CHAPTER XXVII.

FROM OUT THE PAST

That night John Ambrose sat silent, motionless, and thoughtful at the bedside of his unconscious friend.

He had been found by one of the dogs lying unconscious in the woods, four kilometres distant. Apparently he had been on his way home, and had dropped from exhaustion. He was without his cassock, a fact which had given rise to much comment in the village.

“He will explain it all when he comes to his senses,” they said. The doctor from Acquapendente had been summoned, and had sat for half an hour in that bare little upstairs room declaring that his patient had evidently suffered some severe shock. Restoratives applied were all to no purpose. He was white and pulseless, his heart beating only faintly.

“To what, in your opinion, doctor, is the attack due?” Ambrose asked anxiously.

“Ah! _caro signore_, I really cannot tell. Perhaps some sudden fright--perhaps the effect of exhaustion. It can only be cured by complete rest.”

So the unsuspecting medico had prescribed, and left the _curato_ to the care of old Teresa and his guest. Medical science is not very advanced in the obscurer villages in Central Italy, and the diagnosis of the doctor from Acquapendente was by no means a correct one.

Old Teresa remained below, but the hunchback came and went noiselessly, inquiring from time to time after the health of the _padrone_, while the Englishman sat anxiously watching his closest friend.

What had occurred? What sudden fright could Don Mario have possibly sustained?

The more superstitious in the village were declaring that the priest had encountered the Evil One himself in the woods, and that Satan had triumphed. But the others shook their heads dubiously and scented mystery.

In the long watches of the night John Ambrose sat motionless, watching intently the prostrate unconscious man who had been found lying across the narrow footpath leading through the wood towards Monteleone. His body had been drawn up, as though by pain, his white bony fingers clenched into the palms.

Once, only once since he had been laid upon his own narrow, little iron bedstead had he shown signs of life--a deep, long-drawn sigh. Still his faithful friend watched by him, ever anxious for returning consciousness.

The face upon the pillow was deadly pale, the nose more hooked than usual, the sallow cheeks sunken, the eyes half-closed.

As John Ambrose gazed around the bare little whitewashed chamber where a small red light burned before the time-blackened ancient picture of the Madonna and Child, whereon had been placed a dead spray of flowers, he could not help his thoughts running back a good many years.

The doctor from Acquapendente had expressed a fear that the _curato_ was dying. He might never recover consciousness, he had declared before he left--promising to return again at dawn.

And as John Ambrose sat with his gaze upon the thin, pale face, just discernible in the dim light of the oil lamp, there arose before him the vision of an autumn day long ago, when Ellersdale, his great ancestral mansion in Dorsetshire--one of the show places of England--had been filled by a gay shooting-party; for he usually gave two each pheasant season.

Prime Minister of England, a bachelor, owner of one of the finest estates in the kingdom, and the trusted friend and adviser of his Sovereign, his was surely the proudest position a man could hold. Among his guests were many notable people, as well as his youngest brother, the Honourable Rollo Lambton, with his wife and infant daughter, Irene, and not least among those noteworthy guests was Father Mellini, the fashionable Roman Catholic preacher. A man of elegant and commanding presence, good-looking beyond the average, he was highly popular among the women of smart society who fêted and lionised him.

Political duties had recalled the Earl to Downing Street, but he had been absent from his guests only one day when, at evening, on stepping from his carriage and entering the great vaulted hall at Ellersdale, Hinkson, his butler, had handed him a note.

Opening it, he found a few brief words of farewell from Don Mario, who explained that he had been suddenly called to London by the Cardinal at Westminster, who wished to see him. The Earl expressed no surprise, for Father Mellini’s movements were often erratic, as he laughingly told his other guests over the dinner-table that night.

Three nights later--ah! how well he recollected that fateful evening--a strange incident occurred. All the other guests had left the smoking-room and retired when, as was his habit, he had invited his brother Rollo into his own den, a small, cosy oak-panelled room, for a final cigar before turning in.

He noticed that Rollo, tall, thin and athletic, was somewhat annoyed, and attributed it to the fact that he had been unlucky at bridge. But he flung himself into the big arm-chair before the fire, took a cigar from the box, bit off the end viciously and applied a match to it. He had always been against his brother’s marriage with the giddy, ill-bred little woman, who was a Catholic and had been bred in the suburbs of London, and now, as he had predicted, she flirted outrageously, and caused poor Rollo much pain and anxiety. He had mentioned it on the previous night, and his remarks had led to some angry words between them--words that were overheard by two of the guests.

They had been smoking together for five minutes or so, in that silent, old-world room to which he always retired when desirous of quiet, and Rollo had just poured out his whisky and soda, when he suddenly uttered a strange cry, and, half-rising from his chair, fell back, gasping that he had been seized by a strange pain in the throat.

The cigar had fallen from his fingers, and with both hands he was tearing at his collar convulsively. Lord Ellersdale, greatly alarmed, loosened it, and gave his brother a draught of soda-water. But the sharp agony increased, his limbs shook, and he complained of shooting, excruciating pains down the back.

“Get a doctor, John--quick!” he managed to gasp. “I--I believe I’m dying!”

The Earl rang the bell violently, but before any of the servants arrived his brother Rollo had collapsed and breathed his last.

His wife, the pretty, fair-haired young woman in her pale blue dressing-gown--the woman whose flirtations had scandalised the whole house-party--threw herself beside him, almost insane with grief. It was indeed a terrible scene. Try how he would, he could never forget--never. Neither could he rid himself of those painful recollections of all that followed; of the inquest; of the evidence of the Home Office analyst that the cigar smoked by the dead man had been impregnated with some most deadly substance--some unknown neurotic poison. Then the local police had visited Ellersdale, seized the box of cigars, and found another of them to have been prepared, while on searching his lordship’s den, they discovered, locked in one of the drawers of an old buhl cabinet, a tiny glass-stoppered phial, half-filled with some brown liquid, which proved to be the poison used upon the cigars.

The discovery staggered him. He alone had kept the key of that cabinet, yet he had no knowledge whatever of possessing poison. How it had come there he could not tell. His reputation, both as Prime Minister of England and as a private citizen, was now at stake. He knew that the quarrel with his brother regarding the latter’s wife had been overheard--therefore the circumstantial evidence against him was complete. He was quick to realise the worst.

In his intense agony of mind, and in hourly fear of arrest and consequent scandal upon his political party, he sought his old and most intimate friend, Gilbert Cunningham, an Under-Secretary of State, who was one of the house-party. He, in turn, consulted Sir Frank Nesbitt, and they, in the very strictest confidence, interviewed the Home Secretary, the result being that the warrant already issued for Lord Ellersdale’s arrest was suspended for a week.

Then Cunningham and Nesbitt had come down to Ellersdale. Ah! how vividly he recollected that tragic interview in his own great brown library where, with locked doors, they told him frankly that his innocence would never be believed by a jury, that it was alleged he had killed his brother at the instigation of the latter’s wife, and that the only way to escape arrest and trial was--suicide!

At first he vehemently protested, but the pair sat inexorable, sphinx-like. Then they told him an amazing fact. His sister-in-law had made a statement seriously incriminating him, they said. The Party must not suffer. On hearing that, he bowed to their decision, and announced boldly that he would rather die by his own hand than bring scandal and shame upon his political friends. One thing he asked--that the Sovereign should not be told.

And so it was that his illness was announced, and soon afterwards the papers reported his unexpected death. Yet, so well was the whole secret kept--the two doctors receiving big fees for their certificate, and the undertakers for not looking inside the coffin--that not half a dozen people knew how he had been hounded to his end, or that any allegation had been brought against him. The Sovereign sent a representative with a wreath to his funeral, and even his great friend, Sir George Ravenscourt, remained in ignorance, for Cunningham and Nesbitt kept their oath of silence. Two years later both had died, within a few months of each other.

From the position of Prime Minister and holder of the Earldom of Ellersdale, with a handsome income, a deer-forest in Scotland, and a villa at Cannes, the broken man passed, in one single hour, to the obscurity of Richard Goodrick, the eccentric lodger in Charlwood Street, Pimlico. His elder brother succeeded to the great estates, while the suburban woman who had made that mysterious and incriminating statement regarding him went abroad, taking with her her little child.

Three years later she died of phthisis in Geneva, and little Irene, left an orphan, had been brought to England by Sir George and Lady Ravenscourt, who adopted her. It was then that, under the guise of the inoffensive John Ambrose, old Richard Goodrick sought the child out in the park, and ever afterwards kept up that strangely romantic acquaintance.

He still had one firm, faithful friend in Don Mario, who, however, had, soon after his “burial,” fallen into disgrace at the Vatican, and had, alas! been exiled back to that obscure parish in Italy. Yet the one bright spot in his aimless, broken life was the meeting in the park with little Maidee--his pretty, merry-eyed niece, who always called him “Uncle John.”

Through all those long years of weary obscurity and oblivion, the _curato_ of Santa Lucia had never ceased to stand his friend. At infrequent intervals the priest would escape from his barbaric parish in the Umbrian hills and travel post-haste to Denbigh Street, there to be near his old friend--to talk over the past, and to gossip, as in bygone days, when both were great and honoured men.

Don Mario, the man now lying between life and death, was the only living person who knew the truth--who was aware of the real cause of the death of the Earl of Ellersdale, or that, though the fine monument stood to perpetuate his memory in Westminster Abbey, yet he was still alive.

Alas! even he, the devout cleric, his only friend, was now being taken from him!

They had undressed him and laid him upon his narrow, meagre bed.

How different were their positions eighteen years ago--he Prime Minister of England, and the silent, unconscious man there one of the most popular preachers in the United Kingdom.

His own brilliant career had been cut short by that amazing conspiracy which had arisen against him. Someone must have placed those two prepared cigars in the box--someone must have opened that cabinet by means of a false key and hidden the phial therein. For what reason? Either to fix the crime of murder upon him, in order to ruin him both politically and socially, and bring him to the gallows, or perhaps to make it apparent that he himself had wilfully committed suicide.

Somewhere a secret enemy had lurked behind him. But he had been unable to trace his identity. Most probably it had been a political conspiracy, he thought.

Yet what mattered? His two friends Cunningham and Nesbitt believed him to be the murderer of Rollo, so he had bowed bitterly to the fate to which they had condemned him. From the police they had obtained back that tiny phial which they had handed to him so that he might take his own life by the same means as that of his brother had been taken.

Could a man’s public career have ended more tragically?

The old man drew a long, deep sigh as he reviewed the past, his deep-set eyes fixed upon the motionless form of the priest lying upon that narrow bed.

Old Teresa, with sun-browned, wrinkled face, moved noiselessly, stopped to peer in, but uttered no word.

She saw the Signor Inglese bent, with his brow upon his hands--bent beside her _padrone_, his friend.

She heard him mutter low, broken words in English, but she could not understand them.

She only knew instinctively that her old _padrone_ was slowly dying.

The words uttered by the old Englishman were:

“God forgive me! God forgive!”