The Plague, Pestilence & Apocalypse MEGAPACK™
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insult . Yet Tillizini preserved the same outward show of unconcern
which Festini had seen so disastrously reproduced in his son .
“I can only add,” the old man went on, “this one fact—that to
whatever depths a member of a noble house may sink in assisting
the State to bring justice to the men who are setting the laws of the
country at defiance, it is possible, Signor, for a man to sink still,
lower, and to be one of those whose dreadful acts, and whose cruel
practices, set the machinery of the law in motion .”
He spoke in his passionless, even tones, and a red flush crept over
the Count’s face .
“You may search as you wish,” he said . “My house is at your
disposition . Here are my keys .”
He produced from his pocket a steel ring on which a dozen keys
hung .
Tillizini made no attempt to take them .
“If you will conduct me to your bedroom,” he said, “I shall not
trouble you with any further search .”
For a second only Count Festini hesitated . A swift cloud of ap-
prehension passed across his face . Then with a bow he extended his
hand to the door .
He followed them into the hall and led the way up the stairs . His
room was a large one, facing the road . It was as poorly furnished as
the remainder of the house . Tillizini closed the door behind him, and
the officer stood, barring all egress.
“Here are my keys .”
Again Count Festini held out the polished bunch .
“Thank you, I do not want them,” said Tillizini . He stood squarely
before the man . “I think it is as well, Count,” he said gently, “that I
should tell you what I know . Four days ago a man was arrested in
the act of placing a bomb on the railway line between Rome and
Florence . He was apparently a new recruit, but after he was arrested
it was discovered that he was a man who stood very high in the
councils of the Florentine branch of your excellent society .”
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Festini said nothing . He listened with every interest .
“In some way,” Tillizini went on, “this man had discovered many
secrets which I am sure the ‘Red Hand’ had no intention of reveal-
ing . He may have acted as secretary to one of the heads of your
Order . At any rate, he knew that documents incriminating yourself
and a very large number of influential people in Italy were secreted
in this house .”
“Indeed!” said Festini, coldly . “You have the keys; you may
verify for yourself the truth of your informant’s statement .” Again
Tillizini made no attempt to take the keys from him .
“He knew more than I have told,” he said slowly . “He indicated
to me a hiding-place which I gather is known only to you and to the
leaders of your band .”
He walked to the end of the room, where four long windows lit
the apartment . Between the second and the third hung a picture in a
deep gold frame . He passed his hand gingerly over the scroll-work
on the left side of the frame .
Presently he found what he wanted, and pressed .
The bottom half of the rich carving opened like a narrow drawer .
Festini watched him, motionless, as he took a bundle of papers
from the secret recess behind the hinge moulding .
Tillizini examined them briefly at the window and placed them
carefully in the inside pocket of his coat . He looked at Festini long
and earnestly, but before he could speak the door was opened and
Simone Festini came in quickly .
He walked to his father .
“What is it?” he asked, and bent his angry brows upon the old
professor .
“It is nothing, my son,” said Count Festini .
He laid his hand upon the boy’s head and smiled .
“You must go downstairs until I have finished my business with
his Excellency .”
The boy hesitated .
“Why should I go?” he asked .
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He scented the danger and was hard to move . He looked round
from one to the other, alert, suspicious, almost cat-like .
“If anything should happen to me, Simone,” said Count Festini
softly, “I beg you to believe that I have provided for you hand-
somely, and there is a provision which is greater than any I can offer
you—the protection and the friendship, and as I hope one day, the
leadership, of comrades who will serve you well . And now you must
go .”He bent down and kissed the young man on the cheek .
Simone went out, dry-eyed, but full of understanding . In the hall
below he came face to face with his brother, who had returned from
the Piazza .
“Come this way, Antonio,” said the boy gravely .
He walked first into the dining-room where an hour ago they had
been seated together at their meal .
“Our father is under arrest, I think,” he said, still coolly, as though
he were surveying a commonplace happening . “I also think I know
what will happen next . Now, I ask you, which way do you go if I
take up our father’s work?”
His eyes were bright with suppressed excitement; he had grown
suddenly to a man in that brief consciousness of impending respon-
sibility .
Antonio looked at him sorrowfully .
“I go the straight way, Simone,” he said quietly . “Whichever way
is honest and clean and kindly, I go that way .”
“Buono!” said the other . “Then we part here unless God sends a
miracle—you to your destiny and I to mine .”
He stopped and went deadly white, and looking at him, Antonio
saw the beads of sweat upon his brow .
“What is the matter?” he asked, and stepped forward to his side,
but the boy pushed him back .
“It is nothing,” he said, “nothing .”
He held himself stiffly erect, his beautiful face raised, his eyes
fixed on the discoloured decorations of the ceiling.
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For he had heard the pistol shot, muffled as it was by intervening
doors and thick walls, that told the end for Count Festini .
Tillizini, hurrying down to break the news to him, found him
fully prepared .
“I thank your Excellency,” said the boy . “I knew . Your Excel-
lency will not live to see the result of your work, for you are an
old man, but if you did, you will behold the revenge which I shall
extract from the world for this murder, for I am very young, and, by
God’s favour, I have many years to live .” Tillizini said nothing, but
he went back to Florence a sad man .
Three months afterwards he again visited Siena, and in the Via
Cavour, in broad daylight, he was shot down by two masked men
who made good their escape; and, in his chair, at the College of
Anthropology at Florence, there reigned, in good time, Tillizini the
younger .
CHAPTER I.
SIR RALPH DELIVERS JUDGMENT
It was absurd to call the affair “the Red Hand Trial,” because the
“Red Hand” had played no part in t
he case so far as the burglary was
concerned .
It was a very commonplace burglary with a well-known, albeit
humble member of Burboro’s community in the dock . He had been
found in a house in the early hours of the morning, he had given an
incoherent explanation to the alert butler who had captured him,
and, beyond a rigmarole of a story that some mysterious Italian had
sent him thither, there was no hint of the workings of the extraor-
dinary association which at the moment agitated the law-abiding
people of Britain .
It was equally absurd and grossly unfair to accuse the newspa-
pers who referred to it as “the Red Hand Case,” of unjustifiable sen-
sationalism . After all, there was an Italian mentioned in connexion
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with the charge—quite enough in those days of panic to justify the
reference .
The Session House was crowded, for the case had excited more
than usual interest . All the county was there . Lady Morte-Mannery
occupied a seat on the Bench, as was her right . Most of the house-
party from East Mannery had driven over and was seated in privi-
leged places, to the no small inconvenience of the Bar and the rep-
resentatives of the Press, the latter of whom bitterly and indignantly
resented this encroachment upon their already restricted domain .
But Sir Ralph Morte-Mannery, the Chairman of the Session, had
a short way with critics and professed, though his practice did not al-
ways come into line with his theory, that the Press might be ignored
and impressed with a sense of its own unworthiness .
The Pressmen in the Session House at Burboro’ were constantly
undergoing that mysterious process which is known as “being put in
their place .” They desired, most earnestly, that the principle should
be applied now, for their places were occupied by the guests of the
Chairman .
Hilary George, K .C ., sat with his colleagues, though only as a
spectator . He was curious to see in operation the workings of justice,
as Sir Ralph conceived it .
Sir Ralph’s sentences were notorious, his judgments had before
now come up for revision . He was, perhaps, the best hated man in
the country . Mothers frightened their obstreperous children with ref-
erences to Sir Ralph . He was the bogey man of the poacher, a moral
scarecrow to tramps, people who slept out at night, and suchlike
dangerous characters .
A little man, spare and bony, his clothes, though carefully fitted,
seemed to hang upon him; his face was long and white, and solemn;
his lips drooped mournfully at each corner . A pair of gold-mounted
pince-nez struck an angle on his pendulous nose as to suggest that
they were so placed in order not to obstruct his line of vision . His
hair was white and thin; he had two dirty-grey tufts of side-whisker,
and affected a Gladstonian collar . His voice, when he spoke, was
querulous and complaining; he gave the impression that he felt a
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personal resentment toward the unfortunate prisoner in the dock,
for having dragged him from his comfortable library to this ill-
ventilated court .
Sir Ralph was a man hovering about the age of sixty . His wife,
who was looking supremely lovely in her black velvet cloak and her
big black hat, which one white feather lightened, was nearly thirty
years his junior . A beautiful woman by some standards . Junoesque,
imperial, commanding; her lips in repose were thin and straight, and
if the truth be told, a little repellent . Some people found them so .
Hilary George, for one, a daring rider to hounds, and wont to employ
the phraseology of the field, confessed that he never saw those lips
tighten but a voice within him uttered the warning, “’Ware! ’ware!”
She was a beautiful woman, and a disappointed woman . She had
married Sir Ralph Morte-Mannery, five years before, in the supreme
faith that she had emerged for ever from that atmosphere of penury
which had surrounded her girlhood; that she had said “good-bye” to
the strivings, the scrimpings and the make-believe of shabby gentil-
ity with which a mother with social aspirations and an income of a
£150 a year had enclouded her .
But Vera Forsyth found she had moved from an atmosphere of
penury enforced by circumstances to an atmosphere of penury prac-
tised for love of it . Sir Ralph was a mean man, he was little short
of a miser, and he had the settled conviction that, in taking care of
the pennies, he was appointed as by divine right, the natural heir to
hundreds .
It seemed to her, in her first year of marriage, that she could never
escape from the eternal account book . He was a man who believed
in domestic stock-taking . He knew, better than she, the prevalent
price of potatoes, and he noted with pain any advance in the grocer’s
bill, and set himself the congenial task of discovering the cause for
any such swollen expenditure .
Now she looked along the Bench at her husband curiously; he
was always a source of interest to her . She needed some such inter-
est to sustain her in her everyday acquaintance with this man .
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He was summing up with gross partiality . Though he had had one
or two bad raps from the Court of Criminal Appeal, he was not to be
turned from his set purpose, which was to rid the country of those
who showed a disinclination to distinguish the difference between
meum and teum .
All who knew the circumstances realized that the summing up
was in the veriest bad taste . The young man, white of face, who
stood by the dock’s edge, his shaking hands clasping and unclasp-
ing the iron rail before him, was being tried for burglary, and the
burglary was at Sir Ralph’s own place .
“He has told you, Gentlemen of the Jury,” went on Sir Ralph in his
speech, “that a mysterious Italian asked him to break into the house,
where somebody would be waiting to give him an equally mysteri-
ous packet . He did not intend to steal, so he tells you; he was merely
carrying out the instructions of this mythical—perhaps I ought not
to say ‘mythical,’” said Sir Ralph hastily, with the recollection of a
Lord Chief Justice’s comments on a judgment of his—“but which
may to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, appear to be a mythical person .
“He tells you that he was induced by his poverty to go to Highlawn
at midnight, to effect an entrance through the kitchen, and there to
wait until some cloaked, masked individual brought him a packet
which he was to bring away . He tells you that he had no intention
whatever of robbing the owner . He was merely being the accom-
plice of some person in the house .”
Sir Ralph leant back with a little contemptuous smile .
“Well, Gentlemen of the Jury,” he said, throwing out his hands,
with pseudo good-nature, “if you believe that, of course you still
must convict the
man on the charge of being an accomplice . As you
know, there is in this house a very valuable collection of Renais-
sance jewellery; and when the Counsel for the Crown tells you,
as he has told you, that the inference to be drawn from the man’s
presence in the kitchen, where the butler discovered him, is that he
intended to make a raid upon that jewellery, you are, perhaps, as
justified in believing that suggestion as you are in believing that of
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the prisoner’s Counsel—that he was merely acting as an innocent
agent in the matter .”
He said a few more words, summarized such of the evidence as
had not come under his previous purview, and commended the jury
to their deliberations with the air of benevolence which invariably
enwrapped the peroration of his more malignant speeches .
The jury tramped out, and a buzz of conversation overhung the
court . The prisoner lingered a little by the rails; he looked down at
the delicate face of his girl-wife, this woman of seventeen, who had
sat throughout the trial tense and haggard, listening to the evidence .
“It can’t be helped, dear,” he said . He was a man of the working
classes, but his voice showed an unusual culture .
The girl could only raise her piteous eyes to his; her lips trem-
bled, she could frame no answer . She knew that her young husband
spoke the truth . Poverty had ground them down to desperation, but
to whatever end it might drive them, it would never make her man
a thief .
The jury were back in five minutes. They shuffled into the box,
and answered to their names, keeping their eyes averted from the
prisoner at the Bar . The Clerk of Assizes put his questions to them .
“Do you find the prisoner ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Guilty’ of the crime of
burglary?”
“Guilty,” said the foreman, in a high, nervous voice .
Sir Ralph nodded his head approvingly . He turned to the prisoner
as the Clerk said, “Have you anything to say before the sentence is
passed?”
The man in the dock took a swift glance at the drooping figure of
his wife . She had fainted, and a kindly policeman was lifting her to
carry her from the court .
“The story I have told,” he said, speaking clearly and without
hesitation, “was a true story . I had no idea of burgling your house,
Sir Ralph . I merely went there because I thought I was acting as the