Читать книгу Marivosa - Baroness Orczy - Страница 11

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And now here he was, actually and indubitably in Monsataz, standing at the window of a respectable hotel which had been recommended to him by the captain of the small coasting steamer which had brought him north from Rio. The hotel overlooked the wide bay and the beautiful harbour with the huge rocks that guard its entrance like giant sentinels, rising a hundred feet and more out of the water. Beyond the bay the ocean glistened smooth as a purple mirror, with the haze of the setting sun slowly spreading over the still, calm waters like a veil that held within its folds all the secrets and all the mysteries which Tim O’Clee had come all this way to probe.

Brazil! Monsataz! Those two names had been eating into his brain ever since the day when he swore to himself that, in spite of what the lawyers said, he would prove them wrong and Hold-Hands Juliana a liar and a thief. So here he was.

A strange coincidence, which Tim at once put down to luck, had come to pass already. He had been shown into his room by one of the hotel servants. His luggage had been disposed about the room, and the coffee-coloured servant busied himself with undoing the straps of the valise. Tim had been studying Portuguese steadily for the past year. Already on the coasting steamer he had taken every opportunity of talking to the captain and exchanging words with the petty officers and the crew. He did not speak very correctly perhaps, but he made himself readily understood. His mind intent upon the one all-important subject, he remarked casually to the coffee-coloured valet:

‘It is not often, I suppose, that you have foreign visitors here?’

‘But yes, senhor,’ the man replied, ‘many Americanos.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean them. I mean Europeans—English, for instance.’

The man shook his head.

‘No, senhor,’ he said, ‘not many English, they mostly go to the Hotel Americano. But there have been some who stayed here for a day or two, reverend gentlemen—mostly Protestants.’

‘Seen any lately?’

‘Yes, senhor, last year. A reverend gentleman, he came with a lady who said she was his wife, but as he also called himself a priest, we could not understand how he could have a wife.’

Tim did not happen to hold any views one way or the other on the subject of the celibacy of the clergy, but he allowed the man’s tongue to run away with him and listened with half an ear to his dark-skinned friend’s opinion of reverend gentlemen who travelled about in the company of ladies. It seems that all the reverend gentlemen, both English and Americanos, who had ever come to Monsataz had a lady with them, but what was very strange was that the lady never was beautiful, which perhaps made the matter all right from a moral point of view.

It was all the more astonishing, was the man’s final comment on the situation, that the two English gentlemen who had come to this hotel—and who were not reverends—did travel alone.

‘The two English gentlemen?’ Tim asked; ‘who were they?’

‘Well, there is yourself, senhor.’

‘Yes. Who was the other?’

‘A nice tall English gentleman like yourself, senhor. His name was Stone.’

Of course Tim had expected this answer, and yet when it came it seemed to be like a hammer-blow hitting at his brain. Dudley Stone had actually stayed in this hotel, perhaps slept in this very room. If that was not a piece of the most stupendous luck, then he, Tim O’Clee, didn’t know what luck was!

Dudley Stone here—in this very room, probably! The man whose life, or the date of whose death, might mean home, title, riches, everything that a man could possibly wish for in this world, to impecunious Timothy O’Clerigh!

And Tim, brandishing a button-hook in the fashion of a shillelagh, executed a jig to the tune of the one and only Irish ballad which he knew:

‘Come rest in this boo-zum—tiddly hi, tiddly hi—tum ti—’

Nor did he desist when he caught the great black eyes of his friend fixed in a kind of wondering awe upon him.

‘I am so glad you think I’m English, my friend,’ he said, solemnly, ‘because otherwise you might go about saying that Irish gentlemen are mad.’

But undoubtedly the adventure had begun well; the thing to do now was not to waste time, tropical grass must not be left to grow under the feet of Tim O’Clee.

Knowing well that in every country, in every town and in every village throughout the world, the local clergy are the great channel for social intercourse, Timothy, in further conversation with another coffee-coloured employee of the hotel—the waiter this time who served him at dinner—inquired which was the principal church of Monsataz, and who was its incumbent. He learned that there were no fewer than two hundred churches in the city, but that of these the most important one was undoubtedly the church of Sao Felice, of which Fra Martino, a reverend gentleman of great eminence, was the incumbent.

Unfortunately, when Tim further inquired of his informant whether the latter knew anything of the church of Santa Fé and its vicar, Fra Bartolomeo, he was told that that venerable priest had died some four years previously, leaving a comfortable fortune which he had amassed to his devoted friend and confessor, Fra Martino. Now Fra Bartolomeo was the man who had sworn an affidavit that he had heard the last confession of Dudley Stone and had subsequently buried him in the cemiterio of Santa Fé, and the worthy priest must have died less than a year after that affidavit which had helped to shatter O’Clerigh’s hopes of regaining his inheritance.

Thus did Tim stand on the very first day after his arrival in Monsataz, with two tricks to the good. Fra Martino he had already put down as his trump card. Fra Bartolomeo was dead; but here was his friend and confessor, the man to whom he had bequeathed a comfortable fortune, the provenance of which must have been known to its recipient, the incumbent of the fashionable church frequented by the élite of the city, who must, of course, have been in touch at one time with the English gentleman, Dudley Stone.

A trump card, indeed!

Besides him, and of equal importance for Tim’s purpose, there was the doctor who had sworn that he attended Dudley Stone in his last illness, and who had signed the death certificate which Hold-Hands Juliana had triumphantly produced.

The waiter knew the senhor doctor very well by name; he was, according to him, a very distinguished gentleman indeed, a member of the aristocratic Club Nacional and an intimate friend of Dom Manoël da Lisbao who was, as everyone knew, the President of the Club and the acknowledged leader of the fashionable world of the city.

Those three men, then, formed the pivot round which Tim’s adventure in search of Dudley Stone must revolve. He wished to God he had been endowed with diplomatic skill, with the art of gleaning information without seeming to ask a single question. All he had to rely on was just mother wit, which, as it came from Old Oireland, should give a good account of itself even when measured against the subtle brains of these dagoes.

Seven days had gone by since Tim had landed at Monsataz—seven days spent in running the Reverend Fra Martino to earth. The worthy abbé was from home when he called; regretted most ardently that the exigencies of his parish work prevented his hastening at once to return the gracious visit of the distinguished Major O’Clerigh, but the very first minute of leisure that the good God would grant him, he would give himself the infinite pleasure of coming to pay his respects at the hotel. And thus a week went by.

Then, this afternoon, had come a note, couched in florid language, in which Fra Martino conveyed to the most distinguished Major an invitation from the President and prominent members of the Club Nacional to dine with them at the Club that evening. Being Thursday, it was a ladies’ night at the Club, Fra Martino went on to explain, and some of the most beautiful and most distinguished ladies of the city would grace the dinner with their presence. He, Fra Martino, would, moreover, give himself the pleasure of calling for the distinguished Major and taking him round to the Club.

Tim’s excitement had found vent in various ways, chief among which being his natural aptitude to break into song, despite his total inability to produce a single note that was not out of tune. But Tom Moore’s ballad, set to music by the immortal Patrick McDougall, had the effect of steadying his nerves.

Leaning out of the window, he looked down the length of the promenade with its row of tall, crested palm-trees and its sun-baked pavement. The star performer of a while ago had taken his pomegranate and other appurtenances of his star turn elsewhere, and one by one the crowd of admiring urchins had followed him. And now, stumping along on the cobbled road, on short, somewhat bandy legs, came Fra Martino himself—very much in the flesh, a figure such as an artist like the late Stacy Marks would have loved to depict.

Tim watched his coming with ill-controlled delight. The old priest wore a black straw Trilby hat, very much the worse for constant baking in the sun, tilted far back above his domed, perspiring forehead. His soutane of black alpaca was hitched up around his waist, allowing for a generous display of two fat legs in black cloth trousers which he had tucked into a pair of stout, short Wellington boots. He carried a thick, gnarled stick which he brandished with much effect whenever a street urchin poked an impudent nose in his way.

A real figure of fun—almost a caricature—yes, but that obese creature over there held, perhaps, in his fat, podgy hands the destiny of the last of the O’Clerighs.

Ye gods and little fishes, do not desert Tim O’Clee now!