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The Heart of Rome

F >> Francis Marion Crawford >> The Heart of Rome




The Princess thought so too, as it turned out. Sabina took the visitor
to her mother's door, knocked, opened and then went away, still
pressing her dead canary to her bosom, and infinitely glad to be alone
with it at last.

There was confusion in the Princess Conti's bedroom, the amazing
confusion which boils up about an utterly careless woman of the great
world, if she be accidentally left without a maid for twenty-four
hours. It seemed as if everything the Princess possessed in the way of
clothes, necessary and unnecessary, had been torn from wardrobes and
chests of drawers by a cyclone and scattered in every direction, till
there was not space to move or sit down in a room which was thirty
feet square.

Princess Conti was a very stout woman of about the same age as her
visitor, but not resembling her in the least. She had been beautiful,
and still kept the dazzling complexion and magnificent eyes for which
she had been famous. It was her boast that she slept eight hours every
night, without waking, whatever happened, and she always advised
everybody to do the same, with an airy indifference to possibilities
which would have done credit to a doctor.

She was dressed, or rather wrapped, in a magnificent purple velvet
dressing-gown, trimmed with sable, and tied round her ample waist with
a silver cord; her rather scanty grey hair stood out about her head
like a cloud in a high wind; and her plump hands were encased in a
pair of old white gloves, which looked oddly out of place. She was
standing in the middle of the room, and she smiled calmly as the
Baroness entered. On a beautiful inlaid table beside her stood a
battered brass tray with an almost shapeless little brass coffee-pot,
a common earthenware cup, chipped at the edges, and three pieces of
doubtful-looking sugar in a tiny saucer, also of brass. The whole had
evidently been brought from a small cafe near by, which had long been
frequented by the servants from the palace.

Judging from her smile, the Princess seemed to think total ruin rather
an amusing incident. She had always complained that the Romans were
very dull; for she was not a Roman herself, but came of a very great
old Polish family, the members of which had been distinguished for
divers forms of amiable eccentricity during a couple of centuries.

She looked at the Baroness, and smiled pleasantly, showing her still
perfect teeth.

"I always said that this would happen," she observed. "I always told
my poor husband so."

As the Prince had been dead ten years, the Baroness thought that he
might not be wholly responsible for the ruin of his estate, but she
discreetly avoided the suggestion. She began to make a little apology
for her visit.

"But I am delighted to see you!" cried the Princess. "You can help me
to pack. You know I have not a single maid, not a woman in the house,
nor a man either. Those ridiculous servants fled last night as if we
had the plague!"

"So you are going out of town?" enquired the Baroness, laying down her
parasol.

"Of course. Clementina has decided to be a nun, and is going to the
convent this morning. So sensible of her, poor dear! It is true that
she has made up her mind to do it three or four times before now, but
the circumstances were different, and I hope this will be final. She
will be much happier."

The Princess stirred the muddy coffee in the chipped earthenware cup,
and then sipped it thoughtfully, sipped it again, and made a face.

"You see my breakfast," she said, and then laughed, as if the shabby
brass tray were a part of the train of amusing circumstances. "The
porter's wife went and got it at some dirty little cafe," she added.

"How dreadful!" exclaimed the Baroness, with more real sympathy in her
voice than she had yet shown.

"I assure you," the Princess answered serenely, "that I am glad to
have any coffee at all. I always told poor dear Paolo that it would
come to this."

She swallowed the rest of the coffee with a grimace. and set down the
cup. Then, with the most natural gesture in the world, she pushed the
tray a little way across the inlaid table, towards the Baroness, as
she would have pushed it towards her maid, and as if she wished the
thing taken away. She did it merely from force of habit, no doubt.

Baroness Volterra understood well enough, and for a moment she
affected not to see. The Princess had the blood of Polish kings in her
veins, mingled with that of several mediatized princes, but that was
no reason why she should treat a friend like a servant; especially as
the friend's husband practically owned the palace and its contents,
and had lent the money with which the high and mighty lady and her son
had finally ruined themselves. Yet so overpowering is the moral
domination of the born aristocrat over the born snob, that the
Baroness changed her mind, and humbly took the obnoxious tray away and
set it down on another table near the door.

"Thank you so much," said the Princess graciously. "It smells, you
know."

"Of course," answered the Baroness. "It is not coffee at all! It is
made of chicory and acorns."

"I do not know what it is made of," said the Princess, without
interest, "but it has an atrociously bad smell, and it has made a
green stain on my handkerchief."

She looked at the bit of transparently fine linen with which she had
touched her lips, and threw it under the table.

"And Sabina?" began the Baroness. "What shall you do with her?"

"I wish I knew! You see, my daughter-in-law has a little place
somewhere in the Maremma. It is an awful hole, I believe, and very
unhealthy, but we shall have to stay there for a few days. Then I
shall go to Poland and see my brother. I am sure he can arrange
everything at once, and we shall come back to Rome in the autumn, of
course, just as usual. Sassi told me only last week that two or three
millions would be enough. And what is that? My brother is so rich!"

The stout Princess shrugged her shoulders carelessly, as if a few
millions of francs more or less could really not be such a great
matter. Somebody had always found money for her to spend, and there
was no reason why obliging persons should not continue to do the same.
The Baroness showed no surprise, but wondered whether the Princess
might not have to lunch, and dine too, on some nauseous little mess
brought to her on a battered brass tray. It was quite possible that
she might not find five francs in her purse; it was equally possible
that she might find five thousand; the only thing quite sure was that
she had not taken the trouble to look, and did not care a straw.

"Can I be of any immediate use?" asked the Baroness with unnecessary
timidity. "Do you need ready money?"

"Ready money?" echoed the Princess with alacrity. "Of course I do! I
told you, Sassi says that two or three millions would be enough to go
on with."

"I did not mean that. I am afraid--"

"Oh!" ejaculated the Princess with a little disappointment. "Nothing
else would be of any use. Of course I have money for any little thing
I need. There is my purse. Do you mind looking? I know I had two or
three thousand francs the other day. There must be something left.
Please count it. I never can count right, you know."

The Baroness took up the mauve morocco pocket-book to which the
Princess pointed. It had a clasp in which a pretty sapphire was set;
she opened it and took out a few notes and silver coins, which she
counted.

"There are fifty-seven francs," she said.

"Is that all?" asked the Princess with supreme indifference. "How very
odd!"

"You can hardly leave Rome with so little," observed the Baroness.
"Will you not allow me to lend you five hundred? I happen to have a
five hundred franc note in my purse, for I was going to pay a bill on
my way home."

"Thanks," said the Princess. "That will save me the trouble of sending
for Sassi. He always bores me dreadfully with his figures. Thank you
very much."

"Not at all, dear friend," the Baroness answered. "It is a pleasure, I
assure you. But I had thought of asking if you would let Sabina come
and stay with me for a little while, until your affairs are more
settled."

"Oh, would you do that?" asked the Princess with something like
enthusiasm. "I really do not know what to do with the girl. Of course,
I could take her to Poland and marry her there, but she is so
peculiar, such a strange child, not at all like me. It really would be
immensely kind of you to take her, if your husband does not object."

"He will be delighted."

"Yes," acquiesced the Princess calmly. "You see," she continued in a
meditative tone, "if I sent her to stay with any of our cousins here,
I am sure they would ask her all sorts of questions about our affairs,
and she is so silly that she would blurt out everything she fancied
she knew, whether it were true or not--about my son and his wife, you
know, and then, the money questions. Poor Sabina! she has not a
particle of tact! It really would be good of you to take her. I shall
be so grateful."

"I will bring my maid to pack her things," suggested the Baroness.

"Yes. If she could only help me to pack mine too! Do you think she
would?"

"Of course!"

"You are really the kindest person in the world," said the Princess.
"I was quite in despair, when you came. Just look at those things!"

She pointed to the chairs and sofas, covered with clothes and dresses.

"But your boxes, where are they?" asked the Baroness.

"I have not the least idea! I sent the porter's wife to try and find
them, but she has never come back. She is so stupid, poor old thing!"

"I think I had better bring a couple of men-servants," said the
Baroness. "They may be of use. Should you like my carriage to take you
to the station? Anything I can do--"

The Princess stared, as if quite puzzled.

"Thanks, but we have plenty of horses," she said.

"Yes, but you said that all your servants had left last night. I
supposed the coachman and grooms were gone too."

"I daresay they are!" The Princess laughed. "Then we will go in cabs.
It will be very amusing. By the bye, I wonder whether those brutes of
men thought of leaving the poor horses anything to eat, and water! I
must really go and see. Poor beasts! They will be starving. Will you
come with me?"

She moved towards the door, really very much concerned, for she loved
horses.

"Will you go down like that?" asked the Baroness aghast, glancing at
the purple velvet dressing-gown, and noticing, as the Princess moved,
that her feet, on which she wore small kid slippers, were
stockingless.

"Why not? I shall not catch cold. I never do."

The Baroness would have given anything to be above caring whether any
one should ever see her, or not, on the stairs of her house in a
purple dressing-gown, without stockings and with her hair standing on
end; and she pondered on the ways of the aristocracy she adored,
especially as represented by her Excellency Marie-Sophie-Hedwige-
Zenaide-Honorine-Pia Rubomirska, Dowager Princess Conti. Ever
afterwards she associated purple velvet and bare feet with the idea of
financial catastrophe, knowing in her heart that even ruin would seem
bearable if it could bring her such magnificent indifference to the
details of commonplace existence.

At that moment, however, she felt that she was in the position of a
heaven-sent protectress to the Princess.

"No," she said firmly. "I will go myself to the stables, and the
porter shall feed the horses if there is no groom. You really must not
go downstairs looking like that!"

"Why not?" asked the Princess, surprised. "But of course, if you will
be so kind as to see whether the horses need anything, it is quite
useless for me to go myself. You will promise? I am sure they are
starving by this time."

The Baroness promised solemnly, and said that she would come back
within an hour, with her servants, to take away Sabina and to help the
Princess's preparations. In consideration of all she was doing the
Princess kissed her on both her sallow cheeks as she took her leave.
The Princess attached no importance at all to this mark of
affectionate esteem, but it pleased the Baroness very much.

Just as the latter was going away, the door opened suddenly, and a
weak-looking young man put in his head.

"Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, in a thin tone of distress, almost as if he
were going to cry.

He was nearly thirty years old, though he looked younger. He was thin,
and pale, with a muddy and spotted complexion, and his scanty black
hair grew far back on his poorly developed forehead. His eyes had a
look that was half startled, half false. Though he was carefully
dressed he had not shaved, because he could not shave himself and his
valet had departed with the rest of the servants. He was the
Princess's only son, himself the present Prince, and the heir of all
the Conti since the year eleven hundred.

"Mamma!"

"What is the matter, sweetheart?" asked the Princess, with ready
sympathy. "Your hands are quite cold! Are you ill?"

"The child! Something has happened to it--we do not know--it looks so
strange--its eyes are turned in and it is such a dreadful colour--do
come--"

But the Princess was already on her way, and he spoke the last words
as he ran after her. She turned her head as she went on.

"For heaven's sake send a doctor!" she cried to the Baroness, and in a
moment she was gone, with the weak young man close at her side.

The Baroness nodded quickly, and when all three reached the door she
left the two to go upstairs and ran down, with a tremendous puffing of
the invisible silk bellows.

"The Prince's little girl is very ill," she said, as she passed the
porter, who was now polishing the panes of glass in the door of his
lodge, because he had done the same thing every morning for twenty
years.

He almost dropped the dingy leather he was using, but before he could
answer, the cab passed out, bearing the Baroness on her errand.





CHAPTER II




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.





CHAPTER III




If Sabina had known what was before her when she got into the Baroness
Volterra's carriage and was driven up to the Via Ludovisi, followed by
a cab with her luggage, she would probably have begged leave to go
with her elder sister to the convent. Her mother would most likely
have refused the permission, and she would have been obliged to accept
the Volterras' hospitality after all, but she would have had the
satisfaction of having made an effort to keep her freedom before
entering into what she soon looked upon as slavery.

Her mother would have considered this another evidence of the folly
inherent in all the Conti family. Sabina lived in a luxurious house,
she was treated with consideration, she saw her friends, and desirable
young men saw her. What more could she wish?

All this was true. The Baroness was at great pains to make much of
her, and the Baron's manner to her was at once flattering, respectful
and paternal. During the first few days she had discovered that if she
accidentally expressed the smallest wish it was instantly fulfilled,
and this was so embarrassing that she had since taken endless pains
never to express any wish at all. Moreover not the slightest allusion
to the misfortunes of her family was ever made before her, and if she
was in total ignorance of the state of affairs, she was at least
spared the humiliation of hearing that the palace was for sale, and
might be sold any day, to any one who would pay the price asked.

From time to time the Baroness said she hoped that Sabina had good
news of her mother, but showed no curiosity in the matter, and the
girl always answered that she believed her mother to be quite well.
Indeed she did believe it, for she supposed that if the Princess were
ill some one would let her know. She wrote stiff little letters
herself, every Sunday morning, and addressed them to her uncle's place
in Poland; but no one ever took the least notice of these
conscientious communications, and she wondered why she sent them,
after all. It was a remnant of the sense of duty to her parents
instilled into her in the convent, and she could not help clinging to
it still, from habit.

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