'Ah, is that it?' exclaimed the visitors, much interested.
On the stair she gave particulars—told the reason of the failure, spoke of their former riches and the want of any comforts now; told about Signora Luisella's courage and her husband's rage for gambling on the lottery, and poor little Agnesina's good behaviour. She seemed to understand having come into the world and grown up at a bad season. The house-hunters listened full of interest, with that skin-deep emotion peculiar to Southerners; but from what they had seen, as well as from what they had heard from the door-keeper, they got a singular impression of evil fate—a doom weighing down an innocent, good family; a hard destiny, destroying all the sources of happiness and energy.
The house-hunters turned their backs on the Fragalà household and Rossi Palazzo slowly; but they still felt sad, and spoke to each other about there being implacable, unforeseen, overpowering disasters, sometimes coming on humanity. Some attributed it to perfidious fate, some to the evil eye; others were philosophical over the passions of humanity, especially for gambling, still repeating the phrase that includes all the indulgence and forgiveness of Naples' folk: 'We are not our own masters.'
It was difficult to get into the Marquis di Formosa's flat. Often Margherita objected to anyone seeing the house, in spite of its being the right hours for visits. The door-keeper talked her over, feeling rather annoyed. She raised her voice and asked, 'How ever would a house be let, if no one could get in to see it?' Sometimes she managed to get in by slipping through the half-open door. All stopped speaking at once, for from the freezing bare lobby to the bare frozen drawing-room there was such cold, such a smell of old dust displaced, that it gave one a shudder. Big dull stains on the walls marked the outline of large pieces of furniture that had once been there, which the Marquis had sold to use what they fetched for staking on the lottery. One saw the big hooks and nails that the pictures had been hung from, and a heap of old yellow paper lay on the ground in a corner of one empty room. Where curtains had been fastened to the doors and balcony windows, there were holes in the plaster, for they seemed to have been violently torn away.
The chapel, too, had not a saint left. Our Lady of Sorrows and the Ecce Homo had been sold, also the vases and ornaments—even the fine napkins with old lace, so that the despoiled altar had a doleful, desecrated look. Sometimes the visitors, on going through the house, met a slight girlish figure in black, her shoulders wrapped in a shabby shawl, the lady's heavy black tresses seeming to make her face still more bloodless. She gazed at the visitors with her sorrowful eyes as if she did not know what was going on; a shade of grief reanimated them for a moment when she remembered it meant they had to leave that roof, their only refuge. The woman said in a whisper, 'It is the Marchesina!' nothing else, and that apparition was like the outline of an irreparable disaster. Sometimes the house-hunters, followed by Margherita and the door-keeper, came to a closed door. The waiting-woman rather hesitated, but on a hint from the door-keeper she made up her mind to knock.
'My lady, may we come in?'
'Yes, yes; come in,' a feeble voice answered.
Then all saw a wretched maidenly room, freezing with cold, where a pale creature in black, wrapped in a worn shawl, was seated by the bedside, or getting up quickly from her kneeling-desk. Then, abashed, they just gave a quick look round, muttered vaguely some excuse, and went off, the maiden following them with her thoughtful, sorrowing eyes. On the stair they dared to speak. They asked the woman, as if speaking of dead people or things:
'What was their name?'