"Pray do not," replied the Marchesa, smiling; "I attach, like Pompey, a certain value to the flight of birds. Signs found waiting at the turn of the road affect me. Those articles have to me a certain premonitory value."
"They have to me," replied the Duke, "a highly symbolic value. They are signposts, under which I have been standing, somewhat like a runaway lad, now on one foot and now on the other." Then he added, as in formal inquiry, "I hope, Madam, that the Marquis Soderrelli is quite well."
A cloud swept over the woman's face. "He is no longer in the world," she said.
The man saw instantly that by bungling inadvertence he had put his finger on a place that ached. This dissolute Italian Marquis was finally dead then. And fragments of pictures flitted for a moment through the background of his memory. A woman, young, beautiful, but like the spirit of man—after the figure of Epictetus—chained invisibly to a corpse. He saw the two, as in a certain twilight, entering the Hotel Dardanelle in Venice; the two coming forth from some brilliant Viennese café, and elsewhere in remote Asiatic capitols, always followed by a word, pitying the tall, proud girl to whom a sardonic destiny had given such beauty and such fortune. The very obsequious clerks of the Italian consulate, to which this Marquis was attached, named him always with a deprecating gesture.
The Duke's demeanor softened under the appealing misery of these fragments. He blamed the thoughtless word that had called them up. Still he was glad, as that abiding sense of justice in every man is glad, when the oppressor, after long immunity, wears out at last the incredible patience of heaven. The Marquis had got, then, the wage which he had been so long earning.
The Duke sought refuge in a conversation winging to other matters. He touched the steel muzzle of the rifle lying on the table.
"You will notice," he said, "that I do not abandon myself wholly to the memoirs of my uncle. I am going out to Canada to look into the Japanese difficulties that we seem to have on our hands there. And I hope to get a bit of big-game shooting. I have been trying to select the proper rifle. Usually, after tramping about for half a day, one gets a single shot at his beast, and possibly, not another. He must, therefore, not only hit the beast with that shot, but he must also bring him down with it. The problem, then, seems to be to combine the shock, or killing power, of the old, big, lead bullet with the high velocity and extreme accuracy of the modern military rifle. With the Mauser and the Lee-Enfield one can hit his man or his beast at a great distance, but the shock of the bullet is much less than that of the old, round, lead one. The military bullet simply drills a little clean hole which disables the soldier, but does not bring down the beast, unless it passes accurately through some vital spot. I have, therefore, selected what I consider to be the best of these military rifles, the Mannlicher of Austrian make, and by modifying the bullet, have a weapon with the shock or killing power of the old 4:50 black powder Express."
The man, talking thus at length with a definite object, now paused, took a cartridge out of the drawer of the table, and set it down by the muzzle of the rifle.
"You will notice," he said, "that this is the usual military cartridge, but if you look closer you will see that the nickel case of the bullet has four slits cut near the end. Those simple slits in the case cause the bullet, when it strikes, to expand. The scientific explanation is that when the nose of the projectile meets with resistance, the base of it, moving faster, pushes forward through this now weakened case and expands the diameter of the bullet, and so long as this resistance to the bullet continues, the expansion continues until there is a great flattened mass of spinning lead."
The Marchesa Soderrelli, visualizing the terrible effect of such a weapon, could not suppress a shudder.