Part 92 (2/2)
In these ”camere locande” the landlady dressed all the meals, though the lodgers bought the provisions. So Gerard's hostess speedily detected him, and asked him if he was not ashamed of himself: by which brusque opening, having made him blush and look scared, she pacified herself all in a moment, and appealed to his good sense whether Adversity was a thing to be overcome on an empty stomach.
”Patienza, my lad! times will mend, meantime I will feed you for the love of heaven” (Italian for ”gratis”).
”Nay, hostess,” said Gerard, ”my purse is not yet quite void, and it would add to my trouble an if true folk should lose their due by me.”
”Why you are as mad as your neighbour Pietro, with his one bad picture.”
”Why, how know you 'tis a bad picture?”
”Because n.o.body will buy it. There is one that hath no gift. He will have to don casque and glaive, and carry his panel for a s.h.i.+eld.”
Gerard p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at this: so she told him more. Pietro had come from Florence with money in his purse, and an unfinished picture; had taken her one unfurnished room, opposite Gerard's, and furnished it neatly. When his picture was finished, he received visitors and had offers for it: these, though in her opinion liberal ones, he had refused so disdainfully as to make enemies of his customers. Since then he had often taken it out with him to try and sell, but had always brought it back; and, the last month, she had seen one movable after another go out of his room, and now he wore but one suit, and lay at night on a great chest. She had found this out only by peeping through the keyhole, for he locked the door most vigilantly whenever he went out. ”Is he afraid we shall steal his chest, or his picture that no soul in all Rome is weak enough to buy?”
”Nay, sweet hostess, see you not 'tis his poverty he would screen from view?”
”And the more fool he! Are all our hearts as ill as his? A might give us a trial first any way.”
”How you speak of him. Why his case is mine; and your countryman to boot.”
”Oh, we Siennese love strangers. His case yours? nay 'tis just the contrary. You are the comeliest youth ever lodged in this house; hair like gold; he is a dark sour-visaged loon. Besides you know how to take a woman on her better side; but not he. Natheless I wish he would not starve to death in my house, to get me a bad name. Any way, one starveling is enough in any house. You are far from home, and it is for me, which am the mistress here, to number your meals--for me and the Dutch wife, your mother, that is far away: we two women shall settle that matter. Mind thou thine own business, being a man, and leave cooking and the like to us, that are in the world for little else that I see but to roast fowls, and suckle men at starting, and sweep their grown-up cobwebs.”
”Dear kind dame, in sooth you do often put me in mind of my mother that is far away.”
”All the better; I'll put you more in mind of her before I have done with you.” And the honest soul beamed with pleasure.
Gerard not being an egotist, nor blinded by female partialities, saw his own grief in poor proud Pietro; and the more he thought of it, the more he resolved to share his humble means with that unlucky artist; Pietro's sympathy would repay him. He tried to waylay him: but without success.
One day he heard a groaning in the room. He knocked at the door, but received no answer. He knocked again. A surly voice bade him enter.
He obeyed somewhat timidly, and entered a garret furnished with a chair, a picture, face to wall, an iron basin, an easel, and a long chest, on which was coiled a haggard young man with a wonderfully bright eye.
Anything more like a coiled cobra ripe for striking the first comer was never seen.
”Good Signor Pietro,” said Gerard, ”forgive me that, weary of my own solitude, I intrude on yours; but I am your nighest neighbour in this house, and methinks your brother in fortune. I am an artist too.”
”You are a painter? Welcome, signor. Sit down on my bed.”
And Pietro jumped off and waved him into the vacant throne with a magnificent demonstration of courtesy.
Gerard bowed, and smiled; but hesitated a little. ”I may not call myself a painter. I am a writer, a caligraph. I copy Greek and Latin ma.n.u.scripts, when I can get them to copy.”
”And you call that an artist?”
”Without offense to your superior merit, Signor Pietro.”
”No offence, stranger, none. Only, me seemeth an artist is one who thinks and paints his thought. Now a caligraph but draws in black and white the thoughts of another.”
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