“‘I’m afraid that wife of yours is breaking up, Lexman,’ he drawled; ‘she isn’t the good, stout, English stuff that I thought she was.’
“I made no reply. I had found by bitter experience that if I intruded into the conversation, I should only suffer the more.
“‘I have sent down to Durazzo to get a doctor,’ he went on; ‘naturally having taken all this trouble I don’t want to lose you by death. She is breaking up,’ he repeated with relish and yet with an undertone of annoyance in his voice; “she asked for you three times this morning.’
“I kept myself under control as I had never expected that a man so desperately circumstanced could do.
“‘Kara,’ I said as quietly as I could, ‘what has she done that she should deserve this hell in which she has lived?’
“He sent out a long ring of smoke and watched its progress across the dungeon.
“‘What has she done?’ he said, keeping his eye on the ring — I shall always remember every look, every gesture, and every intonation of his voice. ‘Why, she has done all that a woman can do for a man like me. She has made me feel little. Until I had a rebuff from her, I had all the world at my feet, Lexman. I did as I liked. If I crooked my little finger, people ran after me and that one experience with her has broken me. Oh, don’t think,’ he went on quickly, ‘that I am broken in love. I never loved her very much, it was just a passing passion, but she killed my self-confidence. After then, whenever I came to a crucial moment in my affairs, when the big manner, the big certainty was absolutely necessary for me to carry my way, whenever I was most confident of myself and my ability and my scheme, a vision of this damned girl rose and I felt that momentary weakening, that memory of defeat, which made all the difference between success and failure.
“‘I hated her and I hate her still,’ he said with vehemence; ‘if she dies I shall hate her more because she will remain everlastingly unbroken to menace my thoughts and spoil my schemes through all eternity.’
“He leant forward, his elbows on his knees, his clenched fist under his chin — how well I can see him! — and stared at me.
“‘I could have been king here in this land,’ he said, waving his hand toward the interior, ‘I could have bribed and shot my way to the throne of Albania. Don’t you realize what that means to a man like me? There is still a chance and if I could keep your wife alive, if I could see her broken in reason and in health, a poor, skeleton, gibbering thing that knelt at my feet when I came near her I should recover the mastery of myself. Believe me,’ he said, nodding his head, ‘your wife will have the best medical advice that it is possible to obtain.’
“Kara went out and I did not see him again for a very long time. He sent word, just a scrawled note in the morning, to say my wife had died.”
John Lexman rose up from his seat, and paced the apartment, his head upon his breast.
“From that moment,” he said, “I lived only for one thing, to punish Remington Kara. And gentlemen, I punished him.”
He stood in the centre of the room and thumped his broad chest with his clenched hand.
“I killed Remington Kara,” he said, and there was a little gasp of astonishment from every man present save one. That one was T.X. Meredith, who had known all the time.
Chapter XXII
After a while Lexman resumed his story.
“I told you that there was a man at the palazzo named Salvolio. Salvolio was a man who had been undergoing a life sentence in one of the prisons of southern Italy. In some mysterious fashion he escaped and got across the Adriatic in a small boat. How Kara found him I don’t know. Salvolio was a very uncommunicative person. I was never certain whether he was a Greek or an Italian. All that I am sure about is that he was the most unmitigated villain next to his master that I have ever met.
“He was a quick man with his knife and I have seen him kill one of the guards whom he had thought was favouring me in the matter of diet with less compunction than you would kill a rat.
“It was he who gave me this scar,” John Lexman pointed to his cheek. “In his master’s absence he took upon himself the task of conducting a clumsy imitation of Kara’s persecution. He gave me, too, the only glimpse I ever had of the torture poor Grace underwent. She hated dogs, and Kara must have come to know this and in her sleeping room — she was apparently better accommodated than I — he kept four fierce beasts so chained that they could almost reach her.
“Some reference to my wife from this low brute maddened me beyond endurance and I sprang at him. He whipped out his knife and struck at me as I fell and I escaped by a miracle. He evidently had orders not to touch me, for he was in a great panic of mind, as he had reason to be, because on Kara’s return he discovered the state of my face, started an enquiry and had Salvolio taken to the courtyard in the true eastern style and bastinadoed until his feet were pulp.
“You may be sure the man hated me with a malignity which almost rivalled his employer’s. After Grace’s death Kara went away suddenly and I was left to the tender mercy of this man. Evidently he had been given a fairly free hand. The principal object of Kara’s hate being dead, he took little further interest in me, or else wearied of his hobby. Salvolio began his persecutions by reducing my diet. Fortunately I ate very little. Nevertheless the supplies began to grow less and less, and I was beginning to feel the effects of this starvation system when there happened a thing which changed the whole course of my life and opened to me a way to freedom and to vengeance.
“Salvolio did not imitate the austerity of his master and in Kara’s absence was in the habit of having little orgies of his own. He would bring up dancing girls from Durazzo for his amusement and invite prominent men in the neighbourhood to his feasts and entertainments, for he was absolutely lord of the palazzo when Kara was away and could do pretty well as he liked. On this particular night the festivities had been more than usually prolonged, for as near as I could judge by the daylight which was creeping in through my window it was about four o’clock in the morning when the big steel-sheeted door was opened and Salvolio came in, more than a little drunk. He brought with him, as I judged, one of his dancing girls, who apparently was privileged to see the sights of the palace.
“For a long time he stood in the doorway talking incoherently in a language which I think must have been Turkish, for I caught one or two words.
“Whoever the girl was, she seemed a little frightened, I could see that, because she shrank back from him though his arm was about her shoulders and he was half supporting his weight upon her. There was fear, not only in the curious little glances she shot at me from time to time, but also in the averted face. Her story I was to learn. She was not of the class from whence Salvolio found the dancers who from time to time came up to the palace for his amusement and the amusement of his guests. She was the daughter of a Turkish merchant of Scutari who had been received into the Catholic Church.
“Her father had gone down to Durazzo during the first Balkan war and then Salvolio had seen the girl unknown to her parent, and there had been some rough kind of courtship which ended in her running away on this very day and joining her ill-favoured lover at the palazzo. I tell you this because the fact had some bearing on my own fate.
“As I say, the girl was frightened and made as though to go from the dungeon. She was probably scared both by the unkempt prisoner and