“But your genius—your heaven-born detective—would track him down in the new world. My dear Sefton, the whole story is a farrago of nonsense; and I wonder that you, as a man of the world, can be taken in by so vulgar a trickster as your incomparable Ferrari.”
“He is not a trickster. I have the strongest reasons, from past experience, for believing in his honesty. Will you see him, Vansittart? Will you hear his story, calmly and dispassionately?”
“I will not see him. I will not hear his story. I will see no man who trumps up a sensational charge against my future wife’s brother. I can quite understand that you believe in this man—that you have brought this absurd story to my mother and me in all good faith.”
“Why absurd? You admit that there was such a catastrophe—an English traveller killed by an English resident in a Venetian caffè in Carnival time.”
“Yes; but plain fact degenerates into nonsense when your courier tries to fasten the crime upon Eve Marchant’s brother.”
“Hear his statement before you pronounce judgment. He had his facts from people who knew this young man in New York as Harold Marchant, who met him afterwards in Venice, and visited him at his Venetian lodgings, and played cards with him, when he was calling himself Smith—respectable American citizens, whose names and addresses are set down in Ferrari’s note-book. I am not utterly wanting in logic, Mr. Vansittart, and if the circumstantial evidence in this matter had been obviously weak I should never have troubled Mrs. Vansittart or you with the story.”
The mother spoke now for the first time since Sefton had begun his revelation. Her voice was low and sympathetic. Her son might doubt her wisdom, but he could not doubt her love.
“I am deeply sorry for you, Jack,” she said, “deeply sorry for poor Eve, who is a blameless victim of evil surroundings, but I cannot think that you will obstinately adhere to your engagement in the face of these dreadful facts. It would have been bad enough to be Colonel Marchant’s son-in-law; but you cannot seriously mean to marry a girl whose brother has committed murder.”
“It was not murder,” cried Vansittart, furiously. “Even Mr. Sefton acknowledges that the crime at worst was manslaughter—a fatal blow, struck in a moment of blind passion.”
“With a dagger against an unarmed man,” interjected Sefton. “You are inclined to minimize the crime when you call it manslaughter at the worst. I said that at the least—taking the most indulgent view of the case—the crime was manslaughter; and I doubt if an Italian tribunal would have dealt very leniently with that kind of manslaughter. I take it that rapid run and long swim of his saved Harold Marchant some years of captivity in an Italian prison.”