“Oh, no!” cried Corbario, as if he were protesting against something.  “I have made several long voyages, and I have a knack of remembering the names of things, nothing more.”

“I did not mean to suggest that you had been a sailor,” Maddalena answered.

“What an idea!  I, a sailor!”

He seemed vaguely amused at the idea.  The Contessa took leave of him, after giving him her address in the north of Italy, and begging him to write if he found any clue to Marcello’s disappearance.  He promised this, and they parted, not expecting to meet again until the autumn.

In a few days they had left Rome for different destinations.  The little apartment near the Forum of Trajan where the Contessa and her daughter lived was shut up, and at the great villa on the Janiculum the solemn porter put off his mourning livery and dressed himself in brown linen, and smoked endless pipes within the closed gates when it was not too hot to be out of doors.  The horses were turned out to grass, and the coachman and grooms departed to the country.  The servants opened the windows in the early morning, shut them at ten o’clock against the heat, and dozed the rest of the time, or went down into the city to gossip with their friends in the afternoon.  It was high summer, and Rome went to sleep.

CHAPTER VI

“What do we eat to-day?” asked Paoluccio, the innkeeper on the Frascati road, as he came in from the glare and the dust and sat down in his own black kitchen.

“Beans and oil,” answered his wife.

“An apoplexy take you!” observed the man, by way of mild comment.

“It is Friday,” said the woman, unmoved, though she was of a distinctly apoplectic habit.

The kitchen was also the eating-room where meals were served to the wine-carters on their way to Rome and back.  The beams and walls were black with the smoke of thirty years, for no whitewash had come near them since the innkeeper had married Nanna.  It was a rich, crusty black, lightened here and there to chocolate brown, and shaded off again to the tint of strong coffee.  High overhead three hams and half a dozen huge sausages hung slowly curing in the acrid wood smoke.  There was an open hearth, waist high, for roasting, and having three square holes sunk in it for cooking with charcoal.  An enormous bunch of green ferns had been hung by a long string from the highest beam to attract the flies, which swarmed on it like bees on a branch.  The floor was of beaten cement, well swept and watered.  Along three of the walls there were heavy tables of rough-hewn oak, with benches, polished by long and constant use.  A trap-door covered the steps that led down to the deep cellar, which was nothing but a branch of those unexplored catacombs that undermine the Campagna in all directions.  The place was dim, smoky, and old, but it was not really dirty, for in his primitive way the Roman wine-carter is fastidious.  It is not long since he used to bring his own solid silver spoon and fork with him, and he will generally rinse a glass out two or three times before he will drink out of it.