At the table three forbidding-looking men, with their felt hats drawn over their eyes, were drinking and throwing dice, shouting excitedly at each throw, while one man rather better dressed was sitting apart writing a letter, with a long cigar between his lips.
There was, however, no sign of the doctor and his companion who, it seemed, had passed straight into the room beyond. It was hardly the place in which one would have expected to find the owner of that Dorsetshire manor, and I now saw the reason why the doctor had, ever and anon, looked round as though in suspicion that they might be followed.
They had an important appointment there, without a doubt. And, moreover, they were no strangers to the place.
I would have given worlds to have been able to get a peep behind that closed door.
I was, however, forced to remain idling up and down the street, watched and commented upon by the groups of women gossiping at their doors, and scowled at by the men who seemed to lurk smoking in the shadows. They recognised by my clothes and my walk that I was a forestiero, a stranger, and wondered probably whether I was not an agent of police.
After half an hour Miller and his friend came out, accompanied by a young girl, hatless, as is the mode among the people, and with a bright yellow scarf twisted around her neck. She was about seventeen, good-looking, wore big gold ear-rings and showed an even set of white teeth as she spoke to Miller and laughed.
Together they set off along the Lugo Tevere, crossed the Ponte S. Angelo, and plunged into that labyrinth of narrow dirty streets that lay between the river and St. Peter’s. Presently, in a dark street off the Borgo Pia, the girl left them, and halting they stood talking together after lighting cigarettes.
The girl hurried on and was lost in the darkness, yet they were evidently awaiting her return.
My own position was a difficult one, for I feared that at any moment Gavazzi’s quick eyes might detect me and point me out to Miller who would recognise me. For fully a quarter of an hour the pair remained there, until at last the girl returned, bringing with her a young man about twenty-two, a low-born swaggering young fellow who wore his soft grey hat askew, and walked with his hands in his pockets, a man of distinctly criminal type who had probably never done an honest day’s work in his life. By the light of the street lamp I saw that he bore across his cheek an ugly cicatrice from an old knife-wound, and that upon his chin was a mole upon which the hair was allowed to grow. The latter was significant—it was the mark of that powerful secret society of criminals, the Camorra.
The girl, who was probably his inamorata, introduced them, whereupon he lifted his hat with his finger and thumb and swung it back upon his head with a twist—an action by which one Camorrist betrays his allegiance to the initiated.