And he was no longer seen about the town.
He passed his days sitting on the front doorstep, talking to the neighbours, or wandering through the many empty rooms of the dilapidated house. No repairs had been undertaken for years past; the shutters were loose on their hinges. Two floors had given way, and had to be passed by means of planks, laid like bridges from one room to another; and the tiles were off the roof in many places, so that some of the upper rooms were flooded when it rained.
“Sell half the house,” said one of the neighbours; “it is much too large for you two alone!”
But that evening, discussing the matter at supper, Don Mario and Don Ignazio found themselves greatly embarrassed.
“Sell! Easily said.... But what? The room that had been their father’s office?”
“Oh!” exclaimed Don Mario indignantly.
It is true that the big volumes, bound in dark leather, were no longer in the shelves all round the walls. The government had taken possession of them, as though they had been its property, and not that of the notaries, who had drawn up all those documents. But what matter? The shelves, moth-eaten and rickety, reduced to receptacles for dishes, frying-pans, and utensils of all sorts, remained, to their eyes, living witnesses, as it were, to past glories. The two brothers looked at one another.
“Was it possible?... Well.... What should they sell? Their grandmother’s room?”
A mysterious chamber, which had been kept locked for seventy years, and of which now even the key was lost. Their grandfather’s wife—a saint on earth—had died there, and the widower had ordered it to be shut up, in sign of perpetual mourning. Every night the mice kept up a terrible racket there. But what matter? A master notary—one of the Majori—had willed that no one should open it and no one had done so. Were they to profane it? They were both agreed ... it was impossible!
“What then? The portrait-room?”