I started when he introduced himself.
I was actually face to face with the ingenious scoundrel whom Sammy had denounced, and whom the Italian police so strongly suspected to be the leader of one of the cleverest gangs of malefactors in Europe.
Chapter Nine
Contains a Surprise
James Harding Miller was a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan of most gentlemanly exterior. His grey face was deeply lined and bore that curious washed-out look of a man who had lived many years in a hot climate. After ten years or so the fiery Italian sun no longer tans the face of the northerner, but on the contrary his hair goes prematurely grey, and each year as the burning summer comes he is less able to withstand the heat of the “lion” days. His leanness, his foreign-cut clothes, and the slight gesticulation as he spoke all showed him to be a man more at home in the bright Italian land of song and sunlight than there, in an English village, the proprietor of that charming old home of his honourable ancestors.
In reply to his question I was rather evasive, saying that I happened to be in Swanage, and had driven out to pay a complimentary call upon his sister. She was not to put herself out of the way in the least, I urged. I should remain in Swanage for some days and hoped to have the pleasure of calling again.
Then turning and glancing around, I exclaimed: – “What a delightful old room! To me it is a real pleasure to enter a thoroughly English home, as this is.”
“Why?” he inquired, eyeing me with some surprise. “Because I live almost always on the Continent, and after a time foreign life and foreign ways jar upon the Englishman. At least I’ve found it so.”
“Ah!” He sighed, rather heavily I thought. “And I, too, have found it so. I quite agree with you. One may travel the world over, as I have done these past twenty years, yet there’s no place like our much-abused old England, after all.”
“Oh, then you’ve been a rolling stone, like myself,” I remarked, delighted at the success of my ruse.
“Yes. And I still am,” was his answer, given rather sadly. “Ever since my poor wife’s death, now nearly twenty years ago, I’ve been a wanderer. This place is mine, but I’m scarcely ever here. Why? I can’t for the life of me tell you. I’ve tried to settle down, but cannot. After a week here in this quiet rural dulness, the old fever sets up in my blood, a longing for action, a longing to go south to Italy – the country which seems to hold me in a kind of magnetism which I have never been able to resist.”
“And I, too, love Italy,” I said. “Is it not strange that most of us who have lived any length of time in that country of blossoming magnolias and gentle vines always desire to return to it. We may abuse its defects, we may revile its people as dishonest idlers, we may execrate its snail-like railways and run down its primitive hotels, yet all the same we have a secret longing to return to that glowing land where life is love, where art is in the very atmosphere, where the sun brings gladness to the heaviest heart, and the night silence is broken by love stornelli and the mandoline.”
“You are right,” he said, gazing straight out of the old leaded window and speaking almost as though to himself. “Byron found it so, Shelley, Smollet, Trollope, the Brownings and hosts of others. They were fascinated by the fatal beauty of Italy – just as a man is so often drawn to his doom by the face of a beautiful woman. And after all we are but straws on the winds of the hour.”
Then, turning to a cabinet, I bent and admired a fine old Lowestoft tea-set and a collection of old blue posset-pots, whereupon he said: —
“Ah! I see you are interested in antiques. Do you care for pictures? I have one or two.”
“I do. I should delight to see them,” I answered with enthusiasm; therefore he led me across the low old-fashioned hall with its great oak beams and open fireplace into a long gallery where the floor was polished, and along one side was hung a choice collection of masters of the Bolognese, Tuscan and Venetian schools.
At a glance I saw that they were of considerable value, and as I walked along slowly examining them I half feared lest I might come face to face with the daughter of the house.
Mine was a bold adventure, and surely it was fortunate for me that old Miss Catherine had a headache.
Through room after room he conducted me with all the pride of a collector showing his treasures. Indeed, I was amazed to find such a perfect museum of Italian art hidden away in that picturesque old Manor House. “Yes,” he said presently, as we entered the long old-fashioned drawing-room upholstered in antique rose-pattern chintz, “I’ve collected in Italy for a good many years. One can pick up bargains, even now, in the less frequented towns, say Ravenna, Verona, Bologna or Rimini; while in Leghorn there are still lots of genuine Sheraton and Chippendale which was imported from England by the English merchants of that time. I once made a splendid find of seventeenth-century English silver – two porringers and some spoons – in the Ghetto in Leghorn.”
I was at the moment looking at a circular Madonna on panel, evidently of the Bolognese school of the cinquecento, hanging at the end of the long pleasant old room when, in glancing round, my eye fell upon two small tables where stood photographs in frames.
In an instant I bent over one and recognised it as that of the girl who had come to me so mysteriously at Shepherd’s Bush.
“That is my daughter,” he remarked.
“Curious,” I said, feigning to reflect. “I think I’ve met her somewhere abroad. Perhaps it was in Italy. Could it have been in Leghorn?”
“You know Leghorn?”
“I’ve been there many times. I know the Camerons, the Davises, the Matthews, and most of the English colony there.”
“Then you may possibly have met her there,” he said. “We have a small flat on the sea-front, and my daughter often plays tennis.”
“Of course!” I exclaimed, as though the mention of tennis brought back to me full recollection of the incident. “It was at tennis that I saw her – last season when I was at the Palace Hotel. I remember now, quite well. Our Mediterranean fleet were lying there at the time, and there were lots of festivities, as there are every summer. Is your daughter now in England?”
“Oh, yes. She’s up in London, but returns to-morrow.”
“And are you going back to Italy soon?” I inquired.
“I hardly know. My movements are never very certain. I’m quite a creature of circumstances, and nowadays drift about with the wind of chance,” he laughed.
“But this is a lovely old place,” I remarked. “If I had it I should certainly not prefer a flat in a sun-baked Italian town, like Leghorn.”
“Circumstances,” he remarked simply, with a mysterious smile upon his grey face.
What, I wondered, was his meaning?
Did he really intend to convey that the circumstances of his dishonourable profession compelled him to hide himself in a small flat in that somewhat obscure town – obscure as far as English life went?
When he learnt that I knew some of his friends in Leghorn he became enthusiastic, and began to discuss the town and its notabilities. What did I think of the English parson? And whether I did not think that seeing the small English congregation the church ought not to be removed to some town with a larger English colony. It was absurd to keep a parson there for half a dozen people.
And while my sharp eyes were busy examining the photographs set among vases of fresh-cut flowers, I made replies and sometimes laughed at his witty criticisms of persons known to both of us in “the Brighton of Italy.”
“What a contrast is the quiet rural life here, with all its old-world English tranquillity, to that of the gay, garish, sun-blanched passeggiata of Leghorn, with its bright-eyed women, its oleanders, its noise, movement, the glare and strident music of the café-chantants, and the brightness of the newly discovered spa,” I said.
He sighed, pursing