With a superhuman effort Dasso was on his knees again—then, a look of despair and a great fear came into the white staring face, and with no sound he rolled over and lay still.
CHAPTER XXXI
A FINAL NOTE BY EDWARD POVEY
It may be a matter of some astonishment to the few people whom I number as my intimate friends that the records of my doings from the time when Mr. Kyser accosted me as I leant on the parapet of London Bridge, to the time I left the kingdom of San Pietro, have not been chronicled by myself in the first person.
To be candid, such was my original intention, and, indeed, I commenced the task only to find that it was beyond me. There were certain incidents in the record where my actions, however well they turned out, were perhaps not the actions of a strictly honest man. These (although I wish it to be clearly understood that I regret nothing) I felt that I could not write of without feeling a not unnatural bias.
I claim that in my schemes I did harm to no one; I will even go further and claim that I have been the humble instrument by which happiness and a splendid inheritance came to Galva. Had I returned Mr. Kyser's letter to America, it would probably never have reached Mr. Baxendale. If, in an after life, I meet this latter gentleman, I will have no fear. The case of the San Pietro inheritance, had I not undertaken the matter, would have been thrown into the hands of some unknown and perhaps unscrupulous lawyer who would have exploited the affair for his benefit rather than Galva's.
I do not wish to hide the fact that it was not alone the thought of this unknown girl which embarked me on my mission. I believe that beneath the shell of the most ordinary existence there is a kernel of romance, and it was this which tempted me.
I have always held that Romance is not dead, as some would have us believe, but that it is a question of environment. I heard a lecturer once say that Yesterday was romantic, and so is To-morrow, but never To-day—our grandparents and grandchildren, but never our brothers and sisters. Who can dare to say what lies beneath the most prosaic exterior? Where is the line which marks the difference between the man who drives his omnibus down Cheapside and the charioteer of ancient Rome? One wears a shiny felt hat, and the other, I believe, affected a fillet of gold in his hair. Apart from that they are identical. I once knew a man who wore side-whiskers and lectured in little halls on temperance, and I know for a fact that an ancestor of his helped to murder a cardinal on the steps of an Italian cathedral. But I do not believe that romance is dead in my temperate friend, it is only dormant. One of these days something will stir in his mind, and he will see things as they are, just as something stirred in me that evening I looked over London Bridge. I do not expect he will murder a cardinal, they don't do those things now. I know he feels secretly proud of his descent from his violent ancestor—the murder of a cardinal ages ago is so romantic—but should his brother shoot a curate, I think he would die of shame. Yet the crimes are identical. Why is it?
It is now two years since the events recorded in this book happened, and the proof sheets have just come from the friend who has taken upon himself the task of putting my notes into story form. With them, there is a letter in which he asks me to write a final note—to tie a knot, as it were, in the string of the tale.