Don Orsino | Page 7

millions were in part safely deposited in
national bonds, and in part as securely invested in solid and profitable
buildings of which the rents are little liable to fluctuation. Brought up
to know what money means, he is not easily carried away by

enthusiastic reports. He knows that when the hour of fortune is at hand
no price is too great to pay for ready capital, but he understands that
when the great rush for success begins the psychological moment of
finance is already passed. When he dies, if such strength as his can
yield to death, he will die the richest man in Italy, and he will leave
what is rare in Italian finance, a stainless name.
Of one person more I must speak, who has played a part in this family
history. The melancholy Spicca still lives his lonely life in the midst of
the social world. He affects to be a little old-fashioned in his dress. His
tall thin body stoops ominously and his cadaverous face is more grave
and ascetic than ever. He is said to have been suffering from a mortal
disease these fifteen years, but still he goes everywhere, reads
everything and knows every one. He is between sixty and seventy years
old, but no one knows his precise age. The foils he once used so well
hang untouched and rusty above his fireplace, but his reputation
survives the lost strength of his supple wrist, and there are few in Rome,
brave men or hairbrained youths, who would willingly anger him even
now. He is still the great duellist of his day; the emaciated fingers
might still find their old grip upon a sword hilt, the long, listless arm
might perhaps once more shoot out with lightning speed, the dull eye
might once again light up at the clash of steel. Peaceable, charitable
when none are at hand to see him give, gravely gentle now in manner,
Count Spicca is thought dangerous still. But he is indeed very lonely in
his old age, and if the truth be told his fortune seems to have suffered
sadly of late years, so that he rarely leaves Rome, even in the hot
summer, and it is very long since he spent six weeks in Paris or risked a
handful of gold at Monte Carlo. Yet his life is not over, and he has still
a part to play, for his own sake and for the sake of another, as shall
soon appear more clearly.
CHAPTER II.
Orsino Saracinesca's education was almost completed. It had been of
the modern kind, for his father had early recognised that it would be a
disadvantage to the young man in after life if he did not follow the
course of study and pass the examinations required of every Italian

subject who wishes to hold office in his own country. Accordingly,
though he had not been sent to public schools, Orsino had been
regularly entered since his childhood for the public examinations and
had passed them all in due order, with great difficulty and indifferent
credit. After this preliminary work he had been at an English University
for four terms, not with any view to his obtaining a degree after
completing the necessary residence, but in order that he might perfect
himself in the English language, associate with young men of his own
age and social standing, though of different nationality, and acquire that
final polish which is so highly valued in the human furniture of
society's temples.
Orsino was not more highly gifted as to intelligence than many young
men of his age and class. Like many of them he spoke English
admirably, French tolerably, and Italian with a somewhat Roman twang.
He had learned a little German and was rapidly forgetting it again;
Latin and Greek had been exhibited to him as dead languages, and he
felt no more inclination to assist in their resurrection than is felt by
most boys in our day. He had been taught geography in the practical,
continental manner, by being obliged to draw maps from memory. He
had been instructed in history, not by parallels, but as it were by
tangents, a method productive of odd results, and he had advanced just
far enough in the study of mathematics to be thoroughly confused by
the terms "differentiation" and "integration." Besides these subjects, a
multitude of moral and natural sciences had been made to pass in a sort
of panorama before his intellectual vision, including physics, chemistry,
logic, rhetoric, ethics and political economy, with a view to cultivating
in him the spirit of the age. The Ministry of Public Instruction having
decreed that the name of God shall be for ever eliminated from all
modern books in use in Italian schools and universities, Orsino's
religious instruction had