A cry from Geoletti caught me to my senses:
“Zitto! zitto! Ah Dio di compassione! Look, signore! it is there—it has never stirred. The shroud of the waters has enwrapped it where it lay.”
I followed the direction of his hand. The cave was humid with a fine floating spray. Something shapeless, grotesque lay on the floor of it near to its farther end—a thing which, in a first hurried glance, I had taken for a mere natural excrescence of the rock.
“What?” I gasped—“Geoletti—great God!”
We approached it, holding to one another, over the slippery floor, and looked down. A horrible thing; blurred out of mortal recognition; fungussed with lime, preserved in it, decay arrested and perpetuated—a horrible thing. It resembled nothing so much as one of those pitiful casts taken from the ashy moulds in dead Pompeii—grey as pumice-stone—my father.
A smaller excrescence lay near it—quite a little one. Geoletti stooped and pulled, and it came away in his hand.
“Signore!—the box!” he whispered.
“Ah!” I cried. “Go, while I watch, and fetch the others. They must come—they must see this—Valombroso will know what to do. Go, do you hear? I am not afraid any longer. Do you not understand what he was to me?”
CHAPTER XXX.
HARD PRESSED
It was on a dreary wet morning, laden with the very spirit of depression, that I led my little party of three across the fields to the Lone Farm. We had talked, or slept, out the night at the “Black Dog” in Market Grazing; and now, in grim fulfilment of the purpose which had brought us so far, were advancing to the assault of the inner abode of that mystery, whose final ramification had ended for us under the waterfall in far-away Piedmont. We numbered, besides myself, Mr Shapter and the two detectives. Johnny and Geoletti had stopped by the way in London, to provide us with the necessary correspondents in that prescriptive centre to all such operations.