II
Fred Luffington had once had the misfortune to see ‘an impossible brute’ preferred to his elegant self by an old love of Antwerp, hence he had long given up pondering the oddnesses of women’s love-fancies. He was a gentleman as well, and kept that sharply incorrect picture to himself. He met the countess again, and dropped his eyes, ashamed of his knowledge. Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy he eyed with a droll smile, and the more he looked at him, the more incomprehensible the matter appeared.
But he was good company, that Fred admitted heartily, and shook his hand with a cordial hope of meeting him again, now that their little difference was settled, and had led to such cheery results. He counselled him to take to claret, and to himself remarked that his domestic ethics seemed none the better for the drinking of port, which evidently had not taught him to let his neighbour’s wife alone. He had met Lord Harborough once crossing the Park, and perfectly understood the countess’s sobs. That was all he did understand. He could fancy himself sobbing if he were a woman condemned to live his days with that hard-featured, red-haired little man, bearing himself so primly and so distractingly respectable.
‘Yes, that explains her odd choice,’ said Luffington, turning his back upon Fendon, after a last grasp of the Flemish priest’s hand. ‘There’s a taint of disreputableness about the local hero, who looks as if he had rolled so much in the dust in infancy, that neither soap nor brush has been able to give him a respectable head ever since.’
Fred Luffington went abroad again, and forgot all about the Flemish priest and the half revealed drama of Fendon. A couple of years later he had engaged to meet some friends at Lugano and, travelling from Basle, decided to leave the train at the entrance to the St. Gothard tunnel, and walk over the mountain. The weather was glorious, and such scenery is enough to make a saint of the biggest sinner. The flush of roseate snows, whose white from very purity is driven to flame; the crystal splendours above, the shadows of the valleys revealed in the twisted gaps like flakes of blue cloud softening the sunny whiteness, wooded depths and sparkling water, with the ineffable beauty of the turquoise stillness of the grand lake below: combined to make even the breathing of a worldly young man a prayer of thanksgiving. Fred Luffington never could gaze on the Alps without feeling his sins drop from him like a garment, and his soul stand out, naked and innocent before the majesty of creation.
He had been walking since mid-day, with rests in craggy nooks, and now at sundown it behoved him to look out for shelter. He waited until he had seen the last effects of an Alpine sunset before branching into a narrow wooded path, which he was informed led to a little village. At the first châlet, he knocked for admittance, and a fat woman came to the door, in a state of evident perturbation. Her face cleared when she discovered that he spoke Italian.
‘There is a sick man here. We think he must be an Englishman, but we do not understand him, and he neither knows French nor Italian. If the gentleman would but look at him. The doctor says he will not recover,’ she burst out, without stopping for breath.
Luffington followed her upstairs, and entered a tolerably clean little room, where the sick man lay, either asleep or unconscious. Luffington stood, and looked at him long and musingly. Where ever had he seen that thin, sharp, foreign face, the curls of dust-hued black, the oddly beautiful brow and full lips? A small brown hand lay upon the coverlet, and it sprang a gush of sympathy to his eyes. Suddenly the closed lids opened and revealed eyes of the sombre dead blackness of the sloe, without the red and yellow flames he now so vividly remembered. So this was the end of that sorry drama of Fendon! Mr. Malcolm Fitzroy was dying in a far-off Swiss village on the top of St. Gothard. And the countess? Fred bent, and whispered his name, and begged to be used as a friend. A gleam of recognition broke the dark blankness of the dying man’s glance, and he made a feeble movement of his hand, which Luffington caught and held in a gentle clasp. The sick man’s eyes filled gratefully. He knew he was dying, and he was comforted by the presence of Luffington.
All through the night Fred sat and nursed him. He was melted in kindness and gratitude that this chance of redeeming some unworthy hours had fallen to him. He held the dying man’s hand, listened to his babble, and promised to destroy a packet of letters in a certain ebony box, into which he was to place poor Fitzroy’s watch and pocket book, and a copy of the Spanish Gypsy, the only book he possessed, and deliver it into the hands of the Countess of Harborough. In the presence of death, Fred could hear her name without any squeamishness.
‘Take from under my pillow a locket, and open it for me. I want to see her face again.’