To Win the Love He Sought Part 12

The little old man who had alighted from the cab, stood for a moment or two looking helplessly around, half surprised at what he saw, half disgusted. Such monotonous and undeviating ugliness was a thing which he had never dreamed of--certainly he had never encountered anything like it. Was it possible that he had made a mistake in the address? He drew a sc.r.a.p of paper from his pocket and consulted it again. The address was written there plainly enough--85, Eden Street, Camberwell. He was certainly in Eden Street, Camberwell, and the figures on the gate-post opposite him, worn and black with dirt, were unmistakably an eight and a five. With a little shudder he pushed open the gate, and walked through the narrow strip of untidy garden to the front door. The bell he found broken and useless, so he knocked softly at first, and then louder against the worn panels.

It was some time before an answer came. Several of the neighbors appeared upon their doorsteps, and took bold and somewhat ribald stock of the visitor. A young person of eighty-one, who was considered the wit of the neighborhood, made several very audible remarks, which produced a chorus of gigglings, on the subject of his clothes and foreign appearance. But he stood there as though he had been deaf, his hands thrust down into the loose pockets of his overcoat and his deep-sunken eyes fixed wistfully but not impatiently upon the closed door. He was a mute picture of resignation.

At last, after his third summons, the door was slowly and cautiously opened, and the astonished visitor beheld, for the first time in his life, a London maid-of-all-work. The astonishment seemed perfectly mutual. He, with his parchment dried face, white hair and eyebrows, and piercing black eyes only a little dimmed by time, m.u.f.fled up to the throat in furs, and unmistakably a foreigner, was as strange to her as her appearance was to him. He looked at her black hands, her face besmeared with dirt, and with her uncombed hair hanging loose around it, at the tattered and soiled print gown looped up on one side and held together on the other by pins, and at the white-stockinged feet showing through the holes in her boots. What an object it was! It was fortunate for him that the twilight and fog concealed, partially at any rate, the disgust in his face.

"Is--Mr. Bartlezzi in?" he inquired, as soon as he could find words to speak at all.

"Lawk-a-mussy! I dunno," the girl answered in blank bewilderment. "He don't have no visitors, he don't. You ain't taxes, are you?"

"No!" he answered, somewhat at a venture, for he did not catch her meaning.

"Nor water rate? No, you ain't the water rate," she continued, meditatively. "I knows him. He wears a brown billyc.o.c.k and gla.s.ses, 'e does, and I see him walking with Mary Ann Stubbins on a Sunday."

He admitted doubtfully that she was correct He was not the water rate.

It began to dawn upon her that it would be safe to admit him into the house.

"Just yer come hinside, will yer," she said. "I dunno who yer are, but I guess you ain't nothink to be afraid of. Come hinside."

She opened the door and admitted him into a dark, narrow pa.s.sage. He had to squeeze himself against the wall to allow her to pa.s.s him. Then she surveyed him critically again, with her arms akimbo and her head a little on one side.

"I reckon you've got a name," she surmised. "What is it?"

"You can tell Mr. Bartlezzi that a gentleman from abroad desires to speak with him," he answered. "My name is immaterial. Will you accept this?" he added, holding out a half-crown timidly toward her.

She grabbed it from him, and turned it over incredulously in the semi-darkness. There was no deception about it; it was indeed a half-crown--the first she had ever been given in her life.

She dropped a rude sort of curtsey, and, opening the door of a room, half ushered, half pushed him in. Then she went to the foot of the stairs, the coin tightly clinched in her hand, and he heard her call out----

"Master! There's a gent here from furrin parts has wants you, which 'is name his immaterial. 'E's in the parlor."

There was a growl in reply, and then silence. The handmaiden, her duty discharged, shuffled off to the lower regions. The visitor was left alone.

He looked around him in deep and increasing disgust. The walls of the little room into which he had been shown were bare, save for a few cheap chromos and glaring oleographs of the sort distributed by grocers and petty tradespeople at Christmas. A cracked looking-gla.s.s, with a dirty gilt frame, tottered upon the mantelpiece. The furniture was scanty, and of the public-house pattern, and there was a strong nauseous odor of stale tobacco smoke and beer. A small piano stood in one corner, the cheapest of its kind, and maintaining an upright position only by means of numerous props. One leg tilted in the air was supported by two old and coverless volumes of a novel, and another was casterless. The carpet was worn into shreds, and there was no attempt to conceal or mend the huge ravages which time had made in it. The ceiling was cracked and black with smoke, and the faded paper was hanging down from the top of the wall. There was not a single article or spot in the room on which the eye could rest with pleasure. It was an interior which matched the exterior. Nothing worse could be said about it.

The visitor took it all in, and raising his hand to his head closed his eyes. Ah! what a relief it was to blot it all out of sight, if only for a moment. He had known evil times, but at their worst, such surroundings as these he had never met with. A strange nervousness was creeping slowly over him, the presage of disappointment. He dropped his hands, and walked restlessly up and down, striving to banish his fears. Might not all this be necessary--a form of disguise--a clever mode of concealment? Poverty alone could not have brought things to this strait.

Poverty! There had been no poverty in his day. Yet he was full of forebodings. He remembered the wonder, the evasions, almost the pity with which his first inquiries in Rome had been met. He could not expect to find things exactly the same. Twenty years is a long time, and there must be many changes. Why had he not stayed in Rome a little longer, and learned more. He could easily have obtained the knowledge which he desired there. It would have been wiser, surely it would have been wiser.

The door opened in the midst of his meditations, and he looked eagerly up. Again his heart fell. It was not such a man as this that he had expected to see. Ah! what a day of disappointments it was!

The figure which, after a moment's pause in the doorway, now advanced somewhat hesitatingly toward him, was that of a man a little past middle age. He was of medium height, but stout even to corpulency, and his cheeks were fat and puffy. His hair was gray, and his thick, stubbly mustaches, which had evidently once been black, were also changing color. His dark, shiny coat was ridiculously short for him, and his trousers terminated above his ankles. He wore no necktie, and his collar was ragged and soiled. In short, his whole appearance was not only untidy but dirty. His gait, too, was slouching and undignified.

"You wished to speak to me," he said in a thick tone and with a foreign accent. "My name is Bartlezzi--Signor Alfonso Bartlezzi."

"Yes, I wished to speak with you."

Signor Bartlezzi began to feel uncomfortable under his visitor's fixed gaze. Why should he look at him so intently? He had never set eyes upon him before--and what an odd, shrunken little figure it was. He coughed and shifted his position.

"Ah! yes. I am ready, as you see. Is it anything to do with my profession?"

"I do not know what your profession is."

Signor Bartlezzi made an effort to draw himself up, and a.s.sumed a military air.

"I am a master of fencing," he announced, "also a professor of Italian--Professor Alfonso Bartlezzi, at your service. I am fairly well-known in this neighborhood. If you have pupils to recommend, sir, or if you are thinking of taking lessons yourself, I should be most happy. My services are sometimes made use of as interpreter, both in the police court and privately. I should be happy to serve you in that capacity, sir."

Signor Bartlezzi, having declared himself, folded his arms and waited.

He felt certain that his visitor must now divulge his name and mission.

That, however, he seemed in no hurry to do.

"You are an Italian?" he asked presently.

"Certainly, sir."

"May I ask, have you still correspondents or friends in that country?"

The Professor was a little uneasy. He looked steadfastly at his visitor for a moment, however, and seemed to regain his composure.

"I have neither," he answered sorrowfully. "The friends of former days are silent; they have forgotten me."

"You have lived in England for long, then?"

"Since I was a boy, sir."

"And you are content?"

The Professor shrugged his shoulders and looked round. The gesture was significant.

"Scarcely so," he answered. "But what would you have? May I now ask you a question, sir?" he continued.

"Yes."

"Your name?"

His visitor looked around him mournfully.

"The day for secrecy is past, I suppose," he said sadly. "I am the Count Leonardo di Marioni."

"What!" shrieked the Professor.

"Count Leonardo di Marioni--that is my name. I am better known as Signor di Cortegi, perhaps, in the history of our society."

"My G.o.d!"

If a thunderbolt had burst through the ceiling of the little sitting room, the Professor could not have been more agitated. He had sunk down upon a chair, pale and shaking all over with the effect of the surprise.

"He was a young man?" he faltered.

His visitor sighed.