THE FOOL ERRANT - World eBook Library - World Public Library

"My passport," I told him, "is destroyed. It described me as a young Jew with an assured manner and a pendulous nose."
This caused the Capuchin to look upon his visitor. Whether he knew me or not, then or before, he made no sign. "There's no
flattery in that," he said, "but you could have done it. A manner's a manner, and there's an end; but I could swell any man's nose
for him and say thank you. And what does your present passport bear?"
I said, "I have none. The Holy Office having confiscated it, ejected me from Bologna because I wore a crucifix and prayed to
the Madonna."
"Ah," says he, "I've known a man hanged in that city for less. But what you say convinces me of one thing: you will be all the
better for company."
"How so?" said I.
"Why," says the Capuchin, "you tell me you were talking to the Madonna."
"It is true that I was addressing her in her image."
"Very well; that's a proof positive to me that you had nobody else to address—a most unwholesome state of affairs. How does
my beard strike you? Black as blackness, I fancy."
He was right. I assured him that it was now as black as Erebus and pleased him extremely. I told him, however, that I thought
he would have more difficulty with the rest of his description, which gave him a middle size and a cold in the head. He was, in
person, gigantic, and in health appeared to be as sound as a bell.
"I shall get through," said the friar, "on my beard, and where that goes I can follow as easily as a tomcat his head. But I have a
trick of bending the knees which will serve me for some hundreds of yards—and if you suppose that I can't snivel you are very
much mistaken. Listen to this." He hung his head, looked earnestly at the ground: then he sniffed. Sniffed, do I say? It was as if
all the secret rills of the broad earth had been summoned from their founts. No noise more miserably watery could have
proceeded from a nose. He beamed upon me. "Am I a wet blanket?" he cried. "Now, friend, shall we go?" He had packed up
his tools in his begging-bag and stood ready to depart. I reminded him that I had no papers.
"That need not disturb you at all," he said. "You pass in as my convert. All you have to do is to do nothing and keep your mouth
shut. If you cannot speak you cannot answer; that is good logic, I hope. We will discuss our several affairs presently in the
reasonable air of Tuscany. I stifle in the Pope's dominions. You might say that there was not room enough for two such men."
He blew out his shining cheeks till his eyes disappeared; he looked like a swollen tree-bole with a mossy growth dependent;
then he deflated them with a bang, and shouted with laughter —a single expression of delight, sharply reverberant—and
suddenly stopped. "Poh! what a rattle you'll think me," he said. "Come—and remember that you are a deaf-mute."
To get a thing granted it is no bad way to take it for granted. This is what the Capuchin did. I was young and he was old, I
undecided and he perfectly clear in his intention. There was little more—even to my too charitable eyes—in his favour, certainly
not his looks. He was a huge, straddling, positive kind of a fellow with an air of specious, bluff benevolence about him which
gave way to examination. He had a very ugly mouth under his beard, cut up sideways by the pressure of his long tooth to
emerge; his eyes were small, greedy and near together; they looked different ways. His nose was huge and glowing,
broad-rooted as a tree and pitted with the smallpox. On his left brow he had a savage scar. His strength and determination
were very extraordinary; I was to learn within a few weeks how strong he was, how ferocious and dangerous. His age might be
guessed at near sixty for all his vivacity, for at close quarters I could see unmistakably the senile arc in either eye, and, as the
reader knows, his hair and beard were very white. Debauchery may have left these marks upon him, but had not worn out his
force. That, at any rate, was still enough to resolve the irresolute Francis, an incurable believer in the native goodness of
mankind, to obey him in this instance. I am by nature pliant and easily led, and I have never been one for half measures.
Therefore I received upon my staff the Capuchin's bundle in addition to my own, and followed my leader towards the
guard-house, within sight of which, crooking his knees together under his frock, drawing in his shoulders, poking his head, the
sturdy rogue reduced his apparent size and expression more materially than could be believed. His calculating eyes grew weak
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