Francesca shook her head.
“Not that from you!” she exclaimed. “It is not possible. I saw you married this morning to a man who—” she broke off abruptly, then again asked the question: “Signora, do you understand me?”
Ida was startled, her curiosity was excited to a painful degree.
“A man who—what?” she asked, continuing the conversation in Italian. “Yes, I understand you easily—finish what you were going to say.”
Francesca looked at her steadily.
“Yes, it is fate,” she said, in the same slow, deep tones as before. “I saw you this morning in your beautiful white dress, and I said to myself, ‘I see her once now, and I see her no more again forever,’ and lo, Fate sends me here to rest among the graves, and then sends you here with your beautiful flowers, and we meet!”
Ida grew impatient.
“If you have anything to say to me you must say it quickly,” she said, “for I cannot spare you many minutes.”
“And when you have heard what I have to tell, you will say, ‘would that Heaven had smitten my ears with deafness before they had listened to such a tale.’ ”
Ida grew white.
“What is it tell me quickly,” she said; “is it anything about—Captain Culvers?”
The words “my husband” would not come to her lips.
Francesca’s swarthy face flushed with anger at the mention of the name. “Signora,” she said, in low but vehement tones, “if that man had his due it would be a stiletto into his heart. Ah, I would that I had dealt him his deathblow, instead of bringing him back to life to play the lover and the traitor.” She spoke in such hurried, passionate tones, that it was with difficulty that Ida caught her meaning.
“You must speak slowly and quietly if you want me to understand you,” she said, feeling that behind all this passion and vehemence there no doubt lay something which it behoved her to know.
Then Francesca, controlling herself with difficulty, told the story of Sefton Culvers’s visit to Calabria.
It was carried beyond the point at which Sefton had left it in his narrative to Lord Culvers and Clive, and told of events that had occurred after his departure from Alta Lauria.
First in order had ensued the death of the Marchese. This had happened within a month after Sefton had left the place, and had overwhelmed Violante with grief; a grief that had increased upon her to the detriment of her health as the weeks passed by and there came no tidings of her absent lover. Sefton had been very cautious in giving information to Violante and her father respecting himself and his family, and the only address he had left with her was at an hotel in London where he occasionally stayed. To that hotel again and again Violante addressed imploring letters, to which, as a matter of course, there came no reply.
At first the girl had found it impossible to realise that the man in whom she had so implicitly trusted had proved false, and that deliberate insult was intended to one of her name and race. She insisted on believing that some accident had befallen him, and announced her intention of setting off for England to ascertain if such were the case. Illness prevented her putting her intention into execution; malarial fever, always prone to attack the weak and ailing, seized her, and for some time her life was despaired of. Even after the fever had run its course and she had been pronounced convalescent, it did not need a skilled eye to see that her constitution had been seriously undermined. A great lassitude took possession of her; she ate next to nothing, living entirely on granita and fruit; took no exercise, and showed no interest whatever in the people and things around her. Then it was that Francesca had thought that the time to act had come. She had been the one who had brought the man back to life to act the part of lover and traitor, she would be the one to hunt him down, find out the truth about him, and—Here Francesca broke off abruptly, furtively glancing into Ida’s eyes, which, during the whole of the story, had not once been lifted from her face.
She resumed her narrative at another point, telling of the difficulty with which they had got together sufficient money for the journey. How that Violante had given her every penny she had in the world in order to buy Pippo an organ, with which it was hoped the scanty purse might be eked out, and how that Giorno’s passage to Inghilterra had been clubbed together for by his fellow vinedressers, who one and all would willingly have laid down their lives to give their darling young lady the desire of her heart.
Francesca had a relative in London who was an ice and sweetmeat seller. To his house the three made their way first on their arrival in England, and, thanks to his good offices and the use of an Army List and a Burke’s Peerage, they succeeded in coming upon the traces of Captain Culvers. At least, so far as to ascertain that he had resigned his commission in the Army, and that he had near relatives who owned to a country house at Dering and a town house in Belgrave Square.
Then it was that Pippo and his organ had become useful. The little fellow, with his handsome face and merry ways, managed to win favour with the servants of Lord Culvers’s town household, and found out through them that Captain Culvers would shortly be married at Hastings to his cousin.
After ascertaining full particulars of this wedding, the three had started for Hastings. They did not, however, succeed in reaching the church until the service had begun and the doors were closed. So they had stood in the porch waiting till the ceremony was over, and there had seen the bride pass out of the church and down the steps to her carriage.
Then they had wandered
