The young man accompanied him to the door, and spoke a few words with him in the passage.
"I only know him by name," said the doctor. "He goes his own strange misanthropical way. Prefers sitting in the wine-shop with the lowest faccini, and squanders what he earns. But there is not a man in Rome who is his equal at a cameo. He inherits it from his father, Giovanni Bianchi, who has long been dead."
"Are his wounds really not dangerous?"
"If he only spares himself and not the ice. He has limbs of iron, or he could not have made head so long against the brutes. Five, do you say? The fool-hardy man! But that is just one of his tricks. Well, well, he will sleep now. Dispel your anxiety, Señor Theodore."
He was already asleep, when Theodore returned to his room, although he had turned his face towards the blazing fire. Theodore studied him long. He was very handsome, though the nose was a little too thin; his hair here and there sprinkled with grey; his beard untended; from between the breathing, half-opened lips gleamed the white teeth. When Theodore raised the cloak to place fresh ice on the wounds, he perceived the great strength of his limbs.
He sent the boy away, after he had brought a fresh supply of wood and ice, and ordered him to return in the morning. He then drew a chair to the side of the hearth, and seated himself, wrapped in his cloak, to watch. It was about ten o'clock, the bright night reigned without over the deserted square, and the slender stream from the fountain plashed lightly into the Triton's shell. From a neighbouring house he heard a girl's voice, singing:--
"Chi sa se mai
Ti soverrai di me!"
The refrain of an old sorrowful song. Then it ceased, but hummed wordless within him still.
He fancied himself again at the edge of the abyss at Tivoli, on the footway opposite the cascades, which in wintry scantiness gushed down from their many mouths. They walked, but not arm in arm, near each other; he and that fair girl and her lively little companion, who hastened unweariedly along the narrow, toilsome path.
"We ought to have returned with your parents, Mary," she said more than once in English; "indeed, we ought to do so now. Look, child! there they are up above by the cascade, and will soon be sitting comfortably by the fire in the sibyl, and here the wind is cutting our very noses off; yours is quite red already; dear me! how cold you look, child! The wind blows so chilly across the water too. You said that it would, sir, and warned us fairly; but our pet must have her fancies. Bless me, we have seen the view in the autumn already, and in the summer too, and then rode safely and comfortably down the path that we are half stumbling, half sliding down now."