Dorning wondered, in a whimsical turn of thought, how a man like this could also be the "admirer of Rosa."
It was long after midnight when Rodrigo escorted his guest to a bedchamber once occupied by Lorenzo the Magnificent.
CHAPTER II
The morning sun flooded the bedroom of the Torrianis. It glinted off the massive antique furniture, revealing its beauty and the need of an immediate dusting. It invaded the region of shadows and comparative coolness underneath the canopy of the immense four-poster bed.
Though a new day was confronting him, the heir of the Torrianis slept on.
In a larger sense, a new and rather cloudy day had six months previously dawned for young Count Rodrigo Torriani, and he had not awakened to that either. It had brought the loss of his family fortune, debts, Signor Minardi, and an uncertainty as to his future. Rodrigo was vaguely aware of this new metaphorical day. He had opened one eye to it sufficiently to dismiss all his servants save Maria, who had sullenly refused to be dismissed. He had started tentative negotiations to rent the palace that had been occupied by his family for three centuries. But, beyond these gestures, he had continued to pursue the same blithe, unproductive course as before.
Rodrigo was in this respect a great deal like his late father, Angelo Torriani, the handsome, impulsive gentleman who was responsible largely for the plight in which the young man now found himself. Angelo Torriani too had been known even in the later years of his life as a waster. To be sure, the elder Torriani had once mingled a bit of politics with his pleasures. It was this unusual mixture of interests that had led to Angelo Torriani's marriage.
For, sent upon a diplomatic mission by his government, the Italian sportsman-politician, after twenty years of falling in and out of love without jeopardizing his bachelorhood in the slightest, had suddenly lost his heart utterly to the quiet, pretty and rather puritanical daughter of a minor English title whom he encountered at a social function in London.
Angelo, like his son after him, had always been selfish in his loves. He was a taker rather than a giver. But when he found that his accustomed sweeping and very Latin style of love-making was not impressing the sensible Edythe Newbold, he became a suppliant. He made solemn promises to abandon his manner of living and he neglected his political duties. And, having at last carried the citadel of her affections by this method, he found that he must also batter down further defences in the form of a father who thoroughly disliked him. Sir Henry Newbold had amassed his fortune and title in the Indian trade. He distrusted foreigners. He particularly distrusted foreigners who did not work. To obtain the hand of Edythe in marriage, Angelo Torriani had to discard the habits and prejudices of three centuries of idling Italian ancestors, enter Sir Henry's business, and go to India.