Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 12
HE WATCHED her short, strong figure as it descended the long flight of steps that separated his garden terraces and led to the green doorway. When she had gone out, he could see her gray felt hat below the top of the wall as she strode on toward the old gates and the town; and he sighed for her and the stout heart she carried so bravely in her stout body. Then he sighed for himself and the disturbing errand she had set him upon, and went indoors to change his clothes.
When he came forth again, he paused at the top of the steps. The point was high, and commanded the immense sweep of that great crescenting mountain coast. Below him the gray road wound out of the towered and cubed and angled stone masses of the town, and passed toward the vast corrugations of the volcano's buttresses; there were stolid hamlets built of old lava among the convulsive shadows of these harsh slopes; and halfway to the nearest there was a haze of dust upon the road. It was moving toward Raona, and within it there were glints of glitter and colour. Rennie distinguished the uniforms of mounted carabinieri. He stood looking down as they drew nearer, and he saw that two of the carabinieri rode in advance of a mule cart, with three others riding upon each side of it and two more just behind. Following them, a dozen or more men joggled along upon mules or donkeys, and a straggling little crowd of barefooted peasants ran in the dust—attendant spectators anxious to miss nothing.
Looking down from above, Rennie could see, upon a mattress in the cart, a bandaged figure; and seated upon a stool beside it, a man in gray linen clothes smoked a cigarette. The American recognized him as a friend of his, a Raonese surgeon. Moreover, beside the driver sat a priest.
Rennie ran down the steps, and, as this cortege passed, he detained one of the runners, a villager whom he knew.
"Luigi! For what reason so much excitement? Who has been hurt?"
Luigi wiped his wet brow with a bare forearm. "An accident," he said, panting. "An accident of a peculiar appearance, it might be thought. This morning some of our people found Don Arturo Liana lying at the foot of the Salto. The Salto is a very bad little cliff—it is little but wicked, and foreigners should not use that path."
"Liana!" Rennie exclaimed. "Was he badly hurt?"
"Yes, badly. His mother was sent for and she came with the priest, the carabinieri and the doctor from Raona, four hours ago. She has gone ahead in her automobile and they are taking him to the hospital in the cart because he must be kept lying down. Don Arturo talked to the carabinieri and to the doctor; I heard him myself, through a window. He told them he was walking to a meeting at Castrogirone last night, all alone. Ah! I think he should have been more careful! He said he met some men on the path, but in the darkness he could not tell who they were; he said perhaps they had too much wine. Don Arturo is a brave fellow; I willingly say as much as that for him. He is a foreigner from the North; but he understands the customs of our country and of course he would not tell the carabinieri who pushed him off the path."
"So!" Rennie said. "Who did push him off the path, Luigi?"
Luigi opened his eyes until they showed an extreme amount of white below and above their topaz irises. "'Pushed,' signore! Who spoke of any pushing?"
"You did."
"No, no!" Luigi protested. "When a man has such enemies as those belonging to Don Arturo Liana, no one is foolish enough to say the young gentleman was pushed from anywhere! Excuse, signore!"
Rennie let him go and he ran away, his brown bare feet flitting lightly over the gray dust. He had caught up with the ragged end of the procession before it passed through the gates; but the American went more slowly. Inside the town, he walked first to the wine shop of old Onorati, who had the habit of knowing the truth of whatever happened in Raona; but of course Onorati would not speak plainly to a foreigner of Don Arturo's fall from the Salto.
"Some will swear one way; some will swear another," he said. "The only thing it is safe to swear is that Don Arturo ought not to have walked so far alone after the dark!"
"No," Rennie returned dryly. "That is evident."
"Evident? Perhaps. He is in politics."
"So? You think it was political?"
"Who can say? Somewhere there was a whispering" Onorati stopped, and shook his head.
"Yes? What was the whispering?"
"It could not be true, I am sure; but there was some foolish whispering that Don Arturo had talked a little recklessly of some gentlemen; but I heard nothing that would permit me to guess who the gentlemen are."
"What had he said of them?"
"Nobody knows."
"To whom did he talk?"
Onorati rubbed his right cheek and then his left cheek. "Ah, yes! I remember hearing that it might have been to some foreign ladies at the convent."
By the "convent" he meant the hotel that had been a monastery, and Eugene Rennie, on his way there, stopped halfway down a flight of stone steps, and made a sound as of a dolorous kind of laughter. Then he questioned himself upon this very sound. "Why the devil will a man do that?" he asked himself. "How is it that one is able to see something grotesquely humorous even in a tragedy? In this one, probably because the character of the heroine makes it a tragi-comedy—with the emphasis on the first half of the word, I'm afraid. Avanti, then, for my own miserable part in it!"
The concierge informed him that Miss Ambler was in the garden, and Rennie went there at once to find her. Miss Orbison had just brought her brother out to his chair. He was standing, leaning upon the back of it, and beside him was the American girl. Miss Orbison had paused with an unfolded rug hanging from her hands; and all three of them wore the pained and incredulous look of people who have just heard startling news. This, in fact, was their condition, for the Princess Liana stood facing them.
Rennie halted where he was.