It was in Florence that Baronte at last ran to earth that terrific
secret which for ten long months had eluded and maddened him. Here, in
the summer of 1819, was present once again that fiend incarnate of
melody, that monster Paganini--and more astounding, more inexplicable
than ever. He had taken the city captive as utterly as any Marmaldo;
he drew its people, extravagantly laughing and sobbing, in the wake of
his devil’s music. And Florence was Baronte’s native town, and it was
here, he had felt, that his quest must end, though even at the gates
of Death. And, behold! Fate, even in the shadow of his reason’s
overthrow, had vouchsafed him at length and at least an approximate
solution of the mystery.
What mystery, then, and what secret? Why those that touched upon the
source of the Maestro’s superhuman powers--nothing more nor less. But,
for whatever was their ethical value, they had haunted Baronte’s soul
for full ten months--ever since that night, in fact, when he had first
heard Paganini play in the Scala Theatre at Milan. And from that night
onwards he had followed his evil genius, as he regarded the man, from
town to town, feeding yet hungering, drinking yet thirsting, loathing
and lusting at once.
Baronte was himself, though an amateur, a rare violinist. He knew as
well as most the extreme capacities of the instrument, and the
sympathies possible to be created between its sensitive mechanism and
the interpretative soul of its player. But here was something which as
much surpassed the conceivable limits of human execution as it
surpassed mortal understanding in its expression of superhuman
passions and emotions. It was not instrumentation to which one
listened, but temptation--melodious frenzy, an ecstatic lure to things
forbid, rendered not by, but through a human medium. The great Master,
it was very certain, was in league with the devil to betray mankind
through the most voluptuous of its senses, and in no other way could
the miracle be explained. Baronte felt it in every nerve of his
responsible being, and sought nothing but a confirmation of his
suspicions to dare a martyr’s fate. Young, emotional, fanatic, with
haggard face and brilliant eyes, he retained all of that religious
fervour which had once kept him hesitating on the threshold of the
Church, and which still yielded to nothing but his passion for music.
And at last he stood on the brink, as he believed, of the great
discovery. The dread secret lay to be exhumed, he had convinced
himself, from the recesses of the little black morocco handbag which
the dark Master perpetually carried about with him.
It might contain some demoniac philtre; it might conceal some vessel,
like the Fisherman’s flask, loaded with the concentrated essence of
all wickedness. It was certain that the bag never left its possessor’s
custody day or night; that he bore it with him on his rare excursions
abroad; that he hugged it to his pillow throughout the hours of
darkness. Baronte knew all this from his confidant and sympathiser
young Varano, who had hired, at his instance, a room adjoining the
Maestro’s, in the hotel occupied by the latter, and who had been able
to keep a pretty incessant watch, through an unsuspected crack in the
party panelling, on his tremendous neighbour. It was this friend who
had described to him the sympathy apparent between Paganini and his
hidden fetish, who had whispered to him awfully of day-long
prostrations on a couch, broken only by spasmodic writhings, by
fiendish ejaculations and brief explosions of laughter, or by wild
apostrophisings of the _thing_, held up in worshipping hands before
two gloating eyes. It contained, without doubt, the key to the
mystery--only how to find an opportunity to examine it? That was as
yet as stultifying a problem as itself. And in the meantime the
Maestro’s engagement was drawing to a close.
One night before the end Baronte sat in the theatre. It was packed
from floor to ceiling, and his restless vision hunted, as always,
among the massed audience for some confirmation of a shadowy legend.
It related, this legend, of a beautiful weeping girl, and of a man,
her companion, bleak, sardonic, with whom the player would be seen to
exchange a smile of ghastly import, and of the sudden inexplicable
disappearance of the two. He believed the story--and he did not
believe it; as he believed and disbelieved that other tale of the
shape dimly adumbrated behind the Master’s figure and directing its
bowing. The whispers of libertinism and nameless cruelties which
pursued the great performer’s footsteps affected him no more, either
way, than these others. It was sufficient, in his conception of evil,
to credit the fiend with a capacity for achieving without betraying
himself, of directing the touch on the instrument, of _being_ the
instrument itself, the imagined Guanerius, if he chose.
And then instant silence, a shock, a thrill, and Paganini stood before
the expectant house.
Music! He appeared the antithesis of every grace, of every emotion
associated with its production--an impossible grotesque, like a clown
got up as a fiddle and proposing to play upon himself. There he stood
in the glare of the footlights, as ungainly an anomaly as the mind
could conceive. He was tall, he was supernaturally gaunt and angular;
his long kit-shaped face, pallid as Death’s own, seemed pierced with
two blackened sockets for eyes; his hair, lank and raven, straggled
upon his shoulders. He was dressed in a tight-buttoned black
swallow-tail and black trousers, loose for the period and awkwardly
short at the ankles. As the storm of greeting subsided and the
orchestra crashed out its symphony, he settled himself upon his right
hip, like a badly articulated skeleton, and, raising bow and fiddle,
dived his long chin into the latter, and, with a grinning snarl upon
his face, poised the former, like a veritable fiend of extravaganza.
Baronte knew it all so well, and waited impassive for the sequel, his
eyes canvassing the breathless house rather than the performer. And
then suddenly the bow descended, with a blow like a melodious
sledge-hammer, and the wild, lovely orgy had begun.
Paganini surely had never played before as he played that night. It
was all stupendous, unsurpassable, horrible. The very violin seemed to
bend and spring beneath his hands like the body of a young witch,
alluring, eluding, brutifying. At the finish it was with a feeling of
utter emotional collapse that Baronte crept from the house and sought
his lodgings. This thing must end, he told himself--somehow this thing
must end, and to-morrow.
In the late morning he rose--to ominous skies and a sensation of
stifling heat. A haggard ghost of himself, he sought the Master’s
hotel. He knew the obscene creature’s customs--to fast at times, to
gorge at times, to lie brooding all day, hating company as he hated
priests and doctors; sometimes to break abroad in a wild convulsion of
energy, and go tearing none knew whither. And to-day Fortune, whether
for good or evil, favoured Baronte. As he approached the hotel, with
the intent to take counsel of his friend Varano, he saw the demoniac
figure itself issue from the portal, and hurry with distracted visage
northwards. He hesitated a moment--then started in pursuit.
Near the bridge Alle Grazie stood three men--an itinerant butcher, a
bird-vender, and one, a pert, showy vagabond, with a pallid face, and
the dirty little finger-nail of his left hand grown long as a charm
against the evil eye. The butcher, in blue jacket and leathern cap,
carried in one hand a single joint of meat upon a hook, and in the
other a shrill small horn on which to blow its praises; the
bird-seller, a stalwart, bronzed young fellow, with gold rings in his
ears and his shirted torso half bared to the heat, bore over his
shoulders a yoke of cord, from each of whose ends hung a netted sieve
alive with twittering songsters; the loafer carried nothing but
himself, and that cheaply. As the figure of the Maestro, hopping like
a great crow, approached and passed, the bird-seller stared, the
butcher gaped, and the loafer, crossing himself with a muttered
prayer, sprang back into the roadway--and collided with Baronte, who
pushed him aside and sped on.
“The devil!” gasped the loafer; and the bird-seller laughed
deridingly.
“In escaping the smoke you have jumped into the fire, gossip,” said
he. “The second was the true devil.”
He looked it, indeed, if his burning eyes were any criterion, as he
hurried in the wake of the receding figure. It led him across the
south-eastern angle of the city to the gate of the Pinti, through
which it passed like a striding shadow, and thence, turning
northwards, took the winding ascent to Fiesole. Baronte followed, with
what purpose he himself did not know.
It was a terrible day, lowering, oppressive, fateful with tempest. And
all in a moment the heavens were delivered. They burst in a crash of
rain and fire that made the reason stagger. Through the smoke of flung
water Baronte could still see the figure mounting before him,
gesticulating, whirling its long arms, from time to time uttering
peals of loud laughter that mingled unearthly with the tumult of the
storm. And then, all in a moment, it was gone.
A ruined villa stood up stark and streaming against the sky. Baronte,
panting to the shelter of its broken walls, was suddenly aware, in a
brief lull of the storm, of a voice clamant hard by. It wailed, it
laughed, it sobbed; it uttered, it seemed, inarticulate blasphemies;
it sought to out-roar the thunder, to out-screech the wind. With an
answering cry the young man ran round--and staggered to a stop before
the vision which his eyes encountered. For there, prone among the
tumbled masonry and the long weeds and grass, lay the figure of the
black Master himself.
It was flung upon its back, writhing as if in torment. It screamed; it
hugged and crumpled itself into grotesque contortions; it gnashed
grinning teeth; its eyeballs glinted like porcelain in the lightning.
“_Ah, póvero me!_” screamed Paganini. “Why did I forget the bag!
_Eccomi perdûto!_ I am lost--I am lost!”
With a gasp Baronte stepped back, undiscovered of the other. The next
moment he was racing down the hill towards Florence.
At the door of the hotel, wild and drenched, he ran upon young Varano,
and, clutching him by the shoulders, glared into his eyes.
“Quick!” he panted. “He is up there on the hill--I have seen him--and
without his fetish. Quick! Our opportunity has arrived.”
Varano nodded pallidly.
“I know,” he whispered. “I was coming to look for you.”
Together they stole up to the Maestro’s chamber; opened the unlatched
door like thieves; entered, and discovered the forgotten bag lying
upon a chair. Dreading he knew not what terrific revelation, Baronte
pressed the snap and disclosed----
Down in the vestibule a moment later they ran upon the landlord.
“_Benedetto, mi’ amico_,” said Varano smoothly, “can you tell us what
is ‘Leroy’?”
“Of a verity, Signore,” answered the man. “‘Leroy’ is a quack remedy,
a sedative, and very good for relieving pain. You should ask the great
Maestro Paganini, whom it is my distinction to lodge, and who applies
it to a bowel complaint from which he has long suffered terribly. He
is never without a bottle or two of it in his little black bag.”