But there was the cellar, after all.  He could go down in the night and bury his brother’s body there.  No one ever went down, not even he himself.  Who would suspect the place?  It would be a ghastly job, the chiseller thought.  He fancied how it would be in the cold, damp vault with a lantern—­the white face of the murdered man.  No, he shrank from thinking of it.  It was too horrible to be thought of until it should be absolutely necessary.  But the place was a good one.

And then when Paolo was buried deep under the damp stones, who would be the first to ask for him?  For two or three days no one would be much surprised if he did not come to the house.  Marzio would say that he had met him in the street, and that Paolo had excused himself for not coming, on the ground of extreme pressure of work.  But the Cardinal, whom he served as secretary, would ask for the missing man.  He would be the first.  The Cardinal would be told that Paolo had not slept at home, in his lodging high up in the old palace, and he would send at once to Marzio’s house to know where his secretary was.  Well, he might send, Marzio would answer that he did not know, and the matter would end there.

It would be hard to sit calmly at the bench all day with Gianbattista at his side.  He would probably look very often at the iron-bound box.  Gianbattista would notice that, and in time he would grow curious, and perhaps explore the cellar.  It would be a miserable ending to such a drama to betray himself by his own weakness after it was all done, and Paolo was gone for ever—­a termination unworthy of Marzio, the strong-minded freethinker.  To kill a priest, and then be as nervous and conscious as a boy in a scrape!  The chiseller tried to laugh aloud in his old way, but the effort was ineffectual, and ended in a painful twisting of the lips, accompanied by a glance at the corner.  It would not do; he was weak, and was forced to submit to the humiliation of acknowledging the fact to himself.  With a bitter scorn of his incapacity, he began to wonder whether he could ever get so far as to kill Paolo in the first instance.  He foresaw that if he did kill him, he could never get rid of him afterwards.

Where do people go when they die?  The question rose suddenly in the mind of the unbeliever, and seemed to demand an answer.  He had answered often enough over a pint of wine at the inn, with Gaspare Carnesecchi the lawyer and the rest of his friends.  Nowhere.  That was the answer, clear enough.  When a man dies he goes to the ground, as a slaughtered ox to the butcher’s stall, or a dead horse to the knacker’s.  That is the end of him, and it is of no use asking any more questions.  You might as well ask what becomes of the pins that are lost by myriads of millions, to the weight of many tons in a year.  You might as well inquire what becomes of anything that is old, or worn out, or broken.  A man is like anything else, an agglomeration of matter, capable of a few more tricks than a monkey, and capable of a few less than a priest.  He dies, and is swallowed up by the earth and gives no more trouble.  These were the answers Marzio was accustomed to give to the question, “Where do people go to when they die?” Hitherto they had satisfied him, as they appear to satisfy a very small minority of idiots.