A long silence followed. From time to time Masin made a little noise with the drill.
“Perhaps the fellow is asleep,” he observed pleasantly at last. “So much the better, he will wake in Paradise!”
“It is of no use to run any risks,” said Malipieri. “If we go down to kill him he may kill one of us first, especially if he has a revolver. There is no hurry, I tell you. Do you happen to know how long it takes to starve a man to death?”
“Without water, a man cannot live a week, sir. That is the best idea you have had yet.”
“Yes. We will wall him up in the vault. That is easy enough. Those boards that are over the shaft will do to make a little frame, and the stones are all here, just as we got them out. We can fasten up the frame with ends of rope.”
“We have no mortar, sir.”
“Mud will do as well for such a small job,” answered Malipieri. “We can easily make enough. Give me your iron, in case he tries to get out, and go and get the boards and the rope.”
Masin began to rise.
“In a week we can come and take him out,” he remarked in a matter-of-fact way. “By that time he will be dead, and we can have his grave ready.”
He laughed again, as he thought of the sensations his cheerful talk must produce in the mind of the man below.
“Yes,” said Malipieri. “We may as well do it at once and go to bed. It is of no use to sit up all night talking about the fellow’s body. Go and get the rope and the boards.”
Masin was now on his feet and his heavy shoes made a grinding noise on the stones. At that moment a sound was heard from below, and Malipieri held up a finger and listened. Somebody was moving in the vault.
“You had better stay where you are,” said Malipieri, speaking down. “If you show yourself I will drop a stone on your head.”
A hollow voice answered him from the depths.
“Are you Christians,” it asked, “to wall a man up alive?”
“That is what we are going to do,” Malipieri answered coolly. “Have you anything to say? It will not take us long to do the job, so you had better speak at once. How did you get in?”
“If I am to die without getting out, why should I tell you?” enquired the voice.
Malipieri looked at Masin.
“There is a certain sense in what the man says, sir,” Masin said thoughtfully.
“My good man,” said Malipieri, speaking down, “we do not want anybody to know the way to this place for a few days, and as you evidently know it better than we do, we intend to keep you quiet.”
“If you will let me out, I can serve you,” answered the man below. “There is nobody in Rome who can serve you as I can.”
“Who are you?” asked Malipieri.
“Are you going to let me out, Signor Malipieri?” enquired the man. “If you are, I will tell you.”
“Oh, you know my name, do you?”
“Perfectly. You are the engineer engaged by the Senator Volterra to find the treasure.”
“Yes. Quite right. What of that?”
“You have found it,” answered the other. “Of what use will it be to kill me? I cannot take that statue away in my waistcoat pocket, if you let me out, can I?”
“You had better not make too many jokes, my man, or we will put the boards over this hole in five minutes. If you can really be of use to me, I will let you out. What is your name?”
“Toto,” answered the voice sullenly.
“Yes. That means Theodore, I suppose. Now make haste, for I am tired of waiting. What are you, and how did you get in?”
“I was the mason of the palace, until the devil flew away with the people who lived in it. I know all the secrets of the house. I can be very useful to you.”
“That changes matters, my friend. I have no doubt you can be useful if you like, though we have managed to find one of the secrets without you. It happens to be the only one we wanted to know.”
“No,” answered Toto. “There are two others. You do not know how I got in, and you do not know how to manage the ‘lost water.’”
“That is true,” said Malipieri. “But if I let you out you may do me harm, by talking before it is time. The government is not to know of this discovery until I am ready.”
“The government!” exclaimed Toto contemptuously, from his hiding-place. “May an apoplexy seize it! Do you take me for a spy? I am a Christian.”
“I begin to think he is, sir,” put in Masin, knocking the ash from his pipe.
“I think so, too,” said Malipieri. “Throw away that iron, Masin. He shall show himself, at all events, and if we like his face we can talk to him here.”
Masin dropped the drill with a clang. Toto’s hairy hand appeared, grasping the golden wrist of the statue, as he raised himself to approach the hole.
“He is a mason, as he says,” said Masin, catching sight of the rough fingers.
“Did you take me for a coachman?” enquired Toto, thrusting his shaggy head forward cautiously, and looking up through the aperture.
“Before you come up here,” Malipieri answered, “tell me how you got in.”
“You seem to know so much about the overflow shaft that I should think you might have guessed. If you do not believe that I came that way, look at my clothes!”
He now crawled upon the body of the statue, and Malipieri saw that he was covered with half-dried mud and ooze.
“You got through some old drain, I suppose, and found your way up.”
“It seems so,” answered Toto, shaking his shoulders, as if he were stiff.
“Are you going to let him go free, sir?” asked Masin, standing ready. “If you do, he will be down the shaft, before you can catch him. These men know their way underground like moles.”
“Moles, yourselves!” answered Toto in a growl, putting his head up above the level of the vault.
Masin measured him with his eye, and saw that he was a strong man, probably much more active than he looked in his heavy, mud-plastered clothes.
“Get up here,” said Malipieri.
Toto obeyed, and in a moment he sat on the edge of the hole, his legs dangling down into it.
“Not so bad,” he said, settling himself with a grunt of satisfaction.
“I like you, Master Toto,” said Malipieri. “You might have thought that we really meant to kill you, but you did not seem much frightened.”
“There is no woman in the affair,” answered Toto. “Why should you kill me? And I can help you.”
“How am I to know that you will?” asked Malipieri.
“I am a man of honour,” Toto replied, turning his stony face to the light of the lanterns.
“I have not a doubt of it, my friend,” returned Malipieri, without conviction. “Just now, the only help I need of you, is that you should hold your tongue. How can I be sure that you will do that? Does any one else know the way in through the drain?”
“No. I only found it to-night. If there is a day’s rain in the mountains, and the Tiber rises even a little, nobody can pass through it. The lower part is barely above the level of the river now.”
“How did you guess that you could get here by that way?”
“We know many secrets in our trade, from father to son,” answered Toto gruffly.
“You must have lifted the boards, with the stones on them, to get out of the shaft. Why did you put them back in their place?”
“You seem to think I am a fool! I did not mean to let you know that I had been here, so I put them back, of course. I supposed that I could get out through the cellars, but you have put a padlock on the inner door.”
“Is there any way of turning water into that shaft?”
“Only by filling the well, I think. If the Tiber rises, the water will back up the shaft through the drain. That is why the ancients who built the well made another way for the water to run off. When the river is swollen in a flood it must be much higher in the shaft than the bottom of the well, and if the ‘lost water’ were run
ning in all the time, the air would probably make it back, so that the shaft would be useless and the well would be soiled with the river water.”
“You evidently know your trade, Master Toto,” said Masin, with some admiration for his fellow-craftsman’s clear understanding.
“You know yours,” retorted Toto, who was seldom at a loss, “for just now you talked of killing like a professional assassin.”
This pleasing banter delighted Masin, who laughed heartily, and patted Toto on the back.
“We shall be good friends,” he said.
“In this world one never knows,” Toto answered philosophically. “What are you going to do?”
“You must come back with as to my apartment,” said Malipieri, who had been considering the matter, “You must stay there a couple of days, without going out. I will pay you for your time, and give you a handsome present, and plenty to eat and drink. After that you will be free to go where you please and say what you like, for the secret will be out.”
“Thank you,” answered Toto without enthusiasm. “Are you going to tell the government about the treasure?”
“The Senator will certainly inform the government, which has a right to buy it.”
To this Toto said nothing, but he lifted his legs out of the hole and stood up, ready to go. Malipieri and Masin took up their lanterns.
CHAPTER XI
MASIN LED THE way back, Toto followed and Malipieri went last, so that the mason was between his two captors. They did not quite trust him, and Masin was careful not to walk too fast where the way was so familiar to him, while Malipieri was equally careful not to lag behind. In this order they reached the mouth of the overflow shaft, covered with the loaded boards. Masin bent down and examined them, for he wished to convince himself that the stones had been moved since he had himself placed them there. A glance showed that this was the case, and he was about to go on, when he bent down again suddenly and listened, holding up his hand.
“There is water,” he said, and began to lift off the stones, one by one.
Toto helped him quickly. There were only three or four, and they were not heavy. When the mouth of the shaft was uncovered all three knelt down and listened, instinctively lowering their lanterns into the blackness below. The shaft was not wider than a good-sized old-fashioned chimney, like those in Roman palaces, up and down which sweeps can just manage to climb.
The three men listened, and distinctly heard the steady falling of a small stream of water upon the stones at the bottom.
“It is raining,” Toto said confidently, but he was evidently as much surprised by the sound as the others. “There must be some communication with the gutters in the courtyard,” he added.
“There is probably a thunderstorm,” answered Malipieri. “We can hear nothing down here.”
“If I had gone down again, I should have been drowned,” Toto said, shaking his head. “Do you hear? Half the water from the courtyard must be running down there!”
The sound of the falling stream increased to a hollow roar.
“Do you think the water can rise in the shaft?” asked Malipieri.
“Not unless the river rises and backs into it,” replied Toto. “The drain is large below.”
“That cannot be ‘lost water,’ can it?”
“No. That is impossible.”
“Put the boards in their place again,” Malipieri said. “It is growing late.”
It was done in a few moments, but now the dismal roar of the water came up very distinctly through the covering. Malipieri had been in many excavations, and in mines, too, but did not remember that he had ever felt so strongly the vague sense of apprehension that filled him now. There is something especially gloomy and mysterious about the noise of unexplained water heard at a great depth under the earth and coming out of darkness. Even the rough men with him felt that.
“It is bad to hear,” observed Masin, putting one more stone upon the boards, as if the weight could keep the sound down.
“You may say that!” answered Toto. “And in this tomb, too!”
They went on, in the same order as before. The passage to the dry well had been so much enlarged that by bending down they could walk to the top of the rope ladder. Malipieri went down first, with his lantern. Toto followed, and while Masin was descending, stood looking at the bones of the dead mason, and at the skull that grinned horribly in the uncertain yellow glare.
He took a half-burnt candle from his pocket, and some sulphur matches, and made a light for himself, with which he carefully examined the bones. Malipieri watched him.
“The man who was drowned over sixty years ago,” said the architect.
“This,” answered Toto, with more feeling than accuracy, “is the blessed soul of my grandfather.”
“He shall have Christian burial in a few days,” Malipieri said gravely.
Toto shrugged his shoulders, not irreverently, but as if to say that when a dead man has been without Christian burial sixty years, it cannot make any difference whether he gets it after all or not. “The crowbar is still good,” Toto said, stooping down to disengage it from the skeleton’s grasp. But Malipieri laid a hand on his shoulder, for it occurred to him that the mason, armed with an iron bar, might be a dangerous adversary if he tried to escape.
“You do not need that just now,” said the architect.
Toto glanced at Malipieri furtively and saw that he was understood. He stood upright, affecting indifference. They went on, through the breach to which the slit had been widened. Toto moved slowly, and held his candle down to the running water in the channel.
“There is plenty of it,” he observed.
“Where does it come from?” asked Malipieri, suddenly, in the hope of an unguarded answer.
“From heaven,” answered Toto without hesitation; “and everything that falls from heaven is good,” he added, quoting an ancient proverb.
“What would happen if we closed the entrance, so that it could not get in at all?”
“The book of wisdom,” Toto replied, “is buried under Pasquino. How should I know what would happen?”
“You know a good many things, my friend.”
Malipieri understood that the man would not say more, and led the way out.
“Good-bye, grandpapa,” growled Toto, waving his hairy hand towards the well. “Who knows whether we shall meet again?”
They went on, and in due time emerged into the upper air. It was raining heavily, as Toto had guessed, and before they had reached the other end of the courtyard they were drenched. But it was a relief to be out of doors, and Malipieri breathed the fresh air with keen delight, as a thirsty man drinks. The rain poured down steadily and ran in rivers along the paved gutters, and roared into the openings that carried it off. Malipieri could not help thinking how it must be roaring now, far down at the bottom of the old shaft, led thither through deep-buried and long-forgotten channels.
Upstairs, Masin was inclined to be friendly with his fellow-craftsman, and gave him dry clothes to sleep in, and bread and cheese and wine in his own room. In spite of his experiences, Masin had never known how to be suspicious. But as Malipieri looked once more at the man’s stony face and indistinguishable eyes, he thought differently of his prisoner. He locked the outer door and took the key of the patent lock with him when he went to bed at last.
It does not often rain heavily in Rome, late in the spring, for any long time, but when Malipieri looked out the next morning, it was still pouring steadily, and the sky over the courtyard was uniformly grey. It is apparently a law of nature that exceptions should come when least wanted.
In spite of the weather Malipieri went out, however, and did not even send for a cab. The porter was in a particularly bad humour and eyed him distrustfully, for he had been put to the trouble of cleaning the stairs where the three men had left plentiful mud in their track during the night. Malipieri nodded to the old man as usual, and was about to go out, but turned back and gave him five francs. Thus mollified
the porter at once made a remark about the atrocious weather and proceeded to ask how the work was progressing.
“I have explored a good deal,” answered Malipieri. “The Senator is coming to-morrow, and you had better sweep carefully. He looks at everything, you know.”
He went out into the pouring rain, keeping a sharp lookout from under the edge of the umbrella he held low over his head. He had grown cautious of late. As he expected, he came upon one of the respectable men he now met so often, before he had turned into the Piazza Agonale. The respectable man was also carrying his umbrella low, and looking about him as he walked along at a leisurely pace. Malipieri hailed a cab.
Even in wet weather there are no closed cabs in that part of Rome. One is protected from the wet, more or less, by the hood and by a high leathern apron which is hooked to it inside. The cabman, seated under a huge standing umbrella, bends over and unhooks it on one side for you to get in and out.
Malipieri employed the usual means of eluding pursuit. He gave an address and told the man to drive fast, got out quickly on reaching the house, enquired for an imaginary person with a foreign name, who, he was of course told, did not live there, got in again and had himself driven to Sassi’s door, sure of losing his pursuer, if the detective followed him in another cab. Then he paid the man two fares, to save time, and went in. He had never taken the trouble to do such a thing since his political adventures, but he was now very anxious not to let it be known that he had any dealings with the former agent of the Conti family.
The matter was settled easily enough and to his satisfaction. Old Sassi worshipped Sabina, and was already fully persuaded that whatever could be found under the palace should belong to her, as also that she had a right to see what was discovered before Volterra did, and before anything was moved. He was at least as quixotic in his crabbed fashion as Malipieri himself; and besides, he really could not see that there was the least harm or danger in the scheme. It certainly would have been improper for Malipieri to go and fetch the young lady himself, but it was absurd to suppose that a man over sixty could be blamed for accompanying a girl of eighteen on a visit to her old home, in her own interest, especially when the man had been all his life employed by her family in a position of trust and confidence. Finally, Sassi hated Volterra with all his heart, as the faithful adherents of ruined gentlefolks often hate those who have profited by their ruin.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1057