"Or to brother Bendigo, either, for that matter," murmured Mr.

Redmayne. "It is your poor husband's case over again--blood, alas, but nought else!"

Jenny was haggard and worn. She devoted herself to the old man's comfort and hoped that the journey would not do him any hurt.

Mr. Albert Redmayne slept well, but the morning found him very depressed and melancholy. Things, dreadful enough at a distance, seemed far worse now that he found himself in the theatre of their occurrence. He maintained a long conversation with Mark Brendon and cross-questioned Doria; but their information did not inspire him to a suggestion and, after twenty-four hours, it was clear that the little man could be of no a.s.sistance to anybody. He was frightened and awe-stricken. He detested "Crow's Nest" and the melancholy murmur of the sea. He showed the keenest desire to return home at the earliest opportunity and was exceedingly nervous after dark.

"Oh, that Peter Ganns were here!" he exclaimed again and again, as a comment to every incident unfolded by Brendon or Jenny; and then, when she asked him if it might be possible to summon Peter Ganns, Mr. Redmayne explained that he was an American beyond their reach at present.

"Mr. Ganns," he said, "is my best friend in the world--save and excepting one man only. He--my first and most precious intimate--dwells at Bellagio, on the opposite side of Lake Como from myself. Signor Virgilio Poggi is a bibliophile of European eminence and the most brilliant of men--a great genius and my dearest a.s.sociate for twenty-five years. But Peter Ganns also is a very astounding person--a detective officer by profession--but a man of many parts and full of such genuine understanding of humanity that to know him is to gain priceless insight.

"I myself lack that intimate knowledge of character which is his native gift. Books I know better than men, and it was my peculiar acquaintance with books that brought Ganns and me together in New York. There I served him well in an amazing police case and aided him to prove a crime, the discovery of which turned upon a certain paper manufactured for the Medici. But a greater thing than this criminal incident sprang from it; and that is my friendship with the wonderful Peter. Not above half a dozen books have taught me more than that man. He is a Machiavelli on the side of the angels."

He expatiated upon Mr. Peter Ganns until his listeners wearied of the subject. Then Giuseppe Doria intervened with a personal problem.

He desired to be dismissed and was anxious to learn from Brendon if the law permitted him to leave the neighbourhood.

"For my part," he said, "it is an ill wind that blows good to n.o.body. I am anxious to go to London if there is no objection."

He found himself detained, however, for some days, until an official examination of the strange problem was completed. The investigation achieved nothing and threw no ray of light, either upon the apparent murder of Bendigo Redmayne, or the disappearance of his brother. The original mystery at Foggintor Quarry was recalled, to fill the minds of the morbid and curious; but no sort of connecting motive between the two crimes appeared and the problem of Robert Redmayne only grew darker. All purpose was lacking from both tragedies, while even the facts themselves remained in doubt, since neither incident furnished a dead body to prove murder against the missing man.

Mr. Albert Redmayne stayed no longer in Devonshire than his duty indicated, for he could prove of no service to the police. On the night previous to his departure he went through his brother's scanty library and found nothing in it of any interest to a collector. The ancient and well-thumbed copy of "Moby d.i.c.k" he took for sentiment, and he also directed Jenny to pack for him Bendigo's "Log"--a diary in eight or ten volumes. This he proposed to read at his leisure when home again. To the end of his visit he never ceased to lament the absence of Mr. Peter Ganns.

"My friend is actually coming to Europe next year," he explained.

"He is, without doubt, the most accomplished of men in the dreadful science of detecting crime and, were he here, he could a.s.suredly read into these abominations a meaning for which we grope in vain.

Do not think," he added to Jenny, "that I undervalue the labours of Mr. Brendon and the police, but they have come to naught, for there are strange forces of evil moving here deeper than the plummet of their intelligence can sound."

He departed, a.s.sured that his family was the victim of some evil, concealed alike from himself and everybody else; but he promised Jenny that he would presently write to America and lay every incident of the case, so far as it was known and reported, before his friend.

"He will bring a new intelligence to bear upon the tragedy," said Albert. "He will see things that are hidden from us, for his brain has a quality which one can only describe as a mental X-ray, which probes and penetrates in a fashion denied to ordinary thinking apparatus."

Before he returned to the borders of Como and his little villa beneath the mountains, the old scholar took affectionate leave of Jenny and made her promise to follow him as soon as she was able to do so.

He had failed to observe the emotional bonds that united her to Doria; but he had found Giuseppe an attractive personality and welcomed the Italian's good sense and tact under distressing circ.u.mstances. He made him a present of money before leaving and promised him testimonials if he should need them. As for Jenny, she was to enjoy the bequest under her grandfather's will when she desired to do so, while for her future, her uncle trusted that she would make her home with him.

He soon departed and the Redmayne inquiry, begun with much zest and determination, gradually faded away and perished of inanition. No solitary clue or indication of progress rewarded the investigations.

Robert Redmayne had vanished off the face of the earth and his brother with him. There remained of the family only Albert and his niece--a fact she imparted, not without melancholy, to Mark Brendon, when the day came that he must take his leave of her and return to other and more profitable fields of work.

He urged her to join her uncle as soon as possible and he begged her to accept his willing service in any way within his power; while she was gracious and thanked him for all that he had done.

"I shall never, never forget your patience and your great goodness,"

she said. "I am indeed grateful, Mr. Brendon, and I hope, if only for your sake, that time will lay bare the truth of these horrible things. To know that good men, against whom there was no grudge or hate in the world, have been murdered by their fellow men--it is a nightmare. But G.o.d will bring the truth to light--I feel positive of that."

He left her more deeply in love than ever; but there seemed no note of hope or promise in their farewell. And yet he felt a profound conviction that they would meet again. She undertook to acquaint him with her movements and was not sure that she would accept Albert Redmayne's invitation to join him. So Mark left her, believing that Doria was certain to determine her future and guessing that, if she presently proceeded to Como, the lively and indomitable Italian would quickly follow.

For the present, however, Giuseppe seemed to be concerned with his own affairs. He brought Brendon back on his last journey from "Crow's Nest" in the launch and explained that he had already found good work beside the Thames.

"We shall, I hope, meet again," he said, "and you may hear presently of a very wonderful adventure in which Doria shall be l'allegro--the merry man and the hero!"

They talked and Mark became impatient under a growing consciousness that the quicker-witted spirit was pulling his leg. Doria preserved the best possible temper, but his Latin love of a certain sort of fun seemed cynical and almost inhuman under the circ.u.mstances.

They spoke of the mystery and, upon that subject, the motor boatman declared himself as quite unable to find any explanation; but, with respect to Brendon's failure, he did not hesitate to make a sly allusion. Indeed he hinted at things which Mark was to hear six months later in a more responsible mouth.

"Above all, what has puzzled me most in this horrid affair is you, Brendon," declared Giuseppe. "You are a great sleuth, we know; yet you are no better than the rest of us stupid people before these happenings and horrors. That made me wonder for a long time; but now I wonder no longer."

"I'm beat and I own it. I've missed something vital--the keystone of the arch. But why do you say that you wonder no more? Because you know me now and find me a very dull dog?"

"Not so, my friend, far from it. You are a very wily, clever dog.

But--well, as we say in Italy, 'if you put a cat into gloves, she will not catch mice.' You have been in gloves ever since you knew Madonna was a widow."

"What do you mean?"

"Very well you know what I mean!"

And that was the end of their conversation, for Brendon frowned in silence and Giuseppe began to slack the engines as they reached the landing stage.

"Something tells me I shall meet you again, Marco," he said as they shook hands and prepared to part; and Brendon, who shared that impression strongly enough, nodded.

"It may be so," he answered.

For a period of several months, however, the detective was not to hear more of those who had played their small parts in the unsolved mystery. He was busy enough and in some measure rehabilitated a tarnished reputation by one brilliant achievement in his finest manner. But success did not restore his self-respect; and it diminished in no degree the fever burning at his heart.

Once he received a note from Jenny telling him that she hoped to see him in London before leaving for Italy; and the fact that she had decided to join her uncle gave him some peace; but he heard nothing further and his reply to Mrs. Pendean's communication, which had come from "Crow's Nest," won no response. Weeks pa.s.sed and whether she remained still in Devonshire, was in London, or had gone to Italy, he could not know, for she did not write again.

He dispatched a long letter in early spring to the care of Albert Redmayne, but this also won no response. And then came an explanation. She had been in London, but kept him ignorant of the fact for sufficient reasons. She had neither thought of him nor wanted him, for her life was full of another.

On a day in late March, Brendon received a little, triangular-shaped box through the post from abroad, and opening it, stared at a wedge of wedding cake. With the gift came a line--one only: "Kind and grateful remembrances from Giuseppe and Jenny Doria."

She sent no direction that might enable him to acknowledge her gift; but there was a postal stamp upon the covering and Brendon noted that the box came from Italy--from Ventimiglia, a town which Doria once mentioned in connection with the ruined castle and vanished splendours of his race.

And yet, despite this sudden, though not surprising, event, there persisted with Mark a conviction that this did not mean the end.

Time was to bring him into close companionship with Jenny again: he knew it for an integral factor of the future; but the persistence of this impression could not serve to lighten his melancholy before an accomplished fact. That he might live to be of infinite service to Jenny a subconscious a.s.surance convinced him; but he must say good-bye to love forever. Henceforth hope was dead and when duty called he knew not what form his duty might a.s.sume. Through a sleepless night he retraced every moment of his intercourse with Doria's wife and much tormented himself.

But other recollections awakened by this survey gave him pause and pointed to mysteries as yet unguessed. For was it possible that this tender-natured woman, who had mourned her husband so bitterly but nine months before, could now enter with such light-hearted joy into union with another man? Was it reasonable to see Jenny Pendean, as he remembered her in the agony of her bereavement, already the happy and contented bride of one a stranger to her until so recently?

It was indeed possible, because it had happened; but reasons for so untimely an event existed. They might, if understood, absolve the widow for an apparent levity not consonant with her true and steadfast self. It cast him down, almost as much as his own vanished dream and everlasting loss, that hard-hearted love could work such a miracle and banish the wedded past of this woman's life so completely in favour of a doubtful future with a foreign spouse.

There were things hidden, and he felt a great desire to penetrate them for the credit of the woman he had loved so well.

CHAPTER X

ON GRIANTE

Dawn had broken over Italy and morning, in honeysuckle colours, burned upon the mountain mists. Far beneath a lofty hillside the world still slumbered and the Larian lake, a jewel of gold and turquoise, shone amid her flowery margins. The hour was very silent; the little towns and hamlets scattered beside Como, like cl.u.s.ters of white and rosy sh.e.l.ls, dreamed on until thin music broke from their campaniles. Bell answered bell and made a girdle of harmony about the lake, floating along the water and ascending aloft until no louder than the song of birds.

Two women climbed together up the great acclivity of Griante. One was brown and elderly, clad in black with an orange rag wrapped about her brow--a st.u.r.dy, muscular creature who carried a great, empty wicker basket upon her shoulders; the other was clad in a rosy jumper of silk: she flashed in the morning fires and brought an added beauty to that beautiful scene.