Delphi collected works o.., p.714
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 714
“You want to speak to me?” asked Ser Checchi uneasily, his mind ever following the Dante where it was jogging along wrapped in the flowered print and nursed in the fat woman’s knees.
“The smith of Giogoli brought me a manuscript,” began Vestucci.
“Ah!” said Ser Checchi with a little gasping sigh of enquiry and uneasiness. He understood that the book was going away from him, that some rich purchaser had been found.
“He told me of your goodness in acquainting him with its date and value,” continued Vestucci. “Is it really worth so much? You know, Ser, I am very ignorant of manuscripts and their like.”
“Its worth is incalculable,” said Ser Checchi with courageous integrity, though the admission tore at his heart strings, “that is if it be sold to foreigners. Our libraries have no money. Did Iorio speak to you of selling it to me?”
“He did,” answered Vestuccio. “He is grateful; and feels that you have no little right to command its purchase. What would he have known of its very existence even, had it not been for you? I ventured to enquire if you wish to buy it, because I have a client, a German dealer, who would be anxious to get it, before it could be offered to our own government or to the foreign libraries. But, of course, if you intend to buy it yourself your prior claim would never be disputed by me.”
“I wish to buy it; I mean to buy it;” said Ser Checchi, with incautious haste.
Vestucci’s merry blue eyes smiled, as a grown person’s eyes may smile at the silliness of a child; but he answered seriously, and with great respect of tone: “That is enough, Sir; for my part I shall tell the man from Hamburg that the volume is already disposed of, and will never come into the market at all.”
“Yes, yes,” said Ser Checchi hurriedly; “Quite so. If Iorio will cede it at the price he would obtain in Italy I will purchase it.”
“Ready money?” murmured Vestuccio, with a vague apology in his tone for his mention of the two words.
Ser Checchi hesitated. He was the most candid of all men, and transparent as an alabaster vase. He knew that he could not pay ready money for the book; that to pay for it at all would require thought, negotiation, sacrifice, time. He had drooped his head on his chest, his delicate pale hand played nervously with a sheet of blotting paper on the office desk before him. Vestuccio, to whom all his neighbour’s affairs were as well known as the brass nails which he had driven into a leathern chair, or the new gilding with which he revived the glory of a mediaeval nimbis, watched him with a gentle and compassionate amusement. He knew that Ser Checchi could no more put his hand at the moment on a thousand francs than he could have taken hold of the moon or the sun in the heavens.
He saw the trouble and the perplexity of mind which his two words had caused, and he left the old man for a few minutes to his own meditations, while he himself went out into the yard to drive the cat away over the wall. When he came back Ser Checchi was still nervously folding the blotting paper to and fro, a shadow cast on his mobile features. Ready money! Ready money should and must be found.
“The truth is, Ser Checchi,” said the dealer, coming in, and removing the square smoking cap he wore. “The truth is, that this good fellow of Geogoli knows the wish which you have for this volume. It was a thousand pities you let him know it; a thousand pities you did not keep the worth of the manuscript dark—”
“What! Oh, hush! how can you?” said the bookseller, lifting his head in pained indignation. Vestuccio smiled and waved his hand.
“Well, well, sir, pardon me; I know that honour and generosity rule your life. It was noble, very noble, but you throw pearls before swine you know. However, what is done is done. This smith knows now; and, having the knowledge, he will take the money too. We cannot blame him. Of course your conscience ruled you. Mine rules me, and loses me many a hundred franc note in the year. It is terrible, yes, it is terrible in this knavish world to be an honest man.”
Ser Checchi made an impatient and slightly haughty movement.
“It is an elementary virtue!” he said, with a sarcastic intonation. “It is known even amongst savages.”
Vestuccio perceived that he had taken a wrong track; that to congratulate a man of integrity upon his integrity is an affront not easily condoned.
Ser Checchi rose and took his hat “I thought you said that you had business with me. I see I mistook. Good-day, Vestuccio.”
“Stay a moment, Sir,” said the dealer, obsequiously. “Pray do not go in anger. I am a blunt, unpolished fellow, but my heart is sound — my heart is sound. The truth is, Sir, knowing how you wished for this Dante folio, I ventured to hope that, if you cannot find it quite convenient to pay for it down on the nail, you would let me have the pleasure of doing so for you, and you could then repay me when you pleased at your leisure. I owe you much, Ser Checchi, many a rare bit of knowledge and many a date and secret of art have I, a poor ignorant common fellow, learned from you and been your debtor for, in my commerce.”
The elder man was silent. A faint flush came on his cheeks and forehead: the proud and delicate spirit in him winced and shrinked at the idea that his necessities, however slight, were known to others.
“You mean well, and I thank you, my good Aurelio,” he said a little distantly. “But I have not asked your help.”
“Help! I would never give it such a name,” cried Vestuccio. “It would be a favour which you would do me, for I owe you much, and though I am a rough man, I am not a thankless one. I know how you wish for this old book which is, by all right of treasure trove, yours, and the fellow who owns it has placed the sale of it in my hands. I suppose you are sure of its authenticity?”
Ser Checchi smiled with the pity of culture for ignorance. “It is a Codex which the poet himself may have had written!”
“Well, well, Sir, I take your word for it, you are a learned man,” said Vestuccio, who desired to depreciate or appear sceptical of its value.
With that he lifted the lid of the desk, and took out from the hollow underneath the Dante, and with a careless touch opened it, and turned the yellow parchment pages, whilst the sunlight slanting in from the window shone on the regular lines of its black-letter columns.
Ser Checchi thrilled from head to foot like a man who beholds a beloved mistress.
“Iorio has sold it to you!” he exclaimed, involuntarily. “He promised me — he promised me — the preference.”
Vestuccio smiled.
“The good fellow has a wife; and the grey mare is the better horse. He left it with me because he wished you to have it. The woman would have allowed him no peace if it had remained with them.”
Ser Checchi leaned over the desk, touching the manuscript caressingly with his long slender fingers; the colour came and went on his face; he felt as if he had been degraded and soiled by Vestuccio’s praise of his action and by his own sense of how sharp a struggle it had cost him. And the sight of the Dante on the dealer’s desk brought home to him the sense of how certainly, if it did not become his own then and there, it would soon pass forever out of his vision and grasp!
Vestuccio watched him smilingly; an indulgent smile as of a man looking down on a whimsical and half-witted child; after a pause, he said gently: “See now, Ser Checchi, your heart is set on this thing, and for sure as I say it is yours already by all the right of treasure trove. I will buy it of the smith, and you shall buy it of me at your perfect convenience. You will sign me a little paper, just for form’s sake, to set your mind at ease because you are so proud and solitary; and you can take the Dante home with you and put it under your pillow if you like to-night if it will make you sleep the better. Leave me to deal with Iorio. I know those bumpkins, they are sharp as needles, though they look such simple souls. Take the Codice, as you call it, sir; you and I shall never quarrel.”
“No, no; I could not be so deeply beholden to you or to anyone,” said Ser Checchi, as he closed the volume and laid it inside the desk. “You mean well, that I am sure, but I should not be at peace a moment if I took it on those terms. I do not do business so.”
“Then the book must go to the Hamburg people,” said Vestuccio, with a sigh, as he turned the key on his safe. “Think twice of what I have said, sir; it is no obligation: you will just sign to pay me at three months, six, twelve, at any date you please, and the Dante will belong to you, the one man in Europe who is worthy of it?”
“But why should you do this service to me?” asked Ser Checchi, with a flash of insight lightening the placid even tenour of his trust in human nature.
“It is no service,” said Vestuccio, “and, to prevent your feeling that it is one, we will put it in as regular a business form as you may please that it shall take. I wish you to have the book, sir, first of all because justice is justice, and should be done when it can, and secondly because you have been a good friend to me, and I am glad if I can do you ever so slight a benefit. Take the volume home with you, honoured sir, and we will write out the memorandum some other day.”
Ser Checchi knew the ways of commerce although so little trade came nigh his tower, and he ought to have remembered what had been his experiences all his life, that he who leaves a signature behind him gives the costliest of hostages to fortune.
But the manuscript folio allured him irresistibly; even shut away beneath the lid of the desk, like a dead friend beneath a coffin lid, it seemed to draw him towards it with a subtle and magnetic power, and when he left the shop of Aurelio Vestuccio that day he carried the Codice of the Commedia with him; and in the desk in its stead was lying a small, oblong piece of stamped paper bearing his clear, fine handwriting upon it, and at which Vestuccio looked with a satisfied smile.
“Chi va piano va sano,” murmured that shrewd tradesman to himself; heaven had sent fools into the world to be the support of clever men, as little fish are made to be the food of big ones.
He watched the figure of Ser Checchi passing though the artistic lumber of his yard with benevolent compassion, and saw the gates close on him with that triumphant sense of cruel success which moves the trapper in the woods when he sees the gentle beast for whom the trap is set walk guilelessly within its meshes.
And he turned his admirable mind on the morrow to the successful and secret persuasion of the smith of Giogoli, that there had been a mistake about the value of the old vellum book; but that nothing must be said about that to Ser Checchi whose brain was softening and growing childish.
CHAPTER V.
SER CHECCHI DISPLAYED the Codice to his daughter with pride and joy, and found in her all the sympathy with his pleasure which a cultured intelligence and a warm heart could give. But he offered no explanation of how it had come into his possession, beyond saying that he had discovered it amongst some musty and worthless volumes, which Iorio the blacksmith had turned out of an old chest; and Beldia, who was but sixteen at that time, was too respectful to ask more than he chose to explain, and too loyal to enquire from others any details which he did not himself proffer to her. She was not curious; and she was even then so accustomed to have entire liberty in all household matters, but to be wholly excluded from the affairs of her father’s business, that it never seemed to her rather odd or ominous that the cost of the early Dante was concealed from her.
Vestuccio had his own reasons for not speaking of the matter; and Iorio had been so rated by his wife for not waiting for some princely purchaser, that the subject was a sore one to him. But it was the beginning of serious financial transactions between Ser Checchi and the dealer in the Piazza della Madonna; and sometimes when he unlocked the drawer in which the precious volume lay, even though he loved it so dearly, the elder man almost found it in his soul to wish that he had never stopped for that fatal draught of watered wine on the hillside of Giogolo. There were moments of exquisite happiness, when he displayed his treasure to scholars by whom it could be appreciated, and it was a source of profound joy to him always to have a Contemporary Dante Codex for his very own: but at times he realised that he had entered into bondage through and for it.
To get money by merely writing your name is so easy that its ease has been the ruin of tens of thousands; and Vestuccio beyond all others knew how to render it so easy that a man of absent mind, of scholarly extravagance, and of dreamful indolence, like Ser Checchi, never perceived what it might ultimately cost him to possess himself of monastic manuscripts and precious palimpsests by the mere stroke of a pen in his fine, small, clear clerkly handwriting.
He did not even know how many times he had written “Francesco Ardiglione” upon those stamped sheets of paper, which the dealer put away with as apparent a carelessness as though he were merely going to light his pipe with them.
The bibliophile, like the artist, and the poet, and the lover, will do anything wise or unwise, good or bad, to reach the object of his desires. Sometimes Beldia thought with a pang of what a source of happiness his literary passion would have been to him had he been a rich man. Alas! rich men usually look upon their libraries as mere show places to assist their pomp, or as mere inherited wealth to be Quickly sent to the hammer.
Perception is so seldom united with possessions; the wisdom of the soul is so rarely given with the power of the purse!
Beldia was the most dutiful of daughters; and the infinite respect which she entertained for him never permitted her to blame what he did, even in her own thoughts; but he did not care all the same to meet the questioning gravity of her eyes when he had been making unwise purchases, so that little by little he had grown to conceal from her any unusually costly book or manuscript, and the various straits to which he was sometimes put to pay for them. For Ser Checchi would no more have bought a book on credit than a fond mother would get into debt for her child’s christening robe. It would have been difficult to do so, for most rare volumes were found at auction rooms, or in antiquaries’ shops, or in remote presbyteries and church-closets, where immediate payment was the sine qua non of purchase. But when he could have bought on credit he would not; credit would have seemed to him to soil the pure grave faces of the beloved books and manuscripts, which he would touch with such a reverent, caressing gesture of the hand, as you will see in a sculptor when he passes his fingers softly down some marble curve of arm or hip or breast.
“It will sell for ten times its value, my dear,” he would invariably say when she observed it; but as no buyers of costly goods hardly ever came to the tower, and as, whenever they did so, he invariably shrank from losing his favourite volumes and to that end either hid them, or named some preposterous and prohibitive price, she knew by experience that what their worth would, or would not realise, mattered very little to her father except as so far as his pride of a bibliophile was flattered by its possession.
“If he were a rich man collecting a library to enjoy it, there could be no healthier or happier pursuit,” she thought, “but when it is his trade, when he should only buy and sell and do both wisely, his adoration of his books is fatal.”
All the filial veneration of her soul could not blind her clear and keen intelligence to the fact that the commerce of books, as Ser Checchi conducted it, could only be more ruinous than to pursue no trade at all.
“He is a dilettante as if he were a duke!” said Cirillo angrily once; he, for his part, would have made a bonfire of all the books with the utmost pleasure.
Beldia would not admit the truth of it, but in her heart she felt that it was only too true. All the delicate research, the fastidious judgment, and the severe taste of her father would have made the joy and the renown of an amateur collector, but in a librarian were but so many costly impediments. Ser Checchi knew this himself, and it made his conscience twinge and tremble at times; but he thrust the consciousness aside. He was ruled by his master passion, and when he saw an old copy, of undoubted age and value, or any manuscript of some great dead hand, his whole gentle and unassuming person was transformed; he became indifferent to everything, except the means by which he might become the owner of such a treasure, and he had even developed a clever and ingenious, though childlike cunning, in concealing the temptations of this sort which he met with in his daily saunterings through the street. Once he had discovered several pages of autograph verse of Politziano’s in a chandler’s shop, enwrapping some butter, and this discovery had served him for excuse and warrant ever since. True, his honesty had compelled him to acquaint the butterman with the value of his wrapping-paper before offering money for it, but the butterman had been incredulous and had said with a pitying benignant smile that it was only robaccia (rubbish), so that he had taken his Poliziano home for the price of the butter itself, and this lucky chance had served as an example, and as an incentive to purchases, ever since. Many things, however, cost him much more than a pound of butter; and for some of his manuscripts and folios he had paid as heavily as though he had been a curator for the Luxembourg or for the Bodleian.
“They will be a fine dower for Beldia,” he told his conscience. But at that thought his heart contracted and his bowels yearned; for to become a dower for her they would have of necessity to be sold. And the thought of selling them was torture to him. He would have liked to think that his coffin would be filled with them, and that he would lie in his tomb with his folios on his breast, as knights have their shields on theirs.
From the time of the purchase of the Dante Vestuccio had become the chief adviser and assistant in financial matters of the librarian, by whom money-matters had always been esteemed the most vulgar and debasing of all mundane concerns.
Ser Checchi, though too trustful and compliant, was no fool, however, and at times there came over him with uneasiness the perception that he was trusting too much and leaving too much to his good friend of the Piazza della Madonna. Nor did he desire that his daughter should know how thoroughly Vestuccio had ingratiated himself with him, and wound himself into his confidence.
Ser Checchi, like all scholars and people who love impersonal meditation, was reluctant to be roused out of his studies and pursuits, and forced into contact with the vulgar and commonplace interests of daily and practical life. The eminently practical mind of Vestuccio quickly found out this tendency, and knew how to turn it and humour it to serve his own purpose. While the old philosopher floated in an empyrean of fine thought, or pursued some philological or historical question, which for him seemed of as vast import as the conquest of Asia seemed to Alexander, he was very glad to find a quickwitted, pleasant-tempered, and unobtrusive person, who spared him much trouble and attended to many things in his name.
