THE FOOL ERRANT - World eBook Library - World Public Library

"Bravo," said I, "and now, Avanti!"
"Pronti," says Belviso, and we struck east along a fine grassy valley where the trees were in the full glory of early summer. I was
full of hope, which I could neither explain nor justify, and though I did not know it then I had some grounds to be so. I shall not
inflict upon the reader the vicissitudes of our wearisome journey of three weeks over the sharp-ridged valleys of lower Tuscany.
We sometimes begged, sometimes worked for the bread we ate and the sheds in which we slept. We were tanned to the colour
of walnuts, healthy as young cattle, merry as larks in the sky. We gave each other our full confidence, or so I believed. At any
rate I kept nothing from my friend. He was more reticent. "The past is past," he used to say. "My safety is only in the future; let
me talk to you of that." And so he did. A friendship was sealed between us which no difference of race, degree or age could
ever break in upon; we loved each other tenderly, we were as brothers. Belviso was at one and the same time the most
affectionate, the shrewdest, and the most candid boy that ever was conceived in sin and nurtured in vice. No shameful dealing
had left a mark upon him, he was fine gold throughout. But so I have found it always in this dear country of my adoption, that it
takes prosperity, never misery, to corrupt its native simplicity. The lower you descend in the scale of human attainment the
greater the hopes you may conceive of what humanity may be permitted to attain. The poor drab, the world's hire for the price
of a rush-light, the lurking thief, the beggar at the church door, the naked urchin of the gutter—these, though they live with swine
and are of them, have the souls of children new and clean from God. Neither malice nor forethought of evil, nor craft, nor
hatred, nor clamour, nor the great and crowning sin is in their hearts. A kind word, a touch, a kiss redeems them. Thus they,
whom the tyrants of Italy have enslaved, are in truth the very marrow of Italy, without whom she would never have done
anything in this world. And the sorrowful verity is that slaves they must remain if Italy is to live on. For prosperity, which fattens
their bodies, chokes and poisons their souls.
CHAPTER XXXVIII. AN UNEXPECTED MESSENGER LIFTS ME UP
Destitute as we were of anything but the sinews of our backs and arms, we were forced, if we would live, to work our way to
Arezzo; and it often fell out that the piece-work we engaged to do kept us long in one place. Near Sinalunga, in particular, in a
green pastoral country, we hired ourselves out to a peasant to hoe his vines, and were busy there for nearly three weeks. I
cannot say that I was discontented; indeed, I have always found that the harder my labour is and the straiter my lot, the less
room I have for discontent. With this peasant, his family, his pigs, hens and goats, Belviso and I lived, in a hovel which, had it
not been roofed over, might have been a cote or a pigsty. The man's name was Masuccio, his wife's Gioconda; between them
they had a brood of nine children—a grown daughter of fourteen, three stout lads, four brats, and a child not breeched; and in
addition to all these, and to Belviso and myself, to a sow in farrow, four goats, and hens innumerable, the good man's father was
posed as veritable master of the whole—an old man afflicted with palsy, who did nothing but shake and suck at his pipe, but
who, nevertheless, had, by virtue of his years and situation, the only semblance of a bed, the first of everything, and the best and
the most of that. The rest of us, higgledy-piggledy, lay by night on the mud-floor, with a little pease-straw for litter, and
scrambled all together for the remnants of the old tyrant's food. Yet nobody questioned his absolute right, and nobody seemed
unhappy, nor looked out at any prospect but unremitting, barely remunerative labour from year's end to year's end. This is, I am
now convinced, the true philosophy of life—that labour is a man's only riches, and food, shelter, rest, and the satisfaction of
appetite his means whereby to grow rich. In other walks of life the practice is reversed, and labour is looked upon as the
means, appetite and comfort as the end. Inconceivable folly! since labour alone brings health, and health content. But I must
relate how I was cozened out of my own healthy contentment.
One day, when I was afield in the vines not far from the high road which ran from Sinalunga to still distant Arezzo, as I was
resting on my hoe in the furrow, I saw a man come by walking a pretty good horse. He was an elderly, bearded man, very
portly, and wore the brown garb of the Capuchins, which I certainly had no reason to love. His bald head, gleaming in the sun,
was of the steep and flat-topped shape of our English quartern-loaves; and it came upon me with a shock that here was that Fra
Palamone, whom I had last seen extended, shot by my hand, in the Piazza Santa Maria at Florence. This alarming discovery
was verified by his nearer approach. I recognised his twinkling, tireless eyes, his one long tooth, like a tusk, and even the scar
on his right brow. It was Fra Palamone in the flesh—and in great and prosperous flesh.
Although this apparition made me vaguely uneasy, I was relieved to find that I had not his death upon my conscience. On the
other hand, I felt no yearning of the bowels towards him, and did not propose to go one inch over the newly turned clods to bid
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