Read Ebook: Cobra by Brown Martin Holman Russell

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Ebook has 1135 lines and 69308 words, and 23 pages

The American welcomed the unlooked-for offer. He pointed to Minardi. "This man is accusing me of something I know nothing about. He evidently thinks I am someone else. I can't seem to make him see his mistake." At the same time he handed his card to his would-be rescuer.

The card read: "John Dorning, Dorning and Son, Antiques, New York."

The young Italian flicked the card with a flourish. His lean jaw squared and he turned on Minardi. "You have made a grave error," he said rapidly in Italian. "This gentleman is an American. He is not the person you seek at all." And as Minardi broke into a shrill protest, he interrupted, "Stop! Do you want to be arrested? Do you wish the American Consul to prosecute you? Fool! Go! And tell your friends to go also."

He turned swiftly to the American and said in low-voiced English, "And we had better go too. These people are stupid and quarrelsome. Come along. My car is the other side of the inn."

He turned his back upon the crowd and forged away rapidly, the American following. They broke through bushes and the scent of disturbed flowers assailed their nostrils. They dodged through shadows. At length they came out where a low-hanging Isotta roadster was drawn up just out of the road. Behind them sounded pursuing voices and the crackling of bushes. Some one hurled a stick that landed in a flower bed short of them. They could distinguish Minardi's voice booming futilely amid the din.

The young Italian turned his head back toward them and laughed derisively into the moonlight as he pressed his foot upon the starter of his car. With a roar and the sudden pungent odor of petrol, the Isotta leaped forth like a leopard springing at a bullock.

A half mile of silent and hard driving, along the shore road, and the car was whipped abruptly to the left into a rough dirt highway and started climbing. The driver slowed down, due to rocks and ruts, furnishing an opportunity for conversation.

"I neglected to introduce myself," he smiled. "I am Rodrigo Torriani, the admirer of Rosa."

John Dorning jolted about in sober silence.

"That, of course, put me under obligation to rescue you when the fool Minardi mixed us up," explained Count Rodrigo gayly. "Now I am taking you to my home--for a drink, at least, if you will honor me."

"It is I who am honored," said Dorning without enthusiasm. He did not wish to offend his rescuer. But he would have preferred now to have banished this whole unpleasant episode from his mind by being taken at once back to his hotel in Naples. He had had himself driven out along the shore in an open carriage from his stuffy hotel for the sake of the view and the air. The carriage and its patient driver were even now waiting for him at the caf?. Dorning had sat at the Caf? Del Mare for half an hour absorbing a bottle of wine and the glories of the moonlit bay. Then had come this tumultuous destruction of his solitude, followed by the jouncing escape beside this handsome young Italian of about his own age, which was twenty-five. Dorning fancied neither the man nor his gayety.

"Ah--we arrive!" sang out Count Rodrigo suddenly and celebrated the fact by swinging so sharply in through the iron gates that Dorning was almost flung from the seat. They glided around a circular drive and stopped in front of a typical stucco Renaissance palace looming massively in the half-darkness and even in the bad light showing the need of repair.

The Italian led the way through the great grilled door and into the stone-paved entrance hall with its high ceilings and elaborately frescoed walls. John Dorning's interest was aroused at once. Whatever the Count Torriani was, his residence showed almost immediate prospects to the entering visitor of being a treasure house of Italian art and sculpture.

Count Rodrigo clapped his hands. "Maria! Maria!" he called. And to Dorning, "Please sit down." He glanced at his guest, who was wholly occupied in surveying the shadowy Renaissance angels and saints on the wall opposite. "You are interested in murals!--but, of course, Dorning and Son. I remember the shop on Fifth Avenue. I was in New York last summer. I shall be glad to show you around this place. I have some originals that are considered very good."

He clapped his hands again. "Maria!" he called. Maria appeared. She was past middle age and fat and sleepy. She panted in anxiously and nodded vigorously as Rodrigo ordered wine. She panted in again soon, a scrolled solid silver tray with wine bottles and glasses in her hand, and set it down before the two men. They drank solemnly to the destruction of Minardi.

John Dorning was almost immediately glad that he had come. Amid these splendors of a bygone day he was at home. Peace and contentment, aided by the wine, crept over him. The sixteenth century chair upon which he sat, the intricately carved table which held his wine-glass, the frescoed walls, the painted ceilings--these were part of his world, the world he loved.

Young Count Rodrigo sensed what sort of man his guest was at once, and was pleased. For there was in the young Italian, among other qualities less desirable, a strain of appreciation of the beautiful. He was proud of the masterpieces of art which his run-down palace sheltered. He abandoned abruptly his description, over the second glass of wine, of how Minardi's mistake had come about and switched the conversation to the Renaissance and what it owed to the famous Giotto, a rare specimen of whose work hung before them.

John Dorning warmed up at once. In half an hour he found himself liking his host and rendering silent tribute to the man's intimate knowledge of the whole range of Italian painting and sculpture. The flippancy had gone out of Torriani's manner. The two men argued, agreed, split, and drank more wine. Maria, waddling in and out with refreshments, wondered if she would ever again get to her bed. Dorning suggested that one trouble with the Renaissance painters was that they laid too little emphasis upon technical perfection.

Dorning wondered, in a whimsical turn of thought, how a man like this could also be the "admirer of Rosa."

It was long after midnight when Rodrigo escorted his guest to a bedchamber once occupied by Lorenzo the Magnificent.

The morning sun flooded the bedroom of the Torrianis. It glinted off the massive antique furniture, revealing its beauty and the need of an immediate dusting. It invaded the region of shadows and comparative coolness underneath the canopy of the immense four-poster bed.

Though a new day was confronting him, the heir of the Torrianis slept on.

In a larger sense, a new and rather cloudy day had six months previously dawned for young Count Rodrigo Torriani, and he had not awakened to that either. It had brought the loss of his family fortune, debts, Signor Minardi, and an uncertainty as to his future. Rodrigo was vaguely aware of this new metaphorical day. He had opened one eye to it sufficiently to dismiss all his servants save Maria, who had sullenly refused to be dismissed. He had started tentative negotiations to rent the palace that had been occupied by his family for three centuries. But, beyond these gestures, he had continued to pursue the same blithe, unproductive course as before.

Rodrigo was in this respect a great deal like his late father, Angelo Torriani, the handsome, impulsive gentleman who was responsible largely for the plight in which the young man now found himself. Angelo Torriani too had been known even in the later years of his life as a waster. To be sure, the elder Torriani had once mingled a bit of politics with his pleasures. It was this unusual mixture of interests that had led to Angelo Torriani's marriage.

For, sent upon a diplomatic mission by his government, the Italian sportsman-politician, after twenty years of falling in and out of love without jeopardizing his bachelorhood in the slightest, had suddenly lost his heart utterly to the quiet, pretty and rather puritanical daughter of a minor English title whom he encountered at a social function in London.

Angelo, like his son after him, had always been selfish in his loves. He was a taker rather than a giver. But when he found that his accustomed sweeping and very Latin style of love-making was not impressing the sensible Edythe Newbold, he became a suppliant. He made solemn promises to abandon his manner of living and he neglected his political duties. And, having at last carried the citadel of her affections by this method, he found that he must also batter down further defences in the form of a father who thoroughly disliked him. Sir Henry Newbold had amassed his fortune and title in the Indian trade. He distrusted foreigners. He particularly distrusted foreigners who did not work. To obtain the hand of Edythe in marriage, Angelo Torriani had to discard the habits and prejudices of three centuries of idling Italian ancestors, enter Sir Henry's business, and go to India.

During the second of the sixteen years which Angelo Torriani spent intermittently in Calcutta as resident manager of Newbold and Company, Rodrigo was born to Edythe. In the fifteenth year, Rodrigo was sent to England to school. In the same year, Sir Henry Newbold died, an elder son of the self-made knight succeeding to the management of the business. For a year Angelo Torriani carried on in an environment and trade which he had always hated. When, at the end of that period, Edythe, never in robust health and of the type which cannot become accustomed to the tropics, succumbed to a fever, Angelo resigned his position and left India forever.

Returning, after those many years, to the palace of his fathers at Naples, Angelo was for many weeks too much overcome with a very sincere grief hardly to show himself outside the iron gates. But then the reaction smote him. He became, after a few months, nearly the adventuresome Angelo of old. He visited Florence, Rome, the Riviera. He re-entered politics, tentatively at first, then more boldly. He began to notice again that women were smiling at him and then lowering lashes. He spent freely both money and energy. Still a handsome, virile figure at forty-five, he discovered that life, after all, was still good. He struck a rapid pace after a while and maintained it until about six months before Rodrigo Torriani met John Dorning at the Caf? Del Mare. Angelo Torriani then died quite as suddenly as he had fallen in love with Edythe Newbold. The sixteen years in India, busy but abstemious years, had probably prolonged his life. But the blood of the Torrianis, which killed young, had done for him at last.

Rodrigo was a lively, handsome child with large, snapping black eyes, eyes such as friends of mothers jokingly say augur ill for the girls they encounter when the child grows up. In this case, the prophecy worked out. The boy grew up, energetic, quick-tempered, and very attractive.

At Eton, and, later, at Oxford, whence he had been sent from India at the insistence of his mother, Rodrigo was not Edythe Newbold's son, but Angelo Torriani's. He was naturally more popular with his fellows than with his instructors. The latter did not like it because he apparently never studied. This was particularly irritating to the plodding dons in view of the fact that Rodrigo always passed his examinations with ease. He specialized in subjects which he liked, and he did not like subjects for which he did not possess a natural aptitude that made studying almost superfluous. Moreover, he was quick-witted and he had had excellent English tutor in India.

Rodrigo spent most of his vacation periods in the London town house of his mother's brother, Sir William Newbold, and the merchant-knight's rather stuffy family. The family consisted of Rodrigo's prim aunt, who did not at all possess her late sister's good looks or tolerance, and two weedy blond daughters. Though the latter were both about his own age and his own experience among the fair sex was at the time limited by his scholastic activities, he yet treated Evelyn and Sylvia Newbold with a blas? condescension which they did not fancy in the least. Neither did his Aunt Helen, who had esteemed Angelo Torriani as quite unworthy of marrying into the Newbolds and was continually urging Sir William to keep a tight leash upon Angelo's son. Rodrigo, thus, during his leisure time from Oxford found constant barriers in the way of his wandering very far in London on pleasure bent.

It was the irony of fate that a social affair given under the circumspect auspices of his uncle should have led to his acquaintance with Sophie Binner.

Most of the Newbolds' acquaintances were people like themselves--rich, self-satisfied, very respectable, and quite boring. The entertainments given by this set for their very carefully selected guests were for the most part the soul of convention. Bridge for the usual useless prizes, musicales by visiting celebrities, box parties at the opera. On the evening that Sir William came home from the office and suggested that the Newbolds give a Treasure Hunt, his wife was at first mystified and then scandalized.

The Treasure Hunt was the fad of a rather fast set of London society. It was in the nature of a hare and hounds chase, without the hares. The participants started out from a central spot toward a distant goal, aided at frequent intervals by clews posted upon trees, fences and other places. The first to arrive at the goal was the winner. The hunts were usually accompanied by considerable wining, dining and hilarity of a rather rowdy type.

In answer to his wife's disapproval, Sir William announced that a mutual and very respectable friend of theirs had been describing to him a Treasure Hunt in which the friend had participated and which had quite converted him to the sport.

"We have to give a party next month," Sir William urged in his fussy voice. "I think our set needs a little stirring up. Why shouldn't we have a Treasure Hunt! Many conservative people are going in for them. George Trevor said he was quite charmed. And it is important in a business way that I do something in his honor while he is in London. What do you say?"

After several days of deliberation, Helen Newbold yielded. The date was set and preparations were started. Rodrigo, who had just come down from Oxford for three weeks, was interested at once. For the first time since he had been familiar with his uncle's family, they they were about to do something that seemed to promise him some pleasure. He even asked permission to invite some of his Oxford friends who were in town to share in the fun, and received the permission after some questioning by his aunt as to the respectability of these added guests. He invited William Terhune, a Rhodes scholar from South Dakota, a raw-boned, husky chap, crew man and born pleasure-seeker, and Leslie Bond, a classmate from London whom Rodrigo admired for his witty tongue and suavity.

The Treasure Hunters were to travel in automobiles and Rodrigo secured the use of his uncle's light sedan, neatly side-stepping the suggestion that his two cousins travel along with Terhune, Bond and himself.

A large crowd of colorless people gathered one June afternoon in the drive of the Newbolds' town house and received a light collation and their instructions for the hunt. The first directions were to take them out to a London suburb, and the cavalcade started sedately enough, most of the sojourners undecided whether or not the Newbolds were attempting something revolutionary and not quite respectable in this new type of entertainment.

Rodrigo and his two friends were in a chaffing, carefree mood. Rodrigo was never a conservative driver and soon had the borrowed car moving at a pace that started the bobbies at the street intersections frowning and waving admonitory hands at him. Having attained the open country and the little tea house, to which their instructions had led them, in advance of the others, the young men did not stop to partake of the refreshments arranged for them by their host, but set off rapidly for the next rendezvous. This they never attained.

For a half mile or so beyond the tea house, they overtook an open runabout containing two very attractive young ladies. The blonde who was driving was particularly pretty in a bold, artificially arranged way. The girl at the wheel glanced back at the rapidly approaching car, flashed a friendly but taunting smile at it, and then stepped upon the accelerator and attempted to pull away from it. Rodrigo and his companions were interested and aroused at once. Rodrigo sped up and the race was on.

The sedan's glittering radiator-cap was almost even with the left rear wheel of the other car. Down a hill the cars swooped. Fifty yards farther on, the car of Rodrigo was exactly abreast of the runabout. Then came a sharp turn to the left, which the cars took together and plunged up the grade leading to the little rustic bridge neck and neck.

And here came catastrophe.

For the turn and the bridge were surprises to both drivers. It was a small wooden bridge spanning a ravine and a narrow stream running swiftly far below. A stout railing stretched along either side of the road, across the bridge. There was room for two carefully driven cars to pass each other. But not room enough for two speed maniacs.

The thunder of the flying cars across the loose planks was broken by a splintering crash. When the dust cleared away, the hood and front wheels of the runabout were disclosed suspended in mid-air over the ravine, the glass of the front lights and wind-shield were no more. Yet the motor of the runabout was still throbbing, and the two girls, though dust-covered and with faces bleeding slightly from tiny bits of glass that had pricked their skin, were unhurt. They discovered this after moving cautiously around a little.

When Rodrigo and his companions drove slowly back to them, offering succor, both girls were smiling, though a little uneasily to be sure, and the girl at the wheel was showing disturbing signs of putting the motor into reverse and seeking to back off the heavy piece of bridge-railing that, jammed in between their rear mud-guard and the side of the car, was the only thing preventing the machine from plunging off into eternity.

"I say, leave the motor alone!" Rodrigo shouted at once and scrambled hurriedly out from behind the wheel of the sedan, his companions following.

"And whose motor is it, may I ask?" the pretty blonde in the driver's seat came back promptly, at the same time jabbing furiously at levers.

Rodrigo was by this time at her side and, horrified, was clutching for her wrist. "Lady, lady," he cried half in fear and half in mockery. "Shut off the motor and get out quick. You're on the brink of eternity."

"Yes, Sophie, do," the other girl, slightly older and a brunette, agreed.

At first inclined to be stubborn, Sophie at length permitted herself to be helped down from her precarious perch and her companion followed, Terhune and Bond re-inforcing Rodrigo.

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