The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ®. Морис Леблан
gossip of Florence, but out in the garden, with his face in the shadow, he seemed to become morose and uncommunicative. I asked how he had got on during my absence, for I knew he was friendless.
“Oh, fairly well,” was his answer. “A bit lonely, you know. But I used to come up here every day and take the dogs out for a run. An outsider like I am can’t expect invitations to dinners and dances, you know;” and he sighed, and drew vigorously at his cigar.
“By the way,” I said presently, “you remember you once mentioned that you knew Vivi Finlay in the old days in town. I met her in Palermo in the winter.”
He started from his chair, and leaning towards me, echoed—
“You met her!—you? Tell me about her. How did she look? What is she doing?” he asked, with an earnest eagerness that surprised me.
Briefly I explained how I had walked and chatted with her in the gardens of the Igiea at Palermo, though I did not tell him the subject of our conversation. I tried, too, to induce him to tell me what he knew of her, but he would say nothing beyond what I already knew.
“I wonder she don’t marry,” I remarked at last; but to this he made no response, though I fancied that in the half light I detected a curious smile upon his face, as though he was aware that we had been lovers.
He deftly turned the conversation, though he became more bitter, as if his life was now even more soured than formerly. Then, at midnight, he took his hat and stick, and I opened the gate of the drive and let him out upon the road.
As he left, he grasped my hand warmly, and in a voice full of emotion said—
“Good-night, Ewart. May you be rewarded one day for keeping from starvation a good-for-nothing devil like myself!”
And he passed on into the darkness beneath the trees, on his way back to his high-up humble room down in the heart of the town.
At eight o’clock next morning, when I met Pietro, Bindo’s man, I noticed an unusual expression upon his face, and asked him what had happened.
“I have bad news for you, Signor Ewart,” he answered with hesitation.“At four o’clock this morning the Signor Whitaker was found by the police lying upon the pavement of the Lung Arno, close to the Porta San Frediano. He was dead—struck down with a knife from behind.”
“Murdered!” I gasped.
“Yes, Signore. It is already in the papers;” and he handed me a copy of the Nazione.
Dumbfounded, unnerved, I dressed myself quickly, and driving down to the police-office, saw the head of the detective department, a man named Bianchi.
The sharp-featured little man sitting at the table, after taking down a summary of all I knew regarding my poor friend, explained how the discovery had been made. The body was quite cold when found, and the deep wound between the shoulders showed most conclusively that he had fallen by the hand of an assassin. I was then shown the body, and looked upon the face of poor Charlie, the “outsider,” for the last time.
“He had no money upon him,” I told Bianchi. “Indeed, before leaving me he had remarked that he was almost without a soldo.”
“Yes. It is that very fact which puzzles us. The motive of the crime was evidently not robbery.”
In the days that succeeded the police made most searching inquiries, but discovered nothing. My only regret—and it was indeed a deep one—was that I had lost the letter he had given me with injunctions to open it after his death. Did he fear assassination? I wondered. Did that letter give any clue to the assassin?
But the precious document, whatever it might be, was now irretrievably lost, and the death of “Mr. Charles Whitaker, late of the Stock Exchange,” as the papers put it, remained one of the many murder-mysteries of the city of Florence.
* * * *
Months had gone by—months of constant travel and loneliness, grief and despair.
I was in my room at the Hotel Bonne Femme in Turin, having a wash after a dusty run with the “forty,” when the waiter announced Mr. Bianchi, and the sharp-featured, black-haired little man, recently promoted from Florence to watch the Anarchists in Milan.
“I am very glad, Signor Ewart, that I have been able to catch you here; you are such a bird of passage, you know,” he said in Italian. “But in searching the house of a thief in Florence the other day our men found this letter, addressed to you;” and he produced from his pocket the missive that Charlie had on that hot night entrusted to my care.
I broke the black seal and read it eagerly. Its contents held me speechless in amazement.
“Do you know anything of a young man named Giovanni Murri, a Florentine?” I inquired quickly.
“Murri?” he repeated, knitting his brows. “Why, if I remember aright, a young man of that name was found drowned in the Arno on the same day that your friend the Signor Whitaker was discovered dead. He had been a waiter in London, it was said.”
“That was the man. He killed my poor friend, and then committed suicide;” and I briefly explained how Whitaker had given me the letter which two hours afterwards had been stolen from me.
“The thief was the son of Count di Ferraris’ gardener—a bad character. Finding that it was addressed to you, he evidently intended to return it unopened, and forgot to do so,” Bianchi said. “But may I not read the letter?”
“No,” I replied firmly. “It concerns a purely private affair. All that I can tell you is that Murri killed my friend. It explains the mystery.”
Three nights later, I stood with my well-beloved in the elegant drawing-room of a house just off Park Lane, where she was living with her aunt.
I had placed the dead man’s letter in her hand, and she was reading it breathlessly, her sweet face blanched, her tiny hands trembling.
“Mr. Ewart,” she faltered hoarsely, her eyes downcast as she stood before me, “it is the truth. I ought to have told you long ago. Forgive me.”
“I have already forgiven you. You must have suffered just as bitterly as I have done,” I said, taking her hand.
“Ah yes. God alone knows the wretched life I have led, loving you and yet not daring to tell you my secret. As Charlie has written here, the young Italian, my father’s valet, fell in love with me when I came home from school in Germany, and once I foolishly allowed him to kiss me. From that moment he became filled with a mad passion for me, and though I induced my father to dismiss him, he haunted me. Then I met Charlie Whitaker, and fancied that I loved him. Every girl is anxious to secure a husband. He was rich, kind, good-looking, and all that was eligible, save that he was not of the nobility, and for that reason he knew that my father would discountenance him. He, however, induced me to take a step that I afterwards bitterly regretted. I met him one morning at the registry office at Kensington, and we were married. We lunched together at the Savoy, and then I drove home again. That very afternoon the crash came, and on that same night he was compelled to leave England for the Continent, a ruined man.”
“He must have known of the impending crisis,” I remarked simply.
“I fear he did,” was her reply. “But it was only a week later that you, who had known me so long, spoke to me. You told me of your love, alas! too late. What could I reply? What irony of Fate!”
“Yes, yes. I see. You could not tell me the truth.”
“No. For several reasons. I loved you, yet I knew that if you were in ignorance you would remain Charlie’s friend. Ah! you cannot know the awful suspense, and the thousand and one subterfuges I had to adopt. Murri, who was still in London, employed at the Carlton Club, continued to pester me with his passionate letters—the letters of an imbecile. Somehow, a year later, he discovered our marriage, by the official record, I think, and then he met me in secret one day and vowed a terrible vengeance.”
“His threat he carried