The old woman nodded and repeated his words with an elated cackle.
“Ha, why I bought the candlestick!” She paused and beamed at him. “Nobody else got the candlestick....”
“An eccentric,” De Medici murmured. Her ugliness and sinisterness had given way in the moment to a childishness. Aloud he said:
“I’m very much interested in that candlestick ... and the other one, its mate.”
“Yes, the other one!” the woman exclaimed. “They didn’t have it. My, my! I couldn’t get it. I wanted them both, but they had only one.”
She looked at her visitor, and then cocking her head to a side, inquired:
“Well, well ... so you were a friend of Victor Ballau. Ha, sit down, young man. Sit down.”
De Medici obeyed, his mind busy with ways in which he might surprise whatever secrets from the old woman that lay behind the wrinkled witch’s mask of her face. She sat rubbing her hands together nervously and regarding him with brightened eyes.
“How did you happen to buy the candlestick?” De Medici asked again, his voice mild. His eyes, accustoming themselves to the poor light, were taking in some of the features of the room. He had the sense for a moment of having blundered into a theatrical warehouse. Spangled gowns, tawdrily upholstered chairs, sofas, dilapidated theater trunks, ancient “flats” containing parts of drawing-room walls, and various other knick-knacks which he recognized as scenic fittings, littered the place.
“From the way you went after that candlestick,” he was saying with a careful smile, “I thought maybe you knew something about it ... and its mate.”