by Ouida
Thus Fede.
You greater ones, who are not shoemakers or shoemenders, but lawgivers, book-writers, politicians, philosophers, logicians, reformers, and all the rest, do you not find Humanity your Lippo Fede? “Do not spoil trade,” your brethren cry, when you would fain be honest.
But I do not drill holes, despite good Fede’s grumbling and reproaches; and so I am poor.
Yet I thought to myself, —
“A girl cannot cost much to keep, not much more than a couple of thrushes, I suppose; at least, to be sure, the thrushes wear no garments: still, just for a week or two, till she can look round her, one would not be ruined. Into the streets she cannot go, and the convents would not do for her. Instead of entering Ara Cœli, she went to see the Faun.”
So I thought to myself, and set to work clearing away Palès’s straw nest, and the old flasks, and the general litter, and smelling all the while with hungry nostrils the fry that Pippo was frying for me, and which I never should taste, — at least, if she could manage to eat it.
When I had made my room. neat, which was easy to me, because I can turn my hand to most kinds of work, and see no shame in any of it when I have done it, — feeling glad, I remember, to see those scarlet beans at the casement all so bravely flowering up their strings, because they might please her with the sunset-gilded water shining through their leaves, — I went down again to Ersilia.
“Is she better?” I asked, and heard that she was so. “Then, like a good soul, take the linen off my bed up there,” I said to her, “and put fresh linen on, and let her have that room of mine for to-night, at any rate; and let her fancy it an empty room we have here doing nothing.”
“You know nothing of her?” said the old soul, suspicious of me.
“On my word, nothing; but I am not afraid. And you, Ersilia, my dear, you would not have wished your daughter, had she lived, to want a roof between her and the shame or the starvation of the streets?”
“No,” said Ersilia, with her bright, fierce eyes dimming. She had had an only child, and lost her at sixteen years old of cholera. “No; and you have a true tongue, Crispin, and are an honest man. But if I do what you want, where will you sleep?”
“Oh, anywhere. Palès and I can always find a bed together. Go up and get the linen now, and take her there; and do not frighten her, and I will bring her something she can eat.”
“But she is of foul Jew spawn.”
“No more than you or I, or Palès. The Jew disowns her. Anyhow, she is a girl; and the streets are vile.”
“She is handsome,” said Ersilia, still suspicious.
“So much the worse for her. Go up and get the bed ready, dear Ersilia,” said I.
And then I went out and gossiped a little with the people, so as to turn their hearts towards her; because, did they think her of Jewish blood, I knew they would hoot at her, to say the least, and very likely drive her out with stones, or accuse her of poisoning the bright waters of our fountain.
But I have had some skill in managing the minds of crowds; it is a mere knack, like any other; it belongs to no particular character or culture. Arnold of Brescia had it, and so had Masaniello. Lamartine had it, and so had Jack Cade.
They were all ready to hear, or rather to scream questions, which is a crowd’s favorite way of hearing, especially when that crowd is three parts female. The mere sight of the tired, drooping figure following me across my threshold had been enough to set them all aflame with curiosity: so small a thing is enough for us to chatter of, ten hours long, in Rome.
I set their sympathies for and not against her, and told a lie flatly, and said there was nothing of Jewish blood in her, and had no time to do more, but ran in and got the fry from Pippo’s kitchen. Brown and golden it was, lovely as a fry could be, hot as hot, and seething and smoking in the sweetest manner, all its little bubbles singing loud; but I covered it up, and put a nice little roll of white bread and a little fruit beside it, and put it all into Ersilia’s hand, with a glass of Lachryma Christi from the little dark hole in the stairs where I keep my wine.
I did not like to go up to her myself.
“Is she in my room?” I asked.
Ersilia nodded. She was cross; she went up into the darkness of the stairway.
I smoked my pipe in Pippo’s kitchen, to escape the questions of the people; for that corner by the Repetta fountain, and the bridge itself, were growing full and resonant with voices as the evening coolness came.
Pippo, who was always deaf, and was then busy getting ready a supper to go across in a tin dish to a plump priest, had heard nothing, and so asked nothing. I was not willing that he should hear. Pippo was the best of souls, but a devout believer, to whom Jews and heretics were lower than the garbage-seeking swine. Pippo fried his cutlets by the saints’ grace, and kept nigh two hundred days out of each year holy, by snoring through them and drinking a little more than ordinary.
In half an hour’s time Ersilia came down the stairs again: the plate was emptied.
“That looks well,” said I, cheerfully. “She has got back her appetite, at least.”
“Nay, not a bit did she touch. She ate the fruit; I ate the fritter. It were a shame to waste good food the good saints give!” said Ersilia, and expected me to be pleased. I! — who was hungry as a peasant’s donkey, and could not for shame’s sake ask Pippo for another supper. Besides, his charcoal was gone out, all its live ashes being shoveled into the tin box to keep his reverence’s platter warm.
“She ate nothing!” I said, ruefully. And, indeed, it was hard upon me.
“The saints will remember it to you, just as well as though she had eaten it,” said Ersilia, with a gleam of humor in her eyes. “It was more fit for me. She picked a little of the fruit, bird-like, being thirsty. I think she has got fever.”
“You will not leave her alone?” I begged, and felt that the sharp, honest soul was worth a hundred fries and fritters.
Ersilia nodded.
“Oh, for the matter of that, they want nothing in fever; they lie like stocks and stones. But I will see to her. Where do you sleep to-night yourself?”
“I shall do well anywhere, — with Palès!” I answered, and walked out, knowing they would only laugh at me for being so anxious about a stray strange girl, — I, an old man and past all follies of the heart and fancy.
Palès was sitting, bolt upright, and with a shrewd and anxious face, beside the stall, for it was past her hour to be released: at sunset she and I were always drinking and eating cosily in some nook if it were bad weather, or off rambling beyond the gates along the broad green level if it were fair. Palès detested change of any kind: there is no more conservative politician than a dog.
But to-night I only gave her leave to go away and hunt her cats or meet her lovers, as she chose, within the length of the street and bridge, and sat down myself to my board.
“I must finish Padre Trillo’s shoes,” I said to my neighbours, and stitched away at them, and kept my pipe in my mouth to escape gossiping, with the little oil lamp swinging to and fro on its cord under my awning, and the people coming and going, with its light upon their faces.
“He is in one of his queer moods,” they said to one another, passing me. It is of use to have a reputation for queerness: it gains one many solitary moments of peace.
Meanwhile the night drew on, and the bean-flowers before my window up on high lost their color in the moonlight.
I wondered what my Hermes thought of the new form that he gazed upon, — he who made woman.
Have you never known what it is to believe in the thoughts of a statue? You have never lived with marble, then, — marble that speaks to you like a living thing, only that is so much greater than any living thing ever was!
I worked half the night at Padre Trillo’s shoes. He was a heavy man, who trod heavily; and there was much to be done to them. The people cleared away one by one, little by little, till all the gay, mirthful, dancing, love-making, wine-drinking little groups were brok
en up and gone, and one began to hear in the stillness the singing of the nightingales up on high, where the woods and gardens were, and the boughs still rustled that saw Tasso die.
When I had driven in the last brass nail, there was no sound at all but of their distant singing, and of the falling of the fountain near at hand. It was an hour past midnight, the hour, you know, when the buried and forgotten gods arise, they say, and pass through Rome, weeping, bound together by fetters of dead leaves.
I laid myself down upon my plank, with Palès curled beneath it, and fell asleep: I dreamed of other lives than this, and in my dreams the nightingales sorrowing for Itys, and the Faun in the fountain-water piping of dead days, mingled themselves together, and told me many things.
But who cares what they said, or would believe? These are only brown birds and perished fables: so you say! And I am only Crispino the cobbler, stitching at old leather for old Rome.
CHAPTER VI.
WAKING, the Faun was silent, and the nightingales, if they were not silent, had all their voices drowned in the loud chorus of all the other birds, which had been sound asleep all night, and now fluttered into joyousness and movement, with the coming of the day, among the myrtle-and the ilex-leaves in the monastic gardens up yonder upon the Golden Hill.
Waking, I woke cramped, of course, and cold, and with the smell of the dying lamp-wick in my nostrils, and the broad rosy flush of the sky like the glory of the last judgment above my head.
Waking, I wondered a moment, then looked up at my own window, where the bean-flowers were, and remembered why I was there, and thus, with Palès crouching in her straw and yawning, and the fountain so near to us both.
Waking, I yawned like Palès, and shook myself, and dipped my head in a pailful of the fountain-water, and looked, as I always look at daybreak, down the beautiful golden surface of the river, where it is all so calm and stirless, and the great black shadows lie so still, and the sails of the boats droop idle, and the ruined temples shine golden in the morning light.
Every one still was sleeping. It was not yet five by the clocks. Sweet clear-toned bells were pealing from the churches down the shores; and they and the call of a fisherman setting his girella in the sweep of the current, and the murmurs of the water rippling and falling, and the song of the thrushes and the woodlarks in the thickets, were the only sounds there were.
The day was still so young that no one was astir. I sat down and stitched at those big boots of the butcher; but very soon I saw Ersilia with a mop in her hand, and a pail: she came to get the fountain-water.
Your precious waif and stray is in high fever,” she said to me, with that pleasure in bad news which your true gossip always takes; “begins to say nonsense, and all that; a heavy stupid fever. There is nothing to be done; I did not like to send her to hospital without your word, but —
“I will go find an apothecary,” said I, and went and found one, seeking an old man, as old as I myself, whom I knew well.
“What little she costs shall be my charge,” I told Ersilia, when I returned, and put a new little piece or two of money in her hand, because money is more eloquent than all your poets, preachers, or philosophers, and has the only tongue that, strange to no one, needs no dictionary to explain it to the simplest unlearned soul.
The apothecary said it was not dangerous, but might be long; it was the common fever of the city, — tedious and wearisome rather than very perilous to life. It seemed she was always talking of Rome in a faint delirious way, and had a fancy that she had been brought there for martyrdom; only not martyrdom for Christ’s sake, but for the sake of the old dead gods that every one else had abandoned, whilst she herself to them was faithful.
“An odd fancy,” said the apothecary, taking snuff.
To me it did not seem so odd; I half believed in them; only it did not do to say so with Canon Silvio’s and Padre Trillo’s shoes just taken home, and good coins paid me for them.
So she lay sick there, whilst I stitched leather more steadily than ever I had done in all my life, and Palès, who disliked the turn that things had taken, almost split her triangle of a black mouth with yawning.
“You make a rod for your back, Crispin,” said my friend Pippo, the cook.
“You make a clog for your hoof, Crispin,” said my friend Tino, the tinker.
“You make a fool of yourself, Crispin,” said all my neighbours of the Ponte Sisto corner, and the fishers watching their nets in the stream; and, what was worse, the curved mouth of my Hermes said it likewise. Only the Faun in the fountain-water said, “When men are fools, then only are they wise;” and that little voice that lives in us, and must be destined to live after us, I think, said very clearly to me, “What matter being a fool — in others’ eyes, — if only thou dost right?”
I might be doing foolishly. I could not well be doing wrong. As for the rod and as for the clog, he has them both who once admits into him any human affection. But without the rod we are hard and selfish, and without the clog we are idle as feathers on the wind.
Still, a fool I was: that all people around the Ponte Sisto, and in the Quarter of the Tanners, and all the fisher-folk down both banks of the Tiber, were agreed; but they liked me the more because they could laugh at me. To be lowered in your neighbor’s estimation is to be heightened in his love.
Such a fool! to turn out of a good chamber, and eat sparsely, and sleep with the dog, and pay a doctor’s fees, and stitch, stitch, stitch, to buy ice, and fruit, and so forth, all for a stray girl, come from the Lord knows where, and of no more kin to me (if I were to be believed) than the human dust of the Appian Way, or the long-fleeced goats coming tinkling at dawn through the streets! “Eh, such a fool!” said the men and the women standing about the house-doors, and under the wine-sellers’ withered green boughs, and beside the bright water splashing out of the lions’ mouths at our own fountain.
I let them say their say, and sat at my stall; and the girl on high, with Hermes and the bean-flowers, meanwhile, was ill, as was only to be looked for after her fatigue, and the hot sun, and the pain that had met her at the close of her weary travel.
“There was the hospital,” they said.
Yes, there was, no doubt; and I would speak reverently of all such places; but one would not wish to die in one all the same; and, besides, I had loved women, and lost them; I knew what their fancies are, and how they shrink from things, — quite little things, that men would laugh at, or would altogether disregard, but which to them are as torments of Antinora.
So I sat on at my stall through the fierce summer weather; and she lay ill up yonder behind the scarlet blossoms of my bean-flowers.
It would be foolish to say that it did not cost me a good deal. Everything costs to the poor, and costs twice what the rich would give for it. But I had a little money put away in an old stocking, in that cupboard in the wall where the wine was; and then, after all, no man need spend much on himself unless he chooses.
Whose business was it if I smoked but once a day at sunset, or if I troubled Pippo no more to fry for me? Smoking is dry work for the throat in warm weather; and a hunch of bread with a little wine may suffice for any mortal whose paunch is not his god.
Anyhow, she lay ill up there, and I did what I could for her, stitching down below. Ersilia was a good soul, and full of kindliness; but charity is a flower not naturally of earthly growth, and it needs manuring with a promise of profit.
I do not think Ersilia left to herself would have been at all unkind, but she would have been perfectly certain of the excellence of hospitals and the superior chances of life in them, and would have acted on her certainty with perfect honesty of intent; for people are always most honest when they are in any sincere fear for themselves.
The fever was very tedious, and the city grew very hot with the heavy, drowsy, sickly heat of the midsummer-time; and the poor child lay there, parching and weary, and sleeping very little, they told me, with the glaring sun beating all day long at the closed shutters o
f the room, and getting through the crevices, and burning in upon her.
Once, as I thought was my duty, I betook myself down to the Ghetto, and saw the old man Ben Sulim. He was a tall, gaunt, fierce-eyed man, who had been handsome most likely in his youth, but was hungry-looking as any vulture and savage-looking as any wolf. He was in a miserable attic strewn with rusty dusty odds and ends of things that he had bought from rag-pickers and beggars; they said that was his trade.
I told her tale and mine with such eloquence, in hope to move him, — though he looked a brute, — as I could command to my usage. He heard in silence, rubbing up an old iron lock red with rust; then showed his teeth as wolves do.
“My daughter was a wanton,” he said. “Her daughter — if there be one — may go and be the like, for me. Get you gone, whoever you are. I am poor, very poor, as you see; but were I rich with all the riches of Solomon, the maiden — if she be one — should starve for me. I have spoken.”
Then he glowered upon me with his impenetrable eyes, and turned his back, still rubbing at his rusty lock. Brutality, poverty, wretchedness, who would not deem her best saved from such a triad? I hurled a few unsavory words at him, and told him his threshold was accursed, and departed: his mercy would have been more cruel than his cruelty.
I went and bathed in the open baths of the Tiber, to be purified after all that beastliness. Come what might to her, anything would be better than life with such a one as he.
It was a hot evening; I splashed and plunged, Palès with me; the water was yellow and scarcely cool; still, it was water, and so allured one. The moon was up when I returned to my corner by the Ponte Sisto. My window above the bridge stood open, of course; Ersilia put her head out of it. “She is much better: she is safe to live,” she cried to me.
“What shall we do with her?” I said to Palès. Palès stuck her tail out stiffly; she was not interested: if it had been a cat, indeed —
Palès had been born in a wine-cart, and had at that time a lover in a public letter-writer’s dog, and knew the world, and knew that your wise man does not bestir himself about another’s fate, unless to lift its burden off his own.