Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  The consequence was that Orsino found himself helping Maria Consuelo into the modest hired conveyance which awaited her at the gate. He hoped that she would offer him a seat for a short distance, but he was disappointed.

  “May I come to-morrow?” he asked, as he closed the door of the carriage. The night was not cold and the window was down.

  “Please tell the coachman to take me to the Via Nazionale,” she said quickly.

  “What number?”

  “Never mind — he knows — I have forgotten. Good-night.”

  She tried to draw up the window, but Orsino held his hand on it.

  “May I come to-morrow?” he asked again.

  “No.”

  “Are you angry with me still?”

  “No.”

  “Then why—”

  “Let me shut the window. Take your hand away.”

  Her voice was very imperative in the dark. Orsino relinquished his hold on the frame, and the pane ran up suddenly into its place with a rattling noise. There was obviously nothing more to be said.

  “Via Nazionale. The Signora says you know the house,” he called to the driver.

  The man looked surprised, shrugged his shoulders after the manner of livery stable coachmen and drove slowly off in the direction indicated. Orsino stood looking after the carriage and a few seconds later he saw that the man drew rein and bent down to the front window as though asking for orders. Orsino thought he heard Maria Consuelo’s voice, answering the question, but he could not distinguish what she said, and the brougham drove on at once without taking a new direction.

  He was curious to know whither she was going, and the idea of following her suggested itself but he instantly dismissed it, partly because it seemed unworthy and partly, perhaps, because he was on foot, and no cab was passing within hail.

  Orsino was very much puzzled. During the dinner she had behaved with her usual cordiality but as soon as they were alone she spoke and acted as she had done in the afternoon. Orsino turned away and walked across the deserted square. He was greatly disturbed, for he felt a sense of humiliation and disappointment quite new to him. Young as he was, he had been accustomed already to a degree of consideration very different from that which Maria Consuelo thought fit to bestow, and it was certainly the first time in his life that a door — even the door of a carriage — had been shut in his face without ceremony. What would have been an unpardonable insult, coming from a man, was at least an indignity when it came from a woman. As Orsino walked along, his wrath rose, and he wondered why he had not been angry at once.

  “Very well,” he said to himself. “She says she does not want me. I will take her at her word and I will not go to see her any more. We shall see what happens. She will find out that I am not a child, as she was good enough to call me to-day, and that I am not in the habit of having windows put up in my face. I have much more serious business on hand than making love to Madame d’Aranjuez.”

  The more he reflected upon the situation, the more angry he grew, and when he reached the door of the club he was in a humour to quarrel with everything and everybody. Fortunately, at that early hour, the place was in the sole possession of half a dozen old gentlemen whose conversation diverted his thoughts though it was the very reverse of edifying. Between the stories they told and the considerable number of cigarettes he smoked while listening to them he was almost restored to his normal frame of mind by midnight, when four or five of his usual companions straggled in and proposed baccarat. After his recent successes he could not well refuse to play, so he sat down rather reluctantly with the rest. Oddly enough he did not lose, though he won but little.

  “Lucky at play, unlucky in love,” laughed one of the men carelessly.

  “What do you mean?” asked Orsino, turning sharply upon the speaker.

  “Mean? Nothing,” answered the latter in great surprise. “What is the matter with you, Orsino? Cannot one quote a common proverb?”

  “Oh — if you meant nothing, let us go on,” Orsino answered gloomily.

  As he took up the cards again, he heard a sigh behind him and turning round saw that Spicca was standing at his shoulder. He was shocked by the melancholy count’s face, though he was used to meeting him almost every day. The haggard and cadaverous features, the sunken and careworn eyes, contrasted almost horribly with the freshness and gaiety of Orsino’s companions, and the brilliant light in the room threw the man’s deadly pallor into strong relief.

  “Will you play, Count?” asked Orsino, making room for him.

  “Thanks — no. I never play nowadays,” answered Spicca quietly.

  He turned and left the room. With all his apparent weakness his step was not unsteady, though it was slower than in the old days.

  “He sighed in that way because we did not quarrel,” said the man whose quoted proverb had annoyed Orsino.

  “I am ready and anxious to quarrel with everybody to-night,” answered Orsino. “Let us play baccarat — that is much better.”

  Spicca left the club alone and walked slowly homewards to his small lodging in the Via della Croce. A few dying embers smouldered in the little fireplace which warmed his sitting-room. He stirred them slowly, took a stick of wood from the wicker basket, hesitated a moment, and then put it back again instead of burning it. The night was not cold and wood was very dear. He sat down under the light of the old lamp which stood upon the mantelpiece, and drew a long breath. But presently, putting his hand into the pocket of his overcoat in search of his cigarette case, he drew out something else which he had almost forgotten, a small something wrapped in coarse paper. He undid it and looked at the little frame of chiselled brass which Donna Tullia had found him buying in the afternoon, turning it over and over, absently, as though thinking of something else.

  Then he fumbled in his pockets again and found a photograph which he had also bought in the course of the day — the photograph of Gouache’s latest portrait, obtained in a contraband fashion and with some difficulty from the photographer.

  Without hesitation Spicca took a pocket-knife and began to cut the head out, with that extraordinary neatness and precision which characterised him when he used any sharp instrument. The head just fitted the frame. He fastened it in with drops of sealing-wax and carefully burned the rest of the picture in the embers.

  The face of Maria Consuelo smiled at him in the lamplight, as he turned it in different ways so as to find the best aspect of it. Then he hung it on a nail above the mantelpiece just under a pair of crossed foils.

  “That man Gouache is a very clever fellow,” he said aloud. “Between them, he and nature have made a good likeness.”

  He sat down again and it was a long time before he made up his mind to take away the lamp and go to bed.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  DEL FERICE KEPT his word and arranged matters for Orsino with a speed and skill which excited the latter’s admiration. The affair was not indeed very complicated though it involved a deed of sale, the transfer of a mortgage and a deed of partnership between Orsino Saracinesca and Andrea Contini, architect, under the style “Andrea Contini and Company,” besides a contract between this firm of the one party and the bank in which Del Ferice was a director, of the other, the partners agreeing to continue the building of the half-finished house, and the bank binding itself to advance small sums up to a certain amount for current expenses of material and workmen’s wages. Orsino signed everything required of him after reading the documents, and Andrea Contini followed his example.

  The architect was a tall man with bright brown eyes, a dark and somewhat ragged beard, close cropped hair, a prominent, bony forehead and large, coarsely shaped, thin ears oddly set upon his head. He habitually wore a dark overcoat, of which the collar was generally turned up on one side and not on the other. Judging from the appearance of his strong shoes he had always been walking a long distance over bad roads, and when it had rained within the week his trousers were generally bespattered with mud to a considerable height above
the heel. He habitually carried an extinguished cigar between his teeth of which he chewed the thin black end uneasily. Orsino fancied that he might be about eight and twenty years old, and was not altogether displeased with his appearance. He was not at all like the majority of his kind, who, in Rome at least, usually affect a scrupulous dandyism of attire and an uncommon refinement of manner. Whatever Contini’s faults might prove to be, Orsino did not believe that they would turn out to be those of idleness or vanity. How far he was right in his judgment will appear before long, but he conceived his partner to be gifted, frank, enthusiastic and careless of outward forms.

  As for the architect himself, he surveyed Orsino with a sort of sympathetic curiosity which the latter would have thought unpleasantly familiar if he had understood it. Contini had never spoken before with any more exalted personage than Del Ferice, and he studied the young aristocrat as though he were a being from another world. He hesitated some time as to the proper mode of addressing him and at last decided to call him “Signor Principe.” Orsino seemed quite satisfied with this, and the architect was inwardly pleased when the young man said “Signor Contini” instead of Contini alone. It was quite clear that Del Ferice had already acquainted him with all the details of the situation, for he seemed to understand all the documents at a glance, picking out and examining the important clauses with unfailing acuteness, and pointing with his finger to the place where Orsino was to sign his name.

  At the end of the interview Orsino shook hands with Del Ferice and thanked him warmly for his kindness, after which, he and his partner went out together. They stood side by side upon the pavement for a few seconds, each wondering what the other was going to say.

  “Perhaps we had better go and look at the house, Signor Principe,” observed Contini, in the midst of an ineffectual effort to light the stump of his cigar.

  “I think so, too,” answered Orsino, realising that since he had acquired the property it would be as well to know how it looked. “You see I have trusted my adviser entirely in the matter, and I am ashamed to say I do not know where the house is.”

  Andrea Contini looked at him curiously.

  “This is the first time that you have had anything to do with business of this kind, Signor Principe,” he observed. “You have fallen into good hands.”

  “Yours?” inquired Orsino, a little stiffly.

  “No. I mean that Count Del Ferice is a good adviser in this matter.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I am sure of it,” said Contini with conviction. “It would be a great surprise to me if we failed to make a handsome profit by this contract.”

  “There is luck and ill-luck in everything,” answered Orsino, signalling to a passing cab.

  The two men exchanged few words as they drove up to the new quarter in the direction indicated to the driver by Contini. The cab entered a sort of broad lane, the sketch of a future street, rough with the unrolled metalling of broken stones, the space set apart for the pavement being an uneven path of trodden brown earth. Here and there tall detached houses rose out of the wilderness, mostly covered by scaffoldings and swarming with workmen, but hideous where so far finished as to be visible in all the isolation of their six-storied nakedness. A strong smell of lime, wet earth and damp masonry was blown into Orsino’s nostrils by the scirocco wind. Contini stopped the cab before an unpromising and deserted erection of poles, boards and tattered matting.

  “This is our house,” he said, getting out and immediately making another attempt to light his cigar.

  “May I offer you a cigarette?” asked Orsino, holding out his case.

  Contini touched his hat, bowed a little awkwardly and took one of the cigarettes, which he immediately transferred to his coat pocket.

  “If you will allow me I will smoke it by and by,” he said. “I have not finished my cigar.”

  Orsino stood on the slippery ground beside the stones and contemplated his purchase. All at once his heart sank and he felt a profound disgust for everything within the range of his vision. He was suddenly aware of his own total and hopeless ignorance of everything connected with building, theoretical or practical. The sight of the stiff, angular scaffoldings, draped with torn straw mattings that flapped fantastically in the south-east wind, the apparent absence of anything like a real house behind them, the blades of grass sprouting abundantly about the foot of each pole and covering the heaps of brown pozzolana earth prepared for making mortar, even the detail of a broken wooden hod before the boarded entrance — all these things contributed at once to increase his dismay and to fill him with a bitter sense of inevitable failure. He found nothing to say, as he stood with his hands in his pockets staring at the general desolation, but he understood for the first time why women cry for disappointment. And moreover, this desolation was his own peculiar property, by deed of purchase, and he could not get rid of it.

  Meanwhile Andrea Contini stood beside him, examining the scaffoldings with his bright brown eyes, in no way disconcerted by the prospect.

  “Shall we go in?” he asked at last.

  “Do unfinished houses always look like this?” inquired Orsino, in a hopeless tone, without noticing his companion’s proposition.

  “Not always,” answered Contini cheerfully. “It depends upon the amount of work that has been done, and upon other things. Sometimes the foundations sink and the buildings collapse.”

  “Are you sure nothing of the kind has happened here?” asked Orsino with increasing anxiety.

  “I have been several times to look at it since the baker died and I have not noticed any cracks yet,” answered the architect, whose coolness seemed almost exasperating.

  “I suppose you understand these things, Signor Contini?”

  Contini laughed, and felt in his pockets for a crumpled paper box of wax-lights.

  “It is my profession,” he answered. “And then, I built this house from the foundations. If you will come in, Signor Principe, I will show you how solidly the work is done.”

  He took a key from his pocket and thrust it into a hole in the boarding, which latter proved to be a rough door and opened noisily upon rusty hinges. Orsino followed him in silence. To the young man’s inexperienced eye the interior of the building was even more depressing than the outside. It smelt like a vault, and a dim grey light entered the square apertures from the curtained scaffoldings without, just sufficient to help one to find a way through the heaps of rubbish that covered the unpaved floors. Contini explained rapidly and concisely the arrangement of the rooms, calling one cave familiarly a dining-room and another a “conjugal bedroom,” as he expressed it, and expatiating upon the facilities of communication which he himself had carefully planned. Orsino listened in silence and followed his guide patiently from place to place, in and out of dark passages and up flights of stairs as yet unguarded by any rail, until they emerged upon a sort of flat terrace intersected by low walls, which was indeed another floor and above which another story and a garret were yet to be built to complete the house. Orsino looked gloomily about him, lighted a cigarette and sat down upon a bit of masonry.

  “To me, it looks very like failure,” he remarked. “But I suppose there is something in it.”

  “It will not look like failure next month,” said Contini carelessly. “Another story is soon built, and then the attic, and then, if you like, a Gothic roof and a turret at one corner. That always attracts buyers first and respectable lodgers afterwards.”

  “Let us have a turret, by all means,” answered Orsino, as though his tailor had proposed to put an extra button on the cuff of his coat. “But how in the world are you going to begin? Everything looks to me as though it were falling to pieces.”

  “Leave all that to me, Signor Principe. We will begin to-morrow. I have a good overseer and there are plenty of workmen to be had. We have material for a week at least, and paid for, excepting a few cartloads of lime. Come again in ten days and you will see something worth looking at.”

  “In te
n days? And what am I to do in the meantime?” asked Orsino, who fancied that he had found an occupation.

  Andrea Contini looked at him in some surprise, not understanding in the least what he meant.

  “I mean, am I to have nothing to do with the work?” asked Orsino.

  “Oh — as far as that goes, you will come every day, Signor Principe, if it amuses you, though as you are not a practical architect, your assistance is not needed until questions of taste have to be considered, such as the Gothic roof for instance. But there are the accounts to be kept, of course, and there is the business with the bank from week to week, office work of various kinds. That becomes naturally your department, as the practical superintendence of the building is mine, but you will of course leave it to the steward of the Signor Principe di Sant’ Ilario, who is a man of affairs.”

  “I will do nothing of the kind!” exclaimed Orsino. “I will do it myself. I will learn how it is done. I want occupation.”

  “What an extraordinary wish!” Andrea Contini opened his eyes in real astonishment.

  “Is it? You work. Why should not I?”

  “I must, and you need not, Signor Principe,” observed the architect. “But if you insist, then you had better get a clerk to explain the details to you at first.”

  “Do you not understand them? Can you not teach me?” asked Orsino, displeased with the idea of employing a third person.

  “Oh yes — I have been a clerk myself. I should be too much honoured but — the fact is, my spare time—”

  He hesitated and seemed reluctant to explain.

  “What do you do with your spare time?” asked Orsino, suspecting some love affair.

  “The fact is — I play a second violin at one of the theatres — and I give lessons on the mandolin, and sometimes I do copying work for my uncle who is a clerk in the Treasury. You see, he is old, and his eyes are not as good as they were.”