The old man’s discourse1, Fabrizio’s deep attention to it, and his own excessive weariness, had thrown him into a state of feverish2 excitement. He found it very difficult to sleep, and his slumber3 was broken by dreams which may have been omens5 of the future. At ten o’clock next morning, he was disturbed by the rocking of the tower, and a frightful6 noise which seemed to be coming from without. Terrified, he leaped to his feet, and thought the end of the world must have come. Then he fancied himself in prison, and it was some time before he recognised the sound of the great bell which forty peasants had set swinging in honour of the great San Giovità. Ten would have done it just as well.
Fabrizio looked about for a place whence he might look on without being seen. He observed that from that great height he could look all over his father’s gardens, and even into the inner courtyard of his house. He had forgotten it. The thought of his father, now nearing the close of his life, changed all his feelings toward him. He could even distinguish the sparrows hopping7 about in search of a few crumbs8 on the balcony of the great dining-room.
“They are the descendants of those I once tamed,” he thought. This balcony, like all the others, was adorned9 with numerous orange trees, set in earthenware10 vases, large and small. The sight of them touched him. There was an air of great dignity about this inner courtyard, thus adorned, with its sharply cut shadows standing11 out against the brilliant sunshine.
The thought of his father’s failing health came back to him. “It really is very odd!” he said to himself. “My father is only thirty-five years older than I am—thirty-five[172] and twenty-three only make fifty-eight.” The eyes which were gazing at the windows of the room occupied by the harsh parent, whom he had never loved, brimmed over with tears. He shuddered12, and a sudden chill ran through his veins13 when he fancied he recognised his father crossing an orange-covered terrace on the level of his chamber14. But it was only a man-servant. Just beneath the tower a number of young girls in white dresses, and divided into several groups, were busily outlining patterns in red, blue, and yellow flowers on the soil of the streets along which the procession was to pass. But there was another sight which appealed yet more strongly to Fabrizio’s soul. From his tower he could look over the two arms of the lake for a distance of several leagues, and this magnificent prospect15 soon made him forget every other sight. It stirred the most lofty feelings in his breast. All his childish memories crowded on his brain; and that day spent prisoned in a church tower was perhaps one of the happiest in his life.
His felicity carried him to a frame of thought considerably16 higher than was as a rule natural to him. Young as he was, he pondered over the events of his past life as though he had already reached its close. “I must acknowledge that never, since I came to Parma,” he mused17 at last, after several hours of the most delightful18 reverie, “have I known calm and perfect delight such as I used to feel at Naples, when I galloped19 along the roads of Vomero, or wandered on the coasts of Misena.
“All the complicated interests of that spiteful little court have made me spiteful, too.… I find no pleasure in hating anybody; I even think it would be but a poor delight to me to see my enemies humiliated20, if I had any. But, hold!” he cried; “I have an enemy—Giletti! Now, it is curious,” he went on, “that my pleasure at the idea of seeing that ugly fellow going to the devil should have outlived the very slight fancy I had for little Marietta.… She is not to be compared to the Duchess d’A⸺, to whom I was obliged to make love, at Naples, because I had told her I had fallen in love with her. Heavens, how bored I used to be during those long hours of intimacy21 with which the[173] fair duchess used to honour me! I never felt anything of that sort in the shabby room—bedroom and kitchen, too—in which little Marietta received me twice, and for two minutes each time!
“And heavens, again! What do those people eat? It was pitiful! I ought to have given her mamaccia a pension of three beefsteaks a day.… That little Marietta,” he added, “distracted me from the wicked thoughts with which the neighbourhood of the court had inspired me.
“Perhaps I should have done better to take up with the ‘café life,’ as the duchess calls it. She seemed rather to incline to it, and she is much cleverer than I am. Thanks to her bounty—or even with this income of four thousand francs a year, and the interest of the forty thousand francs invested at Lyons, which my mother intends for me—I should always have been able to keep a horse and to spend a few crowns on making excavations22 and forming a collection. As I am apparently23 never destined24 to know what love is, my greatest pleasures will always lie in that direction. I should like, before I die, to go back once to the battle-field of Waterloo, and try to recognise the meadow where I was lifted from my horse in such comical fashion, and left sitting on the grass. Once that pilgrimage had been performed, I would often come back to this noble lake. There can be nothing so beautiful in the whole world—to my heart, at all events! Why should I wander so far away in search of happiness? It lies here, under my very eyes.
“Ah,” said Fabrizio again, “but there is a difficulty—the police forbid my presence near the Lake of Como. But I am younger than the people who direct the police. Here,” he added with a laugh, “I shall find no Duchess d’A⸺, but I should have one of the little girls who are scattering25 flowers down yonder, and I am sure I should love her just as much. Even in love matters, hypocrisy26 freezes me, and our fine ladies aim at too much sublimity27 in their effects. Napoleon has given them notions of propriety28 and constancy.
“The devil!” he exclaimed a moment later, pulling his[174] head in suddenly, as if afraid he might be recognised, in spite of the shadow cast by the huge wooden shutters29 which kept the rain off the bells. “Here come the gendarmes30 in all their splendour!” Ten gendarmes, in fact, four of whom were non-commissioned officers, had appeared at the head of the principal street of the village. The sergeant31 posted them a hundred paces apart, along the line the procession was to follow. “Everybody here knows me. If I am seen, I shall be carried at one bound from the shores of Como to the Spielberg, where I shall have a hundred-and-ten-pound weight of fetters32 fastened to each of my legs. And what a grief for the duchess!”
It was two or three minutes before Fabrizio was able to realize that, in the first place, he was eighty feet above other people’s heads, that the spot where he stood was comparatively dark, that anybody who might glance upward would be blinded by the blazing sun, and, last of all, that every eye was staring wide about the village streets, the houses of which had been freshly whitewashed33 in honour of the feast of San Giovità. In spite of the cogency34 of these arguments, Fabrizio’s Italian soul would have been incapable35 of any further enjoyment36 if he had not interposed a rag of old sacking, which he nailed up in the window, between himself and the gendarmes, making two holes in it so that he might be able to look out.
The bells had been crashing out for ten minutes, the procession was passing out of the church, the mortaretti were exploding loudly. Fabrizio turned his head and looked at the little esplanade, surrounded by a parapet, on which his childish life had so often been endangered by the mortaretti, fired off close to his legs, because of which his mother always insisted on keeping him beside her, on feast days.
These mortaretti (or little mortars), it should be explained, are nothing but gun barrels sawn off in lengths of about four inches. It is for this purpose that the peasants so greedily collect the musket37 barrels which European policy, since the year 1796, has sown broadcast over the plains of Lombardy. When these little tubes are cut[175] into four-inch lengths, they are loaded up to the very muzzle38, set on the ground in a vertical39 position, and a train of powder is laid from one to the other; they are ranged in three lines, like a battalion40, to the number of some two or three hundred, in some clear space near the line of procession. When the Holy Sacrament approaches, the train of powder is lighted, and then begins a sharp, dropping fire of the most irregular and ridiculous description, which sends all the women wild with delight. Nothing more cheery can be imagined than the noise of these mortaretti, as heard from a distance across the lake, and softened41 by the rocking of the waters. The curious rattle42 which had so often been the delight of his childhood put the overserious notions which had assailed43 our hero to flight. He fetched the Father’s big astronomical44 telescope, and was able to recognise most of the men and women taking part in the procession. Many charming little girls, whom Fabrizio had left behind him as slips of eleven and twelve years old, had now grown into magnificent-looking women, in all the flower of the most healthy youth. The sight of them brought back our hero’s courage, and for the sake of exchanging a word with them, he would have braved the gendarmes willingly.
When the procession had passed, and re-entered the church by a side door, which was out of Fabrizio’s range of vision, the heat at the top of the tower soon became intense. The villagers returned to their homes, and deep silence fell over the place. Several boats filled with peasants departed to Bellagio, Menaggio, and other villages on the shores of the lake. Fabrizio could distinguish the sound of every stroke of the oars45. Thi............