“Did the Venetian know Marchant?”
The words came slowly from dry lips, the voice was husky; but neither Mrs. Vansittart nor Mr. Sefton wondered that Eve Marchant’s lover should be deeply moved.
“I don’t know; but there were people in Venice who knew him, and from whom Ferrari heard his mode of life.”
“But you said that Marchant was living under an assumed name.”
“Did I?” asked Sefton, surprised. “I don’t remember saying it, but it is the fact all the same. At Venice Harold Marchant called himself Smith; and Smith was the name he gave on board the P. and O. steamer which took him to Alexandria.”
“Why did he go to Alexandria?”
“Why? To get away from Venice in the quickest and completest manner he could. When he saw that the knife had been fatal, he grasped the situation in an instant, made a dash for the door, ran through the crowd along the Piazzetta, jumped into the water, and swam to the steamer, which was getting up steam for departure. No one guessed that he would make for the steamer. It was a longish swim; and while his pursuers were groping about among the gondolas the steamer was moving off with Harold on board her. Just like him—always quick at expedients; ready at every point where his own interests were at stake; tricky, shifty, dishonest to the core; but a devil for pluck, and as strong as a young lion.”
“I begin to remember the story, now you recall the details,” said Vansittart, who had by this time mastered every sign of agitation, and was firm as iron. “But in all that you have said I see nothing to fix Harold Marchant as the homicide. He might as easily have been the man who was killed.”
“No, no; the man who was killed was a stranger—a Cook’s tourist, a nobody, about whose fate there were no inquiries. It was Marchant who was the Venetian girl’s protector. It was Marchant who was jealous. The whole story is in perfect accord with Marchant’s character. I have seen his temper in a row—seen him when, if he had had a knife handy, by Heaven! he would have used it.”
“But where is the link between Marchant—Marchant at the diamond fields, Marchant at New York—and the man at Venice calling himself Smith? You don’t even pretend to show me that.”
“Ferrari shall show you that. The story is a long one, but there is no solution of continuity. Ferrari shall take you over the ground, step by step, till he brings you from Marchant in Mashonaland to Marchant landing at Alexandria.”
“And after the landing at Alexandria? What then? The thing happened more than three years ago, you say. Did the earth open and swallow Harold Marchant after he landed at Alexandria? Or, if not, what has he been doing since? Why has not your Ferrari—this courier-guide who is so clever at tracing people—traced him a little further? Why should the last link of the chain be the landing at Alexandria?”
“Because, as I have been telling you, Harold Marchant is an uncommonly clever fellow; and having got off with a whole skin—escaping the penalty of a crime which at the least was manslaughter—he would take very good care to sink his identity ever afterwards, and in all probability would bid a long farewell to the old world.”
“But your genius—your heaven-born detective—would track him down in the new world. My dear Sefton, the whole story is a farrago of nonsense; and I wonder that you, as a man of the world, can be taken in by so vulgar a trickster as your incomparable Ferrari.”
“He is not a trickster. I have the strongest reasons, from past experience, for believing in his honesty. Will you see him, Vansittart? Will you hear his story, calmly and dispassionately?”
“I will not see him. I will not hear his story. I will see no man who trumps up a sensational charge against my future wife’s brother. I can quite understand that you believe in this man—that you have brought this absurd story to my mother and me in all good faith.”
“Why absurd? You admit that there was such a catastrophe—an English traveller killed by an English resident in a Venetian caffè in Carnival time.”
“Yes; but plain fact degenerates into nonsense when your courier tries to fasten the crime upon Eve Marchant’s brother.”
“Hear his statement before you pronounce judgment. He had his facts from people who knew this young man in New York as Harold Marchant, who met him afterwards in Venice, and visited him at his Venetian lodgings, and played cards with him, when he was calling himself Smith—respectable American citizens, whose names and addresses are set down in Ferrari’s notebook. I am not utterly wanting in logic, Mr. Vansittart, and if the circumstantial evidence in this matter had been obviously weak I should never have troubled Mrs. Vansittart or you with the story.”
The mother spoke now for the first time since Sefton had begun his revelation. Her voice was low and sympathetic. Her son might doubt her wisdom, but he could not doubt her love.
“I am deeply sorry for you, Jack,” she said, “deeply sorry for poor Eve, who is a blameless victim of evil surroundings, but I cannot think that you will obstinately adhere to your engagement in the face of these dreadful facts. It would have been bad enough to be Colonel Marchant’s son-in-law; but you cannot seriously mean to marry a girl whose brother has committed murder.”
“It was not murder,” cried Vansittart, furiously. “Even Mr. Sefton acknowledges that the crime at worst was manslaughter—a fatal blow, struck in a moment of blind passion.”
“With a dagger against an unarmed man,” interjected Sefton. “You are inclined to minimize the crime when you call it manslaughter at the worst. I said that at the least—taking the
