Part 8 (2/2)
For where could the image of the patron saint be more fitly placed than on the symbol of the Zecca? Was not the royal prerogative of coining money the surest token that a city had won its independence? and by the blessing of San Giovanni this ”beautiful sheepfold” of his had shown that token earliest among the Italian cities. Nevertheless, the annual function of representing the patron saint was not among the high prizes of public life; it was paid for with something like ten s.h.i.+llings, a cake weighing fourteen pounds, two bottles of wine, and a handsome supply of light eatables; the money being furnished by the magnificent Zecca, and the payment in kind being by peculiar ”privilege” presented in a basket suspended on a pole from an upper window of a private house, whereupon the eidolon of the austere saint at once invigorated himself with a reasonable share of the sweets and wine, threw the remnants to the crowd, and embraced the mighty cake securely with his right arm through the remainder of his pa.s.sage. This was the att.i.tude in which the mimic San Giovanni presented himself as the tall car jerked and vibrated on its slow way round the piazza to the northern gate of the Baptistery.
”There go the Masters of the Zecca, and there is my brother--you see him, Melema?” cried Cennini, with an agreeable stirring of pride at showing a stranger what was too familiar to be remarkable to fellow-citizens. ”Behind come the members of the Corporation of Calimara, [Note 2] the dealers in foreign cloth, to which we have given our Florentine finish; men of ripe years, you see, who were matriculated before you were born; and then comes the famous Art of Money-changers.”
”Many of them matriculated also to the n.o.ble art of usury before you were born,” interrupted Francesco Cei, ”as you may discern by a certain fitful glare of the eye and sharp curve of the nose which manifest their descent from the ancient Harpies, whose portraits you saw supporting the arms of the Zecca. Shaking off old prejudices now, such a procession as that of some four hundred pa.s.sably ugly men carrying their tapers in open daylight, Diogenes-fas.h.i.+on, as if they were looking for a lost quattrino, would make a merry spectacle for the Feast of Fools.”
”Blaspheme not against the usages of our city,” said Pietro Cennini, much offended. ”There are new wits who think they see things more truly because they stand on their heads to look at them, like tumblers and mountebanks, instead of keeping the att.i.tude of rational men. Doubtless it makes little difference to Maestro Vaiano's monkeys whether they see our Donatello's statue of Judith with their heads or their tails uppermost.”
”Your solemnity will allow some quarter to playful fancy, I hope,” said Cei, with a shrug, ”else what becomes of the ancients, whose example you scholars are bound to revere, Messer Pietro? Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.”
”Keep your jest then till your end of the pole is uppermost,” said Cennini, still angry, ”and that is not when the great bond of our Republic is expressing itself in ancient symbols, without which the vulgar would be conscious of nothing beyond their own petty wants of back and stomach, and never rise to the sense of community in religion and law. There has been no great people without processions, and the man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone while the river rushed by.”
No one said anything after this indignant burst of Cennini's till he himself spoke again.
”Hark! the trumpets of the Signoria: now comes the last stage of the show, Melema. That is our Gonfaloniere in the middle, in the starred mantle, with the sword carried before him. Twenty years ago we used to see our foreign Podesta, who was our judge in civil causes, walking on his right-hand; but our Republic has been over-doctored by clever _Medici_. That is the Proposto [Spokesman or Moderator] of the Priori on the left; then come the other seven Priori; then all the other magistracies and officials of our Republic. You see your patron the Segretario?”
”There is Messer Bernardo del Nero also,” said t.i.to; ”his visage is a fine and venerable one, though it has worn rather a petrifying look towards me.”
”Ah,” said Nello, ”he is the dragon that guards the remnant of old Bardo's gold, which, I fancy, is chiefly that virgin gold that falls about the fair Romola's head and shoulders; eh, my Apollino?” he added, patting t.i.to's head.
t.i.to had the youthful grace of blus.h.i.+ng, but he had also the adroit and ready speech that prevents a blush from looking like embarra.s.sment. He replied at once--
”And a very Pactolus it is--a stream with golden ripples. If I were an alchemist--”
He was saved from the need for further speech by the sudden fortissimo of drums and trumpets and fifes, bursting into the breadth of the piazza in a grand storm of sound--a roar, a blast, and a whistling, well befitting a city famous for its musical instruments, and reducing the members of the closest group to a state of deaf isolation.
During this interval Nello observed t.i.to's fingers moving in recognition of some one in the crowd below, but not seeing the direction of his glance he failed to detect the object of this greeting--the sweet round blue-eyed face under a white hood--immediately lost in the narrow border of heads, where there was a continual eclipse of round contadina cheeks by the harsh-lined features or bent shoulders of an old spadesman, and where profiles turned as sharply from north to south as weatherc.o.c.ks under a s.h.i.+fting wind.
But when it was felt that the show was ended--when the twelve prisoners released in honour of the day, and the very _barberi_ or race-horses, with the arms of their owners embroidered on their cloths, had followed up the Signoria, and been duly consecrated to San Giovanni, and every one was moving from the window--Nello, whose Florentine curiosity was of that lively canine sort which thinks no trifle too despicable for investigation, put his hand on t.i.to's shoulder and said--
”What acquaintance was that you were making signals to, eh, _giovane mio_?”
”Some little contadina who probably mistook me for an acquaintance, for she had honoured me with a greeting.”
”Or who wished to begin an acquaintance,” said Nello. ”But you are bound for the Via de' Bardi and the feast of the Muses: there is no counting on you for a frolic, else we might have gone in search of adventures together in the crowd, and had some pleasant fooling in honour of San Giovanni. But your high fortune has come on you too soon: I don't mean the professor's mantle--_that_ is roomy enough to hide a few stolen chickens, but--Messer Endymion minded his manners after that singular good fortune of his; and what says our Luigi Pulci?
”'Da quel giorno in qua ch'amor m'accese Per lei son fatto e gentile e cortese.'”
”Nello, _amico mio_, thou hast an intolerable trick of making life stale by forestalling it with thy talk,” said t.i.to, shrugging his shoulders, with a look of patient resignation, which was his nearest approach to anger: ”not to mention that such ill-founded babbling would be held a great offence by that same G.o.ddess whose humble wors.h.i.+pper you are always professing yourself.”
”I will be mute,” said Nello, laying his finger on his lips, with a responding shrug. ”But it is only under our four eyes that I talk any folly about her.”
”Pardon! you were on the verge of it just now in the hearing of others.
If you want to ruin me in the minds of Bardo and his daughter--”
”Enough, enough!” said Nello. ”I am an absurd old barber. It all comes from that abstinence of mine, in not making bad verses in my youth: for want of letting my folly run out that way when I was eighteen, it runs out at my tongue's end now I am at the unseemly age of fifty. But Nello has not got his head m.u.f.fled for all that; he can see a buffalo in the snow. _Addio, giovane mio_.”
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