The information was clear, but the thought that Tebaldo might die without having cleared Ippolito was anything but reassuring. Corona’s instinct was to start at once, but she remembered her promise to Vittoria, and did not see how she could make such a journey without informing her husband and giving some explanation of her conduct. She went to his room as soon as she knew what she must do.
‘Giovanni,’ she said, ‘I wish you to go to Sicily with me at once. I must go to Messina.’
Giovanni looked at her sharply in surprise.
‘Are you ill, my dear?’ he enquired. ‘Is it for a change? Is anything the matter?’
Corona laughed, for she had never been ill in her life. The mere idea seemed ludicrous to her.
‘Can you imagine me ill?’ she asked. ‘No. I will tell you what I can. Someone has told me something, making me promise not to tell anyone else—’
‘Your informant is a woman, dear,’ observed Giovanni, smiling.
‘Never mind who it was. But from what was told me I know that if I can go to Messina I can get evidence which will clear Ippolito completely. So I came to you.’
‘Are you positively sure?’ asked Sant’ Ilario. ‘It is a long journey.’
‘We shall travel together,’ answered Corona, as though that answered every objection.
‘I should like it very much. Do you wish to start to-day?’
‘Yes. The man is said to be dying at a hotel in Messina.’
It amused them both to make a mystery of going away together, though it was not the first time that they had done such a thing, and Sant’ Ilario’s presence lightened the anxiety which Corona still felt as to the result of the journey.
They reached Messina at evening and drove to the wretched hotel where Tebaldo lay dying, for there was no other in the city, in which they could have lodged at all.
Half an hour later Corona entered the sick man’s room. The sister who was nursing him rose in surprise as the Princess entered, and laid her finger on her lips. Tebaldo appeared to be asleep.
‘Is he better?’ whispered Corona.
But the sister shook her head and pointed to his face. It was like a yellow shadow on the white pillow, in the soft light of the single candle, before which the nurse had set a book upright on the table, as a shade.
Corona stood still by the side of the bed and looked down at what remained of the man who had done such terrible deeds during the last month. The colourless lips were parted and displayed the sharp, white teeth, and the half-grown beard gave something wolfish to the face. The lids were not quite closed and showed the whites of the eyes. Corona felt suddenly that he was going to die in his unconsciousness without speaking. Even if he revived for a moment, he might not understand her. The candle flickered, and she thought the lids quivered.
‘He is dying,’ she said in a low voice. ‘But he must speak to me before he dies.’
‘Are you his mother, madam?’ asked the sister, in a whisper.
‘No!’ Corona’s great eyes blazed upon the nun’s face. Then she spoke gently again. ‘I am the mother of the priest he falsely accused. Before he dies he must tell the truth.’
A faint smile moved the wasted lips, and the lids slowly opened. Then he spoke, almost naturally.
‘You have come to see me die. I understand.’
‘No,’ said Corona, speaking clearly and distinctly. ‘I have come to hear the truth about my son, from your own lips, as I know it from others—’
The yellow face shivered and the eyes stared. There was a convulsive effort of the head to rise from the pillow.
‘Who told you?’ The question gurgled in the throat.
‘Your sister told me—’
‘I have no sister.’ The head fell back again, and the twisting smile took possession of the lips.
‘Vittoria is your sister. You are Tebaldo Pagliuca.’ Corona bent down towards him anxiously, for she feared that he was wandering, and that the truth must escape her at last.
‘Oh no! Vittoria is not my sister. I remember when she was brought to Camaldoli by the outlaws when I was a boy.’
Corona bent lower still and stared into the open eyes. Their expression was quite natural and quiet, though the voice was faint now.
‘It is better that someone should know,’ it said. ‘I know, because I saw her brought. The brigands stole her from her nurse’s arms. Vittoria is the daughter of Fornasco. They frightened my father and mother — they brought the child at night — in trying to get a ransom they were all taken, but none of them would tell — there is a paper of my father’s, sealed — in Rome, among my things. He always said that we might be accused, though they managed to make people believe it was my mother’s child, for fear of the brigands — I cannot tell you all that. You will find it in the papers.’
The eyelids closed again, but the lips still moved. Corona bent down.
‘Water,’ said the parched whisper.
They gave him drink quickly, but he could hardly swallow it. He was going fast.
‘Call the doctor,’ said Corona to the nurse. ‘He is dying. Has he seen a priest? Call my husband!’
‘I had sent for a priest,’ answered the nurse, leaving the room hastily.
For many minutes Tebaldo gasped painfully for breath. In his suffering Corona raised the pillow with his head upon it, tenderly and carefully.
‘You are dying,’ she said softly. ‘Commend your soul — pray for forgiveness!’
It was horrible to her belief to see him dying unconfessed in his many sins.
‘Quickly — lose no time!’ she urged. ‘Think of God — think of one prayer! It may be too late in a moment—’
‘Too late?’ he cried suddenly, with a revival of strength. ‘Too late? But I shall catch him on the hill! Gallop, mare, gallop — there, there! So! We shall do it yet. I am lighter than old Basili! One more stretch! There he is! Gallop, mare, gallop, for I shall catch him on the hill!’
One hand grasped the sheet like a bridle, the other patted it encouragingly. Corona stared and listened breathlessly, half in horror, half in expectation. She did not hear the door open, as someone came in. The dying man raved on.
‘What? Down? He has killed his horse? It shied at the woman in black! He will try the church door — on, mare, gallop! We shall catch him there!’
A hideous glare of rage and hatred was in the burning eyes. The twisted and discoloured lips set themselves like blue steel. The right hand struck out wildly. Then the eyes fixed themselves upon the young priest who stood beside Corona, and whom she had not seen till then.
Tebaldo sat up as though raised by a spring, suddenly. He grasped the priest’s ready hands and looked up into his face, seeing only him, though the doctor and the nurse were close by.
‘I confess to Almighty God,’ he began —
And word for word, as he had confessed to Ippolito alone in the little church, he went through the whole confession, quickly, clearly, in a loud voice, holding the priest’s hands.
Who should say that it was not a true confession now? That at the last, the dream of terror did not change to the reality of remorse? The priest’s voice spoke the words of forgiveness, and he bent down above Corona’s kneeling figure, that the dying man might hear.
But before the last merciful word was spoken, the last of the Corleone lay stone dead on his pillow. He was buried beside his two brothers in the little cemetery of Santa Vittoria, for the sister had promised him that, when he knew that he was dying.
And outside the gate, when it was all over, a figure in black came and knelt down upon the rough, broken stones, and two white hands grasped the painted iron rails, and a low voice came from beneath the little black shawl.
‘Mother of God, three black crosses! Mother of God, three black crosses!’
And there were three black crosses, side by side.
CHAPTER XL
IT MIGHT HAVE been a long and difficult matter to establish Vittoria’s identity, if Maria Carolina had been really in
sane, as it had been feared that she might be. She was beyond further suffering, perhaps, when the third of her sons was dead, but her mind was clear enough under the intense religious melancholy that had settled upon her in her grief. The fact of her having been willing and anxious to leave Vittoria at such a time now explained itself. The girl was not her daughter, and in the intensity of her sorrow the bereaved mother felt that she was a stranger, if not a burden. Yet she kept the secret, out of a sort of fear that even after eighteen years the revelation of it might bring about some unimaginably dreadful consequence to herself, and as though the Duca di Fornasco could still accuse her of having helped to steal his child, by receiving her from the brigands.
The fact was that the outlaws had terrified the Corleone at the time, threatening them with total destruction if they refused to conceal the infant. They were poor and lived in an isolated neighbourhood, more or less in fear of their lives, at a time when brigandage was the rule, and when the many bands that existed in the island were under the general direction of the terrible Leone. They had yielded and had kept the secret with Sicilian reticence. Tebaldo alone had been old enough to partly understand the truth, but his father had told him the whole story before dying, and had left him a clearly-written account of it, in case of any future difficulty. But Maria Carolina was alive still, and sane, and she told the truth clearly and connectedly to a lawyer, for she was glad to sever her last tie with the world, and glad, perhaps, that the stolen child should go back to her own people after all. Among her possessions were the clothes and tiny ornaments the infant had worn.
Vittoria’s first sensation when she knew the truth was that of a captive led into the open air after years of confinement in a poisonous air.
She had been the daughter of a race of ill fame, fatherless, and all but motherless. Her three brothers had come to evil ends, one by one. She had been left alone in the world, the last representative of what so many called ‘the worst blood in Italy.’ She had been divided from the man she loved by a twofold bloodshed and by all the horror of her last surviving brother’s crimes. Many and many a time she had stared into her mirror for an hour at night, not pleased by her own delicate loveliness, but asking herself, with heart-broken wonder, how it was possible that she could be the daughter of such a mother, the sister of such brothers, the grandchild of traitors and betrayers to generations of wickedness, back into the dim past. She had never been like them, nor felt like them, nor acted as they did, yet it had seemed mad, if not wicked, to doubt that she was one of them. And each morning, meeting them all again and living with them, there had come the shock of opposition between her inheritance of honour and their inborn disposition to treachery and crime.
And now, it was not true. There was not one drop of their blood in her veins. There was not in her one taint of all that line of wickedness. It had all been a mistake and a dream and an illusion of fate, and she awoke in the morning and was free — free to face the world, to face Corona Saracinesca, to marry Orsino, without so much as a day of mourning for those who had been called her brothers.
The fresh young blood came blushing back to the delicate cheeks, and the radiance of life’s spring played on the fair young head.
‘How beautiful you are!’ exclaimed Miss Lizzie, throwing her arms round her.
And Vittoria blushed again, and her eyes glistened with sheer, unbounded happiness.
‘But I shall never know what to call you,’ laughed Miss Lizzie.
‘I am Vittoria still,’ answered the other. ‘But I am Vittoria Spinelli — and I come of very respectable people!’ She laughed happily. ‘I am related to all kinds of respectable people! There is my father, first. He is on his way to see me — and I have a brother — a real brother, to be proud of. And I am the cousin of Taquisara of Guardia — but I am Vittoria still!’
Rome went half mad over the story, for the Romans had all been inclined to like Vittoria for her own sake while distrusting those who had composed her family. The instinct of an old and conservative society is very rarely wrong in such matters. The happy ending of the tragedy of the Corleone was a sincere relief to every one; and many who had known the Duca di Fornasco in the days when his infant daughter had been carried off and had seen how his whole life had been saddened during eighteen years by the cruel loss, rejoiced in the vast joy of his later years. For he had many friends, and was a man honoured and loved by those who knew him.
‘I have always believed that I should find you, my dear child,’ he said, when his eyes had cleared and he could see Vittoria through the dazzling happiness of the first meeting. ‘But I have often feared to find you, and I never dared to hope that I should find you what you are.’
It seemed to her that the very tone of his voice was like her own, as his brown eyes were like hers.
And later, he took Orsino’s hand and laid it in his daughter’s and pressed the two together.
‘You loved more wisely than you knew,’ he said. ‘But I know how bravely you loved, when you would not give her up, nor yield to anyone. Your father will not refuse to take my daughter from my hands, I think.’
‘He will be as proud to take her as I am,’ said Orsino.
‘Or as I am to give her to such a man as you.’
So Orsino was married at last, and this tale comes to its happy end. For he was happy, and his people took his wife to themselves as one of them, and loved her for her own sake as well as for his; and they loved her, too, for the many troubles she had so bravely borne, under the disgrace of a name not her own. But neither were her sorrows hers, any more.
‘Such things can only happen in Italy,’ said Mrs. Slayback, after the wedding.
‘I am glad that nothing worse happened,’ answered her niece, thoughtfully. ‘To think that I might have married that man! To think that I cared for him! But I always felt that Vittoria was not his sister. If I ever marry, I shall marry an American.’
She laughed, though there was a little ache left in her heart. But she knew that it would not last long, for she had not been very desperately in earnest, after all.
THE END
Via Crucis
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER I
THE SUN WAS setting on the fifth day of May, in the year of our Lord’s grace eleven hundred and forty-five. In the little garden between the outer wall of the manor and the moat of Stoke Regis Manor, a lady slowly walked along the narrow path between high rose bushes trained upon the masonry, and a low flower-bed, divided into many little squares, planted alternately with flowers and sweet herbs on one side, and bordered with budding violets on the other. From the line where the flowers ended, spiked rushes grew in sharp disorder to the edge of the deep green water in the moat. Beyond the water stretched the close-cropped sward; then came great oak trees, shadowy still in their spring foliage; and then, corn-land and meadow-land, in long, green waves of rising tilth and pasture, as far as a man could see.
The sun was setting, and the level rays reddened the lady’s golden hair, and fired the softness of her clear blue eyes. She walked with a certain easy undulation, in which there were both strength and grace; and though she could barely have been called young, none would have dared to say that she was past maturity. Features which had been coldly perfect and hard in early youth, and which might grow sharp in old age,
were smoothed and rounded in the full fruit-time of life’s summer. As the gold deepened in the mellow air, and tinged the lady’s hair and eyes, it wrought in her face changes of which she knew nothing. The beauty of a white marble statue suddenly changed to burnished gold might be beauty still, but of different expression and meaning. There is always something devilish in the too great profusion of precious metal — something that suggests greed, spoil, gain, and all that he lives for who strives for wealth; and sometimes, by the mere absence of gold or silver, there is dignity, simplicity, even solemnity.
Above the setting sun, tens of thousands of little clouds, as light and fleecy as swan’s-down, some dazzling bright, some rosy-coloured, some, far to eastward, already purple, streamed across the pale sky in the mystic figure of a vast wing, as if some great archangel hovered below the horizon, pointing one jewelled pinion to the firmament, the other down and unseen in his low flight. Just above the feathery oak trees, behind which the sun had dipped, long streamers of red and yellow and more imperial purple shot out to right and left. Above the moat’s broad water, the quick dark May-flies chased one another, in dashes of straight lines, through the rosy haze, and as the sinking sun shot a last farewell glance between the oak trees on the knoll, the lady stood still and turned her smooth features to the light. There was curiosity in her look, expectation, and some anxiety, but there was no longing. A month, had passed since Raymond Warde had ridden away with his half-dozen squires and servants to do homage to the Empress Maud. Her court was, indeed, little more than a show, and Stephen ruled in wrongful possession of the land; but here and there a sturdy and honest knight was still to be found, who might, perhaps, be brought to do homage for his lands to King Stephen, but who would have felt that he was a traitor, and no true man, had he not rendered the homage of fealty to the unhappy lady who was his rightful sovereign. And one of these was Raymond Warde, whose great-grandfather had ridden with Robert the Devil to Jerusalem, and had been with him when he died in Nicaea; and his grandsire had been in the thick of the press at Hastings, with William of Normandy, wherefore he had received the lands and lordship of Stoke Regis in Hertfordshire; and his name is on Battle Abbey Roll to this day.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 920