The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow

by Patrick Quentin

  The child rose and put a golden hand caressingly on John’s arm. “You must not be afraid. I am your friend. I shall never tell. And little Mario—who cares for his childish talk? Of course, the police have found by the body your handkerchief with the pretty G on it. But how will they ever know that G stands for Signore Godolphin? My friend, you must not be afraid.”

  John Godolphin pushed the boy’s hand away, panic coiling through him. Impossibly, the charming bubble of his life seemed to be bursting. Sebastiano could not have planted the handkerchief he had given him by the body! Sebastiano could not be saying what he was saying! Sebastiano was a child, a little boy with an angel’s face, whom he had befriended.

  He jumped up. “What have you done, Sebastiano? Tell me! What do you know? Who killed Rosa?”

  “Now it is you who are joking. You dropped your handkerchief. It was foolish, but there is no cause for alarm.”

  “But this is absurd, wicked.” John Godolphin, whose closest brush with the law had been a parking ticket in Poughkeepsie, tried feebly to grasp the fact of evil. “The police would never believe you. Get out of my house! Get out at once!”

  Sebastiano smiled serenely. “But why would the police not believe me? I have never been in trouble like some of the bad boys. I am an innocent little child. You try to threaten me, offer to give me money to keep me quiet. But poor though I am, I can think only of justice and the unfortunate Rosa.” He went to the tea tray and picked up a piece of pastry in both hands. He started to eat it. He might have been a figure from an Etruscan vase. “Always we have such lovely things to eat? And a bed? A big, big bed like I see in the cinema, where you can sleep with your legs stretched out and there is no one to kick you?”

  Sebastiano sighed. “Ah, it pleases me here.”

  Looking back from the nightmare that followed, John Godolphin saw that this had been the one moment when he could still have escaped from the trap. He cursed himself a thousand times for a cowardice which had, barnacle-wise, encrusted him during forty-five years sheltered by inherited money, by gentility, by his faded nineteenth-century belief that the harmless always remain unharmed.

  He could have thrown the boy out then and faced the issue of the handkerchief squarely. It was not entirely that he was afraid of being arrested for Rosa’s murder, although he shuddered as he imagined the effect of Sebastiano’s accusation, babbled out with tears and childish innocence. It was the overtones that unmanned John Godolphin’s little soul, the tittered gossip around Teresa Carduccio’s lunch table, the Marquesa’s tart, socially destroying quip, the cold, cutting eye of the old Duquesa.

  All these concomitants of scandal were too much for him at a moment when he needed courage. John Godolphin’s weapons of self-defense had rusted, and this child with an old man’s insight had exactly gauged his weakness.

  That night Sebastiano slept in the largest, most luxurious room in the Villa. That night John Godolphin started down the path into darkness.

  During the early days of the capitulation John tried to tell himself that, since disaster had struck, things might have been worse. The first morning, after a late breakfast in bed brought up to him by an outraged housemaid, Sebastiano had demanded money for clothes. But once they had been bought, he was not too much in evidence. He seemed fascinated by his own appearance and spent narcissistic hours in front of a mirror, trying on this shirt and that, strutting in a blue suit, lovingly alternating his ties. He was even neat about the house and charmingly helpful to the perplexed and hostile servants.

  In hideous parody John had what he had sometimes thought he craved—the adopted son, the Little Lord Fauntleroy on whom to lavish his middle-aged affection.

  But one morning when John returned from a miserably unsuccessful attempt to sketch the Royal Palace, he found Sebastiano lolling in the salon with little Mario perched opposite him. Sebastiano was drinking sherry from the Venetian glass decanter and smoking one of John’s personal monogrammed cigarettes. Little Mario had nothing. He was sitting with his bare legs dangling high above the floor, his eyes fixed yearningly on the sherry decanter.

  When Sebastiano saw John, he gestured with the cigarette. “Aw, give Mario a coupla bucks, Joe. He’s hongry.”

  He was using the American slang which he knew John hated, and for the first time arrogance stared unconcealed from his eyes. John realized that his capitulation had reached a second crisis. Sebastiano was testing his own strength and John’s weakness. If he got away with this studied insolence, he would know that his victory was complete. But, keen though John’s insight was, a paralyzing weakness overcame him. If he protested now, Sebastiano would humiliate him before this tiny urchin, and that he could not face.

  He handed Mario a thousand-lira note. Mario got up and on timid tiptoe, stood at the table side. Reaching out, he touched the decanter with a fingertip. He was aglow with wonder. It was not the wine that fascinated him, John guessed; it was the sparkle of the exquisitely cut glass.

  “Bello,” he whispered at the decanter and at this rich man’s wonderland where such things could be.

  Suddenly Sebastiano swung round and saw him. Scowling, he raised his hand as if to strike the child.

  “Animal, pig, do not touch. Go—go away from this house and never come back. Go! This is a gentleman’s house. Not fit for the pigs like you.”

  As the little boy scurried away, John noticed that there were wine stains on the quattrocento table and Sebastiano was dropping his ash lazily on the carpet.

  That night Sebastiano got theatrically drunk. Up in his own room, John could hear the boy tramping and cursing around the Villa until the small hours of the morning. He did not get up until noon the next day and then only to scream down the staircase for his lunch. When the housemaid brought it up, he rejected it, yelling obscenities and throwing the tray on the floor. John found his dirty socks on a couch in the living room. Sebastiano spat at the cook and insulted the coachman. Once again John knew exactly what the boy was working towards, but stultifying apathy and fear now had him in their grip.

  It took Sebastiano exactly three well-planned days to get rid of the servants.

  After the last of them, the cook, had left in a flurry of tears and bundles, he was sweet and affectionate to John. He squatted at his feet in the salon, smiling up at him.

  “Aw, forget it, Joe. Justa old hens. My mother’s a swell cook. She cooks spaghetti fine. Oh, boy.” He put a soft hand on John’s knee. “You gonna like my mother’s spaghetti.”

  Nervous exhaustion gave John false courage. “I won’t have it!” he cried. “You’ve deliberately insulted my servants and driven them out of the house to bring in your own wretched family. I won’t have it, I say! Get out of here at once or I will call the police.”

  “And the police will believe you now?” queried Sebastiano. “Maybe at first they believe. But not now. You bring me to live in your house, you buy me fine clothes. Why?” He scratched his back idly. “No, you lika my mother. She cook spaghetti fine. You lika my big brother Gino too, the fidanzato of Rosa. He drives the carriage swell. Oh, boy!”

  Sebastiano’s family moved in that evening—his mother, his father, his grown brother, a nubile sister, and a trio of infants and babies. Semi-hypnotized, John watched Sebastiano showing them proudly through room after room of the Villa. The mother, a forlorn mousy creature, tried to install her brood in the kitchen quarters, but Sebastiano would have none of that. They weren’t to be servants, he assured them. They were the guests of the Signore Godolphin whose benevolence was as infinite as that of the Blessed Santa Lucia.

  John saw then that Sebastiano ruled his own family just as autocratically as he ruled the Villa Godolphin. At fourteen, in the most patriarchal of all societies, his extravagant will to survive had made him the head of the household. With a flash of illumination, John saw too that he and all of them had become part of a boy’s dream. No adult would have dared push his advantage to this extreme point. There was a child’s naïveté mingled with the evil
. Somehow that added a final touch of horror.

  And for John horror hovered close at that first dinner, served in his sumptuous dining hall, where the family sat in reluctant tongue-tied silence while Sebastiano, at the head of the table, dispensed greasy spaghetti from an earthenware kitchen pot. The mother and father were both timid and respectful, yearning for the obscurity of the kitchen, thanking John haltingly over and over again for his great honor to their unworthiness. But brother Gino, a large, hulking youth, was immediately adaptable to good fortune. So was Emelia, the handsome, overblown sister.

  After dinner, Sebastiano brought out John’s French cognac and while the mother put the young children to bed upstairs, a rowdy party developed in the salon. They played the radio blastingly, and Gino and Emelia hurled themselves through jitterbug steps. Sebastiano, shining-eyed, danced by himself.

  The baby and one of the younger sisters had been installed in the room next to John’s. The baby whimpered as John, who had always been a conventional moralist, lay sleepless, trying to understand what it was he had done that had brought this Nemesis upon him.

  It was partly, of course, his cowardice. He had never thought that being brave or not brave mattered in a world which still seemed to him to have some logic, some law. But perhaps it had been lack of heart, too. Because he had never stopped to think of the poor or the war-torn, he had never dreamed what evil poverty and war could spawn.

  Uproarious laughter, rich, unthinking, happy, sounded from downstairs, mingling with the baby’s whining.

  John Godolphin thought of Sebastiano’s smiling face. And the police will believe you now?

  Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, he murmured and turned his face to the wall.

  Since John could not face the Truth which had come to the Villa Godolphin, he spent most of his time in the days that followed away from the house. The arrogant swagger of Gino, the supposed coachman, intimidated him, so he wandered aimlessly about Palermo on foot. Gossip travels fast in provincial Italy and he did not dare visit his friends for fear of what they would be thinking.

  One morning he met the Marquesa Landini outside the Theatro Massimo. The Marquesa leaned out of her carriage, her thin aristocratic face sharpened by malice.

  “Really, Mr. Godolphin, I hear you are suffering from a case of wholesale charity these days. They tell me the daughter is extremely attractive in a coarse way. I suppose it is the daughter, isn’t it? But why did you have to take in the entire family?”

  John felt the hot blood mounting to his face. Teresa Carduccio did not invite him to her next Thursday. He met the old Duquesa in the Cathedral Square and she walked right past him in a cloud of black lace.

  Deeply wounded by this final snub, John found the blaring of the radio in the salon unendurable that evening. He slipped out of the front door and stood, exhausted, under the great baroque portico. A tiny figure was hovering like a night bird in the shadows of the garden. It was little Mario. John was strangely pleased to see someone—anyone—who was not an immediate part of Sebastiano’s all-pervading flock. He made a move towards him, but suddenly Sebastiano appeared from the doorway.

  With shouts of anger Sebastiano plunged at Mario. The small boy scampered away. Sebastiano tossed rocks after him. He turned to John, his young god’s face blazing with fury.

  “The little pig! He never shall come into my house. Never into my house.”

  It was the “my” that decided John upon flight. What had happened had left him stripped of all delusions about himself. He had not had the courage to fight before; he knew he would never have the courage to fight now. But he could summon up the strength to escape. It would mean abandoning his beloved Villa and all the treasures he had so fastidiously amassed. But at least he could know again what it was to be free from a boy’s demented dream.

  The next morning he went downtown and bought a plane ticket to Rome. The plane left at seven that evening. When the time came, he did not dare to take with him even a small suitcase through the barrage of black Sicilian eyes. He walked some distance from the Villa and then hired a carriage to the airport.

  He was in the queue waiting to enter the plane when the policeman came and politely asked him to step aside for a moment. Sebastiano, seraphic and neat in his new blue suit, was standing on the weary airport grass, smiling at him.

  The policeman produced a gold cigarette case which John recognized as his own.

  “Does this belong to you, sir?”

  John stammered: “Why, yes.”

  The policeman patted Sebastiano’s head. “This little boy found it in your carriage. You should give him a reward.”

  Sebastiano looked blandly from John to the policeman. John knew from the boy’s expression exactly what he was meant to know. If he took the plane, Sebastiano would report him to the police as Rosa’s murderer. He would certainly be picked up at the Rome airport.

  Neither he nor Sebastiano spoke as they returned to the Villa Godolphin.

  From that moment John knew that for some reason the boy had not yet finished with him, and he was not kept long in suspense. Two days later, Sebastiano brought to him a small, cringing man with frayed cuffs and a dilapidated brief case. This, said Sebastiano, was his Uncle Giulio, a very clever man, a lawyer. He had brought a paper for John to sign. With much bowing and scraping the little man produced a document from his brief case and handed it to John.

  It was a deed of gift, yielding the Villa and all its contents to Sebastiano’s father as guardian for Sebastiano himself, who was to come into full possession at the age of twenty-one.

  John Godolphin had lived more in the last few weeks than in all his life before. He had learned so many things. And now he knew that there is a perverse pleasure even in the extremity of torment. There comes a point where the prisoner almost loves his chains, where the victim lifts a willing throat to the sacrificial knife. He signed the paper and Uncle Giulio went away. For the rest of the day John sat idly on the sunny terrace. The indeterminate brothers and sisters crawled and squalled and fought around him. But he felt a strange lightness that carried him somehow beyond his body.

  The pressure had been relaxed. In abject defeat, John had discovered, there is peace.

  He slept late the next morning. Why not? It was almost eleven when Emilia, the broad, pleasant smile sponged off her face, burst into his bedroom without knocking and said he was wanted downstairs.

  “The police,” she said. “Something has happened with the police.”

  John took his time about dressing. He carefully chose his most elegant tie and when he looked in the mirror to brush his hair, surveyed his round, uninteresting face with none of his customary dislike. His years of nonentity were over. He was something now, if only a boy’s puppet.

  When he walked into the littered salon, the whole family was there. So were three policemen. John took in the squalid picture with an exactness he had never been able to marshal when, as an artist, he had studied a pretty landscape or a quaint house with a view to painting it.

  But it was Sebastiano, as always, who fixed his attention. In his handsome blue suit the boy was crouched on his knees before one of the policemen. His arms were encircling the man’s legs. His beautiful, tragic face was ravaged with despair.

  “What I have done is a sin, a sin,” he moaned in Italian. “I can no longer sleep with it on my conscience. He gave me money. He brought me here to live with him. He did everything for my family. And because I was weak I promised to lie. But I cannot—not any more. I went to the priest and he gives me no absolution unless I confess.”

  He swung round on his knees, pointing at John. There were round, shiny tears on his dusky cheeks. “It is his handkerchief. He killed Rosa. I saw him do it. He frightened me. He gave me money. But I must tell the truth. He killed her.”

  The pattern was complete now. With strange clairvoyance John saw the symmetry of it. Sebastiano’s childish imagination had its limits. He probably had never heard of bank accounts. He could not grasp the
fact that he could have milked John for years to come. He had had a slum child’s dream of a palace, and stupendously he had made of his dream an actuality. He had the house now. Legally, it was his, and John, who had outlived his usefulness, was to be cynically tossed to the police for removal and ultimate extinction.

  John looked at the boy’s glorious, tear-stained face. There was nothing to say, really. You muddle through life; you have no aim. But eventually you know what you were made for—and the pattern is complete.

  He waited for the policeman to cross to him. What would they do? They had the handkerchief; that was all the evidence they could possibly need.

  But the head policeman turned to Gino. Astonishingly, the two other policemen, the underlings, jumped on Sebastiano’s brother and snapped handcuffs on his wrists.

  That was the first time that John Godolphin noticed little Mario. The tiny boy had emerged from behind the couch and was straining on tiptoe to witness this interesting procedure.

  Gino’s struggle was ineffectual. The chief policeman had scooped little Mario up in his arms and with all the pomp of his exalted position was frowning at Gino.

  “Gino Coletti, you are under arrest for the murder of your mistress, Rosa Morini. This little child was a witness to the crime. He saw your brother Sebastiano plant Signore Godolphin’s handkerchief at the scene, and he has told us all about your brother’s plan to put the blame on the American Signore.”

  Safe in the policeman’s arms, little Mario looked down solemnly at Sebastiano. Suddenly he smiled. John had never seen him smile before. The small dirty face was transformed into the prettiness of a Verrochio Eros.

  Snarling, Sebastiano leaped up at Mario. But the policeman merely held Mario higher, as one holds a leg of lamb from a greedy dog.

  Sebastiano was weeping passionately when they handcuffed him. John Godolphin dropped onto his brocade couch. Yes, there was a pattern here, too. There had been no room for Mario in Sebastiano’s great greedy dream. And Mario had dreams of his own….