Cosmo stuck his head out through the door. Absolute silence reigned in the well of the stairs. A woman in black, on her knees beside a pail of water and scrubbing the floor of the corridor, looked up at him. Cosmo drew his head in. She was a pitiful hag. … He was sure of a gracious reception, of course. He was also sure of meeting a lot of people of all sorts. He wondered what sort of society she received. Everybody, no doubt; Austrians, Italians, French; all the triumphant reactionaries, all the depressed heads bobbing up again after the storm, venomous, revengeful, oppressive, odious. What the devil had become of Spire?
The long window right down to the floor had remained open. Suddenly the sound of a drum reached Cosmo’s ears. Stepping out on a balcony, he saw a company of infantry in white coats marching across a distant corner of the piazza. Austrians! Yes, their time had come. A voice behind him said: “The messenger is back, sir.” Cosmo stepped in and saw Spire empty-handed. “There’s a verbal answer, sir.”
“What is it? You haven’t spoken with the messenger, have you?”
“I have seen him, sir, but I got the message through the innkeeper. He speaks a little English. The lady would be glad to see you as soon after the fourth hour as possible. They have their own way of reckoning time, but as far as I can understand it, sir, it means something between ten and eleven. At any rate, it’s what Cantelucci says, and he can tell the time by an English watch all right.”
“Shut the window, Spire. I don’t want to hear that drum. Yes, it would mean as soon after ten as possible, but why has the fellow been so long? Is it very far?”
“No, sir, I think it’s quite close, really. He was so long because he has been trying to give your note to the lady herself and there was some difficulty about it. That innkeeper tells me that instead of handing it to the porter the fellow got in through the kitchen door and was dodging about a passage for some time.”
Cosmo looked fixedly at Spire, whose face expressed no opinion whatever on those proceedings.
“Dodging in a passage,” repeated Cosmo. “But did he see the lady herself?”
“Apparently not, sir. Cantelucci slanged him for being so long, but he said he thought he was acting for the best. He would have been there yet if a black woman hadn’t come along and snatched the letter out of his hand. It was she too who brought down the message from the lady.”
“Oh, yes,” said Cosmo. “Don’t you remember there was a black maid?”
“Yes, sir, I remember perfectly well, in the housekeeper’s room. She learned to talk English very quickly, but she was a little spitfire.”
“Was she?”
Spire busied himself in brushing Cosmo’s hat while he remarked in an explanatory tone: “She could never understand a joke, sir.”
He attended Cosmo into the hall, where Cantelucci with his usual intense gravity and a deep bow asked whether the signore would want a carriage. Cosmo, however, preferred walking; therefore the youth who had taken Cosmo’s note was directed to guide the English milord to the Palazzo Brignoli. He had a tousled head of hair and wore a jacket that might have belonged at one time to a hussar’s uniform, with all its trimmings and buttons cut off and a ragged hole in each elbow. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes rolled expressively, and his smile discovered a set of very sound teeth.
“Si, si, Palazzo Rosso,” he said.
Cantelucci explained in his imperturbable and solemn manner that the populace gave that name to the Palace on account of the red granite of which it was built, and the thin-faced lad, bounding forward, preceded Cosmo across the piazza, looking over his shoulder from time to time. Cosmo’s doubts and apprehensions disappeared before the inevitable charm and splendour of the town. At the corner of a narrow lane and a small open space with some trees growing in the centre of it the ragged guide stopped and, pointing at a dark and magnificent building, left him alone. Massive and sombre, ornate and heavy, with a dark aspect and enormous carvings, the Palace where little Adèle was living had to Cosmo’s eye the air of a sumptuous prison. The portal with its heavy iron-studded doors was reached by a flight of shallow steps, a segment of a wide circle, guarded on each side by an enormous griffin seated, tensely alert with wing and claw, on a high and narrow pedestal. On ascending the steps Cosmo discovered that the heavy door was ajar, just enough to let him slip in; and, at once, from the gloom of the arched passage he saw the inner sunshine on the oleanders of the inner court, flagged with marble, from whence a broad staircase ascended to the colonnaded gallery of the first floor.
Cosmo had seen no porter or other living soul, and there was no sound of any sort, no appearance of movement anywhere. Even the leaves of the oleanders kept perfectly still. In the light of the morning a slanting shadow cut the western wall into two triangles, one dark, the other glowing as with a red fire; and Cosmo remained for a moment spellbound by a strong impression of empty grandeur, magnificence, and solitude.
A voice behind him, issuing from somewhere
