Sefton answered slowly and gloomily:
“I know no more than you do to what ring she refers, whether to her wedding-ring or to the ring which sealed that letter, and which was given by me to—to someone else. Nor do I know whether the dying hands she speaks of are her own or that other person’s. I only know for certain that Alta Lauria is the last place in the world for my wife to be in—for special reasons—reasons that you must know now—that I must tell—”
He broke off abruptly, he was evidently driving himself to speak.
“Never mind about your special reasons,” said Clive, brusquely, “tell us where this place is, and how we can get to it without a moment’s delay.”
“Unfortunately there must be hours of delay before we can even start for it. It is in Calabria, among the mountains, and not a train will leave for Naples before six tonight. I know the road to that accursed place only too well,” said Sefton, gloomily as before.
“Sefton, answer me this,” said Lord Culvers, in an agitated tone. “Was the person to whom you gave that ring a woman, and was your faith due to her?”
Sefton turned and faced him defiantly.
“Don’t ask me any questions,” he said, fiercely. “I’ll tell you all—all, that is, you need know. It’s a long story; but, unfortunately, there’s time enough and to spare to tell it before we can start.”
But Clive had to be convinced of this—had to fetch and to study railway guides, and maps, and lines of route before he could be persuaded that a weary three hours must elapse before they could so much as take the first step in a journey that might end Heaven only knew how.
XVIII
Sefton’s story, told in short, abrupt sentences, and with as little detail as possible, was, after all, nothing more than the old one of plighted faith and broken troth, that the world has heard so often.
It dated eighteen months back, when Captain Culvers had returned with his regiment from India. He had arrived in England in the middle of a bleak English March, and had been advised by his doctors not to attempt to face it in his enfeebled state of health, but to start at once for the south of Europe. Accordingly, with a brother officer, he had set off on a tour through south Italy, intending to make Naples his headquarters, and thence diverge a little out of the beaten track of the tourist into less frequented regions. At Naples, however, his brother officer had caught the Neapolitan fever, and, after a time, had been compelled to return to England. So Sefton continued his excursions without companionship. After scouring the Abruzzi, he had diverged into Calabria, and, in spite of bad roads, miserable inns, and fever in all directions, had penetrated into the mountainous region of La Sila.
And here, in the heart of the country where the bandit, “Peter the Calabrian,” self-styled “Emperor of the Mountains, and King of the Woods,” had held alike his camp and his court, and where Peter’s descendants and representatives lead as marauding and indolent a life as modern Italian civilisation permits, Sefton fell ill with fever, and went nigh to losing his life. His quarters were a miserable hut—miscalled inn—on the edge of the forest whence Peter and his co-marauders used to emerge to strike terror into the heart of wayfarers. There was no doctor within twenty miles—a distance doubled by the rocky roads. The people of the inn, therefore, called in to his aid the wise woman of the place—a certain Francesca Xardez, who, with remedies assuredly not to be found in any modern pharmacopoeia, brought him back to health.
This Francesca Xardez was a person of no small importance in Alta Lauria, the mountain-hamlet where Sefton had fallen ill. To begin with, chance had put her in the way of receiving a better education than generally falls to the lot of the Italian peasant. Also in her young days she had been something of a traveller, and had visited several of the cities of Continental Europe.
Thirdly and lastly, and what added most to her prestige among the rough mountaineers, she was foster-mother to the only child of the chief landowner in the place, the Marchese da Nava; her husband was the Marchese’s head-bailiff, her six sons were shepherds, vinedressers, or in some other way employed upon his estate.
In addition, her nurse-child, Violante, was devotedly attached to her.
This Marchese da Nava was a widower, and a man close upon seventy years of age, when Sefton visited Alta Lauria. Late in life he had married a peasant girl in the place, who had died, leaving him with this one child, Violante.
Although feudalism has been banished from Italy, the feudal spirit survives in the wilder and more mountainous regions. The bond between peer and peasant in parts of Calabria is of a kind to which northern Europe offers no parallel. The Marchese was poor as a Marchese could well be, for his large estates consisted to a great extent of exhausted mines, hill pastureland, and mountains, sloping down in ridges to the dense forests of gigantic oleander, arbutus, and wild olive, which cover the sites of forgotten battlefields. He was also a man of ungovernable temper; his household was ill-arranged and disorderly, and his sense of obligation as a landowner nil. Nevertheless, the devotion of the peasantry to him was unswerving, and his will as much a law to them as if it had been passed into one by Senate, and would be put into force by Carabinieri.
As for Violante, she was simply the darling and the idol of these rude mountaineers. With a temper nearly as violent as her father’s, she combined a beauty met with nowhere save in the mixed races of Magna Græcia.
