Orsino's gloved hand trembled violently as he pushed aside the tangle of
sweetbrier, trying to reach the place where the man upon whom he had
fired had fallen.
'Let me go first,' said San Giacinto. 'I am bigger and my gloves are
thicker.'
But Orsino pushed on, his heart beating so hard that he felt the pulse
in his throat and his eyes. He had been cool enough when the bullets had
been flying across the carriage, and his hand had been quite steady when
he had aimed at the black something moving stealthily in the bushes. But
the sensation of having killed a man, and in such a way, was horrible to
him. He pushed on, scratching his face and his wrists above his gloves,
in the sharp thorns. The bushes were more than breast high, even to his
tall figure, but San Giacinto could see over his head.
'There!' exclaimed the giant, suddenly. 'There he is--to your right--I
can see him!'
Orsino pushed on, and in another moment his foot struck something hard
that moved a little, but was not a stone. It was the dead man's foot in
a heavy shooting-boot.
They found him quite dead, not fallen to the ground, but half sitting
and half lying in the thorns. He had fallen straight backwards, shot
through the temples. The eyes were wide open, but without light, the
handsome face perfectly colourless, and the silky, brown moustache hid
the relaxed mouth. His rifle stood upright in the bush as it had fallen
from his hand. His soft hat was still firmly planted on the back of his
head.
Orsino was stupefied with horror and stood quite still, gazing at the
dead man's face. San Giacinto looked down over his shoulders.
'He looks like a gentleman,' he said in a low voice.
The chill of a terrible presentiment froze about Orsino's heart. As he
looked, the handsome features became familiar, all at once, as though he
had often seen them before.
'We had better get him out to the road,' said San Giacinto. 'The
carabineers may identify him. The sooner, the better, though you were
perfectly justified in shooting him.'
He laid his hand upon Orsino's shoulder to make him move a little, and
the young man started. Then he bit his trembling lip and stooped to try
and lift the body. As he touched the velveteen coat, the head fell
suddenly to one side, and Orsino uttered an involuntary exclamation. He
had never moved a dead man before.
'It is nothing,' said San Giacinto, quietly. 'He is quite dead. Take his
feet.'
He pushed past Orsino and lifted the head and shoulders, beginning to
move towards the road at once, walking backwards and breaking down the
bushes with his big shoulders. They got him out upon the road. The
carriage horses were standing quite still, with their heads hanging down
as though nothing had happened. They had plunged a little at first. In
the road before them stood the trooper who had been thrown, holding his
own and another charger by the bridle. The cause of the accident was
clear enough. A pit had been treacherously dug across the road and
covered with sticks and wood, so as to be invisible. Fortunately the
horse had escaped injury. The others were tethered by their bridles to
the back of the carriage. In the brush, far to the right, the tall
bushes were moving, showing where the other four carabineers were
searching for the outlaws who had fired, if, indeed there had been more
than one.
They laid the dead man in the middle of the road, on the other side of
the ditch, out of reach of the horses' feet, and the trooper watched
them without speaking, though with a satisfied look of approval.
'Do you know him?' asked San Giacinto, addressing the soldier.
'No, Signor Marchese. But I have not been long on this station. The
brigadiere will know him, and will be glad. I came to take the place of
the man they killed last week.'
Orsino looked curiously at the young carabineer, who took matters so
quietly, when he himself was struggling hard to seem calm. He would not
have believed that he could ever have felt such inward weakness and
horror as filled him, and he could not trust himself to speak, yet he
had no reason to doubt that he had saved his own life or San Giacinto's
by firing in time.
'I see why the other ones fired so wildly,' said San Giacinto. 'They
were afraid of hitting their friend, who was to do the real work alone,
while they led the carabineers off on a false scent on the other side.
This fellow felt quite safe. He thought he could creep up to the
carriage and make sure of us at close quarters. He did not expect that
one of us would be on the lookout.'
'That is a common trick,' said the soldier. 'I have seen it done at
Noto. It must have been a single person that fired, and this man was
also alone. If he had been with a companion, the gentleman's shot would
have been answered and one of you would have been killed.'
'Then it was the other man who was waiting on horseback in the road to
warn this one of our coming?'
'Evidently, Signor Marchese.'
Still Orsino stood quite still, gazing down into the dead man's face,
and feeling very unsteady. Just then nothing else seemed to have any
existence for him, and he was unaware of all outward things excepting
that one thing that lay there, limp and helpless, killed by his hand in
the flash of an instant. And as he gazed, he fancied that the young
features in their death pallor grew more and more familiar, and at his
own heart there was a freezing and a stiffening, as though he were
turning into ice from within.
The sergeant and the troopers came back, covered with brambles, hot and
grim, and empty-handed.
'Did any of you fire that other shot?' he asked, as soon as he was in
the road.
'I did,' said Orsino. 'I killed this man.'
The sergeant sprang forward, and his men pressed after him to see. The
sergeant bent down and examined the dead face attentively. Then he
looked up.
'You have killed rather an important person,' he said gravely. 'This is
Ferdinando Pagliuca. We knew that he was on good terms with the outlaws,
but we could not prove it against him.'
'Oh, yes,' said Tatò, the padrone, suddenly appearing again. 'That is
Don Ferdinando. I know him very well, for I have often driven him. Who
would have thought it?'
Orsino had heard nothing after the sergeant had pronounced the name. He
almost reeled against San Giacinto, and gripped the latter's arm
desperately, his face almost as white as the dead man's. Even San
Giacinto started in surprise. Then Orsino made a great effort and
straightened himself, and walked away a few paces.
'This is a bad business,' said San Giacinto in a preoccupied tone. 'We
shall have the whole mafia against us for this. Has the other man
escaped?'
'Clean gone,' said the sergeant. 'You had better luck than we, for we
never saw him. He must have fired his shots from his horse and bolted
instantly. We could not have got through the brush with our horses.'
Orsino went and leaned against the carriage, shading his eyes with his
hands, while San Giacinto and the soldiers talked over what had
happened. The sergeant set a couple of men to work on the brambles with
their sabres, to cut a way for the carriage on one side of the pitfall
that covered the road.
'Put the body into the carriage,' said San Giacinto. 'We can walk. It is
not far.' He roused Orsino, who seemed to be half stunned.
'Come, my boy!' he said, drawing him away from the carriage as the
soldiers were about to lay the body in it. 'Of course it is not
pleasant, but it cannot be helped, and you have rendered the government
a service, though you have got us into an awkward position with the
Corleone.'
'Awkward!' Orsino's voice was hoarse and broken. 'You do not know!' he
added.
San Giacinto did not understand, but made him fall back behind the
carriage, which jolted horribly with its dead occupant, as Tatò forced
his horses to drag it round the end of the ditch. The carabineers, still
distrustful of the thick trees and the underbush, carried their rifles
and led their horses, and the whole party proceeded slowly along the
drive towards the ancient house. It might have been a quarter of a mile
distant. Orsino walked the whole way in silence with bent head and set
lips.
They emerged upon a wide open space, overgrown with grass, wild flowers,
and rank weeds, through which a narrow path led straight up to the main
door. There had been a carriage road once, following a wide curve, but
it had long been disused, and even the path was not much trodden, and
the grass was beginning to grow in it.
The front of the house presented a broad, rough-plastered surface,
broken by but few windows, all of which were high above the ground. The
tower was not visible from this side. From the back, the sound of water
came up with a steady, low roar. The door was, in fact, a great oak
gate, studded with big rusty nails, paintless, gray, and weather-beaten.
Regardless of old Basili's advice, San Giacinto walked straight up to
it, followed by the notary's man with the bunch of keys.
The loneliness of it all was beyond description, and was, if possible,
enhanced by the roar of the water. The air was damp, too, from the
torrent bed, and near one end of the house there were great patches of
moss. At the other side, towards the sun, the remains of what had been a
vegetable garden were visible, rank broccoli and cabbages thrusting up
their bunches of pale green leaves, broken trellises of cane, half
fallen in, and overgrown with tomato vines and wild creeping plants. A
breath of air brought a smell of rotting vegetables and damp earth to
San Giacinto's nostrils, as he tried one key after another in the lock.
They got in at last, and entered under a gloomy archway, beyond which
there was a broad courtyard, where the grass grew between the
flagstones. In the middle was an ancient well, on the right a
magnificently carved doorway led into the old chapel of the monastery.
On the left, opposite the chapel, a long row of windows, with closed
shutters in fairly good condition, showed the position of the habitable
rooms.
'Is that a church?' asked San Giacinto of Basili's man. 'Take the dead
man in and leave him there,' he added, as the man nodded and began to
look for the key on the bunch.
They took Ferdinando Pagliuca's body from the carriage, which stood in
the middle of the courtyard, and carried it in and laid it down on the
uppermost step of one of the side altars, of which there were three.
Orsino followed them.
It was a very dilapidated place. There had once been a few frescoes,
which were falling from the walls with age and dampness. High up,
through the open windows from which the glass had long since
disappeared, the swallows shot in and out, bringing a dark gleam of
sunshine on their sharp, black wings. Although the outer air had free
access, there was a heavy, death-like smell of mould in the place. The
altars were dismantled and the gray dust lay thick upon them, with
fragments of plaster here and there. Only on the high altar a
half-broken wooden candlestick, once silvered, stood bending over, and a
little glazed frame still contained a mouldering printed copy of the
Canon of the Mass. In the middle of the floor a round slab of marble,
with two greenish bolts of brass, bore the inscription, 'Ossa R. R. P.
P.' covering the pit wherein lay the bones of the departed monks who had
once dwelt in the monastery.
The troopers laid Ferdinando's body upon the stone steps in silence, and
then went away, for there was much to be done. Orsino stayed behind,
alone, for his cousin had not even entered the church. He knelt down for
a few moments on the lowest step. It seemed a sort of act of reverence
to the man whom he had killed. Mechanically he said a prayer for the
dead.
But his thoughts were of the living. The man who lay there was Vittoria
d'Oriani's brother, the brother of his future wife, of the being he held
most dear in the world. Between him and her there was her own blood,
shed by his hand. The shot had done more than kill Ferdinando Pagliuca;
it had mortally wounded his own life.
He asked himself whether Vittoria, or any woman, could marry the man who
had killed her brother. In time, she might forgive, indeed, but she
could not forget. No one could. And there were her other brothers, and
her mother, and they were Sicilians, revengeful and long pursuing in
their revenge. Never, under any imaginable circumstances, would they
give their consent to his marriage with Vittoria, even supposing that
she herself, in the course of years, could blot out the memory of the
dead. He might as well make up his mind that she was lost to him.
But that was hard to do, for the roots of growing love had struck deep
and burrowed themselves in under his heart almost unawares, from week to
week since he had known her, and to tear them up was to tear out the
heart itself.
He went to the other side of the dim chapel and rested his dark forehead
against the mouldering wall. It was as though he were going mad then and
there. He drew himself up and said, almost aloud, that he was a man and
must act like a man. No one had ever accused him of being unmanly, and
he could not tamely bear the accusation from himself.
All the old hackneyed phrases of cynical people he had known came back
to him. 'Only one woman, and the world was full of them'--and much to
that same effect. And all the time he knew that such words could never
fit his lips, and that though the world was full of women, there was
only one for him, and between her and him lay the barrier of her own
brother's blood.
He turned as he stood, and saw the straight, dark figure, with its
folded hands, lying on the steps of the altar opposite--the outward
fact, as his love for Vittoria was the inward truth.
The horror of it all came over him again like a surging wave, roaring in
his ears and deafening him. It could have been but one degree worse if
Vittoria's brother had been his friend, instead of his enemy, and if he
had killed him in anger.
He remembered that he had expected to send his mother a long and
reassuring telegram on this day, and that he had told Vittoria that she
should go to the Palazzo Saracinesca and hear news of him. There was a
telegraph station at Santa Vittoria, three-quarters of a mile from
Camaldoli, but he was confronted by the difficulty of sending any clear
message which should not contain an allusion to Ferdinando Pagliuca's
death, since the carabineers would be obliged to report the fact at
once, and it would be in the Roman papers on the following morning.
That was a new and terrible thought. There would be the short
telegraphic account of how Don Orsino Saracinesca had been attacked by
brigands in a narrow road and had shot one of the number, who turned out
to be Ferdinando Corleone. Her mother, who always read the papers, would
read that too. Then her brothers--then Vittoria. And his own mother
would see it--his head seemed bursting. And there lay the fact, the
source of these inevitable things, cold and calm, with the death smile
already stealing over its white face.
San Giacinto stalked in, looking about him, and the sound of his tread
roused Orsino.
'Come,' he said, rather sternly. 'There is much to be done. I could not
find you. The man is dead; you did right in killing him, and we must
think of our own safety.'
'What do you mean?' asked Orsino, in a dull voice. 'We are safe enough,
it seems to me.'
'The sergeant does not seem to think so,' answered San Giacinto. 'Before
night it will be known that Ferdinando Pagliuca is dead, and we may have
half the population of Santa Vittoria about our ears. Fortunately this
place will stand a siege. Two of the troopers have gone to the village
to try and get a reinforcement, and to bring the doctor to report the
death, so that we can bury the man. Come--come with me! We will shut the
church up till the doctor comes, and think no more about it.'
He saw that Orsino was strangely moved by what had happened, and he drew
him out into the air. The carriage was being unloaded by Tatò and the
notary's man, and the horses had all disappeared. The sergeant and the
two remaining troopers were busy clearing out a big room which opened
upon the court, with the intention of turning it into a guardroom.
Orsino looked at them indifferently. A renewed danger would have roused
him, but nothing else could. San Giacinto led him away to show him the
buildings.
'Your nerves have been shaken,' said the older man. 'But you will soon
get over that. I remember once upon a time being a good deal upset
myself, when a man whom I had caught in mischief suddenly killed himself
almost in my hands.'
'I shall get over it, as you say,' answered Orsino. 'Give me one of
those strong cigars of yours, will you?'
He would have given a good deal to have been able to confide in San
Giacinto and tell him the real trouble. Had he been sure that any
immediate good could come of it, he would have spoken; but it seemed to
him, on the contrary, that to speak of Vittoria might make matters
worse. They wandered over the dark old place for half an hour. At the
back, over the torrent, there was one long wall with a rampart,
terminating in the evil-looking Druse's tower. The trees grew thick over
the stream, and there was only one opening in the wall, closed by double
low doors with heavy bolts. The whole building was, in reality, a
tolerably strong fortress, built round the four sides of a single great
courtyard, to which there was but one entrance,--besides the little
postern over the river.
'I should like to send a telegram to Rome,' said Orsino, suddenly. 'It
is not too late for them to get it to-night.'
'You can send it to Santa Vittoria by the doctor, when he goes back.'
Orsino went down into the court and got a writing-case out of his bag.
It seemed convenient to write on the seat of the carriage, but just as
he was going to place his writing things there, he saw that there were
dark wet spots on the cushions. He shuddered, and turned away in
disgust, and wrote his message, leaning on the stone brink of the well.
He telegraphed that San Giacinto and he had arrived and were well, that
they had met with an attack, and that he himself had killed a man. But
he did not write Ferdinando's name. That seemed useless.
The doctor arrived, and the carabineers brought a couple of men of the
foot brigade to strengthen the little garrison. As they entered, San
Giacinto saw that four rough-looking peasants were standing outside the
gate, conversing and looking up to the windows; grim, clean-shaven,
black-browed men of the poorer class, for they had no guns and wore
battered hats and threadbare blue cloaks. San Giacinto handed the doctor
over to the sergeant and went outside at once. The men stared in silence
at the gigantic figure that faced them. In his rough dark clothes and
big soft hat, San Giacinto looked more vast than ever, and his bold and
sombre features and stern black eyes completed the impression he made on
the hill men. He looked as though he might have been the chief of all
the outlaws in Sicily.
'Listen!' he said, stepping up to them. 'This place is mine now, for I
have bought it and paid for it, and I mean to keep it. Your friend
Ferdinando Pagliuca is dead. After consenting to the sale, he dug a
pitfall in the carriage road to stop us, and he and a friend of his
attacked us. We shot him, and you can go and look at his body in the
chapel, in there, if you have curiosity about him. There are eleven men
of us here, seven being carabineers, and we have plenty of ammunition,
so that it will not be well for anyone who troubles us. Tell your
friends so. This is going to be a barrack, and there will be a company
of infantry here before long, and there will be a railway before two
years. Tell your friends that also. I suppose you are men from the
Camaldoli farms.'
Two of the peasants nodded, but said nothing.
'If you want work, begin and clear away those bushes. You will know
where there are tools. Here is money, if you will begin at once. If you
do not want money, say what you do want. But if you want nothing, go, or
I shall shoot you.'
He suddenly had a big army revolver in one hand, and he pulled out a
loose bank note with the other.
'But I prefer that we should be good friends,' he concluded, 'for I have
much work for everybody, and plenty of money to pay for it.'
The men were not cowards, but they were taken unawares by San Giacinto's
singular speech. They looked at each other, and at the bushes. One of
them threw his head back a little, thrusting out his chin, which
signifies a negation. The shortest of the four, a broad-shouldered,
tough-looking fellow stepped before the rest.
'We will work for you, but we will not cut down the bushes. We will do
any other work than that. You will not find anybody here who will cut
down the bushes.'
'Why not?' asked San Giacinto.
'Eh--it is so,' said the man, with a peculiar expression.
The other three shrugged their shoulders and nodded silently, but kept
their eyes on San Giacinto's revolver.
'We are good people,' continued the man. 'We wish to be friends with
every one, and since you have bought the estate, and own the land on
which we live, we shall pay our rent, when we have anything wherewith to
pay, and when we have not, God will provide. But as for the bushes, we
cannot cut them down. We wish to be friends with every one. But as for
that, signore, if you have no axes nor hedging knives, we have them. We
will bring them, and then we will go away and do any other work for you.
Thus we shall not cut down the bushes, but perhaps the bushes will be
cut down.'
San Giacinto laughed a little, and the big revolver went back into his
pocket.
'I see that we shall be friends, then,' he said. 'When you have brought
the hatchets, then you can come inside and help to clean the house. Then
I will give you this money for your work this evening and to-morrow.'
The men spoke rapidly together in dialect, so that San Giacinto could
not understand them. Then the spokesman addressed him again.
'Signore,' he said, 'we will bring the hatchets to the door, but it is
late to clean the house this evening. We do not want the money to-night.
We will return in the morning and work for you.'
'There are three hours of daylight yet,' observed San Giacinto. 'You
could do something in that time, I should think.'
'An hour and a half,' replied the man. 'It is late,' he added. 'It is
very late.'
The other three nodded. San Giacinto understood perfectly that there
was some other reason, but did not insist. He fancied that they were
suspicious of his own intentions with regard to them, and he let them go
without further words.
As he turned back, the village doctor appeared under the arch, leading
his mule. He was a pale young fellow from Messina, who had been three or
four years at Santa Vittoria. San Giacinto offered him an escort back to
the village, but he refused.
'If I could not go about alone, my usefulness would be over,' he said.
'It is quite safe now. They will probably kill me the next time there is
a cholera season.'
'Why?'
'They are convinced that the government sends them the cholera through
the doctors, to thin the population,' answered the young man, with a
dreary smile.
'What a country! It is worse than Naples.'
'In some ways, far worse. In others, much better.'
'In what way is it better?' asked San Giacinto, with some curiosity.
'They are terrible enemies,' said the doctor, 'but they can be very
devoted friends, too.'
'Oh--we have had a taste of their enmity first. I hope we may see
something of their friendship before long.'
'I doubt it, Signor Marchese. You will have the people against you from
first to last, and your position is dangerous. Ferdinando Corleone was
popular, and he had the outlaws on his side. I have no doubt that many
of the band have been hidden here. It is a lonely and desolate house,
full of queer hiding-places. By the bye, are you going to bury that poor
man here? Shall I send people down from Santa Vittoria with a coffin, to
carry him up to the cemetery?'
'You know the country. What should you advise me to do? We must give him
Christian burial, I suppose.'
'I should be inclined to lift up the slab in the church and quietly drop
him down among the monks,' said the doctor. 'That would be Christian
burial enough for him. But you had better consult the sergeant about it.
If he is taken up to Santa Vittoria, there will be a great public
funeral, and all the population will follow, as though he were a martyr.
If you bury him without a priest, they will say that you not only
murdered him treacherously, but got rid of his body by stealth. Consult
the sergeant, Signor Marchese. That is best.'
The doctor mounted his mule and rode away. San Giacinto closed and
barred the great gate himself before he went back into the court. He
found Orsino in the midst of a discussion with the sergeant, regarding
the same question of the disposal of the body.
'I know his family,' Orsino was saying. 'Some of them are friends of
mine. He must be decently buried by a priest. I insist upon it.'
The sergeant repeated what the doctor had said, namely, that a public
funeral would produce something like a popular demonstration.
'I should not care if it produced a revolution,' answered Orsino. 'I
killed the man like a dog, not knowing who he was, but I will not have
him buried like one. If you are afraid of the village, let them send
their priest down here, dig a grave under the floor of the church, and
bury him there. But he shall not be dropped into a hole like a dead rat
without a blessing. Besides, it is not legal--there are all sorts of
severe regulations--'
'There is one against burying any one within a church,' observed the
sergeant. 'But the worst that could happen would be that you might have
to pay a fine. It shall be as you please, signore. In the morning we
will get a priest and a coffin, and bury him under the church. I have
the doctor's certificate in my pocket.'
Orsino was satisfied, and went away to be alone again, not caring where.
But San Giacinto and the carabineers proceeded to turn the great court
into something like a camp. There were all sorts of offices, kitchens,
bake-houses, oil-presses, and storerooms, which opened directly upon the
paved space. The men collected old wood and kindling stuff to make a
fire, and prepared to cook some of the provisions which San Giacinto had
brought for the night, while he and the sergeant determined on the best
positions for sentries.
Orsino wandered about the great rooms upstairs. They were half
dismantled and much dilapidated, but not altogether unfurnished.
Ferdinando had retired some days previously to the village and had taken
what he needed for his own use, but had left the rest. There was a
tolerably furnished room immediately above the great gate. Orsino opened
the window wide, and leaned out, breathing the outer air with a certain
sense of relief from oppression. Watching the swallows that darted down
from under the eaves to the weed-grown lawn, and up again with meteor
speed, and catching in his face the last reflections of the sun, which
was sinking fast between two distant hills, he could almost believe that
it had all been a bad dream. He could at least try to believe it for a
little while.
But the sun went down quickly, though it still blazed full on the
enormous snowy dome of Etna, opposite the window; and the chill of
evening came on while it was yet day, and with it came back the memory
of the coldly smiling, handsome face of dead Ferdinando Pagliuca, and
the terrible suggestion of a likeness to Vittoria, which had struck at
Orsino's heart when he had found him in the bushes, shot through the
head. It all came back with a sudden, drowning rush that was
overwhelming. He turned from the window, and, to occupy himself, he went
and got his belongings and tried to make the room habitable. He knew
that it was in a good position for the night, since it was not likely
that he should sleep much, and he could watch the gate from the window,
for his share of the defence.