Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (626 page)

Under an iron lantern swung above a flight of three broad steps, Cosmo recognized his servant gazing into the square with a worried expression which changed at once into one of relief on perceiving his master. He touched his cap and followed Cosmo into a large hall with several doors opening into it and furnished with many wooden chairs and tables. At one of them bearing four candlesticks several British naval officers sat talking and laughing in subdued tones. A compactly built clean-shaven person with slightly sunken cheeks, wearing black breeches and a maroon waistcoat with sleeves, but displaying a very elaborate frill to his white shirt, stood in the middle of the floor, glancing about with vigilance, and bowed hurriedly to his latest client. Cosmo returned the greeting of Signor Cantelucci, who, snatching up the nearest candlestick, began to ascend a broad stone staircase with an air of performing a solemn duty. Cosmo followed him, and Cosmo’s servant followed his master. They went up and up. At every flight broad archways gave a view of dark perspective in which nothing but a few drops of dim fire were forlornly visible. At last Signor Cantelucci threw open a door on a landing and bowing again:

“See, milord! There is a fire. I know the customs and habits of the English.”

Cosmo stepped into a large and lofty room where in the play of bright flames under a heavy and tall mantelpiece the shadows seemed very much disturbed by his entrance. Cosmo approached the blaze with satisfaction.

“I had enough trouble to get them to light it,” remarked the valet in a resentful tone. “If it hadn’t been for a jack-tar with big whiskers I found down in the hall it wouldn’t be done yet. He came up from the ship with one of these sea officers downstairs. He drove the fellows with the wood in fine style up here for me. He knows the people here. He cursed them each separately by their Christian names, and then had a glass of wine in the kitchen with me.”

Meantime Signor Cantelucci, wearing the aspect of a deaf man, had lighted, on two separate tables, two clusters of candles which drove the restless gloom of the large apartment half way up to the ceiling, and retired with noiseless footsteps. He stopped in the doorway to cast a keen glance at the master and the man standing by the fire. Those two turned their heads only at the sound of the closing door.

“I couldn’t think what became of you, sir. I was getting quite worried about you. You disappeared without saying anything to me.”

“I went for a walk down to the sea,” said Cosmo while the man moved off to where several cowhide trunks were ranged against the wall. “I like to take a look round on arriving at a new place.”

“Yes, sir; but when it got dark I wondered.”

“I tarried on a tower to watch the sunset,” murmured Cosmo.

“I have been doing some unpacking,” said the servant, “but not knowing how long you mean to stay »

“It may be a long stay.”

“Then I will go on, sir; that is if you are going to keep this room.”

“Yes. The room will do, Spire. It’s big enough.”

Spire took up one of the two candelabras and retired into the neighbourhood of a sort of state bed heavily draped at the other end of the room. There, throwing open the trunks and the doors of closets, he busied himself systematically, without noise, till he heard the quiet voice of his young master.

“Spire.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, standing still with a pile of shirts on his arm.

‘‘Is this inn very full?”

“Yes, very,” said Spire. “The whole town is full of travellers and people from the country. A lot of our nobility and gentry are passing this way.”

He deposited the shirts on a shelf in the depths of the wall and turned round again.

“Have you heard any names, Spire?”

Spire stooped over a trunk and lifted up from it carefully a lot of white neckcloths folded neatly one within the other.

“I haven’t had much time yet, sir. I heard a few.”

He laid down the neckcloths by the side of the shirts while Cosmo, with his elbow on the mantelpiece, asked down the whole length of the room:

“Anybody I know?”

“Not in this place, sir. There is generally a party of officers from the man-of-war staying here. They come and go. I have seen some Italian gentlemen in square-cut coats and powdered hair. Very old-fashioned, sir. There are some Austrians too, I think; but I haven’t seen any ladies. ... I am afraid, sir, this isn’t the right sort of inn. There is another about a hundred yards from here on the other side of the square.”

“I don’t want to meet anybody I know,” said Cosmo Latham in a low voice.

Spire thought that this would make his stay in Genoa very dull. At the same time he was convinced that his young master would alter his mind before very long and change to that other inn patronized by travellers of fashion. For himself he was not averse from a little quiet time. Spire was no longer young. Thirty years ago, before the War and before the Revolution, he had travelled with Sir Charles in France and Italy. He was then only eighteen, but being a steady and trustworthy lad was taken abroad to look after the horses. Sir Charles kept four horses in Florence, and Spire had often ridden on Tuscan roads behind Sir Charles and the two Misses Aston, of whom one later became Lady Latham. After the family settled in Yorkshire he passed from the stables to the house, acquired a confidential position, and whenever Lady Latham took a journey he sat in the rumble with a pair of double-barrelled pistols in the pockets of his greatcoat and ordered all things on the road. Later he became intermediary between Sir Charles and the stables, the gardens, and in all out-of-door things about the house. He attended Lady Latham on her very last drive, all the details for that lady’s funeral having been left to his management. He was also a very good valet. He had been called one evening into the library where Sir Charles, very gouty that day, leaning with one hand on a thick stick and with the other on the edge of a table, had said to him: “I am lending you to Mr. Cosmo for his travels in France and Italy. You will know your way about. And mind you draw the charges of the pistols in the carriage every morning and load them afresh.”

Spire was then requested to help Sir Charles up the stairs and had a few more words said to him when Sir Charles stopped at the door of his bedroom.

“Mr. Cosmo has plenty of sense. You are not to make yourself a nuisance to him.”

“No, Sir Charles,” said the imperturbable Spire. “I will know how to look after Mr. Cosmo.”

And if he had been asked, Spire would have been able to say that during the stay in Paris and all through France and Switzerland on the way to Genoa Mr. Cosmo had given him no trouble at all.

Spire, still busy unpacking, glanced at his young master. He certainly looked very quiet now, leaning on his elbow with the firelight playing from below on his young thoughtful face with its smooth and pale complexion. “Very good-looking indeed,” thought Spire.-In that thoughtful mood he recalled very much the Sir Charles of thirty or thirty-five years ago. Would he too find his wife abroad? There had been women enough in Paris of every kind and degree, English and French and all sorts. But it was a fact that Mr. Cosmo sought most of his company amongst men, of whom also there had been no lack and of every degree. In that, too, the young man resembled very much his father. Men’s company. But were he to get caught he would get caught properly; at any rate for a time, reflected Spire, remembering Sir Charles Latham’s rush back to Italy, the inwardness of which had been no more revealed to him than to the rest of the world.

Spire, approaching the candelabra, unfolded partly a very fine coat, then refolded it before putting it away on a convenient shelf. He had a moment of regret for his own young days. He had never married, not because there had been any lack of women to set their caps at him, but from a sort of half-conscious prudence. Moreover, he had a notion somehow or other that Sir Charles would not have liked it. Perhaps it was just as well. Now he was carefree, attending on Mr. Cosmo without troubling his head about who had remained at home.

Spire, arranging the contents of a dressing case on the table, cast another sidelong look at the figure by the fire. Very handsome. Something like Sir Charles and yet not like. There was a touch of something unusual, perhaps foreign, and yet no one with a pair of eyes in his head could mistake Mr. Cosmo for anything but an English gentleman.

Spire’s memories of his tour with Sir Charles had been growing dim. But he remembered enough of the old-time atmosphere to have become aware of a feeling of tension, of a suggestion of restlessness which certainly was new to him.

The silence had lasted very long. Cosmo before the fire had not moved. Spire ventured on a remark.

“I notice people are excited about one thing and another hereabouts, sir.”

“Excited. I don’t wonder at it. In what way?”

“Sort of discontented, sir. They don’t like the Austrians, sir. You may have noticed as we came along ...”

“Did they like us when we held the town?”

“I can hardly say that, sir. I have been sitting for an hour or more in the couriers’ room, with all sorts of people coming in and out, and heard very wild sort of talk.”

“What can you know about its wildness?”

“To look at their faces was enough. It’s a funny place, that room downstairs,” went on Spire, rubbing with a piece of silk a travelling looking-glass mounted cunningly in a silver case which when opened made a stand for it. He placed it exactly in the middle of a little table and turned round to look at his master. Seeing that Cosmo seemed disposed to listen he continued : “It is vaulted like a cellar and has a little door giving into a side street. People come in and out as they like. All sorts of low people, sir, facchini and carters and boatmen and suchlike. There was an old fellow came in, a gray-headed man, a cobbler, I suppose, as he brought a bagful of mended shoes for the servants of the house. He emptied the lot on the stone floor, sir, and instead of trying to collect his money from the people that were scrambling for them he made them a speech. He spouted, sir, without drawing a breath. The courier-valet of an English doctor staying here, a Swiss I think he is, says to me in his broken English: 4He would cut every Austrian throat in this town.’ We were having a glass of wine together and I asked him, ‘And what do you think of that?’ And he says to me, after thinking a bit, ‘I agree with him. . . / Very dreadful, sir,” concluded Spire with a perfectly unmoved face.

Cosmo looked at him in silence for a time. “It was very bold talk if that is what the man really said,” he remarked. “Especially as the place is so public as you say it is.”

“Absolutely open to the street, sir; and that same Swiss fellow had told me just before that the town was full of spies and what they call sbirri that came from Turin with the King. The King is staying at the Palace, sir. They are expecting the Queen of Sardinia to arrive any day. You didn’t know, sir? They say she will come in an English man-of-war. That old cobbler was very abusive about the King of Piedmont too. Surely talk like that can’t be safe anywhere.”

Spire paused suddenly and Cosmo Latham turned his back to the fire.

“Well, and what happened?” he asked with a smile.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” said Spire in equable tones, “till that Signor Cantelucci — that’s the padrone of this inn, sir ... “

“The man who lighted me up?” said Cosmo.

“Yes, sir. ... I didn’t know he was in the room till suddenly he spoke behind my back telling one of the scullions that was there to give the man a glass of wine. And what the old fellow must do but raise it above his head and shout a toast to the Destructor of the Austrians before he tossed it down his throat. I was quite astonished, but Signor Cantelucci never turned a hair. He offered his snuffbox to that doctor’s courier and myself and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was only Pietro,’ he said, ‘ a little mad’ — he tapped his forehead, you know, sir. The doctor’s courier sat there grinning. I got suddenly uneasy about you, sir, and went out to the front door to see whether you were coming. It’s very different from what it was thirty years ago. There was no talk in Italy of cutting foreigners’ throats when Sir Charles and I were here. It was quite a startling experience.”

Cosmo nodded. “You seem impressed, Spire. Well, 1 too had an experience, just as the sun was setting.”

“I am sorry to hear that, sir.”

“What do you mean? Why should you be sorry?”

“I beg your pardon, sir, I thought it was something unpleasant.”

Cosmo had a little laugh. “Unpleasant? No! Not exactly, though I think it was more dangerous than yours, but if there was any madness connected with it, it had a very visible method. It was not all talk either. Yes, Spire, it was exciting.”

“I don’t know what’s come to them all. Everybody seems excited. There was not excitement in Italy thirty years ago when I was with Sir Charles and took four horses with only one helper from this very town to Florence, sir.”

Cosmo with fixed eyes did not seem to hear Spire’s complaining remark. He exclaimed: “Really it was very extraordinary,” so suddenly that Spire gave a perceptible start. He pulled himself together and asked in a purely business tone:

“Are you going to dine in your room, sir? Time is getting on.”

Cosmo’s mood too seemed to have changed completely.

“I don’t know. I am not hungry. I want you to move one of those screens here near the fire and place a table and chair there. I will do some correspondence to-night. Yes, I will have my dinner here, I think.”

“I will go down and order it, sir,” said Spire. “The cook here is a Frenchman who married a native and…”

“Who on earth is swearing like this outside?” exclaimed Cosmo, while Spire’s face also expressed astonishment at the loud burst of voices coming along the corridor, one angry, the other argumentative, in a crescendo of scolding and expostulation which, passing the door at its highest, died away into a confused murmur in the distance of the long corridor.

“That was an English voice,” said Cosmo. “I mean the angry one.”

“I should think it’s that English doctor from Tuscany that has been three or four days here already. He has been put on this floor.”