The Happy End Part 17

A dark tide of pa.s.sion, visible even in the night, flooded Orsi's countenance.

"Leave!" he insisted, "Or I'll have you flung into the bay."

A deep silence followed, in which Lavinia could hear the stir of the water against the walls below. A sharp fear entered her heart, a new dread of the Spaniard. He was completely outside the circle of impulses which she understood and to which she reacted. He was not a part of her world; he coldly menaced the foundations of all right and security.

Her worship of romance died miserably. In a way, she thought, she was responsible for the present horrible situation; it was the result of the feeling she had had for Mochales. Lavinia was certain that if Gheta had not known of it the Spaniard would have been quickly dropped by the elder. She was suddenly conscious of the perfume he always bore; that, curiously, lent him a strange additional oppression.

"Mochales," he said in a species of strained wonderment, "threatened ...

thrown into the bay! Mochales--the Flower of Spain! And by a helpless mound of fat, a tub of entrails----"

"Cesare!" Lavinia cried in an energy of desperation. "Come! Don't listen to him."

Orsi released her grasp.

"I believe you are at the Grand Hotel?" he addressed the other man.

"Until I hear from you."

"To-morrow----"

All the heat had apparently evaporated from their words; they spoke with a perfunctory politeness. Cesare Orsi said:

"I will order the launch."

In a few minutes the palpitations of the steam died in the direction of Naples.

VII

Lavinia followed her husband to their rooms, where he sat smoking one of his long black cigars. He was pale; his brow was wet and his collar wilted. She stood beside him and he patted her arm.

"Everything is in order," he a.s.sured her.

A species of blundering tenderness for him possessed her; an unexpected throb of her being startled and robbed her of words. He mistook her continued silence.

"All I have is yours," he explained; "it is your right. I can see now that--that my money was all I had to offer you. The only thing of value I possess. I should have realized that a girl, charming like yourself, couldn't care for a mound of fat." Her tenderness rose till it choked in her throat, blurred what she had to say.

"Cesare," she told him, "Gheta was right; at one time I was in love with Mochales." He turned with a startled exclamation; but she silenced him.

"He was, it seemed, all that a girl might admire--dark and mysterious and handsome. He was romantic. I demanded nothing else then; now something has happened that I don't altogether understand, but it has changed everything for me. Cesare, your money never made any difference in my feeling for you--it didn't before and it doesn't to-night--" She hesitated and blushed painfully, awkwardly.

The cigar fell from his hand and he rose, eagerly facing her.

"Lavinia," he asked, "is it possible--do you mean that you care the least about me?"

"It must be that, Cesare, because I am so terribly afraid."

Later he admitted ruefully:

"But no man should resemble, as I do, a great oyster. I shall pay very dearly for my laziness."

"You are not going to fight Mochales!" she protested. "It would be insanity."

"Insanity," he agreed promptly. "Yet I can't permit myself to be the target for vile tongues."

Lavinia abruptly left him and hurried to her sister's room. The door was locked; she knocked, but got no response.

"Gheta," she called, low and urgently, "open at once! Your plans have gone dreadfully wrong. Gheta!" she said more sharply into the answering silence. "Cesare has had a terrific argument with Mochales, and worse may follow. Open!" There was still no answer, and suddenly she beat upon the door with her fists. "Liar!" she cried thinly through the wood.

"Liar! You bitter old stick! I'll make you eat that necklace, pearl for pearl, sorrow for sorrow!"

A feeling of impotence overwhelmed her at the implacable stillness that succeeded her hysterical outburst. She stood with a pounding heart, and clasped straining fingers.

Abrego y Mochales could kill Cesare without the slightest shadow of a question. There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely a.s.saulted; and therefore he would be--in his own, less subtle manner--as dangerous as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most vulnerable place--he had been insulted before her. But, even if the latter refused to proceed, Mochales, she knew, would force an acute conclusion. There was nothing to be got from her sister and she slowly returned to her chamber, from which she could hear Orsi's heavy footfalls.

She mechanically removed the square emerald that hung from a platinum thread about her neck, took off her rings, and proceeded to the small iron safe where valuables were kept. As she swung open the door a sheet of paper slipped forward from an upper compartment. It bore a printed address ... in the Strada San Lucia. She saw that it was the blackmailing letter Cesare had received from the Neapolitan secret society, demanding two thousand lire. She recalled what he had said at the time--if she had an enemy her gown could be spoiled in the foyer of the opera; a man ruined at his club.... Even murders were ascribed to it.

She held the letter, gazing fixedly at the address, mentally repeating again and again the significance of its contents. She thought of showing it to Cesare, suggesting----But she realized that, bound by a conventional honor, he would absolutely refuse to listen to her.

Almost subconsciously she folded the sheet and hid it in her dress.

Kneeling before the safe she procured a long red envelope. It contained the sum of money her father had given her at the wedding. It was her dot--a comparatively small amount, he had said at the time with an apologetic smile; but it was absolutely, unquestionably her own. This, when she locked the safe, remained outside.

When she had hidden the letter and envelope in her dressing table Cesare stood in the doorway. He was still pale, but composed, and held himself with simple dignity.

"Some men," he said, "are not so happy, even for an hour."

A sudden pa.s.sionate necessity to save him swept over her.

In the morning Orsi remained at the villa, but he sent the launch in early with an urgent summons for the Cavaliere Nelli. Later, when he asked for Lavinia, he was told that she had gone to Naples; and when the boat returned, Nelli--a military figure, with hair and mustache like yellowish white silk--a.s.sisted her to the wall. She was closely veiled against the sparkling flood of light and bay, and hurried directly to her room.

There she knelt on a praying chair before a small alcoved altar with tall wax tapers, and remained a long while. She was disturbed by a sudden ringing report below; it was Cesare practising with a dueling pistol. Lavinia remembered, from laughing comments in Florence, that her husband was an atrocious shot. The sound was repeated at irregular intervals through an unbearably long morning.

Gheta, she learned, had refused the morning chocolate and, with her maid, had collected and packed all her effects. Lavinia had no desire to see her. The situation now was past Gheta's mending.

After luncheon Lavinia remained in her room, Nelli departed for Naples and Cesare joined her. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed; but he spoke to her evenly. He was possessed by an impotent rage at his unwieldy body and clumsy hand. This alternated with an evident wonderment at the position in which he found himself and a great tenderness for Lavinia.

At dusk they were in Lavinia's room waiting for a message from Naples.

Lavinia was leaning across the marble ledge of her window, gazing over the dim blue sweep of water to the distant flowering lights. She heard sudden footsteps and, half turning, saw her husband tearing open an envelope.

"Lavinia!" he cried. "There has been an accident in the elevator of the Grand Hotel, and Mochales--is dead!" She hung upon the ledge now for support. "The attendant, a new man, started the car too soon and caught Mochales----" She sank down upon her knees in an att.i.tude of prayer, and Cesare Orsi stood reverently bowed.

"The will of G.o.d!" he muttered.

A long slow shiver pa.s.sed over Lavinia, and he bent and lifted her in his arms.

TOL'ABLE DAVID

I

He was the younger of two brothers, in his sixteenth year; and he had his father's eyes--a tender and idyllic blue. There, however, the obvious resemblance ended. The elder's azure gaze was set in a face scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been--before he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born--a brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color of sweetness and innocence.