Delphi collected works o.., p.453
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 453
He did not reply at all.
‘How long do you intend to defer compliance with the municipal injunction?’ said the great man.
‘Eh?’ said Pippo; he looked sullen and sad, and his head never seemed to him now to be right: ‘there’s a swarm of bees always buzzing in it,’ he said often to his daughter.
‘How long will you let this water obstruct the public way?’ demanded Messer Nellemane, driven in his desperation to use simple language.
Pippo shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.
‘How long?’ repeated Messer Nellemane with imperious impatience.
‘I have nought to do with it,’ said Pippo at last, doggedly. ‘Dominiddio set it running; He can stop it if He wish.’
‘You are impious!’ said Messer Nellemane.
‘No,’ said Pippo, ‘no, not I.’
‘Such trifling is merely insolence,’ cried the other very angrily, and losing something of his dignity, and of his suavity all. ‘Yours is a contravention of the most odious kind. You have been warned, mildly chastised, reasoned with in every way; you are obdurate, obstinate, and blasphemous. Do you, or do you not, intend to make the necessary works to remove this nuisance and obstruction?’
Pippo looked at him with sunken, sullen desperate eyes.
‘I can do nought,’ he said doggedly, and he covered his head as he spoke. ‘With one thing and another of your accursed laws you have taken from me all I have. The roof over my head is wholly mine no more. You can torture me as you may; you can’t get blood out of a post.
Then he sat down, and put his pipe in his mouth, and he let loose little Raggi.
‘You have made slaves of men and beasts,’ he said, ‘but you have done your worst to me already; you can’t get blood out of a post.’
And he took the little dog on his knee and caressed it.
The water rippled and bustled brightly in the sunset light, and toppled over into the river below, as though no presence of a great man were there to trouble it. Messer Nellemane struck his cane into it as though it were an obstinate child that he chastised; he was pale with passion.
‘The laws will force you to respect them, ‘ he said furiously. ‘That you will find, and to your cost.’
‘You can’t get blood out of a post,’ said Pippo. ‘I have bartered my house to pay you, and I’ll do no more. Get you gone.’
As he spoke he threw a pebble down the road, and bade the little dog run after it; Raggi ran, nothing loath, and brought it joyfully.
‘The dog will ne’er be tied again for you,’ said Pippo. ‘We pay, and you hurt us just the same. For me, I can pay no more; and were it so that I could, I would not.’
Messer Nellemane said nothing; he opened his note‐book and wrote in it, and went away in silence.
Raggi played with the pebbles, and the cooper’s children ran out and played too, and shouted and spun tops on the river‐side; and Pippo clapped his hands and encouraged them. An old man, a little dog, and five small boys and girls made up this scene of anarchy and revolt, and broke the com‐ munal laws in a way that was terrible to behold.
‘Laugh, children, laugh while you may,’ cried Pippo; ‘soon you will starve, and then the Law will laugh at you.’
The children did laugh, and romped on; not understanding.
Excellencies and Ministers — you think Messer Nellemane does not matter; that he is only a clerk and his place is only a village; you think that these people are all poor clods, and know not their right hand from their left; in your high place, whether you were born there, or whether you climbed there, it is so far below you, that poor, little, dusty village, with its stone walls and its narrow rooms, where the people die like flies, and no one cares, and Sheriff’s officers, on the Pale Horse, make their rounds together night and day, and no one hears the death cries, for the voices are too feeble and the roofs are too low; you think it does not matter, and you turn away your eyes, and you manufacture your pretty phrases, and you take your armchair at the Congress table of the Nations, for all that does matter to your thinking is only la haute politique. But you mistake; ah yes, you mistake.
Louis Quatorze made just such a mistake; and the scaffold was built for the children of his blood.
But the Roi Soleil had many an excuse. He was born in the purple; he was reared in oblivion of the people; he honestly believed that God had made him of ivory and them of clay; but you — is it so long since you left your cabin in Sicily, your desk in Piedmont? — are you not sons of the wars of independence? — were you not lulled in your cradle by the shouts of ‘Morir per Libertà!’ Would you not be nought, unless the people made you all? unless, with their blood and sweat, they had cemented the mortars of your houses, and with their bodies made the steps by which you have mounted thrones?
Yet once in office you forget!
Once in office, Lethe never gave more utter oblivion than this oblivion of yours. Your portfolios won, what else matters?
Let these people toil, and groan, and die; let the tax‐gatherers seize the last rag off their naked and starving bones, wring from them every poor bronze coin that they have gained by the labour of their limbs, and claim impost off the crust of black bread that their hungry babies gnaw; what matter? it is only the people — you, too, were of the people once, but you have forgotten that.
You are in office; you speak with elo‐ quence in the Chamber, and you have your place in the councils of Europe.
Vive la Haute Politique!
We must be a great Power — ay, though in every house lies a corpse, in every river rots another, in every poor man’s mouth is a curse, and over all the land there spreads the plague of want, the putrefaction of despair.
Vive la Haute Politique!
What! though you see behind her a spectre, a scaffold, and a tomb?
CHAPTER XVI.
IF YOU HAVE only killed your father or mother, or sister or neighbour, that is a trifle, which may well stand over for a year or more; and unless you were caught redhanded in the act, you may go scot free meanwhile. This sort of murder is a merely personal affair, and scarcely concerns anybody. But if you have put your hand upon the sacred person of a guard, ay, though he have been, as often happens, a whilom thief or an ex‐forger, then indeed you have committed something very like high treason, and you must be tried and sentenced as speedily as may be, to pacify the outraged majesty of Law.
Italy is like M. Gambetta; with the cap of liberty on their heads they both set up a policeman and say ‘worship him.’
It seems hardly worth while to have upset all the old religions and all the old dynasties only to arrive at this.
The crime of Carmelo having been therefore so heinous, the usual snail’s pace of the law was hastened, and by what was almost a miracle of rapidity, he having done this crime in sultry June, was actually brought up to trial at the beginning of October, having spent only four months in prison on suspicion, which is, as things go, really nothing at all.
The Pretore of Pomodoro put on his black cap and robes, and mounted his curule chair, with his mind already made up as to Carmelo, before this state prisoner had ever entered the court‐house.
Like the wolves in the ‘Animaux Parlants,’ lawyers, guards, secretaries, chancellors and syndics make a compact party, sworn never to quarrel, and to grip all that comes in their way. The Pretore, Gino Novi, had never seen either accuser or accused in his life before, but before he had heard two words of the case he had made his mind up against Carmelo; all these officials are little Gambettas, and the Law is their fetish. Offend it, and you are vile as a Jesuit; there is no point in your favour possible.
It was with much impatience that this brisk and smart young man, who had the administration of justice in his power over something like seven thousand people, went through all the forms of trial, as though there were any sort of doubt of the prisoner’s criminality.
It was absurd, thought Gino Novi, not to be able to condemn the wretch off‐hand; but the law gave him a trial, and he, as I say, like M. Gambetta, revered the Law; indeed, there is hardly anything to which you may not stretch it, and hardly any end it will not answer; when you hold it as a schoolmaster holds the taws you get quite fond of it. It is so unpleasant to others, and so elastic and omnipotent. Carmelo’s advocate was fainthearted; he was equally sure of his fees whether his client were sentenced or set free; and he was afraid that by taking up this case he made himself obnoxious to the Pretore, and to the governing powers generally. It is far more compromising to defend a free citizen who has been wronged by a guard, than it is to defend a brigand who has only murdered travellers and violated women.
His advocate was fainthearted, and his witnesses were not over‐wise; they were his own relatives, who got passionate and indignant, and were reproved, and neighbours, such as Gigi Canterelli and Cecco, who were too eager in his defence to be believed. Gigi Canterelli made indeed a bad impression on the court by swearing heartily that Bindo Terri was a ‘briccone’ and a ‘scelerato,’ but that he was set on by blackguards in black cloth higher than himself, and that everybody knew, for the whole commune was a prey to this set of oppressors and extortioners; for which violent enunciation of the truth the impetuous old grocer was ordered out of court, with a bad mark scored against his name, to be of use the next, time that he should have a case at law there, against carriers who had stolen his bags of rice, or against octroi‐duties falsely levelled on his cheeses. Never again would Gigi gain any cause that would be heard at the Pretura of Pomodoro.
It is not true that no Italian ever tells the truth, as commentators on the country say, but it is sadly true that when one does he suffers for it.
The trial went on all through the golden October day, wasting the time of many men who should have been at work in the vineyards; and throughout it Carmelo stood between the carabiniers, faint and sick from past confinement and present fatigue, and his old father and his brothers and Pippo listened trembling and indignant, with the sweat rolling off their brows.
When questioned, the prisoner said only, ‘I would do the same to‐morrow; he poisoned my dog.’
But of this there was, alas for Carmelo! no proof, and if there had been, what would it have served? It was the law of the commune of Vezzaja and Ghiralda that the guardian of the public morals should be the poisoner of dogs.
‘I would do the same to‐morrow!’ said Carmelo with eyes that flashed fire from out of the weary pallor of his face.
Gino Novi looked at him from under his black cinque‐cento cap of office, and scowled and shuddered.
‘This is the stuff that makes regicides!’ he thought.
It is certainly the stuff that made Tell; but the Pretore did not think of it in that sense.
Carmelo’s attorney had summoned two or three men whose dogs had been poisoned, and who had traced their death to Bindo; and had also summoned Squillace, the apothecary who had supplied the poison; but when the people came up to the tribunal they were frightened, and hemm’d and haw’d and prevaricated, and scratched their heads and blew their noses, and ended in sheer fright by being sure of nothing, while Signore Squillace perjured himself as handsomely as if he had been a deputy arraigned for bribery, instead of a poor devil paid thirty pounds a year to doctor all the commune.
So the long, dull, sad, terrible day wore away, with the sun beating at the thick panes of the casements, and the dirty, garlic‐scented crowd of Pomodoro pressed together behind the bar, thick as bees in swarming‐time. The advocate’s heart was not in his work; it put him in bad odour, and every now and then the eye of the Pretore menaced him, and then he lost the thread of his subject, and began to think that a few months in prison would not hurt a young fellow, and to remember that he himself was a very poor man with a jolie ribambelle of hungry children.
He examined his witnesses badly, he helped to hush‐hush Gigi Canterelli, he pleaded loosely, spoke at random, showed he thought ill of his client, and had not courage to bring into evidence any one of the many rascalities of Bindo Terri’s past, or the many villanies of his present.
It was one of those trials common enough in Italy, where the verdict is a foregone conclusion. No one except the Pastorini boys and old Pippo was astonished when Gino Novi, with his sharp black eyes glittering like lancets, sentenced Carmelo to seven months’ imprisonment for his assault upon an officer of the law. He would have been better pleased to give seven years, but he was a wise young man, who never let his passions get the mastery of him, and kept himself close within precedents and statutes.
Seven months!
All the bitter winter, and part of the lovely spring, were to pass over the young head of Carmelo in the narrow den of the prison.
When he heard, he opened his great blue eyes, with a frantic terror in them, his lips grew blue, he shivered all over and dropped down in a dead faint. He had eaten nothing all day, and he had been standing many hours.
The elder Pastorini, a strong man, shook like a woman; his veins swelled on his forehead; his eyes grew dull; the men around him forced him out into the open air; they thought he would fall in apoplexy.
When he was in the air he staggered, and gave a great gasp for breath.
‘This is for what we toil!’ he shouted, ‘this is for what we give our last coin to the tax‐gatherer, and our last child to the barracks, and our last breath to the hospital! God above us! We are meeker, duller, stupider fools than any sheep that crouches to the shearing! Men, you have known me all my life. I have been peaceable, neighbourly, respectful to law and State, heedful to pay debt and impost; you have known me all my life. I have reared my sons in honesty and simple worth. I have done no harm, I never wronged man, woman, child, or beast. Have I deserved this that they do to me? Men, as God lives, this night would I bear steel and torch through the kingdom to kill these wretches that ruin us, these worms that crawl to their masters, but sting the poor as the viper stings. As God lives, I pray — I pray — for revolution, for red blood, for bitter battle, for human justice; I pray.—’
Then his voice choked, and he lifted his arms in the air, and the men caught him to save his fall.
Meanwhile, in the court old Pippo had risen on trembling limbs, and with his hat doffed, and his white hair shining in the sunshine, called aloud to the judge, ‘Dear sir, most illustrious, you cannot mean it; you cannot have the heart to mean it. The lad is good as gold. You cannot brand him felon and bracket him with thieves? Dear sir — honoured judge — do hear me. He is to marry my daughter. His marriage lines are all drawn out, and the girl sits at home weeping, and the bridal gown lies in a drawer, and the orange flowers are all yellow and shrivelled, and they lie on it to keep it from moth. Good sir! Most high and honourable sir, do hear me! The dear lad already has suffered four mortal months in the town gaol. It is enough. It is too much! He did no harm. If you only but knew the rogue, the thief, the impostor, the villain, that they make a guard—’
‘Take that old madman out of court,’ hissed the Pretore; and Pippo was hustled and pulled down by the officials from where he stood, and thrown, as if he were a stone, through the doors.
‘Defamation of an officer of the law,’ muttered Gino Novi, as he closed his great case of papers and hurried from his throne, as twilight dimmed the court, to go and eat a supper of robins and tripe, fried ham and lentils, in his own room behind the chamber of justice, where he had invited Messer Gaspardo Nellemane and Messer Luca Finti to pass a jovial hour with him, and lost a friendly coin or two over draughts and dice.
‘Very insubordinate and revolutionary people in this commune, I fear; no veneration for authority,’ said he; and his two guests, who quite forgot that but for revolution they would at this hour have been respectively selling their father’s battered iron and rotting fish, shook their heads and said there was a bad spirit abroad — the people certainly had no respect for authority.
For these good gentlemen were like all their class, the very oddest mixture of Prussian despotism and Parisian radicalism. They hated all those who were above them, and despised all those who were below them; there was only one stratum strata of humanity that they thought worth consideration or preservation, i.e. their own.
When Italy shall purge herself of these, the opportunists of public benches and public desks — the licensed and registered brigands of the public purse — then, and then only may she. lift off the burden of her taxes, and breathe freely, and have title to be a voice in Europe. Will this day ever come? By the educated will of the people, perhaps. Perhaps — never.
Nepotism and Impiegatism are as thorns in her flesh; fixed there in festered wounds, and maybe, past all surgery. They are as thorns that pierce, as leeches that suck; when the flesh is bloodless, then it rots and the body falls.
CHAPTER XVII.
ALL THE WINTER would roll away ere he would behold the eyes of his betrothed; he who should have wedded her in the mid‐summer months, when the crickets were chaunting in the trees, and the magnolias and the rose‐laurels were all ablaze with bloom. During the four months since his arrest he had striven to keep his reason and his patience, saying always to himself that he would be set free at once when his cause should be clearly heard. Hope had sustained him all that while, but now he had no hope.
The sentence had been passed; the doors had closed, the bolts been fastened on him.
He was in prison for seven months.
Ah! judges and gentlemen of the council, who put youths in your prison cells for bathing in a river in the heat, for rescuing a dog from the slaughterer, from begging for a coin when their old mothers or their young babes starve and perish, how much I should like you to taste that prison yourselves! The Bastille was the royal dungeon of the noblesse, and scarcely deserved the rage of the people; but these petty bastilles all over the land, where by petty laws the honest, the poor, the helpless, the courageous, for every trifling act of life are thrown to break their hearts as they may, and from which they can only issue with blackened names and ruined characters — when will these accursed places, that mingle the righteous with the unrighteous, the godly and the innocent with the thief and the assassin, surrender to the summons of the nation, and be dismantled and destroyed?
