Some English travelling-acquaintances had strongly recommended the pension to Cornélie de Retz van Loo, who was travelling in Italy by herself; and she had written to the Marchesa Belloni from Florence. It was her first visit to Italy; it was the first time that she had alighted at the great cavernous station near the Baths of Diocletian; and, standing in the square, in the golden Roman sunlight, while the great fountain of the Acqua Marcia gushed and rippled and the cab-drivers clicked with their whips and their tongues to attract her attention, she was conscious of her "nice Italian sensation," as she called it, and felt glad to be in Rome.
She saw a little old man limping towards her with the instinct of a veteran porter who recognizes his travellers at once; and she read "Hotel Belloni" on his cap and beckoned to him with a smile. He saluted her with respectful familiarity, as though she were an old acquaintance and he glad to see her; asked if she had had a pleasant journey, if she was not over-tired; led her to the victoria; put in her rug and her handbag; asked for the tickets of her trunks; and said that she had better go on ahead: he would follow in ten minutes with the luggage. She received an impression of cosiness, of being well cared for by the little old lame man; and she gave him a friendly nod as the coachman drove away. She felt happy and careless, though she had just the faintest foreboding of something unhappy and unknown that was going to come to her; and she looked to right and left to take in the streets of Rome. But she saw only houses upon houses, like so many barracks; then a great white palace, the new Palazzo Piombino, which she knew to contain the Juno Ludovisi; and then the vettura stopped and a boy in buttons came out to meet her. He showed her into the drawing-room, a gloomy apartment, in the middle of which was a table covered with periodicals, arranged in a regular and unbroken circle. Two ladies, obviously English and of the æsthetic type, with loose-fitting blouses and grimy hair, sat in a corner studying their Baedekers before going out. Cornélie bowed slightly, but received no bow in return; she did not take offence, being familiar with the manners of the travelling Briton. She sat down at the table and took up the Roman Herald, the paper which appears once a fortnight and tells you what there is to do in Rome during the next two weeks.
Thereupon one of the ladies asked her, from the corner, in an aggressive tone:
"I beg your pardon, but would you please not take the Herald to your room?"
Cornélie raised her head very haughtily and languidly in the direction where the ladies were sitting, looked vaguely above their grimy heads, said nothing and glanced down at the Herald again; and she thought herself a very experienced traveller and smiled inwardly because she knew how to deal with that type of Englishwoman.
The marchesa entered and welcomed Cornélie in Italian and French. She was a large, fat matron, vulgarly fat; her ample bosom was contained in a silk cuirass or spencer, shiny at the seams and bursting under the arms; her grey frizzled hair gave her a somewhat leonine appearance; her great yellow and blue eyes, with bistre shadows beneath them, wore a strained expression, the pupils unnaturally dilated by belladonna; a pair of immense crystals sparkled in her ears; and her fat, greasy fingers were covered with nameless jewels. She talked very fast; and Cornélie thought her sentences as pleasant and homely as the welcome of the lame porter in the square outside the station. The marchesa led her to the hydraulic lift and stepped in with her; the lift, a railed-in cage, running up the well of the staircase, rose solemnly and suddenly stopped, motionless, between the second and the third floor.
"Third floor!" cried the marchesa to some one below.
"Non c'e acqua!" the boy in buttons calmly called back, meaning thereby to convey that—as seemed natural—there was not enough water to move the lift.
The marchesa screamed out some orders in a shrill voice; two facchini came running up and hung on to the cable of the lift, together with the ostensibly zealous boy in buttons; and by fits and starts the cage rose higher and higher, until at last it almost reached the third storey.
"A little higher!" ordered the marchesa.
But the facchini strained their muscles in vain: the lift refused to stir.
"We can manage!" said the marchesa. "Wait a bit."
Taking a great stride, which revealed the enormous white-stockinged calf of her leg, she stepped on to the floor, smiled and gave her hand to Cornélie, who imitated her gymnastics.
"Here we are!" sighed the marchesa, with a smile of satisfaction. "This is your room."
She opened a door and showed Cornélie a bedroom. Though the sun was shining brightly out of doors, the room was as damp and chilly as a cellar.
"Marchesa," Cornélie said, without hesitation, "I wrote to you for two rooms facing south."
"Did you?" asked the marchesa, plausibly and ingeniously. "I really didn't remember. Yes, that is one of those foreigners' ideas: rooms facing south. … This is really a beautiful room."
"I'm sorry, but I can't accept this room, marchesa."
La Belloni grumbled a bit, went down the corridor and opened the door of another room:
"And this one, signora? … How do you like this?"
"Is it south?"
"Almost."
"I want it full south."
"This looks west: you see the most splendid sunsets from your window."
"I absolutely must have a south room, marchesa."
"I also have the most charming little apartments looking east: you get the most picturesque sunrises there."
"No, marchesa."
"Don't you appreciate the beauties of nature?"
"Just a little, but I put my health first."
"I sleep in a north room myself."
"You are an Italian, marchesa, and you're used to it."
"I'm very sorry, but I have no rooms facing south."
"Then I'm sorry too, marchesa, but I must look out somewhere else."
Cornélie turned as though to go away. The choice of a room sometimes means the choice of a life.
The marchesa caught hold of her hand and smiled. She had abandoned her cool tone and her voice was all honey:
"Davvero, that's one of those foreigners' ideas: rooms facing south! But I have two little kennels left. Here. … "
And she quickly opened two doors, two snug little cupboards of rooms, displaying through the open casements a lofty and spacious view of the sky, out-spread above the streets and roofs below, with the blue dome of St. Peter's in the distance.
"These are the only rooms I have left facing south," said the marchesa, plaintively.
"I shall be glad to have these, marchesa."
"Sixteen lire," smiled la Belloni.
"Ten, as you wrote."
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