The Heart of Rome | Page 2

The servants all went away last night after dinner, with their belongings. There were only sixteen left, men and women, for I counted them."
"Do you mean to say--" The Baroness stopped in the middle of her question, staring in amazement.
The porter now nodded, as solemnly as he had before shaken his head.
"Yes. This is the end of the house of Conti."
Then he looked at her as if he wished to be questioned, for he knew that she was not really a great lady, and guessed that in spite of her magnificent superiority and coldness she was not above talking to a servant about her friends.
"But they must have somebody," she said. "They must eat, I suppose! Somebody must cook for them. They cannot starve!"
"Who knows? Who knows? Perhaps they will starve."
The porter evidently took a gloomy view of the case.
"But why did the servants go away in a body?" asked the Baroness, descending from her social perch by the inviting ladder of curiosity.
"They never were paid. None of us ever got our wages. For some time the family has paid nobody. The day before yesterday, the telephone company sent a man to take away the instrument. Then the electric light was cut off. When that happens, it is all over."
The man had heard of the phenomenon from a colleague.
"And there is nobody? They have nobody at all?"
The Baroness had always been rich, and was really trying to guess what would happen to people who had no servants.
"There is my wife," said the porter. "But she is old," he added apologetically, "and the palace is big. Can she sweep out three hundred rooms, cook for two families of masters and dress the Princess's hair? She cannot do it."
This was stated with gloomy gravity. The Baroness also shook her head in sympathy.
"There were sixteen servants in the house yesterday," continued the porter. "I remember when there were thirty, in the times of the old Prince."
"There would be still, if the family had been wise," said the Baroness severely. "Is your wife upstairs?"
"Who knows where she is?" enquired the porter by way of answer, and with the air of a man who fears that he may never see his wife again. "There are three hundred rooms. Who knows where she is?"
The Baroness was a practical woman by nature and by force of circumstances; she made up her mind to go upstairs and see for herself how matters stood. The name of Donna Clementina might not just now carry much weight beside those of the patronesses of a complicated charitable organization; in fact the poor lady must be in a position to need charity herself rather than to dispense it to others. But the Baroness had a deep-rooted prejudice in favour of the old aristocracy, and guessed that it would afterwards be counted to her for righteousness if she could be the first to offer boundless sympathy and limited help to the distressed family.
It would be thought distinctly smart, for instance, if she should take the Princess, or even one of the unmarried daughters, to her own house for a few days, as a refuge from the sordid atmosphere of debt and ruin, and beyond the reach of vulgar creditors, one of whom, by the way, she knew to be her own excellent husband. The Princess was probably not aware of that fact, for she had always lived in sublime ignorance of everything connected with money, even since her husband's death; and when good Pompeo Sassi tried to explain things, telling her that she was quite ruined, she never listened to what he said. If the family had debts, why did he not borrow money and pay them? That was what he was paid for doing, after all. It was true that he had not been paid for a year or two, but that was a wretched detail. Economy? Had not the Princess given up her second maid, as an extravagance? What more did the man expect?
The Baroness knew all this and reflected upon what she knew, as she deliberately got out of her cab at the foot of the grand staircase.
"I will go upstairs myself," she said.
"Padrona," observed the porter, standing aside with his broom.
He explained in a single word that she was at liberty to go upstairs if she chose, that it was not of the least use to go, and that he would not be responsible for any disappointment if she were afterwards not pleased. There is no language in the world which can say more in one word than the Italian, or less in ten thousand, according to the humour of the speaker.
The Baroness took no notice as she went up the stairs. She was not very tall, and was growing slowly and surely stout, but she carried her rather