“We are at least on good terms of acquaintance,” said the younger man a little markedly.
Sabina liked the speech and the way in which it was spoken.
“We have a common ground for it in our interest in antiquities. Is it not true, Signer Malipieri?”
The Baron looked at him and smiled again, as if there were a secret between them, and Malipieri glanced at Sabina.
“It is quite true,” he said gravely. “The Baron has read all I have written about Carthage.”
Volterra possessed a sort of rough social tact, together with the native astuteness and great knowledge of men which had made him rich and a Senator. He suddenly became voluble and led the conversation in a new direction, which it followed till the end of dinner.
Several people came in afterwards, as often happened, before the coffee was taken away. They were chiefly men in politics, and two of them brought their wives with them. They were not the sort of guests whom the Baroness preferred, for they were not by any means all noble Romans, but they were of importance to her husband and she took great pains to make them welcome. To one she offered his favourite liqueur, which happened to be a Sicilian ratafia; for another she made the Baron send for some of those horribly coarse black cigars known as Tuscans, which some Italians prefer to anything else; for a third, she ordered fresh coffee to be especially made. She took endless trouble.
Malipieri seemed to know none of the guests, and he took advantage of the Baroness’s preoccupation for their comforts to sit down by Sabina. He did not look at her, and she thought he looked bored, as he sat a moment in silence. Then a thin deputy with a magnificent forehead and thick grey hair began to hold forth on the subject of a projected divorce law and the guests gathered round him. Sabina had never heard of Sydney Smith, but she had a suspicion that nobody could be as great as the speaker looked. While she was thinking of this, Malipieri spoke to her in a low voice.
“I suppose that you are stopping in the house,” he said.
“Yes.”
Sabina turned her eyes a little, but did not look straight at him. She saw, however, that he was still watching the people in the room, and still looked bored, and she was quite unprepared for what followed.
“Are the affairs of your family finally settled?” he enquired, without changing his tone.
Sabina was so much surprised that she waited a moment before answering. Her first instinct was to ask him stiffly why he put such a question, and she would have replied to it in that way if it had come from any other guest in the room; but she changed her mind almost instantly.
“No one has told me anything,” she said simply, in a low voice. Malipieri turned his head a little with a quick movement, and clasped his brown hands over one knee.
“You know nothing?” he asked. “Nothing whatever about the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He bit his lip as if he were indignant, and were repressing an exclamation.
“No one has written to me — for a long time,” Sabina said, after a moment.
She had been on the point of saying that she had never received a line from any member of her family since the crash, but that seemed to sound like a confidence, and what she really said was quite true.
“Has not the Senator told you anything either?” Malipieri asked.
“No. I suppose he does not like to speak about our misfortunes before me.”
“Have you, I mean you yourself, any interest in the Palazzo Conti now? Can you tell me that?”
“I know nothing — nothing!” Sabina repeated the word with a slight tremor, for just then she felt her position more keenly than ever before. “Why do you ask?”
She could not help putting the question which rose to her lips the second time, but there was no coldness in her voice. She was very lonely, and she felt that Malipieri was speaking from some honourable motive.
“I am living in the palace,” Malipieri answered.
Sabina looked up quickly, with an expression of interest in her pale young face. The thought that the man beside her was living in her old home was like a bond of acquaintance.
“Really?” she cried. “In which part of the house?”
“Do not seem interested, please,” said Malipieri, suddenly looking very bored again. “If you do, we shall not be allowed to talk. I am living in the little apartment on the intermediate story. They tell me that a chaplain once lived there.”
“I know where it is,” answered Sabina, “but I was never in the rooms. They used to be shut up, I think.”
The deputy who was haranguing on the subject of divorce seemed to be approaching his peroration. His great voice filled the large room with incessant noise, and everybody seemed anxiously waiting for a chance to contradict him. Malipieri was in no danger of being overheard.
“If it happens,” he said, “that I wish to communicate with you on a matter of importance, how can I reach you best?”
He asked the question quite naturally, as if he had known Sabina all his life. At first she was so much surprised that she could hardly speak.
“I — I do not know,” she stammered.
She had never received letters from any one but her own family or her school friends, and a very faint colour rose in her pale cheek. Malipieri looked more bored and weary than ever.
“It may be absolutely necessary for me to write to you before long,” he said. “Shall I write by post?”
Sabina hesitated.
“Is there no one in all Rome whom you can trust to bring a note and give it to you when you are alone?”
“There is Signor Sassi,” Sabina answered almost instinctively. “But really, why should you—”
“How can I find Sassi?” asked Malipieri, interrupting the question. “Who is he?”
“He was our agent. Is he gone? The old porter will know where to find him. I think he lived near the palace. But perhaps the porter has been sent away too.”
“He is still there. Have you been made to sign any papers since you have been here?”
“No.”
“Will you promise me something?”
Sabina could not understand how it was that a man who had been a stranger two hours earlier was speaking to her almost as if he were an intimate friend, still less why she no longer felt that she ought to check him and assert her dignity.
“If it is right, I will promise it,” she answered quietly, and looking down.
“It is right,” he said. “If the Senator, or any one else asks you to sign a paper, will you promise to consult me before doing so?”
“But I hardly know you!” she laughed, a little shyly.
“It is of no use to waste time and trouble on social conventions,” said Malipieri. “If you do not trust me, can you trust this Sassi?”
“Oh yes!”
“Then consult him. I will make him consult me, and it will be the same — and ten times more conventional and proper.”
He smiled.
“Will you promise that?” he asked.
“Yes. I promise. But I wish you would tell me more.”
“I wish I could. But I hardly know you!” He smiled again, as he repeated her own words.
“Never mind that! Tell me!”
“No. I cannot. If there is trouble I will tell you everything — through Sassi, of course.”
Sabina laughed, and all at once she felt as if she had known him for years.
At that moment the deputy finished his speech, and all who had anything to say in answer said it at once, in order to lose no time, while the speaker relighted his villainous black cigar, puffing tremendously.
The Baroness suddenly remembered Sabina and Malipieri in the corner, and after screaming out several incoherent phrases, which might have been taken for applause or dissent and were almost lost in the general din, she moved across the room.
“It is atrocious!” she cried, as she reached Sabina. “I hope you have not heard a word he said!”
“When a man has such a voice a
s that, it is impossible not to hear him,” said Malipieri, rising and answering before Sabina had time to speak.
Sabina rose, too, rather reluctantly.
“And of course you agreed with everything he said,” the Baroness replied. “All anarchists do!”
“I beg your pardon. I do not agree with him at all, and I am really not an anarchist.”
He smiled politely, and Sabina noticed with an unaccountable little thrill of satisfaction that the smile was quite different from the one she had seen in his face more than once while they had been talking together. As for the deputy’s discourse, she had not heard a word of it.
The Baroness sat down on the sofa, and Sabina slipped away. She was not supposed to be in society yet, as she was not quite eighteen, and there was certainly no reason why she should stay in the drawing-room that evening, while there were many reasons why she should go away. The Baroness breathed an audible sigh of relief when she was gone, for it was never possible to predict what some excited politician might say before her in the heat of argument.
In the silence of her own room she sat down to think over the unexpected events of the evening. Very young girls love to look forward to the moment when they shall be able to “think” of what has happened, after they have met men they are inclined to like, and who interest them. But when the time really comes they hardly ever think at all. They see pictures, they hear voices, they feel again what they have felt, they laugh, they shed tears all alone, and they believe they are thinking, or even reasoning. Their little joys come back to them, the little triumphs of their vanity, and also all the little hurts their sensitiveness has suffered, and which men do not often guess and still more rarely understand.
There must be some original reason why all boys call girls silly, and all girls think boys stupid. It must be part of the first manifestation of that enormous difference which exists between the point of view of men and women in after life.
Women are, in a sense, the embodiment of practice, while men are the representatives of theory. In practice, in a race for life, the runner who jumps everything in his way is always right, unless he breaks his neck. In theory, he is as likely to break his neck at the first jump as at the second, and the chances of his coming to grief increase quickly, always in theory, as he grows tired. So theory says that it is safer never to jump at all, but to go round through the gates, or wade ignominiously through the water. Women jump; men go round. The difference is everything. Women believe in what often succeeds in practice, and they take all risks and sometimes come down with a crash. Men theorize about danger, make elaborate calculations to avoid it and occasionally stick in the mud. When women fall at a stone wall they scream, when men are stuck in a bog they swear. The difference is fundamental. In nine cases out of ten it is the woman who enjoys the ecstatic delight of saying “I told you so,” and there are plenty of women who would ask no greater joy in paradise than to say so to their husbands for ever and ever. Indeed, eternal reward and punishment could thus be at once combined and distributed in a simple manner.
Sabina took her first fence that evening, for when she put out her candle she was sure that Malipieri was already her friend, and that she could trust him in any emergency. Moreover, though she would not have acknowledged it, she inwardly hoped that some emergency might not be far in the future.
But Malipieri walked all the way from the Via Ludovisi to the Palazzo Conti, which is more than a mile, without noticing that he had forgotten to light the cigar he had taken out on leaving Volterra’s house.
CHAPTER VI
MALIPIERI HAD THE Palazzo Conti to himself. The main entrance was always shut now, and only a small postern, cut in one side of the great door, was left ajar. The porter loafed about in the great court with his broom and his pipe; in the morning his wife went upstairs and opened a few windows, merely as a formality, and late in the afternoon she shut them again. Malipieri’s man generally went out twice every day, carrying a military dinner-pail, made in three sections, which he brought back half an hour later. Malipieri sometimes was not seen for several days, but frequently he went out in the morning and did not come back till dark. Now and then, things were delivered for him at the door, — a tin of oil for his lamps, a large box of candles, packages of odd shapes, sometimes very heavy, and which the porter was told to handle with care.
The old man tried to make acquaintance with Malipieri’s man, but found it less easy than he had expected. In the first place, Masin came from some outlandish part of Italy where an abominable dialect was spoken, and though he could speak school Italian when he pleased, he chose to talk to the porter in his native jargon, when he talked at all. He might just as well have spoken Greek. Secondly, he refused the porter’s repeated offers of a litre at the wine shop, always saying something which sounded like a reference to his delicate health. As he was evidently as strong as an ox, and as healthy as a savage or a street dog, the excuse carried no conviction. He was a big, quiet fellow, with china-blue eyes and a reddish moustache. The porter was not used to such people, nor to servants who wore moustaches, and was inclined to distrust the man. On the other hand, though Masin would not drink, he often gave the porter a cigar, with a friendly smile.
One day, in the morning, Baron Volterra came to see Malipieri, and stayed over an hour, a part of which time the two men spent in the courtyard, walking up and down in the north-west corner, and then taking some measurements with a long tape which Malipieri produced from his pocket. When the Baron went away he stopped and spoke with the porter. First he gave him five francs; then he informed him that his wages would be raised in future by that amount; and finally he told him that Signor Malipieri was an architect and would superintend the repairs necessary to the foundations at the north-west corner, that while the work was going on even the little postern door was to be kept shut all day, and no one was to be admitted on any condition without Signor Malipieri’s express permission. The fat Baron fixed his eyes on the porter’s with an oddly hard look, and said that he himself might come at any moment to see how the work was going on, and that if he found anybody inside the gate without Signor Malipieri’s authority, it would be bad for the porter. During this conversation, Malipieri stood listening, and when it ended he nodded, as if he were satisfied, and after shaking hands with the Baron he went up the grand staircase without a word.
It was all very mysterious, and the porter shook his head as he turned into his lodge after fastening the postern; but he said nothing to his wife about what had passed.
From what he had been told, he now naturally expected that a number of masons would come in a day or two in order to begin the work of strengthening the foundations; but no one came, and everything went on as usual, except that the postern was kept shut. He supposed that Malipieri was not ready, but he wisely abstained from asking questions. Then Malipieri asked him for the address of Pompeo Sassi, and wrote it down in his pocket-book, and went out. That was on the morning after he had dined at the Baron’s house, for it was not his habit to waste time when he wanted information.
Sassi received Malipieri in a little sitting-room furnished with a heterogeneous collection of utterly useless objects, all of which the old agent treasured with jealous affection, and daily recommended to the care of the elderly woman who was his only servant. The sofa and chairs had been new forty years ago, and though the hideous red-and-green stuffs with which they were covered were still tolerably vivid in colours the legs did not look safe, and Malipieri kept his feet well under him and sat down cautiously. Two rickety but well-dusted tables were loaded with ancient nicknacks, dating from the early part of the second French Empire, with impossibly ugly little figures carved out of cheap alabaster, small decayed photograph albums, and ingeniously bad wax flowers under glass shades. On the walls hung bad lithographs of Pius Ninth, Napoleon Third and Metternich, with a large faded photograph of old Prince Conti as a young man. Malipieri looked at it curiously, for he guessed that it represented Sabina’s father. The face w
as clean-shaven, thin and sad, with deep eyes and fair hair that looked almost white now, as if the photograph had grown old with the man, while he had lived.
Sassi sat down opposite his visitor. He wore a black cloth cap with a green tassel, and rubbed his hands slowly while he waited for Malipieri to speak. The latter hesitated a moment and then went to the point at once.
“You were the agent of the Conti estate for many years,” he said. “I know the Senator Volterra and have met Donna Sabina. I understand that her mother has left her under the charge of the Senator’s wife, and seems to have forgotten her existence. The young lady is apparently without resources of her own, and it is not clear what would become of her if the Volterra couple should not find it convenient to keep her with them. Is that the state of affairs?”
Sassi nodded gravely. Then he looked keenly at the young man, and asked him a question.
“May I enquire why you take an interest in Donna Sabina Conti?”
Malipieri returned the other’s gaze quietly.
“I am an architect, called in by the Senator to superintend some work on the palace. The Senator, as you know, took over the building when he foreclosed the mortgage, and he has not yet sold it, though he has refused several good offers. I have an idea that he believes it to be very valuable property. If this should turn out to be true, and if he should have made a very profitable transaction, he ought in honour, if not in law, to make over a part of the profits to Donna Sabina, who has practically been cheated of her share in her father’s estate. Her mother, and her brother and sister, spent everything they could lay hands on, whereas she never had anything. Is that true?”
“Quite true, quite true,” repeated Sassi sadly.
“And if Donna Sabina were to call them to account, I fancy the law would take a rather unpleasant view of what they did. I have heard that sort of thing called stealing when the persons who did it were not princes and princesses, but plain people like you and me. Do you happen to think of any better word?”
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1049