Part 19 (1/2)

”Do not stay here,” Zorzi said. ”You can do nothing for me, and the surgeon will come presently.”

Then the foreman also left him, and he was alone. It was not in his nature to give way to bodily pain, but he was glad the men were gone, for he could not have borne much more in silence. He turned his head to the wall and bit the edge of the leathern cus.h.i.+on. Now and then his whole body shook convulsively.

He did not hear the door open again, for the torturing pain that shot through him dulled all his other senses. He wished that he might faint away, even for a moment, but his nerves were too sound for that. He was recalled to outer things by feeling a hand laid gently on his leg, and immediately afterwards he heard a man's voice, in a quietly gruff tone that scarcely rose or fell, reciting a whole litany of the most appalling blasphemies that ever fell from human lips. For an instant, in his suffering, Zorzi fancied that he had died and was in the clutches of Satan himself.

He turned his head on the cus.h.i.+on and saw the ugly face of the old porter, who was bending down and examining the wounded foot while he steadily cursed everything in heaven and earth, with an earnestness that would have been grotesque had his language been less frightful. For a few moments Zorzi almost forgot that he was hurt, as he listened. Not a saint in the calendar seemed likely to escape the porter's fury, and he even went to the length of cursing the relatives, male and female, of half-legendary martyrs and other good persons about whose families he could not possibly know anything.

”For heaven's sake, Pasquale!” cried Zorzi. ”You will certainly be struck by lightning!”

He had always supposed that the porter hated him, as every one else did, and he could not understand. By this time he was far more helpless than he had been just after he had been hurt, and when he tried to move the injured foot to a more comfortable position it felt like a lump of scorching lead.

The porter entered upon a final malediction, which might be supposed to have gathered destructive force by collecting into itself all those that had gone before, and he directed the whole complex anathema upon the soul of the coward who had done the foul deed, and upon his mother, his sisters and his daughters if he had any, and upon the souls of all his dead relations, men, women and children, and all of his relations that should ever be born, to the end of time. He had been a sailor in his youth.

”Who did that to you?” he asked, when he had thus devoted the unknown offender to everlasting perdition.

”Give me some water, please,” said Zorzi, instead of answering the question.

”Water! Oh yes!” Pasquale went to the earthen jar. ”Water! Every devil in h.e.l.l, old and young, will jump and laugh for joy when that man asks for water and has to drink flames!”

Zorzi drank eagerly, though the water was tepid.

”Drink, my son,” said Pasquale, holding his head up very tenderly with one of his rough hands. ”I will put more within reach for you to drink, while I go and get help.”

”They have sent for a surgeon,” answered Zorzi.

”A surgeon? No surgeon shall come here. A surgeon will divide you into lengths, fore and aft, and kill you by inches, a length each day, and for every day he takes to kill you, he will ask a piece of silver of the master! If a surgeon comes here I will throw him out into the ca.n.a.l. This is a burn, and it needs an old woman to dress it. Women are evil beings, a chastis.e.m.e.nt sent upon us for our sins. But an old woman can dress a burn. I go. There is the water.”

Zorzi called him back when he was already at the door.

”The fire! It must not go down. Put a little wood in, Pasquale!”

The old porter grumbled. It was unnatural that a man so badly hurt should think of his duties, but in his heart he admired Zorzi all the more for it. He took some wood, and when Zorzi looked, he was trying to poke it through the 'bocca.'

”Not there!” cried Zorzi desperately. ”The small opening on the side, near the floor.”

Pasquale uttered several maledictions.

”How should I know?” he asked when he had found the right place. ”Am I a night boy? Have I ever tended fires for two pence a night and my supper? There! I go!”

Zorzi could hear his voice still, as he went out.

”A surgeon!” he grumbled. ”I should like to see the nose of that surgeon at the door!”

Zorzi cared little who came, so that he got some relief. His head was hot now, and the blood beat in his temples like little fiery hammers, that made a sort of screaming noise in his brain. He saw queer lights in circles, and the beams of the ceiling came down very near, and then suddenly went very far away, so that the room seemed a hundred feet high. The pain filled all his right side, and he even thought he could feel it in his arm.

All at once he started, and as he lay on his back his hands tried to grip the flat wood of the bench, and his eyes were wide open and fixed in a sort of frightened stare.

What if he should go mad with pain? Who would remember the fire in the master's furnace? Worse than that, what safety was there that in his delirium he should not speak of the book that was hidden under the stone, the third from the oven and the fourth from the corner?