FROM OUT THE PAST
That night John Ambrose sat silent, motionless, and thoughtful at
the bedside of his unconscious friend.
He had been found by one of the dogs lying unconscious in the woods,
four kilometres distant. Apparently he had been on his way home, and
had dropped from exhaustion. He was without his cassock, a fact which
had given rise to much comment in the village.
“He will explain it all when he comes to his senses,” they said. The
doctor from Acquapendente had been summoned, and had sat for half an
hour in that bare little upstairs room declaring that his patient had
evidently suffered some severe shock. Restoratives applied were all to
no purpose. He was white and pulseless, his heart beating only
faintly.
“To what, in your opinion, doctor, is the attack due?” Ambrose asked
anxiously.
“Ah! _caro signore_, I really cannot tell. Perhaps some sudden
fright--perhaps the effect of exhaustion. It can only be cured by
complete rest.”
So the unsuspecting medico had prescribed, and left the _curato_ to
the care of old Teresa and his guest. Medical science is not very
advanced in the obscurer villages in Central Italy, and the diagnosis
of the doctor from Acquapendente was by no means a correct one.
Old Teresa remained below, but the hunchback came and went
noiselessly, inquiring from time to time after the health of the
_padrone_, while the Englishman sat anxiously watching his closest
friend.
What had occurred? What sudden fright could Don Mario have possibly
sustained?
The more superstitious in the village were declaring that the priest
had encountered the Evil One himself in the woods, and that Satan had
triumphed. But the others shook their heads dubiously and scented
mystery.
In the long watches of the night John Ambrose sat motionless, watching
intently the prostrate unconscious man who had been found lying across
the narrow footpath leading through the wood towards Monteleone. His
body had been drawn up, as though by pain, his white bony fingers
clenched into the palms.
Once, only once since he had been laid upon his own narrow, little
iron bedstead had he shown signs of life--a deep, long-drawn sigh.
Still his faithful friend watched by him, ever anxious for returning
consciousness.
The face upon the pillow was deadly pale, the nose more hooked than
usual, the sallow cheeks sunken, the eyes half-closed.
As John Ambrose gazed around the bare little whitewashed chamber where
a small red light burned before the time-blackened ancient picture of
the Madonna and Child, whereon had been placed a dead spray of
flowers, he could not help his thoughts running back a good many
years.
The doctor from Acquapendente had expressed a fear that the _curato_
was dying. He might never recover consciousness, he had declared
before he left--promising to return again at dawn.
And as John Ambrose sat with his gaze upon the thin, pale face, just
discernible in the dim light of the oil lamp, there arose before him
the vision of an autumn day long ago, when Ellersdale, his great
ancestral mansion in Dorsetshire--one of the show places of
England--had been filled by a gay shooting-party; for he usually gave
two each pheasant season.
Prime Minister of England, a bachelor, owner of one of the finest
estates in the kingdom, and the trusted friend and adviser of his
Sovereign, his was surely the proudest position a man could hold.
Among his guests were many notable people, as well as his youngest
brother, the Honourable Rollo Lambton, with his wife and infant
daughter, Irene, and not least among those noteworthy guests was
Father Mellini, the fashionable Roman Catholic preacher. A man of
elegant and commanding presence, good-looking beyond the average, he
was highly popular among the women of smart society who fêted and
lionised him.
Political duties had recalled the Earl to Downing Street, but he had
been absent from his guests only one day when, at evening, on stepping
from his carriage and entering the great vaulted hall at Ellersdale,
Hinkson, his butler, had handed him a note.
Opening it, he found a few brief words of farewell from Don Mario, who
explained that he had been suddenly called to London by the Cardinal
at Westminster, who wished to see him. The Earl expressed no surprise,
for Father Mellini’s movements were often erratic, as he laughingly
told his other guests over the dinner-table that night.
Three nights later--ah! how well he recollected that fateful
evening--a strange incident occurred. All the other guests had left
the smoking-room and retired when, as was his habit, he had invited
his brother Rollo into his own den, a small, cosy oak-panelled room,
for a final cigar before turning in.
He noticed that Rollo, tall, thin and athletic, was somewhat annoyed,
and attributed it to the fact that he had been unlucky at bridge. But
he flung himself into the big arm-chair before the fire, took a cigar
from the box, bit off the end viciously and applied a match to it. He
had always been against his brother’s marriage with the giddy,
ill-bred little woman, who was a Catholic and had been bred in the
suburbs of London, and now, as he had predicted, she flirted
outrageously, and caused poor Rollo much pain and anxiety. He had
mentioned it on the previous night, and his remarks had led to some
angry words between them--words that were overheard by two of the
guests.
They had been smoking together for five minutes or so, in that silent,
old-world room to which he always retired when desirous of quiet, and
Rollo had just poured out his whisky and soda, when he suddenly
uttered a strange cry, and, half-rising from his chair, fell back,
gasping that he had been seized by a strange pain in the throat.
The cigar had fallen from his fingers, and with both hands he was
tearing at his collar convulsively. Lord Ellersdale, greatly alarmed,
loosened it, and gave his brother a draught of soda-water. But the
sharp agony increased, his limbs shook, and he complained of shooting,
excruciating pains down the back.
“Get a doctor, John--quick!” he managed to gasp. “I--I believe I’m
dying!”
The Earl rang the bell violently, but before any of the servants
arrived his brother Rollo had collapsed and breathed his last.
His wife, the pretty, fair-haired young woman in her pale blue
dressing-gown--the woman whose flirtations had scandalised the whole
house-party--threw herself beside him, almost insane with grief. It
was indeed a terrible scene. Try how he would, he could never
forget--never. Neither could he rid himself of those painful
recollections of all that followed; of the inquest; of the evidence of
the Home Office analyst that the cigar smoked by the dead man had been
impregnated with some most deadly substance--some unknown neurotic
poison. Then the local police had visited Ellersdale, seized the box
of cigars, and found another of them to have been prepared, while on
searching his lordship’s den, they discovered, locked in one of the
drawers of an old buhl cabinet, a tiny glass-stoppered phial,
half-filled with some brown liquid, which proved to be the poison used
upon the cigars.
The discovery staggered him. He alone had kept the key of that
cabinet, yet he had no knowledge whatever of possessing poison. How it
had come there he could not tell. His reputation, both as Prime
Minister of England and as a private citizen, was now at stake. He
knew that the quarrel with his brother regarding the latter’s wife had
been overheard--therefore the circumstantial evidence against him was
complete. He was quick to realise the worst.
In his intense agony of mind, and in hourly fear of arrest and
consequent scandal upon his political party, he sought his old and
most intimate friend, Gilbert Cunningham, an Under-Secretary of State,
who was one of the house-party. He, in turn, consulted Sir Frank
Nesbitt, and they, in the very strictest confidence, interviewed the
Home Secretary, the result being that the warrant already issued for
Lord Ellersdale’s arrest was suspended for a week.
Then Cunningham and Nesbitt had come down to Ellersdale. Ah! how
vividly he recollected that tragic interview in his own great brown
library where, with locked doors, they told him frankly that his
innocence would never be believed by a jury, that it was alleged he
had killed his brother at the instigation of the latter’s wife, and
that the only way to escape arrest and trial was--suicide!
At first he vehemently protested, but the pair sat inexorable,
sphinx-like. Then they told him an amazing fact. His sister-in-law had
made a statement seriously incriminating him, they said. The Party
must not suffer. On hearing that, he bowed to their decision, and
announced boldly that he would rather die by his own hand than bring
scandal and shame upon his political friends. One thing he asked--that
the Sovereign should not be told.
And so it was that his illness was announced, and soon afterwards the
papers reported his unexpected death. Yet, so well was the whole
secret kept--the two doctors receiving big fees for their certificate,
and the undertakers for not looking inside the coffin--that not half a
dozen people knew how he had been hounded to his end, or that any
allegation had been brought against him. The Sovereign sent a
representative with a wreath to his funeral, and even his great
friend, Sir George Ravenscourt, remained in ignorance, for Cunningham
and Nesbitt kept their oath of silence. Two years later both had died,
within a few months of each other.
From the position of Prime Minister and holder of the Earldom of
Ellersdale, with a handsome income, a deer-forest in Scotland, and a
villa at Cannes, the broken man passed, in one single hour, to the
obscurity of Richard Goodrick, the eccentric lodger in Charlwood
Street, Pimlico. His elder brother succeeded to the great estates,
while the suburban woman who had made that mysterious and
incriminating statement regarding him went abroad, taking with her her
little child.
Three years later she died of phthisis in Geneva, and little Irene,
left an orphan, had been brought to England by Sir George and Lady
Ravenscourt, who adopted her. It was then that, under the guise of the
inoffensive John Ambrose, old Richard Goodrick sought the child out in
the park, and ever afterwards kept up that strangely romantic
acquaintance.
He still had one firm, faithful friend in Don Mario, who, however,
had, soon after his “burial,” fallen into disgrace at the Vatican, and
had, alas! been exiled back to that obscure parish in Italy. Yet the
one bright spot in his aimless, broken life was the meeting in the
park with little Maidee--his pretty, merry-eyed niece, who always
called him “Uncle John.”
Through all those long years of weary obscurity and oblivion, the
_curato_ of Santa Lucia had never ceased to stand his friend. At
infrequent intervals the priest would escape from his barbaric parish
in the Umbrian hills and travel post-haste to Denbigh Street, there to
be near his old friend--to talk over the past, and to gossip, as in
bygone days, when both were great and honoured men.
Don Mario, the man now lying between life and death, was the only
living person who knew the truth--who was aware of the real cause of
the death of the Earl of Ellersdale, or that, though the fine monument
stood to perpetuate his memory in Westminster Abbey, yet he was still
alive.
Alas! even he, the devout cleric, his only friend, was now being taken
from him!
They had undressed him and laid him upon his narrow, meagre bed.
How different were their positions eighteen years ago--he Prime
Minister of England, and the silent, unconscious man there one of the
most popular preachers in the United Kingdom.
His own brilliant career had been cut short by that amazing conspiracy
which had arisen against him. Someone must have placed those two
prepared cigars in the box--someone must have opened that cabinet by
means of a false key and hidden the phial therein. For what reason?
Either to fix the crime of murder upon him, in order to ruin him both
politically and socially, and bring him to the gallows, or perhaps to
make it apparent that he himself had wilfully committed suicide.
Somewhere a secret enemy had lurked behind him. But he had been unable
to trace his identity. Most probably it had been a political
conspiracy, he thought.
Yet what mattered? His two friends Cunningham and Nesbitt believed him
to be the murderer of Rollo, so he had bowed bitterly to the fate to
which they had condemned him. From the police they had obtained back
that tiny phial which they had handed to him so that he might take his
own life by the same means as that of his brother had been taken.
Could a man’s public career have ended more tragically?
The old man drew a long, deep sigh as he reviewed the past, his
deep-set eyes fixed upon the motionless form of the priest lying upon
that narrow bed.
Old Teresa, with sun-browned, wrinkled face, moved noiselessly,
stopped to peer in, but uttered no word.
She saw the Signor Inglese bent, with his brow upon his hands--bent
beside her _padrone_, his friend.
She heard him mutter low, broken words in English, but she could not
understand them.
She only knew instinctively that her old _padrone_ was slowly dying.
The words uttered by the old Englishman were:
“God forgive me! God forgive!”