“Excellent. What is it?”
“God knows. Let us call it Cantelucci’s gratitude. Generous stuff, this, to wash down those dishes with. Gluttony is an odious vice, but an ambition to dine well is about the only one which can be indulged at no cost to one’s fellow men.”
“It didn’t strike me,” murmured Cosmo absently, for he was just then asking himself why he didn’t like this pleasant companion, and had just come to the conclusion that it was because of his indecisive expression wavering between peevishness and jocularity with something else in addition, as it were, in the background of his handsome, neat, and comfortable person. Something that was not aggressive nor yet exactly impudent. He wondered at his mistrust of the personality which certainly was very communicative but apparently not inquisitive. At that moment he heard himself addressed with a direct inquiry.
“You passed, of course, through Paris?”
“Yes, and Switzerland.”
“Oh, Paris. I wonder what it looks like now. Full of English people, of course. Let’s see, how many years is it since I was last there? Ha, lots of heads rolled off very noble shoulders since. Well, I am trying to make my way there. Curious times. I have found some letters here. Duke of Wellington very much disliked, what? His nod is insupportable, eh?”
“I have just had a sight of the Duke two or three times,” said Cosmo. “I can assure you that everybody is treating him with the greatest respect.”
“Of course, of course. All the same I bet that all these foreigners are chuckling to themselves at having finished the job without him.”
“They needn’t be so pleased with themselves,” said Cosmo scornfully. “The mere weight of their numbers …”
“Yes. It was more like a migration of armed tribes than an army. They will boast of their success all the same. There is no saying what the Duke himself thinks. … I wonder if he could have beaten the other in a fair fight. Well, that will never be known now.”
Cosmo had a sudden sense of an epical tale with a doubtful conclusion. He made no answer. Cantelucci had come and gone solemnly, self-contained, with the usual two ceremonial bows. As he retreated he put out all the candles on the central table and became lost to view. From the illuminated spot at which he sat, Cosmo’s eyes met only the shadows of the long refectory-like room with its lofty windows closely shuttered so that they looked like a row of niches for statues. Yet the murmur of the piazza full of people stole faintly into his ear. Cosmo had the recollection of the vast expanse of flagstones enclosed by the shadowy and palatial masses gleaming with lights here and there under the night sky thick with stars and perfectly cloudless.
“This is a very quiet inn,” he observed.
“It has that advantage certainly. The walls are fairly thick, as you can see. It’s an unfinished palace, I mean as to its internal decorations, which were going to be very splendid and even more costly than splendid. The owner of it, I mean the man who had it built, died of hunger in that hall out there.”
“Died of hunger?” repeated Cosmo.
“No doubt about it. It was during the siege of Genoa. You know the siege, surely?”
Cosmo recollected himself. “I was quite a child at the time,” he said.
The venerated client of Cantelucci cracked a walnut and then looked at Cosmo’s face.
“I should think you weren’t seven years old at the time,” he said in a judicial tone. “When I first came into Italy with the vaccine, you know, Sir Charles’s marriage was still being talked about in Florence. I remember it perfectly though it seems as if it had all happened in another world. Yes, indubitably he died of hunger like ten thousand other Genoese. He couldn’t go out to hunt for garbage with the populace or crawl out at night trying to gather nettles in the ditches outside the forts, and nobody would have known that he was dead for a month if one of the bombs out of a bomb-vessel with Admiral Keith’s blockading squadron hadn’t burst the door in. They found him at the foot of the stairs, and, they say, with a lot of gold pieces in his pockets. But nobody cared much for that. If it had been a lot of half-gnawed bones there would have been blood spilt, no doubt. For all I know there were or may be even now secret places full of gold in the thickness of these walls. However, the body was thrown into a corpse-cart and the authorities boarded the doorway. It remained boarded for years because the heirs didn’t care to have anything to do with that shell of a palace. I fancy that the last of them died in the snows of Russia. Cantelucci came along, and owing to a friendship with some sort of scribe in the Municipality he got permission to use the place for his hostelry. He told me that he found several half ducats in the corners of the hall when he took possession. I suppose they paid for the whitewash, for I can’t believe that Cantelucci had much money in his pockets.”
“Perhaps he found one of those secret hiding-places of which you spoke,” suggested Cosmo.
“What? Cantelucci? He never looked for any gold. He is too much in the clouds; but he has made us dine well in the palace of the starved man, hasn’t he? Sixteen years ago in Naples he was a Jacobin and a friend of the French, a rebel, a traitor to his king if you like—but he has a good memory, there is no denying that.”
“Is he a Neapolitan, then?” asked Cosmo. “I imagined they were of a different type.”
“God only knows. He was there and I didn’t ask him. He was a prisoner of the royalists, of the reactionaries. I was much younger then and perhaps more humane. Flesh and blood
