above asking questions of a servant when she was curious.

  ‘Who was that?’ she inquired, looking down and beginning to write on her card while she spoke. ‘I know his face, but I cannot remember his name.’

  ‘He is the steward of Montalto, Excellency, Signor Schmidt.’

  ‘Of course!’ exclaimed Teresa as if she now remembered perfectly.

  She finished writing, gave the porter the card, and drove away, meditating on the fact that the steward of Montalto frequented a gambling den in Via Belsiana and spoke to ladies in the street. It also annoyed her to think that Monsieur de Maurienne had doubtless often played at the same table with such people, and had possibly won money from Signor Schmidt. Teresa was more sensitive on some points than on others.

  Maria did not answer her written message. On the second day Teresa received a note in a large, stiff handwriting, unfamiliar to her.

  Montalto had written himself, in very cold and formal terms, to request her not to put herself to the inconvenience of asking for the Countess again.

  Nothing could have been plainer, and Teresa flushed angrily.

  ‘That is what one gets for defending one’s friends!’ she cried, in a rage.

  But she remembered quite well that in her anxiety to defend Maria she had said a number of extremely disagreeable things about Montalto’s mother, which were also quite untrue. Some careful relation had doubtless repeated her observations to him, and now he refused to let her enter his house. She wondered rather flippantly what would happen if everything she had said in her life were repeated to the wrong people, and the idea was so amusing that she laughed at it. But she bore Montalto a lasting grudge from that day, and it pleased her to reflect that his steward spent spare hours in a gambling den and would probably rob him in the end. She would take great care to keep the secret, lest some one should warn him in time, but she would also do her best to meet Maria in some friend’s house, and would tell her what she thought of her behaviour. She felt the humiliation of having had her name sent down to the porter’s lodge as that of a person for whom the Countess was never at home. Such a thing had never happened to her before.