Persons Unknown Part 58

"I, too, was brought to come here by the ruin of my life through Allegra Alieni! Of her husband I never knew. Only hold back the force that ma.s.ses at our door and here is a plan. We are here four--three men and a woman. Send us four men--mask them, if you will--and let them look at us close and well; they will see that we cannot be those whom you seek. But we have with us the body of Nicola whom this one here, calling himself Giuseppe Gumama, slew, and who was brother to the Alienis. Let your men take this Nicola from our house, for we, no more than you, have any use for traitors!"

These words produced an extraordinary effect. A murmur of admiration, of fellowship, exclamations, argument, a sort of congratulation traversed the green s.p.a.ces through the still strengthening dawn. Christina, as always, had found her audience.

"Oh, sirs," cried the girl, in a softer cadence, advancing to the very edge of the terrace, and still eagerly baring her face to the pale light, "you seek our lives and I am so weary I am almost glad to die.

But die or live, oh, now, for the dear love of G.o.d, let me go down to the river! Let me see who is still alive there! Send whom you will with me, but let me go!" And Christina stretched out her arms to the men of the Camorra as to the brothers of her soul and for the moment they were all more than her brothers in their inflammable hearts.

But even a little noise could still distract them. And this time it was the noise of the unhinged shutter as it slid, b.u.mping, for a second and then fell with a crash upon the terrace. In the half-light Ten Euyck's hand, holding a pistol, was visible at the window and above it the white leer of his face. Voices cried, "A fourth man! A man of whom she did not tell!"

A prisoner from the yellow farmhouse called out in an insufferable, fawning yelp, "I know him! He used to visit the signora! He is the confidant of the signora and of her brother!"

A roar rose and drowned out Christina's voice. "That man--how comes he there! The friends of Allegra Alieni are her friends!"

The crowd did not advance for the ring of Herrick's gun was still pressed against Mr. Gumama's beautiful brow. But some shrill voice rose, a-quiver with exhorting hate. "The hour is come! For what have we waited? Till they had not a shot left! They have none now! If they had they would have shot Gumama when he came in! They do not shoot him, now--they have nothing to shoot! Give the signal! They hid the friend of Allegra Alieni behind the window--how shall they tell us her friends are not their friends? How shall they tell us they can injure our Gumama?

Close in! Close in!"

The tide of the Camorra washed forward, and surged up the first terrace.

But it came to a halt.

"How?" Christina had cried. And then, extending the revolver that carried the last shot, she had fired straight into the dead face of Ten Euyck.

The jar shattered that perilous equilibrium. The corpse fell in upon itself, its weapon dropping with a clank, the tongue suddenly protruding beneath the shattered cheekbones and the head goggling on the breast.

The note of one still unaffrighted bird came through the perfect stillness.

The invading army shivered, shocked and applausive; then, apprehensively, it glanced at Gumama. It drew together in consulting knots. Some men, coming from round the house, joined the counsel and created a sensation. A puzzled but now rather friendly voice shouted, "Some one lies! Alieni was seen to enter where you are!"

They all looked at Christina. But the wire had snapped at last. She stood with a scared vagueness on her white face, the pistol swinging loose in her hand and her eyes fixed on the hunched clutter of what had been Ten Euyck. Herrick made out to translate the message and Kane said, "Ask 'em if they'll send up that investigating committee?"

Christina's shot had made, however, too great an impression. If they had ammunition to spare, they were no hosts for the Camorra. Would the Americans come out, each one, upon the second terrace?--bringing, also, the dead and wounded, till Gumama shall tell us there are no more?

"When the devil drives--! Say we'll begin with the dead!"

They began with Ten Euyck. Sheriff Buckley took the head, Kane the feet; the long, bony figure sagged between them and the tails of its dress-coat flopped as if pointing jocularly toward the ground. As they bore this burden down the terraces and laid it on the smooth greenness of the lawn, amid the ever brightening daylight and the ever growing chirp and twitter of the slowly calming birds, various disheveled figures began to hurry into view along the drive from the river. These arrivals had all the air of refugees and continued to excite, in counsel, an increasing perturbation. Yet the truce remained unbroken. So long as Kane and Buckley, exposed, defenseless, to the first marksman, carried forth Nicola no word nor movement was given in enmity. But the delay in reaching the figure in the gallery produced great restiveness.

Taunts and outcries of nervous impatience gave way, when the two men appeared with their slighter burden, to a chorus of half-derisive welcome. The Camorra had begun to be in a hurry.

Its nervousness communicated itself to the men who bore this third body down the great stone steps and laid it at Ten Euyck's right hand. A thick sweat stood out upon them when a sharp storm of curses, geysers and downpours of venom broke suddenly from heavens and earth. But the tempest was not for them. The face of their last burden had become visible to the advance guard stationed among the foremost trees and this now leaned violently forth, tossing like branches with the shriek, "Alieni! Traditore! Alieni!"

Upon that the shadow of the woodland broke at last. A dozen men, their hats screened low to shield their faces, detached themselves from the ma.s.s which crouched greedily after them and, racing out upon the lawn, threw themselves prostrate on the soft, supine thing that lay there.

Behind them the tide became ungovernable; rose, swelled forward; covered the road, the lowest terrace; raving, shrieking, leaping and falling; biting the gra.s.s upon which it rolled in frenzy. There were perhaps two minutes of pandemonium. Then a whistle sounded. Then another. The tide rolled back; the groves of oak and pine and maple swallowed it into their shadow; and of that orgy of living hate no trace remained in the full clearness of the fresh morning but the trampled, mangled body of Filippi Alieni, pierced with fifty-eight wounds and still bearing between the shoulder blades a triangular knife. The will of the Camorra was satisfied.

A chorus of whistles sounded from the wood. Then arose a single voice, demanding Gumama. His captors realized that the war was over; the prisoner was released. Despite the hurrying bird-calls of his mates he paused, thoughtfully knitting his Saracen brows, for a look at Christina.

The girl was standing perfectly still, with her eyes intent upon Ten Euyck's empty chair, as if she had not observed his removal; her gaze was fixed, but her lower lip strained and quivered. As Gumama paused the pistol slid from her hand; the noise of its dropping at her feet attracted her eyes; she shivered violently; broke into trembling mirth and sank, till her soft cheek and the convulsive throbbing of her young body lay pressed upon the stone. Herrick and Gumama both sprang to her.

Herrick lifted her head upon his knee, but she lay limp and shook from head to foot with sobbing laughter.

Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet s.n.a.t.c.hed from Nancy was on Christina's wrist.

Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no triumph, now, in victory.

"Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see."

He ran off swiftly; and the sort of uproarious twitter which welcomed him under the trees ended in a final message. "Farewell, Americans. You do us the courtesy of our beloved Gumama! We do you our courtesy--Flee!

Whoever you are, the policemen are upon you! They are coming from the gate, they are coming from the river! In ten minutes they will be here!

Americans, farewell!"

It was the last word of the Camorra in their lives. The undergrowth of the wood seemed to grow scantier; it was the backward fading of the shadows, it was the pa.s.sing of a great, black bulk; the disappearance of innumerable unknown persons whom they had never even seen, of whose existence they had never even known, out of their path. Nothing remained but the signaling whistles of the Camorra, gathering its children in its retreat. The thing was over. The last consequence of the Ingham murder, of the birth of the Hopes' first child twenty-eight years ago in Naples, was over and done. And the three men regarded each other with a strange feeling of vacancy.

But in the mouths of Kane and the sheriff the morning air was good and life ran sweet in their veins. Even to Herrick, with the exhausted girl laughing and shuddering in his arms, there seemed to rise a kind of future hope when forgetfulness should deal tenderly with her. Soon she must begin to weep and the other side of weeping a kind of consolation lies. "Why, her own youth and life must heal her!" Kane said. "It's hard, it's bitter hard! But there's her feeling for you, her future, her work--Don't look at her as if she were dying! Time, my boy, she needs time, that's all!--As for Nancy Cornish, she fell with one shot. And since she was so much in love with that poor fellow, believe me, she's better off!"

Herrick looked up in alarm, lest Christina should hear bad news. But she was lost in the hot surge of tears that had come to her at last and lay only quieter and quieter in his hold. Till at length, since there was a time coming when she must know if Fate had played her doubly false, he fetched a coat to put under her head and drew Kane aside. "You meant just now--?"

"I meant what I've had on my mind through all this night, as something with which I didn't know how to face Miss Hope. I meant that this chap Denny was never a very lucky fellow--"

"_Was?_"

"But that never was anything unluckier than his consenting to leave the Tombs."

"Because they followed and brought him back?"

"They followed. But they didn't bring him back!--I forgot you wouldn't know. The Italians somehow palmed off on Ten Euyck's men another Italian made up with the things in which they took Denny from the Tombs. It's easy enough to understand now why Ten Euyck, with discreet mercy, called this subst.i.tute simply a mistake and let him go." He paused, studying the driveway with clouded eyes. "The Italians must have got clear away with Denny, but why did they take so much pains? Were they really going to hand over to Allegra a man whom they certainly considered in some way their enemy, when already they must have begun to turn against her?

What were they going to do with him? What _did_ they try to do with him when he was first imprisoned in the Tombs? Don't groan, my boy! It's the one way out. It's the most merciful thing for that poor girl, there; it's the most merciful thing for Denny himself. Hope for it! If his captors didn't get away, if he's been retaken with them, then marry Christina Hope as fast as may be and get her out of this country for awhile. You understand?" Herrick looked up. "I intend, with all my strength, to keep my bargain. I'll go to the Governor to-morrow. But he let me know, as I was starting here, that it would be useless."

"After his promise?"

"Since that promise Denny broke jail. There are minds to which such a move is always the unpardonable sin! Against it the mere justifying provocation in any story Allegra Alieni may tell could make no appeal.

Besides, it's told by a woman who was in love with him, and who, by this time, is either dead or run away. So must be every witness to it. Even as evidence against the blackmailers, if there are any left, Miss Hope can't force the state to sell her his life for this, now. Well, some day, perhaps, you can make her see that whatever happens, police or Camorra, he managed to get his way, poor chap! If she weren't fooled by life's being hope she would see, well enough, that he was the last man to thank her for a light sentence. He was keen against jail, you remember?"

They were both silent. Yes, Herrick remembered. "The best friend Christina ever had" she would surely some day see could not have lingered in the black durance that he loathed.--Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!

It was the hour for resolution, for new birth. Herrick felt a strength of pity in his breast whose tide should lift Christina from the whirlpools of which the lessening eddies still plucked at her sick soul.

Poor girl, poor, brave, spoiled, wilful, imperious, generous heart! To have fought so hard and to be checked thus at the end! To have out.w.a.tched, outstalked, outrun the hounds for this! "Thus far shalt thou go...." Hers had been a heroic presumption, but it had been presumption all the same. You cannot outface consequences nor outdare natural tragedy; no, not even you, Christina Hope! After all, could she have expected to clear out from a mora.s.s like this without a loss? Ah, for her defeat he suffered, but for her safety he thanked G.o.d! Rest, time, the irrevocable--these in the end would place the past under her feet.

Was it because she read the tender vowing of his thought that she had a little ceased to weep?

For she lifted her exhausted face, where the wild, wet eyes still seemed to listen, just as Herrick remembered their continual guard six weeks ago. She was listening to those chorusing signals, still whistled from far stations nearer road and river and returned in such imitation of bird voices that bird after bird replied. They were growing fainter--they were retreating on every hand--all but one, which seemed to advance and to give forth a more familiar note. And suddenly Christina answered it.

Herrick caught her closer, in a new terror of delirium. The girl rose to her knees and put him back. "But we've wandered many a weary foot--"

From among the fleeing whistles of the wood one had certainly warned or questioned in articulate notes with which hers joined in a familiar bar--"Since auld lang syne, my dear--" Through the colorless day a strong yellow light had begun to flood the earth; the clouds were carved out sharp in it, the woods stood black; the light had a blush of happy fire and the air sparkled. In that cool radiance, in that bright hour, out from among the very waves of the Camorra's receding sea, a single figure stepped from the border of the wood and came straight up the terraces.

Not so tall as Mr. Gumama but still vaguely Sicilian in cut, the messenger or fugitive or whatever he might be advanced under the gaze of those who grew terribly pale and could not speak; Christina peering forward, shaking from head to foot, her clenched hands hanging at her side and her lips caught between the knocking of her teeth. The echoing, ominous whistles, the noises of rescue approaching from two sides, the hails of the police, the sound of wheels, tires, horses' hoofs and running feet did not deter the single figure which, mounting with a kind of steady stumble, like one far spent, blind, now, to the danger of sudden bullets, indifferent to arrest or punishment or anything in heaven or earth but his own ends, gained at length the foot of the stone steps and lifted his face. At the same instant the risen sun glinted on the swinging gold of sailors' earrings, on the bracelet slipped out below a ragged cuff, on the red cord of a scapular and on the scarf in the Sicilian colors that had helped to play their part in the Duel by Wine in the loft above the garage. The wearer was damp from the river and stained with earth, yet smelling of singed cloth and grimed with smoke; torn, wounded, blackened, haggard, with bright, steady eyes. It was Will Denny. He carried the unconscious but still breathing figure of Nancy Cornish in his arms.

The first thing she woke to was Allegra's letter and Kane's question, "Do you know what this doc.u.ment contains? Can you witness its truth?"

And then answered Nancy Cornish, "Of course I can! I saw her come out in Christina's cloak. They kept me waiting in the motor outside while she shot Mr. Ingham."