Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (161 page)

In this general distraction, the Florentine boys, who were never wanting in any street scene, and were of an especially mischievous sort — as who should say, very sour crabs indeed — saw a great opportunity. Some made a rush at the nuts and dried figs, others preferred the farinaceous delicacies at the cooked provision stalls — delicacies to which certain four-footed dogs also, who had learned to take kindly to Lenten fare, applied a discriminating nostril, and then disappeared with much rapidity under the nearest shelter; while the mules, not without some kicking and plunging among impeding baskets, were stretching their muzzles towards the aromatic green-meat.

“Diavolo!” said Bratti, as he and his companion came, quite unnoticed, upon the noisy scene; “the Mercato is gone as mad as if the most Holy Father had excommunicated us again. I must know what this is. But never fear: it seems a thousand years to you till you see the pretty Tessa, and get your cup of milk; but keep hold of me, and I’ll hold to my bargain. Remember, I’m to have the first bid for your suit, specially for the hose, which, with all their stains, are the best
panno di garbo
— as good as ruined, though, with mud and weather stains.”

“Ola, Monna Trecca,” Bratti proceeded, turning towards an old woman on the outside of the nearest group, who for the moment had suspended her wail to listen, and shouting close in her ear: “Here are the mules upsetting all your bunches of parsley: is the world coming to an end, then?”

“Monna Trecca” (equivalent to “Dame Greengrocer”) turned round at this unexpected trumpeting in her right ear, with a half-fierce, half-bewildered look, first at the speaker, then at her disarranged commodities, and then at the speaker again.

“A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die by the sword!” she burst out, rushing towards her stall, but directing this first volley of her wrath against Bratti, who, without heeding the malediction, quietly slipped into her place, within hearing of the narrative which had been absorbing her attention; making a sign at the same time to the younger stranger to keep near him.

“I tell you I saw it myself,” said a fat man, with a bunch of newly-purchased leeks in his hand. “I was in Santa Maria Novella, and saw it myself. The woman started up and threw out her arms, and cried out and said she saw a big bull with fiery horns coming down on the church to crush it. I saw it myself.”

“Saw what, Goro?” said a man of slim figure, whose eye twinkled rather roguishly. He wore a close jerkin, a skull-cap lodged carelessly over his left ear as if it had fallen there by chance, a delicate linen apron tucked up on one side, and a razor stuck in his belt. “Saw the bull, or only the woman?”

“Why, the woman, to be sure; but it’s all one,
mi pare
: it doesn’t alter the meaning —
va
!” answered the fat man, with some contempt.

“Meaning? no, no; that’s clear enough,” said several voices at once, and then followed a confusion of tongues, in which “Lights shooting over San Lorenzo for three nights together” — “Thunder in the clear starlight” — “Lantern of the Duomo struck with the sword of Saint Michael” — “
Palle
” (Arms of the Medici) — “All smashed” — “Lions tearing each other to pieces” — “Ah! and they might well” — “
Boto (Note 1) caduto in Santissima Nunziata
!” — “Died like the best of Christians” — “God will have pardoned him” — were often-repeated phrases, which shot across each other like storm-driven hailstones, each speaker feeling rather the necessity of utterance than of finding a listener. Perhaps the only silent members of the group were Bratti, who, as a new-comer, was busy in mentally piecing together the flying fragments of information; the man of the razor; and a thin-lipped, eager-looking personage in spectacles, wearing a pen-and-ink case at his belt.

“
Ebbene
, Nello,” said Bratti, skirting the group till he was within hearing of the barber. “It appears the Magnifico is dead — rest his soul! — and the price of wax will rise?”

“Even as you say,” answered Nello; and then added, with an air of extra gravity, but with marvellous rapidity, “and his waxen image in the Nunziata fell at the same moment, they say; or at some other time, whenever it pleases the Frati Serviti, who know best. And several cows and women have had still-born calves this Quaresima; and for the bad eggs that have been broken since the Carnival, nobody has counted them. Ah! a great man — a great politician — a greater poet than Dante. And yet the cupola didn’t fall, only the lantern.
Che miracolo
!”

A sharp and lengthened “Pst!” was suddenly heard darting across the pelting storm of gutturals. It came from the pale man in spectacles, and had the effect he intended; for the noise ceased, and all eyes in the group were fixed on him with a look of expectation.

“‘Tis well said you Florentines are blind,” he began, in an incisive high voice. “It appears to me, you need nothing but a diet of hay to make cattle of you. What! do you think the death of Lorenzo is the scourge God has prepared for Florence? Go! you are sparrows chattering praise over the dead hawk. What! a man who was trying to slip a noose over every neck in the Republic that he might tighten it at his pleasure! You like that; you like to have the election of your magistrates turned into closet-work, and no man to use the rights of a citizen unless he is a Medicean. That is what is meant by qualification now:
netto di specchio
(Note 2) no longer means that a man pays his dues to the Republic: it means that he’ll wink at robbery of the people’s money — at robbery of their daughters’ dowries; that he’ll play the chamberer and the philosopher by turns — listen to bawdy songs at the Carnival and cry ‘Bellissimi!’ — and listen to sacred lauds and cry again ‘Bellissimi!’ But this is what you love: you grumble and raise a riot over your
quattrini bianchi
” (white farthings); “but you take no notice when the public treasury has got a hole in the bottom for the gold to run into Lorenzo’s drains. You like to pay for footmen to walk before and behind one of your citizens, that he may be affable and condescending to you. ‘See, what a tall Pisan we keep,’ say you, ‘to march before him with the drawn sword flashing in our eyes! — and yet Lorenzo smiles at us. What goodness!’ And you think the death of a man, who would soon have saddled and bridled you as the Sforza has saddled and bridled Milan — you think his death is the scourge God is warning you of by portents. I tell you there is another sort of scourge in the air.”

“Nay, nay, Ser Cioni, keep astride your politics, and never mount your prophecy; politics is the better horse,” said Nello. “But if you talk of portents, what portent can be greater than a pious notary? Balaam’s ass was nothing to it.”

“Ay, but a notary out of work, with his inkbottle dry,” said another bystander, very much out at elbows. “Better don a cowl at once, Ser Cioni: everybody will believe in your fasting.”

The notary turned and left the group with a look of indignant contempt, disclosing, as he did so, the sallow but mild face of a short man who had been standing behind him, and whose bent shoulders told of some sedentary occupation.

“By San Giovanni, though,” said the fat purchaser of leeks, with the air of a person rather shaken in his theories, “I am not sure there isn’t some truth in what Ser Cioni says. For I know I have good reason to find fault with the
quattrini bianchi
myself. Grumble, did he say? Suffocation! I should think we do grumble; and, let anybody say the word, I’ll turn out into the piazza with the readiest, sooner than have our money altered in our hands as if the magistracy were so many necromancers. And it’s true Lorenzo might have hindered such work if he would — and for the bull with the flaming horns, why, as Ser Cioni says, there may be many meanings to it, for the matter of that; it may have more to do with the taxes than we think. For when God above sends a sign, it’s not to be supposed he’d have only one meaning.”

“Spoken like an oracle, Goro!” said the barber. “Why, when we poor mortals can pack two or three meanings into one sentence, it were mere blasphemy not to believe that your miraculous bull means everything that any man in Florence likes it to mean.”

“Thou art pleased to scoff, Nello,” said the sallow, round-shouldered man, no longer eclipsed by the notary, “but it is not the less true that every revelation, whether by visions, dreams, portents, or the written word, has many meanings, which it is given to the illuminated only to unfold.”

“Assuredly,” answered Nello. “Haven’t I been to hear the Frate in San Lorenzo? But then, I’ve been to hear Fra Menico in the Duomo too; and according to him, your Fra Girolamo, with his visions and interpretations, is running after the wind of Mongibello, and those who follow him are like to have the fate of certain swine that ran headlong into the sea — or some hotter place. With San Domenico roaring
è vero
in one ear, and San Francisco screaming
è falso
in the other, what is a poor barber to do — unless he were illuminated? But it’s plain our Goro here is beginning to be illuminated for he already sees that the bull with the flaming horns means first himself, and secondly all the other aggrieved taxpayers of Florence, who are determined to gore the magistracy on the first opportunity.”

“Goro is a fool!” said a bass voice, with a note that dropped like the sound of a great bell in the midst of much tinkling. “Let him carry home his leeks and shake his flanks over his wool-beating. He’ll mend matters more that way than by showing his tun-shaped body in the piazza, as if everybody might measure his grievances by the size of his paunch. The burdens that harm him most are his heavy carcass and his idleness.”

The speaker had joined the group only in time to hear the conclusion of Nello’s speech, but he was one of those figures for whom all the world instinctively makes way, as it would for a battering-ram. He was not much above the middle height, but the impression of enormous force which was conveyed by his capacious chest and brawny arms bared to the shoulder, was deepened by the keen sense and quiet resolution expressed in his glance and in every furrow of his cheek and brow. He had often been an unconscious model to Domenico Ghirlandajo, when that great painter was making the walls of the churches reflect the life of Florence, and translating pale aerial traditions into the deep colour and strong lines of the faces he knew. The naturally dark tint of his skin was additionally bronzed by the same powdery deposit that gave a polished black surface to his leathern apron: a deposit which habit had probably made a necessary condition of perfect ease, for it was not washed off with punctilious regularity.

Goro turned his fat cheek and glassy eye on the frank speaker with a look of deprecation rather than of resentment.

“Why, Niccolò,” he said, in an injured tone, “I’ve heard you sing to another tune than that, often enough, when you’ve been laying down the law at San Gallo on a festa. I’ve heard you say yourself, that a man wasn’t a mill-wheel, to be on the grind, grind, as long as he was driven, and then stick in his place without stirring when the water was low. And you’re as fond of your vote as any man in Florence — ay, and I’ve heard you say, if Lorenzo — “

“Yes, yes,” said Niccolò. “Don’t you be bringing up my speeches again after you’ve swallowed them, and handing them about as if they were none the worse. I vote and I speak when there’s any use in it: if there’s hot metal on the anvil, I lose no time before I strike; but I don’t spend good hours in tinkling on cold iron, or in standing on the pavement as thou dost, Goro, with snout upward, like a pig under an oak-tree. And as for Lorenzo — dead and gone before his time — he was a man who had an eye for curious iron-work; and if anybody says he wanted to make himself a tyrant, I say, ‘
Sia
; I’ll not deny which way the wind blows when every man can see the weathercock.’ But that only means that Lorenzo was a crested hawk, and there are plenty of hawks without crests whose claws and beaks are as good for tearing. Though if there was any chance of a real reform, so that Marzocco (the stone Lion, emblem of the Republic) might shake his mane and roar again, instead of dipping his head to lick the feet of anybody that will mount and ride him, I’d strike a good blow for it.”

“And that reform is not far off, Niccolò,” said the sallow, mild-faced man, seizing his opportunity like a missionary among the too light-minded heathens; “for a time of tribulation is coming, and the scourge is at hand. And when the Church is purged of cardinals and prelates who traffic in her inheritance that their hands may be full to pay the price of blood and to satisfy their own lusts, the State will be purged too — and Florence will be purged of men who love to see avarice and lechery under the red hat and the mitre because it gives them the screen of a more hellish vice than their own.”

“Ay, as Goro’s broad body would be a screen for my narrow person in case of missiles,” said Nello; “but if that excellent screen happened to fall, I were stifled under it, surely enough. That is no bad image of thine, Nanni — or, rather, of the Frate’s; for I fancy there is no room in the small cup of thy understanding for any other liquor than what he pours into it.”