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Updated: May 31, 2025
"I do not know whether she is rich or not," said Orsino. "I never thought about it." He began to work at his books again, while Contini sat down and fanned himself with a bundle of papers. "She admires you very much, Don Orsino," said the latter, after a pause. Orsino looked up sharply. "What do you mean by that?" he asked.
He even kept a private account of his own expenditure on the allowance he received from his father, in order that, if called upon, he might be able to prove how large a part of that allowance he regularly paid to poor Contini as compensation for the unhappy position in which the latter found himself.
I should no longer have the alternative of remaining his slave in exchange for safety from bankruptcy to myself and ruin or something like it to my father. "But let us talk no more about it all. But for your kindly letter, no one would ever have known all this, except Contini.
Orsino took the money indifferently enough, conscious that he had three fortunes at his back in case of trouble, but Contini grew more nervous as time went on and the sums on paper increased in magnitude, while the chances of disposing of the buildings seemed reduced to nothing in the stagnation which had already set in.
He was a problematic personage with a disquieting nose, who spoke few words but examined everything with an air of superior comprehension. He looked keenly at Orsino but seemed to have no idea who he was and put all his questions to Contini.
The sum of money is so considerable that I would not like to ask all my family, with their three fortunes, to contribute it. The business is enormous. I have an establishment like a bank and Contini you remember Contini? has several assistant architects. Moreover we stand alone. There is no other firm of the kind left, and our failure would be a very disagreeable affair.
Compared with the necessity of acknowledging the present state of his affairs to his father, the prospect of being made a tool of by Del Ferice was bearable, not to say attractive. "What had we better do, Contini?" he asked at length. "There is nothing to be done but to go on, I suppose, until we are ruined," replied the architect.
"If you will have patience Signor Principe, I will be at your disposal in five minutes." Orsino was obliged to be satisfied and sat down again by Contini. He told him the news of Del Ferice's wife. "That will make matters worse," said Contini. "It will not improve them," answered Orsino indifferently.
As for the architect himself, he surveyed Orsino with a sort of sympathetic curiosity which the latter would have thought unpleasantly familiar if he had understood it. Contini had never spoken before with any more exalted personage than Del Ferice, and he studied the young aristocrat as though he were a being from another world.
If, as was probable, Del Ferice had means of either selling or letting the houses, he stood to make an enormous profit. He saw, too, that if he accepted now, he must in all likelihood be driven to accept similar conditions on a future occasion, and that he would be binding Andrea Contini and himself to work, and to work hard, for nothing and perhaps during years.
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