Читать книгу Marivosa - Baroness Orczy - Страница 16

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In the days and weeks that followed, Timothy, strolling about the quay, the cafés and places of amusement of the city, had entered into conversation with scores of men in every station of life; with soldiers and sailors, with stevedores and barmen, with half-breeds and vaqueiros, shop-girls and women in the streets. Discreetly, tactfully, always leading up by easy stages to the subject of past and present foreign visitors in Monsataz, he would put in a question presently about an Englishman—Dudley Stone. Quite a number of people knew about him, but more or less vaguely; he had not remained in Monsataz very long; an English senhor, who was not a reverend, had, it was admitted, visited Monsataz some six years ago, but he had not apparently remained long enough to leave his mark on the minds of those with whom he had not come into personal contact. But there were some here and there who had known him, spoken to him. At the bar of the Hotel Americano he had often been served with drink. A dancer at the Conquistador music-hall had lived with him for a month or two. He had hired a car at one of the garages and driven himself about all over the neighbouring country. These and various other traces of Stone’s passage through Monsataz had been easy to pick up. But his stay here had only been a passage: coming one day by steamer from Pernambuco, he went off again some few months later—no one knew whither or how.

When Timothy suggested that this Mr. Stone had died of malaria some time in May, 1924, they shrugged their shoulders and said that that was very likely—many people died of fever in Monsataz, especially in the old town, every year. There was a mound in a corner of the cemiterio of Santa Fe, with a broken wooden cross stuck at the head of it. The cross had once had a coat of white paint on it, with a name painted on in black, but both white and black paint had long since been washed off by the tropical rains. The girl from the Conquistador music-hall took Timothy thither one day and told him that she had been made to understand that her English lover was buried there. But there was nothing to prove that. Tim ran Fra Martino to earth and plied him with questions, but, as usual, the old priest had extraordinarily little to say on the subject. It might be; he did not know; he himself was away from Monsataz in the spring of 1924, and he had never taken any special interest in this Mr. Stone. On the other hand, the old verger at the church of Santa Fé shook his head most emphatically at the suggestion that a foreign senhor had been buried in the cemiterio, either six years ago or at any time—and he had been verger of the church for the last forty years. The mound beneath which the foreign senhor was supposed to be buried was one of a number in which rested the bones of the many victims of a severe epidemic of yellow fever, which had carried away no end of people in the spring of 1924. A corner of the cemiterio had been set apart for the purpose, because burials had to be done very quickly by order of the Government. But a foreign senhor? No! no! Old Hermanos was quite sure about that—no foreign senhor lay buried in the cemiterio of Santa Fé. All this, then, left the puzzle more acute than ever; for if Dudley Stone did not die of malarial fever in May, 1924, what then had become of him?

The general opinion was that the English senhor, Mr. Stone, had gone up-country either on a shooting expedition or in search of adventure, and that in either case he had been killed and eaten by a jaguar.