The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

to testify only to what he actually knows. That is the rule. It is true there are exceptions to it. In some instances he may testify as to what he has heard.”

“Ah, yes,” replied the Count; “you will not permit such evidence to take away a man's horse, but you will permit it to take away a woman's reputation! I shall never be able to understand these delicate refinements of the English law!”

“But, Count,” suggested Sir Henry Marquis, “reputation is precisely that what the neighborhood says about one.”

“Pardon, monsieur,” returned the Count. “I do not criticize your customs. They are doubtless excellent in every variety of way. I deplore only my inability to comprehend them. For example, monsieur, why should you hold a citizen responsible in all other cases only for what he does, but in the case of his own character turn about and try him for what people say he does?

“Thus, monsieur, as I understand it, the men of an English village could not take away my pig by merely proving that everybody said it was stolen; but they could brand me as a liar by merely proving what the villagers said! It seems incredible that men should put such value on a pig.”

Sir Henry Marquis laughed.

“It is not entirely a question of values, Count.”

“I beg you to pardon me, monsieur,” the Italian went on. “Doubtless, on this subject I do nothing more than reveal an intelligence lamentably inefficient; but I had the idea that English people were accustomed to regard property of greater importance than life.”

“I have never heard,” replied the Englishman, smiling, “that our courts gave more attention to pigs than to murder.”

“Why, yes, monsieur,” said the Count—“that is precisely what they have been accustomed to do. It is only, I believe, within recent years that one convicted of murder in England could take an appeal to a higher court; though a controversy over pigs—or, at any rate, the pasture on which they gathered acorns—could always be carried up.”

The great age of the Count—he seemed to be the representative in the world of some vanished empire—gave his irony a certain indirection. Everybody laughed. And he added: “Even your word 'murder,' I believe, was originally the name of a fine imposed by the Danes on a village unless it could be proved that the person found dead was an Englishman!

“I wonder when, precisely, the world began to regard it as a crime to kill an Englishman?”

The parchment on the bones of his face wrinkled into a sort of smile. His greatest friend on the Riviera was this pipe-smoking Briton.

Then suddenly, with a nimble gesture that one would not believe possible in the aged, he stripped back his sleeve and exhibited a long, curiously twisted scar, as though a bullet had plowed along the arm.

“Alas, monsieur,” he said, “I myself live in the most primitive condition of society! I pay a tribute for life.... Ah! no, monsieur; it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite unromantic. I think my secretary carries it in his books as a pension to an indigent relative.”

He turned to the American

“Believe me, monsieur, my estates in Salerno are not what they were; the olive trees are old and all drains on my income are a burden—even this gratuity. I thought I should be rid of it; but, alas, the extraordinary conception of justice in your country!”

He broke the cigarette in his fingers, and flung the pieces over the terrace.

“In the great range of mountains,” he began, “slashing across the American states and beautifully named the Alleghanies, there is a vast measure of coal beds. It is thither that the emigrants from Southern Europe journey. They mine out the coal, sometimes descending into the earth through pits, or what in your language are called shafts, and sometimes following the stratum of the coal bed into the hill.

“This underworld, monsieur—this, sunless world, built underneath the mountains, is a section of Europe slipped under the American Republic. The language spoken there is not English. The men laboring in those buried communities cry out sparate when they are about to shoot down the coal with powder. It is Italy under there. There is a river called the Monongahela in those mountains. It is an Indian name.”

He paused.

“And so, monsieur, what happened along it doubtless reminded me of Cooper's story—Bough of Oak and the case of Corporal Flint.”

He took another cigarette out of a box on the table, but he did not light it.

“In one of the little mining villages along this river with the enchanting name there was a man physically like the people of the Iliad; and with that, monsieur, he had a certain cast of mind not unHellenic. He was tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, lean as a gladiator, and in the vigor of golden youth.

“There were no wars to journey after and no adventures; but there was danger and adventure here. This land was full of cockle, winnowed out of Italy, Austria and the whole south of Europe. It took courage and the iron hand of the state to keep the peace. Here was a life of danger; and this Ionian—big, powerful, muscled like the heroes of the Circus Maximus—entered this perilous service.

“Monsieur, I have said his mind was Hellenic, like his big, wonderful body. Mark you how of heroic antiquity it was! It was his boast, among the perils that constantly beset him, that no criminal should ever take his life; that, if ever he should receive a mortal wound from the hand of the assassins about him, he would not wait to die in agony by it. He himself would sever the damaged thread of life and go out like a man!

“Observe, monsieur, how like the great heroes of legend—like the wounded Saul when he ordered his armor-bearer to kill him; like Brutus when he fell on his sword!”

He looked intently at the American.

“Doubtless, monsieur,” he went on, “those near this man along the Monongahela did not appreciate his attitude of grandeur; but to us, in the distance, it seemed great and noble.”

He looked out over the Mediterranean, where the great adventurers who cherished these lofty pagan ideals once beat along in the morning of the world.

“On an afternoon of summer,” he continued like one who begins a saga, “this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a Parisian Apache, skulked behind.

“As they went along, two Austrians seated on the porch of a house heard the little man speak to the prisoner. He used the word sparate. They did not know what he meant, for he spoke in Italian; but they recognized the