Hello again, my dear friend. How are you? Please enjoy the rest of Raffles’ recount of his time abroad.
“Well, I was strung up for trouble when the next Saturday came, and I’ll tell you what I had done. I had broken the pledge and burgled Corbucci’s villa in my best manner during his absence in Naples. Not that it gave me the slightest trouble; but no human being could have told that I had been in, when I came out. And I had stolen nothing, mark you, but only borrowed a revolver from a drawer in the Count’s desk, with one or two trifling accessories; for by this time I had the measure of these damned Neapolitans. They are spry enough with a knife, but you show them the business end of a shooting-iron, and they’ll streak like rabbits for the nearest hole. But the revolver wasn’t for my own use. It was for Faustina, and I taught her how to use it in the cave down there by the sea, shooting at candles stuck upon the rock. The noise in the cave was something frightful, but high up above it couldn’t be heard at all, as we proved to each other’s satisfaction pretty early in the proceedings. So now Faustina was armed with munitions of self-defence; and I knew enough of her character to entertain no doubt as to their spirited use upon occasion. Between the two of us, in fact, our friend Stefano seemed tolerably certain of a warm week-end.
“But the Saturday brought word that the Count was not coming this week, being in Rome on business, and unable to return in time; so for a whole Sunday we were promised peace; and made bold plans accordingly. There was no further merit in hushing this thing up. ‘Let him who wins her take and keep Faustine.’ Yes, but let him win her openly, or lose her and be damned to him! So on the Sunday I was going to have it out with her people—with the Count and Stefano as soon as they showed their noses. I had no inducement, remember, ever to return to surreptitious life within a cab-fare of Wormwood Scrubbs. Faustina and the Bay of Naples were quite good enough for me. And the prehistoric man in me rather exulted in the idea of fighting for my desire.
“On the Saturday, however, we were able to meet for the last time as heretofore—just once more in secret—down there in the cave—as soon as might be after dark. Neither of us minded if we were kept for hours; each knew in the end that the other would come; and there was a charm of its own even in waiting with such knowledge. But that night I did lose patience: not in the cave, but up above, where first on one pretext and then on another the direttore kept me going until I smelt a rat. He was not given to exacting overtime, this direttore, whose only fault was his servile subjection to our common boss. It seemed pretty obvious, therefore, that he was acting upon some secret instructions from Corbucci himself, and, the moment I suspected this, I asked him to his face if it was not the case. And it was; he admitted it with many shrugs, being a conveniently weak person, whom one felt almost ashamed of bullying as the occasion demanded.
“The fact was, however, that the Count had sent for him on finding he had to go to Rome, and had said he was very sorry to go just then, as among other things he intended to speak to me about Faustina. Stefano had told him all about his row with her, and moreover that it was on my account, which Faustina had never told me, though I had guessed as much for myself. Well, the Count was going to take his jackal’s part for all he was worth, which was just exactly what I had expected him to do. He intended going for me on his return, but meanwhile I was not to make hay in his absence, and so this tool of a direttore had orders to keep me at it night and day. I undertook not to give the poor beast away, but at the same time told him I had not the faintest intention of doing another stroke of work that night.
“It was very dark, and I remember knocking my head against the oranges as I ran up the long, shallow steps which ended the journey between the direttore’s lodge and the villa itself. But at the back of the villa was the garden I spoke about, and also a bare chunk of the cliff where it was bored by that subterranean stair. So I saw the stars close overhead, and the fishermen’s torches far below, the coastwise lights and the crimson hieroglyph that spelt Vesuvius, before I plunged into the darkness of the shaft. And that was the last time I appreciated the unique and peaceful charm of this outlandish spot.
“The stair was in two long flights, with an air-hole or two at the top of the upper one, but not another pin-prick till you came to the iron gate at the bottom of the lower. As you may read of an infinitely lighter place, in a finer work of fiction than you are ever likely to write, Bunny, it was ‘gloomy at noon, dark as midnight at dusk, and black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight.’ I won’t swear to my quotation, but I will to those stairs. They were as black that night as the inside of the safest safe in the strongest strong-room in the Chancery Lane Deposit. Yet I had not got far down them with my bare feet before I heard somebody else coming up in boots. You may imagine what a turn that gave me! It could not be Faustina, who went barefoot three seasons of the four, and yet there was Faustina waiting for me down below. What a fright she must have had! And all at once my own blood ran cold: for the man sang like a kettle as he plodded up and up. It was, it must be, the short-winded Count himself, whom we all supposed to be in Rome!
“Higher he came and nearer, nearer, slowly yet hurriedly, now stopping to cough and gasp, now taking a few steps by elephantine assault. I should have enjoyed the situation if it had not been for poor Faustina in the cave; as it was I was filled with nameless fears. But I could not resist giving that grampus Corbucci one bad moment on account. A crazy hand-rail ran up one wall, so I carefully flattened myself against the other, and he passed within six inches of me, puffing and wheezing like a brass band. I let him go a few steps higher, and then I let him have it with both lungs.
“‘Buona sera, eccellenza, signorì!’ I roared after him. And a scream came down in answer—such a scream! A dozen different terrors were in it; and the wheezing had stopped, with the old scoundrel’s heart.
“‘Chi sta la?’ he squeaked at last, gibbering and whimpering like a whipped monkey, so that I could not bear to miss his face, and got a match all ready to strike.
“‘Arturo, signorì.’
“He didn’t repeat my name, nor did he damn me in heaps. He did nothing but wheeze for a good minute, and when he spoke it was with insinuating civility, in his best English.
“‘Come nearer, Arturo. You are in the lower regions down there. I want to speak with you.’
“‘No, thanks. I’m in a hurry,’ I said, and dropped that match back into my pocket. He might be armed, and I was not.
“‘So you are in a ’urry!’ and he wheezed amusement. ‘And you thought I was still in Rome, no doubt; and so I was until this afternoon, when I caught train at the eleventh moment, and then another train from Naples to Pozzuoli. I have been rowed here now by a fisherman of Pozzuoli. I had not time to stop anywhere in Naples, but only to drive from station to station. So I am without Stefano, Arturo, I am without Stefano.’
“His sly voice sounded preternaturally sly in the absolute darkness, but even through that impenetrable veil I knew it for a sham. I had laid hold of the hand-rail. It shook violently in my hand; he also was holding it where he stood. And these suppressed tremors, or rather their detection in this way, struck a strange chill to my heart, just as I was beginning to pluck it up.
“‘It is lucky for Stefano,’ said I, grim as death.
“‘Ah, but you must not be too ’ard on ’im,’ remonstrated the Count. ‘You have stole his girl, he speak with me about it, and I wish to speak with you. It is very audashuss, Arturo, very audashuss! Perhaps you are even going to meet her now, eh?’”
I told him straight that I was.
“‘Then there is no ’urry, for she is not there.’
“‘You didn’t see her in the cave?’ I cried, too delighted at the thought to keep it to myself.
“‘I had no such fortune,’ the old devil said.
“‘She is there, all the same.’
“‘I only wish I ’ad known.’
“‘And I’ve kept her long enough!’
“In fact I threw this over my shoulder as I turned and went running down.
“‘I ’ope you will find her!’ his malicious voice came croaking after me. ‘I ’ope you will—I ’ope so.’
“And find her I did.”
Raffles had been on his feet some time, unable to sit still or to stand, moving excitedly about the room. But now he stood still enough, his elbows on the cast-iron mantelpiece, his head between his hands.
Illustration by theonekierce on tumblr. Image description in caption.
“Dead?” I whispered.
And he nodded to the wall.
“There was not a sound in the cave. There was no answer to my voice. Then I went in, and my foot touched hers, and it was colder than the rock ... Bunny, they had stabbed her to the heart. She had fought them, and they had stabbed her to the heart!”
“You say ‘they,’” I said gently, as he stood in heavy silence, his back still turned. “I thought Stefano had been left behind?”
Raffles was round in a flash, his face white-hot, his eyes dancing death.
“He was in the cave!” he shouted. “I saw him—I spotted him—it was broad twilight after those stairs—and I went for him with my bare hands. Not fists, Bunny; not fists for a thing like that; I meant getting my fingers into his vile little heart and tearing it out by the roots. I was stark mad. But he had the revolver—hers. He blazed it at arm’s length, and missed. And that steadied me. I had smashed his funny-bone against the rock before he could blaze again; the revolver fell with a rattle, but without going off; in an instant I had it tight, and the little swine at my mercy at last.”
“You didn’t show him any?”
“Mercy? With Faustina dead at my feet? I should have deserved none in the next world if I had shown him any in this! No, I just stood over him, with the revolver in both hands, feeling the chambers with my thumb; and as I stood he stabbed at me; but I stepped back to that one, and brought him down with a bullet in his guts.
“‘And I can spare you two or three more,’ I said, for my poor girl could not have fired a shot. ‘Take that one to hell with you—and that—and that!’
“Then I started coughing and wheezing like the Count himself, for the place was full of smoke. When it cleared my man was very dead, and I tipped him into the sea, to defile that rather than Faustina’s cave. And then—and then—we were alone for the last time, she and I, in our own pet haunt; and I could scarcely see her, yet I would not strike a match, for I knew she would not have me see her as she was. I could say good-by to her without that. I said it; and I left her like a man, and up the first open-air steps with my head in the air and the stars all sharp in the sky; then suddenly they swam, and back I went like a lunatic, to see if she was really dead, to bring her back to life ... Bunny, I can’t tell you any more.”
Illustration by Hy Leonard. Image description in caption.
“Not of the Count?” I murmured at last.
“Not even of the Count,” said Raffles, turning round with a sigh. “I left him pretty sorry for himself; but what was the good of that? I had taken blood for blood, and it was not Corbucci who had killed Faustina. No, the plan was his, but that was not part of the plan. They had found out about our meetings in the cave: nothing simpler than to have me kept hard at it overhead and to carry off Faustina by brute force in the boat. It was their only chance, for she had said more to Stefano than she had admitted to me, and more than I am going to repeat about myself. No persuasion would have induced her to listen to him again; so they tried force; and she drew Corbucci’s revolver on them, but they had taken her by surprise, and Stefano stabbed her before she could fire.”
“But how do you know all that?” I asked Raffles, for his tale was going to pieces in the telling, and the tragic end of poor Faustina was no ending for me.
“Oh,” said he, “I had it from Corbucci at his own revolver’s point. He was waiting at his window, and I could have potted him at my ease where he stood against the light listening hard enough but not seeing a thing. So he asked whether it was Stefano, and I whispered, ‘Si, signore’; and then whether he had finished Arturo, and I brought the same shot off again. He had let me in before he knew who was finished and who was not.”
“And did you finish him?”
“No; that was too good for Corbucci. But I bound and gagged him about as tight as man was ever gagged or bound, and I left him in his room with the shutters shut and the house locked up. The shutters of that old place were six inches thick, and the walls nearly six feet; that was on the Saturday night, and the Count wasn’t expected at the vineyard before the following Saturday. Meanwhile he was supposed to be in Rome. But the dead would doubtless be discovered next day, and I am afraid this would lead to his own discovery with the life still in him. I believe he figured on that himself, for he sat threatening me gamely till the last. You never saw such a sight as he was, with his head split in two by a ruler tied at the back of it, and his great moustache pushed up into his bulging eyes. But I locked him up in the dark without a qualm, and I wished and still wish him every torment of the damned.”
“And then?”
“The night was still young, and within ten miles there was the best of ports in a storm, and hundreds of holds for the humble stowaway to choose from. But I didn’t want to go further than Genoa, for by this time my Italian would wash, so I chose the old Norddeutscher Lloyd, and had an excellent voyage in one of the boats slung in-board over the bridge. That’s better than any hold, Bunny, and I did splendidly on oranges brought from the vineyard.”
“And at Genoa?”
“At Genoa I took to my wits once more, and have been living on nothing else ever since. But there I had to begin all over again, and at the very bottom of the ladder. I slept in the streets. I begged. I did all manner of terrible things, rather hoping for a bad end, but never coming to one. Then one day I saw a white-headed old chap looking at me through a shop-window—a window I had designs upon—and when I stared at him he stared at me—and we wore the same rags. So I had come to that! But one reflection makes many. I had not recognized myself; who on earth would recognize me? London called me—and here I am. Italy had broken my heart—and there it stays.”
Flippant as a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him for a right appreciation of those last words. That they were no mere words I know full well. That, but for the tragedy of his Italian life, that life would have sufficed him for years, if not for ever, I did and do still believe. But I alone see him as I saw him then, the lines upon his face, and the pain behind the lines; how they came to disappear, and what removed them, you will never guess. It was the one thing you would have expected to have the opposite effect, the thing indeed that had forced his confidence, the organ and the voice once more beneath our very windows:
“Margarita de Parete,
era a’ sarta d’ e’ signore;
se pugneva sempe e ddete
pe penzare a Salvatore!
“Mar—ga—rì,
e perzo e Salvatore!
Mar—ga—rì,
Ma l’ommo è cacciatore!
Mar—ga—rì,
Nun ce aje corpa tu!
Chello ch’ è fatto, è fatto, un ne parlammo cchieù!”
I simply stared at Raffles. Instead of deepening, his lines had vanished. He looked years younger, mischievous and merry and alert as I remembered him of old in the breathless crisis of some madcap escapade. He was holding up his finger; he was stealing to the window; he was peeping through the blind as though our side street were Scotland Yard itself; he was stealing back again, all revelry, excitement, and suspense.
“I half thought they were after me before,” said he. “That was why I made you look. I daren’t take a proper look myself, but what a jest if they were! What a jest!”
“Do you mean the police?” said I.
“The police! Bunny, do you know them and me so little that you can look me in the face and ask such a question? My boy, I’m dead to them—off their books—a good deal deader than being off the hooks! Why, if I went to Scotland Yard this minute, to give myself up, they’d chuck me out for a harmless lunatic. No, I fear an enemy nowadays, and I go in terror of the sometime friend, but I have the utmost confidence in the dear police.”
“Then whom do you mean?”
“The Camorra!”
I repeated the word with a different intonation. Not that I had never heard of that most powerful and sinister of secret societies; but I failed to see on what grounds Raffles should jump to the conclusion that these everyday organ-grinders belonged to it.
“It was one of Corbucci’s threats,” said he. “If I killed him the Camorra would certainly kill me; he kept on telling me so; it was like his cunning not to say that he would put them on my tracks whether or no.”
“He is probably a member himself!”
“Obviously, from what he said.”
“But why on earth should you think that these fellows are?” I demanded, as that brazen voice came rasping through a second verse.
“I don’t think. It was only an idea. That thing is so thoroughly Neapolitan, and I never heard it on a London organ before. Then again, what should bring them back here?”
I peeped through the blind in my turn; and, to be sure, there was the fellow with the blue chin and the white teeth watching our windows, and ours only, as he bawled.
“And why?” cried Raffles, his eyes dancing when I told him. “Why should they come sneaking back to us? Doesn’t that look suspicious, Bunny; doesn’t that promise a lark?”
“Not to me,” I said, having the smile for once. “How many people, should you imagine, toss them five shilling for as many minutes of their infernal row? You seem to forget that’s what you did an hour ago!”
Raffles had forgotten. His blank face confessed the fact. Then suddenly he burst out laughing at himself.
“Bunny,” said he, “you’ve no imagination, and I never knew I had so much! Of course you’re right. I only wish you were not, for there’s nothing I should enjoy more than taking on another Neapolitan or two. You see, I owe them something still! I didn’t settle in full. I owe them more than ever I shall pay them on this side Styx!”
He had hardened even as he spoke: the lines and the years had come again, and his eyes were flint and steel, with an honest grief behind the glitter.
My heart does ache for all that Raffles has lost; I hope Faustina knew of the love which he felt for her. Yet I cannot say I am upset that Raffles ultimately left Italy and came home to England. I shall write you next to tell you the tale of the Last Laugh.
Affectionately yours,
Bunny Manders