Whosoever Shall Offend Part 11

As he looked up from the contemplation of his hands Maddalena was struck by his extreme pallor and the terrible hollowness of his eyes.

"How ill you look!" she exclaimed, almost involuntarily. "The sooner you go away the better."

"What did Aurora say about the brigantine?" he asked earnestly, by way of answer.

Maddalena knew too little about the sea to understand that he must have noticed the vessel's rig to name it correctly, as he did, and without hesitation.

"She is convinced that Marcello got on board of her," she answered.

Corbario's face relaxed a little, and he laughed harshly.

"That is utterly absurd!" he answered. "No swimmer that ever lived could have got to her, nor any boat either! There was a terrific surf on the bar."

"Of course not," a.s.sented Maddalena. "But you saw the ship, too?"

"Yes. Aurora was looking at her when I reached the gap. That is why I noticed the vessel," Corbario added, as if by an afterthought. "She was a Sicilian brigantine, and was carrying hardly any sail. If the gale had lasted she would probably have been driven ash.o.r.e. Her only chance would have been to drop anchor."

"You know all about ships and the sea, don't you?" asked Maddalena, with a very little curiosity, but without any particular intention.

"Oh, no!" cried Corbario, as if he were protesting against something. "I have made several long voyages, and I have a knack of remembering the names of things, nothing more."

"I did not mean to suggest that you had been a sailor," Maddalena answered.

"What an idea! I, a sailor!"

He seemed vaguely amused at the idea. The Contessa took leave of him, after giving him her address in the north of Italy, and begging him to write if he found any clue to Marcello's disappearance. He promised this, and they parted, not expecting to meet again until the autumn.

In a few days they had left Rome for different destinations. The little apartment near the Forum of Trajan where the Contessa and her daughter lived was shut up, and at the great villa on the Janiculum the solemn porter put off his mourning livery and dressed himself in brown linen, and smoked endless pipes within the closed gates when it was not too hot to be out of doors. The horses were turned out to gra.s.s, and the coachman and grooms departed to the country. The servants opened the windows in the early morning, shut them at ten o'clock against the heat, and dozed the rest of the time, or went down into the city to gossip with their friends in the afternoon. It was high summer, and Rome went to sleep.

CHAPTER VI

"What do we eat to-day?" asked Paoluccio, the innkeeper on the Frascati road, as he came in from the glare and the dust and sat down in his own black kitchen.

"Beans and oil," answered his wife.

"An apoplexy take you!" observed the man, by way of mild comment.

"It is Friday," said the woman, unmoved, though she was of a distinctly apoplectic habit.

The kitchen was also the eating-room where meals were served to the wine-carters on their way to Rome and back. The beams and walls were black with the smoke of thirty years, for no whitewash had come near them since the innkeeper had married Nanna. It was a rich, crusty black, lightened here and there to chocolate brown, and shaded off again to the tint of strong coffee. High overhead three hams and half a dozen huge sausages hung slowly curing in the acrid wood smoke. There was an open hearth, waist high, for roasting, and having three square holes sunk in it for cooking with charcoal. An enormous bunch of green ferns had been hung by a long string from the highest beam to attract the flies, which swarmed on it like bees on a branch. The floor was of beaten cement, well swept and watered. Along three of the walls there were heavy tables of rough-hewn oak, with benches, polished by long and constant use. A trap-door covered the steps that led down to the deep cellar, which was nothing but a branch of those unexplored catacombs that undermine the Campagna in all directions. The place was dim, smoky, and old, but it was not really dirty, for in his primitive way the Roman wine-carter is fastidious. It is not long since he used to bring his own solid silver spoon and fork with him, and he will generally rinse a gla.s.s out two or three times before he will drink out of it.

The kitchen of the inn was cool compared with the road outside, and though it smelt chiefly of the stale smoke of green wood, this was pervaded and tempered by odours of fern, fresh cabbages, goats'-milk cheese, and sour red wine. The brown earthen pot simmered over one of the holes in the hearth, emitting little clouds of steam; but boiling beans have no particular smell, as everybody knows.

Paoluccio had pushed his weather-beaten soft hat back on his head, and sat drumming on the oak table with his knotty fingers. He was a strong man, thickset and healthy, with grizzled hair and an intensely black beard. His wife was fat, and purple about the jaws and under the ears.

She stood with her back to the hearth, looking at him, with a wooden spoon in her hand.

"Beans," she said slowly, and she looked up at the rafters and down again at her husband.

"You have told me so," he growled, "and may the devil fly away with you!"

"Beans are not good for people who have the fever," observed Nanna.

"Beans are rather heavy food," a.s.sented the innkeeper, apparently understanding. "Bread and water are better. Pour a little oil on the bread."

"A man who has the fever may die of eating beans," said Nanna thoughtfully. "This is also to be considered."

"It is true." Paoluccio looked at his wife in silence for a moment. "But a person who is dead must be buried," he continued, as if he had discovered something. "When a person is dead, he is dead, whether he dies of eating beans or--"

He broke off significantly, and his right hand, as it lay before him, straightened itself and made a very slight vibrating motion, with the fingers all close together. It is the gesture that means the knife among the southern people. Nanna instantly looked round, to be sure that no one else was in the room.

"When you have given that medicine, you cannot send for the doctor," she observed, lowering her voice. "But if he eats, and dies, what can any one say? We have fed him for charity; it is Friday and we have given him beans. What can we know? Are not beans good food? We have nothing else, and it is for charity, and we give what we have. I don't think they could expect us to give him chickens and French wine, could they?"

Paoluccio growled approval.

"It is forty-seven days," continued Nanna. "You can make the account.

Chickens and milk and fresh meat for forty-seven days! Even the bread comes to something in that time, at least two soldi a day--two forties eighty, two sevens fourteen, ninety-four--nearly five francs. Who will give us the five francs? Are we princes?"

"There is the cow," observed Paoluccio with a grin.

"Imbecile," retorted his wife. "It has been a good year; we bought the wine cheap, we sell it dear, without counting what we get for nothing from the carters; we buy a cow with our earnings, and where is the miracle?"

The innkeeper looked towards the door and the small window suspiciously before he answered in a low voice.

"If I had not been sure that he would die, I would not have sold the watch and chain," he said. "In the house of my father we have always been honest people."

"He will die," answered Nanna, confidently and with emphasis. "The girl says he is hungry to-day. He shall eat beans. They are white beans, too, and the white are much heavier than the brown."

She lifted the tin cover off the earthen pot and stirred the contents.

"White beans!" grumbled Paoluccio. "And the weather is hot. Do you wish to kill me?"

"No," answered Nanna quietly. "Not you."

"Do you know what I say?" Paoluccio planted a huge finger on the oaken board. "That sick b.u.t.terfly upstairs is tougher than I am. Forty-seven days of fever, and nothing but bread and water! Think of that, my Nanna!

Think of it! You or I would be consumed, one would not even see our shadows on the floor! But he lives."

"If he eats the white beans he has finished living," remarked Nanna.

A short silence followed, during which Paoluccio seemed to be meditating, and Nanna began to ladle the beans out into four deep earthenware bowls, roughly glazed and decorated with green and brown stripes.

"You are a jewel; you are the joy of my heart," he observed thoughtfully, as Nanna placed his portion before him, covered it with oil, and scattered some chopped basil on the surface.

"Eat, my love," she said, and she cut a huge piece from a coa.r.s.e loaf and placed it beside him on a folded napkin that looked remarkably clean in such surroundings, and emitted a pleasant odour of dried lavender blossoms.

"Where is the girl?" asked Paoluccio, stirring the mess and blowing upon it.