CHAPTER IX
“Via!” said Vincenzo, and his black, oily forefinger, uplifted, gave emphasis to his words. “There are no such things as ghosts. This princess of yours cannot be seen at moonrise, or at any other time.”
There is no room for faith in the swelled head of young Italy, but the waiter was a middle-aged man. He paused in the act of re-filling the customer’s cup. “You do not believe, then?”
The Tuscan looked at him with all the scarcely-veiled contempt of the North for the South. “You tell me you are a Calabrian. Si vede! You listen to all the priests say; you go down on your knees in the mud when the frati are carrying a wax doll about the roads; you think a splinter of bone from the ribs of some fool who would not enjoy life while it lasted will cure a dropsy or a broken leg; you hope the rain will stop because a holy toe-nail is exposed on the altar. Ghosts, visions, miracles!”
Vincenzo Torrigiani was the son of a stone-cutter in the village of Settignano, and he had worked as a boy in the gardens of the Villa Fiorelli. After a while the master had noticed and had taken a fancy to him, chiefly on account of his ever-ready and unusually dazzling and expansive smile, and he had been sent to a garage in Milan for six months. The quick-witted Florentine learned a great many things in a short time besides the necessary smattering of mechanics and the management of cars, and on his return he displayed many new airs and graces in addition, fortunately, to the same old smile. Later on he spent the obligatory two years in barracks, in a regiment of Bersaglieri, and came back to Avenel’s service plus a still more varied knowledge of the world, a waxed moustache, and a superficial tendency to atheism. He was always delighted to air his views, and he fixed the shocked waiter now with a glittering eye as he proceeded to recite his unbelief at some length.
“God is merely man’s idea of himself at his best, and the devil is his idea of other people at their worst,” he concluded.
“Would you spend a night alone in this haunted house?”
“Sicuro!”