CHAPTER XX.
THE BREAK OF DAWN.
It was with difficulty Gilardoni could curb his impatient desire for his master’s return. Could he by any possibility have imagined in which direction to seek for him, he would have started off in quest before the storm was well exhausted. But he was absolutely a stranger in this part of the world, and for aught he could tell, his master might be the same.
He was perforce obliged to remain in Captain Desfrayne’s rooms in absolute inaction, listening with keenly strained watchfulness to every sound, every footfall of man or beast.
Unfortunately, the rooms did not overlook the yard through which the young officer must enter the barracks, so Gilardoni did not enjoy the half-irritating consolation of watching the gate by which he would come.
It was very late before there was the slightest sign of Captain Desfrayne’s coming.
In fact, Gilardoni at length, somehow, lost count, and was only recalled to his eager watch by a gentle touch upon his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, unaware that he had fallen asleep.
Captain Desfrayne had come into the room quietly. At first he had thought of letting the poor tired fellow have his sleep to the end in peace; but, finding he needed his services, he had aroused him.
“No matter, my good Gilardoni,” he said, with that pleasant, winning, yet sad, smile that had become habitual to him. “I have no doubt you are tired waiting for me. I am dog-tired myself. This afternoon, I was caught in the storm, and had the good luck”—there was an imperceptible shade of irony in his tone—“to find shelter in a friend’s house, so was delayed. Will you——”
The words died on his lips. Gilardoni had placed the tiny packet in the silver tissue-paper on the table, justwithin the rays of the lamp, and Paul Desfrayne’s glance happened to light on it as he spoke.
With a hasty movement, he put out his hand to take it up, but the Italian was more swift, and with the rapidity of lightning covered the packet with the palm of his hand, but without removing it from the table.
The two young men looked into each other’s face for some moments. Not a sound was heard beyond the monotonous tick-tick of the clock on the chimneypiece.
“What is the meaning of this?” demanded Captain Desfrayne.
He recollected the night when he engaged this man as his servant—it seemed months ago—when he had seen him clench his fist at the pictured resemblance to Lucia Guiscardini.
Gilardoni took up the tiny gold cross in its filmy covering, and kept it in his hand.
“Sir,” he said, “this morning you dropped this—as I supposed. I picked it up——”
“Both self-evident facts. As it happens to belong tome, and you acknowledge my proprietorship, why do you not restore it to me?” said Captain Desfrayne. “Do you know what it is?”
Gilardoni laughed bitterly.
“I naturally opened the packet, in order to ascertain what the contents might be,” he responded, “for I was not certain until now that it had really been dropped by you, sir. It is——”
“What is it? A gold cross, a pendant for a watch-chain.”
“More than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sir, may I ask you a question?”
“A thousand, if you will let me have my own property, and be brief enough to let me get to bed within half an hour, for I sorely need rest.”
“Sir—my good master, to whom I owe so much kindness and charity—I am not going to ask this question out of impertinent curiosity, but—but from a sufficiently reasonable and strong motive.”
“Come, let us have the question without further preamble.”
“I will ask you two questions. Did you buy this cross, or was it given to you?”
Captain Desfrayne hesitated before replying, as a man in the witness-box might do for fear of criminating himself.
“It was given to me,” he at length replied.
“By a woman?”
Captain Desfrayne looked keenly at his questioner. The idea that he was a former lover of the beautiful Italian prima donna’s, again occurred to him.
“If it will afford you any gratification to know, I do not object to admitting that it was given to me by a woman,” he said.
“By an Italian?”
“By an Italian? Yes.”
“It was a love-gift?”
An exclamation of anger escaped Gilardoni’s master, and he impatiently stretched out his hand.
“Enough of this nonsense!” he exclaimed, with displeasure. “Give me that packet, and get you to bed. Your wits are addled by the nap you were betrayed into.”
Gilardoni moved a step nearer to Captain Desfrayne, and, gripping him tightly by the wrist, looked with intent, searching earnestness into his face, as if he would read his soul. There was nothing sinister or menacing in his attitude, gestures, or expression. He had simply the appearance of a man carried away by some self-absorbing desire to learn a fact of paramount interest to himself.
“This cross,” he said, “was given to you by Lucia Guiscardini.”
“I do not understand why the fact should interest you,” answered Paul Desfrayne. “It certainly did come from her hand. What was Lucia Guiscardini to you, or you to Lucia Guiscardini, that the sight of her gifts to another should cause you so much emotion?”
“Did she tell you where she had obtained this toy?” asked Gilardoni.
“I did not think of inquiring. She linked it on mywatch-chain one day, and there was an end of the affair.”
“I knew this as well as if I had been present,” muttered the Italian. “Oh! false, wicked, traitorous serpent!”
These latter words he spoke so rapidly in his native language that his master did not catch their import.
“If you knew, why the deuce have you put yourself to the trouble of asking so many questions? I should be glad to know what you mean by cross-examining me in this ridiculous manner. You apparently consider you have no very good reason to like this same Lucia Guiscardini. Has she done you any harm?”
“She has ruined my happiness—blighted my life—that is all. No, I have no great reason to remember her with feelings of good-will.”
“As you have asked me some questions, I may be allowed the privilege of retaliating. May I ask if she jilted you?”
“No. Oh! no. Would to Heaven she had done so, and saved me these years of bitter hate and regret!”
“Is she your sister?” demanded Paul Desfrayne, startled by the overthrow of the supposition he had so readily built up.
“No. She is the only woman I have ever loved, or can ever love again.”
“Do you still love her, or do you hate her for being so far beyond you?”
Gilardoni regarded his master with a strange, inexplicable look, and then broke into a low, savagely bitter laugh.
“May I ask, sir,” he said, “if she jiltedyou? She was quite capable of playing the coquette to amuse herself, and then laughing in your face, for her soul was really steeped in ambitious desires.”
“I believe, my good fellow, ambition was her besetting sin—is still, if what folks say be true. No, she did not jilt me. But you have not answered my question. Be frank with me. Tell me why you hate this woman. Why do you hate her—and yet, why do you feel anger at finding her gifts in the possession of another?”
“This cross,” said Gilardoni, tearing it from its wrapper, and holding it out at arm’s length, with a strange, vindictive smile, “was my gift to her—given the day I told her I loved her, and asked her——”
“What?”
“She pretended she returned my love. Bah! Her heart was as cold as ice. She cares for no one but herself. She was born a peasant girl, yet never was princess of blood royal more proud, more insolent, more resolved to stand above the common herd. I adored her. I was like one bereft of his senses when she was near me. She had but to will, and I obeyed like the basest slave. Bah! I made an idol and tricked it out with all the graces of my love-smitten imagination, and fell down and worshiped it. I believed that she was exactly what my weak, foolish heart pictured her to be. I would have raised her from her ignoble station, but not to the height she desired to climb. To be a Russian princess, or the lady of some great English milord, was her dream.”
“I know it,” said Paul Desfrayne, very quietly, yet he felt that some great revelation was at hand. That the revelation was to be to his advantage he did not hope.
“But not at the time when I linked about her neck the chain that held this poor little gewgaw,” cried Gilardoni excitedly. “No, no. At that time she was barely conscious of her power to charm—just waking to the consciousness of her dangerous charm of beauty. I was her first victim, her first triumph. She was a girl of sixteen then; I was about six or seven years her senior. We had been neighbors and friends from childhood. I taught her such songs and snatches of music as I occasionally picked up, and she loved to warble the chants and psalms she heard at chapel. She had not discovered that she had a fortune in her throat. If she had not found outthat, we might have been a happy, contented couple at this day.”
Paul Desfrayne looked at the excited face of Gilardoni in a strange, contemplative silence for a moment or two, as the Italian paused. The dark, foreign face was lividly pale from passion; the dark, gleaming eyes were burning with inward fire.
“I thought you assured me just this moment,” observed the young officer, “that Lucia Guiscardini had not jilted you. If you loved her, and she declared she reciprocated your affection, why, it is to be imagined that the course of true love must have run tolerably smooth. A little hypocrisy, I believe, is supposed to be pardonable with the feminine part of our common humanity. If she said she loved you, her affection was next best to reality.”
“She declared she loved me. I believed her,” said Gilardoni fiercely. “I believed her because—I supposed because I wished it to be true. I fancied no man was ever so happy as I. For a while I walked no longer on earth, but on roseate clouds of happiness. I despise myself when I look back on that time. Perhaps I am not the first who has been betrayed into folly by the arts and wiles of a beautiful, treacherous girl,” the Italian added, shrugging his shoulders.
“You have not yet given me the slightest idea of the reason why you so cordially dislike Madam Guiscardini, if that be her correct designation,” said Captain Desfrayne. “You indulge in the most vehement invectives against her, yet state no specific charge. You say you made a fool of yourself about her, and that she laughed in her sleeve at your declarations of affection. Certainly, very shabby on her part, but, then, it is a thing beautiful, vain, silly women do every day. Why should you cherish such rancor against her? I suppose she found she could make a better market of her beauty and wonderful talents than by disposing of them to a man who could never hope to raise her beyond the level of, say, a wealthy farmer’s wife. Do not be too severe upon her.”
“If she had laughed at me, and left me,” cried Gilardoni, throwing out his hands with impetuosity, “I could have forgiven her; I might have forgotten her. It could not have been that I could ever have loved again; but what of that? I do not believe in lovenow. But no. She left the poison of her treacherous touch upon my life. I could kill her, if she were within my reach.”
“Such hate must be justified by very serious provocation,” said Paul Desfrayne. “May I ask how your lovewas turned to such bitter gall, since your suit prospered in the first instance?”
“By deeds of the blackest treachery.”
“In a word, may I ask—since we are playing at the game of question and answer—may I once more ask, why do you hate the beautiful Lucia Guiscardini? She did not jilt you, you say—then what relationship does she hold toward you?”
Gilardoni turned his great dark eyes upon his master, as if in surprise, forgetting at the moment that he had not told him of the completing point of his story. Then he said, with a vindictive bitterness terrible to hear, because it revealed the smoldering fire beneath:
“She is my wife!”