“You think I murdered her!” cried the Russian, with more vehemence than a moment before he had seemed capable of. “I, who would have given my life, my soul, to save her!”
“Nothing of the kind. I might have done so if I hadn’t happened to know that your friend here spoke the truth when he said you were away—miles away from here—at the time. But it’s my duty to discover who did murder the unfortunate lady, and if you don’t choose to give me any information you can that may assist me, here and now, you’ll only have it wrung from you later in cross-examination. So please yourself!”
“He is right—you must tell him all you know, my son,” interposed Cacciola. “I myself know so little,” he added plaintively to Snell. “They have always kept me—how do you call it?—in the dark, these two unhappy ones.”
“Well, while Mr. Melikoff makes up his mind as to whether he’s going to say anything or nothing to-night, Signor Cacciola, perhaps you’ll explain just what your association with them both was, and why her ladyship came here, more or less disguised, so often?”
The old man flung out his hands with a deprecating gesture.
“I know so little,” he repeated distressfully. “At least of Milady Rawson—Donna Paula as we call her. I love him—Boris—as if he were my son. I learn to know him first, oh, many years since, in Russia, when he was a little boy, with the voice of an angel. Though quite untrain, Signor, he sing like the birds of the air! And I say to him then, and to his mother, the countess, ‘He shall come to me in good time, and I make him the greatest singer in the whole world.’ And at last he came——”
“When?”
“But two years since, signor; and the good saints guided him to me, for he did not mean to come. He had escaped with the bare life from his unhappy country, having fought in the Great War, and then against the Red Terror, till all was lost—all, all swept away. He was at the gate of death when I find him and bring him home here so joyfully, and Giulia and I nurse him back to health, and I begin to train him, or I try, for the voice is there, signor, beautiful as ever, but the desire to sing—alas!”
He shrugged his shoulders, and again threw up his hands with an expressive gesture.
“He doesn’t want to go in for singing now?” asked Snell, with a swift glance at the Russian, who had relapsed into his former attitude. Yet the detective believed he was listening to the colloquy.