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-glass, 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."