Under False Pretences. Sergeant Adeline
Order and of his Church?
He turned as if to ask another question, but he was too late. Old Assunta was fast falling into the stupor that is but the precursor of death. He called her attendant, and waited for a time to see whether consciousness was likely to return. But he waited in vain. Assunta said nothing more.
The boy of whom she had spoken came and wept at her bed-side, and Padre Cristoforo observed him curiously. He was well worthy of the monk's gaze. He was light and supple in figure, perfectly formed, with a clear brown skin and a face such as one sees in early Italian paintings of angelic singing-boys—a face with broad, serious brows, soft, oval cheeks, curved lips, and delightfully dimpled chin. He had large, brown eyes and a mass of tangled, curling hair. The priest noted that his slender limbs were graceful as those of a young fawn, that his hands and feet were small and well shaped, and that his appearance betokened perfect health—a slight spareness and sharpness of outline being the only trace which poverty seemed to have left upon him.
The sub-Prior of San Stefano saw these things; and meditated upon certain possibilities in the future. He went next day to old Assunta's funeral, and laid his hand on Dino's shoulder as the boy was turning disconsolately from his grandmother's grave.
"My child," he said, gently, "you are alone."
"Yes, Father," said Dino, with a stifled sob.
"Will you come with me to the monastery? I think we can find you a home. You have nowhere to go, poor child, and you will be weary and hungry before long. Will you come?"
"There is nothing in the world that I should like so well!" cried the boy, ardently.
"Come then," said the Padre, with one of his subtle smiles. "We will go together."
He held out his hand, in which Dino gladly laid his hot and trembling fingers. Then the monk and the boy set out on the three miles walk which lay between them and the monastery.
On their arrival, Padre Cristoforo left the boy in the cool cloisters whilst he sought the Prior—a dignitary whose permission would be needed before Dino would be allowed to stay. There was a school in connection with the monastery, but it was devoted chiefly to the training of young priests, and it was not probable that a peasant like Dino Vasari would be admitted to the ranks of these budding ecclesiastics. The Prior thought that old Assunta's grandchild would make a good helper for Giacomo, the dresser of the vines.
"Does that not satisfy you?" said Padre Cristoforo, in a rather peculiar tone, when he had carried this proposal to Dino, and seen the boy's face suddenly fall, and his eyes fill with tears.
"The Reverend Fathers are very good," said Dino, in a somewhat embarrassed fashion, "and I will do all that I can to serve them, and, if I could also learn to read and write—and listen to the music in the chapel sometimes—I would work for them all the days of my life."
Padre Cristoforo smiled.
"You shall have your wish, my child," he said, kindly. "You shall go to the school—not to the vine-dressers. You shall be our son now."
But Dino looked up at him timidly.
"And not the English lady's?" he said.
"What do you know about an English lady, my son?"
"My grandmother talked to me of her. Is it true? She said that I might, turn out to be an Englishman, after all. She said that Vincenza told her that I did not belong to her."
"My child," said the monk, calmly but firmly, "put these thoughts away from your mind. They are idle and vain imaginations. Assunta knew nothing; Vincenza did not always speak the truth. In any case, it is impossible to prove the truth of her story. It is a sin to let your mind dwell on the impossible. Your name is Bernardino Vasari, and you are to be brought up in the monastery of San Stefano by wise and pious men. Is that not happiness enough for you?"
"Oh, yes, yes, indeed; I wish for nothing else," said Dino, throwing himself at Padre Cristoforo's feet, and pressing his lips to the monk's black gown, while the tears poured down his smooth, olive cheeks. "Indeed I am not ungrateful, Reverend Father, and I will never wish to be anything but what you want me to be."
"Better so," soliloquised the Father, when he had comforted Dino with kind words, and led him away to join the companions that would henceforth be his; "better that he should not wish to rise above the station in which he has been brought up! We shall never prove Vincenza's story. If we could do that, we should be abundantly recompensed for training this lad in the doctrines of the Church—but it will never be. Unless, indeed, the woman Vincenza could be found and urged to confession. But that," said the monk, with a regretful sigh, "that is not likely to occur. And, therefore, the boy will be Dino Vasari, as far as I can see, to his life's end. And Vincenza's child is living in the midst of a rich English family under the name of Brian Luttrell. I must not forget the name. In days to come who knows whether the positions of these two boys may not be reversed?"
Thus mused Father Cristoforo, and then he smiled and shook his head.
"Vincenza was always a liar," he said to himself. "It is the most unlikely thing in the world that her story should be true."
END OF THE PROLOGUE.
CHAPTER II.
BY THE LOCH.
"It is you who have been the thief, then?"
The question was uttered in tones of withering contempt. The criminal, standing before his judge with downcast face and nervously-twitching fingers, found not a word to reply.
"Answer me," said Richard Luttrell, imperatively. "Tell me the truth—or, by Heaven, I'll thrash you within an inch of your life, and make you speak! Did you, or did you not, take this money out of my strong-box?"
"I meant to put it back," faltered the culprit. He was a slender lad of twenty, with the olive skin, the curling jet-black hair, the liquid-brown eyes, which marked his descent from a southern race. The face was one of singular beauty. The curved lips, the broad brow on which the dusky hair grew low, the oval cheek and rounded chin might well have served for the impersonation of some Spanish beggar-boy or Neapolitan fisher-lad. They were of the subtilely sensuous type, expressive of passion rather than of intellect or will. At present, with the usual rich, ripe colour vanished from cheek and lips, with eyes downcast, and trembling hands dropped to his sides, he was a picture of embodied shame and fear which his cousin and guardian, Richard Luttrell, regarded with unmitigated disgust.
Luttrell himself was a man of very different fibre. Tall, strong, fiercely indignant, he towered over the youth as if he could willingly have smitten him to the earth. He was a fine-looking, broad-shouldered man of twenty-eight, with strongly-marked features, browned by exposure to the sun and wind. The lower part of his face was almost hidden by a crisp chestnut beard and moustache, whilst his eyes were of the reddish hazel tint which often denotes heat of temper. The fire which now shot from beneath the severely knitted brows might indeed have dismayed a person of stouter heart than Hugo Luttrell. The youth showed no signs of penitence; he was thoroughly dismayed and alarmed by the position in which he found himself, but that was all.
The scene of their interview was hardly in accordance with its painful character. The three men—for there was another whom we have not attempted to describe—stood on the border of a small loch, the tranquil waters of which came lapping almost to their feet as they spoke together. The grassy shores were fringed with alder and rowan-trees. Above the heads of the speakers waved the branches of a great Scotch fir, the outpost and sentinel, as it were, of an army of its brethren, standing discreetly a few yards away from the banks of the loch. Richard Luttrell's house, though not far distant, was out of sight; and the one little, grey-stone cottage which could be seen had no windows