As We Forgive Them

He raised his dark eyebrows slightly, and I could have sworn that my words caused him to start. Yet so cleverly did he conceal any surprise I had caused him that he replied in a quiet, natural tone —

“That is so. I am here to see him.”

“Then I regret to tell you that you will never see him again,” I said in a low, earnest voice.

“Why?” he gasped, his black eyes wide open in surprise.

“Because,” I answered, “because poor Burton Blair is dead – and his secret has been stolen.”

“What!” he cried, with a look of abject terror and in a voice so loud that his exclamation echoed along the high, vaulted roof. “Blair dead – and the secret stolen! Dio! impossible – impossible!”

Chapter Nine

The House of Silence

The effect of my words upon the burly Capuchin, whose form seemed almost gigantic on account of the thickness of his inartistic habit, was as curious as it was unexpected.

My announcement of Blair’s death seemed to completely unnerve him. Apparently he had been waiting there, keeping the appointment, all unconscious of the untimely end of the man with whom he had been on terms of such secret and intimate friendship.

“Tell me – tell me how it happened,” he gasped in Italian in a low, hushed voice, as though he feared that some eavesdropper might be lurking in those dark recesses.

In a few brief words I explained the truth, to which he listened in silence. Then, when I had finished, he muttered something, crossed himself, and, as the approaching footsteps of the sacristan aroused us both, we walked forward and out into the dusk of the broad piazza.

Old Carlini, was was lounging upon a bench smoking the end of a cigar, noticed us in an instant and I saw him open his eyes in wonderment, although further than that he betrayed no sign.

“Poverino! Poverino!” repeated the monk as we strolled together slowly beside the old red walls of the once-proud city. “To think that our poor friend Burton died so suddenly – and without a word!”

“Not exactly without a word,” I said. “He gave several directions, one of which was that he placed his daughter Mabel beneath my care.”

“Ah, the little Mabel,” he sighed. “Surely it is ten years since I saw her in Manchester. She was then about eleven, a tall, dark-haired, rather pretty child, a striking likeness of her mother – poor woman.”

“You knew her mother, then?” I asked in some surprise.

He nodded in the affirmative, but gave no further information.

Suddenly turning to me as we walked towards the city gate, the Ponto Santa Maria, where the uniformed officers of the dazio were lounging ready to tax every pennyworth of food-stuff entering there, he demanded —

“How did you know that I had an appointment with our friend to-night?”

“By the letter which you wrote him, and which was found in his bag after his decease,” I responded frankly.

He grunted with distinct satisfaction. It struck me indeed as though he were apprehensive that Burton had before his death told me some details regarding his life. I recollected that curious cipher upon the playing-card, although I made no reference to it.

“Ah! I see!” he exclaimed presently. “But if that little wallet, or whatever it was, that he always wore either concealed within his clothes or suspended around his neck, is missing, does not it point to a tragedy – theft and murder?”

“There are distinct suspicions,” was my reply. “Although, according to the doctors, he died from a purely natural cause.”

“Ah! I don’t believe it!” cried the monk, fiercely clenching his fist. “One of them has succeeded at last in stealing that sachet of which he was always so very careful, and I’m positive that murder has been committed in order to conceal the theft.”

“One of whom?” I inquired anxiously.

“One of his enemies.”

“But are you aware what that little bag contained?”

“He never would tell me,” was the Capuchin’s reply, looking me straight in the face. “He only said that his secret was concealed within – and I have reason to believe that such was a fact.”

“But you knew his secret?” I said, my eyes full upon him.

I noted, by the change in his dark countenance, how my allegation caused him quick apprehension. He could not totally deny it, yet he was certainly seeking some means of misleading me.

“I only know what he explained to me,” he responded. “And that was not much, for, as you are aware, he was a most reticent man. He has long ago related to me, however, the somewhat romantic circumstances in which you met, what a good friend you were to him before his stroke of fortune, and how you and your friend – I forget his name – put Mabel to school at Bournemouth, and thus rescued her from that weary tramp which Burton himself had undertaken.”

“But why was he on tramp in that manner?” I asked. “To me it has always been an enigma.”

“And also to me. He was, I believe, in search of the key to that secret which he carried with him – the secret which, you say, he has bequeathed to you.”

“Did he reveal to you nothing more?” I inquired, recollecting that from this man’s remarks regarding Mabel’s youth, he and Blair must have been old friends.

“Nothing. His secret remained his own, and he revealed it to nobody always fearing betrayal.”

“But now that it is in other hands, what do you anticipate?” I inquired, still walking at his side, for we had passed out of the city and were out upon that wide, dirty road that led away to the Moriano Bridge and then fifteen miles up into the mountains to that leafy and rather gay summer resort well known to all Italians and some English, the Baths of Lucca.

“Well,” responded my companion, very gravely, “from what I learned in London on the occasion we met, I anticipate that poor Blair’s secret has been most ingeniously stolen, and will be put to good account by the person into whose possession it has now passed.”

“To the detriment of his daughter Mabel?”

“Most certainly. She must be the principal sufferer,” he replied, with just a suspicion of a sigh.

“Ah, if he had only confided his affairs in some one who, knowing the truth, might have combated this cunning conspiracy! But, as it is, we seem all utterly in the dark. Even his lawyers know nothing!”

“And you, to whom the secret is left, have actually lost it!” he added. “Yes, signore, the situation is indeed a most critical one.”

“In this affair, Signor Salvi,” I said, “being mutual friends of poor Blair, we must endeavour to do our best to discover and punish his enemies. Tell me, therefore, if you are aware of the source of our unfortunate friend’s vast wealth?”

“I am not Signor Salvi here,” was the monk’s quiet reply. “I am known as Fra Antonio of Arezzo, or Fra Antonio for short. The name of Salvi was given to me by poor Blair himself, who did not wish to introduce a Capuchin among his worldly friends as such. As to the source of his wealth, I believe I am acquainted with the truth.”

“Then tell me, tell me!” I cried anxiously.

“For it may give us the clue to these persons who had so successfully conspired against him.” Again the monk turned his dark, penetrating eyes upon me, those eyes that in the gloom of San Frediano had seemed so full of fire and yet so full of mystery.

“No,” he answered in a hard, decisive tone. “I am not permitted to tell anything. He is dead – let his memory rest.”

“But why?” I demanded. “In these circumstances of grave suspicion, and of the theft of the secret which is my property by right, it is surely your duty to explain what you know, in order that we may gain a clue? Recollect, too, that the future of his daughter depends upon the truth being revealed.”

“I can tell you nothing,” he repeated. “Much as I regret it, my lips are sealed.”

“Why?”

“By an oath taken years ago – before I entered the Order of the Capuchins,” he responded. Then after a pause, he added, with a sigh, “It is all strange – stranger perhaps than any man has dreamed – yet I can tell you nothing, Mr Greenwood, absolutely nothing.”

I was silent. His words were highly tantalising, as well as disappointing. I had not yet made up my mind whether he was actually my enemy or my friend.

At one moment he seemed simple, honest and straightforward as are all men of his religious order, yet at others there seemed within him that craft and cunning, that clever diplomacy and far-seeing acumen of the Jesuit, traits of a character warped into ingenuity and double-dealing.

The very fact that Burton Blair had always hidden from me his friendship – if friendship it were – for this stalwart monk with the bronzed and furrowed face, caused me to entertain a kind of vague distrust in him. And yet, when I recollected the tone of the letter he had written to Blair, how could I doubt but their friendship, if secret, was a real and genuine one? Nevertheless, I recollected those words I had overheard on the pavement of Leicester Square, and they caused me to ponder and to doubt.

I walked on beside this man, heedless of our destination. We were quite in the country now. The immobility of everything, the luminous brilliancy of the tints of that winter afterglow gave the grey, olive-clad Tuscan hills something of sadness. That great, calm silence over everything, that unchanging stillness in the air, those motionless lights and great shadows gave one the impression of a pause in the dizzy movement of centuries, of a reflectiveness, of an intense waiting, or rather a look of melancholy thrown back on a past anterior to suns and human beings, races and religions.

Before us, as we rounded a bend in the road, I saw a huge, white old monastery standing high upon the hillside half hidden by the grey-green trees.

It was the Convent of the Cappuccini, he told me – his home.

I halted for a moment, gazing upon the white, almost windowless building, scorched by three hundred summers, standing like a stronghold, as once it was, against the background of the purple Apennines. I listened to the clanking of the old bell that sent out its summons with the same note of age, the same old voice as in centuries gone. It was then, in that moment, that the charm of old-world Lucca and her beautiful surroundings became impressed upon me. I felt, for the first time, stealing up from everywhere, an atmosphere of separateness, as it were, from the rest of the world, of mystery – a living essence of what the place is – destructible, alas! but still impregnating all things, exhaling from all things – surely the dying soul of once-brilliant Tuscany.

And there beside me, overwhelming all my thoughts, as the shadow of the giant Sphinx falls lengthening upon the desert sands, stood that big, bronzed monk in the faded brown habit, his feet bare, his waist bound by a hempen cord, his countenance a mystery, yet within his heart the great secret which no power could induce him to divulge – the secret of wealth that had been bequeathed to me.

“Poor Blair is dead!” he repeated again and again in fairly good English, as though almost unable as yet to realise that his friend was no more. Nevertheless, I was slow to become convinced that he spoke seriously. He might be misleading me, after all.

At his invitation I accompanied him up the steep, winding road until we came to the ponderous gate of the monastery, at which he rang. A solemn bell clanged loudly, and a few moments later the little grille was opened, revealing the white-bearded face of the janitor, who instantly admitted us.

He took me across the silent cloister, in the middle of which was a wonderful mediaeval well of wrought ironwork, and then along endless stone corridors, each lit by its single oil lamp, which rendered the place only more gloomy and depressing.

From the chapel at the end of the great building came the low chanting of the monks, but beyond, the quiet was that of the grave. The dark, ghostly figures passed us noiselessly and seemed to draw aside into the darkness; the door of the refectory stood open, showing by the two or three dim lights magnificent carvings, wonderful frescoes and the two long rows of time-blackened oak benches at which the Brothers sat at meals.

Suddenly my conductor stopped before a small door, which he opened with his key, and I found myself within a tiny, carpetless cubicle containing a truckle bed, a chair, a well-filled bookcase and a writing-table. Upon the wall was a large wooden crucifix before which he crossed himself on entering.

“This is my home,” he explained in English. “Not very luxurious, it is true, but I would not exchange it for a palace in the world outside. Here we are all brothers, with the superior as our father to supply us with all our worldly wants, even to our snuff. There are no jealousies, no bickerings, no backbitings or rivalry. All are equal, all perfectly contented, for we have each one of us learnt the very difficult lesson of brotherly love.” And he drew the single chair for me to seat myself, for I was hot and tired after that long, steep ascent from the town.

“It is surely a hard life,” I observed.

“At first, yes. One must be strong in body and in mind to successfully pass the period of probation,” he answered. “But afterwards the Capuchin’s life is surely one of the pleasantest on earth, banded as we are to do good and to exercise charity in the name of Sant’ Antonio. But,” he added, with a smile, “I did not bring you here, signore, to endeavour to convert you from your Protestant faith. I asked you to accompany me, because you have told me what is a profound and remarkable mystery. You have told me of the death of Burton Blair, the man who was my friend, and to whose advantage it was to meet me in San Frediano to-night. There were reasons – the very strongest reasons a man could have – why he should have kept the appointment. But he has not done so. His enemies have willed it otherwise, and they have stolen his secret!” While he spoke he fumbled in a drawer of the little deal writing-table, and drew forth something, adding in deep earnestness —

“You knew poor Blair intimately – more intimately, perhaps, than I did of later years. You knew his enemies as well as his friends. Tell me, have you ever met the original of either of these men?”

And he held before my gaze two cabinet photographs.

One of them was quite unfamiliar to me, but the other I recognised in an instant.

“Why!” I said, “that’s my old friend Reginald Seton – Blair’s friend.”

“No,” the monk declared in a hard, meaning tone, “not his friend, signore – his bitterest enemy.”

Chapter Ten

The Man of Secrets

“I don’t understand you,” I exclaimed, resenting this charge against the man who was my most intimate friend. “Seton has been even a better friend to poor Blair than myself.”

Fra Antonio smiled strangely and mysteriously, as only the subtle Italian can. He seemed to pity my ignorance, and inclined to humour me in my belief in Seton’s genuineness.

“I know,” he laughed. “I know almost as much as you do upon the one side, while upon the other my knowledge extends somewhat further. All I can say is that I have watched, and have formed my own conclusions.”

“That Seton was not his friend?”

“That Seton was not his friend,” he repeated slowly and very distinctly.

“But surely you make no direct charge against him?” I cried. “You surely don’t think he’s responsible for this tragedy – if tragedy it really is.”

“I make no direct charge,” was his ambiguous reply. “Time will reveal the truth – no doubt.”

I longed to ask him straight out whether he did not sometimes go under the name of Paolo Melandrini, yet I feared to do so lest I should arouse his suspicion unduly.

“Time can only reveal that Reginald Seton has been one of the dead man’s best friends,” I said reflectively.

“Outwardly, yes,” was the Capuchin’s dubious remark.

“An enemy as deadly as the Ceco?” I inquired, watching his face the while.

“The Ceco!” he gasped, instantly taken aback by my bold remark. “Who told you of him? What do you know regarding him?”

The monk had evidently forgotten what he had written in that letter to Blair.

“I know that he is in London,” I responded, taking my cue from his own words. “The girl is with him,” I added, utterly unaware however of the identity of the person referred to.

“Well?” he asked.

“And if they are in London it is surely for no good purpose?”

“Ah!” he said. “Blair has told you something – told you of his suspicions?”

“Of late he has gone about in daily dread of secret assassination,” I replied. “He was evidently afraid of the Ceco.”

“And surely he had need to be,” exclaimed Fra Antonio, his dark, brilliant eyes again turned upon mine in the semi-darkness. “The Ceco is not an individual to be dealt with easily.”

“But what took him to London?” I demanded. “Did he go with harmful intentions?”

The burly monk shrugged his shoulders, answering —

“Dick Dawson was never of a very benevolent disposition. He evidently discovered something, and swore to be avenged.”

His remarks made plain one very important fact, namely, that the man who went by the nickname of the “blind man” in Italy was really an Englishman of the name of Dick Dawson – an adventurer most probably.

“Then you suspect him of complicity in the theft of the secret?” I suggested.

“Well, as the little sachet of chamois leather is missing, I am inclined to think that it must have passed into his hands.”

“And the girl, what of her?”

“His daughter, Dolly, will assist him, that’s plain. She’s as shrewd as her father, and possesses a woman’s cunning into the bargain – a dangerous girl, to say the least. I warned poor Blair of them both,” he added, suddenly, it seemed, recollecting his letter. “But I am glad you have recognised one of these photographs. His name is Seton, you say. Well, if he is your friend, take my advice and beware. Are you certain you have never seen this other man – a friend of Seton’s?” he asked very earnestly.

I carried the picture in my hand to where the dim oil lamp was burning, and examined it very closely. It was a vignette of a long-faced, bald-headed, full-bearded man, wearing a stand-up collar, a black frock-coat and well-tied bow cravat. The stud in his shirt-front was somewhat peculiar, for it seemed like the miniature cross of some foreign order of chivalry, and produced a rather neat and novel effect. The eyes were those of a keen, crafty man, and the hollow cheeks gave the countenance a slightly haggard and striking appearance.

It was a face that, to my recollection, I had never seen before, yet such were its peculiarities that they at once became photographed indelibly upon my memory.

I told him of my failure to recognise who it was, whereupon he urged —

“When you return, watch the movements of your so-called friend Seton, and you will perhaps meet his friend. When you do, write to me here, and leave him to me.” And he replaced the photograph in the drawer, but as he did so my quick eye detected that within was a playing-card, the seven of clubs, with some letters written upon it very similar to those upon the card in my pocket. I mentioned it, but he merely smiled and quickly closed the drawer.

Yet surely the fact of the cipher being in his possession was more than strange.

“Do you ever travel away from Lucca?” I inquired at last, recollecting how I had met him at Blair’s table in Grosvenor Square, but not at all satisfied regarding the discovery of the inscribed card.

“Seldom – very seldom,” he answered. “It is so difficult to obtain permission, and then it is only given to visit relatives. If there is any monastery in the vicinity of our destination we must beg our bed there, in preference to remaining in a private house. The rules sound irksome to you,” he added with a smile. “But I assure you they do not gall us in the least. They are beneficial to man’s happiness and comfort, all of them.”

Again I turned the conversation, endeavouring to ascertain some facts concerning the dead man’s mysterious secret, which I somehow felt convinced was known to him. But all to no avail. He would tell me nothing.

All he explained was that the reason of the appointment in Lucca that evening was a very strong one, and that if alive the millionaire would undoubtedly have kept it.

“He was in the habit of meeting me at certain intervals either in the Church of San Frediano, or at other places in Lucca, in Pescia, or Pistoja,” the monk said. “We generally varied the place of meeting from time to time.”

“And that, of course, accounts for his mysterious absences from home,” I remarked, for his movements were frequently very erratic, so that even Mabel was unaware of his address. He was generally supposed, however, to be in the North of England or in Scotland. No one had any idea that he travelled so far afield as Central Italy.

The monk’s statement also made it plain that Blair had some very strong motive for keeping these frequent appointments. Fra Antonio, his secret friend, had undoubtedly also been his most intimate and most trusted one.

Why had he kept this strange and mysterious friendship from us all – even from Mabel?

I gazed upon the Italian’s hard, sunburnt face and tried to penetrate the mystery written there, but in vain. No man can keep a secret like the priest of the confessional, or the monk in his cell.

“And what is your intention, now that poor Blair is dead?” I asked at length.

“My intention, like yours, is to discover the truth,” he replied. “It will be a difficult matter, no doubt, but I trust that we shall, in the end, succeed, and that you will regain the lost secret.”

“But may not Blair’s enemies make use of it in the meantime?” I queried.

“Ah! of course we cannot prevent that,” answered Fra Antonio. “We have to look to the future, and allow the present to take care of itself. You, in London, will do your best to discover whether Blair has met with foul play and at whose hands, while I, here in Italy, will try to find out whether there was any further motive than the theft of the secret.”

“But if the little chamois-bag had been stolen, would not Blair himself have missed it?” I suggested. “He was quite conscious for several hours before he died.”

“He might have forgotten it. Men’s memories often fail them completely in the hours preceding death.”

Night had fallen before the great wooden clappers, used to arouse the monks to go to prayers at two o’clock in the morning, resounded through the cloister as a reminder that I, a stranger, must take my departure.

Fra Antonio rose, lit a great old brass lantern, and conducted me along those silent corridors, out across the small piazza and down the hillside to the main road which lay straight and white in the darkness.

Then, having directed me on the road, he grasped my hand in his big palm, rough through hard toil at his patch of garden, and said —

“Rely upon me to do my best. I knew poor Blair – yes, knew him better than you did, Signor Greenwood. I knew, too, something of his remarkable secret, and therefore I am aware how strange and how mysterious are all the circumstances. I shall work on here, making inquiries, while you return to London and pursue yours. I would, however, make the suggestion to you that if you meet Dick Dawson strike up a friendship with him, and with Dolly. They are a strange pair, but friendship with them may be profitable.”

“What!” I exclaimed. “Friendship with the man whom you declare was one of Blair’s bitterest enemies?”

“And why not? Is it not diplomacy to be well received in the enemy’s camp? Recollect that your own stake in this affair is the greatest of any one’s. The secret is bequeathed to you – the secret of Burton Blair’s millions!”

“And I intend to recover it,” I declared firmly.

“I only hope you will, signore,” he said in a voice which to me sounded full of a double meaning. “I only hope you will.”

Then wishing me “Addio, e buona fortuna,” Fra Antonio, the Capuchin and man of secrets, turned and left me standing in the dark highway.

Hardly had I advanced fifty yards before a short dark figure loomed out from the shadow of some bushes, and by the voice that hailed me I knew it to be old Babbo, whom I had believed had grown tired of awaiting me. He had, however, evidently followed us from the church, and seeing us enter the monastery had patiently awaited my return.

“Has the signore discovered what he wished?” inquired the old Italian, quickly.