Signor Pompeo Sassi sat in his dingy office and tore his hair, in the
good old literal Italian sense. His elbows rested on the shabby black
oilcloth glued to the table, and his long knotted fingers twisted his
few remaining locks, on each side of his head, in a way that was
painful to see. From time to time he desisted for an instant, and held
up his open hands, the fingers quivering with emotion, and his watery
eyes were turned upwards, too, as if directing an unspoken prayer to
the dusty rafters of the ceiling. The furrows had deepened of late in
his respectable, trust-inspiring face, and he was as thin as a skeleton
in leather.
His heart was broken. On the big sheet of thick hand-made paper, that
lay on the desk, scribbled over with rough calculations in violet ink,
there were a number of trial impressions of the old stamp he had once
been so proud to use. It bore a rough representation of the Conti
eagle, encircled by the legend: "Eccellentissima Casa Conti." When his
eyes fell upon it, they filled with tears. The Most Excellent House of
Conti had come to a pitiful end, and it had been Pompeo Sassi's unhappy
fate to see its fall. Judging from his looks, he was not to survive the
catastrophe very long.
He loved the family, and yet he disliked every member of it personally
except Sabina. He loved the "Eccellentissima Casa," the checky eagle,
the Velasquez portraits and his dingy office, but he never had spoken
with the Princess, her son, his wife, or his sister Clementina, without
a distinct feeling of disapproving aversion. The old Prince had been
different. In him Sassi had still been able to respect those
traditional Ciceronian virtues which were inculcated with terrific
severity in the Roman youth of fifty years ago. But the Prince had died
prematurely at the age of fifty, and with him the Ciceronian traditions
had ended in Casa Conti, and their place had been taken by the caprices
of the big, healthy, indolent, extravagant Polish woman, by the
miserable weaknesses of a degenerate heir, and the fanatic religious
practices of Donna Clementina.
Sassi was sure that they all three hated him or despised him, or both;
yet they could not spare him. For different reasons, they all needed
money, and they had long been used to believing that no one but Sassi
could get it for them, since no one else knew how deeply the family was
involved. He always made difficulties, he protested, he wrung his
hands, he warned, he implored; but caprice, vice and devotion always
overcame his objections, and year after year the exhausted estate was
squeezed and pressed and mortgaged and sold, till it had yielded the
uttermost farthing.
Then, one day, the whole organization of Casa Conti stood still; the
unpaid servants fled, the unpaid tradesmen refused to trust any longer,
the unpaid holders of mortgages foreclosed, the Princess departed to
Poland, the Prince slunk away to live on what was left of his wife's
small estate, Donna Clementina buried herself in a convent to which she
had given immense sums, the Conti palace was for sale, and Pompeo Sassi
sat alone in his office, tearing his hair, while the old porter sat in
his lodge downstairs peeling potatoes.
It was not for himself that the old steward of the estate was in danger
of being totally bald. He had done for himself what others would not
allow him to do for them, a proceeding which affords some virtuous
people boundless satisfaction, though it procured him none at all. He
was provided for in his old age. During more than thirty years he had
saved and scraped and invested and added to the little sum of money
left him by his father, an honest old notary of the old school, until
he possessed what was a very comfortable competence for a childless old
man. He had a small house of his own near the Pantheon, in which he
occupied two rooms, letting the rest, and he had a hundred thousand
francs in government bonds, besides a few acres of vineyard on the
slope of Monte Mario.
More than once, in the sincerity of his devotion to the family he
served, he had thought of sacrificing all he possessed in an attempt to
stave off final ruin; but a very little reflection had convinced him
that all he had would be a mere drop in the flood of extravagance, and
would forthwith disappear with the rest into the bottomless pit of debt.
Even that generous temptation was gone now. The house having collapsed,
its members appeared to him only in their true natures, a
good-for-nothing young man, tainted with a mortal disease, a foolish
mother, a devout spinster threatened with religious mania, and the last
descendant of the great old race, one little girl-child not likely to
live, and perhaps better dead. In their several ways they had treated
him as the contemptible instrument of their inclinations; they were
gone from his life and he was glad of it, when he thought of each one
separately. Yet, collectively, he wished them all in the palace again,
even a month ago, even on the day before the exodus; good, bad,
indifferent, no matter what, they had been Casa Conti still, to the
end, the family he had served faithfully, honestly and hopelessly for
upwards of a third of a century. That might seem to be inconsistent,
but it was the only consistency he had ever known, and it was loyalty,
of a kind.
But there was one whom he wished back for her own sake; there was Donna
Sabina. When he thought of her, his hands fell from his head at last,
and folded themselves over the scrawled figures on the big sheet of
paper, and he looked long and steadily at them, without seeing them at
all.
He wondered what would become of her. He had seen her on the last day
and he should never forget it. Before going away with the Baroness
Volterra she had found her way to his dark office, and had stood a few
moments before the shabby old table, with a small package in her hand.
He could see the slight figure still, when he closed his eyes, and her
misty hair against the cold light of the window. She had come to ask
him if he would bury her dead canary, somewhere under the sky where
there was grass and it would not be disturbed. Where could she bury it,
down in the heart of Rome? She had wrapped it in a bit of pink satin
and had laid it in a little brown cardboard box which had been full of
chocolates from Ronzi and Singer's in Piazza Colonna. She pushed back
the lid a finger's breadth and he saw the pink satin for a second. She
laid the box before him. Would he please do what she asked? Very
timidly she slipped a simple little ring off her finger, one of those
gold ones with the sacred monogram which foreigners insist upon calling
"Pax." She said she had bought it with her own money, and could give it
away. She wished to give it to him. He protested, refused, but the
fathomless violet eyes gazed into his very reproachfully. He had always
been so kind to her, she said; would he not keep the little ring to
remember her by?
So he had taken it, and that same day he had gone all the way to his
lonely vineyard on Monte Mario carrying the chocolate box in his hands,
and he had buried it under the chestnut-tree at the upper end, where
there was some grass; and the breeze always blew there on summer
afternoons. Then he had sat on the roots of the tree for a while,
looking towards Rome.
He would have plenty of time to go to the vineyard now, for in a little
while he should have nothing to do, as the palace was going to be sold.
When he got home, he wrote a formal letter to Donna Sabina, informing
her that he had fulfilled the commands she had deigned to give him, and
ventured to subscribe himself her Excellency's most devoted, humble and
grateful servant, as indeed he was, from the bottom of his heart. In
twenty-four hours he received a note from her, written in a delicate
tall hand, not without character, on paper bearing the address of Baron
Volterra's house in Via Ludovisi. She thanked him in few words, warmly
and simply. He read the note several times and then put it away in an
old-fashioned brass-bound secretary, of which he always kept the key in
his pocket. It was the only word of thanks he had received from any
living member of the Conti family.
A month had passed since then, but as he sat at his desk it was all as
vivid as if it had happened yesterday.
He was in his office to-day because he had received notice that some
one was coming to look at the palace with a view to buying it, and he
considered it his duty to show it to possible purchasers. Baron
Volterra had sent him word in the morning, and he had come early. Then,
as he sat in his old place, the ruin of the great house had enacted
itself again before his eyes, so vividly that the pain had been almost
physical. And then, he had fallen to thinking of Sabina, and wondering
what was to become of her. That was the history of one half-hour in his
life, on a May afternoon; but the whole man was in it, what he had been
thirty years earlier, and a month ago, what he was to-day and what he
would be to the end of his life.