Baron Volterra introduced Marino Malipieri to the two ladies. The guest
had come punctually, for the Baron had looked at his watch a moment
before he was announced, and it was precisely eight o'clock.
Malipieri bowed to the Baroness, who held out her hand cordially, and
then to Sabina.
"Donna Sabina Conti," said the Baron with extreme distinctness, in
order that his guest should be quite sure of the young girl's identity.
Sabina looked down modestly, as the nuns had told her to do when a
young man was introduced to her. At the same moment Malipieri's eyes
turned quietly and quickly to the Baron, and a look of intelligence
passed between the two men. Malipieri understood that Sabina was one of
the family in whose former palace he was living. Then he glanced again
at the young girl for one moment, before making a commonplace remark to
the Baroness, and after that Sabina felt that she was at liberty to
look at him.
She saw a very dark man of average height, with short black hair that
grew rather far back from his very white forehead, and wearing a
closely clipped black beard and moustache which did not by any means
hide the firm lines of the mouth and chin. From the strongly marked
eyebrows downward his face was almost of the colour of newly cast
bronze, and the dusky hue contrasted oddly with the clear whiteness of
his forehead. He was evidently a man who had lately been living much
out of doors under a burning sun. Sabina thought that his very bright
black eyes and boldly curved features suggested a young hawk, and he
had a look of compact strength and a way of moving which betrayed both
great energy and extreme quickness.
But there was something more, which Sabina recognized at the first
glance. She felt instantly that he was not like the Baron and his wife;
that he belonged in some way to the same variety of humanity as
herself; that she would understand him when he spoke, that she would
often feel intuitively what he was going to say next, and that he would
understand her.
She listened while he talked to the Baroness. He had a slight Venetian
accent, but his voice had not the soft Venetian ring. It was a little
veiled, and though not at all loud it was somewhat harsh. Sabina did
not dislike the manly tone, though it was not musical, nor the Venetian
pronunciation, although that was unfamiliar. In countries like Italy
and Germany, which have had many centres and many historical capital
cities, almost all educated people speak with the accents of their
several origins, and are rather tenacious of the habit than anxious to
get rid of it, generally maintaining that their own pronunciation is
the right one.
"Signor Malipieri," said the Baron to Sabina, as they went in to
dinner, "is the celebrated archaeologist."
"Yes," Sabina answered, as if she knew all about him, though she had
never heard him mentioned.
Malipieri probably overheard the Baron's speech, but he took no notice
of it. At dinner, he seemed inclined to be silent. The Baron asked him
questions about his discoveries, to which he gave rather short answers,
but Sabina gathered that he had found something extraordinary in
Carthage. She did not know where Carthage was, and did not like to ask,
but she remembered that Marius had sat there among some ruins. Perhaps
Malipieri had found his bones, for no one had ever told her that Marius
did not continue to sit among the ruins to his dying day. She connected
him vaguely with AEneas and another person called Regulus. It was all
rather uncertain.
What she saw clearly was that the Baron wished to make Malipieri feel
at his ease, but that Malipieri's idea of being at his ease was
certainly not founded on a wish to talk about himself. So the
conversation languished for some time.
The Baroness, who knew about as much about Carthage as Sabina, made a
few disconnected remarks, interspersed with laudatory allusions to the
young man's immense learning, for she wished to please her husband,
though she had not the slightest idea why Malipieri was asked to
dinner. Finding that he was not perceptibly flattered by what she said,
she began to talk about the Venetian aristocracy, for she knew that his
name was historical, and she recognized in him at once the
characteristics of the nobility she worshipped. Malipieri smiled
politely, and in answer to a direct question admitted that his mother
had been a Gradenigo.
The Baroness was delighted at this information.
"To think," she said, "that by a mere accident you and Donna Sabina
should meet here, the descendants of two of the oldest families of the
Italian aristocracy!"
"I am a republican," observed Malipieri quietly.
"You!" cried the Baroness in amazement. "You, the offspring of such
races as the Malipieri and the Gradenigo a republican, a socialist, an
anarchist!"
"There is a difference," said Malipieri with a smile. "A republican is
not an anarchist!"
"I can never believe it," answered the Baroness solemnly.
She ate a few green peas and shook her head.
"I went to Carthage because I was condemned to three years' confinement
in prison," replied Malipieri with calm.
"Prison!" exclaimed the Baroness in horror, and she looked at her
husband, mutely asking why in the world he had brought a convict to
their table.
The Baron smiled benignly, as he disposed of an ample mouthful of green
peas, before he spoke.
"Signor Malipieri," he said, when he had swallowed the last one,
"founded and edited a republican newspaper in the north of Italy."
"And you were sent to prison for that?" asked Sabina with indignation.
"It is one thing to send a man to prison," said Malipieri. "It is
another to make him go there. I escaped to Switzerland, and I came back
to Italy quite lately, after the amnesty."
"I am amazed!" The Baroness looked at the servants timidly, as if she
expected the butler and the footman to express their disapprobation of
the guest.
"I have left politics for the present," Malipieri replied, looking at
Sabina and smiling.
"Of course!" cried the Baroness. "But--" she stopped short.
"My wife," said the financier with a grin, "is afraid you have dynamite
about you."
"How absurd!" The Baroness felt that she was ridiculous. "But I do not
understand how you can be friends," she added, glancing from her
husband to Malipieri.
"We are at least on good terms of acquaintance," said the younger man a
little markedly.
Sabina liked the speech and the way in which it was spoken.
"We have a common ground for it in our interest in antiquities. Is it
not true, Signer Malipieri?"
The Baron looked at him and smiled again, as if there were a secret
between them, and Malipieri glanced at Sabina.
"It is quite true," he said gravely. "The Baron has read all I have
written about Carthage."
Volterra possessed a sort of rough social tact, together with the
native astuteness and great knowledge of men which had made him rich
and a Senator. He suddenly became voluble and led the conversation in a
new direction, which it followed till the end of dinner.
Several people came in afterwards, as often happened, before the coffee
was taken away. They were chiefly men in politics, and two of them
brought their wives with them. They were not the sort of guests whom
the Baroness preferred, for they were not by any means all noble
Romans, but they were of importance to her husband and she took great
pains to make them welcome. To one she offered his favourite liqueur,
which happened to be a Sicilian ratafia; for another she made the Baron
send for some of those horribly coarse black cigars known as Tuscans,
which some Italians prefer to anything else; for a third, she ordered
fresh coffee to be especially made. She took endless trouble.
Malipieri seemed to know none of the guests, and he took advantage of
the Baroness's preoccupation for their comforts to sit down by Sabina.
He did not look at her, and she thought he looked bored, as he sat a
moment in silence. Then a thin deputy with a magnificent forehead and
thick grey hair began to hold forth on the subject of a projected
divorce law and the guests gathered round him. Sabina had never heard
of Sydney Smith, but she had a suspicion that nobody could be as great
as the speaker looked. While she was thinking of this, Malipieri spoke
to her in a low voice.
"I suppose that you are stopping in the house," he said.
"Yes."
Sabina turned her eyes a little, but did not look straight at him. She
saw, however, that he was still watching the people in the room, and
still looked bored, and she was quite unprepared for what followed.
"Are the affairs of your family finally settled?" he enquired, without
changing his tone.
Sabina was so much surprised that she waited a moment before answering.
Her first instinct was to ask him stiffly why he put such a question,
and she would have replied to it in that way if it had come from any
other guest in the room; but she changed her mind almost instantly.
"No one has told me anything," she said simply, in a low voice.
Malipieri turned his head a little with a quick movement, and clasped
his brown hands over one knee.
"You know nothing?" he asked. "Nothing whatever about the matter?"
"Nothing."
He bit his lip as if he were indignant, and were repressing an
exclamation.
"No one has written to me--for a long time," Sabina said, after a
moment.
She had been on the point of saying that she had never received a line
from any member of her family since the crash, but that seemed to sound
like a confidence, and what she really said was quite true.
"Has not the Senator told you anything either?" Malipieri asked.
"No. I suppose he does not like to speak about our misfortunes before
me."
"Have you, I mean you yourself, any interest in the Palazzo Conti now?
Can you tell me that?"
"I know nothing--nothing!" Sabina repeated the word with a slight
tremor, for just then she felt her position more keenly than ever
before. "Why do you ask?"
She could not help putting the question which rose to her lips the
second time, but there was no coldness in her voice. She was very
lonely, and she felt that Malipieri was speaking from some honourable
motive.
"I am living in the palace," Malipieri answered.
Sabina looked up quickly, with an expression of interest in her pale
young face. The thought that the man beside her was living in her old
home was like a bond of acquaintance.
"Really?" she cried. "In which part of the house?"
"Do not seem interested, please," said Malipieri, suddenly looking very
bored again. "If you do, we shall not be allowed to talk. I am living
in the little apartment on the intermediate story. They tell me that a
chaplain once lived there."
"I know where it is," answered Sabina, "but I was never in the rooms.
They used to be shut up, I think."
The deputy who was haranguing on the subject of divorce seemed to be
approaching his peroration. His great voice filled the large room with
incessant noise, and everybody seemed anxiously waiting for a chance to
contradict him. Malipieri was in no danger of being overheard.
"If it happens," he said, "that I wish to communicate with you on a
matter of importance, how can I reach you best?"
He asked the question quite naturally, as if he had known Sabina all
his life. At first she was so much surprised that she could hardly
speak.
"I--I do not know," she stammered.
She had never received letters from any one but her own family or her
school friends, and a very faint colour rose in her pale cheek.
Malipieri looked more bored and weary than ever.
"It may be absolutely necessary for me to write to you before long," he
said. "Shall I write by post?"
Sabina hesitated.
"Is there no one in all Rome whom you can trust to bring a note and
give it to you when you are alone?"
"There is Signor Sassi," Sabina answered almost instinctively. "But
really, why should you--"
"How can I find Sassi?" asked Malipieri, interrupting the question.
"Who is he?"
"He was our agent. Is he gone? The old porter will know where to find
him. I think he lived near the palace. But perhaps the porter has been
sent away too."
"He is still there. Have you been made to sign any papers since you
have been here?"
"No."
"Will you promise me something?"
Sabina could not understand how it was that a man who had been a
stranger two hours earlier was speaking to her almost as if he were an
intimate friend, still less why she no longer felt that she ought to
check him and assert her dignity.
"If it is right, I will promise it," she answered quietly, and looking
down.
"It is right," he said. "If the Senator, or any one else asks you to
sign a paper, will you promise to consult me before doing so?"
"But I hardly know you!" she laughed, a little shyly.
"It is of no use to waste time and trouble on social conventions," said
Malipieri. "If you do not trust me, can you trust this Sassi?"
"Oh yes!"
"Then consult him. I will make him consult me, and it will be the
same--and ten times more conventional and proper."
He smiled.
"Will you promise that?" he asked.
"Yes. I promise. But I wish you would tell me more."
"I wish I could. But I hardly know you!" He smiled again, as he
repeated her own words.
"Never mind that! Tell me!"
"No. I cannot. If there is trouble I will tell you everything--through
Sassi, of course."
Sabina laughed, and all at once she felt as if she had known him for
years.
At that moment the deputy finished his speech, and all who had anything
to say in answer said it at once, in order to lose no time, while the
speaker relighted his villainous black cigar, puffing tremendously.
The Baroness suddenly remembered Sabina and Malipieri in the corner,
and after screaming out several incoherent phrases, which might have
been taken for applause or dissent and were almost lost in the general
din, she moved across the room.
"It is atrocious!" she cried, as she reached Sabina. "I hope you have
not heard a word he said!"
"When a man has such a voice as that, it is impossible not to hear
him," said Malipieri, rising and answering before Sabina had time to
speak.
Sabina rose, too, rather reluctantly.
"And of course you agreed with everything he said," the Baroness
replied. "All anarchists do!"
"I beg your pardon. I do not agree with him at all, and I am really not
an anarchist."
He smiled politely, and Sabina noticed with an unaccountable little
thrill of satisfaction that the smile was quite different from the one
she had seen in his face more than once while they had been talking
together. As for the deputy's discourse, she had not heard a word of it.
The Baroness sat down on the sofa, and Sabina slipped away. She was not
supposed to be in society yet, as she was not quite eighteen, and there
was certainly no reason why she should stay in the drawing-room that
evening, while there were many reasons why she should go away. The
Baroness breathed an audible sigh of relief when she was gone, for it
was never possible to predict what some excited politician might say
before her in the heat of argument.
In the silence of her own room she sat down to think over the
unexpected events of the evening. Very young girls love to look forward
to the moment when they shall be able to "think" of what has happened,
after they have met men they are inclined to like, and who interest
them. But when the time really comes they hardly ever think at all.
They see pictures, they hear voices, they feel again what they have
felt, they laugh, they shed tears all alone, and they believe they are
thinking, or even reasoning. Their little joys come back to them, the
little triumphs of their vanity, and also all the little hurts their
sensitiveness has suffered, and which men do not often guess and still
more rarely understand.
There must be some original reason why all boys call girls silly, and
all girls think boys stupid. It must be part of the first manifestation
of that enormous difference which exists between the point of view of
men and women in after life.
Women are, in a sense, the embodiment of practice, while men are the
representatives of theory. In practice, in a race for life, the runner
who jumps everything in his way is always right, unless he breaks his
neck. In theory, he is as likely to break his neck at the first jump as
at the second, and the chances of his coming to grief increase quickly,
always in theory, as he grows tired. So theory says that it is safer
never to jump at all, but to go round through the gates, or wade
ignominiously through the water. Women jump; men go round. The
difference is everything. Women believe in what often succeeds in
practice, and they take all risks and sometimes come down with a crash.
Men theorize about danger, make elaborate calculations to avoid it and
occasionally stick in the mud. When women fall at a stone wall they
scream, when men are stuck in a bog they swear. The difference is
fundamental. In nine cases out of ten it is the woman who enjoys the
ecstatic delight of saying "I told you so," and there are plenty of
women who would ask no greater joy in paradise than to say so to their
husbands for ever and ever. Indeed, eternal reward and punishment could
thus be at once combined and distributed in a simple manner.
Sabina took her first fence that evening, for when she put out her
candle she was sure that Malipieri was already her friend, and that she
could trust him in any emergency. Moreover, though she would not have
acknowledged it, she inwardly hoped that some emergency might not be
far in the future.
But Malipieri walked all the way from the Via Ludovisi to the Palazzo
Conti, which is more than a mile, without noticing that he had
forgotten to light the cigar he had taken out on leaving Volterra's
house.