Dasso poured out Madeira into two thin goblets of Venetian glass and handed one to the young man, who stood looking into the fire, seeing in the glowing coals the disdainful face of Galva Baxendale. He stood up with a clanking of spurs on the polished oak floor and took the glass.
"To Dasso," he said, with a reckless laugh; "To King Gabriel the First."
He drained the goblet, then: "You may burn the cards, Dasso, as I have burned my boats. Heart and soul I am with you, and any work in your cause I will do, for it is my cause, too, now. And the more devilish the work the better I shall like it. My fiacre is outside, Dasso; I will come again this evening. My news can hold till then; I am taking Julie to lunch at Amato's."
CHAPTER XII
IN THE CATHEDRAL AT CORBO
Shopping was very far from the thoughts of Galva Baxendale as she made her way up the street that ran at right angles to the promenade. Tumultuous thoughts they were, in which the figures of Lieutenant Mozara and the Duc de Choleaux Lasuer played important parts.
She must have walked a considerable distance, for when she glanced at the tiny watch at her wrist she saw that it was eleven o'clock. At the same moment the sonorous chimes of a clock reached her, and glancing up she saw, between the gables of the houses at the end of the street, the white façade of Corbo Cathedral showing brightly in the sunlight.
It had been her first thought on arriving in San Pietro to pay a visit to the tombs of her ill-fated father and mother. Never having known them, she could not be expected to feel a very poignant or present grief, but the sadness of the story made a deep impression, and at times she tried to tell herself that within the storehouse of her memory there was a corner in which a black-bearded man, a-glitter with scarlet and gold, had place. A fancy, doubtless, and one that would have had no existence had she never left her Cornish home. But the knowledge that she had been born in the palace behind the town, helped the illusion, an illusion of a father, and she grappled it to her soul with all the strength of her loving nature.
Edward Sydney had, however, reasoning with the brain of your true conspirator, been firm. There was, to his mind, a grave risk to the living in a too demonstrative reverence for the dead. It is true he had agreed to one visit to the tombs, as ordinary tourists, and Galva gave a little shudder at the recollection.