The Tor di Rocca were hard and swift and cruel as steel. That Duchess Veronica, who had brought her husband the other woman’s severed head, wrapped in fine linen of her own weaving, as a New Year’s gift!—she had been one of them. Then there had lived one Filippo who kept his younger brother chained up to the wall of some inner room of his Florentine palace for seventeen years, until, at last, a serving-man dared to go and tell of the sound of blows in the night hours, the moaning, the clank of a chain, and the people broke in, and hanged the Prince from the wrought-iron fanale outside his own gate.
Vincenzo knew of all these old, past horrors; the Florentines had made ballads of them, and sang them in the streets, and one might buy “L’Assassina,” or “Il Fratello del Principe,” printed on little sheets of coarse paper, on the stalls in the Mercato, for one soldo. So, though the house was very still, the little man drew his long knife and read the motto scratched on the blade before he climbed the stairs.
“Non ti fidar a me se il cor ti manca.”
Hurriedly he passed through every room, but there was no one there, and so he ran out into the dripping green wilderness of torn leaves and storm-tossed, drenched blossoms, and up the lane, between the high walls of the olive orchards, to the town.
Don Filippo was really gone, and he was waiting now on the platform of the Albano station for the train that should take him back to Rome. He was not, however, presenting the spectacle of the murderer fleeing from his crime. He was quite calm. The heat and cruelty of the Tor di Rocca blood flared in him, but it burned with no steady flame. He had not the tenacity of his forefathers; and so, though he might kill his brother, he would not care to torment him during long years. Hate palled on him as quickly as love. He was content to leave the lives of Jean Avenel and of Olive on the knees of the gods.
There was no pity, no tenderness in him to be stirred by the remembrance of blue eyes dilated with fear, of loosened brown hair, of the small thing that had lain in a huddled heap at his feet, and he was not afraid of any consequences affecting him. In Italy the plea of jealousy covers a multitude of sins, and he was sure that a jury would acquit him if he were charged with murder.
How many hundred years had passed since Pilate had called for water to wash his hands! Filippo—reminded in some way of the Roman governor—felt that same need. His hands were not clean—there was dust on them—and it seemed that the one thing that really might clog his thoughts and tarnish them later on was the dust on a frilled cushion.