A woman"s cry of agony rang out upon the sweet morning stillness. Count Marioni, who had been hurrying on with downcast head, stood still in the cliff path and lifted his head. It was the woman whose memory he had cursed who stood before him--the woman on whom his vengeance was to fall.
Her face was as white as his own, and in the swiftness of her flight her hat had fallen away and her hair was streaming in the breeze. Yet in that moment of her awful fear she recognized him, and shrank back trembling, as though some unseen hand had palsied her tongue, and laid a cold weight upon her heart They stood face to face, breathless and speechless. A host of forgotten sensations, kindled by her appearance, had leaped up within the Sicilian"s heart. He had indeed loved this woman.
"Merciful G.o.d! to meet you here," she faltered. "You will help me? Oh, you will help me? My husband is being murdered there on the cliff by an escaped lunatic. Oh! Leonardo, save him, and you may strike me dead at your feet. It is I whom you should hate, not him. Oh, come! Come, or it will be too late!"
He stood quite still, looking at her curiously.
"And it is I to whom you dare to come for help--I whom you ask to save him--your husband? Adrienne, do you remember my words on the sands at Palermo?"
She wrung her hands, frantically imploring.
"How can I remember anything--think of anything, now? For the love of G.o.d, help him," she begged, seizing his hand. "That was all so long ago.
You would not have him killed here before my eyes? Come! Oh, do come!"
"Lead the way," he answered sternly. "Call your loudest for other help.
I make no promise, but I will see this tragedy."
She ran back along the path, and he followed her. They turned suddenly an abrupt corner, and came upon two men locked in one another"s arms, and swaying backward and forward upon the short green turf. The lunatic, an immense fellow, more than six feet high, was clutching his opponent"s throat with his left hand, while with his right he brandished a long table-knife with keenly-sharpened edge. The struggle was virtually over.
The madman"s strength was more than human, and desperately though he had struggled, Lord St. Maurice was lying exhausted and overcome in his arms.
With a final effort he turned his head at the sound of footsteps, and saw them come--his wife and this shrunken little old man. But close at hand though they were, nothing could help him now. He saw the steel flashing in the sunlight, and he closed his eyes.
The knife descended, but Lord St. Maurice remained unhurt. With a swiftness which seemed almost incredible, the Sicilian had sprung between them, and the knife was quivering in his side. Behind, the lunatic was struggling helplessly in the grasp of three keepers.
There was a wild cry of horror from Lady St. Maurice, a choking gasp of relief from her husband, and a horrid chuckle of triumph from the madman as he gazed upon his handiwork. But after that there was silence--a deep, awe-stricken silence--the silence of those who stand in the presence of death.
Count Marioni lay on the turf where he had sunk, very white and very still, with the blood dropping slowly from his wound upon the gra.s.s, and his eyes closed. At first they thought that he was already dead; but, as though aroused by Lady St. Maurice"s broken sobs, he opened his eyes and looked up. His lips moved, and she stooped low down to catch the sound.
"Will you tell Margharita that this was best?" he faltered. "I have heard a whisper from over the sea, and--and the White Hyacinth forgives.
I forgive. She will understand."
"Leonardo," she sobbed, "your vengeance----"
He interrupted her.
"This is my vengeance!" he said. "I have kept my oath!"
Then he closed his eyes, and a gray shade stole into his pallid face. A breeze sprung up from the sea, and the tall, blood-red poppies, which stood up all around him like a regiment of soldiers, bent their quivering heads till one or two of them actually touched his cheek. He did not move; he was dead.
Lord and Lady Lumley had lingered long in Rome, and now, on the eve of their departure, they had spent nearly the whole of a bright November afternoon buying curios of a wizened old dealer, whose shop they had found in one of the dark narrow streets at the back of the Piazza Angelo. Lady Lumley had taken up a curious old ring, and was examining it with a vague sense of familiarity.
"Ten pounds for that ring, my lady," the curio dealer remarked, "and it has a history. You will see that it bears the arms and motto of the Marionis, once the most powerful family in Sicily. I had it from the late Count himself."
Lady Lumley sank into the little chair by the counter, holding the ring tightly in her hand.
"Will you tell us the history?" she asked in a low tone.
The man hesitated.
"If I do so," he said doubtfully, "will you promise to keep it absolutely secret?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, I have told it to no one yet, but I will tell it to you.
Many years ago I was a chemist, and among my customers was Count Leonardo di Marioni. His history was a very sad one, as doubtless you may have heard. When he was quite a young man he was arrested on some political charge, and imprisoned for five-and-twenty years--a cruel time. Well, scarcely more than twelve months ago he came to me here, so altered that I found it hard indeed to recognize him. Poor old gentleman, when he had talked for a while, I felt quite sure that his long confinement had affected his mind, and his errand with me made me sure of it. He came to buy a celebrated poison which I used at one time to be secretly noted for, and I could tell from his manner that he wanted it for some fatal use. Well, I thought at first of refusing it altogether, but what was the use of that? Some one else would have sold him an equally powerful poison, and the mischief would be done all the same. So, after a little consideration, I made up quite an innocent powder, which might cause a little momentary faintness, but which could do no further harm, and I gave it to him as the real thing. I couldn"t take money for doing a thing like that, so he pressed this ring upon me.
You see, it really has a history."
Lord Lumley took his wife"s hand and pressed it tenderly. In the deep gloom of the shop the curio dealer could not see the tears which glistened in her dark eyes.
"We will have the ring!" Lord Lumley said, taking a note from his pocket-book and handing it across the counter.
The man held it up to the light.
"One hundred pounds," he remarked. "I shall owe your lordship ninety."
Lord Lumley shook his head.
"No, Signor Paschuli, you owe me nothing; it is I who owe you a wife.
Come, Margharita, let us get out into the sunshine again."
And Signor Paschuli kept the note. But he has come to the conclusion that all Englishmen traveling on their honeymoon are mad.
THE GREAT AWAKENING
Sir Powers Fiske, though far from being a sybarite, possessed a fundamental but crudely developed love of the beautiful. Before all things with him came his devotion to science and scientific investigation. But for his unexpected accession to the t.i.tle and estates he would, without doubt, have become a denizen of Harley Street, and made his way without difficulty into the front ranks of his profession.
With the pa.s.sing away of all necessity for work came a curious era of half-doubtful dilettanteism, a time during which he read hugely, traveled a good deal, and finally returned to England with the seeds of a great unrest sown in his mind.
Mysticism and psychology, which he had dabbled in at first half-contemptuously, had become serious studies to him. Dimly he felt the fascination of that unending effort which from the days of the Chaldeans had swayed the lives of a long succession of the world"s masters, the effort to establish some sort of communication, however faint, however speculative, between the world of known things and the world beyond. At times he found himself moved to the most profound self-ridicule. He would ask himself how it was possible for a man of science seriously to investigate problems whose very foundation must be an a.s.sumption. He looked at his walls lined with books, and he smiled grimly as he realized how little, after all, they had taught him. The sum of all that he had learned from them amounted to nothing. Yet he remembered what Spencer Trowse, a fellow student, had said to him. A sudden flush had lightened his thin cheeks, pallid with the ceaseless energy of their student life.
"After all, Powers, I think that we are wasting our days," he exclaimed.
"Those ancients saw no farther behind the veil than we. I am tired of all this musty lore, this delving among cobwebs."
"What then?" Powers had asked. "Modern scholarship has taught us little enough."
"Let us have done with all scholarship," Trowse answered. "It is the laws of humanity we want to understand. Let us study them at first hand.
Let us go down among the people."
"What can this rabble teach us?" Powers had asked himself, full of the intellectual contempt of the young student for the whole pleasure-loving world. "Whether their wings be soiled or pure, they are only b.u.t.terflies!"
Trowse smiled grimly.
"They are the living evidences," he said, "of laws which are worth studying. If we would understand humanity we must not start by despising any part of it."