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.