If learning should ever bring him money, he meant to reclaim the old place, which in the meanwhile could not be in safer hands; but on this he did not reckon, and while he looked down on the sordid poverty that only prompted his neighbors to sell butter and milk, and take toll from visitors coming to see the faded frescos or old armor in their ruinous dwellings, he saw with very different eyes the probable future of another kind of poverty before him: the pittance and privations of a student’s lot, the obscure life of a professor or the uncertain one of a discoverer; but withal the glorious counterweight of intellectual life, the wealth of vigor and progress, and stimulated, restless thought, doubling and trebling his interests, and making akin to himself all the mental processes or achievements all over the world, which would come of a few years’ study and the sacrifice of his home. Far more patriotic and far more proud was this youth who sold his inheritance than the indignant vegetators around him, who all felt the honor of their order insulted by his unheard-of deed, and their country deprived of another son unworthy of her because he could see in Germany something more than a barbarous, hereditary tyrant and enemy!
So it came about that the good Salviani kept a hotel in Carpeggio tower, the walls of which had always been kept in good repair, and which was easily furnished, at no great expense, from the contents of various lumber-rooms and a little intelligent help from the local carpenter, who, like most Italians, had an intuitive understanding of the artistic. Tourists who had stopped here for a night or two; artists who had established their sketching headquarters here; Italians of some fortune who passed here on their way to their inland villeggiature; anglers and peddlers, friars, and even commercial travellers of various nations who had begun to experiment on the rural population hereabouts; pilgrims to the two neighboring shrines hardly known beyond twenty miles around, and yet the boast of the neighborhood for nearly four hundred years; wine merchants from the next cities—these and many more could witness to the satisfactory way in which Salviani kept the only hotel in Macchio. And of course his prices were moderate—indeed, to a foreigner they seemed absolutely ridiculous; and he always made it a point to give an Englishman or an American plenty of water, having found that by experience a salve to the fault-finding spirit, and his young master having also accustomed his old attendant to it by requiring it himself ever since his boyhood. Foreigners with a “turn” for antique furniture spent more time roaming the old chambers than they did eating at the landlord’s excellent, if strictly national, table (for Salviani, knowing that he was ignorant of foreign dishes, never attempted to drive away his guests by bad imitations). The tower was very high and uncommonly large in proportion; in fact, it reminded you rather of two Cecilia Metella tombs raised one above the other than of an ordinary tower; and it was oddly distributed within. A staircase wound in the centre of the building, communicating with the rooms on each tier by a circular corridor on which the doors opened; but from the third floor this staircase ceased, and from that to the fourth there was no access except from a winding stair within the thickness of the outer wall. The great stairs were of stone and uncarpeted, and in the corridor on which the doors of the rooms opened were placed at intervals pieces of furniture, such as chairs, tables, stands, bronzes, vases, marble cornices, things picturesque, but not always available for use, and many sadly injured and mutilated, yet forming such a collection as sent a thrill of envy to the heart of a few stray connoisseurs who had come across it and never been able to bring away even a specimen. Old Salviani had his superstitions, but, unlike his countrymen in general, he felt that these forbade him to sell anything belonging to the old family seat, especially to a foreigner.
One day two travellers stopped at the hotel, a mother and daughter—“English, of course,” said the landlord with a smile, as he saw their costume and independent air. The daughter was, equally of course, in evident and irrepressible raptures about everything she saw in the place, from the ruinous outhouses to the museum-like interior. Their own rooms on the first floor, large, marble-paved, and scantily but artistically furnished with the best preserved of the antique things, satisfied them only for a short time; they wanted to be shown over the whole house. The bedrooms were not quite in such good taste, they thought; and indeed, as Salviani was not perfect, here the “cloven foot” did appear, for a peddler had once beguiled him into buying some Nottingham lace curtains with which he disfigured one of the third-story rooms, and some cheap chintzes which he had made into curtains for some of the patched-up bedsteads. But as the two strangers went up through each corridor, looking down at the tier below and at the various beautiful things beside them, they forgot these blemishes in their delight at a sight so unusual as this large, inhabited, well-preserved tower. They had seen nothing like it and could never have imagined it. It had an air of dignity, of grandeur, of repose, and yet of connection with the present to which one is more accustomed in old English country-houses than in Italian palaces.
One of the rooms on the fourth tier was almost unfurnished, having only two dilapidated bedsteads, one very large and promiscuously heaped with bed-quilts of equal dilapidation, while the other, in the form of a cot, or child’s bed, was also much larger than such beds are made now. On this was thrown an old-fashioned but almost new black mantle trimmed with silk ribbon. This was the room afflicted with the Nottingham lace curtains, which were cleaner than seemed natural in such a room. The view hence was beautiful, and the young Englishwoman was moved to suggest that they should change their plans a little and stay here a few weeks, when she would endeavor to learn the language and would make a study of this tower-nest with the fine view. It would be so out of the way, and a few antique chairs and a table would be enough furniture to replace the beds, which could be put into the next room. The mother smiled; she was used to these sudden schemes growing up full-fledged out of any pleasant and suggestive-looking circumstances, but the landlord, seriously entering into the proposal, said he feared the other room was too small to hold the beds—certainly the big one, which could not be got through the door, and, in fact, did not take to pieces. This set the young girl to examining the bed, and suddenly she called her companions to notice a panel in the tall head-board, which reached nearly to the ceiling. It seemed movable, she said, and might she not try to find the spring? Did the signor know anything about it? Salviani turned rather pale and hastily crossed himself, muttering something in Italian; then, in bad French, attempted to explain to his guest that there was a story of a former Carpeggio who was said to have lived alone on this top story and to have been a wizard, but how long ago he could not tell, nor if the bed had been there then. The young girl insisted on getting to the bottom of the secret of the panel, which at last yielded, and revealed a space between itself and another room of which only a corner was visible, and a very small grated window high up in the wall. She scrambled through the panel opening, out into a lot of rubbish which filled the intervening space and covered the sloping floor several inches deep. The door into the other room was gone, or else there had never been one, and there were large hooks on either side of the gap, as if curtains might once have hung there. The floor was sunk much lower than this level—quite three feet—giving one the impression of a shallow well, so that there must have once been some movable way of descent. An old press or chest, with two drawers at the bottom, filled one corner, and on it was a faded piece of green silk, looking unmistakably part of a woman’s dress, and a beautiful, delicate ivory desk lying open, with many thin plates folding together like the leaves of a portfolio. The curious girl handled it with a sort of dread, yet eagerly and closely inspected it, leaving it afterwards in just the position in which she had found it. As she turned from it she gave a cry of surprise; a chair stood in the corner, half hidden by the press, and across the back of it hung a long lock of hair, brown and silky, now fluttering in the unaccustomed draught from the open panel. Suddenly the intruder was aware that the walls were covered with books but they were hidden behind a close, thin green wire netting, which had at first looked like the pattern of the wall. She eagerly called for a chair to stand on to examine them; the landlord handed her one through the door, and then for the first time, fascinated yet afraid, gazed into the room. Many were the voluble and simple exclamations he uttered; but he was evidently more concerned as to the risk of touching such uncanny things than pleased at the discovery of the energetic stranger. Meanwhile, she looked at the books, which filled up two sides of the room from floor to ceiling—they were a treasure, as she knew: old Italian and German books on theological and philosophical subjects; translations into Italian of some Elizabethan authors—these, perhaps, unique of their kind, and rarer than originals in either English or Italian; Italian translations of more modern English books; poetry, science, illuminated manuscripts, first editions of sixteenth-century printed books—the Italian ones, even those in black-letter, perfectly clear and legible to a tyro, while a few English books of a century later were not half so decipherable; a good many Greek and Latin books, but not so many as of the Italian and German; and a few Oriental manuscripts, chiefly Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac. In two places on the wall, which showed traces of a rough kind of painting as a background, were hung unframed Chinese landscapes on wood, and in other parts of the room old engravings, some plainly framed, some not, but pasted on to boards, and one or two unfinished etchings. The most interesting purported to be a head of St. Peter—not a conventional one, but a copy from some old painting, itself copied from a Byzantine fresco, and claiming to be—so said the quotation at the foot of the etching—a portrait of the apostle as he really was. The pedigree of the portrait, however, was the really interesting point, and this was minutely traced in the foot-note, added by one signing himself Andrea C., to the unfinished etching of the artist, who, it seems, had died while engaged on this work.
And here ends the part the strangers took in the affair; for they continued their journey to Ancona, and often in after-years, in their quiet English home between lake and rocky fell, wondered what became of the books of Torre Carpeggio. But the faithful Salviani had written to his young master at once, and Carpeggio returned a joyous answer, full of excitement and curiosity, promising a visit as soon as his means and his studies combined would allow of it. It was a year before he was able to come—a year during which he had changed and ripened, but which had left the old tower, and, indeed, the sleepy, beautiful old city, as unchanged as anything can be where human beings are being born, married, and buried in due season. Even this inevitable change, however, was neutralized by the firmly-grooved life which, as each generation grew up, it placidly inherited from the last and religiously carried out, undreaming of any other possibilities and ignorant even of its own dormant energies. This was before the commotions of the last twenty years, and there was not even a political ferment, much less an intellectual one, to disturb the even flow of things. One or two of the cathedral clergy had the reputation of being great scholars, and, indeed, had the right to be so looked upon, if by scholarship we understand the kind of knowledge which made the men of the Medici days fully the equals of the Oxford dons of only one generation ago; but that sort of scholarship harmonized well with the air of serene drowsiness that covered the picturesque and half-deserted old city. The old canons kept much to themselves, and studied in a dainty, desultory, solitary way, not extending the daintiness to dress or furniture, but keeping up an unconscious kind of picturesqueness which they chiefly owed to such details as velvet skull-caps and bits of stray carving, or an old and precious ivory crucifix or Cellini relic-case—things prized by them for their meaning rather than for their art-value.
To this quaint, quiet city Emilio Carpeggio came back, after a two years’ absence, a youth still—for he was only twenty—but a phenomenon, if any one had known what was passing in his brain. He found the state of things more deplorable than ever, now that he had had experience of a different lot; he had thought it hopeless enough before. Practical and far-seeing, he did not find a panacea in reckless political disturbances, and in impossible strivings to make citizens and statesmen out of his easy-going neighbors, so he was saved the loss of time that clogged the efforts of so many well-meaning men of his acquaintance abroad; individual mental activity was what he looked forward to as the thin edge of the wedge that should break up this spell of what he could not help looking upon as lamentable stagnation, however beautiful the disguise it wore.
His three months’ holiday came to an end, and he disappeared again, carrying off his treasures with him to Germany, where they became the wonder and envy of the professors. But such luck, after all, was only due, said the kindly old men, to one who had done so much to win knowledge.
There was one of these men, not nearly so old as the rest, the special teacher to whom Carpeggio had attached himself, who was the young man’s best friend. To him only the dreams and hopes and resolves of this concentrated young mind were made freely known; for, though young as regards most of the professors, Schlichter was like a father to the Italian student. He was only forty-two, and already had a European reputation in his own line—mining engineering. A year after Carpeggio came back from his visit to Italy his master received an invitation from a scientific society in England to give a course of lectures in London during the summer. He proposed to the young man to accompany him, telling him that there was no knowing what practical advantages might result from his visit to a country where you needed only energy to grasp success.
“But you forget the Mammon-worship of the English,” said Emilio, “of which you yourself have so scornfully told me, and that obscure young foreigners without interest are not likely to have a chance of showing off their energy. I think I had better stay and study here another year or two, instead of deliberately exposing myself to the vertigo of London.”
“Nonsense!” said Schlichter impatiently. “Society is not likely to dazzle us, or, indeed, take much notice of us; they know how to keep the streams separate, even if the fine ladies do play at a little pretty enthusiasm for science now and then. A lecture nowadays is only another excuse for a pretty toilette, a change from the breakfast and morning concert or the afternoon kettle-drum; but that does not imply a real, personal notice of the lecturer, or, indeed, of any other working-bee. But, seriously, I know some men in London who might help you, if they had a mind to do it. You know how many surveys and plans there are—always some new expedition to far-away places—and young men of brains are always useful, especially single men, who can leave home without regret or difficulty. You speak English and other useful modern languages, and you have every chance, I tell you, if you will only keep your eyes open. As for study, a man need never say he can find no time for it, however busy he is. If my evil genius had made me a merchant, I should have found time for study, and so will you, just as well as if you stayed at home. It is settled, is it not?”