REVOLVER AND PICKAXE
While Brendon entertained no sort of regard for Giuseppe Doria, his
balanced mind allowed him to view the man with impartial justice. He
discounted the fact of the Italian's victory in love, and, because
he knew himself to be an unsuccessful rival, was the more jealous
that disappointment should not create any bias. But Doria had failed
to make Jenny a happy wife; he understood that well enough, and he
could not forget that some future advantage to himself might accrue
from this circumstance. The girl's attitude had changed; he was not
blind and could not fail to note it. For the present, however, he
smothered his own interests and strove with all his strength to
advance a solution of the problems before him. He was specially
desirous to furnish important information for Peter Ganns on his
return.
He did what his judgment indicated but failed to find sufficient
reasons for linking Doria with the mystery, or associating him with
Robert Redmayne. For despite Peter's luminous analysis, Mark still
regarded the unknown as Albert Redmayne's brother; and he could find
no reasonable argument for associating Giuseppe with this person,
either at present or in the past. Everything rather pointed in a
contrary direction. Brendon traversed the incidents connected with
Bendigo Redmayne's disappearance, yet he could recall nothing
suspicious about Giuseppe's conduct at "Crow's Nest"; and if it
seemed unreasonable to suppose he had taken a hand in the second
tragedy, it appeared still less likely that he could be associated
with the first.
It was true that Doria had wedded Pendean's widow; but that he
should have slain her husband in order to do so appeared a grotesque
assumption. Moreover, as a student of character, Mark could not
honestly find in Jenny's husband any characteristics that argued a
malevolent attitude to life. He was a pleasure-loving spirit and his
outlook and ambitions, while frivolous, were certainly not criminal.
He talked of the smugglers a good deal and declared himself in
sympathy with them; but it was gasconade; he evinced no particular
physical bravery; he was fond of his comforts and seemed little
likely to risk his own liberty by association with breakers of law
and order.
A startling proof that Mark had not erred in this estimate was
afforded by a conversation which he enjoyed with Doria on a day soon
after the departure of Albert Redmayne and his friend. Giuseppe and
his wife had planned to visit an acquaintance at Colico, to the
northward of the lake; and before the steamer started, after noon,
the two men took a stroll in the hills a mile above Menaggio.
Brendon had asked for some private conversation and the other gladly
agreed.
"As you know, I'm going to spend the day in the red man's haunt,"
explained Mark, "and I'll call at supper time since you wish it; but
before you go, I'll ask you to stroll along for an hour. I want to
talk to you."
"That will suit me very well," said the other, and in half an hour
he returned to Brendon, found him chatting with Jenny in the dark
portal of the silkworm house, and drew him away.
"You shall have speech with her to-night after supper," promised
Giuseppe. "Now it is my turn. We will ascend to the little shrine on
the track above the orchards. There are shrines too many to the Holy
Mother, my friend. But this one is not to Madonna of the wind, or
the sea, or the stars. I call her 'Madonna del farniente'--the saint
for weary people, whose bodies and brains both ache from too much
work."
They climbed aloft presently, Doria in a holiday suit of
golden-brown cloth with a ruby tie, and Brendon attired in tweeds,
his luncheon in his pocket. Then the Italian's manner changed and he
dropped his banter. Indeed for a time he grew silent.
Brendon opened the conversation and of course treated the other as
though no question existed concerning his honesty.
"What do you think of this business?" he asked. "You have been
pretty close to it for a long time now. You must have some theory."
"I have no theory at all," replied Doria. "My own affairs are enough
for me and this cursed mystery is thrusting a finger into my life
and darkening it. I grow a very anxious and miserable man and I
will tell you why, because you are understanding. You must not be
angry if I now mention my wife in this affair. A mill and a woman
are always in want of something, as our proverb says; but though we
may know what a mill requires, who can guess a woman's whims? I am
dazed with guessing wrong. I don't intend to be hard or cruel. It is
not in me to be cruel to any woman. But how if your own woman is
cruel to you?"
They had reached the shrine--a little alcove in a rotting mass of
brick and plaster. Beneath it extended a stone seat whereon the
wayfarer might kneel or sit; above, in the niche, protected by a
wire grating, stood a doll painted with a blue cloak and a golden
crown. Offerings of wayside flowers decorated the ledge before the
little image.
They sat down and Doria began to smoke his usual Tuscan cigar. His
depression increased and with it Brendon's astonishment. The man
appeared to be taking exactly that attitude to his wife she had
already suggested toward him.
"Il volto sciolto ed i pensieri stretti," declared Giuseppe with
gloom. "That is to say 'her countenance may be clear, but her
thoughts are dark'--too dark to tell me--her husband."
"Perhaps she fears you a little. A woman is always helpless before a
man who keeps his own secrets hidden."
"Helpless? Far from it. She is a self-controlled, efficient,
hard-headed woman. Her loveliness is a curtain. You have not yet got
behind that. You loved her, but she did not love you. She loved me
and married me. And it is I who know her character, not you. She is
very clever and pretends a great deal more than she feels. If she
makes you think she is unhappy and helpless, she does it on purpose.
She may be unhappy, because to keep secrets is often to court
unhappiness; but she is not helpless at all. Her eyes look helpless;
her mouth never. There is power and will between her teeth."
"Why do you speak of secrets?"
"Because you did. I have no secrets. It is Jenny, my wife, who has
secrets. I tell you this. _She knows all about the red man!_ She is
as deep as hell."
"You mean that she understands what is happening and will not tell
her uncle or you?"
"That is precisely what I mean. She does not care a curse for
Alberto. What is born of hen will scrape--remember that. Her father
had a temper like a fiend and a cousin of her mother was hanged for
murder. These are facts she will not deny. I had them from her
uncle. I am frightened of her and I have disappointed her, because I
am not what she thought and have ceased to covet my ancestral
estates and title."
Such a monstrous picture of Jenny at first bewildered Brendon and
then incensed him. Was it within the bounds of possibility that
after six months of wedded life with this woman, any man living
would utter such an indictment and believe it?
"She is great in her way--much too great for me," said Giuseppe
frankly. "She should have been a Medici or a Borgia; she should have
lived many centuries sooner, before policeman and detective officers
were invented. You stare and think I lie. But I do not lie. I see
very clearly indeed. I look back at the past and the veil is lifted.
I understand much that I did not understand when I was growing blind
with love for her. As for this Robert Redmayne--'Robert the Devil,'
I call him--once I thought that he was a ghost; but he is not a
ghost: he is a live man.
"And presently what will happen if he is not caught and hanged? He
will kill Uncle Alberto and perhaps kill me, too. Then he will run
away with Jenny. And I tell you this, Brendon: the sooner he does
so, if only he leaves me alone, the better pleased I shall be. A
hideous speech? Yes, very hideous indeed; but perfectly true, like
many hideous things."
"Do you honestly expect that I, who know your wife, am going to
believe this grotesque story?"
"I do not mind whether you believe it or no. Feel as savage as you
please. For that matter I feel rather savage myself. There is a new
ferocity creeping into me. If you keep company with a wolf, you will
soon learn to howl--that's why I howl a good deal in secret, I can
tell you. Soon I shall howl so that everybody will hear. So now you
know how it is with me. I am outside her secrets and feel no wish
whatever to learn them, save as they affect me. If she will give me
a few thousand pounds and let me vanish out of her life, I shall be
delighted to do so. I did not marry her for her money; but since
love is dead, I shall like a little of the cash to start me at
Turin. Then she is free as air. It will pay you quite well to try
and arrange the bargain."
Brendon could hardly believe his ears, but the Italian appeared very
much in earnest. He chattered on for some time. Then he looked at
his watch and declared that he must descend.
"The steamer is coming soon," he said. "Now I leave you and I hope
that I have done good. Think how to help me and yourself. What she
now feels to you I cannot tell. Your turn may come. I trust so. I am
not at all jealous. But be warned. This red man--he is no friend to
you or me. You seek him again to-day. So be it. And if you find him,
be careful of your skin. Not that a man can protect his skin against
fate. We meet at supper."
He swung away, singing a canzonet, and quickly vanished, while
Brendon, overwhelmed by this extraordinary conversation, sat for an
hour motionless and deep in thought. He could hardly plough his path
through what appeared a jungle of flagrant falsehood. But where
another man had striven to find underlying purpose in this diatribe
and consider Doria's object in choosing him for a confessor,
Brendon, while swift enough to regard the attack on Jenny as foul
and false, yet did not hesitate to believe that which his own desire
drove him to believe. He sifted the grain from the chaff, doubtfully
guided by his own passion, and saw the Italian's wife free. But he
could not see her false. He scorned the baleful picture that
Giuseppe had painted and guessed that his purpose was to cut the
ground from under Jenny's feet and accuse her of those identical
crimes that he himself had committed. His attitude to Doria was
affirmed, and from that hour he believed, with Peter Ganns, that the
Italian knew the purposes of the unknown and was assisting him to
achieve them. But again his spirit picked and chose. He did not
remember how Ganns also, though in more temperate words than
Doria's, had warned him for the present to put no trust even in
Jenny. He trusted her as he trusted himself; and that also meant
distrusting her husband.
He considered now his own course of action and presently proceeded
to the region in which Robert Redmayne had been most frequently
reported. Certain appearances were chronicled and, before Ganns
returned to England, the theory had been accepted that the fugitive
hid and dwelt aloft in some fastness with the charcoal burners. Now
Brendon felt the need to probe this opinion and determined, if
possible, to find the lair of the red man.
Not single-handed did he expect to do so. His purpose henceforth was
to watch Doria unseen and so discover whom he served. Thus he would
kill two birds with one stone and simplify action for Peter Ganns
when he returned.
Brendon climbed steadily upward and presently sat down to rest upon
a little, lofty plateau where, in the mountain scrub, grew lilies
of the valley and white sun-rose. Idly he sat and smoked, marked the
steamers creep, like waterman beetles, upon the shiny surface of the
lake stretched far below, watched a brown fox sunning itself on a
stone and then plucked a bunch of the fragrant valley lilies to take
to Jenny that night when he came to sup at the Villa Pianezzo. But
the blossoms never reached the hand of Mrs. Doria.
Suddenly, as he rose from this innocent pastime, Mark became aware
that he was watched and found himself face to face with the object
of his search. Robert Redmayne stood separated from him by a
distance of thirty yards behind the boughs of a breast-high shrub.
He stood bare-headed, peering over the thicket, and the sun shone
upon his fiery red scalp and tawny mustache. There could be no
mistaking the man, and Brendon, rejoicing that daylight would now
enable him to come to grips at last, flung down his bouquet and
leaped straight for the other.
But it appeared that the watcher desired no closer contact. He
turned and ran, heading upward for a wild tract of stone and scrub
that spread beneath the last precipices of the mountain. Straight at
this cliff, as though familiar with some secret channel of escape,
the red man ran and made surprising speed. But Mark found himself
gaining. He strove to run the other down as speedily as possible,
that he might close, with strength still sufficient to win the
inevitable battle that must follow, and effect a capture.
He was disappointed, however, for while still twenty yards behind
and forced to make only a moderate progress over the rocky way he
saw Robert Redmayne suddenly stop, turn and lift a revolver. The
flash of the sun on the barrel and the explosion of the discharge
were simultaneous. As the red man fired, the other flung up his
arms, plunged forward on his face, gave one convulsive tremor
through all his limbs, and moved no more. The discovery, the chase
and its termination had occupied but five minutes; and while one big
man, panting from his exertions, approached only to see that his
fallen victim showed no sign of life, the other, with his face amid
the alpine flowers, remained where he had dropped, his arms
outstretched, his hands clenched, his body still, blood running from
his mouth.
The conqueror took careful note of the spot in which he stood and
bringing a knife from his pocket blazed the stem of a young tree
that rose not very far from his victim. Then he disappeared and
peace reigned above the fallen. So still he lay that another fox,
scared from its siesta, poked a black muzzle round a rock and
sniffed the air; but it trusted not appearances and having
contemplated the recumbent object lifted its head, uttered a dubious
bark and trotted away. From on high an eagle also marked the fallen
man, but swiftly soared upward to the crown of the mountain and
disappeared. The spot was lonely enough, yet a track ran within one
hundred yards and it often happened that charcoal burners and their
mules passed that way to the valleys.
None, however, came now as the sun turned westward and the cool
shadow of the precipice began to creep over the little wilderness at
its feet. Many hours passed and then, after night had flooded the
hollow, there sounded from close at hand strange noises and the
intermittent thud of some metal weapon striking the earth. The din
ascended from a rock which lifted its grey head above a thicket of
juniper; and here, while the flat summit of the boulder began to
shine whitely under the rising moon, a lantern flickered and showed
two shadows busy above the excavation of an oblong hole. They
mumbled together and dug in turn. Then one dark figure came out into
the open, took his bearings, flung lantern light on the blazed tree
trunk, and advanced to a brown, motionless hump lying hard by.
Infinite silence reigned over that uplifted region. Above, near the
summit of the mountain, flashed the red eye of a charcoal burner's
fire; beneath only the plateau sloped to a ragged edge easterly, for
the lake was hidden under the shoulder of the hills. No firefly
danced upon this height; but music there was, for a nightingale
bubbled his liquid notes in a great myrtle not ten yards from where
the still shape lay.
The dark, approaching figure saw the object of his search and came
forward. His purpose was to bury the victim, whom he had lured
hither before destroying, and then remove any trace that might
linger upon the spot where the body lay. He bent down, put his hands
to the jacket of the motionless man, and then, as he exerted his
strength, a strange, hideous thing happened. The body under his
touch dropped to pieces. Its head rolled away; its trunk became
dismembered and he fell backward heaving an amorphous torso into the
air. For, exerting the needful pressure to move a heavy weight, he
found none and tumbled to the ground, holding up a coat stuffed with
grass.
The man was on his feet in an instant, fearing an ambush; but
astonishment opened his mouth.
"Corpo di Bacco!" he cried, and the exclamation rang in a note of
something like terror against the cliffs and upon the ear of his
companion. Yet no swift retribution stayed his steps; no shot rang
out to arrest his progress. He leaped away, dodging and bounding
like a deer to escape the expected bullet and then disappeared
behind the boulder. But neither rascal delayed a moment. Their
mingled steps instantly rang out; then the clatter faded swiftly
upon the night and silence returned.
For ten minutes nothing happened. Next, out of a lair not fifteen
yards from the distorted dummy, rose a figure that shone white as
snow under the moon. Mark Brendon approached the snare that he
himself had set, shook the grass out of his coat, lifted his hat
from the ball of leaves it covered, and presently drew on his
knickerbockers, having emptied them of their stuffing. He was cold
and calm. He had learned more than he expected to learn; for that
startled exclamation left no doubt at all concerning one of the
grave-diggers. It was Giuseppe Doria who had come to move the body,
and there seemed little doubt that Brendon's would-be murderer was
the other.
"'Corpo di Bacco,' perhaps, but not corpo di Brendon, my friend,"
murmured Mark to himself. Then he turned northward, traversed some
harsh thickets that barred the plateau, and reached a mule track, a
mile beneath, which he had discovered before daylight waned. It led
to Menaggio through chestnut woods.
The operations of the detective from the moment that he fell
headlong, apparently to rise no more, may be briefly chronicled.
When his enemy drew up and fired pointblank upon him, the bullet
passed within an inch of Brendon's ear and the memory of a similar
experience flashed into his mind and led to his subsequent action.
On a previous occasion, having been missed at close quarters, he
pretended to be hit and fell apparently lifeless within fifteen
yards of a famous malefactor. The ruse succeeded; the man crept back
to triumph over an inveterate foe and Brendon shot him dead as he
bent to examine a fancied corpse. With a loaded revolver still in
his opponent's hand, he could take no risk on this second occasion
and fell accordingly. His purpose was to tempt the red man back and
if possible secure his weapon before he had time to fire again.
But he was disappointed, for the unknown, seeing Mark crash
headfirst to the ground, and blood run from his mouth, evidently
felt assured that his purpose was accomplished. Brendon had
simulated death for a while, but when satisfied of his assailant's
departure, presently rose, with no worse hurts than a bruised face,
a badly bitten tongue, and a wounded shin.
The situation thus created he weighed in all its bearings and
guessed that those who now believed themselves responsible for his
death would take occasion to remove the evidence of their crime
without much delay. The blazed tree, which he presently noted,
confirmed this suspicion. Nobody had ever seen one of Robert
Redmayne's victims and the last was little likely to be an
exception. Mark guessed that until darkness returned he might expect
to be undisturbed. He walked back, therefore, to his starting-place,
and found the packet of food which he had brought with him and a
flask of red wine left beside it.
After a meal and a pipe he made his plan and presently stood again
on the rough ground beneath the cliffs, where he had pretended so
realistically to perish. He intended no attempt to arrest; but,
having created the effigy of himself and stuffed his knickerbockers
and coat to resemble nature and deceive anybody who might return in
darkness to his corpse, Brendon found a hiding-place near enough to
study what would happen. He expected Redmayne to return and guessed
that another would return with him. His hope was to recognize the
accomplice and prove at least whether Jenny was right in hinting her
husband's secret wickedness, or whether Doria had justly accused her
of collusion with the unknown. It was impossible that both were
speaking the truth.
With infinite satisfaction he heard Giuseppe's voice, and even an
element of grim amusement attended the Italian's shock and his
subsequent snipe-like antics as he leaped to safety before an
anticipated revolver barrage.
The adventure told Brendon much and his first inclination was to
arrest Doria on the following morning; but that desire swiftly
passed. A surer strategy presented itself. From the first
ambition--to get Jenny's husband under lock and key--his mind leaped
to a more workmanlike proposition. He suspected, however, that
Giuseppe might take the initiative and deny him any further
opportunity of bettering their acquaintance; and that night as he
fell asleep with an aching shin and cheek, Mark endeavoured to
consider the situation as it must appear from Doria's angle of
vision. Much temporal comfort resulted for him from this
examination.
It seemed clear that Doria and Redmayne were working to destroy
Albert Redmayne for their common advantage. Let the old book lover
disappear and Robert and his niece would be the last of the
Redmaynes to share the fortune of the vanished brothers. Robert,
indeed, could have no open part in these advantages, for he was
outlawed; but it would be possible for him, in process of time,
when Jenny inherited all three estates and Robert, Bendigo and
Albert were alike held to be deceased in the eyes of the law, to
share the fortune in secret with his niece and her husband. This
view explained the prescience of Peter Ganns and his surprise that
Albert Redmayne should still be in the land of the living. Ganns,
however, was proved mistaken in one vital particular, for there
could no longer be any reasonable doubt that Robert Redmayne still
lived.
Utterly mistaken as Brendon's theories ultimately proved to be, they
bore to his weary brain the stamp of truth and he next proceeded to
consider Doria's future attitude before the problem now awaiting him
and his companion in crime. Doria could not be sure that he had been
recognized or even seen when approaching the supposed corpse of
Redmayne's victim; and, in any case, under the darkness, no man
might certainly swear that it was Doria who came to dig the grave
and dispose of the body. Brendon confessed to himself that only
Giuseppe's startled oath had proved his presence, and Jenny's
husband might well be expected to offer a sound alibi if arrested.
He judged, therefore, that Doria would deny any knowledge of the
incident; and time proved that Mark was right enough in that
prediction.