Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet snatched from Nancy was on Christina's wrist.
Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no triumph, now, in victory.
"Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see."
He ran off swiftly; and the sort of uproarious twitter which welcomed him under the trees ended in a final message. "Farewell, Americans. You do us the courtesy of our beloved Gumama! We do you our courtesy—Flee! Whoever you are, the policemen are upon you! They are coming from the gate, they are coming from the river! In ten minutes they will be here! Americans, farewell!"
It was the last word of the Camorra in their lives. The undergrowth of the wood seemed to grow scantier; it was the backward fading of the shadows, it was the passing of a great, black bulk; the disappearance of innumerable unknown persons whom they had never even seen, of whose existence they had never even known, out of their path. Nothing remained but the signaling whistles of the Camorra, gathering its children in its retreat. The thing was over. The last consequence of the Ingham murder, of the birth of the Hopes' first child twenty-eight years ago in Naples, was over and done. And the three men regarded each other with a strange feeling of vacancy.
But in the mouths of Kane and the sheriff the morning air was good and life ran sweet in their veins. Even to Herrick, with the exhausted girl laughing and shuddering in his arms, there seemed to rise a kind of future hope when forgetfulness should deal tenderly with her. Soon she must begin to weep and the other side of weeping a kind of consolation lies. "Why, her own youth and life must heal her!" Kane said. "It's hard, it's bitter hard! But there's her feeling for you, her future, her work—Don't look at her as if she were dying! Time, my boy, she needs time, that's all!—As for Nancy Cornish, she fell with one shot. And since she was so much in love with that poor fellow, believe me, she's better off!"
Herrick looked up in alarm, lest Christina should hear bad news. But she was lost in the hot surge of tears that had come to her at last and lay only quieter and quieter in his hold. Till at length, since there was a time coming when she must know if Fate had played her doubly false, he fetched a coat to put under her head and drew Kane aside. "You meant just now—?"
"I meant what I've had on my mind through all this night, as something with which I didn't know how to face Miss Hope. I meant that this chap Denny was never a very lucky fellow—"
"Was?"
"But that never was anything unluckier than his consenting to leave the Tombs."