For a week St. Hilary scarcely left my room. He ate little; he smoked
boxes of cigarettes; he consumed pots of black coffee. Such sleep as he
had he snatched for an hour at a time in my armchair. And always in
front of him were the photographs of the backgrounds of the twelve
hours.
As for me, I waited on him hand and foot. I was a hewer of wood and a
drawer of water. Now I went to Rosen’s to buy some volume, now to
Organia’s to borrow a collection of rare prints, now to the Museo Civico
to consult the director. The archives of the Frari, the Academy of Arts,
each of them saw me often. In the morning, perhaps I looked at a picture
of Carpaccio or Bellini; in the afternoon I explored an obscure
_canaletto_.
I was content to take the humbler position. St. Hilary had a right to
command. His had been the discovery that made the search possible.
Again, it seemed fit that his quicker brain should catch the fire, the
inspiration. I did not doubt but that sooner or later from the mass of
lifeless evidence, which he was heaping about him, he would surely draw
forth the secret.
But now, after a week of fruitless searching, his chin a reproach, his
hands trembling, and his temper a thing to be respected, he leaned back
in the chair and despaired.
“It is useless,” he sighed. “The thing is not to be done in a day or a
week. I have not the art of divination. Sometimes I feel that I am on
the right track. I grope; I touch something; I clutch at it, but it
eludes me, always. There stands the ticking, mocking braggart. It laughs
at us with its brazen wheels; it mocks us with its silver tongue. I
believe that the spirit of the mad goldsmith actually dwells in its
hollow sides.”
And yet, in spite of St. Hilary’s despair, we had accomplished
something.
Of the original automata of the twelve hours we had found four only to
be in actual working order. In three of the hours, some of the figures
were intact, and some were broken. In the five remaining hours, the
figures were completely lacking.
To consider the four hours with the figures intact, namely, 1, 2, 6, 7:
1.–A robed figure and a lion. The lion nods once.
2.–A figure standing over a kneeling slave in an attitude of menace,
twice strikes the neck of the slave with a sword.
6.–A dancing figure advances ten steps forward and retreats ten steps.
7.–A dove appears at the window of a tower.
In hours 3, 8, 9, some of the figures were intact, some broken:
3.–A robed figure seated in a chair. Before this figure, designedly
motionless, ten disks appear in succession, and are ranged in a row. The
figures are broken off the disks.
8.–A crowned figure standing on a dais before a throne. A second figure
at the foot of the throne is broken off.
9.–A seated figure with a scepter.
In hours 4, 5, 10, 11, 12 there was not the slightest fragment of the
figures remaining.
So much for the automata.
The scenes of the bas-reliefs of the backgrounds were as follows:
1.–A palace, plainly the Doge’s palace. Seven arches of the palace are
seen. Beneath six of these arches groups of men are standing–ten figures
in each group, or sixty in all.
2.–A hanging.
3.–A gate.
4.–Three trees; a beast of burden, probably a camel; a well.
5.–Badly mutilated.
6.–Two figures seated on the balcony over the doorway of San Marco. One
figure wears the Doge’s cap; the other is crowned with a wreath of
laurel.
7.–A barge on a stormy sea.
8.–An empty room in a palace. The door is open; no figures are seen.
9.–Thirteen kneeling figures with outstretched hands.
10.–Six gondolas in procession; tritons spouting.
11.–Mutilated.
12.–Three figures holding out bags.
Such were the automata and the bas-reliefs in the backgrounds of the
twelve hours.
As to the scenes they represented, St. Hilary had made a rough guess at
most of them. Four or five of the scenes he thought he had identified
unmistakably. All twelve of them were scenes out of Venetian history.
When I urged him for the results he had gained so far, he declared at
first that they were too meager to be suggestive. But I was not to be
balked.
“I have been running your errands for a week, St. Hilary,” I reminded
him. “I have been your obedient messenger–an intelligent messenger, if
you will–and I have left you to do the piecing together of the different
parts of the puzzle. Now I want to know what you have accomplished.”
“There is very little to tell,” he said sulkily. “Scene one represents
St. Mark and his lion, the tutelary saint of Venice. As to the second
scene, the story is in every guide-book. The artist Gentile Bellini
visited the Sultan of Turkey, and painted for him a picture of the
daughter of Herodias bringing in the head of St. John the Baptist on a
charger. The Sultan objected that the neck was not rightly drawn–that
when a man was beheaded, no neck appeared at all, in fact. The artist
disputed the point. To prove himself in the right, the Sultan struck off
a slave’s head.”
“And the third hour–the ten disks arranged in a row?”
“The Council of Ten, I suppose.”
“Well, well, the fourth, St. Hilary?” I cried sharply.
“Perhaps you know its significance. I don’t. The camel doesn’t figure in
Venetian history, so far as I know. It is true, Marco Polo traveled to
the Great Khan of Cathay. The scene might have been a chapter out of his
life. But after wading through his travels I have failed to find it.”
“And the next, I suppose, is too badly mutilated to be identified?”
“Absolutely,” he grumbled.
“And the background of the sixth hour?” I asked, studying the photograph
through a powerful magnifying-glass. “Have you been able to identify
either of the two figures seated on the balcony?”
“Both,” he replied with more animation. “The figure with the Doge’s cap
is Dandolo. The figure crowned with a wreath of laurel by his side
represents the poet Petrarch, who was his guest. The automatic figure
that dances the ten steps forward and backward symbolizes a festival
held on the Piazza after Venice had subdued her enemy Crete.”
“The seventh hour represents,” I ventured, “the legend of the Doge
receiving news of victory by a carrier-pigeon. Every child who feeds the
creatures on the Piazza knows that story. The tower must be the
Campanile.”
“Quite right. The scene of the eighth hour,” continued St. Hilary, “you
discovered for yourself in the Academy this morning. The room of the
palace in the background is an exact reproduction of the palace seen in
the painting of Carpaccio.”
“And the ninth?” I demanded, feeling that our information was meager
indeed.
“Here, again, we can only guess. The broken figure may be Carmagnola,
the soldier of fortune. The thirteen figures kneeling in the background
no doubt typify his conquered enemies. The procession of the gondolas
and the spouting tritons in the tenth probably represent the going of
the Doge in his bucentaur to wed the Adriatic.”
“And the eleventh hour must be quite hopeless. The automaton is missing
and the plate at the back is battered beyond all recognition,” I said
moodily.
“The twelfth is almost as obscure,” concluded St. Hilary. “The figures
holding out the bags are perhaps conquered Genoese offering ransom.”
“It is not very promising,” I confessed, “Have you any theory whatever
as to the meaning of these scenes?”
“I have a dozen. But they are all equally impossible.”
“Let me hear one of them, at least,” I urged.
“Well, then, if I repeat to you the numbers 10, 4, 7, 21, 1, 10, 3, 40,
of what do you at once think?”
“A cipher,” I cried eagerly.
“That is the theory that seems to me the most hopeful at present. The
numbers I have mentioned are the figures of the different successive
scenes. It is barely possible that these numbers, either alone or
combined with other numbers, might bring us to the hiding-place of the
casket. The trouble is that not every scene has figures in the
background. The eighth, for instance. And in hours five and eleven, the
backgrounds are so mutilated that, even if this theory were true, we
should lack those numbers to make our cipher complete.”
“And yet the existence of a cipher seems the only possible way by which
the riddle may be solved.”
“I believe that is true. There are twelve hours, that is, there are
twelve different steps–twelve different links to the whole chain.
Beginning at hour one, so many steps, paces, or what not, ought to bring
us to hour two. There, beginning afresh, so many steps, paces, and so
forth, again ought to bring us to hour three, and so on. Do you get the
idea?”
“It sounds reasonable,” I replied thoughtfully. “But since two or three
scenes are missing, I can not see much promise in this theory.”
“I told you that they were all impossible,” growled the dealer. “So far
we are quite at sea. To-morrow, perhaps–” he sighed wearily.
“To-morrow perhaps we shall have better luck,” I said cheerfully. “It is
always darkest before the dawn.”
“_Pas de banalités._ I am not a Sunday-school scholar to be preached at.
Come, let’s to dinner.”