Perhaps, after all, what gave the sting to these bitter thoughts was the knowledge of Sefton Culvers’s unworthiness. Clive’s worst enemies had never accused him of priggishness, he had been known to stand up for more than one man who had, as the phrase goes, “gone under,” and plead “extenuating circumstances” where most men would have said “serve him right.” Those, however, had been cases which had not come so nearly home to him. He had seen the unworthiness of other men, he felt the unworthiness of Sefton Culvers—therein lay the whole of the difference.
It was not, then, surprising that with thoughts such as these he could throw but little warmth into his intercourse with the man to whom he had been thus suddenly called upon to act the comrade.
Sefton, on his part, showed no disposition to bridge the distance between them.
His demeanour throughout the journey was gloomy and abstracted, broken now and again by sudden fits of stormy, reckless defiance, in which he talked a good deal about being a first-rate shot; and threatened to teach those skulking, cowardly vagabonds a sharp lesson. These fits, however, grew rarer as the journey progressed, and his demeanour became less that of a man nerving himself to meet a crisis with energy and decision, than of one compelling himself to stoicism and despair.
Clive noting this change of manner set it down to the conviction—gaining strength in his own mind—that it was to Ida’s dying bed they had been summoned, and that the ring to be resigned was a wedding-ring which she judged ought never to have been placed upon her finger.
A wild, irrepressible feeling that could be called exultation compared with other moods filled his mind at the thought. To see Ida on her deathbed resigning a ring she had never prized to its unworthy donor, would be to see her soul set free from bondage. That would be a sorrow that became a joy beside the thought of a peace patched up between this uncongenial husband and wife, and years of dreary companionship to be passed together.
“The fever is the greatest danger she runs, there can be no other,” he blurted out once, impetuously, as he and Sefton paced the platform at Naples waiting for the train that was to bear them on the latter half of their journey. “She is an Englishwoman—the daughter of an English peer. She is staying in the house of an Italian nobleman. They would never dare to offer her insult or even annoyance.”
Sefton’s reply contradicted every one of his suppositions.
“To my mind,” he said, gloomily, “fever is the very least of her dangers. Take the facts of the case and judge for yourself. Supposing that you had offended past forgiveness, not one person only, but a whole community, a set of lawless, insolent, ill-conditioned people, glad of any excuse to execute a vendetta—a vendetta, believe me, is far from being a thing of the past in Italy, in some places the authorities take no notice whatever of its perpetration. Tell me, would you like the person who had partly been the cause of this offence to be planted in the midst of such a set of ruffians without any protection whatever?”
There could be but one answer to such a question, and for a few minutes there fell a pause, which the two men made busy with gloomy thoughts.
“Then,” said Clive, presently, “you imagine Ida’s letter to you was written under compulsion? I imagined it to be—”
He broke off abruptly, remembering to whom he was talking.
The finish of his sentence would have been:
“The natural outburst of indignation that a high-spirited girl would feel at a sudden revelation of treachery.”
“Perhaps written under compulsion, or perhaps under persuasion, for they are a wily people these south Italians,” answered Sefton. “But, in any case, however written, it serves their purpose—”
He broke off abruptly; his face, on which a gas-lamp overhead threw a flickering light, showed white and rigid.
“What purpose?” asked Clive, for Sefton’s voice had an odd, jarring note in it.
“Of a decoy,” answered Sefton, shortly; and then he turned on his heel, and left Clive to ruminate over a new train of thought.
It was a train of thought which stirred the very depths of his nature, and made him feel that the angels of darkness were coming about him in new shapes now. Great Heavens! The monsters with which the Greek heroes did battle in old time were comely compared with these.
He rallied his forces, and resolved to beat them down.
“I am a man,” he cried, in spirit. “There is such a thing as duty! I will sweep my heart clean of all thoughts rather than entertain such monsters as these. If danger threaten Culvers I will stand by him as if he were my dearest friend.”
And it so chanced that at the very moment that Clive was making up his mind, in spite of all temptations and adverse circumstances, to listen to the voice of duty, Ida, by another road, was arriving at the conclusion that life was intended to be something other than a playground where people could pluck flowers and chase butterflies to their hearts’ content.
Death had speeded more quickly on his way to Alta Lauria than had these travellers on theirs; and as the two men stood waiting for their train at Naples, Violante’s wayward, lovesick soul had struggled forth from its worn and wasted tenement.
Her eyes had been fixed upon the door, waiting for it to open and admit the man who had played her so ill a turn, and her ears had strained for the sound of his footsteps to her very last breath.
Francesca’s grief took a strange form. She was a passionate, impetuous woman, apt to speak her thoughts as they rose in her mind, and noisy alike in grief and in joy, yet when she stood beside the white, lifeless form, not a sound passed her lips, not a tear stood in her eye.
She went silently from the chamber of
