Storm by Max Brand - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) (eBook)

Max Brand (Autor)

Max Brand (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
145 Seiten
Delphi Classics (Parts Edition) (Verlag)
978-1-78877-945-6 (ISBN)

Infos

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'The Storm by Max Brand - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)' from the bestselling edition of 'The Collected Works of Max Brand'.

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Textauszug

CHAPTER II.

THE RING.

GIOVAN PAOLO, WHEN he had finished reading the letter, his voice dropping with an honest reverence as he pronounced the last words, remained for a time with his head bent.

“I know the brave Englishman,” said he, at last. “I know he has been a bulwark of the house of the Oddi. I have seen him in battle and anyone who has watched the work of his sword can remember him easily enough. I know that it was he who allowed us to pass out of the city on the night of the Betrayal. I would give all the jewels and the gold in this place and all I could send for in order to set him free. But that would not help him. Money will not buy a man out of the cruel hands of Jeronimo della Penna. And what can you do, or any other man? We can only pray that we may storm the city and set him free before Jeronimo makes up his mind what form of torment he will use on Melrose.”

“Look!” said Tizzo, and held out a rolled letter which Giovan Paolo pulled open and read aloud:

 

FRIEND AND FIRE-EATER, MY TIZZO:

 

I send you this letter by sure hand. I have already rewarded him, but give him plenty of money when he arrives in honor of a dead man. That is myself.

The days went very well immediately after the Great Betrayal. The wine ran in the gutters, so to speak; the people cheered the murderers of the Baglioni; the traitors sat high in the saddle and they remembered Henry of Melrose with a good many favors and quite a bit of money. I began to feel that I might spend a happy time here except for the stench of murder which rises in my heart when I think of the midnight work which has been done in these streets.

However, when I was about to skim the cream off my cup of fortune and go away with it I was suddenly haled before the chiefs of the Great Betrayal — before Jeronimo della Penna, I mean, and Carlo Barciglia. For Grifone Baglioni is no longer accounted anything. Except for him they never would have taken the place, of course, but since the Great Betrayal conscience has been eating his heart; he has turned yellow and is growing old. Every day he goes to the castle of his lady mother and begs her to let him enter and give him her blessing, and every day the Lady Atlanta bars her doors against him and sends him a curse as a traitor instead of a blessing as a son.

So I was before Jeronimo and Carlo alone, and the information against me was dug up by that double-tongued snake of darkness, that hell-hound of a Mateo Marozzo, who hates you so sweetly and who wears on his forehead the cross which you put there with the point of your dagger. If he remains long out of hell, the chief devil will die of yearning.

It is this Marozzo who discovered that on the night of the Great Betrayal it was through my gate that there passed the Lady Beatrice Baglione, accompanied by the main head and brains of the Baglione family, the famous Giovan Paolo, and that firebrand, the hawk-brained wild man, Tizzo, who had snatched those two lives from the slaughter.

Giovan Paolo, after this, merely made a mute gesture and argued no more.

“Beatrice is in the inner tent,” he said. “You will want to say farewell to her?”

“No,” answered Tizzo. “If I see her, I’ll fall out of this resolution of mine and be in love with life again. Tell her so after I have gone.”

“I shall tell her,” said Giovan Paolo. “What is your plan?”

“Simply to enter the city and go to the house of a certain Alberto Marignello, in the little lane off the via dei Bardi. This Marignello is the fellow I have given the money to, the one with the keys to the cellars of della Penna. When I have the keys — why, you see that I’ll not know the next step until I come to take it.”

“Tizzo, you are a dead man!”

“I am,” said Tizzo, cheerfully, “and that is why I have come to say farewell!”

He held out his hands, and Giovan Paolo, with a groan but with no further protest, held out his hands to make that silent farewell.

 

THE green, the orange, the yellow and the crimson no longer flashed on the body of Tizzo when he came near Perugia in the twilight of that day. His skin, rather fairer than that of most Italians, had been darkened with the walnut stain which he had used on the night of the Great “I must go to him,” answered Tizzo. “Listen to me,” urged Giovan Paolo. “How can one man help him?”

“The man who brought me the letter is an assistant jailer. I’ve bribed him with a fine sum of money. He is going to meet me in Perugia and admit me to the house of Jeronimo, where Melrose lies in one of the great cellars.

He will furnish me with a file to cut through the manacles. After that, I must try to get Melrose away.”

“How will you take him out of the city? Will you use wings?”

“Chance,” said Tizzo. “I’ve worshipped her so long with dice, I’ve made so many sacrifices in her name, that she would not have the heart to refuse me a single request like this one.”

“Tizzo — tell me in brief. What is Melrose to you? He is brave; he has an eye which is the same flame-blue as yours in a fight; he is true to his friends. I grant all that. But other men have the same qualities.”

“Paolo,” said Tizzo, “you and I have sworn to be true to one another. We have sworn to be blood brothers without the blood.”

“That is right,” nodded Giovan Paolo.

“Well, then,” said Tizzo, “if I heard that you were lying in prison, expecting death, my heart would be stirred no more than when I hear that the Englishman is rotting in misery in the dungeon of della Penna.”

Betrayal, and his red hair, darkened also, tumbled unkempt about his face. His clothes were ragged; his back was bowed under a great fagot of olive wood to which was lashed a heavy woodsman’s ax. In the full light of the day a curious eye might have been interested in the blue sheen of the blade of that ax, but in the half-light of the evening the glimmer of the pure Damascus steel could not be noticed.

When he came to the gate, a pair of fine young riders were being questioned by the captain on duty there, but none of the guards paid the slightest attention to that bowed form under the heavy load of wood. A young lad inside the gate bawled: “Look! Look at the donkey walking on two legs!”

In fact, hardly the poorest man in Perugia would have carried such a crushing burden of wood on his back into the town, but Tizzo, with a hanging head and a slight sway from side to side of his entire body, strode gradually up the steep slope of the street. He turned right and left again before he came to the wide façade of the great house in which lived Atlanta Baglione, the mother of the traitor to his house. Grifone.

In the dusk, he came to the entrance of the courtyard, where the porter merely sang out: “What’s this?”

“A broken back and a load of olive wood,” said Tizzo. “Where shall I leave the stuff?”

He made as if to drop it to the pavement but the porter cursed him for a lout. “D’you wish to litter the street and give me extra work?” he demanded. “Get in through the court and I’ll open the inner door.”

He led the way, but stopped suddenly as he saw the form of a man kneeling on the farther side of the court under a shuttered window, crying out, not over-loud: “Mother, whatever I have done, I have repented. If I have sinned against God, he will have his own vengeance. If I have sinned against men, my heart is already broken. But if you turn a deaf ear to me, the devils in hell are laughing!”

“So!” muttered the porter. “Always the same! Always the same! But she is the sort of pale steel that will not bend. This way, woodcutter.”

He led through a doorway, but as he was about to close the door, the man who cried out in the corner of the courtyard rose and rushed to enter behind the burden-bearer. A streak of light from a window flashed dimly across his face and Tizzo recognized the most handsome features of Perugia, the richest of her sons, the pride and the boast of all her youth, Grifone. He was a great deal altered. Even in that faint glimpse, Tizzo could see the pale, hollow face. Then the door slammed heavily and shut out the vision.

“So! So!” panted the porter. “God forgive him for his sins; God forgive my lady for shutting him away; and God forgive me that I have seen such things in my life!”

He showed Tizzo where to carry the wood into a storeroom, and locked the door behind him.

“And now for the payment,” said Tizzo, standing straight with a groan. “I have brought twenty backloads of that wood, now, and I need the money for it, friend.”

He leaned on the handle of the ax and wiped sweat from his face.

“You want money? There is not a penny ever paid out in this household except by my lady,” said the porter. “Do you want me to break in on her now?”

“Brother,” said Tizzo, “there is neither flour nor oil in my house, to say nothing of wine, and I have to walk a league to come to my place.”

“Have you carried that backload three miles?” asked the porter.

“Yes,” said Tizzo,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.7.2017
• Reihe/Serie: Delphi Parts Edition (Max Brand)
• Reihe/Serie: Delphi Parts Edition (Max Brand)
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Anthologien
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Barry • complete • Doone • Kildare • Rider • silvertip • Western
• ISBN-10: 1-78877-945-2 / 1788779452
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78877-945-6 / 9781788779456