Persons Unknown Part 57

Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the gla.s.sy face taking aim behind the shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across the drive.

There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and rea.s.sumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet they don't attack!"

Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or is it dark with men?"

"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick.

It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the brightness of the steps the stone and then the gra.s.sy terraces fell indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form--they were the shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!"

One group pa.s.sed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a crouching, irregular line behind its f.a.ggot-like shields of broken boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky.

Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness, "The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf.

The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois.

The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina who first said, "Some one else is in this room!"

As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed.

He was making horrible motions with his mouth; Christina found some unspilled wine and thrust the edge of the gla.s.s between his lips. "Tell me! Nancy--?"

Kane held up his hand. Beyond, in the pantry, a step sounded--backing from Nicola's trail. Herrick and the sheriff dragged in between them a tall Sicilian whose triangular knife was still wet. The embroidered table-cloth with which they bound him to the piano strained under his renewed efforts to attack the dying man whom Christina still entreated, "Is she with my sister? Is she?"

A hoa.r.s.e sob raged through Nicola and gasped past his last grin of pride and hate. "You fool of hers! Fool of us all! _Your_ sister? _My_ sister, mine! You think _you_ ever have a sister like that?"

The girl stood above him, tranced and wide-eyed, with distended nostrils; as she turned to Herrick a face which release and knowledge were even then palely lighting the figure of a man darted into the gallery where Herrick had lain; a slim, soft man whose pretty little face was all flecked and sweated with the insane hate and courage which come of insane fear. The Sicilian greeted what he took for reinforcement with a cry of triumph and encouragement; but it was not Nicola, it was Herrick at whom this tremulous a.s.sa.s.sin, yelling "Spy! Spy! Will you show me again to the Camorra?" extended his revolver. At the same moment, Nicola, turning on his side and aiming upward, shot him dead.

The slim, soft figure doubled over the rail and the refined, pretty, convulsed face swung there with open mouth. At this Nicola spat the wine which he had sucked as he lay: "Thus my sister salutes thee!" Then his head knocked back upon the floor and he lay still.

The tall Sicilian, who had watched the action without fully understanding the quick English words, now strained forward, peering with a kind of gratified thirst into Christina's face. He said to her in Italian that was almost a whisper, "You are very fair!"

"Do you think that is news to me?" asked the girl, with a kind of fury.

"But my fairness has done all it can! What's to do, now?"

"You are fair. But you are the devil. You brought police to the river, who will return with more. You have plunged this night in the blood of your brothers. There was one who was like a little sister. Where is she?"

Christina started; half in appeal, half in defense against the omen of his tones, she stretched out her hands. The Sicilian lowered his mouth to the bosom of his shirt and brought forth in his teeth a little hoop of silver which he shook before Christina's eyes. "Where is she now? Of her tokens _she has lost the third_!" It was Nancy's bracelet that he dropped at Christina's feet.

"Devil of fine fairness," he said, "I shall pick it up again, when you are lying low! When not one shot is left for our hurt we there, without, will come quietly in! Then shall I bear this to my chief. I took it from the hand of Beppo, who lay bleeding in the gra.s.s. Were Chigi and Pepe caught in the fire? They reached her late, for they had rowed their boat back, to escape those policemen on the river. Only when Alieni jumped and swam they must follow him and tramp to the house for boats along the sh.o.r.e. But they reached her! I was against it always--she was not of our nation. Ah, she was pretty! Had you not let her know too much she need not have been put to sleep!"

Christina made no outcry. If his attack on herself bewildered her, her imagination caught the significance of the Camorrist phrase. "Where,"

asked she slowly, "does she sleep?"

"In the dead ashes of the house of boats." His malignant sneer took in the stricken, threatened group, as well as his own bondage. And turning once more to Christina he smilingly informed her, "I seek in the house for boats Nicola Pascoe. I hear him talking as at a telephone. They have brought a lamp and in the window I see a pretty girl, young and not so tall, with a face very sweet but sick and the hair falls curling and red. She has in her hands a tiny bottle filled with a dark liquid. She throws it from the window where it fills the air with laudanum smell.

And at that up runs to her Nicola--and she, away! They must have knocked over the lamp, for next the house for boats is blazing high. And, as the smoke comes in the window, there she runs again--just as I see the woman's figure and in the fiery smoke one light of her red hair at that out from the bushes a bullet springs. She clasps her hands over her breast with a small cry and down she sinks. And Alieni flies out of the bushes with Beppo and Chigi and Pepe at his back and he races into the flaming house. It is after that down plunges Nicola, down and past us, running here to this place, and I follow him, sure that past him I shall come, too, upon his sister. Before we reach here, through the dark, comes a horse with two men on its back--one is yelling 'I have killed her! I have killed her!' and he pa.s.ses. The other falls off. It is Beppo, who dies at my feet, giving me the bracelet. He had it from Pepe, the Parmesan, whom he saw meet with Alieni in the doorway of the house for boats. By this time all, everywhere, is fighting and the house for boats blows up in a puff and falls in upon itself in crumbling fire."

Christina had never taken her eyes from his face and in those eyes alone there now seemed any life to hold her body upright. "It's not true!"

said she, gently and at length. "Life's not so silly!" But she stretched out a blind hand to Herrick and leaned on him a little.

"Ah!" mocked the Sicilian, "it made a beautiful grave! You will not have so fine! But yours gapes for you now as well as for your lover, and for your husband, who caused all the death! Do not pity the girl who died.

Exult not over Giuseppe Gumama. Read, instead, the writing in your golden pistol--of Alieni--and the Signora Alieni--" He stopped with a gratified gasp. The handle of the door into the hall had been softly turned from the outside.

No one moved. In a strange voice the sheriff called to know if this were one of his men. There was no answer. "Where are they? Why don't they--"

Gumama the Sicilian laughed aloud. "The long cellar-way, where by night we carried out to the river our broken press--It has let us in--so quietly--Many went upstairs--"

Herrick translated. With one impulse the three men turned toward the slide in the paneling. It was closed. But their intent listening made sure of more than one soft touch, straying in search of the mechanism.

Of crowding whispers they could not be so sure. Herrick reached for Nicola's gun. But it had only one charge and then, indeed, though without turning her head, Christina closed her hand on his and took it from him. "That's mine, you know!" No man gainsaid her and she put it in her breast. Undisguised, unhurried footsteps sounded overhead. An alien presence pervaded all that house. Caged in their shelter, they drew together, close under the balcony. Christina suffered herself to be drawn with them, but she was considering aloud the Sicilian's words.

"My golden pistol!" Christina looked from the little femininely jeweled dummy to the script, "'Filippi Alieni and all his house'--And all his house! 'The death of traitors'--My husband, you say? The Signora Alieni--A. A. A. Alieni, of course! But--Allegra?--Allegra?--Alieni?"

"Signora Alieni!" Gumama smilingly repeated.

The girl gave him one glance, sprang past him and flung herself against the shuttered windows. "Whom do you mean by traitors?" she called. "For whom do you take us? Answer! Answer!"

At the sound of her voice a deep-bayed, many-throated yell roared out derision and victory. As the men dragged Christina back a coa.r.s.e laugh mocked loudly from across the road. "Signora Alieni, we rejoice at the last to salute you!" And the whole woodland took up his phrase in chorus, "Buona sera, Signora Alieni!"

Then, uncontrollably, at length the darkness volleyed, the earth was rived with sound and fire, the flashes of it scorching their skin while gla.s.s, plaster, woodwork, split and spattered round them as through the windows the hail beat.

CHAPTER VI

THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"

Christina's stream of Italian left Herrick so far behind that he could only watch the incredulity of Gumama's face turn to doubt and then to reflection. The word "American" was often repeated, and then came Gumama's slower answer, puzzling out the question--But was not the Signora Alieni herself much American? Did not she to-night meet here in this house her brother Nicola? And was she not to run away at sunrise with--and he pointed to Herrick--an American? And how well was it not known that the Signora Alieni was bella, bella donna?--"Bella--bella!"

with mounting fervor he violently repeated.

"But you, yourself? You never saw her?"

"The Signora Alieni goes always veiled."

"Are there none--out there--who know her?"

"Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola."

"When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said Christina, with an odd, proud calm. "Ah, please, let me see what they are about!" And she persistently advanced to a window and peered between the slats of a blind.

Blackness was lifting from the earth. That clear gray light, clearer and grimmer than ever they had seen it, of the slowly rising dawn had begun to fill the open s.p.a.ces. Under the trees it was still a dusk of living shadows, and, from within the house, the half-m.u.f.fled, surrounding pressure strained closer still against the walls. Christina faced round, uttered a piercing shriek and pointed toward the panel. To this, the men who watched her turned. And on the instant, the shutters clicking as she flung them open, the girl flashed through and ran straight into the dawn on the white terrace. "You who know Allegra Alieni, am I she? Am I she?"

A wail of amazement and denial greeted her. The men within, the men without, came to a standstill.--"If you ever loved me," said Christina to Herrick, "keep back from me, now!" He replied only by swinging forward Gumama, who thereupon stood in the sight of his friends with the mute argument of a revolver at his head. Not a voice replied. But not a shot was fired.

In the pause produced by the concerned and puzzled hesitation of the besiegers, Christina gathered up her voice. She was used to send it far, to hush and rouse with it, to pierce and move at will, and neither misery nor fatigue seemed now to have weakened its flexible and winning melody. "Sirs," cried the girl, "I ask you the one thing. Are you not here as the executioners of the great Camorra? Do you, then, wish to disobey?"

She had centered upon herself a bewildered stare.

"And do you not disobey if you blunder? Do you wish to bring all the new world about your ears for the wrong thing? Believe me, we four, we are strong persons in that world--we do not fall unavenged! If we are to die here, now, and the great society of the Camorra is to wreck itself upon our death, let it not be in a mistake!--Ah, you see! Believe me! We are not false brethren of yours, we are Americans, every one! But in a way you and I are brethren, for I, like you, have seen my heart's good faith betrayed--and by the same hand!"

A startled murmur rose.