We were all very much impressed—all of us, that is to say, but Jannaway. He maintained his insular reserve, and insular prejudice in favour of insular methods.
“Handkerchers, indeed!” said he, with a withering intonation. “I’d back any one of our London pickpockets to take and blow his nose in his handkercher and put it all back into his pocket without his knowing. He’d never guess but that it was the echo of himself a-blowing of his own trumpet.”
This lack of the right appreciation rather disillusioned us, I think, about Jannaway. Assurance is always so much more convincing than reserve. We sneer at conceit, but we allow it the privileges of its self-estimation. Valombroso must know himself so much better than we could possibly know him; and so, as his method was frankness, what reason had we to doubt his being the greatest detective in the world? It was simply Jannaway’s jealousy.
From Turin we went north to Aosta, an old walled and turreted town, situated in a beautiful fertile valley under the mountains, and rich in Roman remains. I have no time nor will to enlarge on the thousand wondering sensations which all this novel experience awoke in me. They were poignant enough, but they do not come into the story. More germane to that is it to describe something of the feelings with which I approached this Mecca of my pilgrimage, and thought, with an agitation hardly to be repressed, how it was here that my father and mother had come, stealing away from their party, to put a bond upon their love. How old and far away and strange it all seemed! a pretty antique pastoral, smelling of pot-pourri, until—ah! one could not long forget the end of it, sordid and horrible, behind those tumbling waters.
Yet now, being here, a very strange and sweet realisation of my relationship to the dead came to me—for the first time, I think, as a full conviction. Not even, seeing his young eyes laugh down from that portrait on the wall at Evercreech, had I ever felt him so near to me and so understanding as when, in this place, I looked up to the hills and thought of what was lying hidden from me in their quiet folds. Charlie Skene—the lover and young husband of those days—the boy, still less than my own present age as he lay up there at this moment, and yet my father! Was it not all ghastly pitiful! and to think how that dastard blow had fallen upon three lives in one. O, Mr Mark Dalston—if they would only hang in Italy!
And so one morning we went up to Cormayeur, and found the Hospice of St Marguerite hardly altered, by Geoletti’s showing, from the Hospice of twenty years ago. There was even the same Directrice presiding over its establishment—a vivid, brown-eyed old dame, with cavernous cheeks and a vulturine neck. She remembered Geoletti, and the gossip about his utter evanishment; she remembered the young English milord, and his no less startling, if more explainable, disappearance; she remembered very well, better than all the rest, the little demoiselle, white and pink, and the old aunt, grim and de mauvaise humeur, whose cruelty had betrayed to scandal what should have adorned a pretty tale of love and matrimony. And were the cold ashes of that scandal to be raked over for the benefit of a new generation? she protested. Alas! if the dead were to be consulted for their countenances, better bury all men in the Abbey La Sagra di S. Michele, where the soil would convert them in a little into natural mummies—a significant suggestion, to be sure.
I have given a French tone to these observations, but, as a matter of fact, they talked a hybrid patois, nearer Savoyard than Italian, up in these remote tributary valleys of the Aosta. Valombroso had to be our interpreter to its meaning; but he was always equal to any exigencies of talk. He loved the sound of his own tongue impartially in all the dialects of Babel. He could give us a reason, too, for the strange anachronisms of dress which still prevailed in part among these mountaineers—cocked hats, to wit, and bright-coloured long-skirted coats, and breeches and stockings and shoe buckles. They were the scum of an old upheaval of the ancient order risen to the top, and not yet entirely skimmed away by the spirit of democracy. As to the coquettish bibbed caps of the women, they were designed, after the fashion of other whited sepulchres, to conceal the disfigurement of the goître.
But now all this becomes likened in my memory to the crackling of thorns under a pot, while I turn to face the real tragic purpose of our mission.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE BODY IN THE CAVE
Emerging from the pine woods at last, we saw before us a vast barren slope scattered with an infinite débris of rocks and stones. The hill went up, shouldering itself hugely against a cold white sky. There might have been, from our point of view, no higher altitudes beyond; yet but a short climb was needed to reveal this waste as but a low-down step to the majesty of the peaks. They rose into view before us as we advanced, remote and ethereal, springing loftier with our every step, a whipped froth of pinnacles white as cream.