by Ouida
‘Good God, what can have happened?’ said Carmelo in his bewilderment and terror. Had the old man been murdered? But who should murder one who had nothing?
Remigio Rossi from the mill‐house across the river saw him thus standing, rigid and gasping, staring at the house. He shouted to the youth:
‘The house has been seized for debt. They turned your grandfather out of it last night. He went away. I thought he went to you. Did nobody send you word? But, to be sure, it was nobody’s business. Come in, my poor fellow, and take a drink of wine.’
Carmelo hurled a bitter curse at him.
‘Where is he gone?’ he shouted.
‘Nay, that I know not,’ said the owner of the steam‐mill. ‘We though he came to you. Lord, boy, I mean none of you ill‐will because I put up this black servant of mine and fill my pockets—’
But Carmelo had no ears for him. He had left the garden as he had entered it, and was gone across the fields. He had seen in the damp ground a print of a foot without shoes: he thought it was Pippo’s.
‘I never can meet my girl’s eyes again if both are dead,’ he thought. ‘Surely he has killed himself like Nanni.’
He heard a step in pursuit of him and the friendly hand of Gigi Canterelli touched him.
‘Carmelo, Carmelo!’ he cried to him, ‘I have just this minute heard that your grandfather was turned out last night. They did it so quietly, none of us knew. It seems that lawyer in Pomodoro had a right to the place because the interest on the mortgage was not paid, and there were sums Pippo owed to the municipality, fines and what not, God knows, about the water, and so the usciere came and took the thing, and locked it all up, all in the name of the law, and it has been sold at auction: so they say. That is what Angelo, the beast, has just old me. He saw you coming here. How it was we none of us saw or heard I cannot think, but the lawyers and the other folks kept still tongues in their heads, and the door of the house is turned to the river, and Pippo can never have made a sound—’
‘He is gone away to kill himself,’ said Carmelo under his breath.
He paid no heed to what was told him of the seizure of the house; all he thought of was that Pippo was lying dead in the Rosa water, or hanging dead from some bough in the fields.
‘Nay,’ said Gigi Canterelli in a hushed and solemn way, ‘I think he will not take his life. He is a God‐fearing man, is Pippo, and he thinks that in the matter of our living or dying it is the good God that fans our breath or stills it.’
Carmelo did not hear; he was looking to right and left of him wildly, as though he saw the corpse of the old man swinging in the air.
‘If he be not dead,’ he said, with a burst of weeping like a woman, ‘he has gone to try and hide, so that we should not know. Look, here is a footmark; it goes along the fields; he would not stay by the river, I think, to see that iron beast roar along it; he would get away into the fields, away from the accursed smoke.’
He strode away as he spoke, and his old friend followed him.
‘His brain was not right,’ said Carmelo with a sob. ‘It has never been right since he signed away his house to pay the thieves yonder. And I, who came to ask him to go with me to a new life—’
‘O Lord, have mercy on us,’ groaned the other. ‘Nobody ever killed themselves when I was young; but nowadays the rivers are choked full, and the charcoal is used for naught but death.’
‘Let us look,’ said Carmelo in a low tone. He felt as if he were choking.
He broke off with a loud cry.
Under one of the maples of the vinefields that stretched all around he saw the old man sitting. The tree was heavy with green grapes, and the leaves were golden with sunbeams. Pippo was bare‐headed, and his head was sunk on his breast.
Carmelo ran to him and threw himself beside him.
‘Grandfather, don’t you know me? Speak to me! look at me! Don’t you see me, me, Carmelo? don’t you hear?’
The old man’s clothes and long white hair were wet with dew; he had been out all night. He lifted his head, but his face was quite vacant. He chuckled a little; and he kept a great old rusty key in his hand. Carmelo saw it, and understood, and his heart stood still.
‘They won’t get in,’ said Pippo in a whisper, clutching the key. ‘They won’t get in; I’ve got the key. It is my house, and I am master. There were many of them, so I took the key and hid. It is my house; it is my house.’
That was all he said; he hugged the key against his breast and chuckled.
‘It is my house; they’ll find I’m master. They’ve taken a hundred scudi from me, and all the things, and the bed that the girl was born on, and the bit of glass she saw her pretty face in; and the little dog is dead, and the reeds in the river are wanted for the king; but they won’t get in the house; I’ve got the key.’
His hands clenched the thing closer and closer; he laughed a little feeble laugh of foolish triumph.
His mind was quite gone.
When the law had seized his house it had given the death‐blow to his poor old brain, that for so long had been ‘buzzing and muddling,’ and seeing nothing anywhere in the air or in the water, in the sky or on the land, but those figures that had puzzled him so.
‘I’ve got the key, they can’t get in; it’s my house, it’s my house; and when I’m dead you’ll bury me under the almond‐trees where the little dog is, and you’ll make the house into a chapel,’ he muttered, clasping the key to his bosom, and looking with blank and foolish eyes into the sunshine that played with the vines .
At that moment, at the banquet in the Pretura of Pomodoro, the Cavaliere Durellazzo was reading out with much applause an oration compiled for him by Messer Gaspardo Nellemane.
In this eloquent speech he spoke of the prosperity of the country, of the excellence of the laws, of the admirable economy that was observed in every public department, of the necessity for Italia to be heard and respected in the councils of Europe, and of the large army that must be one of her chief glories as a great Power.
The discourse was received with great enthusiasm, and was duly reported in the local press, and praised in the organs alike of the Opposition, the Dissidenti, and the Ministry.
‘I recognise your hand,’ whispered Signor Luca Finti to Messer Nellemane. ‘You must become a deputy at the next election; and I make no doubt that you and I some day shall sit as Ministers round the same council table.’
Messer Nellemane smiled modestly as he slipped away to send a telegram in the name of the two Syndics to the King, announcing the completion of the great work opened that day.
He saw no reason why the prediction should not be fulfilled; nor, I confess, do I see any. He has every qualification for he honour.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
AT this moment Santa Rosalia pays two francs a day for Pippo, who has to be kept at the public cost at the asylum of St. Bonifaccio in the city. He is an imbecile, and at times violent, but his old frame is tough; he does not die. At times he weeps for days together, and then they punish him. He is always searching for a lost key.
Viola was so unnerved and distracted at the calamity befallen her grandfather that she fell into a fever, which, coupled with her distress of mind, killed her as it killed young Mercédes of Spain: but Viola was not so soon forgotten and replaced. The little ‘bimbo,’ bereft of his young mother, soon followed her to her grave. Carmelo, maddened with grief, joined himself to some few fiery and chafing spirits, nourished like himself on the bitterness of endless wrong; they tried to burn down the communal palace which held all those accursed documents against the poor, and, failing, were taken prisoners, and after a long trial sent to the galleys. The Italian and English press described them as a band of ignorant and brutal socialists; and then no one remembered them any more. They are in the mines of Sardinia.
Demetrio Pastorini died broken‐hearted; his sons were unable to compete with the steam‐mill, and sold the old place to the commune for a pittance; they are some of them day‐labourers, and some
are taken as conscripts.
Cecco is dead, and his sons are also conscripts. Gigi Canterelli, having the municipality against him, became bankrupt, and is now a beggar; the old convent on the hill is a factory where the women and children earn a few centimes a day with loss of all their health. The little house of the Madonna has been bought and enlarged by Bindo Terri, who has married well and entered into a wine business with the money he saved in his service of the State. His brother succeeded to his uniform and sword, and is as like him as one ferret is like another.
Messer Gaspardo Nellemane meanwhile flourishes like a green bay‐tree in the service of the State: he is full of ambition, and in all probability will live to attain all his aims and die in all honour.
Santa Rosalia soon became too small to hold so great a man.
He has been translated to Rome.
When the Dissidenti become the Possidenti he will be with them in power. If, on the other hand, the Right return to office, Messer Nellemane will know how to take profit from the fact that he has always been moderate; he has been always on the side of order and the law.
Whatever party reign at Montecitorio it will be said of him, ‘Verily he has his reward.’
APPENDIX.
MARK TWAIN has said that an appendix gives a great dignity to a book. Despite this joke at it, it does not scare readers away, perhaps, as greatly as a preface does. At any rate, I will risk the addition, because I want to assure all who take up this story that there is no kind of exaggeration in it.
No doubt the public will be tempted to think that the municipal tyrannies, here depicted, are over‐coloured, but I can assure them that I have in not the slightest degree overdrawn the power of those little communal councils, and the terrible suffering that they entail upon the poor people of this beloved country.
Travellers, and even foreign residents, do not, as a rule, know anything about this. You must know the language intimately, and you must have gotten the people’s trust in you, before you can understand all that they endure. The system is, as I have said, professedly autonomous, but practically it works in the manner I have depicted. The frightful taxation of the noble and gentle is bad; the taxation of the commercial interest, of the shipping and the trades is still worse; but more cruel by far than all is the municipal extortion by tax, by fine, and by penalty, that crushes out the very life‐blood of the peasant part of the nation. There are, of course, communes where some good and wise man is chief proprietor, and then it is fairly well governed. There are others in which the blacksmith or the carpenter is at the head of affairs, and then, though things may go ill, the populace cannot complain. But these are few exceptions, and, in the main part, the twopenny Gessler that I have endeavoured to sketch disposes of the destinies at his will.
It is entirely useless to change the ministries of Italy so long as this municipal system remains what it is. It has ruined Venice, Florence, and Naples, and is ruining Rome; as it has done on a great scale in the cities, so it does on a little one in the small towns and villages. An enormous bureaucracy enriches itself at the public cost, and the people perish.
I believe that these municipal tyrannies might often legally be combated, but the populace cannot afford to do this. I won a cause lately against a municipality, and a shoemaker said to me, ‘Oh, there is one law for you rich folks, and another law for us poor!’
And practically it is so; the poor man cannot afford to employ an advocate, and his pleading against false charges or extortion is never attended to; the tax‐gatherers or the communal clerks are believed, and the poor man is beggared at a blow. Against the decisions of these small courts also, there is no appeal.
It is no question of the Right, or of the Left; it is a question of a method of so‐called self‐government, which goes on and impoverishes and distracts the country just the same, whether Cairoli or Sella, Minghetti or Nicotera, rule at Montecitorio.
It is this which the public of other countries never understand, and which the correspondents of the foreign Press never endeavour to point out. Here Garibaldi does in vain rail against it; nobody attends to him. In vain has he again and again declared the misery of Italy to arise from the locust‐swarms of the impiegati, and the crowds of pensioners who live on and bleed the State to death. If I ruled Italy, I would ship nine‐tenths of the impiegati and the pensioners to New Guinea: we might then get public business done, and the public coffers filled, without wrenching his last coin from the day‐labourer. When the pensioner dies, his pension dies with him; but when the accursed impiegato leaves his stool of office, another of his breed is ready to spring on to it. He is an alligator that the hot sands of sinecure and corruption generate, and he multiplies without end. All political parties nourish him alike, as all alike continue to allow the local despotisms to cramp and starve the body politic.
One man arose and said this nobly in Montecitorio in the last session: no one listened to him; he was even shouted down; all they care to hear about there is Tunis or Albania, or a new loan.
It is a common remark that Italy wants a Bismarck: she wants nothing of the kind: she wants a minister, temperate, just, indifferent to bombast or display, resolute to destroy corrup‐ tion, and convinced of the great truth that the first duty of a State is the prosperity of her children. But, alas! when a good man comes, he has no chance; his party split into schisms; the Disssidenti, disappointed of place, sting him like wasps; to be popular with Parliament and the Press, he must talk big of armies, of ships, and the councils of Europe, and, even if he be premier, it is fifty to one that the great bulk of the populace never even know his name. Harassed, weary and impotent, he will leave his good intentions to pave a lower deep than Dante ever visited, and, out of heart with all things, will let them drift on in their old fashion, knowing that you must be a demigod ere you can sweep clean this Augean stable.
I know the Italian people well; I mean the poor, the labouring people; I am attached to them for their loveableness, their infinite natural intelligence, their wondrous patience; they are a material of which much might be made.
They are but little understood by foreigners, even by foreign residents; they are subtle and yet simple; of an infinite good nature, and yet sadly selfish; they are very docile, yet they have great sensitiveness, and I see no more greed in them than in the poor of all countries; if we had not bread for our hungry children, I daresay we should be greedy too. There are sundry people, very, very poor, to each of whom I give a little sum weekly; not one of these people has ever asked for more than the allotted sum, not one has ever made it an excuse to plead for further gifts. Dear readers of mine, can you say as much of your countrymen?
They are ignorant, no doubt, and they are likely to remain so, for the public free education is a farce; the communal schools, when they have taught a boy his letters, set him to teach some smaller boy, and so on ad infinitum. They are ignorant, no doubt, and it is the interest of the municipalities, as much as ever it was that of the priesthood, to keep them so. As it is, they endure all these extortions and tyrannies that I have endeavoured in some measure to depict; endure them patiently, knowing no remedy, and incapable of the general action that can alone make a people’s strength felt. Now and then there are clamourers for bread, but very few and gentle ones; there are troops and carabiniers everywhere ready to shoot them down, and if they murmur they are clapped in the Murate, where poor diet and low fever do the rest for most of them.
The nobility and gentry are supine, where they are not tyrannical.
Consequently, the municipalities conduct all affairs high over the heads of the persons concerned, and all sorts of important public works, sales, demolitions, or constructions are effected against the will of the people, who stand helpless.
The Left is inclined to make each commune still more self‐governing and independent of the State: should this be done, the effects will be distressing on the populace; on the contrary, it would be far better to confine the syndics of all districts within the limit
s of imperial law. Their changes and caprices are a source of continual distraction to the country; for instance, at Genoa, a syndic (a well‐known general) forbade dogs being given by the city to the vivisectors; a few weeks after came another syndic, who decreed that all dogs found loose should be seized and sent to the vivisectors’ laboratories. This is only one instance out of many.
The illimitable and captious powers of these momentary rulers are a source of worry, grief, and extortion to the people, greater than I can hope to make anyone believe. The whole system is execrable, and leads to endless abuses.
The greater number of the nobles are so absorbed in their own grievance of paying 45 per cent. impost, that they have no ear and no inclination to pity any woes of the poor. The inexhaustible generosity of France has no counterpart in Italy. Even subscriptions for a charitable purpose are very niggardly given, and when given are usually filtered through so many hands in their passage to the poor that little reaches them. Save here and there an asylum, to which it takes strong interest and recommendation to get admitted, there is nothing for the poor; the man or woman who is starving has nothing to do except to die. The great difficulty in Italy is the apathy of the higher classes, and their absolute indifference to the state of the poor. When they do take interest in public affairs, it is too often only for the sake of the personal advantages, the nepotism, the contracts, or the kudos that may grow out of it. An Italian, in office of any kind, will always hear you amiably and courteously but when you plead for the people he will only think you a fool, and say, ‘Cara mia, why trouble yourself? They do very well, and they are all of them cheats.’
‘How can you write books about these birbonaccie?’ said an Italian nobleman to me, meaning about the contadini in Signa. ‘They spend their whole lives in fleecing us. You should never believe a word that they say.’
Now, I would be far from declaring that this is the only view that the proprietor takes in Italy, but it is, alas! a very general one.