Читать книгу Musk and Amber - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 12
ОглавлениеA Change in the Peerage
Julian had not returned; and the Inn which had but that afternoon been gay with music was given over to consternation and dismay. Sir Edward Place used all his great prestige with the police. Domenico was taken to the guard and questioned and held in custody. A search of the city was begun. Twice during the night Sir Edward drove back to the Inn, only to find Frances Scoble, now blaming herself for neglect, now dissolved in tears, whilst Henry paced the room and rushed to the window at every sound. Mr. Elliot, too, passed a disordered night. He was not welcome in the apartment on the first floor, being outside the family and of no help; and he could not sit or lie in his room upon the second. He paced the streets, imagining in every sleeping figure in a portico or on a doorstep the truant Julian.
He went back to “The Golden Ox” at four o’clock in the morning as the sun was rising in a stainless sky and met the Minister, pale and haggard in the doorway.
“I shall see King Charles this morning. No one will be more distressed. His affection for the English ... the good name of Naples ... nothing, you may be sure, will be left undone.”
As he got into his carriage, he added:
“The boy may be held to ransom. We must tread gingerly,” and he flung himself back unhappily against the cushions.
On the first floor landing two chambermaids were crying with stifled murmurs of “Pobrecito!” and their aprons to their eyes. All next day the search went on.
“Julian went for a sail in the morning of yesterday,” said Elliot hopefully.
“With Bortolo Scalfi and his two sons,” Henry returned at once. Mr. Elliot had sought news of him and Lady Frances at noon. “I engaged them myself after I had taken the best advice. They have been questioned by the police. They were all three last night at their home at Santa Lucia.”
Santa Lucia, just to the east of the Castel dell ’Ovo, was the quarter where most of the fishermen lived. Mr. Elliot’s sudden hope died away.
“It’s my fault,” Frances Scoble broke in with a tragic air like a Queen on the stage. “I fastened the diamond brooch in his cloak. I was afraid of the night air—and its danger for his voice. I alone am guilty.”
Mr. Elliot would have been inclined to look upon such an outburst as acting and not very good acting. But he knew the world too well to make that assumption. People under the attack of extreme emotions, despair, grief, even joy, did behave in the most absurd theatrical manner, even the sedatest of them. They leaned against walls and buried their faces in their arms, they blubbered and beat their breasts, so that not an actor at the Lane was a match for them. Lady Frances, who had held the boy so tenderly to her breast, lest he wake in some convulsion of terror, might well be breaking her heart over her careless folly.
“Sir Edward knows this country better than we, Madam,” he said in a desire to console her. “It may well be that Julian is held to ransom. At any moment some ragged paper may be left by a boy quick as an eel to disappear ...” and he stopped short, realising in a horror that he was using the very words in which Domenico described how Julian had escaped from him.
But no ragged paper was left, and as the days piled themselves one upon the other, Henry Scoble grew more gloomy and restless, Frances more distraught.
“How will it end?” she cried in an odd kind of passion, her voice breaking as though she were at the end of her strength. “And when—when?”
“Nay, my dear coz,” said Henry, laying his hand tenderly upon her shoulder, “the time has not come for despair. There will be time and to spare, if grief must come. Never run half way to meet it.”
The Queen, Maria Amalia Walburga, received Frances Scoble, dismissing all her own attendants, and kept her by her side for an hour. Frances returned to the Inn, a little comforted by that great lady’s condescension; but on the next morning all fears were confirmed.
Thirteen days had passed since the festival of San Januarius. Mr. Elliot remembered the moment to the end of his life. The hooded band of the Misericordia, the stretcher they carried with the little shrouded body upon it—a package wrapped in a cloth—hardly more. They carried it up the hill to the Carthusian Monastery of San Martino; and thither Henry and the doctor were summoned. Fishermen working out in the bay over towards Vesuvius had felt a weight in their net as they drew it in. The weight was a boy of the height and size of Julian, but he had been in the water too long for any recognition. He wore the clothes, however, in which Julian had left the Inn, even to the dark cloak which was drawn tight about his body with a cord. But the brooch, the buckles from his knees and shoes, the jewelled pin in his cravat had all been wrenched brutally off. Moreover, a broken cord was twisted about his waist as though a heavy stone had been tied to it to keep the body deep. Frances refused to accept the evidence. She called upon the doctor from London to support her. But the sea and the fish had worked their will. She gave in at the end. Two days later the boy was buried in the Protestant corner of the Campo Santo on the hill. Both Henry and Frances had wished the ceremony to be as private as possible, and they were helped in that the Neapolitans wished the slur of this death upon their hospitality to be removed from sight and recollection as soon as might be. None the less there were many present, representatives of the King, and the whole retinue of Lady Frances.
“With rich flames and hired tears they solemnized their obsequies,” Elliot quoted to himself as he heard the lamentations about him. He returned to “The Golden Ox” and asked whether he could be of service.
Frances smiled with a wan gratitude.
“Nothing. I should call on you without hesitation if there were. You were a friend of——” but she couldn’t speak the name. “I am going to-morrow,” and in a sudden outburst, “I never wish to see this town again as long as I live.”
Mr. Elliot bent over her hand. He was himself deeply moved. That dreadful little package on the stretcher between the shrouded servants of the Misericordia—Julian Linchcombe—old Admiral Timbertoes stumping in the Italian garden amongst his children. He murmured a broken word or two of farewell. As he stood erect again, the doctor and the tutor entered the room together.
“I asked for you, gentlemen,” said Henry, “to announce that we shall leave at seven in the morning. So if you have farewells to make, they should be made this afternoon. I shall ask you to be precise to the minute.”
There was a noticeable new stateliness in Henry’s address which took Mr. Elliot by surprise. The tutor, whose eyes were swollen and red behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, could only sniff and nod his head. The physician was calm as became his profession and his experience.
“You can count upon our punctuality, my Lord,” he said, and with a cry Henry covered his face with his hands.
“Oh, no! Please!”
Then he lifted a face twisted with pain.
“Not yet! Let us go back as we came!”
The physician bowed with discreet and silent sympathy. Mr. Elliot was almost startled out of his skin. “My Lord”—Henry Scoble! He had not given a thought to this change in Henry’s fortunes. Henry Scoble, the son of Philip’s younger brother, a mere tutor at an Oxford College with a cottage in the Park was now Henry Scoble, Earl of Linchcombe, Viscount Terceira, Baron Hardley, the owner of Grest and all its wide acres, its appurtenances, its pocket boroughs, its power.
He had disclaimed the title almost with horror, certainly with distress. That was much in his favour—yes—he earned the best marks for his revulsion from the title. Yet—yet—was there more than an unusually dramatic “nolo episcopari” in his outcry? There had been undoubtedly a new stateliness and authority in his injunctions to the two doctors ... Mr. Elliot wondered. Henry was dressing himself in the robes, whilst rejecting, or at all events deferring, the style.
