214This short cut led, too—apparently to Fortunato’s surprise and dismay—directly through a walled farmyard surrounding a frowning, half-ruined casa, nail-studded of door and barred of window, and with an air of ancient and secretive menace. It was the sort of place travellers in such books as “The Mysteries of Udolpho” used to come upon at nightfall, far from any other habitation, with a thunderstorm about to break among the mountains, and the leader of their four-horsed travelling carriage hopelessly lame, so that the delicate and shrinking heroine must, willy nilly, beg for a night’s accommodation and the surly inhabitant’s sinister hospitality. Curiously enough the dwellers in this casa were, it seemed, of the exact Udolpho variety. Ringing the correctly rusty bell, and battering upon the massive gate with their parasol handles aroused a storm of deep-mouthed baying of dogs within, and a fierce brown face finally appeared at a small wooden shutter to demand the cause of the intrusion. Fortunato’s heart and legs plainly turned to water at the sight of this person, but realizing that he had got Jane and Peripatetica into a hole and must get them out, he wheedled in such honeyed and persuasive Sicilian, that at last, and reluctantly, the heavy portal “Ground its teeth to let them pass,” the furious dogs having first been chained. Very arid and ruined and poor this jealously guarded dwelling seemed. Nothing was visible the protection of which required those four big wolf-like dogs that shrieked and bounded and tore at their chains as the intruders passed; nor that the lean fierce man and his leaner and fiercer wife and children should accompany them 215like a jailer’s guard to the exit. Fortunately this nether door was unbarred before the lean man demanded money for having permitted them to cross his land, and having a sense of Fortunato’s imploring eyes upon them they made the gift a lire instead of a copper, and pushing through the door fled as for their lives. “So there really was an Italy like the Italy of the romantic Georgian novel!” said Jane wonderingly, as soon as she could catch breath. “It’s only another proof,” gasped Peripatetica, “that travellers really do tell the truth. It’s the ignorant stay-at-homes who can’t believe anything they haven’t seen themselves. Fortunato,” she demanded sternly, “who are those people, and why do they behave so absurdly? What are they concealing?” But no explanation was to be had from that erstwhile fluent and expansive homme du monde. He was frightened, he was vague, and simply darkened counsel. “I strongly suspect there is some Mafia business behind all this—you naughty boy!” said Jane reprovingly, but Fortunato only pulled his cap over his eyes and slunk away without claiming his day’s wage.