“No use telling you why,” he continued. “I didn’t believe the Doctor’s treasure story, you know, till I found the Titian sketch. Then I changed my mind.”
“You were in Venice?” said I.
“Yes, and was shown the Winters’ manuscripts. They gave me my clue.”
“Why did you come to Monte Corbo?” I asked.
“Because I happened to know that Titian was born at Monte Corbo. If, as the documents proved, Titian and Durer left Venice on a sketching expedition, they would have visited the birthplace of the great Venetian, of course. The Doctor knew nothing of that.”
“Did you bring him with you?”
“No! He had gone to Switzerland to identify the wrong castle. I came here.”
“But you don’t mean to say that you found the treasure?”
“The treasure has disappeared. Durer may have recovered it, or it may be a myth.”
“Then you found nothing?”
“Not exactly nothing. I have discovered your landscape.”
We had left the unique little kitchen, and were standing in the windswept street. The fantastic pinnacles of Monte Crystallo had begun to blaze in the glow of sunset. Glancing at his watch, Barron declared that we still had half an hour of sunlight.
“Come on,” said he. “You must see the place.”
Hurrying through the village, we soon reached the great mountain road, and turned down the hill in full view of the Lombard Plain. As our footsteps echoed on the hard highway, our talk turned to the great Venetian painter, who though a city dweller, had yet charmed the world with landscapes.
“What a view!” exclaimed Barron. “How could he forget it? Italy seen from the clouds!”
“It lured Hannibal, when Rome was in danger,” said I. “You remember the story.”
“Hannibal saw it farther to the West. But wait. There are two views. We are looking in the wrong direction.” Barron pointed over his shoulder at some rocks that shut off the upward distance.
At length we stopped where the road at a sharp downward bend escaped a high bluff.
“Now look,” said my guide.
Against the darkening sky, Monte Crystallo, seen at a new angle, had taken a new shape. Under the towering mountain wall, the foothill in the mid distance, with its overhanging crag, till now invisible, stood out in unmistakable silhouette.
“Sit down,” Barron said. “You are within a few feet of where Durer sat nearly four hundred years ago.”
For a long time I looked, too much amazed at the gorgeously colored realization of my sketch, to wonder at its discovery.
“Those rock-pinnacles come to life,” I exclaimed, “overwhelm me. Is there anything else like this in Europe?”
“I doubt it,” said Barron. “The Dolomites seem to converge here. Titian must have known the place and shown it to Durer. But Durer’s sketch records a novelty which until then he could only have dreamt of. It has given me an idea. Have you ever noticed a striking characteristic in early Flemish art, rocky-pinnacles, mountain-fantasies, grotesque, unbelievable, yet continually produced by painters in a country where no such things existed.” He paused. “But that’s not the point,” he added gloomily. “I came here to find the Doctor’s treasure.”
While we talked on, it had begun to grow dark. The colours had slowly faded out of the great picture, before I noticed that an important detail of my sketch was missing.
“Where is the castle?” I asked.
“Destroyed long ago,” returned my friend. “Half the houses in Monte Corbo are built of its stones. No matter. You can see the foundations, and if you choose, look into that infernal well and imagine the rest. I have made a fool of myself.”
“You must have found the well very deep,” said I.
“On the contrary, shallow. It had gone dry, and was full of rubbish.”
As the mountain shadows deepened about us on our uphill walk, he said he had found blacksmith tools, chains, remains of buckets, and a cartload of potsherds and stamped bricks. Nothing else to repay him for an immense amount of trouble with the village authorities, including a narrow escape from a law suit.
“If I stay here, I shall be arrested,” he muttered, after declaring his determination to leave the unlucky place next day.
iv
The windy but bright morning following Barron’s early departure, found me in the castle-ruins, for a long time looking only outward and upward, so absorbed by the familiar cloud-swept panorama, that I had forgotten the purpose of my climb, until at last a sound of voices brought me to a heap of rubbish marking the site of his fruitless excavation. Two peasants, his employees, with a cart and a gigantic pair of white oxen were engaged in removing the debris. I glanced admiringly at the noble animals, then at a windlass standing near, and at last down the well, while I carelessly listened to their account of the exhausting work. Finally, to satisfy my curiosity, I traced the still visible outcrops of castle foundation that Barron had spoken of. The massive walls, obscured by grass and bushes, had led me by several dangerous precipices, to a neighboring clump of trees, and I thought I had pretty well made out the ground-plan of the demolished fortress, when it suddenly grew dark, and I felt a few drops of rain. I looked up half expecting to see Durer’s great cloud in process of transformation. But nothing so spectacular broke the misty blur, and I was about to leave the place, when I forgot the weather at sight of something which caused me to kneel down for a closer look at the hard foothold. What I saw was the abnormal growth of a young oak, which, without sign of adjacent earth, had forced its way upward through a crack in the bare ledge. The tree had split the stone by growing through an artificial circular hole, just beyond which a second round, clean-cut orifice, about four inches in diameter, perforated the level rock.
After pushing my cane down the latter opening until its ferrule penetrated soft earth, I got up, and discovered to my surprise on scraping aside some leaves and brushwood, that the split rock was not part of the solid ledge, but formed a fragment of a thin loose circular slab, about eight feet in diameter.
I looked at the place in the failing light, until I finally grasped its meaning. Then finding a small stone, and again kneeling down, I dropped it through the crack and listened. An expected splash and deep hollow reverberation settled the matter. I sprang up in the fast-falling rain, got out of the bushes, and hurried back to the peasants.
“Did Mr. Barron see the castle well?” I asked excitedly.
“This is the well, Signor,” said one of the men, a small, very muscular peasant in a red shirt, with clear cut classic features and close curled hair, who, heedless of the rain, had been looking up at the clouds. “Here is what we brought up,” said he, “the gentleman went over it with that sieve.”
I glanced again down the opening, at the rubbish pile, and then at the man, until my uncontrollable laugh at the absurdity of the situation, brought a sudden glare of rage into his piercing close-set black eyes.
“You have been working at the wrong place,” I cried. “This is the castle cistern.”
I walked to the windlass with its short roped bucket.
“Have you no more rope?” I asked.
The scowling man pointed to a large loose coil in the bushes, and then, with his comrade, incredulously followed me back to the split rock. A few moments later, after dropping several stones down the crack, both men were staring with amazement and final conviction at my discovery.
“What did you do all this digging for?” was my next question, as the sun began to shine again.
The tall peasant had taken off his steaming coat and thrown it down upon the rock. “The gentleman said it was a statue made of gold. But he was mistaken about that,” said he. “We found no kind of statue, Sir.”
“The statue is down this well,” I cried. “Will you help me to ge
t it out?”
Before I had explained my already formulated plan to the assenting men, the large peasant had left us for the oxen, and as we only had to deal with half of the stone lid, the two animals when brought up and chained thereto, through the hole I had noticed, soon dragged it out of the way. Half an hour later, the windlass was in place, the bucket freshly roped, and the small man had descended nearly one hundred feet into the long unbroken darkness. After many shouts to his listening comrade, and cautious haltings by the latter, who continually locked the crank, I could see him light a candle, and as it illumined the clean cut cylindrical walls, and caught the subterranean glitter below him, could hear the rattle of his dredge and thumping of objects thrown into the bucket. I was lying flat for my down-look, and was guessing at the depth of the flashing rock-enclosed pool, when suddenly the plucky little man, to my surprise, got over the side of the bucket, and dropped into the water. For a while he splashed, shuffled and ducked about shoulder deep, while several times, interrupting the reverberations, I heard a tinkling sound, as if he might be jingling a chain.
At last he stopped and looked up.
“Niente Signor,” he shouted, and then, as I faintly made out in the glimmer, clambered back into the bucket.
A later call to his companion at the windlass, soon brought him to the surface. He stepped out upon the rock, where after a loud side slapping of his numbed hands, I complimented him warmly on his exploit.
He pointed to the bucket, from which, still soaked and glittering from their bath of centuries, I pulled out, one by one, several battered bricks, two or three fragments of stone and pottery, and the rusted head of a large iron claw hammer.
“This is all, Signor,” said he.
“But you found a chain,” said I. “I heard you jingle it.”
“No, Signor, that was the grapnel. There was no chain.”
Not greatly surprised at the result, yet still disappointed, I watched the white oxen pull back the stone, paid the men the price they asked, and left the place.
v
A week had passed, during which several verifications of my landscape, and another look at the castle ruins, had exhausted my interest in Monte Corbo, when on the morning fixed for my departure, an incident happened which suddenly gave a new meaning to my visit.
I had just got through breakfast at the hotel, and had gone upstairs to finish packing, when a knock at my bedroom door, and a word from a ceremonious Austrian waiter, was followed by the appearance of a heavily-built, neatly-dressed peasant, whom I recognized as my tall helper at the castle well.
The man seemed embarrassed. Holding his hat in one hand, and a small paper-wrapped bundle in the other, he looked awkwardly around the room and out the window. At length, sitting down on the chair I offered him, after several long breaths, he spoke.
“The Signor was not satisfied with our work the other day?”
“Why not?” said I. “I paid you for it.”
“But we found nothing, Signor.”
Prepared for some ingenious scheme of extortion, I looked suspiciously at the rugged sunburned face. “Tell me what you want,” I asked sharply.
The man laid his hat on the floor, walked solemnly to the table, and placed his package on its cloth.
“It is what we found in the well, Sir.”
Pulling a clasp-knife out of his pocket, he cut the string, and after unwrapping the paper, slowly unwound a gaily printed chintz handkerchief, revealing a globular metallic object resembling at first sight the head of a reptile. Above a long mouth-like slit ending in circular enlargements, flashed two deep red stones close set under uptwisted tail-like projections.
I stared at the semicircular handle formed by these loops, and then again at the gleaming stones which I took to represent eyes, until as the grotesque extravagance of the modelling gradually disclosed the head and body of a frog or a fish, its astounding meaning flashed upon me.
I sprang from my chair, stepped nearer and leaned over the table.
“You say you found this in the well?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, Signor.”
He picked it up and shook it, but at a high keyed jingle, quickly set it down again. The musical echoes seemed to offend or frighten him.
Reaching forward, I grasped it, and shook it myself.
“A frog’s head!” I cried, “a bell!” Again and again I jingled it, detecting, as I thought, three keys in the sounds.
“You think it sounds very pretty, Signor. To you it is not terrible.”
“Terrible,” I repeated. “Why terrible?”
“I hear it night and day, night and day, Signor. I can’t stand it, Sir.”
“What do you mean? Do you dream about it?”
“It is no dream, Signor, will you take it? It is yours.”
With my eyes fixed upon its elusive modelling, I rubbed my hand over the dark metal. “Bronze,” said I. “The eyes are rubies.”
“Yes, Signor, I am a poor man, but——”
“But must be paid for it,” I interrupted.
“No, Signor. No pay for me. I can’t keep it, that is what I mean. I got it from a thief. He stole it from you.”
I listened with amazement. The thing, he declared, had been found in the icy water at the bottom of the well, replaced by his companion, and easily recovered after my departure.
“He promised me to give it to you, Signor,” said he, “but he is a liar and a cheat.”
“What?” I cried astonished. “I never would have thought that. How did you get it?”
“It was from his wife, Sir.”
It appeared that the man he denounced had just been imprisoned for wife beating, and that the injured woman had revenged herself by revealing the hiding place of the treasure.
“If he murders me,” added my visitor, with a contemptuous shrug of the powerful shoulders, “it will be when I am asleep.”
I looked at the tall peasant, until a glow of admiration that would have depleted my letter of credit, took complete possession of me.
“I didn’t understand,” I exclaimed. “What can I give you for this?”
‘‘Nothing, Sir.”
‘‘But you must have your reward.”
“No, Signor, it would bring me bad luck.”
“Why?”
“It is my birthday.”
I stared at him with increased amazement.
“The twenty-fourth of June. St. John’s Day. If I insult St. John on his day, will the bells ever stop? Never, Signor. My name is Giovanni Battista.”
He crossed himself, turned and walked hurriedly away, just as the waiter came to tell me that the omnibus was waiting. With the latter’s help, I finished my packing, thrust the bell into my valise and reached a delayed company of departing guests, who angrily watched me tip the domestic doorway group, before joining them in the omnibus.
Leaning back on the seat, I forgot my surroundings, and in the long drive that followed, tried to adjust my plans to what had happened.
But for a time, with eyes closed upon the scenic grandeur, doubts as to my responsibility in the matter, the rights of science, my duty to Barron, urged me to turn back. Should I hand over the relic to the village authorities, from whom I had had no permit to find it? Or under the strange circumstances, should I take the law into my own hands? At last on reaching the station, a decision to postpone immediate action relieved my mind, and I stepped into an empty first class car, labelled Vicenza, where, according to our last talk, my friend had planned to spend the autumn.
vi
Barron’s visit to Vicenza had been timed for a Triennial Session of the Lombard Archaeological Union there that autumn. But as he had said nothing to me of his extravagant plans, I was not prepared to find him engaged in entertaining a large party of his
scientific colleagues in one of the great historic Villas.
A band was playing in the Park, and I stopped at the gate to glance at the Palladian Dome, pillared façade and then at the crowded grounds, in which I caught sight of the gesticulating figure of Doctor Lysander. This induced a detour, and several inquiries, as a result of which, I at last found and interviewed my friend. Leaving him to his duties, I had gone upstairs unobserved. It was late in the afternoon, and I was still in my traveling clothes in one of the great bedrooms overlooking the Park when the music below and uproar of departing guests ceased.
The bell, the chief purpose of my visit, was in the pocket of an Austrian traveling mantle, which I had carefully unpacked. Just as I had rewrapped the relic and thrown the cloak upon a sofa piled with displaced carpet and brocade, my host joined me. He was followed by a servant with a tray, a bottle and some glasses. The windows were open, and as the cross lights of sunset caught the leaves outside, and began to invade the shadows of the room, he held up before a mirror one of the grass-bound flasks that enhance the looks if not the taste of Italian wine.
“Orvieto,” said he. “Too good to be kept long.”
Several times we exchanged healths in the sparkling beverage with its faint aroma of Hesperidean apples, while in his characteristic style he called my attention to still surviving touches of Palladio in the pilasters of the great room, and then to unique examples of Maize Ears, as trophies of Columbus, modelled along one of the cornices. But though full dressed for the occasion, and bedecked with medals, he looked more worn and tired than at Monte Corbo. His voice had lost its ring, when at last, after a pause, he remarked gloomily that his fête champêtre had been a failure. Doctor Lysander, who had just returned from Switzerland, in a prolonged dispute with several of his critics, had spoiled the afternoon.
“They can’t come to terms,” he continued. “We have had a bears’ garden here,” and while I did my best to suppress a fit of laughter, at a distant noise of angry voices, walked to one of the open windows, and looked out into the darkening park.
November Night Tales Page 21