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THE FOOL ERRANT

BEING THE MEMOIRS OF

FRANCIS-ANTONY STRELLEY, ESQ.

CITIZEN OF LUCCA

EDITED BY MAURICE HEWLETT

AUTHOR OF "THE QUEEN'S QUAIR," "NEW CANTERBURY TALES," "RICHARD YEA-AND-NAY," "LITTLE NOVELS OF ITALY," ETC., ETC.

To

J. M. BARRIE

AFFECTIONATELY

INTRODUCTION

The top-heavy, four-horsed, yellow old coach from Vicenza, which arrived at Padua every night of the year, brought with it in particular on the night of October 13, 1721, a tall, personable young man, an Englishman, in a dark blue cloak, who swang briskly down from the coupe and asked in stilted Italian for "La sapienza del Signer Dottor' Lanfranchi." From out of a cloud of steam--for the weather was wet and the speaker violently hot--a husky voice replied, "Eccomi--eccomi, a servirla." The young man took off his hat and bowed.

"Have I the honour to salute so much learning?" he asked courteously. "Let me present myself to my preceptor as Mr. Francis Strelley of Upcote."

"His servant," said the voice from the cloud, "and servant of his illustrious father. Don Francis, be accommodated; let your mind be at ease. Your baggage? These fellows are here for it. Your valise? I carry it. Your hand? I take it. Follow me."

These words were accompanied by action of the most swift and singular kind. Mr. Strelley saw two porters scramble after his portmanteaux, had his valise reft from his hand, and that hand firmly grasped before he could frame his reply. The vehemence of this large perspiring sage caused the struggle between pride and civility to be short; such faint protests as he had at command passed unheeded in the bustle and could not be seen in the dark.

Vehement, indeed, in all that he did was Dr. Porfirio Lanfranchi, Professor of Civil Law: it was astonishing that a bulk so large and loosely packed could be propelled by the human will at so headlong a speed. Yet, spurred by that impetus alone, he pounded and splashed through the puddled, half-lit street of Padua at such a rate that Mr. Strelley, though longer in the leg, fully of his height, and one quarter his weight, found himself trotting beside his conductor like any schoolboy. The position was humiliating, but it did not seem possible to escape it. The doctor took everything for granted; and besides, he so groaned and grunted at his labours, his goaded flesh protested so loudly, the pitfalls were so many, and the pace so severe, that nothing in the world seemed of moment beyond preserving foothold. Along the winding way--between the half-discerned arcades, palace gateways, black entries, church portals--down the very middle of the street flew master and pupil without word spoken. They reached the Pra, skirted its right- hand boundary for some hundreds of yards, and came to the door of a tall, narrow, white house. Upon this door the doctor kicked furiously until it was opened; then, with a malediction upon the oaf who snored behind it, up he blundered, three stairs at a time, Strelley after him whether or no; and stayed not in his rush towards the stars until he had reached the fourth-floor landing, where again he kicked at a door; and then, releasing his victim's hand, took off hat and wig together and mopped his dripping pate, as he murmured, "Chaste Madonna, what a ramble! What a stroll for the evening, powerful Mother of us all!" Such a stroll had never yet been taken by Mr. Francis Strelley of Upcote in his one-and-twenty years' experience of legs; nor did he ever forget this manner of being haled into Italy, nor lose his feeling of extremely helpless youth in the presence of the doctor, his tutor and guardian. But to suppose the business done by calculation of that remarkable man is to misapprehend him altogether. Dr. Lanfranchi's head worked, as his body did, by flashes. He calculated nothing, but hit at everything; hit or miss, it might be--but "Let's to it and have done" was his battle- cry.

The lamp over the door of his apartment revealed him for the disorderly genius he was--a huge, blotch-faced, tumble-bellied man, bullet-headed, bull-necked, and with flashing eyes. Inordinate alike in appetite, mind and action, he was always suffering for his furies, and always making a fine recovery. Just now he was at the last gasp for a breath, or so you would have said to look at him. But not so; his exertions were really his stimulant. Presently he would eat and drink consumedly, drench himself with snuff, and then spend half the night with his books, preparing for to-morrow's lecture. Of this sort was Dr. Porfirio Lanfranchi, who had more authority over the wild students of Padua than the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and Senate put together.

The same lamp played upon the comely and ingenuous face, upon the striking presence of Mr. Strelley, and showed him a good-looking, good- tempered, sanguine young man of an appearance something less than his age. He was tall and supple, wore his own fair hair tied with a ribbon, was blue-eyed and bright-lipped, and had a notable chin--firm, square at the jaw, and coming sharply to a point. He looked you straight in the face--such was his habit--but by no means arrogantly or with defiance; seriously rather, gravely and courteously, as if to ask, "Do I take your precise meaning to be--?" Such a look was too earnest for mere good manners; he was serious; there was no laughter in him, though he was not of a melancholy sort. He pondered the world and its vagaries and examined them, as they presented themselves in each case, UPON THE MERITS. This, which was, I think, his strongest characteristic, should show that he lacked the humorous sense; and he did. He had no time to laugh; wondering engaged him. The life of the world on its round showed him miracles daily; he looked for them very often, but more frequently they thrust themselves upon him. Sunrise now--what an extraordinary thing! He never ceased to be amazed at that. The economy of the moon, too, so exquisitely adapted to the needs of mankind! Nations, tongues (hardly to be explained by the sublime folly of a Babel), the reverence paid to elders, to women; the sense of law and justice in our kind: in the leafy shades of Upcote in Oxfordshire, he had pondered these things during his lonely years of youth and adolescence--had pondered, and in some cases already decided them UPON THE MERITS. This was remarkably so in the matter of Betty Coy, as he will tell you for himself before long. Meantime, lest I keep Dr. Lanfranchi too long upon the threshold of his own house, all I shall add to my picture of his pupil now is that he was the eldest son and third child of Squire Antony Strelley of Upcote, a Catholic, non-juring, recusant, stout old gentleman of Oxfordshire, and of Dame Mary, born Arundell, his wife; and that he was come to study the moral and civil law at this famous University of Padua, like many an Englishman of his condition before him. He was twenty-one years of age, had as much money as was good for him and much more poetry than enough in his valise--to say nothing of the germ of those notes from which he afterwards (long afterwards) compiled the ensuing memoirs.

Dr. Lanfranchi had not said "Accidente!" more than twice, nor kicked his door more than half a dozen times, before it was opened by a young and pretty lady, who held a lamp above her head. She was, apparently, a very young and very pretty, rather little, lady, and was dressed with some care--but not more than her person deserved--in black and white. Her dark hair, which was high upon her head, was crowned with a large tortoiseshell comb. She held the lamp, as I say, above her as she curtseyed, smiling, in the way. "Be very welcome, sir," she said, "and be pleased to enter our house." It was charming to see how deftly she dipped without spilling the lamp-oil, charming to see her little white teeth as she smiled, her lustrous eyes shining in the light like large stars. It was charming to see her there at all, for she was charming altogether--in figure, in face and poise, in expression, which was that of a graceful child playing housewife; lastly, in the benevolence, curiosity and discretion which sat enthroned upon her smooth brow, like a bench of Lords Justices, or of Bishops, if you prefer it. This was none other than Dr. Porfirio's wife, as he then and there declared by grunts. "Mia moglie--a servirla," he was understood to say; and pushed his way into his house without ceremony, while Mr. Strelley, with much, kissed the hand of his hostess. The salute, received with composure, was rendered with a blush; for this, to be truthful, was the very first hand ever saluted by the young gentleman. The fact says much for his inexperience and right instinct at once.

Quite at her ease, as if she were the mistress of a well-kissed hand, was Signora Aurelia Lanfranchi, for that was her name, and had been so for rather more than two years--quite at her ease and most anxious to put Strelley there. Relieving him of his cloak and hat, of his sword, pistols and other travelling gear, in spite of all protestations on his part, she talked freely and on end about anything and nothing in a soft voice which rose and died down like a summer wind, and betrayed in its muffled tones--as if it came to him through silk--that she was not of the north, but of some mellower, more sun-ripened land. She was in fact of Siena, a Gualandi by birth, and extremely proud of it. Strelley was so informed before he had been four-and-twenty hours in her company. But now, having spoiled him of his defences, she invited him into the salone, wooed him thither, indeed, with that sidelong head and sort of sleek smile with which you coax a cat to come to your knee. Mr. Francis would have followed her singing to the bonfire on such terms.

At the table, which was liberal, was the learned doctor seated already, napkin to chin. Mr. Strelley was shown his place, and expected to take it while the fair housewife waited upon the two; and when he seemed timid, she raised a wail of pretty protest and dragged him by the arm towards the chair. It was absurd, it was preposterous, he was robbing her of her pride. She had eaten long ago--besides, it was the woman's place, and Nonna was in the kitchen, ashamed to appear in the state she was in. Signor Francesco must please her in this--she would be vexed-- and surely he would not vex his hostess. To this wilful chant the doctor contributed his burden of "Che! che! S'accommodi!" and rapped with his knife-handle upon the table. Old Nonna, toothless, bearded and scared, popped her head beyond the kitchen door; to be short, insistence went to a point where good manners could not follow. Mr. Francis sat himself down, and Donna Aurelia, clapping her little hands, cried aloud that victory was hers. "Quick, quick, Nonna, these signori are at table!" She stormed into the kitchen, and speedily returned with a steaming and savoury dish. She dispensed the messes, she poured the wine, she hovered here and there--salt? pepper? cheese? yet a little bread? Madonna purissima, she had forgotten the mustard! No! it was here--it was here! There must have been more rejoicings over the recovery of the mustard than were made for the victory of Lepanto. Betweenwhiles she talked gaily or pathetically or intimately of things of which the guest had known nothing, but immediately felt that he now knew all; the moral lapses of this professor or that, the unparalleled slight offered to Signora Pappagallo by Donna Susanna Tron, the storm of rain and thunder on Tuesday week--no, it must have been Monday week; a scandal in the Senate, a duel in the Pra, how the Avvocato Minghini was picked up dead in Pedrocchi's--a meat-fly in his chocolate! Sparkling eyes, a delicate flush, quick breath, a shape at once pliant and audacious, flashing hands with which half her spells were woven--all these, and that wailing, dragging, comico-tragic voice, that fatal appeal of the child, trained by the wisdom of the wife, completed the rout of our youth. Before supper was over he was her loyal slave.

She insisted upon showing him his quarters. They were not, it seemed, upon this floor, nor the next below--no, but on the next below that. Signor Francesco must follow her as, lamp in hand, she went downstairs, her high heels clattering like Spanish castanets. She opened his door with a key which she then handed over to him: she showed him his bedroom, his saloon. "Your citadel, Don Francis," she said, "your refuge from my heedless tongue. Your chocolate shall be brought to you here, but we hope you will give yourself the trouble to dine with us. Generally my husband sups too late for your convenience. He is always at the cafe till nine o'clock. He sits there with his friends and hears the news, which he knows beforehand as well as they do. And when they have done, he tells it all over again to them. This is the way with men; and I sit at home and make my clothes. This also is the way with women, it seems. There is no other." She stayed a few more minutes, chattering, laughing and blushing; then with a sudden access of shyness wished him "felicissima notte," and held him out her hand. Mr. Francis stooped over it, and saluted it once more with profound respect.

He was long in going to bed. He wrote furiously in his diary after a space of restless contemplation, when he roamed across and across the room. But now I must leave his raptures and himself to his own pen, having got him inmate of a household where by ordinary he might have lived a blameless three years. If, however, he had done that, I don't suppose the singular memoirs which follow would ever have been written.

CHAPTER I

MY EXORDIUM: A JUSTIFICATORY PIECE

If we soberly reflect upon the part which the trappings and mantlings of men have played in their affairs, we shall not hesitate, I believe, to put into that category many things which have hitherto been considered far less occasional. What is honour but a garment? What money but a walking-stick? What are fine manners but a wig? If I professed, instead of abhorring, the Cynic school of philosophy, I might go on to ask what were love but an ointment, or religion but a tinted glass. I can thank my Redeemer, as I sit here in my green haven, with the stormy sea of my troubles afar off, beating in vain against the walls of contentment, that through all my vicissitudes I was never tempted to stray into such blasphemous imaginations. Fool as I have been, and fool as I have declared myself upon the forefront of this very book, I have never said in my heart, THERE IS NO GOD; but much and loudly have maintained the affirmative. And although I have been sadly, wickedly, detestably errant from His way, there is one divine precept which I have never failed to keep, and that is, LOVE ONE ANOTHER. All other affections, additions, accidents, accessories of men, however, from the lowest, which is Money, to the highest, which is Polite Education, I have been able to discard without concern or loss of self-respect. This fact alone should furnish good reason for my Memoirs, and commend them to the philosopher, the poet, the divine, and the man of feeling. For true it is that I have been bare to the shirt and yet proved my manhood, beaten like a thief and yet maintained myself honest, scorned by men and women and yet been ready to serve my fellows, held atheist by the godly and yet clung to my Saviour's cross. In situations calculated to excite the contemptuous ridicule of the meanest upon earth I have been satisfied that I was neither contemptible nor reasonably ridiculous, and that while I might herd with ruffians, and find in their society my most comfortable conversation, I was the richer, partly for that I had lost in choosing to consort with them, and partly for what I had gained. As having nothing, yet possessing all things; as poor, yet making many rich--the boast of St. Paul, the hope of St. Francis of Assisi! in those pithy antitheses is the summa of my experience.

Eldest son, but third child, of my parents, I was born upon the 4th of October, in the year 1700; and for that reason and another (to which I shall shortly allude) was named Francis, after the great Champion of our faith commemorated upon my birthday. The other reason was that, oddly enough, my mother, before my birth, had dreamed of him so persistently and with particulars so unvaried that she gave my father no option but to change the settled habits of our family and bestow upon me the name, which he despised, of a patriarch whom he underrated. Her dream, repeated, she told me, with exact fidelity and at regularly recurring periods, was that she could see St. Francis standing on a wide sea-shore between sand-dunes and the flood of waters--standing alone there with an apple in his hand, which he held lightly, as if weighing it. By and by, said my mother, she saw three women come slowly over the sandhills from different points, one from the south, one from the north, and one from the west; but they converged as they drew near to St. Francis, joined hands, and came directly to him. The midmost of the three was like a young queen; she on the side nearest the sea was bold and meagre; the third was lovely, but disfigured by a scar. When they were come before St. Francis, after reverences, they knelt down on his right hand and his left, and the queenly woman in front of him. To her, courteously, he first offered the apple, but she laughingly refused it. She of the scar, when it was held before her, covered her face with her hands and shrank away; but the hardy woman craned her head forward and bit into the apple while it was yet in the saint's hand. Then the young queen would have had it if she might, but was prevented by the biter, and the two clamoured for it, silently, by gestures of the hands and eyes, but with haste and passion. At this point, said my mother, her dream always ended, and she never knew who had the apple. She fretted greatly because of it, and was hardly recovered after I was born.

My father, who disliked all women except my mother, and, Catholic as he was, had scant respect for the mendicant orders, hated this dream, hated to be reminded of it, hated the name which he had been persuaded into giving me, and, as a consequence, I believe, never loved me. For unnumbered generations of our family we had been Antonys, Gerards, Ralphs, Martins; the name of Francis was unknown to the tree; he never ceased to inveigh against it, and foretold the time when it would stand out like a parasite upon its topmost shoot. "Your Italian ecstatic," he told my mother, "began life by running away from his father and only came back for the purpose of robbing him. He taught more people to live by singing hymns than ever were taught before, and preached the virtues of poverty, by which he intended the comfort it was for the blessed poor to be kept snugly idle by the accursed rich. It never occurred to him to reflect that, if everybody had been of his opinion, everybody would have starved, the world would have stood still, and neither St. Ferdinand of Spain, nor St. Edward the Confessor, nor Don John of Austria could have become famous. As for your women and apples, the conjunction is detestable. Cain was the result of one woman's desire for an apple, and the siege of Troy that of another's. I don't wish this boy to grow up either murderer or pretty Paris."

The like of this speech, often repeated--indeed, never omitted when so I happened to fall into some childish disgrace--may be imagined. It made an outcast of me, an exile from my nursery days. I grew up lonely, sullen, moody. I could not meet my father with any comfort to either of us; and though I loved my mother, and she me, that cold shadow of his prejudice seemed to be over my intercourse with her, to chill and check those emotions which should glow naturally when a son stands in the presence of his mother. To be brief, I was an unhappy, solitary lad, with sisters much older and brothers much younger than himself; cut off, too, by reason of religion, from the society of neighbours, from school and college. Such companions as I could have were far below me in station, and either so servile as to foster pride, or so insolent as to inflame it. There was Father Danvers, it's true, that excellent Jesuit and our chaplain; and there were books. I was by nature a strong, healthy, active boy, but was driven by sheer solitariness to be studious. If it had not turned out so, I know not what might have become of me, at what untimely age I might have been driven to violence, crime, God knows what. That there was danger of some such disaster Father Danvers was well aware. My faults, as he did not fail to remind me week by week, were obstinacy and pride of intellect; my weaknesses, lack of proportion and what he was pleased to call perversity, by which I suppose he meant a disposition to accept the consequences of my own acts. I freely admit a personal trait which will be obvious as I proceed. Trivial as it may seem, and does, at this time of writing, I must record an instance of it, the last I was to exhibit in England. Never vicious, I may sincerely say convinced, rather, that women are as far above our spiritual as they are fatally within our material reach, it was by my conduct to a woman that I fell into a way of life which nobody could have anticipated. In my twentieth year, in a moment of youthful ardour, I kissed Betty Coy, our dairymaid, over the cheese- press, and was as immediately and as utterly confounded as she was. I remember the moment, I remember her, a buxom, fresh-coloured young woman, rosy red, her sleeves above her elbows, her "La, Mr. Francis, what next?"--I remember all, even to my want of breath, suddenly cooled passion, perplexity and flight. It is a moot point whether that last was the act of a coward, but I can never allow it to be said that in what followed I showed a want of courage. I devoted a day and night to solitary meditation; no knight errant of old, watching his arms under the moon, prayed more earnestly than I; and when I had fully made up my mind to embrace what honour demanded of me, I sought out the girl, who was again in the dairy, and in solemn form, upon my knees, offered her my hand. Father Danvers, walking the terrace, was an accidental witness of my declaration, and very properly told my father. Betty Coy, unfortunate girl, was dismissed that evening; next day my father sent for me. [Footnote: I need only say further of Betty that she, shortly afterwards, married James Bunce, our second coachman at Upcote, and bore him a numerous progeny, of whose progress and settlement in the world I was able to assure the worthy parents.]

It would be idle to rehearse the interview between an angry father and an obdurate son. The more I said the angrier he got: the discrepancy between us made a reasonable conclusion hopeless from the first. When he cried, Did I mean to disgrace my name? and I replied, No, but on the contrary I had been wishful to redeem it--"How, you fool," said he, "by marrying a dairymaid?" "Sir," I answered, "by showing to the world that when a gentleman salutes a virtuous female it is not his intention to insult her." I was too old for the rod or I should have had it. As it was, I received all the disgrace he could put me to--dismissed from his presence, confined to my room, forbidden any society but that of Father Danvers and my own thoughts. My infatuation, however, persisted, and threatened to take the dangerous form of FRAUD. I could not for the life of me see what else I could do to recover the girl's fair fame, hopelessly compromised by me, than exhibit to the world at large the only conceivable motive of my salute. I knew, immediately I had done it, that I could not love Betty Coy, but I believed that I could prove the tender husband.

Correspondence to this effect--all on my side--with her parents decided mine to hasten my removal abroad. It had always been intended that I should study in Padua, rather than in Paris or Salamanca, if for no better reason than that that had been Father Danvers' University, and that he knew many of the professors there--among others, Dr. Porfirio Lanfranchi, who became my host and guardian, and had been class-mate and room-mate of our chaplain's. These things matter very little: I was not consulted in them, and had no objections, as I had no inclinations, for any particular residence in the world. Before my twenty-first birthday-- I forget the exact date--the hour arrived when I received on my knees my mother's tearful blessing, embraced my brothers and sisters, kissed my father's hand, and departed for Oxford, where I caught the London mail; and, after a short sojourn in the capital, left England for ever.

I conceive that few further prolegomena are necessary to the understanding of the pages which follow. Before I touched the Italian soil I was, in the eyes of our law, a grown man, sufficiently robust and moderately well-read. I was able to converse adequately in French, tolerably in Italian, had a fair acquaintance with the literatures of those countries, some Latin, a poor stock of Greek. I believe that I looked younger than my age, stronger than my forces, better than my virtues warranted. Women have praised me for good looks, which never did me any good that I know of; I may say without vanity that I had the carriage and person of a gentleman. I was then, as I have ever been, truly religious, though I have sometimes found myself at variance with the professional exponents of it. In later years I became, I believe, something of a mystic, apt to find the face of God under veils whose quality did not always commend itself to persons of less curious research. On the other hand, I do not pretend to have kept the Decalogue of Moses in its integrity, but admit that I have varied it as my occasions seemed to demand. I have slain my fellow-man more than once, but never without deliberate intention so to do. If I have trespassed with King David of Israel, I feel sure that the circumstances of my particular offence are not discreditable to me; and it is possible that he had the same conviction. For the rest, I have purposely discarded many things which the world is agreed to think highly necessary to a gentleman, but which I have proved to be of no value at all. I will only add this one observation more. For my unparalleled misfortunes in every kind of character and dangerous circumstance I am willing to admit that I have nobody to thank but myself. And yet--but the reader must be judge--I do not see how, in any single case, I could have acted otherwise than as I did. What, then! we carry our fates with us from the cradle to the grave, even as the Spinning Women themselves wind that which was appointed them to wind, and ply the shears and make fruitless their toil when they must; and all that we acquire upon our journey does but make that burden more certainly ours. What was I but a predestined wanderer--and fool if you will--burdened with my inheritance of honourable blood, of religion, of candour, and of unprejudiced enquiry? How under the sun could I---? But let the reader be judge.

I left England early in September, made a good passage to Genoa, and from thence proceeded by easy stages to Padua. Arriving there by the coach on the night of October 13, I was met by my host and tutor, Dr. Porfirio Lanfranchi, and by him taken to his lodgings on the Pra della Valle and introduced to the charitable ministrations of his young and beautiful wife--the fair, the too-fair Donna Aurelia, with whom, I shall not disguise from the reader, I fell romantically and ardently in love.

CHAPTER II

AURELIA AND THE DOCTOR

It was, I know very well, the aim and desire of this beautiful lady to approve herself mother to the exile thus cast upon her hands, and it was so as much by reason of her innate charity as of her pride in her husband's credit. To blame an ambition so laudable would be impossible, nor is blame intended to lie in recording the fact that she was a year my junior, though two years a wife. Such was the case, however, and it did not fit her for the position she wished to occupy. Nor indeed did her beauties of person and mind, unless a childish air and sprightly manner, cloudy-dark hair, a lovely mouth and bosom of snow, a caressing voice, and candour most surprising because most innocent, can be said to adapt a young lady to be mother to a young man. Be these things as they may--inflaming arrows full of danger, shafts of charity, pious artillery, as you will--they were turned full play upon me. From the first moment of my seeing her she set herself to put me at ease, to make me an intimate of her house, to make herself, I may say in no wrong sense, an inmate of my heart--and God knoweth, God knoweth how she succeeded.

Aurelia! Impossibly fair, inexpressibly tender and wise, with that untaught wisdom of the child; daughter of pure religion, as I saw thee at first and can see thee still, can that my first vision of thee ever be effaced? Nay, but it is scored too deeply in my heart, is too surely my glory and my shame. Still I can see that sweet stoop of thy humility, still thy hands crossed upon thy lovely bosom, still fall under the spell of thy shyly welcoming eyes, and be refreshed, while I am stung, by the gracious greeting of thy lips. "Sia il ben venuto, Signer Francesco," saidst thou? Alas, what did I prove to thee, unhappy one, but il mal venuto, the herald of an evil hour? What did I offer thee in exchange for thy bounty but shame and salt tears? What could be my portion but fruitless reproach and footsore pilgrimage from woe to woe? But I forget myself. I am not yet to disinter these unhappy days.

It is not to be supposed from this apostrophe that when I fell at once to love my master's wife I saw in her more than my lamp and my saint, the gracious presence which should "imparadise," in Dante's phrase, my mind. I was an honest lad, very serious and very simple. Perhaps I was a fool, but I was a pure fool: and he had been a very monster of depravity who could have cast unwholesome regard upon a welcome so generous and modest as hers. I declare that she was never anything to me but a holy emanation, not to be approached but on the knees, not to be looked upon but through a veil. So from this page until near the end of my long history she will appear to the reader. I never had an unworthy thought of her, never an unworthy desire. I never credited her with more than charity towards myself; and if I gloried in the fact that I was privileged to love so wondrous a being, the thought humiliated me at the same time. I was conscious of my nothingness before her worthiness, and desperate to fit myself for her high society. A noble rage for excellence possessed me; like any champion or knight of old I strove to approve my manhood, only that I might lay the spoils of it at her sacred feet.

By origin Aurelia was a Sienese, the daughter of the ancient, noble but reduced family of Gualandi, and had, without knowing it, caught the fancy of Dr. Lanfranchi when he was in her native city upon some political question or another. At the age of eighteen she had been made the subject of a marriage treaty between her mother and this learned man of fifty--a treaty conducted by correspondence and without any by-or- with-your-leave of hers. It may be doubted whether she had done much more than see and quiz her husband until she was brought to his house, to be mistress of that and slave of its master. Doing violence to the imaginations of a lover, I can look back upon her now with calmness, and yet see no flaw upon her extraordinary perfections. I can still see her lovely in every part, a bright, glancing, various creature, equally compounded of simplicity and common sense. Her greatest charm was precisely what we call charm--a sweetly willing, pliant disposition, an air of gay seriousness, such as a child has, and a mood which could run swiftly, at the touch on some secret spring, from the ripple of laughter to the urgency of tears. She was very devout, but not at all in our way, who must set our God very far off if we are to consider His awful nature; she carried her gaiety with her into church, and would laugh in the face of the Blessed Virgin or our Saviour just as freely as in that of the greatest sinner of us all. Her carriage and conversation with Heaven were, indeed, exactly those which she held towards the world, and were such that it was impossible not to love her, and yet, for an honest man who desired to remain one, equally impossible to do it. For although she was made in shape, line and feature to be a man's torment and delight, she carried her beauties so easily, valued them so staidly, and considered them so unaffectedly her husband's property, that he would have been a highway thief who had dared anything against her.

Here, indeed, was to be reckoned with that quality of strong common sense, without which she had been no Tuscan girl. She had it in a remarkable degree, as you may judge when I say that it reconciled her to her position of wife to a vast, disorderly, tyrannical man nearly old enough to be her grandfather. It enabled her to weigh the dignity, ease and comfort of the Casa Lanfranchi against any romantic picture which a more youthful lover could paint before her eyes. I am convinced--the conviction was, it will be seen, forced upon me--that not only was she a loyal, obedient and cheerful, but also a loving wife to this huge and blusterous person, of whom nevertheless she was a good deal afraid. For if he fondled her more than was becoming, he stormed at her also in a way not tolerable.

When Dr. Lanfranchi met me on my arrival, I remember that he took my hand in his own and never let go of it until he had me in his house. This made me feel like a schoolboy, and I never lost the feeling of extreme youth in his eyes. I believe now that his terrific silence, his explosive rages, mock ceremoniousness, and startling alternations were all parts of his method towards his pupils, for my experiences of them were not peculiar. I have seen him cow a whole class by a lift of his great square head, and most certainly, whatever scandalous acts may have disgraced the university in my time, they never occurred where Dr. Lanfranchi was engaged. Burly, bulky, blotched as he was, dirty in his person, and in his dress careless to the point of scandal, he had the respect of every student of the Bo. He was prodigiously learned and a great eater. The amount of liquid he could absorb would pass belief: it used to be said among us that he drank most comfortably, like a horse, out of a bucket. His lectures were extraordinary, crammed with erudition, which proceeded from him by gasps, jerks, and throttled cries for mercy on his failing breath, and illustrated by personalities of the most shocking description--he spared no deformity or defect of any one of us if it happened to engage his eye. Sometimes a whole hour's lecture would be consumed in a scandalous tale of Rome or Naples, sometimes indeed it would be a reminiscence of his own youthful days, which policy, if not propriety, should have counselled him to omit. Yet, as I say, he never lost the respect of the class, but was feared, served, and punctually obeyed.

It was much the same at home--that is, his methods and their efficacy were the same. In private life he was an easy, rough, facetious companion, excessively free in his talk, excessively candid in the expression of his desires, and with a reserve of stinging repartee which must have been more blessed to give than to receive. Terrible storms of rage possessed him at times, under which the house seemed to rock and roll, which sent his sweet wife cowering into a corner. But, though she feared him, she respected and loved the man--and I was to find that out to my cost before my first year was out.

Meantime that year of new experience, uplifting love and growth by inches must ever remain wonderful to me--with Aurelia's music in my ears and Love's wild music in my heart. Happy, happy days of my youth!

"Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados!" cried the knight of La Mancha; and I may call that Paduan year my age of song. It ran its course to the sound of flutes, harps, and all sweet music. I never knew, until I knew Aurelia, that such exulting tides of melody could pour from human throat.

When Aurelia rose in the morning and threw open her green shutters, if the sunlight was broad upon the Pra, flecked upon the trees, striking the domes and pinnacles of the Santo with fire, she sang full diapason with that careless fling of the voice, that happy rapture, that bravura which makes the listener's heart go near to burst with her joy. If rain made the leaves to droop, or scudded in sheets along the causeways, she sang plaintively, the wounded, aggrieved, hurt notes of the nightingale. Her song then would be some old-remembered sorrow of her land--of Ginevra degli Almieri, the wandering wife; of the Donna Lombarda, who poisoned her lover; or of the Countess Costanza's violated vow. So she shared confidences with the weather, and so unbosomed herself to nature and to God. Meantime she was as busy as a nesting-bird. She made her doctor's chocolate, and took it in to him with the gazette or the news- sheet; she would darn a hole in my stocking, on my leg, without pricking me at all, look me over, brush me, re-tie my hair, pat me into order with a critical eye, and send me off to my classes or study with a sage counsel to mind my books, and a friendly nod over her shoulder as we each went our ways. She would go to mass at the Santo, to market in the Piazza; she would cheapen a dress-length, chat with a priest, admonish old Nonna, the woman of the house--all before seven o'clock in the morning; and not before then would she so much as sip a glass of coffee or nibble a crust of bread. On Sundays and Festas she took her husband's arm and went to church as befitted, wearing her glazed gown of silver grey, her black lace zendado. She took a fan as well as a service-book-- and happy was I to carry them for her; she had lace mittens on her hands and a fine three-cornered hat on her head. She looked then what she truly was, the thrifty young housewife, who, if she was as lovely as the summer's dawn, was so only by the way. And thrifty she proved herself. For when she had kneeled and crossed herself twice towards the altar, she pulled up the shining silk gown all about her middle and sat down upon her petticoat.

Exquisite, fragrant, piteous Aurelia! Is it wonderful that I loved her? And who was I--O heaven! What sort of lover was I to disturb her sweetly ordered life? To that I must next address myself, cost me what it may.

CHAPTER III

MY DANGEROUS PROGRESS

I was fairly diligent during my year of study at Padua, fairly punctual in attendance at my classes and lectures, fairly regular in my letter- writing home. I acquired no vices, though there were plenty to be got, was not a wine-bibber, a spendthrift, nor a rake. I was too snug in the Casa Lanfranchi to be tempted astray, and any truantry of mine from the round of my tasks led me back to Aurelia and love. To beat up the low quarters of the town, to ruffle in the taverns and chocolate houses with sham gentlemen, half frocked abbes and rips; to brawl and haggle with vile persons and their bullies, set cocks a-fighting or rattle the dice- box in the small hours--what were these pleasures to me, who had Aurelia to be with? From the first she had taken her duties to heart, to mother me, to keep me out of harm's way, to maintain her husband's credit by making sure of mine. These things she set herself to do with a generous zest which proved her undoing. Slowly, and from the purest of motives, her influence upon me, her intercourse with me grew and spread. Slowly the hours I spent with her extended--unperceived by her, exquisitely perceived by me--until, at the date to which I am now come, near a year after my entering the university, I may say there was not a spare moment of the day, from my rising to my going to bed, which was not passed with Aurelia.

To make the full import of this plain to the reader I must particularise to some extent. My own rooms, I have explained, were in the same house, two storeys below the Lanfranchi apartment. In them I was served with my chocolate by old Nonna the servant, and was understood to leave them at seven o'clock in the morning and not to return until midday, when I dined with my hosts. The afternoons were my own. I was at liberty to take horse exercise--and I kept two saddle-horses for the purpose--or to make parties of pleasure with such of my fellow-students as were agreeable to me. At six I supped with Aurelia alone, and at seven I was supposed to retire--either to my own room for study and bed, or into the town upon my private pleasures. These, I say, were the rules laid down by Aurelia and her husband at the beginning of my residence in Padua. By almost imperceptible degrees they were relaxed, by other degrees equally hard to measure they were almost wholly altered.

The first to go was the practice of taking my chocolate abed. One morning Nonna was late, and I rose without it. The same thing happened more than twice, so then I went upstairs to find out what had hindered her. There I found my Aurelia fresh from Mass and market, drinking her morning coffee. Explanations, apologies, what-not, ensued; she invited me to share her repast. From that time onwards I never broke my fast otherwise than with her. So was it with other rules of intercourse. The doctor was a machine in the ordering of his life. His chocolate at six, his clothes at eight; he left the house at nine and returned at noon. He left it again at two in the afternoon and returned at nine in the evening; he supped; he went to bed on the stroke of ten. Except on Sundays, high festivals, the first, the middle, and the last day of carnival, through all the time of my acquaintance with him, I never knew him break these habits but once, and that was when his mother died at Mestre and he had to attend the funeral. On that occasion he must rise at six, and miss his dinner at noon. He was furious, I never saw a man so angry.

I cannot tell how or when it was that I first spent the whole of my afternoons in Aurelia's society, nor how or when it was that, instead of leaving her house at seven in the evening, I stayed on with her till the stroke of nine, within a few minutes of the doctor's homecoming. It is a thing as remarkable as true that nothing is easier to form than a habit, and nothing more difficult to break. Formed and unbroken these habits were, unheeded by ourselves, but not altogether unperceived. There was one member of the household who perceived them, and never approved. I remember that old Nonna used to shake her finger at us as we sat reading, and how she used to call out the progress of the quarters from the kitchen, where she was busy with her master's supper. But my beloved mistress could not, and I would not, take any warning. It became a sort of joke between Aurelia and me to see whether Nonna would miss one of the quarters. She never did; and as often as not, when nine struck and I not gone, she would bundle me out of doors by the shoulders and scold her young mistress in shrill Venetian, loud enough for me to hear at my own chamber door. Aurelia used to tell me all she had said next morning. She had an excellent gift of mimicry; could do Nonna and (I grieve to say) the doctor to the life.

The end of this may be guessed. Privilege after privilege was carelessly accorded by Aurelia, and greedily possessed by me. At the end of six months' residence those three still evening hours existed, not for the blessedness of such intercourse alone, but to be crowned by the salutation of an adorable hand; and when I retired at last, it was not to my bed, but to my window; to the velvet spaces of the night, to the rustling trees, the eloquent congress of the stars; to sigh my secret abroad to those sympathetic witnesses, to whisper her name, to link it with my own; to tell, in a word, to the deep-bosomed dark all the daring fancies of a young man intoxicated with first love. And from privilege to privilege I strode, a fine conqueror. A very few months more, and not only was I for ever with Aurelia, but there was no doubt nor affectation of concealment on my part of how I stood or wished to stand before her. I postulated myself, in fine, as her servant in amours--cavalier I will not say, for that has an odious meaning in Italy, than which to describe my position nothing could be wider of the truth. I did but ask liberty to adore, sought nothing further, and got nothing else. This, upon my honour, was ever the sum of my offence--up to my last day of bliss.

You would have supposed that she could hardly have misunderstood the state of my affairs, had I said or done nothing. So quick-witted was she, it is inconceivable. But as time went on, and success with it, I quite got out of the way of concealment, and spoke of myself openly as her slave. She used to laugh at me, pretend to think me an absurd boy; and now and then threatened (and that half in jest) to tell her husband. I know very well that she never did. The padron, we used to call him to each other, having taken the name from old Nonna. It was one of our little foolish jokes to pretend the house an inn, he the landlord, and ourselves travellers met there by hazard. We had a many familiar, private sayings and nicknames of the sort, secret cues to look across the table when he was there, and smile at each other--as when he railed (as he was fond of doing) at Tuscan ways and speech, at the usage of Siena, her own country, or when (after his meal) he made a noise, sucking his teeth. Sweetly pleasant, dangerous days--were they as lovely to her as to me? How can I tell? There was no doubt but she knew me thoroughly. The little pleasant encroachments of mine, stolen upon her unawares, were now never checked--I am speaking of the end of my first year, when I could hold her hand unreproved, and kiss it as often as I pleased. I took and kept, and exhibited to her without embarrassment, little trifles of hers--a hair-ribbon, a garter, a little trodden Venice slipper; if she asked for them back, it only provoked me to keep them closer to my heart. She saw no harm in these foolish, sweet things: she felt herself to be my senior; by comparison with her position, mine was that of a child. To the very end she maintained the fiction that she was my foster-mother, responsible to my parents for my advancement in education and morals. Assuredly she taught me her tongue and kept me out of gross iniquity; but equally certain is it that I learned more than Italian.

I learned, however, to be very fluent in that, for, inspired by love of Aurelia, I attacked it with extraordinary passion. All Italy, and above all Tuscany, took sacred air from her; there grew to be an aureole about everything which owned kinship with her. I was a severe ritualist, as every lover is: it became a blasphemy in me to think of Aurelia in any form of words but those of her own honey tongue. And that was of the purest in the land. She had very little Venetian at any time, and kept what she had for her husband and household management. To me she employed her native speech, not the harsh staccato of Florence, a stringent compound of the throat and the teeth, but the silken caressing liquids of Siena, the speech of women to their lovers, of St. Catherine to her Spouse. So I became expert in Tuscan, and after the same fashion in Tuscany also. She was deeply and burningly proud of that land of art and letters; she knew something of its history, something (if not much) of its monuments. Such as it was it sufficed me. Inspired by her, I began the study of literature, and if at first I read disingenuously, I went on to read with profit. The "Vita Nova" of Dante enabled me, perhaps, to touch upon topics with her which I could not have dared to do without its moving text; but it won me to the heart of the great poet. I walked the dire circles of Hell, I scaled the Mount of Purgatory, I flew from ring to ring of the Heaven of pure light. Aurelia was my Beatrice; but the great Florentine and his lady were necessarily of the party. And then I began, as men will, to take the lead. Aurelia had exhausted her little store when she had named Giotto and Dante: I took her further afield. We read the Commentaries of Villani, Malavolti's History of Siena, the Triumphs of Petrarch, his Sonnets (fatal pap for young lovers), the Prince of Machiavelli, the Epics of Pulci and Bojardo, and Ariosto's dangerously honeyed pages. Here Aurelia was content to follow me, and I found teaching her to be as sweet in the mouth as learning of her had been. I took enormous pains and consumed half the night in preparation for the morrow's work. I abridged Guicciardini's intolerable History, I hacked sense out of Michael Angelo's granite verses, weeded Lorenzo of disgustfulness, Politian of pedantry. The last thing we read together was the Aminta of Tasso; the last thing I had of her was the "Little Flowers of St. Francis," a favourite book of her devotion. My Saint, she called St. Francis of Assisi--as in one sense no doubt he was; but, "Aurelia," I had replied, kissing both her hands, "you know very well who is my saint. I should have been named Aurelius." She had said, "It is a good name, Aurelio. There are many who have it in my country." "You shall call me nothing else, "said I then; but she shook her head, and hung it down as she whispered softly, "I like best Francesco," and then, so low as to be hardly audible, "Checho," the Sienese diminutive for my name of Francis. Old Nonna came in to hound me from the room. That night--it was my last but one--Aurelia came to the door with me, and let me kiss her two hands again.

I have come to the hour of my destruction--the 16th of June, 1722. The smouldering fires which had laboured in my breast for nine months burst into a flame which overwhelmed both Aurelia and me. I committed an unpardonable sin, I endeavoured to repair it with an act of well-nigh incredible temerity. What occurred on that night is, in fact, the origin of these Memoirs and their sole justification. The dawn of that momentous day found her a loving and honoured wife; and its close left her, innocent as she was, under the worst suspicion which can fall upon a good woman. It found me a hopeful gentleman of means and prospects; and I went out of it into the dark, a houseless wanderer, to consort with profligates, thieves and murderers.

CHAPTER IV

FATAL AVOWAL

I shall not deny that the overnight's tenderness may have wrought in me the dangerous ecstasy which was to prove so cruel a requital of it; for it is of the nature of love to be inflamed by the least hint of a neighbouring, answering fire. I believe that I could have been for ever Aurelia's mute, adoring, unasking slave, but for the fact that she had sighed, and whispered me "Checho," and twice suffered me to kiss her hands. Fatal benevolence that lifted suddenly the meek! Fatal wealth bestowed that made the pauper purse-proud! I had passed the night in a transport of triumphant joy; throughout the day succeeding it I felt my wings. "Nunc," I could exclaim with Propertius.

"Nunc mihi summa licet sidera contingere plantis." And that exalted strain, which was my perdition, alas, was hers also!

That which followed was a very hot still night, with thunder in the Euganean hills; and Aurelia may have been lax or languid, or in my miserable person some of the summer's fire may have throbbed. It was late, near nine o'clock; already old Nonna had given three warnings of the hour, and was only delaying the last while she stirred the ingredients of the doctor's minestrone over the fire. The knowledge that she must come in, and I go out, shortly, at any moment, fretted my quick senses to fever. I looked for ever at Aurelia with a wildly beating heart; she, on her side, was aware of my agitation, and breathed the shorter for the knowledge. She sat by the open window mending a pair of stays; at her side was her work table, upon that her three-wicked lamp. I leaned over a chair exactly in front of her, watching every slight tremor or movement, just as a dog watches a morsel which he longs for but is forbidden to touch. Thrice a dog that I was! I felt like a dog that night.

We had read little and spoken less; the airless night forbade it; for the last half hour no words had passed between us but a faint, "Ah, go now, go now, Checho," from her, and from me my prayer of "Not yet, not yet--let me stay with you." Aurelia was tired, and now and again put down her work with a sigh, to gaze out of the window into the soft deeps of the night, gemmed as it was with fireflies and wavering moths. How prone is youth to fatuous conceits! I imagined that she suffered with me; I identified her pains with mine; I thought that she loved me and had not the heart to bid me begone. That new wicked feeling of triumph, that new exultation in manly strength, that delirium, that poisonous frenzy, came flooding over me. Some gesture of hers more than commonly eloquent may have set me on fire; I may have seen her tremble, I may have guessed a tear. More insensate folly than mine can be lent by youth on less security than this. For there sat I quivering with love, and there before me, unlaced, in loose attire, in all the luxury of lassitude, breathed and sighed the loveliest of women. I cannot explain what I dare not extenuate: dowering her with my own madness, I forgot her honour, my own, the world, and God. I leaned forward towards her, took her languid hand, and, holding it in my own, said quietly--very quietly, "I love you--you are my soul."

She laughed gently, then sighed. "You must not say so to me, even if it is true," she said. I repeated the words, "I love you--you are my soul," and she was silent.

I said, after a pause, during which I could hear the furious beating of my heart, "I am at my prayers, in my church, before my altar. Your eyes are the candles, your heart is the altar stone. I kneel--" and I did kneel. Then she grew alarmed, and was for stopping me.

"Checho," she said, "this is foolish, and I must not listen. I beg you to get up; I know it is late. Please to ask Nonna what's o'clock. I am serious."

"And I," I said, "am serious. The time is full--the time is now. Oh, Aurelia," I said urgently, "my saint and my lamp--"

"Hush, hush," she said, and tried to regain her hand. "No, but you must be quiet. Listen!" But I could not now be stopped.

"Oh," I cried out, "I have been silent too long, and now I must speak. For six months I have been silent; but now there is death in silence. I shall die of love, and it will be you that will have killed me." I knelt again, and again said, "I love you."

"Oh, no, no," she said, but her protest was fainter. I repeated it, and now she made no protest. God help me, I thought her won. I flung myself violently near, and in my agitation knocked over my chair. As that fell backwards, so fell I forwards to her knees. I clasped them closely, studded kisses on her hands, I raised my face to hers, and saw her the lovelier for her pale terror. She was speechless.

"Listen to me, Aurelia, youngest of the angels," I began, and just then old Nonna burst in upon me crying "Ruin!" I sprang to my feet, and Aurelia away, her work table went down, the lamp with it; we were all three in darkness.

"Ruin!" said Nonna, "I tell you, ruin! That wretched boy--the padron is on the stair."

Aurelia shrieked that she was undone; Nonna, who had flown back into the kitchen, returned with a lamp. I saw my beautiful mistress distraught and ran forward to comfort her. She shrank from me with horror, as well she might. "Farewell, lady," I said, "I will go to meet what I deserve."

I took my cloak, hat and sword, and went to the door, but Nonna caught me by the skirt, and, "Is he mad then?" she cried; and, "What are you about, Don Francis? Will you meet the padron on the stair and let him up to see this wreckage? Madonna purissima, what is one to do with a boy of this sort?"

"Let me go," said I, "to my proper fate. I know very well what I have done." It may be that I did, and I hope that I did; but very certainly I did not know what to do next; nor did Aurelia. Sobbing and trembling she lay upon Nonna's breast, imploring her to save us both. I heard the professor clear his throat upon the floor below, and knew that I was too late. Nonna took the command.

She flung open the door of the clothes-press, and, "In with you," says she to me. "Little fool! a pretty state of things!" She turned to her mistress, "Mistress, go you down and meet him. Keep him at the door-- hold him in talk--hug, kiss, throttle, what you will or what you can, while I set this to rights." Aurelia, drying her eyes, flew to the door; and Nonna then, taking me by the shoulders, fairly stuffed me into the clothes-press, among Aurelia's gowns, which hung there demurely in bags. "Keep you quiet in there, foolish, wicked young man," said she, "and when they've gone to bed maybe I'll let you out. If I do, let me tell you, it will be because you have done so much folly and wickedness as no one in his senses could have dared. That shows me that you are mad, and one must pity, not blame, the afflicted."

All this time she was working like a woolcarder at the disordered room, but could not refrain her tongue from caustic comments upon my behaviour. "Wicked, wicked Don Francis! Nay, complete and perfect fool rather, who, because a lady is kind to you, believes her to be dying for your love. Your love indeed! What is your precious love worth beside the doctor's? Have you a position the greatest in the university? Have you years, gravity, authority, money in the funds? Why, are you breeched yet? Have you tired of sugar-sticks? What next?" So she went on grumbling and scolding until the doctor came grunting to the open door with Aurelia upon his arm.

He was, as usual, out of breath and angry. He was also, I judged, embarrassed and fretted by the ministrations of Aurelia.

"My curse," I heard him say, "my undying curse upon the man who built this house. Twice a day am I to scale a mountain? Wife, wife, you strangle me!"

"Oh, dear friend! Oh, dear friend!" 'Twas the voice of Aurelia. "Are you come back to your poor girl?"

"Hey," cried he testily, "do I seem to be absent? I wish you would talk sense. These infernal stairs rob us all of our wits, it seems."

"I am very foolish," said Aurelia, and I heard her trouble in her tones. "I have been waiting so long--so very long."

"There, my child, there," said he, and kissed her. "Now be pleased to let me into my house." With a sigh, which I heard, she released him, and he came stamping into the room. I trembled in my shameful retreat.

The reflections of a young man of sensibility, ear-witness against his will of the chaste and sanctioned familiarities of a man and wife, must always be mingled of sweet and bitter; but when to the natural force of these is added horror of a crime and the shame arising from discovery of utter delusion, the reader may imagine the stormy sea of torment in which I laboured. In a word, I was to discover a new Aurelia--Aurelia the affectionate wife, the careful minister; not the adored mistress of a feverish boy, the heroine of a Vita Nuova, the Beatrice of a, I fear me, profane comedy, the beloved of Aminta and the Pastor Fido. I own that I was dismayed, wounded in my tenderest part, at the discovery. Aurelia had suddenly become a stranger to my heart. I was nothing, less than nothing, to her now that she was alone with her husband. Beside the care of his appetite for food, my labours upon Guicciardini--the toil of a month of nights--was as the work of an ant in the dust. Beside her interest in his gossip of the schools, the coffee-house, the street corner, my exposition of the Sonnets of Petrarca was as the babble of school children at play in the Pra; beside her attentions to his clumsy caresses, her tenderness to me hour after hour was but the benevolence of a kindly woman to a lad left on her hands. Oh, bitter tonic discovery! How bitter it was I leave my reader to determine. I do not feel equal to the task of relating all that I overheard; if I could have stopped my ears, I would have done it. She tempted him, beguiled him to eat, to praise her, to be at ease, to love her. With that liquid tongue of hers, which would have melted a flinty core, she talked of his and her affairs; she was interested in his commentary upon the Pandects, she was indignant at the jealousy of Dr. This, she made light of the malice of Professor That. With flying feet from table to kitchen and back, with dexterous hands at bottle, platter or napkin, she ministered to his slightest whims. She refused to allow Nonna to wait upon him; she must do everything for him for this once.

And when, amid his flung ejaculations and bolted mouthfuls, between his "Non c'e male," his "Buono, buono!" his "Ancora un po'," or "Dammi da here," he could find time to ask her what this new alacrity of hers meant on such a hot night of summer, with a touching falter of the voice I heard her reply, "It is because--it is because--I have not always been good to you, Porfirio. It is because--of late--this evening--I have much wished for you to be here. It is because---"

"Cospetto!" I heard the doctor cry, "what is the meaning of this? Come here, my dear." And then, when she went to him and sat upon his knee, I heard him murmur his endearments--ah, and I heard her soft and broken replies! And I knew very well that in her heart she was reproaching herself for what I alone had done, and by her humble appeal for kindness was craving his forgiveness for offences for which I could never hope to be forgiven.

These terrible discoveries, far from making me cease to love Aurelia, increased incalculably while they changed and purged my love. Pity and terror, says Aristotle in his Poetics, are the soul's cathartics. Both of these I felt, and emerged the cleaner. By the tune Aurelia had coaxed her husband to come to bed, and had gone thither, with a kiss, herself, I was half way to a great resolve, which, though it resulted in untold misery of body, was actually, as I verily believe, the means of my soul's salvation. Without ceasing for a moment to love Aurelia, I now loved her honestly again. I could see her a wife, I could know her a loving wife, without one unworthy thought; I could gain glory from what was her glory, I could be enthusiastic upon those virtues in her which to a selfish lover would have been the destruction of his hopes. In a word, I loved her now because she loved another.

There is nothing remarkable in my possession of feelings which no honourable man should be without; nor can I see that what I was moved to do, in consequence of having those feelings, was any way out of the common. If the sweet subservience and careful ministry of Aurelia had moved her husband's admiration, how much the more must they have moved mine! And what is more natural to the ardent explorer than to announce his discoveries? I had learned that I had loved an angelic being; what wonder that I desired to inform the one person in the world who had a right to know it, that such was my extreme privilege? Of this I am content, reader, to be judged by thee. If my enthusiasm was extravagant, surely it was pardonable. Judge me then as thou wilt, and as thou canst, for the end of this chapter of my history is cardinal.

But there were these moving considerations also. If Aurelia had tacitly reproached herself to her husband with what were my crimes, and only mine--was it not my bounden duty to save her before it were too late? Must I not avow what, as it seemed, she was on the point of avowing? If she--pure innocent--believed herself guilty and needing forgiveness-- whereas I and I only was that monster--in a few moments' time, when she should be with her husband in the innermost shrine of the Temple of Hymen, I might be sure she would take upon herself the guilt, and alone receive my punishment. Could I endure the thought of this, miserable that I was? Could I suffer such a sacrifice and wear the livery of man? I knew that I could not. "Out, therefore, of thy hiding-place, sinner," I bade myself, "and get the vice scourged out of thee."

These were a part of my reflections, this was my plain resolution. Generous, honourable, they seemed to me then--honourable alike to Aurelia and to her husband. The doctor had replenished his glass, and was leaning back in his chair. He had released some of the buttons of his vest, and they had flown to their repose. He was looking down at the table, where he twisted the glass about; he was thinking of his wife, of her sweet humour, innocence and purity--of everything which I so adored and had dared to tarnish. He was frowning and smiling at once at his thoughts. I heard him say to himself, "That's a good girl--that's a good girl of mine"--when I walked out of the cupboard and stood, pale but composed, before him at the opposite side of the table. Even then, so absorbed he was in his mellow humours he did not hear me. "Eh, la Madonna!" he mused--"as good as gold!" He stretched his legs out to the full and glanced with lazy luxury round about his room. Then he saw me.

CHAPTER V

DISASTER

"Light of Light!" he said in a horrible whisper--and again, "Very God--"

"Doctor Lanfranchi," said I seriously, for my passion lifted me up, "Doctor Lanfranchi, she is better than refined gold."

He did what I suppose he had not done for many years; he crossed himself over the face. "Bless my soul!" he said.

"Sir, sir," I admonished him, "you little know of what excellent substance that saint is compact. Sir--"

I might have continued I know not how long upon a theme so noble, but for his astonishment, which, though it kept him stupid, must have a vent. "Who the devil--" stammers he, "What the devil--" It amazed me, and vexed me greatly, that I could not make him understand whom I praised. I went close to him, I touched him on the shoulder.

"Hearken to me, doctor," said I, "Donna Aurelia, your lady, is as it were an angel of Heaven--and I"--I said it with sorrowful grimness--"and I have better reason to know it than you."

He felt my touch, and recoiled from it: he looked at me half askance, from under knitted brows and between blinking lids, as if he thought me a spirit. "Paradise of God," says he then, "who is this?" His glance lighted upon the cupboard doors set open; he frowned and said, with difference: "And who are you that speak of angels?"

"Sir," I replied, and my convictions were never more firmly in my words, "my name is Wretch, and I am unworthy to live. I am that vile thing once called Francis Strelley, now brought to confusion and conscious of his horrible offence. Sir! Sir!" I said wildly, "Donna Aurelia is the handmaid of high Heaven.--While I, while I--O God!" emotion poured its hot flood over me. I fell to my knees.

In the painful silence which ensued, and no doubt seemed longer than it actually was, I suppose that he collected some half of the truth, and in the manner of him who sees but half, distorted it to be greater than the whole. His manner towards me altered very materially; he resumed his authority.

"Get up," he said, croaking like a raven; and at first I thought that I dared not, and immediately after knew that I dared. I sprang to my feet, and faced him, livid as he was. "Doctor Lanfranchi," said I, "I have overheard you-by accident--as you praised her. I have heard you call her good. Ah, and in agreeing with you I can testify that you spoke more truth than you dreamed of. No saint in Heaven is so good as she, but it has been required of me that I should grope in Hell before I could see Heaven in her soul."

He held himself from me by doing violence to his own person--caught at his cravat and gripped it with both hands.

"What are you saying? Say that again. Of what do you accuse yourself?"

"Of sin," I said. He looked at the cupboard, then with chilly rage at me.

"What were you doing in there?" he asked; and that was a terrible question, since there I never ought to have been.

I asked him would he hear me? He nodded his head and sat grimly down by the table, at which of late he had so happily reclined. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand, but kept his piercing eyes upon me. Disconcerting! but even so, had he listened in silence I might have made him see the truth.

"Sir," I began, "it is true that I love, and have always loved, your wife; and it is true that I have been wicked enough to declare my passion. But it is also true that by her, and by her alone, I have been convinced of my presumption." Here he held up his hand.

"Stop there. You say you have been convinced. How were you convinced? Where were you convinced? Let me understand you. Was it in there?" He jerked his hand towards the fatal cupboard.

"Yes," I replied, "it was in there. I was forced to overhear your conversation with Donna Aurelia, which proved to me that I am less than nothing to her, and that you are all the world."

He snorted, scoffing at the thought. "We shall see soon enough," he said bitterly, "who and what I am."

I continued: "If you think that I have injured YOU--I say nothing of my lady or of myself--you are horribly deceived. On the contrary, I have done you a service. You have the proof to your hand that you are the husband of a pattern among ladies." Here, once more, he looked at the cupboard, and "Ma!" he said, and shrugged. After this, so long as I could speak to him, he tapped his foot.

"Punish me," I advised him; "use me as you will; kill me--I shall not defend myself. I have never yet refused to take the consequences of my acts. But over my dead body, if you are a true man, you will give thanks to God for the gift of such a wife as you have."

I was indignant, honestly, and, as I think, rightly so; but again he misunderstood me.

He got up and threatened me with his great forefinger. "Enough of your sermons, sir," he said. "Have I lived and taught sucklings all these years to be told my duty to God Almighty? Will you teach me, forsooth, for what I am to give thanks, and whom I am to correct or chastise? Wait you there, young gentleman--wait you there until I know more about you and my pattern lady." He turned his back upon me, and, wrenching open the chamber door, called harshly upon Aurelia. Immediately--and no doubt she had been quaking for the summons--my adored mistress came trembling out, her hair tumbled about her shoulders, her hands at her neck. Her feet were bare upon the flags, her great and mournful eyes loomed hollow in her face. They were my instant reproof, for now, and now to the full, I saw a fatal consequence of my enthusiastic action. Unhappy Francis, what hadst thou done? Thou hadst intended to abase thyself in her service--and betrayed her. Thou hadst intended to honour, and condemned her to dishonour! Alas, thou hadst gone near to ruining the purest and loveliest of women by revealing those very things which proved her so.

The doctor, at his pitch of most savage and relentless calm, pointed to me and the cupboard--to the criminal and his lurking den together. "Look at those, woman," he said ominously, deliberately, but she could not or would not; and, before she could collect her wits, what must need old Nonna do but make bad worse, and, running, thrust herself in between, and wag her hand under the doctor's nose.

"Eh, eh, eh, what a bother about nothing!" says this amiable old fool. "Let us pray all together to the Madonna that you be not sorry for this. She has done nothing, padron--nothing at all. He alone is wicked--by Diana the Mighty I swear it--and it was I who put him in the cupboard, and therefore know what I am saying. She--a lamb of our Saviour's flock! Madness! Are you jealous of a boy without a beard? Do you conceive that your lady could listen to a voice that sang among milk-teeth? Ah, do you listen, rather, padron, to me and the truth, for we are at one together, the truth and I." She stayed for breath.

"Hag," said the doctor, "you are lying. This fine young man has confessed to me the agreeable truth. Madam," he turned to Donna Aurelia, "here is a confessed lover of yours. Pray have you anything to say?"

"He is very foolish, he is very wicked; I have often told him so, often and often," says Aurelia, twisting her hands about. "To-night he has said what he should not--and I believe he knows that very well. I had intended to tell you, if you had come sooner, as I wished--ah, and as I asked you, Porfirio--you would have heard it all from me. That is all. I was frightened--Nonna popped him in the cupboard--how he got out, how you found him there, I know not. But he has done me no harm--nor you neither, Porfirio. That I swear before the saints in Heaven." The doctor glared at her--then took her by the wrist.

"Lies, lies, woman!" he said furiously. "He convicts you himself. He came out of the cupboard of his own act."

She stared in amazement, and forgot the pain he was giving her. "He-- came--out? But----Is he mad?"

"No, madam," said I; and, "No, by Heaven!" cried the doctor, "for I have no doubt at all but that he intended to provoke me to anger and then to run me through the body with that sword of his."

I threw up my arms at such a monstrous suspicion. Aurelia, who had been gazing at me as if she feared for my reason, now looked down.

"Please to let go of my wrist," she said, "you are hurting me, Porfirio. I know no more than you do why he came out of the cupboard; but of course you do him a wrong. He did not mean anything of the sort--he is of a good heart--incapable of murder. And now, please, Porfirio, let go of my wrist."

But he did not; his rage, gathering in volume, bade fair to convulse him.

"I intend to have the truth from one of the three of you before I let you go," said he. "From you I require to know why you put him into the cupboard."

"It was very silly," said Aurelia, "since he had done no harm. Nonna, why did you put him into the cupboard?"

"Diana!" cried the old woman, "where else was I to put the boy?" The doctor's laughter was terrible to me. I took a step forward.

"I will tell you, sir, the reason of both your puzzlements," I said. "I was put into the cupboard because Donna Aurelia was rightly ashamed of me, and I came out because I was honestly ashamed of myself."

"Ha!" said he, "so now we have it."

"You shall have it now," I replied. "I was honestly ashamed of myself, and honestly glorious that I had been rebuked by so noble a lady. Sir, it is true that I love this lady." Aurelia gave a shocked little cry, but I went on. "It is true that I kiss her feet. Sir, I worship the ground she presses with them--it is holy ground."

He scoffed at me. I said, "My feelings overcame me--I sinned--I am utterly unworthy. Punish me for my sin as you will, I shall not defend myself. But do not, and do not you, madam, I entreat, punish me for the one thing I have done this night of which I may be rightly proud."

"Bah," said he, "you are a fool, I see. And now, madam---"

"Yes, Porfirio," said she, poor soul.

"You, and that she-wolf over there--what have you to say?"

"I say," said Nonna, "that the young gentleman is out of his wits."

Aurelia said, "I am wretched. He was very foolish."

"You have deceived me," he thundered at her, "made a fool of me at your ease. You spoke your wheedling words, and he was in there to listen, and to laugh, by my soul! You coaxed, you stroked, you sidled, you whispered, and he was in there laughing, laughing, laughing! Oh, madam, you talk of his young foolishness, but you make your profit of my old foolishness."

"It is false," said Aurelia. "I never did it."

"By my soul," says he, "I'll not be contradicted. I say that you do. O Heaven, is this your duty, your gratitude, your thanks due to me? Why-- why--why--what did I take you from? What did I make of you? Your wretched mother---"

She looked up with flashing eyes. There was danger to be seen on its way. "She is not wretched."

"Then she should be, madam," he said. "She is parent of a wicked, false--"

Aurelia, crying, shook to get free. "No, no! Be silent. You shall not say such things." She stamped her foot. "It is absurd, I won't have it," she said. He gave a strangling cry of rage and despair, released her and rushed towards the cupboard. Dramatically, he flung his arms towards it as if he would shake off his two hands and leave them there. "Explain that, woman," he screamed. "Explain it if you dare---"

She was now equally angry, with patches of fire in her cheeks. "I shall explain nothing more. You will not believe me when I do. My mother will understand me."

"Then she shall--if she can," says the doctor, "and as soon as you please." Aurelia peered at him. "What do you mean, sir?"

"Why, madam, that you shall go where you are best understood."

"What!" she cried, "you mean--? You cannot mean--Oh, preposterous!"

The doctor was looking at the cupboard. "Ay, and it is preposterous, and I do mean it."

She stared at him for a moment, perplexed, then flew into a towering and ungovernable rage. "Ah," she cried, and she shook in every member. "Ah, now you may mean what you please, for I have done. Do you dare to suspect me? Do you dare to treat me as an infamous woman? Oh, oh, do you dare? You shall have no need to repeat it. I will go to my mother's house--I will go now--now--now. Nonna, my cloak and shoes--at once. I have been good--I have always tried to be good--and do you faithful duty. I have known what I ought to do--I have been proud to be Dr. Lanfranchi's wife. I thought I would show to my people that a girl of Siena could be proud, even of a Venetian pig, if he were her husband. Ah, but no more, no more. No, I will work elsewhere, for better wages-- you have seen the last of Aurelia." She was superbly beautiful as she turned, pointing to me. "This youth--this mad, incomprehensible youth-- what harm has he done YOU compared to what he has now done to me? He loves me, he says--I don't understand his love--but why should he not? Am I to fall in love with everybody who says that? Do you think you are the only one? And--and--why!--you have never said that you loved me: no, you have not. You just took to me, and made me work--your servant or your doll--your plaything when you were done with the cafe--me, a Gualandi of Siena--and you, a pig of Padua. Good Heaven, for what do you take me, sir? Did you find me in the street? Is my family one of wretches? Oh, what a man you are; ungrateful, cruel, hard as the grave. Yes, yes, Nonna, fold me close in my cloak; it will keep me from such cold as this." She stood, cloaked and ready: we all stood--the doctor like a rock, I like a man dead at his prayers.

She looked from one of us to the other, to me second. "You told me that you loved me, Don Francis," she said. "I am going to my mother. Will you take me?"

I never loved her so well as at this moment when I said, "Madam, I dare not do it."

She blushed, I know she was mute with astonishment. I thought old Nonna would have torn my eyes out. "Dog!" she called me, "son of a dog."

"I dare not go with you, madam," I repeated. "I love you too well. I have done you so much wrong, meaning to do right, that I dare not now risk an act which I know to be wrong. Oh," I cried, as my distress grew, "oh, unsay those words, Aurelia! You could not mean them, they were not yours."

She tossed her head, and shrugged. "I will be careful not to say them again, at least," she said. "They evidently distressed you. Come, Nonna-- we will leave these gentlemen." The doctor never moved--I followed her with my eyes. One more look from hers would have drawn us both to our destruction. I thank God at this hour that she never showed it me. She went out and shut the door behind her. Neither of us moved until we heard the street door bang. We had been waiting for that.

"Now, Dr. Lanfranchi," said I, with a glance at my sword, "I am ready for you how and when you please."

With a howl like that of a miserable maniac he leapt upon me, tripped and threw me flat upon the flags. I remember the stunning shock of my fall, but remember no more. I learned afterwards that he had pitched me out on to the stairs, and that I fell far.

CHAPTER VI

I COMMENCE PILGRIM

I arose from bed, some two or three days after the terrible occurrence related--and how I had got into it, except for the charity of the doorkeeper, there's no telling. I arose, I say, to a new heaven and a new earth: a heaven impossibly remote, an earth of sickly horror, an earth of serpents and worms, upon which I crawled and groped, the loathliest of their spawn. I surveyed myself in the glass, faced myself as I was--I the wrecker of homes, the betrayer of ladies, love's atheist! Pale, hollow-cheeked, with eyes distraught, there was good ground for believing that when Dr. Lanfranchi threw me upon my worthless skull he had jogged out my wits.

The facts were otherwise, however. Resolution came back upon the crest, as it were, of the wave that brought me full knowledge; the more disastrously showed the ruin I had made, the more stoutly I determined to repair it.

The surgeon who attended me was perfectly discreet and told me nothing more than that Professor Lanfranchi had left Padua and was gone to Venice. Not so the custode of the house: it was from him I had the rest. Dr. Lanfranchi had taken his keys with him and had left no directions. Donna Aurelia had been twice to the house since her first departure from it, and had been unable to get access. The second time of failing, said the custode, she had "lashed into the street like a serpent from a cage. And nobody," he added, "nobody in this town, and nobody under heaven's great eye, can say where she has gone. Perhaps she is dead, sir; but I believe that she is not. Pretty and snug lady that she was, it's my belief she will fret after her comforts, and that if she get them not from one, she will have them from another." Old Nonna had also disappeared, he said, which was better than things might have been; but the strongest ray of comfort shed upon me from this worthy fellow's store was this, that Donna Aurelia had returned to her house. Plainly, if she had been thither twice, she could be induced thither a third time. It must then be my business to induce her, and to see to it, if possible, that she was properly received upon that occasion.

Here was a duty plainly set before me--my first and greatest reparation, which no other tie must hinder, to accomplish which I must shrink from no hardship however severe, no humiliation however bitter. Another lay closer to my heart, I'll allow, the words of pardon which I hoped to sue forth from the dearest lips in all the world--for I could never hope to be happy until the being whom, most loving, I had most offended could consent to assure me of my peace. This, however, I resolutely put by as a selfish pleasure which I must not expect to enjoy until I had earned it. However natural might be the impulse which urged me to find Aurelia, fall at her feet, anoint them with my tears, I must withstand it until I could be sure of her honour saved. Now, was that surety to be gained first from her or first from her wrathful husband?

I turned to the custode, who stood smiling and rubbing his chin in my doorway. I said, "Beppo, I am in great perplexity. It is idle to deny that I am the immediate cause of all this misery, for you know it as well as I do."

He said that he had guessed something of what I was so good as to tell him. "There was, as I understand, a little misadventure with a cupboard door," he said; "but who can contend with Fate?"

"It has been my fate," I said, "to bring ruin upon the lady whom I adore. My sin is worse than that of Hophni and Phineas, and I would that the requital might be as theirs was, save that I can make it more bitter yet."

"Why," says he, "what was done to those gentlemen?" I told him that they were slain with the sword; to which he replied that, so far as he had ever heard, the doctor was nothing of a swordsman, and that he knew I had some proficiency in fence. "I hope then," he added, "that your honour will succeed where those other gentlemen failed; but if you ask my advice, I say, leave the doctor alone, and comfort the little lady."

His gross misapprehension of every merit of the case nettled me: I saw it was useless to talk with a person of his condition, and that instant action was my only safety. I must go, on my knees if must be, to the feet of Donna Aurelia, I must put myself entirely at her service. Should that lie in spurning me with her heel I must endure it; should she bid me go and receive public chastisement from her dangerous husband, I would assuredly go. Tears, stripes, hunger, thirst, cold, heat, loneliness, nakedness, unjust accusation, ridicule, malicious persecution--all these I would cheerfully undergo; and if one or any of them could repair her misfortunes, then they would be repaired. The custode said that he believed they could not, but I bade him be silent and begone. "Wretched Venetian," I cried at him, "thou art incapable of comprehending anything but victuals. If I tell thee that I have lacerated an angel and deserve the sword, thou speakest of my skill in fence! I waste my breath upon thee. Comfort the lady, dost thou dare to say? What comfort can she have but in my repentance? What have I to offer but devotion?"

"It is just that which I advise your honour-" he began, but I was now embarked upon the waters of adventure, cheered with the prospect of action, impatient to begin my voyage. Astonishment cropped his period midway; he gaped as he saw what I did. I threw upon the floor my sword and finely laced coat; I threw my vest, ruffles, cravat, watch, rings, after them. I kicked into a corner with my foot my buckled shoes, my silk stockings, my fine gilt garters. Upon the top of the heap I cast my Paris hat, my gloves and brooch. "There lies," I said, "the sinful husk of Francis Strelley. Let the swine nozzle and rout in it for what they can find to their liking. And here," I cried, standing before him in shirt and breeches, barefooted, bareheaded, without a coat to my back, "here, good man, stands the naked soul of that same Francis, which shall go shivering forth to declare his shame, to meet his penance, to stand begging at the door of the Holy Place for the mercy which he has shown himself unworthy of."

About my disordered hair I tied Aurelia's ribbon, round my upper arm I placed her garter, to my neck, upon a silken cord, I hung her Venice slipper. In the bosom of my shirt I placed the little book of devotion which she had given me, and the "Aminta" of Tasso in which we had last read together. "Farewell, Beppo," said I; "you may not see Francis again."

"Where are you going, sir?" he asked me, wondering.

"To Siena--to Aurelia--to Heaven!" and he held up his hands.

"You are never going to Siena as you are," he cried; and I asked him how else he would have me go.

"Your honour will take cold in the chest," says he, "that's very plain; but long before that can declare itself your honour will be lodged in the madhouse. And what is Madam Aurelia to say, by your leave, to an undressed young gentleman which she declined to say to a dressed one? Let me tell you, young sir," he added with a sneer, "Siena's not the only city in Italy where there are madmen."

"Man," I said, "what is it to me, do you suppose, whether I am in a madhouse or a prison this night? I intend for Siena, and shall certainly get there in good time. Now I will ask you to leave me."

"Tis your honour is for leaving, not I," said he, "and though I shall be taking a liberty, it's in a case of bad-is-the-best I do believe." He took off his jacket and put it on the bed.

"What are you proposing, Beppo?" said I.

"A strait-waistcoat," said he, and came at me with determination.

I was his master in a very few minutes, for I was much stronger than he reckoned for. When I had him at my discretion, I let him get up and thus addressed him:

"I have every reason to be extremely offended with you," I said, "but I believe that you have acted honestly. Let me, however, recommend you not to interfere in the private and personal affairs of gentlemen until you have fitted yourself to understand them. I am going upon a journey in a manner which appears becoming to one who is responsible for these lamentable troubles. I shall leave my property here in your charge, but will ask you to accept such of those articles as are on the floor as may be of use to you. When you see me again it will be as your indulgent master; but he who now bids you farewell is unworthy to shake your hand."

He nevertheless took my hand and kissed it devotedly immediately afterwards he had fallen upon my discarded trifles.

"Excellency! Excellency!" he cried, gasping, "what bounty! what splendour of soul!" He fingered my watch, listened to it. "It goes yet-- it is a famous watch!" He babbled like a happy child. "Mechlin stuff, every thread of it!" He smoothed out the lace ends of my cravat. So he ran through the silly things one after another--shoes which he could not wear, a sword which he could not use, a coat which must exhibit him a monkey--he grovelled before me and would have kissed my foot, but that I shrank from him in disgust. "Horrible, venal Venetian," I said, "thou hast shown me one more degraded than I." He was out of sight with his bundle of treasures before I could finish my reproof, and I busied myself with my last preparations.

I wrote two letters: the first was to Dr. Lanfranchi, the second to my father. To the doctor I said what was, I think, becoming, namely, that his wife was as spotless as the snow, and that the very blackness of my guilt did but show her whiteness more dazzling. I added an expression of my undying sorrow for having brought misfortune upon her whom I must always love, and him whom I had once respected, and assured him that I did not intend to rest until I had repaired it. This I addressed to the university.

I explained briefly to my father the reason of my temporary absence from Padua; and upon reconsideration of my plans, desiring to avoid any affectation of extravagance, added a cloak, a small bundle of clean linen, a staff and a few gold pieces to my thin equipment. At four o'clock in the afternoon I went out into the street and directed my steps towards the gate of San Zuan.

Leaving Padua, I turned and looked for the last time upon her domes and towers. "Farewell, once proud city, now brought low by my deed," I said. "Keep, if thou must, the accursed memory and name of Francis Antony Strelley, gentleman--Poisoner of Homes, Stabber-in-secret, Traitor in Love. I leave him behind me for the worst thou canst do. He that quits thee now is another than he: Francesco Ignoto, Pilgrim, in need of Grace."

Then I addressed myself stoutly to the hills; and it is a circumstance worthy of remark that the further I pushed the more certainly I recovered my spirits. I suppose there never was yet in this world a young man to whom the future did not appeal more urgently than the present, or who would not rather undertake an adventure without a shilling to his name than in his post-chaise and four. It is, I take it, of the essence of romance that the lady's castle-prison of enchantment lies beyond the forest, across the hills or over sea; and most assuredly that damsel who is to be won by means of a courier leading a spare horse is as little worth your pains as she whose price is half a guinea. I, in that commencement of my pilgrimage, then, was happy because I was doing something, and hopeful because I could not see my way!

CHAPTER VII

I AM MISCONCEIVED AT THE HOSPITAL

I am conscious that the reader may find much to condemn in my last chapter. He may think my schemes chimerical, my methods undisciplined; he may say that I am perverse. I shall only urge in defence of what I did that I deeply loved, and had deeply injured, the lovely Aurelia. She had departed from me in misunderstanding and anger; she did not believe in my devotion, she could not understand my behaviour. Was it surprising, then, if I felt that I must find her at all costs? Was it wonderful that I wished her to know of my repentance, or that I wished to repair my wrong-doings? For eight months I had enjoyed daily and hourly communion with her--and I don't pretend to say that the horrible loss of that had a good deal to do with my precipitate departure, any more than that the hope of finding her was what gave the spring to my feet and brought back the young blood to my heart. No pilgrim to Loretto or Compostella more longingly set his eyes to where he believed his hopes to lie than did I watch for the first sign of the Apennines, which barred my way to Siena. Having thus briefly defended myself against misconception, I shall say no more on that head.

After my first night under the stars--wondrous night of wakefulness and hopeful music, throughout which I lay entranced at the foot of a wooded hill and was never for a moment uncompanioned by nightingale, cicala and firefly--I began to suffer from footsoreness, a bodily affliction against which romance, that certain salve for the maladies of the soul, is no remedy, or very little. Crossing the hills, over burning roads, through thorny brakes or by slopes of harsh grass, my heels and the balls of my toes became alarmingly inflamed; and an acacia-spine, lodging in the sole of one foot, made matters no better. That second day of mine I could barely hobble twelve miles, and nothing but resolution could do that much for me. The night came and found me ill; I slept not; though I had provided myself with food, I could not touch it. Luckily, I was discovered by some shepherd boys early in the morning and directed to the town of Rovigo at some half a league's distance, where they said there was a hospital.

Seeing that my foot was now so bad that the touch of a hand upon it was torment, I think it had gone hard with me if Rovigo had stood another half-league away. I shall not readily forget the noble charity of one of those boys, who, seeing the inflammation set up by the thorn in my foot, ripped off the sleeve of his shirt and bound it round the instep--my first experience of the magnanimity of the poor, but by no means my last.

I limped into Rovigo and learned the direction of the hospital, at whose gate I was kept with a sorry crew of wretches for a mortal hour while the brother-in-charge finished his siesta.

Two friars, a soldier disguised in drink, a young Jew, and myself completed the company, which was allowed to make itself free of a flagged and whitewashed hall, absolutely devoid of furniture, and smelling at once sour and stale. I am sorry and ashamed to remember that the Jew was the only person of my four fellows in misfortune who kept up any semblance of manners or proper reserve. He differed, indeed, markedly from the others, not only in his behaviour, which was at least conformable, but in his appearance of alacrity and cheerful health. Seeing that I suffered as much from the ribaldry of my fellow-guests as from my bodily pains, he came and sat by my side, and encouraged me with the assurance that it was far better to wait for the brother-in-charge to awake in the course of nature than to disturb him out of his sleep. "Mighty little chance for me, for example," he said, "if Brother Hyacinth don't have his nap to the full. He'll be as savage as a starved wolf, understand, and will send a man to hell sooner than to admit him if he have a good foot left to take him there."

"Why, then," said I, "he will never send me for sure, for I have no feet."

"Be not so sure, dear sir," returned the Jew. "You don't know Brother Hyacinth as well as I do. There was a fellow came here on a day all spent and bleeding. He had lost a toe under a coach-wheel. If you will believe it, this dear host of ours bade him go walk on his hands, and offered him the cloister to get perfect in. Now, with me, I know it will go hard, unless those fools cease their din." The two friars had been dicing with the soldier, and had won his boots. Each had taken one from him, and were now wrangling who should have both. I was struck by the sinister expression of one of them, a Capuchin of great strength, with a long white beard. More than enough of him in due course. I told the Jew that my case was so bad I cared not greatly whether I was received or no. A man, I said, could die anywhere. "Why, yes," he said, "so he can-- and live anywhere also. One is as easy as the other, if you but give your mind to it. But one thing I will tell you," he added, "it is not so easy as you might think to live cheaply when you have the means of living dear. I shall be lucky if I spend this night as I desire--but you will see. Hush! here is our man." I had been about to ask him what was his malady, for he appeared to me the picture of health, and shining with it; but just then a square-headed religious, with small angry eyes and prominent bones, came into the hall, attended by a clerk, a sleek young fellow, who called out "Silence," and was instantly obeyed. The two friars were on their knees in a trice, and chattering their Hail Marys; the soldier, after some efforts to rise, had managed to lift himself by the wall, and, being propped up against it, was saluting all and sundry with great impartiality. The Jew only was good enough to help me with the support of his arm.

His was the first case. "Your name?" said Brother Hyacinth, and was answered "Giovanni-Battista-Maria-Bentivoglio."

"Write," said Brother Hyacinth to his clerk, "Jew, name unknown, active liar." This done, he continued his questions.

"Your means?"

"Alas, none," replied the Jew.

"Search him," said Brother Hyacinth.

The clerk thereupon turned out his pockets, which were empty of everything but holes. Not content with that, however, he felt all over his body, and when he had, as I may say, drawn all the coverts blank, knelt down and pulled off the man's shoes. The Jew was unable to repress an exclamation, which I naturally set down to his disgust at the indignity. But I found that this was not so. The clerk very neatly picked out a small key from between his toes and held it up to his master.

"I thought as much," said Brother Hyacinth. "Go." The young Jew sighed, shrugged, and stood back without a word; and while I was considering what his imposture could have been it was my turn.

Brother Hyacinth examined me with keen displeasure. "Who are you?" he asked me. I told him "Francesco-Antonio Strelli"--and he bade the clerk write these names down. "Nationality?" he asked next. I told him "Inglese." One of the friars, that evil, bearded fellow, I noticed, had drawn near and was listening with all his might. Now it was to be noticed of him that he breathed very short and fast, and that his breath struck like fire upon my skin. The interrogatory was renewed.

"Your place of immediate origin?" I was asked.

I said, "Padua."

"Your present occupation?"

"Repentance," I said, and spoke the truth.

"Your means of support?"

"Grace," said I, and he stamped on the ground.

"You are trifling with me--I advise you to take care. Answer me truthfully of what you repent."

This angered me. I told him shortly that, like everybody else in the world of my way of thinking, I repented of sin.

He turned to his amanuensis. "Write down that the young man refuses to give an account of himself," he said harshly; and then asked me what I wanted of the hospital.

I said with heat, "My brother, I had required of it what I now see I am not to expect, charity, namely, both of judgment and act. I am afflicted, as you ought to have seen at once; I need your wisdom--but need most your sympathy--" To my amazement he cut me short, as he had done with the Jew, by the brief command, "Search him." I recoiled as well as I could in my fainting and helpless condition.

"Do you dare insult a sick man?" I cried; and to the clerk, who was about to put me to this indignity, I said, "Touch me at your peril, sir; for though I die for it, you will pay for your temerity."

The Jew, who had been looking on at my examination (quite unabashed at the mortification of his own), here interposed by telling me that the thing was a common form and must be gone through with. I was about to shake him off for his impertinence when a chance phrase of his, "free lodging," enlightened me. This, then, was not what I understood by a hospital--using the applied sense of the word--but one of those original institutions, so-called, which were, of course, guest-houses for the poor. The moment I understood that, I saw that I and Brother Hyacinth had been at cross-purposes. I pulled out my handful of money and spilled some pieces upon the floor. Instantly the great friar behind me clapped his foot upon them. The Jew hunted down the rest.

Brother Hyacinth now recoiled. "What does this mean?" he asked. "Are you a fool, or a thief, or an impudent rascal?"

"You are mistaken," I replied, "I am none; but it is clear that I have deceived you. Had I understood the real objects of your hospital--which, I am compelled to add, you have most successfully concealed--I should not have been before you. I am ill and in great pain. I supposed that you could give me assistance. And even now, should that be possible, I would accept it, and pay for it." Brother Hyacinth, with keen displeasure, said that mine was a case for the police, and that, while he should decline my money, he was minded to detain my person for their consideration; but the Jew thereupon broke in with more assurance than I should have thought him capable of. "Your pardon, very reverend," he said, "but this is a case for the best physician in Rovigo, and the best bed in the best inn. This gentleman, as I knew very well from the first, is acting for a wager. Only your astuteness has prevented him from winning it. He has failed, but not by much; it is an honourable defeat. He very willingly bestows upon you two ducats for the beneficent purposes of the hospital--those very two, in fact, which the reverend frate behind him has covered with his foot. With the others he will return to his noble parents, being furnished with a certificate from your reverence to the effect that he has failed in his endeavour."

The clerk, who had by this time extracted the two pieces from beneath the foot of the Capuchin (who loudly denied that they were there), was now whispering with Brother Hyacinth. After a short time he drew me apart and told me that but for him I should certainly be sent to prison. The brother-in-charge, he said, believed me to be a highway thief--or professed that he did--against all reason; for said the clerk, "As I told his reverence, if your honour had been a thief it is very unlikely that we should have had the pleasure of your company at the hospital. His reverence has made difficulties--it has been hard to convince him, though your honour's generosity to the hospital has not been without effect. I flatter myself that my arguments have been useful. Any further service I can do your honour, I shall very thankfully undertake."

I expressed myself obliged to him, and added that though it might be very true that I deserved prison, I had other acts of penitence in view which could only be properly performed in Tuscany. I said, "You would be justified--if you knew the whole of my history--in declining what I nevertheless urge upon your benevolence--this crown-piece namely---" He assured me that no crime of mine, however unnatural, could cause him a momentary scruple, took the coin, spat upon it, pocketed it, and said that he was my servant and orator to the end of time. At this moment the great Capuchin--he of the covering foot--took me by the arm and begged the favour of a word in my ear. He was a hideous villain, broad- shouldered, scarred, hugely bearded, and had a prominent tooth in his lower jaw, rather loose, which stuck out like a tusk. I have spoken of his breath, which was as the blast of a furnace.

"I see," he said with an odious leer, "that you are a game-cock. I knew you by your ruffle. It was gallantly tried, and nearly successful. I like your spirit much. Come with me, and you shall not fail again. You and I will take the road together, live at our ease, and live for nothing, and brave it with the best notwithstanding. What do you say? Shall we shake hands upon it?" Monster that he was, as he hovered over me there, grinning, moving his tooth, he inspired me with loathing. I felt the blood tingle in my cheek.

"Better a Jew than a thieving renegade," says I. "That is my answer to you. Go in peace."

He said, "As you will," and turned to his affairs. I left the hospital with the benevolent Jew, whose name was Issachar.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PEDLAR OF CRUCIFIXES

Issacher, as well as being a cheerful, loquacious fellow and of ready wits, was so exceedingly kind as to support my weight upon his sparer frame. My arm was heavy, I am sure, upon his neck, as his was certainly tight about my middle; but he uttered no complaints, indeed there was no room for them in the voluble series of his comments, confessions, promises and inquiries. He said, as we made our painful way down the single street of Rovigo, "My dear friend, you and I have both failed in our enterprise, and for much the same reason; but really you must be a novice at the trade if you expect to get a free lodging with a pocketful of gold about you. Confess that my invention of your wager was as happy as it was apt. Done in a flash--on the wings of the moment as they spread for a flight--but that is my way--I am like that. The lodging of my key, however, was a folly of a sort I am never likely to commit again. Another time I will swallow it. It was indolence on my part--my besetting weakness--a child of a whim! Having bestowed my goods, what but that hindered me from likewise bestowing the key? I am vexed with myself, but I expected more company. Who was to know there would be time for so much examination? But now, sir, let me see how I can serve you. An inn? A meal? A decent bed? Medicaments? All these you can have for a turn of your pretty golden key."

I thanked him for his services, but he would not hear a word of them. Helping me through the town, he took me to a small inn outside the gate, saw me put to bed, brought me a good broth, some wine and bread, and left me to my meditations while he went for a doctor. The thorn was extracted, poultices applied; I was given a soothing medicine, fell asleep and slept heavily.

In the morning I found him by my side. After asking how I did, and satisfying himself, by examination, that my feet were recovering, he said that he wished to serve me without being indiscreet. "What your private purposes may be," he said, "I neither know nor seek to inquire. It is plain that you are a gentleman of some simplicity, or of a subtlety far too fine for my eyes of every day. Whichever you may be, I admire. If you are candid in calling yourself a pilgrim I appreciate your candour. If you are not, I appreciate even more your discretion. But you will still let me observe that for a young gentleman of personal attractions to walk half naked through an inquisitive nation, and to give oracular replies to questions put him by officials (to say the least of it) is to excite remark. I have some recommendations to make, which I hope you'll pardon--as first, stockings; second, a pair of stout walking-shoes; third, a hat; fourthly, some apparent calling beside that of penitent. Penitence is a trade open to many objections; but for those, I am sure I should have tried it myself. Of what, for instance, do you repent? Is it murder? Is it coin-clipping? Is it--but I spare your blushes. Besides, it can always be objected that, as there is nothing to hinder your penitent fishmonger from trading in fish and being truly contrite at the same time, so also your honour has the same privilege before you. To be short, I recommend you to choose some calling more plainly commercial."

I replied that he was very right, and that I would gladly embrace any calling which would not hinder my design. To this he answered that I had not done him the honour of explaining my design, but that he conceived it to be that of walking about the country with as much discomfort as possible. To this superficial judgment I, very naturally, demurred.

"You are dry, my dear sir," I said, "nor do I wonder. Allow me to tell you my story, and I shall make you sweat with indignation." Omitting names of persons and places, I thereupon detailed the whole of my case, and concluded thus solemnly: "I hope that you now understand how I am placed. I am a gentleman who has behaved himself like a ruffian, a Christian who has stultified his religion. I love a certain lady and have insulted her; I was placed in a sacred relationship and betrayed it. Still a lover, still a postulant for service, I have three objects in life: (a) to bite and burn the vice out of myself; (b) to find my mistress; (c) to make her amends. Whatever occupation you propose for my consideration must subserve these three great ends."

Issachar listened with attention, and remained for some time after I had finished speaking lost in thought. Then he said, "I see that yours is no common case. Honour, Religion, and Love make a strong partnership and hard taskmasters to a young journeyman. Perhaps I am too little of a casuist to maintain that the lady will not be gratified by your efforts to gain her esteem. My experiences have been few, and I am no lady's man, but I own I should have thought that she would have preferred a more dashing return to her feet--something on horseback, say, with a hand on your thigh and a kiss of the finger-tips. Ha! you might say, ha! fair enchantress, do we meet again? A nonchalant mien! I believe few ladies can resist it. But it is not for me to say. I am, however, convinced of one thing, which is that if you stray about the country at random, proclaiming in a resolute voice that you are a criminal, in a very short time you will be taken at your word and clapped into gaol-- there or in a madhouse. Either will be uncomfortable--but in neither will you meet your lady. Of that I am positive." He grew warm, he grew declamatory. "Why, this is extraordinary!" he cried. "Why, sir, how will you get out of this State and into another without a passport? How will you live when you have spent your money? How can you approach your lady, or anybody's lady, without a coat on your back or a quattrino in your pocket? I am ashamed to put you questions so elementary, but if you can answer one of them I shall have done with them."

As I had no answer ready, Issachar proceeded--briskly, confidentially, and with alacrity. "It is indeed lucky for you," he said, "that you have fallen into my hands; Fra Palamone--that old tusker with the useful foot--would have flayed you alive and sold the skin. Now, I have everything here that a man of honour can want--a neat jacket"--he produced it--"shoes, stockings, garters?"--he put them on the bed. "A hat?" He held up a broad-brimmed felt, with a draggled feather which conferred no benefit upon it. "And now," he continued, "for your trade. Short of chivalry, which involves horse exercise and is to be condemned on the score of expense, peddling is the very thing for you. I understand your requirements perfectly: put shortly they are: (a) piety, (b) travel, (c) gallantry; beyond those you need health, reasonable protection from law or lawlessness, honest profit. Well, take peddling. It is safe, it is easy; you have company, you may make money; you see all the sights and hear all the news, and you may repent as diligently as you please through all. But my assistance will be better than you can dream of. I am myself a pedlar, with a small stock left, which (as I am going home to Venice) I shall make over to you at cost price. In addition to that, I will hand my passport over to you, just as I have given you my coat and hat. Read it, and you will see how exactly your wheels fall into my ruts." He produced his passport and put it in my hands. I found myself about to be described as "Issacaro, Ebreo, vendor of pious objects," licensed by the Sacred College and vouched for by the Grand Inquisitor. My features were said to be fleshy, my nose pendulous, my hair black and curly, my shoulders narrow, my manner assured. I objected that the description would never pass me over the frontier; but Issachar replied, "Have no concern on that score. Observe my shoulders, they are as level as your own. Can it be said of my manner that it fails of delicacy? That passport was no more mine than it is now. The fact is that a passport is needed to distinguish one man from another; and if the traveller have no particular features, these must be found for him. These crucifixes will save you."

"That," I said, "as a Christian, I am not allowed to deny."

"I have a round score of them left," says he. "Let us figure up the whole. The passport I could not let go for less than two ducats; upon my soul and honour it cost me near three. The hat, the coat, shoes and stockings--well, can we say less than a ducat and a half? Surely not. The workmanship alone is worth the money. For the crucifixes, which are very fine, and in the rococo manner now so much esteemed, I cannot say a quattrino less than four ducats, nor can a Christian, I suppose, set any bounds to the value he places upon that symbol. My price, therefore, is nominal--an act of charity on my part, which my sympathy with your sad story moves me to do. I believe you had in your breeches pocket some ten ducats and a few broad pieces. Supposing I take seven ducats and conclude the bargain--what do you say? Will you shake hands upon it?" He looked pleasantly at me, holding out his hand.

The crucifixes were large--the image of plaster, the cross of white wood. The price was exorbitant; but I felt the force of his argument, that no Christian could set bounds to the value of such a symbol. Moreover, the trade attracted me. To walk the world as a pedlar of crucifixes--could one conceive a nobler employment? I, at least, could not. The merchandise so noble that it could not be degraded by the merchant, the merchant so ignoble that he must needs be dignified by the merchandise--the cross, emblem of sacrifice, emblem of divine compassion, divine providence and humility! I must be excused if I saw here something more than happy coincidence, if I fell into a mood of dangerous exaltation. I embraced my new career with fervour, I embraced my stock-in-trade. "Oh, thou unique and venerable wood," I cried, "often as thou hast been carried into men's affairs, in the forefront of red battle, to preside over the consecrations of pontiffs and emperors, to abase kings, to lend criminals a final hope, never yet hast thou submitted thyself to a sinner in sorer need, but never also found sincerer champion than Francis Strelley! Under this sign did Constantius Caesar subdue Chosroes; under it shall riotous Francis tread down himself!" I bade Issachar take his purchase-money; I thanked him warmly for his friendly thoughts of me; and having put on the coat, hat, and other garments he had sold me, set out once more, after a day's and night's repose, which were complete enough to make further inactivity impossible.

I found my passport an easy key into the States of the Church, which all that rich alluvial country of Ferrara had now become. I sold no crucifixes, but meditated profoundly upon them as I penetrated further into the great Lombard plain, and drew nearer to the cloudy mountains which seemed to me the guardians of my Land of Promise. I hung one of them round my neck by a cord, and got much comfort and spiritual assistance from it. My faith grew livelier as my needs increased; the sacred figure received my confidences and seemed to impart ghostly counsels. I had a superstitious care to keep it always towards Tuscany, twisting the cord round so that the cross was on my back whenever I had occasion to face north instead of south. Before going to sleep I was careful to stand it up so that the image pointed its bowed head in the right direction. I felt sure that all would go well with me whilst I bore upon me this infallible mark of honest profession. I was like Dante, it seemed to me, approaching the Mount of Purgation--for which, in my own case, I put the Apennines. Like Dante, it was necessary that all my stains should be done off, and that I should be marked by the Guardian of the Gate. Well, here I bore my Sign--the only sign tolerable for a Christian--and before I had reached the last ridge of the mountains, before I could hope to look up to the shining eyes of my Beatrice, my brands of sin must one by one be wiped out. Ah, that was very true; and was proved to be so before I had done my journeyings; but I knew not then in what manner.

A misfortune for me was that, playing a character, I could not refuse to sell my wares. At Malalbergo, a small town between Ferrara and Bologna, I came into a region where famine and pestilence between them had been rife, stalking (dreadful reapers!) side by side, mowing as they went. The people stormed the churches, and hung with wild cries for mercy about the shrines on the wayside. They fell ravenously upon me--and as I could not set a price upon my crucifixes, and it was soon known that I had them to give away, it follows that within half an hour after entering Malalbergo I was able to leave it with nothing to show for my declared profession but the cross about my neck. So fearful was I of losing that one, I concealed my passport, and travelled henceforward under my own name and profession. I had very little money left--some three or four ducats, I think. I determined to be careful of these, and to endeavour after some employment in Bologna, at once congenial and lucrative, which should not, however, deflect my designs from the speedy accomplishment of my pilgrimage.

CHAPTER IX

I AM HUMILIATED, LIFTED UP, AND LEFT CURIOUS

It had been my hope to be able to buy, exercising great economy, a new store of crucifixes in Bologna, and to find a country beyond it where I might, without scruple, sell them for the means of bare subsistence--for I asked no more than that. But even that much was not to be: the city of St. Dominick's last rest would not allow long resting-place to me.

I was delighted with the first view of it, as, following the brown street of entry, it revealed itself to me. Its towers and arcades, squares and fountains and spacious churches made a strong impression upon my excited senses. Having found a modest lodging, I wandered from shrine to shrine enraptured, and, believing myself fondly in a city of believers as ardent as myself, I took no trouble either to conceal my crucifix, a most conspicuous ornament, I must allow, or my sentiments of hopeful devotion. I suppose that by degrees I excited remark. I was a stranger in a thinly populated, very idle, curious city. I think that I meditated aloud--I may certainly have done so, since I had no desire to conceal my ambitions. If I struck my breast, the action was sincere, becoming to a contrite sinner; if I was inspired--and I was--I believe that I was about to prove a cause of inspiration in others. It is indubitable that I spoke to the crowd which gathered about me and followed me from church to church, and that, under the stimulus of their plaudits, I was moved to what may be called eloquence. I spoke of charity, I remember, upon the steps of San Petronio--charity of interpretation in matters of faith and morals and private conscience; and I ended by declaring, what was perfectly true, that Christian as I was, a Jew had put me in my present way of salvation.

At this singularly inopportune moment I was rudely interrupted. The crowd parted and fell this way and that without my perception, and a hand clapped upon my shoulder brought me to earth from those middle regions of the aether, where I had seemed to be afloat. It was as if, looking up at the stars, I had stumbled on a knotty root.

An officer of the Inquisition stood beside me, a tall, keen-eyed man, cloaked in black.

"I have been watching you, young man, for two hours," he said. "You perform your devotions somewhat publicly, and seem to have a great deal to say about your spiritual state. The Church has appointed ways and means for the consolation of the faithful, some of which are no doubt open to you. Only scandal can ensue these kind of practices."

I was highly indignant, as who would not have been? "Upon my word, sir," I exclaimed, "if a sinner may not proclaim, his repentance so near the throne of pardon, nor a faithful believer record his sincerity within this shadow of the truth---"

"Such excesses as you use," he stopped me, "savour of private conscience following its own bent. The Church is distrustful of such excursions. That crucifix which you carry, for instance---"

I clasped it with fervour. "Ah, it is my passport!"

"Sovereigns and rulers of States," said the officer, "will require more particulars, and so, for that matter, will the police of Bologna. This is useless for any such purpose, and your pretence only adds urgency to my desire of you. I don't wish to be severe with you. I ask you in a friendly and reasonable way to give me the crucifix."

"Never," said I. "Without it I am lost to Tuscany."

"With it," replied the officer, "you are lost to the world for some time. This indecent profession of opinion--What! a wooden cross as big as a dagger! Give it to me at once, and follow me to the tribunal of the police."

I confess that I grew cold before such irrational tyranny. "You are going the way to work, sir," I said, "to make me an atheist. I shall yield only to force."

Vain protest! "Have it as you will," said the officer, and signed to the sbirri, who came forward at once, cleaving the crowd with their drawn swords. "This young man is illuminated," said the officer; "take him to the tribunal, and look into his papers." I saw that submission was my only course, and took it. The police led me away.

A much more severe scrutiny of my miserable passport than had taken place at Ferrara followed upon this. Nothing but the "assured manner" of Issachar was allowed to stand up for me. My nose was fatally straight, my hair fatally out of curl. I was asked was I a Jew? and had I dared to pretend it, I know not to what extremes they might not have proceeded. But I had never learned to lie; I admitted at once that I had bought the passport. Instant action was taken upon this. My crucifix was burnt, the passport confiscated. I was given six hours in which to leave Bologna, and did not take three. I departed in a towering rage, which perhaps did me good, and devoured the leagues between the city and the mountains at a pace which I am sure did me credit. The lengthening shadows of these engulfed and sobered me. Late at night I reached a village at the foot of the mountains, whose name I don't know, and sought out the only inn the place boasted--if any place could have been assured enough to boast of so miserable a shelter. By this time I had walked off my fury and a great part of my piety. I shall only add of Bologna, which I have never revisited, that, if it is the duty of a city of the Church to freeze the faith out of the heart of a son of the Church, then that haughty seat may boast of having fulfilled it.

My inn was full of French and Savoyard soldiers, recruiting, it was evident, for their cause or their pockets. War was said to be threatening between the Holy See and the Grand Duchy: these were the Pope's allies, roaring, drinking, carding, wenching, and impressing all travellers who could not pay their way out. Saturnian revels! The landlord was playing Bacchus, much against his will; the landlady and a tattered maid were Venus and Hebe by turns; for my own part, shunning to be Ganymede, I slunk into an outhouse and shared its privacy with some scared fowls and a drover of the Garfagnana, who, taking me at first for a crimp, ran at me gibbering with a knife. I pacified him, luckily, before it was too late, and crouched with him until daylight, expecting discovery at every outcry. Not until then did the house seem asleep. But about cockcrow there was a silence as of the dead, and that time was judged favourable by my companion-in-hiding to get clear away. Knife in mouth he crept out of cover and went tiptoe by the house. The poor fellow was crimped at the corner by some wakeful sentry and tied up to fight the Grand Duke. So I stayed with the fowls until the maid came in for a victim, which was to supply the lieutenant's breakfast.

Here was my chance. "Madam," says I, and the girl gave a little shriek. Being desperate, I put an arm round her waist and covered her mouth with my hand.

"Madam," I said courteously, "I deplore the necessity of laying violence upon you, but pray you to believe, if you can, in my sincere respect for you. I am travelling to Florence, but alone. Help me to avoid these guests of yours, and I shall be eternally grateful." When I was sure that she had understood me I released her; she sighed.

"Forgive me, sir," she said, "but I thought you were going to make love to me."

"God forbid it," said I, perhaps a little too devoutly, for she seemed to be piqued.

She said, "It's as you please, sir, of course. He never forbids what you gentlemen have a mind to."

"You are wrong, my dear," I replied. "He does forbid it--but we don't know it until too late."

"Sir," said she, "it's not too late yet." It was now for me to sigh.

"If you knew, or could read, one page of my story," I told her, "you would understand how late I am, and how pressed for time. Will you not help me? I am in your hands." She looked kindly.

"Stay here, sir," said she. "I'll do my best for you."

What means she took cannot be told; but after a short absence she returned with bread and a jug of wine under her apron, and beckoning me to follow her, took me by a back way behind the houses, up a stair cut into the rock, and so to the upper street of the little town. Towering above me then, I saw the broad green side of the mountain, whose summit was wreathed in white mist.

"You are free to go now, sir," said she. "There lies your honour's way." I thanked her warmly, offering her my hand. But she put hers behind her.

"Is that all you are going to give me?" she asked me, and made me blush for my poverty.

"I would give you something very handsome if I had it," I said, "for you have done me a real service. It would have been impossible for me to fight the Grand Duke, feeling as I do towards one of his subjects. You have saved me from a painful dilemma and deserve more than I can offer you." Such as they were, however, I held out to her in one hand my last gold ducat, in the other my "Aminta." The maid looked all about her, shaking her head at the choice. Nobody was near--the narrow street was asleep. "I would much rather take a kiss from your honour," said she. "No girl likes to be disappointed--and you have a smooth chin."

I could not but tell her that in accepting a salute of the kind she little knew what risk she was running; to which she at once replied that a girl in her situation, with a houseful of French soldiers, was indifferent to common dangers. I told her I was sorry to hear it, and felt obliged to add that I was peculiarly accursed.

"Why," says she, mighty curious, "whatever have you done, a pretty gentleman like you?"

"My dear," said I, "I have injured a spotless lady." Her reply was to throw her arms about my neck and give me some three or four resounding kisses. "Bless your innocence," she cried warmly, "I wish I had been your lady. Injuries indeed!"

I was moved. "You are a kind and charitable soul," I said, "and put the religious of Bologna to shame. Except from you and a Venetian Jew I promise you that I have met with no humanity upon my travels." At this moment she heard herself called from below, and bade me kindly adieu. "I suppose you are after your lady?" she asked as she turned to leave me. "Yes," says I, "that is my pilgrimage--to make her amends." "Well," says the maid, "be bolder with her than you were with me, or you'll never do it. Adieu, sir!" I saw her no more.

I felt myself touched in a lively part--so quickly is our nature responsive to kindness. "The embrace of that warm-hearted girl," I thought as I went on my way, "has put heart into me. A generous forgiving soul! And, by a figure, she may stand for that compassionate Aurelia for whom I shall seek until I fall. Is there no offence which women will not forgive? Yes, there is one--the great offence of all: Pride. Ah, Beppo, Beppo!" I cried, "my venal Paduan, I was happily inspired when I left thee my purple and linen!" I laughed aloud, and footed the long hill bravely. It may seem trifling to establish one's uplifting by the kiss of a poor wench--but who can explain the ways of the soul? The wind bloweth where it listeth! And if that of hers were the kiss of peace? At any rate, it was kindly meant, and so I kindly received it. Unknown, lowly benefactress, I salute thee again from afar, after many years.

Breasting the last green steep of the hill, picking my way amid black rocks and dripping fern, I soon came upon the high road whose entry had been barred to me by the soldiers. I ate my bread, finished my jug of wine, and pushed on so vigorously that by noon I was in the heart of the mountains. To cut the narrative short, after one cold night in the open and one more day's march, having surmounted the watershed of Lombardy and Tuscany, I found myself within view of the frontier, saw the guard- house with the red and white posts of the Grand Duchy, and two sentries with muskets walking up and down--a sharp reminder of difficulties ahead. Beyond the frontier the road curved about a great bluff of rock and skirted the edge of an abyss. I could see dimly a far-stretching blue plain with rivers and white villages showing faintly upon it; my heart leaped at the thought that there below me, within a day's travel, was the land that held Aurelia and Redemption; but even in that same moment there surged up that bitter something which chilled the generous feelings and staled the fluttering hopes. Cruel and vexatious thought! There was not a rill of water on these mossy stones which did not race unimpeded, or, if impeded, gathering force and direction from the very obstacle, towards Aurelia; yet here was I, sentient, adoring, longing, who had travelled so far and endured so much, unable to move one step beyond a painted post. Such thoughts make rebels of us. Is man, then, the slave of all creation? Is his the one existence framed by the Almighty that cannot follow his nature? Better then to be a beast of chase, darting mouse or blundering mole, than a man, if the more erect posture is to be the badge of a greater degradation. If the sole merit of two legs be that they take less hobbling, better far to go upon four. Needless to say that these were the mutinous reflections of the young Francis who suffered--not of him who now writes them down, who pays taxes, wears a good coat and bows to the police with the best citizens in the country. But that Francis of nascent rebellion--miserably irresolute, truly indignant, not daring to go forward, not able to retire--asked himself such burning questions in vain as he paced the brown length of a beechen glade, within sight but out of hope of his promise.

I must have wandered further than I reckoned; for so it was that I presently became aware of a companion in my solitudes. This was a Capuchin of great girth and capacity, who sat under a chestnut tree, secluded from observation, and was at that time engaged in dyeing his beard.

CHAPTER X

I FALL IN AGAIN WITH FRA PALAMONE

The Capuchin's employment was precisely what I have stated, though all probability is against it. I was curious enough to watch him and could make no mistake. He had a copious beard descending to his stomach, the half snowy white, the half a lustrous black. Upon a depending twig he had fixed a tin-edged mirror, in his hand was a small tooth-comb. With this he raked his beard over and over again, occasionally dipping it in a tin cup at his side. He looked in the glass, picked up a strand of beard, examined it minutely underneath, dipped his comb and raked, dipped and raked again. My gradual advance, due, as I have said, to curiosity, not presumption, did not disconcert him at all; he began to speak without so much as looking at me, whereby I was able to hope that I was not recognised. On my side it had not taken long to ascertain that I knew the Capuchin very well--if not by his white half-beard, then by that jutting tusk of his--at once so loose and so menacing. It was that very same who at the hospital of Rovigo had looked at me so hard, had burnt my cheek with his hot breath and urged the value of his friendship so clamantly against that of the Jew's; Fra Palamone, as I remembered his name. Nor could I forget why I had decided against him, nor in what terms. It had been because, when I had brought my handful of money flooding out of my pocket, two ducats had been covered by this man's foot and had been buried deep in his toes.

"Buon di," said he in cheerful Tuscan speech. "Are you come upon a like errand of accommodation, by chance? You are welcome to a corner of my dressing-room. We'll strike a bargain. If you dip my beard, I'll dip yours."

I said that would be bad commerce on my part, since I had no beard. "You, sir," I added, "have a remarkable one, which I confess I regret to see coloured."

"A fig for your regrets, little man," said the other. "Politics is the cry. If your passport described you as a middling-sized man with a black beard and a running at the nose, you'd be doing as I am. But you'll never have such a passport as that."

"My passport," I told him, "is destroyed. It described me as a young Jew with an assured manner and a pendulous nose."

This caused the Capuchin to look upon his visitor. Whether he knew me or not, then or before, he made no sign. "There's no flattery in that," he said, "but you could have done it. A manner's a manner, and there's an end; but I could swell any man's nose for him and say thank you. And what does your present passport bear?"

I said, "I have none. The Holy Office having confiscated it, ejected me from Bologna because I wore a crucifix and prayed to the Madonna."

"Ah," says he, "I've known a man hanged in that city for less. But what you say convinces me of one thing: you will be all the better for company."

"How so?" said I.

"Why," says the Capuchin, "you tell me you were talking to the Madonna."

"It is true that I was addressing her in her image."

"Very well; that's a proof positive to me that you had nobody else to address--a most unwholesome state of affairs. How does my beard strike you? Black as blackness, I fancy."

He was right. I assured him that it was now as black as Erebus and pleased him extremely. I told him, however, that I thought he would have more difficulty with the rest of his description, which gave him a middle size and a cold in the head. He was, in person, gigantic, and in health appeared to be as sound as a bell.

"I shall get through," said the friar, "on my beard, and where that goes I can follow as easily as a tomcat his head. But I have a trick of bending the knees which will serve me for some hundreds of yards--and if you suppose that I can't snivel you are very much mistaken. Listen to this." He hung his head, looked earnestly at the ground: then he sniffed. Sniffed, do I say? It was as if all the secret rills of the broad earth had been summoned from their founts. No noise more miserably watery could have proceeded from a nose. He beamed upon me. "Am I a wet blanket?" he cried. "Now, friend, shall we go?" He had packed up his tools in his begging-bag and stood ready to depart. I reminded him that I had no papers.

"That need not disturb you at all," he said. "You pass in as my convert. All you have to do is to do nothing and keep your mouth shut. If you cannot speak you cannot answer; that is good logic, I hope. We will discuss our several affairs presently in the reasonable air of Tuscany. I stifle in the Pope's dominions. You might say that there was not room enough for two such men." He blew out his shining cheeks till his eyes disappeared; he looked like a swollen tree-bole with a mossy growth dependent; then he deflated them with a bang, and shouted with laughter --a single expression of delight, sharply reverberant--and suddenly stopped. "Poh! what a rattle you'll think me," he said. "Come--and remember that you are a deaf-mute."

To get a thing granted it is no bad way to take it for granted. This is what the Capuchin did. I was young and he was old, I undecided and he perfectly clear in his intention. There was little more--even to my too charitable eyes--in his favour, certainly not his looks. He was a huge, straddling, positive kind of a fellow with an air of specious, bluff benevolence about him which gave way to examination. He had a very ugly mouth under his beard, cut up sideways by the pressure of his long tooth to emerge; his eyes were small, greedy and near together; they looked different ways. His nose was huge and glowing, broad-rooted as a tree and pitted with the smallpox. On his left brow he had a savage scar. His strength and determination were very extraordinary; I was to learn within a few weeks how strong he was, how ferocious and dangerous. His age might be guessed at near sixty for all his vivacity, for at close quarters I could see unmistakably the senile arc in either eye, and, as the reader knows, his hair and beard were very white. Debauchery may have left these marks upon him, but had not worn out his force. That, at any rate, was still enough to resolve the irresolute Francis, an incurable believer in the native goodness of mankind, to obey him in this instance. I am by nature pliant and easily led, and I have never been one for half measures. Therefore I received upon my staff the Capuchin's bundle in addition to my own, and followed my leader towards the guard-house, within sight of which, crooking his knees together under his frock, drawing in his shoulders, poking his head, the sturdy rogue reduced his apparent size and expression more materially than could be believed. His calculating eyes grew weak and watery, he snivelled at the nose, drew his breath sharply as if it hurt him--almost visibly shrank into himself. I looked at him with amazement, but the officers seemed to know him very well.

"Ho, Fra Clemente," says one, "on the round again, it appears!" The Capuchin quavered his admission, his hand shook as he proffered his passport. Yes, yes, poor Brother Clement must live, find consolation if he could. A festival at Prato called him, a great affair; but he was getting very sadly, as his friends might see, could not keep the road much longer. The Customs officers gave him back his papers with scarcely a glance to spare for them, and had no ears for his maundering, so occupied were they with me, his companion. "Whom have we here, Fra Clemente?" said one presently, and sent my heart into my throat. But the Capuchin sniggered and touched his nose with his finger; there was an air of low cunning about him very unpleasant to observe. "This, Sor Giacomo," says he with a cackle, "is a little surprise for the Grand Duke--a specimen, a rarity, a pretty thing. This is a Scythian youth, deaf and dumb from his birth, but very taking, as you can see. 'Tis the best thing I've picked up on my travels for many a year, and a fortune to me. Why, if I can present this handsome lad to his Highness, you may have me back upon you in my bishop's coach and six! And there will still be men of my religion who will have got more for doing less, let me tell you. You're never going to spoil an old friend's industry for the sake of a dumb heathen!"

"Heathen!" cries the fellow. "Is he a heathen? Do you suppose you may offer the Grand Duke a heathen? You'll have the Inquisition upon you, my man, for certain sure, and the Cardinal Archbishop for once on their side. Into the water with him before you touch Florence, or out with your knife. Make a Christian or a Jew of him."

"Ay," says his colleague, handling me as if I had been an Odalisque, "Ay, and the prince, between you and me, is near his time. His menagerie may go to the dogs for all he cares, Jews and infidels, blacks and whites and all. He sees little but the doctors and the priests in these days."

"What! Has it come to that?" says the Capuchin, peering through what seemed to be rheumy eyes. "If it have indeed, then may Heaven be his friend, for he'll need one. Tut! so I've spent my ducats for nothing, it seems." He shook his pretended convoy roughly by the shoulder. "Accursed Scythian, that ever I set eyes upon thee! Forty ducats, signori, of hard money to a Venice ship's-chandler who had him, I know, from a Tripoli merchant for half the sum. And a hardy, healthy, tall, propagating rogue he is, by the looks of him. Well, well, you may keep him for me. I am just a broken old man!" He spat upon the ground and appeared to ruminate upon his hard fortune.

I was greatly disgusted by now at the false position in which I had been put, and should assuredly have found my tongue had I not perceived that the trick was succeeding. One of the officers said that he would go to perdition rather than have a mute heathen on his hands, the other encouraged the Capuchin to hope for the best. The Grand Duke might rally; he had the strength of a cow and the obstinacy of an old woman. In fact, I was pushed over the frontier after my supposed owner without further ceremony, and soon joined him. The old scoundrel moved painfully off, dragging one leg after the other; but no sooner had the winding of the road concealed him than, erect and replete once more, he clapped me heartily on the back and began to crow and caper his delight in the mountain airs. I watched him with mingled feelings, half gratitude, half disgust.

CHAPTER XI

I EXERCISE COMMON SENSE, IMAGINATION AND CHARITY

"Was not that fine comedy in an old grey-bearded Capuchin dog?" cried the frate, leaping about and cracking his fingers. "Could you have bettered it? Could any man living have bettered it? Confess me an old rogue-in-grain, or I break every bone in your body."

"It is not for me to confess you one thing or another, Fra Clemente--to call you so"--I replied; "except that you have made me party to some abominable falsehoods. However, I have benefited by them, and am willing to believe that you acted for the best, which is more than I can say for your endeavours upon our last meeting at Rovigo. May I remind you of that?"

If I had hoped to startle him I was very much mistaken. The Capuchin at once sobered down, and became confidential and affectionate. He put his arm round my neck and spoke with feeling. "You have as good a memory as I have, I see," he said, laughing pleasantly. "I had not intended to recall to your mind a time when I confess to having been the victim of prejudice. And without going so far as to say that I followed you solely to remove your suspicions--that would not be the truth--I shall own that I had you much in my thoughts, and hoped more than once that we might cross paths. My prayer is answered. I shall set to work to convince you of my good intentions towards you. Perfect confidence of man to man-- shall it not be so? If I cannot help you it will be surprising: you have seen how I can help myself."

I did not again remind him that I had seen that very clearly when, at Rovigo, his foot had been clapped upon my coins; but Fra Clemente, if that were his name, saw that it was remembered.

"Your money, let me say, would have been safer with me than with that oily thief Issachar," he said calmly, "but let that pass. You saw fit to trust him, and now you can judge how far I am to be trusted. I have nothing to complain of and nothing to hide. I hope you can say the same." I was silent.

"Let me tell you," he went on, "that my name in religion is Palamone-- Fra Palamone"--here his tones became lighter, as he soared from the injured benefactor's into a jauntier suit. "Yes, I am that Fra Palamone, known all over Tuscany for the most wheedling, good-natured, cunning, light-fingered and light-hearted old devil of a Capuchin that ever hid in St. Francis' wound. Hey! but I'm snug in my snuff-coloured suit. My poor old father--God have him after all his pains!--put me there, to lie quiet and nurse my talent, and so I do when times are hard. But the waxing moon sees me skipping, and you will no more keep me long off the road than your cur upon it. I must be out and about--in the kitchen to tease the wenches, into the taverns for my jug of wine, off to the fairs, where the ducats blow like thistle-down; under the gallows to see my friends dance, at the gaol doors against delivery; the round of the pillories, a glance at the galleys--with a nose for every naughty savour and an ear for every salted tale. I have prospered, I was made to prosper. This good belly of mine, this broad, easy gullet, these hands, this portly beard, which may now get as white as it can, since I have done with gossip Fra Clemente--a wrist of steel, fingers as hard as whipcord, and legs like anchor-cables; all these were fostered and made able by brown St. Francis' merry sons. Fra Palamone, dear unknown, Fra Palamone, ever your servant! And now--"here, with another revolting change, he turned his lips back to show his tooth--"And now," said he, "you fish-eyed, jelly-gutted, staring, misbegotten bottle of bile, who in the deuce's name lent you the impudence to listen to my confidential histories without so much as letting me know your fool's name--hey?"

The ferocious invective of this peroration accorded so ill with his prattling exordium that I was left with nothing but a gaze. This I gave him liberally; but he went on, lashing himself into fury, to use every vernacular oath he could lay tongue to. He swore in Venetian, in Piedmontese, in Tuscan. He swore Corsican, Ligurian, Calabrian, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabian and Portuguese. He shook his fists in my face, dangerously near my astonished eyes; he leaped at me, gnashing his teeth like a fiend; he bellowed injuries, shocking allegations impossible to be proved, horrible guesses at my ancestry, he barked like a dog, bayed at me on all fours; finally whirling his staff over his head, he rushed at me as if to dash my brains out--then, cooling as suddenly as he had boiled over, stopped short, looked quizzically at me, blew out his cheeks and let his breath escape in a volley. "Poh!" says he, "Poh! what an old Palamone we have here," threw down his staff and came towards me all smiles, his arms extended.

"Admirable youth!" he cried heartily, "give me your hands. I love you dearly; we shall be fast friends, I can see. Kiss me, boy, kiss me."

I should have resented this comedy of thunderstorms more hotly than I did if I had not believed the friar to be mad. But I was very much offended by the titles of dishonour most improperly bestowed upon me, and was determined to have done with their inventor. "Sir," I said, "you have done me a service, I allow, and I am much obliged to you; but I am constrained to point out that I have carried your baggage on my shoulder for some five or six miles. You gave me your confidences unasked and undesired. It matters, no thing to me whether your name be Palamone or Graffiacane, nor how far you choose to disgrace your habit or molest the charitable. Now you have acted like a maniac, and if I did my duty I should give proper information in the proper quarter. Instead of that, I restore you your bundle, and wish you a good evening."

Fra Palamone had been watching me, studying my face intently as I spoke, his arms folded over his labouring chest. He had, before the close of a dignified, if somewhat sententious, address, recovered his breath, and completely his gravity. "My dear young gentleman," he said, "I admire your spirit as much as your person and manner. All three puzzle me, I must say. So young and so rhetorical! So simple and so polished--an egg! an egg! Are you English, Dutch, Irish? What the devil are you? You won't tell me, and I don't know. But with all you say of my whirligig self I entirely and heartily agree. That at least is to the good. I propose that we sit down here and now, and discuss your affairs--for what better can we do? A grassy bank! the scent of leaves! a fading sun--the solemn evening air! Nature invites! Come, what do you say? We will eat and drink of the best, for I and my sack are no mean caterers. We'll make all snug for the night, and rise up betimes better friends than ever for our late little difference of opinion."

Nothing could have been less to my taste; the man inspired me with extreme disgust. "Fra Palamone," I said firmly, "our ways separate here. I go to Pistoja, you where you please; or, do you go to Pistoja, I shall take the other road. I commend you to God, I salute you, I thank you, and hope I shall never see you again."

"English!" cried Fra Palamone, slapping his forehead. "Now I know with whom I am dealing. Who else commends his enemy to God and hopes that the devil will step in?" He looked me up and down triumphantly, grating his upper lip with that fierce tusk of his. "If I were in the humour, boy," he said, "which you may thank Madonna I am not, I could have you on your back in two ticks, and your hands tied behind you. I could take every paul off you--ah, and every stitch down to your shirt. But no! you are a gentleman. I prefer to take your hand, being confident that we shall meet again in a few days' time from now. Hold your way to Pistoja, since so you will have it. I am never deceived in my man. I know you and all your concerns as well as if you were my own son--and better, a deal. You have your troubles before you, brought upon you by your own headiness-- your own insufferable piety and crass conceit. And I, young sir, and I am one of them. That you will find out."

"I bid you farewell, sir," says I very stiff.