Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier: A Novel

Eagerly bent upon adventure, no matter where, how, or with whom, he stood on the mountain’s peak, gazing at the scene beneath him. A waving tract of country, traversed by small streams, stretched away toward Tuscany, but where the boundary lay between the states he could not detect. No town or village could be descried; and, so far as he could see, miles and miles of journey yet lay before him ere he could arrive at a human dwelling. This was indeed the less matter, since Tina had fastened up in his handkerchief sufficient food for the day; and even were night to overtake him, there was no great hardship in passing it beneath that starry sky.

‘Many there must be,’ thought he, ‘campaigning at this very hour, in far-away lands, mayhap amid the sand deserts of the East, or crouching beneath the shelter of the drifted snows in the North; and even here are troops of gypsies, who never know what means the comfort of a roof over them.’ Just as he said these words to himself, his eyes chanced to rest upon a thin line of pale blue smoke that arose from a group of alders beside a stream in the valley. Faint and thin at first, it gradually grew darker and fuller, till it rose into the clear air, and was wafted slowly along toward the sea.

‘Just as if I had conjured them up,’ cried Gerald, ‘there are the gypsies; and if there be a Strega in the company, she shall have this crown for telling me my fortune! What marvels will she not invent for this broad piece – what dragons shall I not slay – what princesses not marry; not but in reality they do possess some wondrous insight into the future! Signor Gabriel sneered at it, as he sneered at everything-; but there’s no denying they read destiny, as the sailor reads the coming storm in signs unseen by others. There is something fine, too, in their clanship; how, poor and houseless, despised as they are, they cling together, hoarding up their ancient rites and traditions – their only wealth – and wandering through the world, pilgrims of centuries old.’

As he descended the mountain path he continued thus to exalt the gypsies in his estimation, and with that unfailing resource in similar cases, that what he was unable to praise he at least found picturesque. The path led through a wood of stunted chestnut-trees, on issuing from whose shade he could no longer detect the spot he was in search of; the fire had gone out, and the smoke ceased to linger over the place.

‘Doubtless the encampment has broken up; they are trudging along toward the coast, where the villages lie,’ thought he, ‘and I may come up with them to-morrow or next day,’ and he stepped out briskly on his way.

The day was intensely hot, and Gerald would gladly have availed himself of any shade, to lie down and enjoy the ‘siesta’ hours in true Italian fashion. The only spot, however, he could procure likely to offer such shelter was a little copse of olives, at a bend of the river, about a mile away. A solitary rock, with a few ruined walls upon it, rose above the trees, and marked the place as one once inhabited. Following the winding of the stream, he at length drew nigh, and quickly noticed that the grass was greener and deeper, with here and there a daffodil or a wild-flower, signs of a soil which, in some past time, had been cared for and cultivated. The river, too, as it swept around the base of the rock, deepened into a clear, calm pool, the very sight of which was intensely grateful and refreshing. As the youth stood in admiring contemplation of this fair bath, and inwardly vowing to himself the luxury of a plunge into it, a low rustling noise startled him, and a sound like the sharp stamp of a beast’s foot. He quickly turned, and, tracing the noise, saw a very diminutive ass, who, tethered to an olive-tree, was busily munching a meal of thistles, and as busily stamping off the stray forest flies that settled on him. Two panniers, covered over with some tarnished scarlet cloth, and a drum of considerable size and very gaudy colouring, lay on the grass, with three or four painted poles, a roll of carpet, and a bright brass basin, such as conjurers use for their trade. There was also a curiously-shaped box, painted in checkers, doubtless some mysteriously gifted ‘property.’

Curious to discover the owners of these interesting relics, Gerald advanced into the copse, when his quick hearing was arrested by the long-drawn breathings of several people fast asleep – so, at least, they seemed, by the full-toned chorus of their snorings; though the next moment showed him that they consisted of but three persons, an old, stunted, and very emaciated man; an equally old woman, immensely fat and misshapen, to which her tawdry finery gave something indescribably ludicrous in effect; and a young girl, whose face was buried in the bend of her arms, but whose form, as she lay in the graceful abandonment of sleep, was finely and beautifully proportioned. A coarse dress of brown stuff was her only covering, leaving her arms bare, while her legs, but for the sandals of some tawdry tinsel, were naked to the knees and as brown as the skin of an Indian, yet in shape and symmetry they might have vied with the most faultless statue of the antique – indeed, to a sleeping nymph in the gallery of the Altieri Palace was Gerald now comparing her, as he stood gazing on her. The richly floating hair, which, as a protection against the zanzari, she had let fall over her neck and shoulders, only partially defended her, and so she stirred at times, each motion displaying some new charm, some fresh grace of form. At last, perhaps startled by a thought of her dreams, she gave a sudden cry, and sprang up to a sitting posture, her eyes widely staring and her half-opened lips turned to where Gerald stood. As for him, the amazement that seized him overcame him – for she was no other than the tarantella dancer of the Piazza di Spagna, the Marietta who had so fascinated him on the night he left the convent.

‘Babbo! Babbo!’ screamed she, in terror, as she caught sight of the naked rapier at the youth’s side; and in a moment both the old man and the woman were on their legs.

‘We are poor, miserably poor, Signore!’ cried the old man piteously; ‘mere “vagabonds,” and no more.’

‘We have not a Bajocclo among us, Signore mio,’ blubbered out the old woman.

An honest burst of laughter from Gerald, far more reassuring than words, soon satisfied them that their fears were needless.

‘Who are you, then?’ cried the girl, as she darted her piercing black eyes toward him; ‘and why are you here?’

‘The world is wide, and open to all of us, cara mia,’ said the youth good-humouredly. ‘Don’t be angry with me because I ‘m not a brigand.’

‘He says truly,’ said the old man.

‘Sangue dei Santi, but you have given me a hearty fright, boy, what ever brought you here!’ said the fat old woman, as she wiped the hot drops from her steaming face.

There is some marvellous freemasonry in poverty – some subtle sympathy links poor men together – for scarcely had Gerald told that he was destitute and penniless as themselves, than these poor outcasts bade him a frank welcome among them, and invited him to a share of their little scanty supper.

‘I ‘ll warrant me that you have drawn a low number in the conscription, boy; and that’s the reason you have fled from home,’ said the old woman; and Gerald laughed good-humouredly, as though accepting the suggestion as a happy guess; nor was he sorry to be spared the necessity of recounting his story.

‘But why not be a soldier?’ broke in Marietta.

‘Because it’s a dog’s life,’ retorted the hag savagely.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Gerald. ‘When I saw the noble guard of his Holiness prancing into the Piazza del Popolo, I longed to be one of them. They were all glittering with gold and polished steel, and their horses bounded and caracoled as if impatient for a charge.’

‘Ah!’ sighed the old man drearily, ‘there’s only one happy road in this life.’

‘And what may that be, Babbo?’ said Gerald, addressing him by the familiar title the girl had given him.

‘A Frate’s, boy, a Frate’s. I don’t care whether he be a Dominican or an Ignorantine. Though, myself, I like the Ignorantines. Theirs is truly a blessed existence: no wants – no cares – no thoughts for the morrow! I never watched one of them stepping along, with firm foot and sack on his arm, that I didn’t say to myself, “There’s freedom – there’s light-heartedness.”’

‘I should have called your own a pleasanter life.’

‘Mine!’ groaned he.

‘Ay, Babbo, and so is it,’ burst in the girl, in an excited tone. ‘Show me the Frate has such a time as we have! Whenever the friar comes, men shuffle away to escape giving him their “quattrini.” They know well there’s no such sturdy beggar as he who asks no alms, but shows you the mouth of his long empty sack; but where we appear the crowds gather, mothers snatch up their babies and hurry out to greet us; hard-worked men cease their toil; children desert their games; all press round eagerly at the first roll of Gaetana’s drum, and of poor Chico’s fife, when he was with us,’ added she, dropping her head, while a heavy tear rolled down her swarthy cheek.

‘Maladizione a Chico!’ screamed out the old man, lifting up both his clenched hands in passion.

‘What was it he did?’ asked Gerald of the old man.

‘He fancied himself a patriot, boy, and he stabbed a spy of the police at the St. Lucia one evening; and they have him now at the galleys, and they ‘ll keep him there for life!

‘Ah! if you saw him on the two poles,’ cried the girl, ‘only strapped so, over his instep, and he could spring from here to the tree yonder; and then he ‘d unfasten one, and holding it on his forehead, balance Babbo’s basin on the top, all the while playing the tambourine! And who could play it like him? It was a drum with cymbals in his hands.’

‘Was he handsome, too?’ asked Gerald, with a half-sly glance toward her; but she only hung her head in silence.

‘He handsome!’ cried the old woman, catching at the words. ‘Brutto! brutto! he had a hare-lip, with a dog’s jaw!’

‘No, truly,’ muttered Babbo; ‘he was not handsome, though he could do many a thing well-favoured ones couldn’t attempt. He was a sore loss to us,’ said he, with a deep sigh.

‘There wasn’t a beast of the field nor a bird that flies he couldn’t imitate,’ broke in Marietta; ‘and with some wondrous cunning, too, he could blend the sounds together, and you ‘d hear the cattle lowing and the rooks cawing all at the same time.’

‘The owl was good; that was his best,’ said Babbo.

‘Oh, was it not fine! – the wild shriek of the owl, while the tide was breaking on the shore, and the waves came in plash, plash, in the still night.’

‘May his toil be hard and his chains heavy!’ exclaimed the hag; ‘we have had nothing but misery and distress since the day he was taken.’

‘Poor fellow,’ said Gerald, ‘his lot is harder still.’ The girl’s dark eyes turned fully upon him, with a look of grateful meaning, that well repaid his compassionate speech.

‘So may it be,’ chimed in the hag; ‘and so with all who ill-treat those whose bread they’ve eaten,’ and she turned a glance of fiery anger on the girl. ‘What art doing there, old fool!’ cried she to the Babbo, who, having turned his back to the company, was telling over his beads busily. He made no reply, and she went on: ‘That’s all he’s good for now. There was a time he could sing Punch’s carnival from beginning to end, keep four dancing on the stage, and two talking out of windows; but now he’s ever at the litanies: he’d rather talk to you about St. Francis than of the Tombola, he would!’

As the old hag, with bitter words and savage energy, inveighed against her old associate, Gerald had sense to mark that, small as the company was, it yet consisted of ingredients that bore little resemblance, and were attached by the slenderest sympathies to each other. He was young and inexperienced enough in life to imagine that they who amuse the world by their gifts, whatever they be, carry with them to their homes the pleasant qualities which delight the audiences. He fancied that, through all their poverty, the light-hearted gaiety that marked them in public would abide with them when alone, and that the quips and jests they bandied were but the outpourings of a ready wit always in exercise.

The Babbo had been a servitor of a convent in the Abruzzi, and, dismissed for some misdemeanour, had wandered about the world in vagabondage till he became a conjurer, some talent or long-neglected gift of slight-of-hand coming to the rescue of his fortune. The woman, Donna Gaetana, had passed through all the stages of ‘Street Ballet,’ from the prodigy of six years old, with a wreath of violets on her brow, to the besotted old beldame, whose specialty was the drum. As for Marietta, where she came from, of what parentage, or even of what land, I know not. The Babbo called her his niece – his grandchild – his ‘figliuola’ at times, but she was none of these. In the wayward turns of their fortune these street performers are wont to join occasionally together in the larger capitals, that by their number they may attract more favourable audiences; and so, when Gerald first saw them at Rome, they were united with some Pifferari from Sicily; but the same destiny that decides more pretentious coalitions had separated theirs, and the three were now trudging northward in some vague hope that the land of promise lay in that direction. It is needless to say how Gerald felt attracted by the strange adventurous life of which they spoke. The Babbo, mingling his old convent traditions, his scraps of monkish Latin, his little fragments of a pious training, with the descriptions of his subtle craft, was a study the youth delighted in, while from his own early teaching, it was also a character he could thoroughly appreciate. Donna Gaetana, indeed, offered little in the way of interest, but did not Marietta alone compensate for more than this? The wild and fearless grace of this young girl, daring to the very verge of shamelessness, and yet with a strange instinctive sense of womanly delicacy about her, that lifted her, in her raggedness, to a sphere where deference was her due; her matchless symmetry, her easy motion, a mingled expression of energy and languor about her, all met happily in one who but needed culture to have become a great artiste. She possessed, besides, a voice of exquisite richness, one of those deep-toned organs whose thrilling expression seems to attain at once the highest triumph of musical art in the power of exciting the sensibilities: such was that poor neglected child, as she hovered over the brink where vice and wretchedness and crime run deep and fast below!

When the meal was over, and the little vessels used in preparing it were all duly washed and packed, old Gaetana lighted her pipe, and once in full puff proceeded to drag from a portentous-looking bag a mass of strange rags, dirty and particoloured, the slashed sleeves and spangled skirts proclaiming them as ‘properties.’

‘Clap that velvet cap on thy head, boy, and let’s see what thou lookest like,’ cried she, handing Gerald a velvet hat, looped up in front, and ornamented with an ostrich feather.

‘What for?’ cried he rudely; ‘I am no mountebank.’ And then, as he caught Marietta’s eyes, a deep blush burned all over his face, and he said, in a voice of shame, ‘To be sure! Anything you like. I’ll wear this too,’ and he snatched up a tawdry mantle and threw it over his shoulders.

‘Come e bellino!’ said Marietta, as she clasped her hands across her bosom, and gazed on him in a sort of rapture. ‘He’s like Paolo in the Francesca,’ muttered she.

‘He’ll never be Chico,’ growled out the hag. ‘Birbante that he was, who ‘ll ever jump through nine hoops with A lighted taper in his hand? Oh, Assassino! it won’t serve you now!’

‘Do you know Paolo’s speech?’ whispered Marietta.

‘No,’ said he, blushing, half angry, half ashamed.

‘Then I ‘ll teach it to you.’

‘Thou shouldst have been an acolyte at San Giovanni di Laterano when the Pope says the high mass, boy,’ cried Babbo enthusiastically. ‘Thy figure and face would well become the beauteous spectacle.’

‘Does not that suit him?’ cried the girl, as she replaced the hat by a round cap, such as pages wear, with a single eagle’s feather. ‘Does not that become him?’

‘Who cares for looks?’ muttered the hag. ‘Chico was ugly enough to bring bad luck; and when shall we see his like again?’

‘Who knows! who knows?’ said Babbo slowly. ‘This lad may, if he join us, have many a good gift we suspect not. Canst sing?’

‘Yes; at least the litanies.’

‘Ah, bravo, Giovane!’ cried the old man. ‘Thou It bring a blessing upon us.’

‘Canst play the fife, the tambourine, the flute?’ asked Gaetana.

‘None of them.’

‘Thou canst recite, I’m sure,’ said Marietta. ‘Thou knowest Tasso and Petrarch, surely, and Guarini?’

‘Yes; and Dante by heart, if that be of any service to me,’ said Gerald.

‘Ah! I know nothing of him,’ said she sorrowfully; ‘but I could repeat the Orlando from beginning to end.’

‘How art thou on the stilts or the slack-rope?’ asked the old woman; ‘for these other things never gave bread to any one.’

‘If I must depend upon the slack-rope, then,’ said Gerald, good-humouredly, ‘I run a good chance of going supperless to bed.’

‘How they neglect them when they’re young, and their bones soft and pliant!’ said Gaetana sternly. ‘What parents are about nowadays I can’t imagine. I used to crouch into a flower-pot when I was five years old; ay, and spring out of it too when the Fairy Queen touched the flower!’

Gerald could with great difficulty restrain the burst of laughter this anecdote of her early life provoked.

‘Oh, come with us; stay with us,’ whispered Marietta in his ear.

‘If thou hast been taught the offices, boy,’ said Babbo, ‘thou deservest an honester life than ours. Leave us, then; go thy ways, and walk in better company.’

‘Corpo del diavolo!’ screamed out the hag. ‘It’s always so with him. He has nothing but hard words for the trade he lives by.’

‘Stay with us; stay with us,’ whispered the girl, more faintly.

‘Thou mightst have a worse offer, lad; for who can tell what’s in thee? I warrant me, thou ‘It never be great at jumping tricks,’ said Babbo.

‘Wilt stay?’ said Marietta, as her eyes swam in tears.

‘I will,’ said Gerald, with a glance that made her cheek crimson.