by Ouida
‘Eh, sir?’ said Pippo wistfully.
‘I see nothing out of order in these,’ said Luca Finti. ‘Really nothing. It may fall hard on you; but you should have observed the laws.’
‘Laws, sir?’ said the old man hotly. ‘I never broke the law — never. It never could be put against me. They are not laws, these tomfool’s rubbish that those spies and blackguards lay their heads together to concoct, that they may wring our money out of us when they want a breakfast, or a supper, or a drink, or a trull!’
‘Hush — sh — sh!’ said the Deputy, putting up his hand with quite a shiver. ‘You must not say such things. You must never say such things. The Law is unassailable, and its administrators and representatives must be respected. These papers are perfectly correct. They are founded on Imperial Law, and, were they not so, every municipality has a right to make and to enforce its own laws. The regulations of your commune are admirable ones; wise, preventative, full of an excellent forethought and caution. It is your duty, and it ought to be your pleasure, to obey them—’
Messer Luca Finti might have gone on in this strain for an hour, since every Italian is eloquent, or, at any rate, long‐winded and master of a million words, but old Pippo, whose slow and patient blood was beginning to boil under the bitterness of his disappointment, interrupted him.
‘Listen, your honor; that guard is a rogue that has been a vagabond before all our eyes ever since he could run alone; and the clerk that makes the laws is a rogue too, only a smooth one, in cloth clothes; and wrong, to my knowledge, I have never done; and the brook has been put there by God in heaven, and the reeds any man of us cuts when he pleases, and no one is a penny the worse; and my little old dog is a pet of every baby about in the place, and why shouldn’t it sit at the door; and if you only will think on the cruelty of all this, and the shame and the sin against me, an old man, and one who never did harm, and—’
‘My dear friend,’ said the Deputy wearily, ‘your head is a wooden head. You will not understand. You have broken the law. Libel against the officers of the law will not efface the fact, but only increase your criminality. I can do nothing. Nothing whatever.
‘What is the use of you being our Deputy, then, if you cannot see to having us righted?’ said Pippo, whose spirit had risen as his heart was breaking.
‘You are not wronged,’ said Luca Finti with a polite contempt. ‘Were you wronged, be sure my protection should be all over you. You are not wronged at all, caro mio. You have transgressed certain just laws, and you must be made to pay a just penalty for your disobedience. It is no use to groan,’ added the Deputy, as Pippo did groan at all the grand words that fell like ice on his ear.
‘You should not complain. You should confess yourself to blame. I do not see that the fines are in any way excessive. You must pay them, and you will be a wiser man for the future.’
Pippo stood quite still; the veins swelling on his wrinkled forehead and great angry tears gathering in his eyes.
There is nothing on earth so hard to endure as this tone of easy superiority, of jaunty counsel: to the old man, with whom this matter was ruin itself, every one of the tranquil, insolent, chill words was like the stab of a knife.
He gathered up the papers with a tremulous hand; it was all he could do to keep from bursting out crying like a child.
‘There’s no right in them, and no justice,’ he muttered. ‘God forgive you gentlemen who ruin the poor.’
And with that he put his hat on his old white head, and turned his back on Luca Finti, and went out of the door. The Deputy hesitated a moment, then rose and went after him: this was an old fool rightly served, he thought; but then — he wanted to keep a good name in his newly‐won Collegio.
He touched Pippo on the shoulder.
‘Here,’ he said a little hurriedly. ‘You must try and make a collection and pay those amounts so; they are not at all excessive; quite just, quite just; but if you are so poor, take this to begin with; only you must not say I gave it.’
Then he slid into the old man’s hand a five‐franc note.
Pippo put it back again very quietly.
‘Thank you sir,’ he said very quietly too. ‘I came for justice not for favour, and I never was a beggar yet.’
Then he went down the stairs and Messer Luca Finti for the first time in his life felt crest‐fallen.
CHAPTER XIII.
LITTLE Pippo, saying nothing more, went with the bitterness gnawing at his heartstrings, and got leave to visit Carmelo.
It was a sad sight to see that strong healthy, handsome youth, who should have been at work in the mill with the weighty sacks pulling at his arms, shut up in prison, lying on a wooden bench face downwards, doing nothing, grown spiritless, and yet sullen, broken in strength, and yet savage, as the dogs are that these wise laws chain.
Pippo sat down before him; the old man’s brown face was pinched and pallid, but he was quiet still; he felt like one stunned and paralysed.
‘My boy, these devils claim two hundred and forty three francs of me,’ he said with a little quiver in his voice. ‘If I do not pay they will sell me up; I must get money on the house. You know well a thing borrowed on is as good as lost. I did think to give the girl the house in dower, when she married you. What do you say now? It will come to you mortgaged, and that is no better than a loaf that the mice have gnawed, with all the crumb eat off, but so it must be.’
Carmelo nodded.
Nothing mattered to him much.
‘Will not the new deputy do any good for us?’ he asked wearily.
‘Curse him!’ said Pippo. ‘He is one of them; a scoundrel climbed up on poor fools’ backs, and making more poor fools a ladder to get up higher by, that’s all. A scoundrel; a sheer scoundrel, a tongue of oil, a heart of brass! Don’t think of him! You won’t mind then, Carmelo, if the old house never comes to the girl?—’
Carmelo laughed a little bitterly.
‘I am a felon,’ said he. ‘House or no house, Viola will be too good for me when I come out; I am disgraced.’
‘Not you,’ said the old man. ‘You did right; the prison can do you no shame: all the village says that, and Viola will be as proud to walk before the priest with you, as if you were the king. I thought I would tell you of the house, because you had a right to look for it, and when once there is a loan on it, it is gone for good.’
‘Never mind me, ‘ said Carmelo. ‘I am so sorry all this loss falls on you. There seems a curse on us. Tell Viola not to fret, to keep a brave heart; I shall be out in three weeks more, for certain I am that when they hear all they will set me free, and then—’
‘Then she shall marry you,’ said Pippo. ‘Not but what if things go on as they are now you will breed but beggars.’
‘We must take our chances of that,’ said Carmelo. ‘If you are sure she will not be ashamed of me—’
‘If she were, she would be turned out of my door, neck and crop,’ said Pippo. ‘But there is no fear of that. Viola is a good girl and a loyal. I am glad you do not care more for the house.’
‘I do not care at all except for you,’ said Carmelo, to whom in his durance it seemed that no roof could ever be needed by anyone except the broad blue sky.
Then Pippo left him and said to the gaoler at the prison door:
‘Can you tell me of a man who lends money?’ and the gaoler answered that he knew no one who would lend it without making a profit on it, but if there were a profit to be had, then nobody he thought could be fairer than a certain Signore Nicolo Poccianti, who dwelt hard by the west gate, and was a notary and a lender too.
To him went Pippo.
‘When you must be hanged, what matters the rope?’ he said to himself, and by sunset on the morrow he had three hundred francs in his breeches pocket, and he left his papers that concerned the house with Messer Nicolo, and had put his cross before two witnesses against a long written thing that was read out to him without his understanding any word or any sense of it, and had seen seals and si
gnatures set at the public office to documents a metre in length.
When he took his place in the lumbering diligence to be borne homeward, he felt that the dust of the road and the blue of the sky spun round him. Life was over for him, as much as though the coffin had been nailed down above his body.
His little house had been very dear to him; it had made him feel proud and like a man; there had been always that little place to live and die in, a place all his own, as much as the palace is a monarch’s: now that another had a claim on it, all that was over.
‘I have borrowed on the house,’ he said to his daughter when he reached home, and sank into a chair, pale to the lips, and with all his limbs and frame trembling.
Then he stretched out his hands with a sudden strength of passion.
‘God’s curse on them!’ he cried fiercely; ‘God’s curse on them!’
CHAPTER XIV.
NEXT morning timid Cecco the cooper went for Pippo and paid the two hundred and forty three francs claimed by the municipality.
Pippo was in bed with what is called a stroke of heat, and wandered in his speech and seemed stupid. Timid Cecco went and paid it all because the girl asked him to do so, he being very far from sure that he would not be incriminated in some way himself. But when they gave him the receipt for the money, the simple soul was overjoyed, and ran back as fast as ever he could, and tore up Pippo’s stairs, and went in triumph to Pippo’s bedside.
‘Now you have got a bit of paper,’ he cried, ‘they never can hurt you any more. Keep it close. Never lose it. You’ve got your bit of paper now!’
The old man lay with his face to the wall, and answered nothing.
Viola, young, and so hopeful, caught Cecco’s arm in both her hands.
‘Is that true? Is that really true? Will they never be able to torment us any more? Are you quite certain?’
Simple Cecco, in the honesty of his own convictions, patted her hands kindly, and said:
‘Of course they can’t, my dear, now you have got that bit of paper. You must keep it close, and always have it by to show; this bit of paper. Why, my dear,’ continued Cecco, with a touch of patriotic indignation, ‘Do you think after taking nigh three hundred francs from your poor grandfather, they wouldn’t respect his bit of paper? No, no; they’re bad, but not so bad as that.’
‘And Raggi may be loose?’
‘Why, I should say so, my dear: for what else is the tax paid for her, and that bit of paper given?’
The one‐idea’d mind of Cecco the cooper could not embrace a state of things in which you pay heaps of fines and taxes and yet get nothing in return for them.
‘Poor grandfather!’ said Viola with her onyx‐like eyes suffused and tender. ‘Pray God send him no more trouble.’
Pippo, as she spoke, sat suddenly up in his bed.
‘Nay, nay; Dominiddio has nought to do with sending this sort of trouble,’ he said, with a thickened voice and a sort of wild gesture. ‘Never lay it on God, my child. This trouble and them who made it are spawned and hatched in hell.’
The girl shuddered.
She had never seen her kindly, placid, pious old grandfather thus.
A lull occurred in the storm of summonses. Some eight or ten days drifted by in peace. Raggi ran about.
At the end of the week Pippo got up and put on his clothes and went out to his daily work.
‘Never to cut the reeds! Never to cut the reeds!’ he muttered: but he had been cowed and terrified; he did not dare take his reaping‐hook and wade in amongst the little green blowing rushes. It is the per‐ fection of these laws that they change brave men into soulless machines.
He got his spade and went and dug, in his little bit of ground amongst the potatoes and tomatoes. Seeing him thus labouring the girl took heart, and began to hope all would go well. She did not know enough to realise all the mortgage on the little house implied, and she felt sure that Carmelo would soon be free.
She called Raggi, and ran lightly up to Gigi Canterelli’s shop to buy a little macaroni. She passed Messer Gaspardo Nellemane. She coloured hotly, remembering the gifts of Corpus Domini. He uncovered his head with a bland smile; his eye, glancing from her, fell on little yellow Raggi.
That night he said to Bindo, ‘There are still dogs loose despite the law. Enforce our regulations.’
Bindo promised extra zeal, though it was by no means to his views to drill the populace into perfect obedience, but rather to leave a little troop of contraventions straying about like gipsies, on which he could pounce down for his fines at leisure, as a hawk picks one out a brood of young birds for breakfast, and takes another at noonday.
The next day another summons, to ‘make accord on a transgression,’ was left at Filippio Mazetti’s. Viola received it when her grandfather was in the kitchen garden, and after a moments hesitation thrust it in her pocket, and waited her opportunity to take counsel with Cecco the cooper.
‘It is a mistake,’ said Cecco. ‘Of course it’s a mistake, when you have got the bit of paper! Lend me the bit of paper, and I will go and see to it. I have been once; — I can just as well go again, and not worry your grandfather.’
Cecco was a long, thin man, like a lath, and was very pale, and almost anything in the world set him all of a tremble, as he would say himself, and he shook in his shoes as he went up to the Municipal Palace on his unselfish errand. But he was a good neighbour and friend, and was fond of Viola; and he put a bold front over a quaking spirit as he asked to see Messer Nellemane. It was the hour when the potentate gave gracious audience.
‘I have ventured, sir,’ he began, with great respect in his tone, for he knew that the Secretary liked and expected much obsequiousness. ‘I have ventured, Pippo being ailing himself, as one may say, and not able in any way to come to you, to bring your most illustrious this summons they have sent him by a mistake, sir. Quite a mistake, as you will see, sir, for you will remember only last week giving to me, who came for him then also, a bit of paper that set him free of all these things. This is a mistake, sir—’
‘We never make mistakes,’ said Messer Nellemane frigidly, and glanced his eye over the summons. ‘I cannot suppose for a moment it is a mistake. But it is not in my department. However, as you seem a well‐meaning person, I will send for the usciere.’
He touched a hand bell.
The usciere was out, serving warrants; in his stead fat Maso, who was below cracking walnuts, as he had been eating figs when Carmelo’s wedding‐party had come, responded to the summons, even tried to look pompous and official, knowing that the master of all their destinies expected it.
‘This summons, Signore Tommaso,’ said Messer Gaspardo to him, with dignity yet graciousness; ‘Will you be as good as to say why it was issued? It is worded so as to call to account Mazzetti Filippo, for a transgression of the law on the 15th ult.; that was the day before yesterday. What is his offence?’
‘Dog loose, Signore,’ said the fat Maso, who knew that his superior liked to do all the eloquence himself, and expected pithy and pregnant replies from his colleagues and inferiors.
‘Dog loose? Ah! The witness?’ asked Messer Nellemane.
Maso replied promptly, ‘The municipal guard, Terri Bindo.’
‘All in order — all quite in order,’ said Messer Gaspardo complacently, and turned to Cecco. ‘You perceive, my friend, there is no mistake. No mistake is ever made here. I should have thought that Mazzetti had had caution and lesson enough; he must be an extremely obstinate and perverse person. His dog was loose the day before yesterday. He must pay two francs, and if he continue his transgression the next penalty must be higher.’
Cecco gasped: he remained standing with his mouth wide open, so amazed and so horror‐stricken he was.
‘But your honour,’ he said with a trembling and panting voice. ‘Please, your honour, here is this bit of paper; you gave it yourself, and the taxgatherer gave such another; I paid all that mint of money for him only last week; if it don’t set him free, w
hat was the use of it? what was the money paid for — ?’
This most timid man grew audacious in his grief and amazement. If a bit of paper was no protection, then to Cecco heaven and earth alike were falling.
‘What was the money paid for — what was the money paid for?’ he stammered in his bewilderment. ‘Sixty‐five francs of it was every penny for Raggi!’
‘Everything is in order,’ said Messer Nellemane, coldly eyeing the agitated creature with some scorn and more disgust. ‘What this very stubborn friend of yours paid last week were arrears; long due arrears. That payment has nothing to do with this, nor with any future ones that his contumacy may cost him.’
‘Lord have mercy on his soul!’ groaned Cecco.
Messer Nellemane grew impatient.
‘If you are come to pay the fine, pay it. If not, I must remind you that my time is valuable, and so also is that of the other officers of the commune.’
‘Lord have mercy on his soul,’ ejaculated Cecco, looking all round the room with a scared expression. ‘Why, if he were as rich as a wax candle maker he would be ruined at this rate in a month!’
‘Are you coming to pay the fine?’ repeated Messer Nellemane, sharply hitting his desk with his ruler, as Léon Gambetta does when in a rage with Paul de Cassagnac.
‘Lord, have mercy!’ moaned the cooper for the third time, and fumbled in his breeches pocket and pulled out some very dirty little half‐franc notes and halfpence.
‘Is it two francs?’ he asked faintly.
‘Three‐fifty with spese,’ said Maso with great rapidity.
Costs.
Cecco counted out the sum; he happened to have it in his pocket, for he had just been paid for some wine barrels.
Maso made him out a receipt grudgingly, but Cecco put it back with a feeble gesture.
‘What is the use of it if you will come again directly?’ said this very stupid man.
‘Imbecile!’ thundered Messer Nellemane. ‘Every charge is separate, and every charge is just. A word more, and I call the guard.’