He clapped his hands and a woman of about fifty years, stout and rosy and neatly dressed, came to them from the house.
“What can I offer you for your pleasure, gentlemen?” she asked.
“Your best white wine, my good hostess,” said the lawyer, as he took a pinch of snuff from a big brass snuff-box.
“In a moment, Sirs,” she said and as she turned, her eyes fell upon the youngest of her three visitors. “Gesu!” she cried, her mouth agape, “but it is an angel the good God has sent to us this blessed afternoon.”
The youth to whom she spoke had, with his fair brown hair, his blue eyes, and the delicacy of his features, a beauty spiritual enough to justify her admiring cry. He blushed and looked as uncomfortable under her praise as a schoolboy. The third of the party, a man, oldish and spare, with a lined, tired face, in which a pair of lively dark eyes twinkled incongruously, slapped his hand on the table.
“If you had had the schooling of that angel, my good soul, you would not call the afternoon of his first visit to your house blessed,” he cried with a laugh. “For it is his first visit, isn’t it?”
“Madre Maria, yes!” she answered. “Would I forget, even if I passed him in the city street?” And she went back to the house to fetch the wine.
The three men waited. About them were ridges of bare rock, with here and there on a spur, a grey column, like a splinter, pointing upwards to the sky. But between the ridges, wherever plants or trees could grow, they grew. Little forests of chestnut trees darkened the flanks of the hills, vines climbed them, or thickets of myrtle. Below, sheep and goats pastured on the lush grass; below the grass, orchards made a pattern of all the happy colours, red and green, orange and white; straight in front across the wide bay of Naples, the smoke of Vesuvius rose lazily into the sky.
“That was a point well taken,” said the attorney, rapping on his brass box with his knuckles. “An excellent point! I make you my compliments, Signor il Cavaliere.”
The Signor Cavalier lifted up a warning hand as the woman of the house brought glasses and a bottle of wine to the table.
“In a moment, my gentlemen, I shall bring you cakes and fruit. Cherries and figs and melons for your pleasure,” but it was at the lad of the party that her smiles and glances were directed. “You are from Pozzuoli perhaps? You will have ridden from Ischia town. You must eat, my young one,” and she bustled back to the house.
The lawyer laughed drily, finding an ironical amusement in the woman’s attentions.
“She is embarrassing, perhaps?” he said with a glance at the youth.
“She is surprising,” the oldest of the three observed. “I am myself in the dark, for I am here only as a witness of my young friend, but I’ll warrant that that good woman is more in the dark than I am.”
The young friend moved restlessly.
“It would be better, perhaps, to ask for her husband,” he said. He took his hat from his head and laid it on the ground beside his chair, but the lawyer would have none of such misplaced expedition. He filled his glass with wine and tasted it with relish and sat back in his chair.
“That would be an error. Let us proceed without haste! Or we shall meet with nothing but the shut mouth and the stubborn ignorance. And already I see someone coming down from the vineyard on the hill. It is very likely our man.”
When the others looked, they too saw him. He came down through the orchard with a swinging easy walk, a man on his own domain. He, too, was about the age of fifty, ruddy and cheerful, a big strong contented man. He came without hesitation straight up to the table and addressed himself to the Cavalier as the chief amongst his guests.
“The wine is to your liking, Sir, I hope?”
The Cavalier bowed with an uncomfortable word of thanks, but the lawyer straightened his shoulders. He looked round with a start and then a smile of recognition altered his face.
“But it is Crespino!” he cried. “You remember me, Crespino? The lawyer Zanotti — Lelio Zanotti of the Via di Toledo. Nay, never look so disturbed!” For at the sight of Zanotti’s face and the sound of his voice, Crespino’s manner had changed. The ease and cheerfulness had gone and in their place were discomfort and uneasiness. Zanotti the lawyer, however, was as genial as any piece of parchment ever could be.
“There was a little trouble once, to be sure, when you were fishing over there in the village of Portici.
Yes, I prosecuted, but Dio Mio, all that is past and forgotten. Come, you shall drink a glass of your own wine with us to show that no rancour remains. Bring up a chair — Crespino — let me see! Crespino Ferrer. Yes, that was the name.”
Crespino Ferrer brought another chair to the table reluctantly.
“There is no rancour, Signor Zanotti,” he answered simply. “You got me six weeks in the prison,” and he laughed with a return of his good humour. “But you see I have a different life here, long good nights of sleep, long good days of not too hard work, and a full belly. One does not wish the old days to encroach upon it.”
“That I understand very well, Crespino,” the lawyer said heartily. “From there,” he waved a hand towards the shore of Vesuvius across the bay, “to this little Paradise of Ischia — yes, keep the bay between them, my friend, whilst you can. Come, sit down, and your good wife with you—” For he saw Ferrer’s wife carrying towards them a tray piled with cakes and fruit. As she set out her dainties upon the table with a smile of invitation to the youth to set to, Zanotti called out: “And we shall want another bottle and more glasses, one for Crespino here and one — =-”
“Crespino? Then you know him?”
Her interruption was sharp, and from her face in its turn the smile and the pleasure fled. But it was no more than disappointment which replaced them. In this green corner of their contentment some old patron by chance had found them out. It was to be expected. She turned back to the house for the glasses. As she took them from the shelf, her red cheeks dimpled and her mouth softened. She would ask the boy with the angel’s beauty and the pale rose of an angel in his face, to swear his friends to silence. For what were angels sent down to earth, except to grant the prayers of their supplicants?
She carried out the glasses and hurried a little faster than was her habit. For her husband had apparently already made her prayer for her.
“I understand that, Crespino,” the lawyer was saying. “Gesti Cris to! one does not want the riffraff of Portici drinking you out of house and ease for the sake of old acquaintanceship. No, no, we have a secret here to keep. Madam, a glass,” and he took it from her and filled it to the brim. “And for you, madam! So! Now you shall tell us, Crespino, how this good fortune came.”
Crespino drank his glass. He sat and smiled.
“It was a gift of God,” he said, and the woman who had not sat down nodded her head behind him, her eyes shining.
“Never was a truer word spoken,” she said fervently.
“But there are in God’s lucky bag many kinds of gifts,” said Lelio Zanotti, laughing. “Which came to your fingers?”
“The most precious of all, Signor,” the wife replied immediately. “A son.”
Even Lelio Zanotti, the lawyer, was caught by surprise. He splashed his wine on the table. That poor little skeleton washed up on a beach in the fine clothes of a patrician. This kindly, pleasant woman had the effrontery to acknowledge that their fortune was owed to that piece of roguery?
“A son!” he exclaimed.
The woman’s smile became triumphant.
“Giovanni.”
“The singer?”
“Giovanni Ferrer. A great singer, my gentlemen, but a greater son. To him we owe everything. It isn’t always so, no, parents must pray like beggars in the streets and be grudged perhaps just enough to keep a roof over their heads. But our Giovanni — oh! a son amongst a thousand.”
“But — but—” Lelio Zanotti pushed back his wig and scratched his head, a man bewildered. “You had a son, Crespino. Certainly you had a son, and no doubt his name w
as Giovanni. I never heard. But he was sick — yes, I remember that — and he died—”
“No!”
Both Crespino and his wife interrupted with the same cry. But the odd circumstance was the spontaneity of the cry. In neither case was it a cry of defence, or defiance. There was almost a note of horror in the denial. It was intolerable that anyone should doubt the existence of this noble and generous son.
“He was near to death,” said Crespino, “but we sent him away from our village up into the hills.”
“To Traetta, I suppose,” the youth at the table interposed quietly.
“Yes, Sir, exactly,” Crespino returned. “To Traetta—” but he did not finish the name. His mouth fell open. He stared across the table. “How should you, Sir, know of Traetta?”
“I am Giovanni Ferrer, known as Marelli,” said Julian.
The third of the travellers was Durante, the Maestro di Capella of the St. Onofrio Conservatory, but his evidence was not needed. The woman uttered a cry, her glass slipped from her hand, she stared for a while at Julian, without any enmity, and burst into tears. Crespino was on his feet before anyone else could move. With a remarkable tenderness, he put his arm about her waist and placed her in his chair.
“There, there, mother!” he said in a helpless voice, seeking to comfort her.
And between her sobs, she gasped:
“And we almost believed it to be true.”
“Yes, old lady,” Grespino answered. “Another month or two, perhaps, with no neighbours to disturb us, in the quiet of our vines and our cherry trees, we should have quite believed it, fought for it, perhaps, as people fight for a belief. But what is, is, and dreams have their end.”
He stood upright and faced the three men at the table. With him, too, there was no anger, but a great sadness and a surprising dignity.
“You must understand us, gentlemen. In our hovel over there at Portici, dirty, stinking of old fish, we fished a little, starved a good deal, quarrelled, and at times imagined a small farm such as others have — a farm like this, a long way off like this. When Giovanni died — yes, Signor Zanotti, he did die — and we had money given, we said nothing to our neighbours. We found this little plot, we made it as you see it, we missed nothing but Giovanni. Then a year and a half ago, some time like that, news reached us, when we were in the town of Ischia, of a boy with our dead boy’s name, whose voice and beauty had brought to him fame and riches in a night. We began to say to each other, ‘If only it had been our Giovanni.’ We made a little play with the fancy to pass the evenings. It was he who had given his old father and mother the farm and paid them so much through the lawyer at Ischia, so much every quarter out of his great earnings. We said to people, ‘Oh, yes, this is Giovanni’s gift. You have heard him perhaps at Florence, or Naples — our son.’ People asked what news we had of him. As mother here says, the poor woman, we almost believed it.”
He patted his wife on the shoulder and braced himself.
“I don’t know what has brought you gentlemen here. But if there is some trouble and we have to leave here and go back to Portici—”
“I am not going to say that that will be necessary,” Julian said gently, and the woman looked up with a gleam of hope in her eyes.
“What was this money which you had after Giovanni died?” asked Zanotti.
“I will tell you all that I know,” said Crespino.
“Wait,” said Zanotti.
He took from one pocket an inkhorn and a pen, from another a scroll of paper which he unrolled and reversed until it lay flat upon the table.
“It was seven years ago,” Crespino resumed. “Giovanni was dying of a consumption.”
Late one night a man had crept down the alley of the fishing village and rapped gently on the door. He proposed an infamous bargain. When Giovanni died, his parents were to sell his body and his name. “My wife, the poor woman, wept — she said we were murdering our own child by bartering him away before he died. But that of course was nonsense. We were very poor, we could not buy anything to keep him alive — and the price offered was very high.”
On the day that the boy died, Crespino had himself carried the news into Naples.
“To a house or an inn?” asked Zanotti, lifting his eyes from his parchment.
“To neither, Signor. It was a matter of a day or two, you understand. At noon on each day, there would be someone waiting for five minutes under the great Head of Naples near the Church of St. Eligio.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Julian. “By the Mercato.”
Zanotti turned his head towards his employer in surprise.
“You know that rendezvous, Signor?”
“I know none so well, though I saw it but once, and in the dark,” Julian replied with a sombre quietude. “Continue, Crespino?”
“That night the man came again to my house in the fishing village, but with a companion.”
“Traetta,” said Zanotti, making a statement rather than asking a question.
“Yes, Signor, the old Traetta.”
Between them they had carried the boy’s body down to the beach and laid it carefully in a boat as though he still lived, and the Traettas sailed it away. “I was to say what I did say, Signors, that I had sent Giovanni up the hill and that he was recovering his health.”
Two days afterwards Crespino had called upon a lawyer at the top of a great house in the Via di Lepri.
“Fabricio Menico,” said Zanotti, as he wrote, “a pettifogging scoundrel of the lowest class.”
“He is not of your Excellency’s eminence, no doubt,” Crespino returned, “but he is well known amongst the fishermen.”
“That is what I said,” Zanotti observed drily.
Menico had given Crespino Ferrer money. He was to find a new home and as long as he stayed quietly in it and kept to his story, he would draw another sum of money every quarter.
“I knew of course,” Crespino declared, “that there was trickery — a substitution — perhaps crime. So much money would not else have been given. But we were very poor, we had lost the boy, there were still the little vineyard and the orchard for the price of a fable. We paid the price, Signors, and we began to believe the fable. That is all I have to tell you.”
“No, no, Crespino.”
The lawyer raised his hand.
“You have omitted the most important item in your story, the very heart and kernel of it.”
Crespino Ferrer looked blank.
“The name of the man who called on you in the night and bought the dead body of your son. Ah!” and he pointed the butt of his quill menacingly at Ferrer’s breast, “you are holding out against me, are you — Adam?”
“Adam,” the man stammered. “There was no Adam.”
“But there will be one, my good fellow, unless you recover your memory,” said the lawyer with a ferocious spasm of laughter. “Adam lived in the Garden of Eden until an angel,” and he indicated Julian to the wife with his finger, “said ‘March!’ And Adam marched.”
Crespino wrung his hands.
“But Signor, I swore by—”
“No doubt by San Januarius. Yes, yes, it was in fact at the time of that Saint’s festival that a great crime was committed. The name of the criminal, Crespino?”
Ferrer’s wife touched him on the arm, and he gave in.
“It was Domenico, the courier.”
“You knew him before?”
“I had taken parties for him to fish in the bay and to visit Herculaneum.”
“He came twice? Once alone, once with Traetta, and a third time you met him under the Head of Naples,” said Zanotti, writing vigorously. “There! It is done. You can sign your name?”
“I can’t write.”
“You shall make a cross then and the Cavalier Durante will attest it.”
He made room for Crespino. The tears were rolling down Ferrer’s cheeks now, but he took the pen from the lawyer’s hand and made a big black cross beneath the writing. Then Durante in his turn wrote in
his fine small hand the date of the month and year and that he witnessed the mark as Ferrer’s signature. Zanotti rolled up his scroll and tied it round with a ribbon and tucked it away with his inkhorn and his pen in his pocket. He rose and bowed to Julian.
“I am at the Signor’s service.”
Julian sat at his place, his forehead resting on his hand, whilst the others waited upon his word. Then he too rose to his feet, and in a bitter voice he cried:
“It is not here that I shall seek justice. I shall exact it in my own time, in my own way. Crespino Ferrer and his wife have nothing to fear from me.”
Crespino’s wife flung herself on her knees in front of him and tried to seize his hand. But he would not yield it to her.
“You don’t go scot-free,” he said to her with a gentle smile. “You have lost a dream, an illusion on which you had set your heart, and you will never recover it. The pleasant talks in the long evenings before a fire of cherry-tree logs — the generous son, his fame in the great cities — at an end, my poor woman! You must find another theme.”
He put his hat upon his head and led his companions back to the gate where their muleteer was squatting with his mules.
With the confessions of the Ferrers, Julian’s savings and his own ingenuity, Lelio Zanotti had an easy task. But, as so often throughout this strange affair, seeming accidents helped to discover the crime. On the third day of Julian’s sojourn in Naples, he was stopped by a woman outside “The Golden Ox.” For a moment he did not recognize her, so old and ravaged she looked, so coarsened in face and form.
“So, my little one!” she cried boldly, with her hands upon her hips, “what did I tell you? The Dukedom — it is in your pocket. You have not forgotten Costanza and what you owe to her?”
Through her the Traettas were found. Squalor for the squalid was a maxim which applied to them. They were living in Portici, rich for a week once a quarter and beggars for the rest of the year. As Zanotti pointed out to them in his office, they lay under a charge, if Julian cared to bring it, for which the penalty was death, and their only hope was a full confession. By the help of the Traettas, Zanotti reached Domenico.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 746