Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  ‘Mad?’ Casalmaggiore laughed. ‘You don’t know her! Don’t you see that it is all a trick to make de Maurienne compromise her by fighting a duel for her, and that he will be forced to marry her afterwards, for decency’s sake?’

  Castiglione looked at his colonel with sincere admiration, for such tortuous reasoning could never have taken shape in his own rather simple brain, though he now saw that no other explanation of Teresa’s conduct was possible. The Duca smiled and pushed his delicate grey moustaches from his lips with the dry tip of his cigar, which he never by any chance placed between them. He seemed able to draw in the smoke by some mysterious means without even touching the tobacco, for in smoking, as in everything else, he was a thorough epicure.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, his words following the fresh cloud he blew, ‘that de Maurienne will at least have the sense to act as I suggested just now. In France he can do better. He can be divorced without difficulty. Fancy the satisfaction of divorcing Teresa! Can you see her expression? And she would be “a defenceless woman” again in no time. Of all the offensive forms of defencelessness!’

  He laughed softly to himself.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Castiglione, trying to bring him back to the subject in hand, ‘I am afraid something very disagreeable may happen.’

  ‘What is that?’ asked the Colonel, following his own amusing thoughts and still smiling.

  ‘You see, I have never fought a duel, and as I am not inclined to let de Maurienne run me through, I might kill him. There would be very serious trouble if an Italian officer killed a French diplomatist, I suppose, not to mention the fact that I should have to spend a couple of years in a fortress.’

  ‘You are afraid you might upset the European concert, are you?’ The Colonel seemed much amused at the idea. ‘But it is all nonsense, Castiglione. There is not going to be any fight.’

  ‘But the man called me a coward to my face, Colonel! What am I to do?’

  ‘Go home and go to bed. It’s the only safe place when Teresa is on the war-path. If you want an excuse, I’ll put you under arrest in your rooms, but that seems useless. Go home and go to bed, I tell you!’

  ‘It’s rather early,’ objected Castiglione, smiling. ‘And meanwhile Monsieur de Maurienne will be sitting up waiting for my friends.’

  ‘Dear Captain,’ said Casalmaggiore, ‘I have not the least idea what Monsieur de Maurienne will do. If I say that I will be responsible for your honour as for my own, and for that of the Piedmont Lancers, and if I tell you that there will be no duel, Monsieur de Maurienne may sit up all night, for weeks and weeks, so far as you are concerned.’

  ‘That is a very different matter,’ answered Castiglione gravely. ‘I have nothing more to say. If my honour can be safer anywhere than in my own keeping, it will be so in your hands. Do you really wish me to stay at home this evening?’

  ‘Yes, unless you want a couple of days’ leave, though we have a general order from headquarters not to allow officers or men leave to go further than three hours by railway. Trouble is expected owing to these strikes, and we shall probably be doing patrol duty next week! You may have two days if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, no. I’ll go home.’

  Castiglione made a movement to get up.

  ‘No, no!’ objected Casalmaggiore. ‘I have not told you everything about that mare yet. Stay a little longer.’

  ‘Certainly; with pleasure. But first, if it’s not indiscreet, may I ask how in the world you are going to settle my affair?’

  ‘You may ask, Castiglione,’ replied the Colonel with great gravity, ‘but it is beyond my power to answer you; for I give you my word of honour that I have not the slightest idea. Montalto knows perfectly well,’ he continued without a break and in precisely the same tone of voice, ‘that I will pay twenty thousand francs for the mare whenever he likes, and that’s a large price in Italy.’

  After that Castiglione made no further attempt to talk about de Maurienne, and his colonel kept him till after four o’clock.

  CHAPTER XXI

  MARIA WAS SILENT and preoccupied throughout the day, and did not attempt to rouse Montalto from his apathy. He made no reference to the letters, though he gave some thought to the subject in the privacy of his study, and practically decided to consult the police on the morrow, since no other course suggested itself to his not very active imagination.

  One of Giuliana Parenzo’s horses was lame, and another had a bad cold, and she telephoned to ask if Maria would take her for a drive and make a few visits with her. Having no ready excuse, Maria agreed to the proposal on condition that Giuliana should not object to waiting for her a few minutes outside the Church of the Capuchins. She had ascertained from her maid, who was a Roman, that twenty-three-and-a-half o’clock meant sunset at all times of the year, which seemed to her a clumsy way of reckoning, the more so as she had to make further inquiries in order to ascertain the hour at which the sun actually went down. It turned out to be about a quarter before five, but as she was not quite sure, she thought it best to go at half-past four. If Padre Bonaventura had not come in she could wait for him. Giuliana probably had some visit to make at one of the modern hotels in the vicinity, for she and her husband necessarily knew many foreigners.

  Accordingly, at half-past four, when the brown front of the old church was just beginning to glow in the evening light, the Countess’s carriage stopped before the steps. Giuliana had said that she preferred to wait, as she had nothing to do in the neighbourhood, but, to Maria’s surprise, she now also got out.

  ‘It is a long time since I was here,’ she explained, ‘so I have changed my mind. I shall not be in your way if I stay near the door.’

  ‘In the way? How absurd!’ Maria laughed a little as she went up the steps.

  They parted just inside the door; Giuliana knelt down by a straw chair on the right, while Maria went up the church diagonally towards the left, in the direction of the confessional which Padre Bonaventura usually occupied.

  She found him in the last chapel on the left, by the door of the sacristy, in the act of shaking hands with Castiglione, who was evidently taking leave of him. Coming upon them so suddenly when the evening glow through the upper windows made the church very light, it was out of the question to draw back into the shadow. The monk saw her first, but Castiglione turned his head a second later, and the three were standing together.

  Maria drew herself up very straight in the effort to check a cry of surprise, and Castiglione made rather a stiff military bow; but she saw his eyes in the rosy light, and he saw hers. A moment later he was gone, and her ears followed the musical little jingle of his spurs as he went down the nave towards the door, near which Giuliana Parenzo was kneeling.

  But while she listened she was looking into the monk’s face, and her own was pale and had a frightened expression.

  ‘It could not be helped,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I did not know he was coming, and you are here early. If there is any fault it is mine.’

  Maria listened in silence. He held out the sealed envelope Castiglione had brought him, and she saw the well-known writing.

  ‘This is addressed to me,’ continued Padre Bonaventura, ‘but I give it to you unopened. It contains a document which will relieve you of all anxiety about your letters.’

  ‘Already!’

  ‘Yes. He has lost no time. He is a man of action.’

  The monk could not withhold a word of admiration, and Maria felt the warmth in her cheeks.

  ‘Indeed he is!’ she answered in a low voice. ‘Thank him for me!’

  ‘I have thanked him. That is enough, and we may never meet again.’

  ‘I may at least be grateful to you,’ Maria said.

  ‘My share has been small. I must leave you now, for there is some one waiting to confess.’

  He left the chapel, but Maria remained a few moments longer. When she was sure that no one could see her she slipped the sealed envelope inside her frock, for she did not like to trust it
to the little bag in which she carried her cards, her handkerchief, and her money. She had almost forgotten Giuliana till she met her standing by the door, and saw the look of surprise and reproach in her eyes.

  They went down the steps side by side in silence, and neither spoke till the carriage was moving again.

  ‘I really think you might choose some other place in which to meet,’ said Giuliana at last.

  Maria had expected something of the sort from her impeccable friend.

  ‘We met by accident, and we did not speak,’ she answered quietly, for she knew that appearances were against her.

  ‘I did not know that he ever entered a church,’ returned Giuliana, who was well acquainted with Castiglione’s opinions in matters of religion.

  ‘Very rarely — at least, when I knew him.’

  Maria was not inclined to say more, and Giuliana thought the explanation anything but sufficient. Maria had always been very truthful, but when unassailable virtue is suspicious it always goes to extremes, and tells us that the devil is everywhere, whereas, since he is usually described as an individual, and by no means as divine, it is hard to see how he can be in two places at once. Maria was aware of her friend’s state of mind, but was too much occupied with her own thoughts to pay any more attention to it after having told the truth. The sealed envelope that came from Castiglione’s hand lay inside her frock, upon her neck, somewhat to the left, and it was burning her and sending furious little thrills through her; yet it would have to lie there at least another hour while she made visits with Giuliana.

  She left the latter at her home at last, and they had never parted so coldly in the course of their long friendship. When Maria was alone in her carriage, in the dark, she opened her frock again and took out the envelope and put it into her bag, for she could not bear to let it touch her any longer, and the recollection of Castiglione’s eyes had not faded yet.

  To drive the vision of him away she thought of Giuliana, and reflected upon the extreme foolishness of her friend’s suspicions. If the two had meant to meet in the chapel, though only for an instant, it would have been easy to warn Castiglione that Giuliana was in the church, and that he must wait for her to go away before showing himself.

  The carriage descended the Via Nazionale on the way home, and had gone a hundred yards further when it stopped short, to Maria’s surprise, and at the same moment she saw a villainous face almost flattened against the glass. Telemaco turned the horses suddenly to the right and drove quickly along the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, which was almost deserted. The Countess dropped the front window of the brougham and asked what was the matter.

  ‘There is a riot in Piazza di Venezia, Excellency. They are throwing stones.’

  Maria raised the glass again. It was only another strike, she thought, or an anarchist’s funeral, and the carriage would go round by another way. Such disturbances were frequent that winter, but never seemed to have any serious consequences.

  When she was at last alone in her boudoir she cut the envelope and spread out the sheet it contained. It was strange to be reading something written in Castiglione’s handwriting, and to feel that it was her duty to read it.

  This was what she read: —

  ‘I, the undersigned, proprietor of a gambling-house in Via Belsiana, and representing Orlando Schmidt, the absconding steward of the Count of Montalto, and my accomplices calling themselves Carlo Pozzi of Palermo and Paolo Pizzuti of Messina, do hereby declare and confess that the photographs of seven letters, more or less, purporting to be written by Her Excellency the Countess of Montalto, by means of which I, and my aforesaid accomplices, have criminally attempted to extort money from her, are reproduced from forgeries executed by the aforesaid Orlando Schmidt, who had surreptitiously obtained specimens of Her Excellency’s handwriting. Rome, this eleventh day of January 1906.

  ‘Rodolfo Blosse.

  ‘Witness: Baldassare del Castiglione,

  ‘Piedmont Lancers.’

  Castiglione had not hesitated to force the blackmailer to declare the letters to be forgeries. Maria guessed why he had done that, as she sat reading the paper a second time. He had suspected Schmidt of having really forged such words as she would never have written, she thought; and he had in some way extracted the truth from the man who signed the paper. In that case her danger had been even greater than she had imagined. What abominations might not have been forged in her handwriting! Yes, Castiglione was a man of action, indeed, as the monk had said. Poor Montalto had hesitated and done nothing for days, and in a little while some vile newspaper would have scattered broadcast a scandal from which no recovery would have been possible. But within twenty-four hours after she had spoken to Padre Bonaventura the man who loved her had found the chief criminal and had made him sign a document, on the strength of which no judge would hesitate to send the whole gang to penal servitude. ‘Witness, Baldassare del Castiglione’; the well-loved name rang in her ears, the name of a man on whose honour there was no slur before the world, nor any in her inmost thoughts now; a name after which every officer and non-commissioned officer in the regiment would write his own blindfold, if need were, because they all knew him and trusted him.

  She folded the paper slowly, letting her fingers linger where his had touched it last, and she put it back into the cut envelope and looked at the seal. It was the same he had used long ago, in the dark ages of her life — a plain, old-fashioned shield with his simple arms and the motto in Latin: Si omnes ego non.

  Maria knew whence it was taken, with but a slight change. There was a mark in the margin of her old missal at the Gospel for Wednesday in Holy Week opposite the words, and the whole line read, ‘Though all forsake Thee, I will not forsake Thee.’ She had never had the courage to erase that mark, not even in the years when she had deceived herself. Year after year, when the day came round, she had read the noble words; and many times she had read them bitterly, thinking of what followed afterwards and of him who, having spoken them, denied not once but thrice, and with an oath. She read them now on the dark wax, under the bright light, and after a little while she pressed the seal gently to her lips, the seal that held the motto she loved, not the paper he had touched.

  ‘In all honour,’ she said gravely, under her breath.

  CHAPTER XXII

  SOON AFTER FIVE o’clock the Duca di Casalmaggiore sent in his card to Monsieur de Maurienne. The diplomatist was engaged in examining an etching by Robetta with a huge lens, under a strong light, and was too much interested to desist until the Colonel was actually in the room. He received his visitor, whom he knew very well, with that formal courtesy which is considered becoming when an affair of honour is to be discussed. He had expected a couple of officers of Castiglione’s rank, and had asked two of his own friends to hold themselves in readiness if he telephoned for them. He was surprised that only one representative should appear for his adversary, and that he should be no less a personage than the Colonel of the regiment.

  Casalmaggiore did not even seem inclined to behave with the solemn gravity required on such an occasion. He sat down on a comfortable chair and laid his laced cap unceremoniously upon a little table he found at his elbow, instead of holding it in his hand and sitting bolt upright with his sabre between his knees. De Maurienne thought that Italians took duelling in much too free and easy a way, and he stiffened a little and sat very straight. He was not prepared for what was coming. Casalmaggiore spoke in French.

  ‘I shall begin by making a little apology,’ he said, leaning back and folding his gloved hands.

  De Maurienne’s eyebrows went up, high above the gold rims of his glasses, and he spoke in a politely icy tone.

  ‘Indeed! I cannot see how any can be required from your side, under the circumstances!’

  ‘Not from our friend Castiglione,’ answered the Colonel, ‘but on my own behalf. I must really beg your pardon beforehand for what I am going to say — always placing myself entirely at your disposal if I should unintentionally offend yo
u. Is that quite clear?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Thank you. You are the victim of an unworthy trick, my dear de Maurienne. I am going to take the liberty of explaining exactly what has happened to you, by giving you the details of what had just occurred when you entered Donna Teresa Crescenzi’s drawing-room.’

  De Maurienne looked at his visitor in surprise, and not without some suspicion.

  ‘Donna Teresa is a connection of mine,’ observed Casalmaggiore, ‘and I know her extremely well. What I have to say about her should not offend you. Castiglione came to me this afternoon and told me the story. I know him to be a perfectly truthful and honourable man, and I know that he is incapable of fear. Indeed, he does not know what fear is.’

  ‘Allow me to say,’ said de Maurienne, ‘that with us, in France, matters of this kind are discussed between the friends of the principals. Is the practice different in your country?’

  ‘Not at all. But this is quite another sort of affair. I, personally, give you my word that what I am going to tell you is what really happened. You will understand that if I, as colonel, give my word for that of one of my officers, I am fully aware of the responsibility I undertake.’

  ‘This changes the aspect of things, I admit,’ said de Maurienne gravely, but less coldly.

  He had never been placed in such a position, nor had he ever heard of just such a case.

  ‘Practically,’ continued the Colonel, ‘it transfers all the responsibility to me. I know Castiglione to be a man of accurate memory, and as soon as he was gone I wrote down precisely what he had told me. Here it is.’

  He took out his note-book, found the place, and read aloud a precise account of what had passed between Teresa Crescenzi and Castiglione up to the moment when de Maurienne had entered the room. De Maurienne listened attentively.