Sir John Constantine Part 55

Now along the quays we had met and pa.s.sed but a few idlers, the hour being early for business; but in the market, when we reached it, we found a throng--citizens and citizens' wives and housekeepers, all armed with baskets and chaffering around the stalls. The crowd daunted me at first; but finding it too intent to heed us, I drew breath and was observing it at leisure when my eyes fell on the back of a man who, bending over a stall on my right, held forth a cabbage in one hand while with the other--so far as the basket on his arm allowed--he gesticulated violently, cheapening the price against an equally voluble saleswoman.

Good heavens! That back--that voice--surely I knew them!

The man turned, holding the cabbage aloft and calling G.o.ds, mortals, and especially the population of Genoa, to witness. It was Mr.

Pett!--and, catching sight of me, he stared wildly, almost dropping the vegetable.

"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 cuc.u.mbers!

"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 d.a.m.ned 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 Badc.o.c.k too--il signore Badcocchio: give Badc.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sed beyond an interchange of winks: but we might send Badc.o.c.k 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sers-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 gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sably 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.s--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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sion for gardening, albeit that for long he had neither the time nor the money nor even the s.p.a.ce 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 Sat.u.r.days, an old fellow over whose head some sixty-five summers had pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 ma.s.s 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 _pa.s.sions?_ Why, sir, yet another story occurs to me, which might pa.s.s for an express epologue upon your father's career. Did you never hear tell of the Grand d.u.c.h.ess 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--"