XVIII

Sefton’s story, told in short, abrupt sentences, and with as little detail as possible, was, after all, nothing more than the old one of plighted faith and broken troth, that the world has heard so often.

It dated eighteen months back, when Captain Culvers had returned with his regiment from India. He had arrived in England in the middle of a bleak English March, and had been advised by his doctors not to attempt to face it in his enfeebled state of health, but to start at once for the south of Europe. Accordingly, with a brother officer, he had set off on a tour through south Italy, intending to make Naples his headquarters, and thence diverge a little out of the beaten track of the tourist into less frequented regions. At Naples, however, his brother officer had caught the Neapolitan fever, and, after a time, had been compelled to return to England. So Sefton continued his excursions without companionship. After scouring the Abruzzi, he had diverged into Calabria, and, in spite of bad roads, miserable inns, and fever in all directions, had penetrated into the mountainous region of La Sila.

And here, in the heart of the country where the bandit, “Peter the Calabrian,” self-styled “Emperor of the Mountains, and King of the Woods,” had held alike his camp and his court, and where Peter’s descendants and representatives lead as marauding and indolent a life as modern Italian civilisation permits, Sefton fell ill with fever, and went nigh to losing his life. His quarters were a miserable hut⁠—miscalled inn⁠—on the edge of the forest whence Peter and his co-marauders used to emerge to strike terror into the heart of wayfarers. There was no doctor within twenty miles⁠—a distance doubled by the rocky roads. The people of the inn, therefore, called in to his aid the wise woman of the place⁠—a certain Francesca Xardez, who, with remedies assuredly not to be found in any modern pharmacopoeia, brought him back to health.

This Francesca Xardez was a person of no small importance in Alta Lauria, the mountain-hamlet where Sefton had fallen ill. To begin with, chance had put her in the way of receiving a better education than generally falls to the lot of the Italian peasant. Also in her young days she had been something of a traveller, and had visited several of the cities of Continental Europe.

Thirdly and lastly, and what added most to her prestige among the rough mountaineers, she was foster-mother to the only child of the chief landowner in the place, the Marchese da Nava; her husband was the Marchese’s head-bailiff, her six sons were shepherds, vinedressers, or in some other way employed upon his estate.

In addition, her nurse-child, Violante, was devotedly attached to her.

This Marchese da Nava was a widower, and a man close upon seventy years of age, when Sefton visited Alta Lauria. Late in life he had married a peasant girl in the place, who had died, leaving him with this one child, Violante.

Although feudalism has been banished from Italy, the feudal spirit survives in the wilder and more mountainous regions. The bond between peer and peasant in parts of Calabria is of a kind to which northern Europe offers no parallel. The Marchese was poor as a Marchese could well be, for his large estates consisted to a great extent of exhausted mines, hill pastureland, and mountains, sloping down in ridges to the dense forests of gigantic oleander, arbutus, and wild olive, which cover the sites of forgotten battlefields. He was also a man of ungovernable temper; his household was ill-arranged and disorderly, and his sense of obligation as a landowner nil. Nevertheless, the devotion of the peasantry to him was unswerving, and his will as much a law to them as if it had been passed into one by Senate, and would be put into force by Carabinieri.

As for Violante, she was simply the darling and the idol of these rude mountaineers. With a temper nearly as violent as her father’s, she combined a beauty met with nowhere save in the mixed races of Magna Græcia. Ill-trained, and all but uneducated, she had grown up among them half-princess, half-peasant, related on her father’s side to some of the noblest houses in Italy, and owning on her mother’s side to near relatives among the poorest and most debased of the vinedressers and shepherds of Alta Lauria. She was one with the peasants in all their joys and sorrows, and it was no unusual thing for this last representative of a race that had held sway in the district for centuries, to be seen in her foster-mother’s cottage eating macaroni and drinking wine side by side with her foster-brothers, Giorno the vinedresser, or Pippo the little goatherd.

It was no wonder that when Francesca was called in to administer her remedies to the handsome young Englishman, Violante should accompany her, nor that, later on, when the Englishman, restored to health, called on his skilful doctress to offer her his thanks, Violante should have been found in the cottage eating eggs and vermicelli with her peasant foster-brothers.

On the fascination which this beautiful half-educated girl soon grew to have for him Sefton touched but lightly. It was, on his side, a delirium that came to an end with the summer’s moon under which it had had its birth. While it lasted, however, it led him over the bounds of prudence, and he accepted an invitation from the Marchese to make the Palazzo his headquarters, and thence visit the places of interest in the neighbourhood.

And before the first week of his visit had come to an end, he had made Violante an offer of marriage which, with her father’s approval, she had accepted.

Then with a start he had awakened from his dream of passion, and told himself what a fool he had been to think of introducing the ill-trained, half-educated, and penniless Violante to his aristocratic English friends as his wife. He set his wits to work to find a way out of the entanglement, and could see one only⁠—flight. That even to be accomplished successfully had to be craftily contrived, for he had no mind to run the gauntlet of the stilettoes or bullets of Violante’s numerous foster-brothers or half-savage cousins. So, under pretext of a journey to England to prepare his mother to receive his beautiful bride, he had said goodbye to the Marchese and Violante, begging them during his absence to make all preparations for the wedding-day, and promising a speedy return.

That promise, it need scarcely be said, had never been fulfilled.

After his flight from Alta Lauria, Captain Culvers had remained for some months in Paris, and there had drifted into dissipations that had left an indelible mark on his character. For some time after his return to England he had lived in the expectation of the story of the Calabrian episode in some way or other becoming known, and of his character suffering accordingly.

It was under the influence of this feeling that he had resigned his commission. When, however, a year passed by, and Violante’s friends made no sign, he concluded that the matter had blown over, and did his best to dismiss it from his thoughts.

He ended his story, saying that he had never in remotest fancy connected Ida’s disappearance with this episode in his life; nor could he in any way explain how nor by whom she had been inveigled into that “accursed Alta Lauria⁠—a nest of wild, hot-blooded ruffians.”

With reference to Ida’s disappearance, his impression from first to last had been either that she and Juliet were playing off some trick on him, doing their utmost, in fact, to make him look like a fool, or else that Ida, having come to the conclusion that married life with him would be an impossibility, had taken the first step in a plan which she and Juliet had arranged together, and of which he would hear more anon. He would give his “word of honour” that this was the simple truth so far as he was concerned.

The phrase, his “word of honour,” came jarringly as “Finis” to such a narrative.

For a few minutes there fell a dead silence in the room⁠—a silence, however, which, to Sefton’s fancy, seemed charged with the contempt and scorn that not a doubt his two hearers felt for him.

Lord Culvers was the first to break that silence.

“My dead brother’s only son!” was all he said by way of comment on the tale.

He did not hurl the words at his nephew, challenging reply and defence; they came rather as the words of a sigh that could not be repressed.

Sefton turned upon him fiercely.

“Surrounded with such a set of desperate ruffians, there was no course but flight open to me. You, yourself, in the circumstances, would have done precisely the same thing.”

Clive felt that it was not the time for either attack or defence. His business training and daily companionship with his father had taught him one thing if nothing else: that to lose self-control at a crisis in affairs, meant to let go the helm and let the vessel drive.

“The most terrible part of the whole thing is that Ida should be in the midst of such a den at the present moment,” he interposed, hurriedly. “We must put every thought but this out of our minds.”

Personally he felt such a course to be imperative. Here was he compelled, by force of circumstances, to act the comrade to a man whom he would have delighted to call a scoundrel to his face. Once give his tongue license, and that comradeship must collapse.

Lord Culvers made no reply. He was wandering slowly, helplessly almost, round the room, collecting papers and other of his possessions, with which he had littered Clive’s sitting-room earlier in the day.

It was easy to see his intention.

“You wouldn’t be fit for it. You’d break down before we got across the frontier,” said Sefton, a little roughly, but not unkindly.

“It will be easy to telegraph to you daily⁠—every few hours, if you like⁠—and then you can follow us step by step, as it were,” said Clive.

And then, taking out his pencil, with Sefton’s aid he jotted down various stations from which they could despatch their telegrams, and where also they could receive them should need arise.

Lord Culvers allowed himself to be persuaded. To impede the young men at such a time would have been sheer folly; and it was impossible to disguise even from himself the fact that in his present depressed and nervous condition, he could be nothing but an impediment to them.

“And there is something to be done in Paris,” pursued Clive, anxious once more to rouse Lord Culvers from his depression by turning his attention to the practical details of the “situation.” “The Prefect of Police, not a doubt, must be told of the turn affairs have taken; he may have suggestions to make that may be of value to us⁠—you can telegraph them to us, you know, at one of the stations we have named.”

Sefton, at any rate, had a suggestion to make to Clive as he strapped together his hand-portmanteau, and he made it in a voice so low that it did not reach Lord Culvers’s ear. It was:

“Whatever you do or don’t take with you, don’t forget your revolver. Mine is in my breast-pocket.”

As the train by which Clive and Sefton started on the first stage of their journey was about to move from the platform, two persons, hurriedly passing through the barrier, swung themselves into a third-class compartment. One of these two was a man of about five-and-twenty, a handsome, reckless, insolent looking young fellow, wearing a slouch hat and a gay necktie; the other was a black-eyed, olive-skinned boy, with a barrel-organ and a monkey.