Cosmo recollected himself. "I was quite a child at the time," he said. 

 The venerated client of Cantelucci cracked a walnut and then looked at Cosmo's face. 

 "I should think you weren't seven years old at the time," he said in a judicial tone. "When I first came into Italy with the vaccine, you know, Sir Charles's marriage was still being talked about in Florence. I remember it perfectly though it seems as if it had all happened in another world. Yes, indubitably he died of hunger like ten thousand other Genoese. He couldn't go out to hunt for garbage with the populace or crawl out at night trying to gather nettles in the ditches outside the forts, and nobody would have known that he was dead for a month if one of the bombs out of a bomb-vessel with Admiral Keith's blockading squadron hadn't burst the door in. They found him at the foot of the stairs, and, they say, with a lot of gold pieces in his pockets. But nobody cared much for that. If it had been a lot of half-gnawed bones there would have been blood spilt, no doubt. For all I know there were or may be even now secret places full of gold in the thickness of these walls. However, the body was thrown into a corpse-cart and the authorities boarded the doorway. It remained boarded for years because the heirs didn't care to have anything to do with that shell of a palace. I fancy that the last of them died in the snows of Russia. Cantelucci came along, and owing to a friendship with some sort of scribe in the Municipality he got permission to use the place for his hostelry. He told me that he found several half ducats in the corners of the hall when he took possession. I suppose they paid for the whitewash, for I can't believe that Cantelucci had much money in his pockets." 

 "Perhaps he found one of those secret hiding-places of which you spoke," suggested Cosmo. 

 "What? Cantelucci? He never looked for any gold. He is too much in the clouds; but he has made us dine well in the palace of the starved man, hasn't he? Sixteen years ago in Naples he was a Jacobin and a friend of the French, a rebel, a traitor to his king if you like—but he has a good memory, there is no denying that." 

 "Is he a Neapolitan, then?" asked Cosmo. "I imagined they were of a different type." 

 "God only knows. He was there and I didn't ask him. He was a prisoner of the royalists, of the reactionaries. I was much younger then and perhaps more humane. Flesh and blood couldn't stand in the sight of the way in which they were being 

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