His opinion restored him to Mrs. Lander’s esteem, when it was expressed to her, and as she was left to fix the sum of her debt to him, she made it handsomer than anything he had dreamed of.  She held out against seeing the vice-consul till the landlord sent in his account.  This was for the whole month which she had just entered upon, and it included fantastic charges for things hitherto included in the rent, not only for the current month, but for the months past when, the landlord explained, he had forgotten to note them.  Mrs. Lander refused to pay these demands, for they touched her in some of those economies which the gross rich practice amidst their profusion.  The landlord replied that she could not leave his house, either with or without her effects, until she had paid.  He declared Clementina his prisoner, too, and he would not send for the vice-consul at Mrs. Lander’s bidding.  How far he was within his rights in all this they could not know, but he was perhaps himself doubtful, and he consented to let them send for the doctor, who, when he came, behaved like anything but the steadfast friend that Mrs. Lander supposed she had bought in him.  He advised paying the account without regard to its justice, as the shortest and simplest way out of the trouble; but Mrs. Lander, who saw him talking amicably and even respectfully with the landlord, when he ought to have treated him as an extortionate scamp, returned to her former ill opinion of him; and the vice-consul now appeared the friend that Doctor Tradonico had falsely seemed.  The doctor consented, in leaving her to her contempt of him, to carry a message to the vice-consul, though he came back, with his finger at the side of his nose, to charge her by no means to betray his bold championship to the landlord.

The vice-consul made none of those shows of authority which Mrs. Lander had expected of him.  She saw him even exchanging the common decencies with the landlord, when they met; but in fact it was not hard to treat the smiling and courteous rogue well.  In all their disagreement he had looked as constantly to the comfort of his captives as if they had been his chosen guests.  He sent Mrs. Lander a much needed refreshment at the stormiest moment of her indignation, and he deprecated without retort the denunciations aimed at him in Italian which did not perhaps carry so far as his conscience.  The consul talked with him in a calm scarcely less shameful than that of Dr. Tradonico; and at the end of their parley which she had insisted upon witnessing, he said: 

“Well, Mrs. Lander, you’ve got to stand this gouge or you’ve got to stand a law suit.  I think the gouge would be cheaper in the end.  You see, he’s got a right to his month’s rent.”

“It ain’t the rent I ca’e for:  it’s the candles, and the suvvice, and the things he says we broke.  It was undastood that everything was to be in the rent, and his two old chaias went to pieces of themselves when we tried to pull ’em out from the wall; and I’ll neva pay for ’em in the wo’ld.”