I am a tall man, but as he said this Nikola seemed to tower over me, his face set hard as a rock, his eyes blazing like living coals, and his voice trembling under the influence of his passion. Little by little I was growing to think as he did, and to look upon Martinos as he saw him.
"But this cannot go—it cannot go on," I repeated, in a last feeble protest against the horror of the thing. "Surely you could not find it in your heart to treat a fellow-creature so?"
"He is no fellow-creature of yours or mine," Nikola retorted sternly, as if he were rebuking a childish mistake. "Would you call the man who shot down those innocent young men of Equinata, before their mothers' eyes, a fellow-creature? Is it possible that the son of the man who so cruelly wronged and betrayed the trusting woman he first saw in this room, who led her across the seas to desert her, and to send her to her grave, could be called a man? I will give you one more instance of his barbarity."
So saying, he threw off the black velvet coat he was wearing, and drawing up his right shirt-sleeve, bade me examine his arm. I saw that from the shoulder to the elbow it was covered with the scars of old wounds, strange white marks, in pairs, and each about half-an-inch long.
"Those scars," he went on, "were made by his orders, and with hot pincers, when I was a boy. And as his negro servants made them he laughed and taunted me with my mother's shame. No! No! This is no man—rather a dangerous animal, that were best out of the way. It has been told me that you and I shall only meet twice more. Let those meetings lead you to think better of me. The time is not far distant when I must leave the world! When that hour arrives there is a lonely monastery in a range of eastern mountains, upon which no Englishman has ever set his foot. Of that monastery I shall become an inmate. No one outside its walls will ever look upon my face again. There I shall work out my Destiny, and, if I have sinned, be sure I shall receive my punishment at those hands that alone can bestow it. Now leave me!"
God help me for the coward I am, but the fact remains that I left him without another word.
CHAPTER XIII
If I were offered my heart's desire in return for so doing, I could not tell you how I got home after my interview with Nikola at the Palace Revecce. I was unconscious of everything save that I had gone to Nikola's house in the hope of being able to save the life of a man, whom I had the best of reasons for hating, and that at the last moment I had turned coward and fled the field. No humiliation could have been more complete. Nikola had won a victory, and I knew it, and despaired of retrieving it. On reaching the hotel I was about to disembark from my gondola, when a voice hailed me from another craft, proceeding in the direction I had come.
"Dick Hatteras, as I'm a sinner!" it cried. "Don't you know me, Dick?"