Scenes of Clerical Life

Chapter 3

The last chapter has given the discerning reader sufficient insight into

the state of things at Cheverel Manor in the summer of 1788. In that

summer, we know, the great nation of France was agitated by conflicting

thoughts and passions, which were but the beginning of sorrows. And in

our Caterina's little breast, too, there were terrible struggles. The

poor bird was beginning to flutter and vainly dash its soft breast

against the hard iron bars of the inevitable, and we see too plainly the

danger, if that anguish should go on heightening instead of being

allayed, that the palpitating heart may be fatally bruised.

Meanwhile, if, as I hope, you feel some interest in Caterina and her

friends at Cheverel Manor, you are perhaps asking, How came she to be

there? How was it that this tiny, dark-eyed child of the south, whose

face was immediately suggestive of olive-covered hills and taper-lit

shrines, came to have her home in that stately English manor-house, by

the side of the blonde matron, Lady Cheverel--almost as if a humming-bird

were found perched on one of the elm-trees in the park, by the side of

her ladyship's handsomest pouter-pigeon? Speaking good English, too, and

joining in Protestant prayers! Surely she must have been adopted and

brought over to England at a very early age. She was.

During Sir Christopher's last visit to Italy with his lady, fifteen years

before, they resided for some time at Milan, where Sir Christopher, who

was an enthusiast for Gothic architecture, and was then entertaining the

project of metamorphosing his plain brick family mansion into the model

of a Gothic manor-house, was bent on studying the details of that marble

miracle, the Cathedral. Here Lady Cheverel, as at other Italian cities

where she made any protracted stay, engaged a _maestro_ to give her

lessons in singing, for she had then not only fine musical taste, but a

fine soprano voice. Those were days when very rich people used manuscript

music, and many a man who resembled Jean Jacques in nothing else,

resembled him in getting a livelihood 'a copier la musique a tant la

page'. Lady Cheverel having need of this service, Maestro Albani told her

he would send her a poveraccio of his acquaintance, whose manuscript was

the neatest and most correct he knew of. Unhappily, the poveraccio was

not always in his best wits, and was sometimes rather slow in

consequence; but it would be a work of Christian charity worthy of the

beautiful Signora to employ poor Sarti.

The next morning, Mrs. Sharp, then a blooming abigail of

three-and-thirty, entered her lady's private room and said, 'If you

please, my lady, there's the frowsiest, shabbiest man you ever saw,

outside, and he's told Mr. Warren as the singing-master sent him to see

your ladyship. But I think you'll hardly like him to come in here. Belike

he's only a beggar.'

'O yes, show him in immediately.'

Mrs. Sharp retired, muttering something about 'fleas and worse'. She had

the smallest possible admiration for fair Ausonia and its natives, and

even her profound deference for Sir Christopher and her lady could not

prevent her from expressing her amazement at the infatuation of

gentlefolks in choosing to sojourn among 'Papises, in countries where

there was no getting to air a bit o' linen, and where the people smelt o'

garlick fit to knock you down.'

However she presently reappeared, ushering in a small meagre man, sallow

and dingy, with a restless wandering look in his dull eyes, and an

excessive timidity about his deep reverences, which gave him the air of a

man who had been long a solitary prisoner. Yet through all this squalor

and wretchedness there were some traces discernible of comparative youth

and former good looks. Lady Cheverel, though not very tender-hearted,

still less sentimental, was essentially kind, and liked to dispense

benefits like a goddess, who looks down benignly on the halt, the maimed,

and the blind that approach her shrine. She was smitten with some

compassion at the sight of poor Sarti, who struck her as the mere

battered wreck of a vessel that might have once floated gaily enough on

its outward voyage to the sound of pipes and tabors. She spoke gently as

she pointed out to him the operatic selections she wished him to copy,

and he seemed to sun himself in her auburn, radiant presence, so that

when he made his exit with the music-books under his arm, his bow, though

not less reverent, was less timid.

It was ten years at least since Sarti had seen anything so bright and

stately and beautiful as Lady Cheverel. For the time was far off in which

he had trod the stage in satin and feathers, the _primo tenore_ of one

short season. He had completely lost his voice in the following winter,

and had ever since been little better than a cracked fiddle, which is

good for nothing but firewood. For, like many Italian singers, he was too

ignorant to teach, and if it had not been for his one talent of

penmanship, he and his young helpless wife might have starved. Then, just

after their third child was born, fever came, swept away the sickly

mother and the two eldest children, and attacked Sarti himself, who rose

from his sick-bed with enfeebled brain and muscle, and a tiny baby on his

hands, scarcely four months old. He lodged over a fruit-shop kept by a

stout virago, loud of tongue and irate in temper, but who had had

children born to her, and so had taken care of the tiny yellow,

black-eyed _bambinetto_, and tended Sarti himself through his sickness.

Here he continued to live, earning a meagre subsistence for himself and

his little one by the work of copying music, put into his hands chiefly

by Maestro Albani. He seemed to exist for nothing but the child: he

tended it, he dandled it, he chatted to it, living with it alone in his

one room above the fruit-shop, only asking his landlady to take care of

the marmoset during his short absences in fetching and carrying home

work. Customers frequenting that fruit-shop might often see the tiny

Caterina seated on the floor with her legs in a heap of pease, which it

was her delight to kick about; or perhaps deposited, like a kitten, in a

large basket out of harm's way.

Sometimes, however, Sarti left his little one with another kind of

protectress. He was very regular in his devotions, which he paid thrice

a-week in the great cathedral, carrying Caterina with him. Here, when the

high morning sun was warming the myriad glittering pinnacles without, and

struggling against the massive gloom within, the shadow of a man with a

child on his arm might be seen flitting across the more stationary

shadows of pillar and mullion, and making its way towards a little tinsel

Madonna hanging in a retired spot near the choir. Amid all the

sublimities of the mighty cathedral, poor Sarti had fixed on this tinsel

Madonna as the symbol of divine mercy and protection,--just as a child,

in the presence of a great landscape, sees none of the glories of wood

and sky, but sets its heart on a floating feather or insect that happens

to be on a level with its eye. Here, then, Sarti worshipped and prayed,

setting Caterina on the floor by his side; and now and then, when the

cathedral lay near some place where he had to call, and did not like to

take her, he would leave her there in front of the tinsel Madonna, where

she would sit, perfectly good, amusing herself with low crowing noises

and see-sawings of her tiny body. And when Sarti came back, he always

found that the Blessed Mother had taken good care of Caterina.

That was briefly the history of Sarti, who fulfilled so well the orders

Lady Cheverel gave him, that she sent him away again with a stock of new

work. But this time, week after week passed, and he neither reappeared

nor sent home the music intrusted to him. Lady Cheverel began to be

anxious, and was thinking of sending Warren to inquire at the address

Sarti had given her, when one day, as she was equipped for driving out,

the valet brought in a small piece of paper, which, he said, had been

left for her ladyship by a man who was carrying fruit. The paper

contained only three tremulous lines, in Italian:--'Will the

Eccelentissima, for the love of God, have pity on a dying man, and come

to him?'

Lady Cheverel recognized the handwriting as Sarti's in spite of its

tremulousness, and, going down to her carriage, ordered the Milanese

coachman to drive to Strada Quinquagesima, Numero 10. The coach stopped

in a dirty narrow street opposite La Pazzini's fruit-shop, and that large

specimen of womanhood immediately presented herself at the door, to the

extreme disgust of Mrs. Sharp, who remarked privately to Mr. Warren that

La Pazzini was a 'hijeous porpis'. The fruit-woman, however, was all

smiles and deep curtsies to the Eccelentissima, who, not very well

understanding her Milanese dialect, abbreviated the conversation by

asking to be shown at once to Signor Sarti. La Pazzini preceded her up

the dark narrow stairs, and opened a door through which she begged her

ladyship to enter. Directly opposite the door lay Sarti, on a low

miserable bed. His eyes were glazed, and no movement indicated that he

was conscious of their entrance.

On the foot of the bed was seated a tiny child, apparently not three

years old, her head covered by a linen cap, her feet clothed with leather

boots, above which her little yellow legs showed thin and naked. A frock,

made of what had once been a gay flowered silk, was her only other

garment. Her large dark eyes shone from out her queer little face, like

two precious stones in a grotesque image carved in old ivory. She held an

empty medicine-bottle in her hand, and was amusing herself with putting

the cork in and drawing it out again, to hear how it would pop.

La Pazzini went up to the bed and said, 'Ecco la nobilissima donna;' but

directly after screamed out, 'Holy mother! he is dead!'

It was so. The entreaty had not been sent in time for Sarti to carry out

his project of asking the great English lady to take care of his

Caterina. That was the thought which haunted his feeble brain as soon as

he began to fear that his illness would end in death. She had wealth--she

was kind--she would surely do something for the poor orphan. And so, at

last, he sent that scrap of paper which won the fulfilment of his prayer,

though he did not live to utter it. Lady Cheverel gave La Pazzini money

that the last decencies might be paid to the dead man, and carried away

Caterina, meaning to consult Sir Christopher as to what should be done

with her. Even Mrs. Sharp had been so smitten with pity by the scene she

had witnessed when she was summoned up-stairs to fetch Caterina, as to

shed a small tear, though she was not at all subject to that weakness;

indeed, she abstained from it on principle, because, as she often said,

it was known to be the worst thing in the world for the eyes.

On the way back to her hotel, Lady Cheverel turned over various projects

in her mind regarding Caterina, but at last one gained the preference

over all the rest. Why should they not take the child to England, and

bring her up there? They had been married twelve years, yet Cheverel

Manor was cheered by no children's voices, and the old house would be all

the better for a little of that music. Besides, it would be a Christian

work to train this little Papist into a good Protestant, and graft as

much English fruit as possible on the Italian stem.

Sir Christopher listened to this plan with hearty acquiescence. He loved

children, and took at once to the little black-eyed monkey--his name for

Caterina all through her short life. But neither he nor Lady Cheverel had

any idea of adopting her as their daughter, and giving her their own rank

in life. They were much too English and aristocratic to think of anything

so romantic. No! the child would be brought up at Cheverel Manor as a

protegee, to be ultimately useful, perhaps, in sorting worsteds, keeping

accounts, reading aloud, and otherwise supplying the place of spectacles

when her ladyship's eyes should wax dim.

So Mrs. Sharp had to procure new clothes, to replace the linen cap,

flowered frock, and leathern boots; and now, strange to say, little

Caterina, who had suffered many unconscious evils in her existence of

thirty moons, first began to know conscious troubles. 'Ignorance,' says

Ajax, 'is a painless evil;' so, I should think, is dirt, considering the

merry faces that go along with it. At any rate, cleanliness is sometimes

a painful good, as any one can vouch who has had his face washed the

wrong way, by a pitiless hand with a gold ring on the third finger. If

you, reader, have not known that initiatory anguish, it is idle to expect

that you will form any approximate conception of what Caterina endured

under Mrs. Sharp's new dispensation of soap-and-water. Happily, this

purgatory came presently to be associated in her tiny brain with a

passage straightway to a seat of bliss--the sofa in Lady Cheverel's

sitting-room, where there were toys to be broken, a ride was to be had on

Sir Christopher's knee, and a spaniel of resigned temper was prepared to

undergo small tortures without flinching.