Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

P >> Prosper Paleologus Constantine >> Sir John Constantine

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

"Angels and ministers--" here, at a quick sign of warning from me, he
checked himself sharply. "_O anima profetica, il mio zio!_ . . .
Devil a doubt but it sounds better in Shakespeare's mother-English,"
he added, as I hurried him aside; and then--for he still grasped the
cabbage, and the stallwoman was shouting after him for a thief.
"You'll excuse me, signora. Two soldi, I think you said? It is an
infamy. What? Your cabbage has a good heart? Ah, but has it ever
loved? Has it ever leapt in transport, recognizing a long-lost
friend? Importunate woman, take your fee, basely extracted from me
in a moment of weakness. O, heel of Achilles! O, locks of Samson!
Go to, Delilah, and henceforth for this may a murrain light on thy
cucumbers!

"Though, strictly speaking," said Mr. Fett, as I drew him away and
down the street leading to the quay, "I believe murrain to be a
disease peculiar to cattle. Well, my friend, and how goes it with
you? For me"--here he tapped his basket, in which the cabbage
crowned a pile of green-stuff--"I am reduced to _buying_ my salads."
He wheeled about, following my glance, and saluted the Princess, who
had followed and overtaken us.

"Man," said I, "you shall tell us your story as soon as ever you have
helped us to a safe lodging. But here are we--and there, coming
towards us along the quay, are two comrades--four Corsicans in all,
whose lives, if the Genoese detect us, are not worth five minutes'
purchase."

"Then, excuse me," said Mr. Fett, becoming serious of a sudden, "but
isn't it a damned foolish business that brings you?"

"It may be," I answered. "But the point is, Can you help us?"

"To a lodging? Why, certainly, as luck has it, I can take you
straight--no, not straight exactly, but the devil of a way round--to
one where you can lie as snug as fleas in a blanket. Oh--er--but
excuse me--" He checked himself and stood rubbing his chin, with a
dubious glance at the Princess.

"Indeed, sir," she put in, smoothing down at her peasant-skirt,
"I think you first found me lodging upon a bare rock, and even in
this new dress it hardly becomes me to be more fastidious."

"I was thinking less of the lodgings, Princess, than of the company:
though, to be sure, the girls are very good-hearted, and Donna Julia,
our _prima amorosa_, makes a most discreet _duenna_, off the boards.
There is Badcock too--il signore Badcocchio: give Badcock a hint, and
he will diffuse a most permeating respectability. For the young
ladies who dwell at the entrance of the court, over the archway, I
won't answer. My acquaintance with them has not passed beyond an
interchange of winks: but we might send Badcock to expostulate with
them."

"You are not dealing with a child, sir," said the Princess, with a
look at me and a somewhat heightened colour. "Be assured that I
shall have eyes only for what I choose to see."

Mr. Fett bowed. "As for the lodgings, I can guarantee them.
They lie on the edge of a small Jew quarter--not the main _ghetto_--
and within a stone's-throw of the alleged birthplace of Columbus; if
that be a recommendation. Actually they are rated in the weavers'
quarter, the burgh of San Stefano, between the old and new walls, a
little on the left of the main street as you go up from Sant' Andrea
towards Porticello, by the second turning beyond the Olive Gate."

"I thank you," I interrupted, "but at a reasonable pace we might
arrive there before you have done giving us the direction."

"My loquacity, sir, did you understand it," said Mr. Fett, with an
air of fine reproach, "springs less from the desire to instruct than
from the ebullience of my feelings at so happy a rencounter."

"Well, that's very handsomely said," I acknowledged. "Oh, sir, I
have a deal to tell, and to hear! But we will talk anon.
Meanwhile"--he touched my arm as he led the way, and I fell into step
beside him--"permit me to note a change in the lady since I last had
the pleasure of meeting her--a distinct lessening of _hauteur_--a
touch of (shall I say?) womanliness. Would it be too much to ask if
you are running away with her?"

"It would," said I. "As a matter of fact she is in Genoa to seek her
brother, the Prince Camillo."

"Nevertheless," he insisted, and with an impertinence I could not
rebuke (for fear of drawing the attention of the passers-by, who were
numerous)--"nevertheless I divine that you have much either to tell
me or conceal."

He, at any rate, was not reticent. On our way he informed me that
his companions in the lodgings were a troupe of strolling players
among whom he held the important role of _capo comico_. We reached
the house after threading our way through a couple of tortuous alleys
leading off a street which called itself the Via Servi, and under an
archway with a window from which a girl blew Mr. Fett an unabashed
kiss across a box of geraniums. The master of it, a Messer' Nicola
(by surname Fazio) had rooms for us and to spare. To him Mr. Fett
handed the market-basket, after extracting from it an enormous melon,
and bade him escort the Princess upstairs and give her choice of the
cleanest apartments at his disposal. He then led us to the main
living-room where, from a corner-cupboard, he produced glasses,
plates, spoons, a bowl of sugar, and a flask of white wine.
The flask he pushed towards Marc'antonio and Stephanu: the melon he
divided with his clasp-knife.

"You will join us?" he asked, profering a slice. "You will drink,
then, at least? Ah, that is better. And will you convey my
apologies to your two bandits and beg them to excuse my conversing
with you in English? To tell the truth"--here, having helped them to
a slice apiece and laid one aside for the Princess, he took the
remainder upon his own plate--"though as a rule we make collation at
noon or a little before, my English stomach cries out against an
empty morning. You will like my Thespians, sir, when you see 'em.
The younger ladies are decidedly--er--vivacious. Bianca, our
Columbine, has all the makings of a beauty--she has but just turned
the corner of seventeen; and Lauretta, who plays the scheming
chambermaid, is more than passably good-looking. As for Donna Julia,
her charms at this time of day are moral rather than physical: but,
having married our leading lover, Rinaldo, she continues to exact his
vows on the stage and the current rate of pay for them from the
treasury. Does Rinaldo's passion show signs of flagging? She pulls
his ears for it, later on, in conjugal seclusion. Poor fellow!--

"_Non equidem invideo; miror magis_.

"Do the night's takings fall short of her equally high standard?
She threatens to pull mine: for I, cavalier, am the treasurer. . . .
But at what rate am I overrunning my impulses to ask news from you!
How does your father, sir--that modern Bayard? And Captain Pomery?
And my old friend Billy Priske?"

I told him, briefly as I could, of my father's end. He laid down his
spoon and looked at me for a while across the table with eyes which,
being unused to emotion, betrayed it awkwardly, with a certain shame.

"A great, a lofty gentleman! . . . You'll excuse me, cavalier, but I
am not always nor altogether an ass--and I say to you that half a
dozen such knights would rejuvenate Christendom. As it is, we live
in the last worst ages when the breed can afford but one phoenix at a
time, and he must perforce spend himself on forlorn hopes. Mark you,
I say 'spend,' not 'waste': the seed of such examples cannot be
wasted--"

'Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust:'

nay, not their actions only, but their every high thought which
either fate froze or fortune and circumstance choked before it could
put forth flower. Did I ever tell you, Cavalier, the Story of My
Father and the Jobbing Gardener?"

"Not that I remember," said I.

"Yet it is full of instruction as an egg is full of meat. My father,
who (let me remind you) is a wholesale dealer in flash jewellery, had
ever a passion for gardening, albeit that for long he had neither the
time nor the money nor even the space to indulge his hobby.
His garden--a parallelogram of seventy-two feet by twenty-three,
confined by brick walls--lay at the back of our domicile, which
excluded all but the late afternoon sunshine. As the Mantuan would
observe--"

'nec fertilis illa juvencis,
Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho.'

To attend to it my father employed, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, an
old fellow over whose head some sixty-five summers had passed without
imparting to it a single secret. In short, he was the very worst
gardener in West Bromicheham, and so obstinately, so insufferably,
opinionated withal that one day, in a fit of irritation, my father
slew him with his own spade.

"This done, he had at once to consider how to dispose of the body.
Our garden, as I have said, was confined within brick walls, two long
and one short; and this last my father had screened with a rustic
shed and a couple of laurel-bushes; that from his back-parlour
window, where he sat and smoked his pipe on a Sunday afternoon, he
might watch the path 'wandering,' as he put it, 'into the shrubbery,'
and feast his eyes on a domain which extended not only further than
the arm could stretch, but even a little further than the eye could
reach.

"In the space, then, intervening between the laurels and the terminal
wall my father dug a grave two spits deep and interred the corpse,
covering it with a light compost of loam and leaf-mould. This was on
a Wednesday--the second Wednesday in July, as he was always
particular to mention. (And I have heard him tell the story a score
of times.)

"On the Sunday week, at half-past three in the afternoon, my father
had finished his pipe and was laying it down, before covering his
head (as his custom was) with a silk handkerchief to protect his
slumber from the flies, when, happening to glance towards the
shrubbery, he espied a remarkably fine crimson hollyhock overtopping
the laurels. He rubbed his eyes. He had invested in past years many
a shilling in hollyhock seed, but never till now had a plant bloomed
in his garden.

"He rubbed his eyes, I say. But there stood the hollyhock.
He rushed from the room, through the back-doorway and down the
garden. My excellent mother, aroused from her siesta by the slamming
of the door, dropped the Family Bible from her lap, and tottered in
pursuit. She found my father at the angle of the shrubbery, at a
standstill before a tangled mass of vegetation. Hollyhocks,
sunflowers, larkspurs, lilies, carnations, stocks--every bulb, every
seed which the dead man had failed to cultivate--were ramping now and
climbing from his grave high into the light. My father tore his way
through the thicket to the tool-shed, dragged forth a hook and
positively hacked a path back to my mother, barely in time to release
her from the coils of a major convolvulus (_ipomoea purpurea) which
had her fast by the ankles.

"Now, this story, which my father used to tell modestly enough, to
account for his success at our local flower-shows, seems to me to
hold a deeper significance, and a moral which I will not insult your
intelligence by extracting for you . . . The _actions_ of the just?
Foh!" continued Mr. Fett, and filled his mouth with melon.
"What about their _passions?_ Why, sir, yet another story occurs to
me, which might pass for an express epologue upon your father's
career. Did you never hear tell of the Grand Duchess Sophia of
Carinthia and her Three Wooers?"

"Pardon me, Mr. Fett--" I began.

"Pardon _me_, sir," he cut me short, with a flourish of his spoon.
"I know what you would say: that you are impatient rather to hear how
it is that you find me here in Genoa. That also you shall hear, but
permit me to come to it in my own way. For the moment your news has
unhinged me, and you will help my recovery by allowing me to talk a
little faster than I can think. . . . I loved your father, Cavalier.
. . . But our tale, just now, is of--"

"THE GRAND DUCHESS AND HER THREE WOOERS."

"Once upon a time, in Carinthia, there lived a Grand Duchess, of
marriageable age. Her parents had died during her childhood, leaving
her a fine palace and an ample fortune, which, however, was not--to
use the parlance of the Exchange--easily realizable, because it
consisted mainly in an avenue of polished gold. By this avenue,
which extended for three statute miles, the palace was approached
between two parallel lines of Spanish chestnuts. It ran in an
easterly direction and was kept in a high state of polish by two
hundred retainers, so that it shone magnificently every morning when
the Grand Duchess awoke, drew her curtains, and looked forth towards
the sunrise.

"Her name was Sophia, and the charms of her young mind rivalled those
of her person. Therefore suitors in plenty presented themselves, but
only to be rejected by her Chancellor (to whom she left the task of
preliminary inspection) until he had reduced the list to three, whom
we will call Prince Melchior, Prince Otto, and Prince Caspar.
The two former reigned over neighbouring states, but Prince Caspar, I
have heard, came from the north, beyond the Alps.

"A day, then, was fixed for these three to learn their fate, and they
met at the foot of the avenue, at the far end of which, on her palace
steps, stood the Grand Duchess to make her choice. Now, when Prince
Melchior came to the golden road, he thought it would be a sin and a
shame were his horse to set hoof on it and scratch it and perchance
break off a plate of it; so he turned aside and rode up along the
right of it under the chestnuts. Likewise and for the same reason
Prince Otto turned aside and rode on the left. But Prince Caspar
thought of the lady so devoutly and wished so much to be with her
that he never noticed the golden pavement at all, but rode straight
up the middle of it at a gallop.

"When the three arrived, Sophia felt that she liked Prince Caspar best
for his impetuosity; but, on the other hand, she was terribly annoyed
with him for having dented her precious avenue with hoof-marks.
She temporized, therefore, professing herself unable to decide, and
dismissed them for three years with a promise to marry the one who in
that time should prove himself the noblest knight.

"Thereupon Prince Melchior and Prince Otto rode away in anger, for
they coveted the golden road as well as the lady. Prince Melchior,
who loved fighting, went home to collect an army and avenge the
insult, as he called it. Prince Otto, whose mind worked more subtly,
set himself by secret means to stir up disaffection among the
Carinthians, telling them that their labour and suffering had gone to
make the splendid useless avenue of gold; and he persuaded them the
more easily because it was perfectly true. (He forbore to add that
ho coveted it for his own.) But Prince Caspar, having seen his
lady-love, could find no room in his heart either for anger or even
for schemes to prove his valour. He could think of her and of her
only, day and night. And finding that his thoughts brought her
nearer to him the nearer he rode to the stars, he turned his horse
towards the Alps, and there, on the summit, among the snows, lived
solitary in a little hut.

"His mountain overlooked the plain of Carinthia, but from such a
height that no news ever came to him of the Grand Duchess or her
people. From his hut, to which never a woodman climbed, nor even a
stray hunter, he saw only a few villages shining when they took the
sun, a lake or two, and a belt of forest through which--for it hid
the palace--sometimes at daybreak a light glinted from the golden
avenue. But one night the whole plain broke out far and wide with
bonfires, and from the grand-ducal park--over which the sky shone
reddest--he caught the sound of a bell ringing. Then he bethought
him that the three years were past, and that these illuminations were
for the wedding; and he crept to bed, ashamed and sorrowful that he
had failed and another deserved.

"Towards daybreak, as he tossed on his straw, he seemed to hear the
bells drawing nearer and nearer, until they sounded close at hand.
He sprang up, and from the door of his hut he saw a rider on muleback
coming up the mountain track through the snow. The rider was a
woman, and as she alighted and tottered towards him, he recognized
the Grand Duchess. He carried her in and set her before his fire;
and there, while he spread food before her, she told him that the
Princes Melchior and Otto had harried her lands and burnt her palace,
and were even now fighting with each other for the golden avenue.

"Then," said Caspar, pulling his rusty sword from under a heap of
faggots, "I will go down and win it from them; for I see my hour
coming at last."

But the Princess said, "Foolish man, it is here! And as for the
golden avenue, that too is here, or all that was ever worth your
winning." And thereupon she drew aside her cloak, shaking the snow
from it; and when the folds parted and the firelight fell on her
bosom, he saw a breastplate gleaming--a single plate of gold--and in
the centre of it the imprint of a horse's hoof.

"So these two, Cavalier--or so the story reached me--lived content in
their silly hut, nor ever thought it worth their while to descend to
the plain and lose what they had found. . . . But you were good
enough just now to inquire concerning my own poor adventures."

"Billy Priske," said I, "has given me some account of them up to your
parting from my father--at Calenzana, was it not?"

"At Calenzana." Mr. Fett sighed assent. "Ah! Cavalier, it has been
a stony road we have travelled from Calenzana. _Infandum jubes
renovare dolorem_ . . . but Badcock must bear the blame."

Badcock with his flute made trees--

Has it ever struck you sir, that Orpheus possibly found the gift of
Apollo a confounded nuisance; that he must have longed at times to
get rid of his attendant beasts and compose in private? Even so it
was with Badcock.

"That infernal _mufro_ chivvied us up the road to Calvi and into the
very arms of a Genoese picket. The soldiers arrested us--there was
no need to arrest the _mufro_, for he trotted at our heels--and
marched us to the citadel, into the presence of the commandant.
To the commandant (acting, as I thought, upon a happy inspiration) I
at once offered the beast in exchange for our liberty. I was met
with the reply that, as between rarities, he would make no invidious
distinctions, but preferred to keep the three of us; and moreover
that the _mufro_ (which had already put a sergeant and two private
soldiers out of action) appeared amenable only to the strains of Mr.
Badcock's flute. . . . And this was a fact, Cavalier. At first, and
excusably, I had supposed the brute's behaviour to express aversion;
until, observing that he waited for the conclusion of a piece before
butting at Mr. Badcock's stomach, I discovered this to be his
rough-and-ready method of demanding an _encore_.

"The commandant proved to be a _virtuoso_. Persons of that
temperament (as you may have remarked) are often unequal to the life
of the camp with its deadening routine, its incessant demand for
vigilance in details; and, as a matter of fact, he was on the point
of being superseded for incompetence. His recall arrived, and for a
short while he was minded to make a parting gift of us to his late
comrades-in-arms, sharing us up among the three regiments that
composed the garrison and endowing them with a _mascot_ apiece; but
after a sharp struggle selfishness prevailed and he carried us with
him to the mainland. There for a week or two, in an elegant palace
behind the _Darsena_, we solaced his retirement and amused a select
circle of his friends, till (wearying perchance of Badcock's
minstrelsy) he dismissed us with a purse of sequins and bade us go to
the devil, at the same time explaining that only the ingratitude he
had experienced at the hands of his countrymen prevented his offering
us as a gift to the Republic.

"We left the city that afternoon and climbed the gorges towards Novi,
intending our steps upon Turin. The _mufro_ trotted behind us, and
mile after mile at the brute's behest--its stern behest, Cavalier--
Mr. Badcock fluted its favourite air, _I attempt from love's sickness
to fly_. But at the last shop before passing the gate I had provided
myself with a gun; and at nightfall, on a ledge above the torrent
roaring at our feet, I did the deed. . . . Yes, Cavalier, you behold
a sportsman who has slain a wild sheep of Corsica. Such men are
rare.

"The echoes of the report attracted a company of pedestrians coming
down the pass. They proved to be a party of comedians moving on
Genoa from Turin, whence the Church had expelled them (as I gathered)
upon an unjust suspicion of offending against public morals.
At sight of Badcock, their leader, with little ado, offered him a
place in the troupe. His ignorance of Italian was no bar; for
pantomime, in which he was to play the role of pantaloon, is enacted
(as you are aware) in dumb-show. Nay, on the strength only of our
nationality they enlisted us both; for Englishmen, they told me, are
famous over the continent of Europe for other things and for making
the best clowns. We therefore turned back with them to Genoa.

"But oh, Cavalier! these bodily happenings which I recite to you,
what are they in comparison with the adventures of the spirit?
I am in Italy--in Genoa, to be sure, which of all Italian cities
passes for the unfriendliest to the Muse: but that is my probation.
I have embraced the mission of my life. Here in Italy--here in the
land of the vine, the olive--of Maecenas and the Medicis--it shall
be mine to revive the arts and to make them pay; and if I can win out
of this city of skinflints at a profit, I shall have served my
apprenticeship and shall know my success assured. The Genoese,
cavalier, are a banausic race, and penurious at that; they will go
where the devil cannot, which is between the oak and the rind;
opportunity given, they would sneak the breeches off a highlander:
they divide their time between commercialism and a licentiousness of
which, sordid as it is, they habitually beat down the price. And yet
Genoa is Italy, and has the feeling of Italy--the golden atmosphere,
the clean outlines, the amplitude of its public spaces, the very
shadows in the square, the statues looking down upon the crowd, the
pose, the colouring, of any chance poor onion-seller in the market--"

But here Mr. Fett broke off his harangue to rise and salute the
Princess, who, entering with our host at her heels, turned to
Marc'antonio and bade him, as purse-bearer, count out the money for a
week's lodging. Payment in advance (it seemed) was the rule in
Genoa. Messer' Fazio bit each coin carefully as it was tendered, and
had scarcely pocketed the last before a noise at the front-door
followed by peals of laughter announced the arrival of our
fellow-lodgers. They burst into the room singing a chorus,
_O pescatore da maremma_, and led by Mr. Badcock, who wore a wreath
of seaweed a-cock over one eye and waved a dripping basket of
sea-urchins. Two pretty girls held on to him, one by each arm, and
thrust him staggering through the doorway.

"O pesca--to--o--o--" Mr. Badcock's eyes, alighting on me, grew
suddenly large as gooseberries and he checked himself in the middle
of a roulade. "Eh! why! bless my soul, if it's not--"

"Precisely," interjected Mr. Fett, with a quick warning wink and a
wave of his hand to introduce us. "_I pescatori da maremma_.
. . . To them enter Proteus with his attendant nymphs. . . . They
rush on him and bind him with strings of sausages (will the Donna
Julia oblige by tucking up her sleeves and fetching the sausages from
the back kitchen, _with_ a brazier?) The music, slow at first,
becomes agitated as the old man struggles with his captors; it then
sinks and breaks forth triumphantly, _largo maestoso_, as he
discourses on the future greatness of Genoa. The whole written,
invented, and entirely stage-managed by Il Signore Fetto, Director of
Periodic Festivities to the Genoese Republic. . . . To be serious,
ladies, allow me to present to you four fellow-lodgers from--er--
Porto Fino, whom I have invited to share our repast. What ho!
without, there! A brazier! Fazio--slave--to the macaroni! Bianca,
trip to the cupboard and fetch forth the Val Pulchello. Badcock,
hand me over the basket and go to the ant, thou sluggard; and thou,
Rinaldo, to the kitchen, where already the sausages hiss, awaiting
thee. . . ."

In less than twenty minutes we were seated at table. Master Fazio's
hotel (it appeared) welcomed all manner of strange guests, and
(thanks to Mr. Fett's dextrous tomfooling) the comedians made us at
home at once, without questions asked. Twice I saw Mr. Badcock, as
he held a mouthful of macaroni suspended on his fork, like an angler
dangling his bait over a fish, pause and roll his eyes towards me;
and twice Mr. Fett slapped him opportunely between the
shoulder-blades.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29