by Ouida
And he would take no denial, but thrust them away almost roughly, and shut to the door; then he sat himself down again, and again began counting, ‘Two and three make five, and four are nine, and six make fifteen,’ and so on through all the figures they had brought against him, repeating them over and over again, all through the dreary hours of the night.
‘He will lose his mind, saying over those figures!’ sobbed Viola, as they stood in the night air, no more, as of old, clear, silver and sweet, but full of noxious steam and stench.
Carmelo wound his arm about her; he dared not trust himself to speak.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE law has been compared by some writers to Fate. It may, perhaps, be accurately compared to the Juggernaut, which rolls on regardless whether it crushes straw or diamonds, youth or age, beauty or deformity.
The Juggernaut having been set in motion by Messer Nellemane, it rolled over Pippo quite regardless of his circumstances; and a few mornings after the Usciere had taken away everything except the little rusty pot, the law, which is never conscious of being ridiculous, served a summons to this old destitute man to pay sixty francs for a month’s delay in executing the work above the running water commanded by the commune.
Pippo could not read, but he knew the look of the summons paper with the arms of the province a‐top of its long pages. He laughed a shrill, hard little laugh, and twisted the paper up and lit his pipe with it.
He had a stupid and vacant look on his face, and he was very taciturn; and when alone at work could always be heard muttering over and adding up those figures; but he had set his back up straight against his lot; he would not die like Nanni.
He went on with his basket‐work and vegetable garden; one neighbour brought in an old chair, and another a kettle, and another some cracked plates, and Dom Lelio lent him a mattress; and so Pippo began life again at nigh seventy years of age; an age when hope is only a remembered thing, like a fair bird flown away long down the golden mists of the valley of youth.
They had been allowed to see ‘Nunziatina once more, but the interview was but added pain to her and to themselves. She was almost distraught; her dim eyes were streaming with tears, and her voice was hoarse with screaming. She could be made to understand nothing; she could not fancy anything except that they thought her guilty of some crime.
‘Let me get out; let me go free!’ she was crying with all her force. ‘I want the air; I want to see the sky. This is the day I am always to go to Varammista for my bread, and the pretty foreign child comes and gives me something more herself, and smiles with her blue eyes; let me get out; I have got a rose at home on purpose for the little miss; let me go to my own home. I shall die away from the my own house.’
The little musty place where she had cooked and worked, and eaten and slept for forty years, ever since her husband’s death, was dearer to her than her palace to a queen.
‘Dear lad, don’t you get into trouble for me,’ she said to Carmelo. ‘But let me out they must. I have done no harm at all. I only want to go home; I don’t want a cart or anything; I can walk every step of the way.’
But no one would let her out; and there they had to leave her. But for the entreating pressure of Viola’s hand upon his arm, Carmelo would have done that day what would have lodged him anew in the Carcere of Pomodoro. Sadly they had left her, and sadly they had returned.
Carmelo had only one thing of any value in the world; it was a watch that his grandfather had given him, leaving it to him by will as to his favourite. It was an old silver watch, two hundred years old, with fine répoussé work of cherubs and foliage around it: it went well still, and was as big as a peach. Carmelo loved and honoured it so that he never wore it except on feast‐days and Sundays. He wound it up only on those rarer occasions; at other times it lay in his drawer, wrapped in a silk handkerchief.
The day after he had seen Annunziata for the second time, in the prison of Pomodoro he waited carefully till Viola was busy washing linen and his father was out of sight; then he stepped upstairs, took the watch out of its drawer and slipped it in his pocket. Then he went and harnessed the mule.
‘I am going to take that flour back to Varammista,’ he called in at the kitchen window.
The flour had been ground for the fattore of that place. His brothers helped him up with the sacks, and he drove away, no one thinking that he was on any uncommmon errand.
He drove to Varammista (where unhappily he found the owners who liked Annunziata were absent), and left his sacks with their fattore, then on into the town that he hated. His face was flushed, and he carried his head high as he went through the streets. He fancied everyone was pointing at him.
There was a shop in the place that was a jeweller’s and an antiquity seller’s, both in one, kept by a man of whom in the happy weeks before his marriage Carmelo had brought some little coral and silver earrings for Viola.
Carmelo walked into the shop now, and held out the watch. ‘How much?’ he asked.
The jeweller stared, and took the watch in one hand; he had often seen and often coveted it.
‘Twenty francs?’ he said, hesitatingly. ‘You know it will only sell for old silver. No one will buy a watch that is not new.’
‘That is a lie,’ said Carmelo, ‘for you told me yourself that all that work round it made it of value; yourself, you said so two years ago, at the wine fair, when I showed it you.’
‘I only said that to please you,’ said the jeweller, who, however, longed for the watch.
After chaffing and disputing a quarter of an hour, Carmelo was sick of heart, and said passionately:
‘Give me fifty francs, and you shall have it. You know well enough I would not let it go but for some dire necessity.’
‘You are always in trouble,’ said the jeweller testily; but he paid the money and locked the old watch up in a desk: he knew a collector of such things who would give him ten napoleons any day for it.
Carmelo went out of the shop; his face was a dusky red; he felt ashamed. But he kept to his purpose. He took the fifty francs and went to the prison. If anyone would pay so much caution money as guarantee that the offence would not be repeated, those guilty of begging were let go out again.
‘My father has sent me to pay the money for ‘Nunziatina,’ he said unsteadily to the gaoler. ‘May she come out with me now?’
‘Ugh! We do not do things as fast as all that,’ they said to him.
Nevertheless, they were obliged to abide by their own rules, and the next night Annunziata, weeping and laughing, was home in her own room.
Viola missed the watch.
‘Oh, my love, how good you are!’ she cried.
Carmelo blushed and shook his head.
‘Do not praise me, sweetheart. Your people are mine.’
After that action something of the gloom and bitterness that had been on him, lifted, and once or twice he smiled his old merry smile, and little Isola threw her arms about him, and cried:
‘Oh, Carmelino mio! Forget all the wicked men, and let us be happy.’
‘I will forget them if they will let me, dear,’ said Carmelo.
And so he would, and, thus forgetting, would have been a blameless, useful, and contented man.
But the State, which creates Messer Nellemane, does not care to have useful, harmless, and contented men in its cities and communes. It thinks it of far greater importance that no dog should be seen in the streets, no poverty be exempt from a tax, and no man be able to call his soul his own; it likes to have its gros bataillons of unwilling conscripts, and it thinks it more profitable to have its galleys and its hospitals full than to remit a tax, or cease to t keep ten clerks to do the work of one.
CHAPTER XXXI.
PASTORINI grew very anxious; his many boys and girls had always been as much as he could find food and clothes for in the best of times, and now they were very heavy on him. Dina indeed was to marry in a year or so, but her betrothed was poor. The other girls were all young and, though h
andy and helpful, could not bring in anything; and though, when plenty of grist came to the mill, he could make ends meet, now that Rossi’s iron servant took two‐thirds of the grain away he grew very harassed, and afraid, especially as he foresaw, as I have said, that with the summer the water would be shallower than ever now that the trees were gone; and in effect it had become so as early as June, a thing never known before, and the big black wheels stood high and dry with the weeds on them dying in the sun, whilst farther below on the Rosa the black devil, as the people called it, vomited smoke and worked all day and night.
It was a hideous blot on the landscape; it spread dirt and dust and poisonous vapours all around it; and the little children near it grew pallid and sickly little things instead of the Correggio‐like loves, all rosy and brown, that they had been. But Messer Nellemane, sitting before the Nuova Italia (though, if had confessed the truth, he was choked by the smoke as well as lesser people) said to everyone:
‘What a pleasure it is to see that pillar of progress arisen in our midst;’ and all Santa Rosalia understood, by his look and his smile, that whosoever would wish to please the municipality must carry his grain to Remigio Rossi.
The place had been, of yore, sweet with the scent of the flowers on the river‐bank according to each season, of the meadow‐thyme and the fragrant yellow tulip, of the vine‐blossom and the sturdy rosemary, of the acacias and the catalpas, of the magnolias and the Chinese olives; now there was only a stench of oil and hot iron, and the smoke of burning lignite; but the present generation has been taught to think this is a change for the better, and Messer Nellemane was essentially a man of modern mind.
An engine smelt sweeter to him than a lilac‐bush; and he thought hurry, strife, noise, and money‐making much finer things than ‘fair quiet, and sweet rest.’
Dear Old Leisure, with his smile of peace and hands of blessing, was but an old‐fashioned obstructionist to him.
The last day of the past month of March had been the day on which the first half‐yearly payment of the interest of his mortgage was due from Pippo; an interest of fifty per cent., which, on a loan of three hundred francs with all the costs thereof — as he phrased it, a hundred scudi — was a hundred and fifty every twelve months.
Pippo had by no means understood what mortgages were; the law of hypothec was Greek to him; when the day came round, of course he had not the money, and truly had never in any way realized the arrangement to which he had put his cross before witnesses. The time went by without any great dis‐ quietude, except that uneasy sense of debt and burden which was so new and horrible to him. His head had got muddled, and as he could not read he could not clear himself by any study of papers.
When the Usciere had seized his things he had said to himself: ‘I shall have to tell the advocate down in Pomodoro, for I never will be able to pay him aught yearly.’
But his head never seemed right now; he forgot things, and could not recollect words very often when he wanted them, and so the matter kept slipping his mind, and when he remembered it he thought to himself: ‘Well, he will get the house at my death, so he will be no loser.’
That was his unlearned view of hypothec.
The lawyer neither sent nor wrote to him, so naturally he was confirmed in his delusion. It was now August, and in his empty home he was making a good fight against fortune. His work brought him in, on an average, not eighty centimes a day, but that was enough for his few and frugal wants.
‘If my health only will serve,’ he said to himself, weaving the osiers that he had now to buy, ‘I should like to see Viola’s boy on my knees.’
That fancy kept up his spirit, though his head would always buzz. The child would be best unborn, he knew, but still he wished to live to see it.
Now to Messer Nellemane there were a perverseness and almost an insolence in this old man, so very small, poor, and helpless, presuming to live on, and lift his head up again after such a series of deserved chastisements as he had received.
To see Pippo sitting at work in the doorway was irritating to him, and not atoned for by the fact that Pippo was surrounded as he sat by all the foul fumes and vapours of the steam mill across the river. And there was the running water, too, always bubbling across the roadway, and the months slipping away one after another, with the old man still at liberty to sit in the air and mock the municipal majesty by disobedience.
What was to be done?
Messer Nellemane was for ever turning over the problem in his mind, and even stooped to the humility of asking the advice of the deputy of Pomodoro, who was in the neighbourhood, being on the point of marriage with the Zauli heiress.
‘I should have the work executed if really necessary for the public good,’ said Signore Luca Finti gravely, ‘and then I should debit the offending proprietor with the cost of the works. That is the usual course taken in Rome.’
Messer Nellemane thanked his distinguished adviser cordially, and proceeded to get out several blank forms, signed by the Cavaliere Durellazzo, which it was needful to fill in before acting.
The whole of Santa Rosalia was in a mess with public works; those for the steam mill had left heaps of black rubbish about, those for the tramway had left many mounds of as yet unlaid iron rails; the old bridge, which was as firm as a rock, and quite wide enough for the bullocks and mules that alone passed over it was being pulled about and widened by the Giunta; altogether the pretty little green village had that dusty unkempt, stony, desolate look which so many ‘improved’ places have in Rome and Venice, and which is an aspect always as sweet to the municipalic mind, as the wasted province is to a conqueror.
The conqueror sees his victories in the smoking fields; the Municipality sees its commissions and concessions in the rubbish heaps.
So one day Pippo had several workpeople whom he knew, masons and plumbers and the like, come about his premises; and they made as though they would pass through the house into the kitchen garden behind where Raggi was buried under the willows. But Pippo slammed the door in their faces.
‘No, no,’ said he, ‘they have taken all I had out of it, but the four walls are mine still. Into it not a man comes without my leave and license.’
The men beat on the door, and told him through the door that they came to work for the municipality.
‘You don’t come to work for me; and into my house you come not,’ said Pippo. ‘A hundred scudi your municipality has robbed me of, and I do not open my door to the thieves of a thief. Get you gone.’
Most of the workmen were old neighbours of his, and were for going away in silence, but amongst them were two masons from another part of the world, employed and brought there by Pierino Zaffi.
These called to him to let them in, in the name of the law, and, as he made them no reply, they went and asked Messer Nellemane permission to open the door by force.
To them Messer Nellemane replied: ‘I do not love force; it is the weapon of the barbarian. I think we will wait a few days. Mazzetti may hear reason.’
So he postponed the execution of the work, and counted up the days that had elapsed since Pippo had been ordered to begin the work; and the many times he had been summoned to appear and answer for his transgressions; all those various summonses which the old rebel had put in the fire.
Then he took the diligence over to Pomodoro, and had a little talk with the advocate Niccolo Poccianti, who lived by the Pretura.
‘I am afraid for your grandfather, carina,’ said the cooper to Viola. ‘Always alone like that, and the house so miserable, and over the wall I hear him always muttering, muttering, muttering those accursed figures over and over again; I am afraid for him, my lass.’
‘And I too,’ said Viola, with a sob in her throat. ‘But what can we do? Carmelo and I would go and stay with him, but he will not have us; he thinks we are happier here.’
‘I am afraid for him,’ said Cecco. ‘He is made of stouter stuff than Nanni was, but the best pipkin breaks with much knocking and much fire.’
‘What can I do?’ said Viola, in despair.
She would have gone through flame and water to help her grandfather, and would have borne any trouble to save it for him, but she could not tell what to do.
Sickness, sorrow, trial burdens of poverty and pain, these the poor can understand well enough; they are familiar companions that have rocked their cradles and will go with them to their graves; but these oppressions, these exactions, these harassing debts that they are sold up for, yet which they know they never owed and never ought to pay, these bewilder them, break their nerve, and dull their brain.
Viola would have gone and besought the mercy of the Syndic, but she knew that she would only see his secretary.
She took a pilgrimage barefoot to a famous Madonna ten miles away on the hills, and there knelt and prayed humbly, and set up a candle in the shrine, all glittering with ex‐votos, and the gems and metals of similar devotees, and she asked nothing for herself; she only asked for the old man.
‘For Carmelo and I are young,’ she said to herself, ‘and we love each other, and we are together: that is so much; we ought not to want any more.’
Whilst she was still on her knees in the chapel on the side of the mountain, with the plain below like a sea, so grey was it with olive woods, the inspiration came into her to go and find the Prefect of the province at his own palace in the city.
It was to her as strange, as daring, and as distant, a travel as it would be to us to go through the terrible cañons of the Colorado, or scale the height of Chimborazo’s summit. She had never been even so far as Pomodoro, and the mere thought of the great glittering city whose domes she could just see on the farthest edge of the plains, was one quite awful and terrible to her.
Nevertheless, when she came down in the twilight from the holy place, and met her husband at the foot of the hill, her mind was made up, and she said to him: ‘Our Lady has told me to go to the city and see the Prefect, and that there I shall find help for Nonno.